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What was life like at the lighthouse for the wives of the Coast Guard members stationed there? In the end, it likely depends on who you ask and, too, whether or not the road to the lighthouse had yet been laid. For some, it was paradise; for others, a prison.
For Freeda Settle, it was the latter. “It was almost like being in jail.”
Freeda lived at the light station before the advent of the road. She and her husband Richard F. “Rich” Settle were stationed at Point San Luis from October 1960 until January 1962. It wasn’t until later in 1962 that the Coast Guard began negotiations with the surrounding landowners for a right-of-way, allowing a road to be built from Port San Luis to the light station that would pass through their properties. The road wasn’t finished until 1964.
Rich graduated from Central Union High School in Fresno, Calif. in 1956 and joined the Coast Guard right away. Rich and Freeda were high school sweethearts; they married in 1957 when Freeda was just eighteen. Three weeks after their marriage Rich was assigned to isolated duty in Alaska and then, a year later, to ship duty on a Coast Guard cutter—first out of Long Beach and later out of San Diego. Four months after their first child was born, they were transferred to the Point Arguello light station, near the city of Lompoc and Vandenberg Air Force Base. They were there about nine months when, bowing to his parents’ pressure to come home, Rich left the Coast Guard and the couple returned to Fresno.
But Rich had no luck finding work in Fresno, so he re-enlisted. Because he’d had light station duty before, the Coast Guard wanted to send him to another lighthouse. But Freeda balked. At Point Arguello, they had lived in one of the houses dating back to the early 1900s. “The windows were so bleached by the sun that they were white, and there were holes in the walls,” she recalled. So, Rich told the Coast Guard his wife wouldn’t live at another light station. (At the time, lighthouses were family stations; you had to be married to be assigned there and wives had to accompany their husbands.)
As it happened, the Coast Guard was finishing the construction of a new duplex at Point San Luis at the time, having torn down the original Victorian duplex dating back to 1890. As an incentive for Freeda to accept lighthouse duty, Rich was offered Point San Luis and quarters in the new duplex. Freeda allowed herself to be persuaded.
The couple lived in the right side of the new duplex with their sixteen-month-old daughter Sherill; officer-in-charge Rodger Dewey and his family lived in the left side. Down the hill, in the cinderblock duplex built by the Coast Guard in 1948, were two other Coast Guardsmen, Allan Karp and Bob Doell, and their families: No one lived in the old Keeper’s house. “It was used only for storage. Mice had eaten away at the floorboards. You were told it was not safe. We kind of ignored it. There was a lot of vegetation that grew around it. I never went in,” Freeda said.
Freeda was delighted with the accommodations at Point San Luis:
There was an electric stove, washer, dryer—really, really nice. I was thrilled with it. All the furniture was brand new. There were two bathrooms and each side of the duplex had its own laundry room. The families in the little duplex down the hill had to share a washer and dryer not near as nice as ours.
In June 1961, Freeda delivered their second child, Calleen. And the other Coast Guard families at Point San Luis were having babies, too. All the children were quite young. “If your child was getting close to school age, they moved you out,” Freeda said.
Freeda recalled:
We would go to the commissary at Vandenberg Air Force Base and fill our trunks with two weeks’ worth of food for two families. Then we would park our car on the third pier [Harford pier] and climb down a ladder into a twenty-foot Coast Guard boat with groceries and babies in tow. Load up the little boat, go around the point to the Coast Guard dock below the light station, get hoisted twenty feet in the air, and dropped on the dock. Then we’d load the groceries into the Coast Guard Jeep or—when the Jeep broke down—into a wheelbarrow, and bring them up the hill. The wives and babies walked up the hill because the groceries took up all the room.
When the tide was out or if the boat couldn’t be used, they walked the trail:
It was a little path about 18-20 inches wide. You got on it at the foot of the pier. We did that if we dared to stay out after dark and wanted to get home or if the boat wouldn’t come. The Coast Guard boat couldn’t be taken out at night because Dewey refused to put running lights on it. I walked the trail about half a dozen times. The men walked it a lot. They were always finding an excuse to go into Avila to get the mail. There was a tiny grocery store there and one bar.
While other Coast Guard wives I’ve spoken with remember their lives at Point San Luis with fondness, Freeda does not:
Couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that. Couldn’t go anywhere at night, couldn’t go to a movie because you couldn’t get back home. Monthly inspections. And that foghorn day and night. I just couldn’t take it any longer. If you wanted to move to another station without the Coast Guard ordering it, you had to pay your own way. And so, we did.
The Settle family moved up to a Coast Guard station in Port Angeles, Washington in January 1962. The other families at the station—the Deweys, Doells, and Karps—threw them a going-away dinner, an evening captured in a photograph that is, unfortunately, badly damaged by time.
After his Coast Guard service ended, Rich Settle attended Southwestern Bible College in Phoenix, Arizona and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1969. Rev. Settle died in 2003. Freeda lives in Arkansas.
The author wishes to thank Calleen Settle Spigner for her help in obtaining these photographs from her mother.
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2025 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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