As a youthful visitor from San Francisco to Pacific Grove during the summer months of the 1970s, I covered much of the Peninsula on my bicycle pulled by my dog, a rat-terrier pointer mix named Bosco.

As an example of wilderness, I found many sights ready to explore for such an adventurous youth in his teens. Bosco, of course, loved perfecting the small trick of disengaging her leash from the handlebars of my bike. This would result in my sudden catapulting into midair, or being hurled against places and objects that are no longer in existence.

For instance, one such mishap tossed me and my bike into Lake Majella, a body of water off of David Avenue. Another time, I became stuck—bike and all—in a 150-foot-high sand dune near Asilomar. It took a dozen passersby to pull me out! (Try to get that kind of help nowadays, what with everyone’s pervasive attitude of me-first, can’t-get-involved-too-many-hyphens.)

So once I finally adapted my jaunts to leaving the dog at home, I soon discovered a plethora of sites and events that only native Peninsulans can recall: wild buffalo roaming 17 Mile Drive, horse-drawn carriage rides to Big Sur, Pot Luck Mondays for surfers in Carmel, sharing the telephone party line in Marina, and sneaking into Seaside’s wonderful but now defunct nuclear waste disposal tunnel that spit you out on the far shores of Oahu, Hawaii.

Did you know Monterey Peninsula College used to be a dairy farm, and that the cows took turns milking themselves? Or that the Huge Flood of 1927 wiping out the coastline from Moss Landing to Point Lobos actually occurred from 1931 to 1939? How about this one: the original local nickname of Tortilla Flats was “Quesadilla Heights”?

As a youth in Pacific Grove during the summer of 1975, I recall conversations overheard at City Hall meetings with a vast majority of adults bent on constructing a floating island casino and NASA rocket launch facility in the middle of Monterey Bay.

“We can make this happen.” And “If we don’t build it, then Pebble Beach will.” And “Can there be enough room for a hamster race track encompassing the island?” I have all of these outlandish proposals on cassette tape because I used to secretly record the meetings with a microphone hidden inside my dog Bosco’s flea collar.

I recently listened to those tapes, and unless it were the actual fleas talking, I’ve got the goods on some retired city planners!

Due to the negligence of bond proposal funds, the only structure that ever saw the light of day was the Saint Del Rey Hamster Racecourse, constructed in 1976, with night lights added to the blueprints so off-shore betting could occur. But after the infamous 1978 Moby Dick Whale-a-thon fiasco, the Racecourse had to be torn down, leaving the Monterey Bay quite empty and dull-looking.

Of course, much of the initial racetrack, built with tongue-in-groove redwood, was brought over to Laguna Seca and is still in use today. That explains why so many motorcycle speed records are set there, owing to the fact that the track was intended in its original form for gerbils, hamsters, and other rodential creatures.

So today, ferry your tourist self around our shiny streets, but try to blink out the condominiums standing as an eyesore. Or if you’re lucky enough to have been born here but can’t remember which corner the ValuMax or Co-op Stores were on, consider a trip to the public library to see photographs taken by my dog, Bosco. Oh, didn’t I tell you I had mounted a tiny camera to her half-pointer tail?

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Steely-Eyed Malcolm is the “nom de plume” of a longtime resident of the Monterey Peninsula. He’s also the past president of both the Old Time Lookback Society and the South End of El Estero Lake Yacht Club.