Huntington Beach Happenings
by: Chris MacDonald
Published: November 10, 2025
HUNTINGTON BEACH...Happy Birthday to Huntington Beach Beach Maintenance Supervisor Terry Tintle.
Here is a link to my article on JoAnn Rossi 91 Years of Inspired Living.
Here is a link to Huntington Beach City Council Meeting Action Agenda from Tuesday November 4th, 2025.
Huntington Beach City Historian Jerry Person Remembering When - Lets not forget former teacher Dale Smith
How many of you still remember some of your former teachers and wished they had got to know them better and so this week we are going to remember a man who taught industrial arts at both Huntington and Marina High Schools. I hope some of you do remember Dale Smith when he was teaching that subject and hopefully some of his wisdom rubbed off on you.
Dale’s parents were farmers in the rural town of Roseburg in the state of Oregon and it was in this small town that Dale Winston Smith was born in 1904.
I know of some kids today that balk at walking a few blocks to school yet Dale would have to travel seven miles to school and seven miles back over a dirt road.
After completing elementary school Dale would continue his education in Roseburg’s high school and while in high school he would become the school’s basketball manager and more than once inspired his team to win the state’s basketball championship.
After school was out in the afternoon and during summer vacations, Dale worked doing maintenance work at a local road construction camp and he would also be working as a logger at a logging camp. After he graduated from high school Dale enrolled at Oregon State in 1923 and after five years of hard study he received his B.S. degree in 1928.
Dale headed to California where he studied at Hemphill trade school in Los Angeles for six months to earn money for his studies. Dale later took a job at a Firestone Tire & Rubber Company service store in of all places, Brawley, California. Now if you have ever traveled through Brawley in the summer, you would think that the heat would of melted the tires off the cars. Next he attended U.C.L.A. and it was there that he would earn his teaching credentials.
For three and a half years Dale would remain with the Firestone Company and they had him working from Brawley all the way to Long Beach.
During this period of his life that he met Betty Bourhill, a home economics teacher at Huntington Beach High School and the relationship blossomed into something more and it was on July 10, 1936 that Dale and Betty were married up in Portland, Oregon. Now with a wife, Dale worked evenings at the Douglas Aircraft Co.
In 1941 their twin daughters, Joan and Jean were born and in that same year began teaching auto shop and welding classes in a local high school and by 1944 he became an industrial arts department head with a staff of eight instructors under him. He taught industrial arts to many of our youngsters at Huntington High and when that school was being remodeled in the early 1960s, he would, along with several of Huntington’s teachers be transferred to the newly completed Marina High School campus.
While at Marina High he was the chairman of the industrial arts department and taught along with fellow industrial art teachers; Ronald Byrd, Charles Clifner, Gary Finney, George Hays, Deward Ingram, John Reed and Frank Vineyard.
Betty and Dale resided at 1005 – 12th Street here in our downtown.
In 1944 Dale joined our Huntington Beach Lions Club at a time when many of its members would become important civic leaders in our community.
His wife Betty would continue teaching and by the late 1950s she was teaching home economics at Long Beach’s Millikan High School.
By this time Dale had become president of the Orange County Industrial Arts Association and also he had become an honorary member in the industrial arts fraternity, Epsilon Phi Tau.
When he was not in class you could find him fishing or out in his garden and he even built an 18-foot cabin cruiser outboard boat in his backyard.
Dale and Betty are no longer with us today, but there may still be a few of Mr. Dale Smith's students alive that remember taking his class.