The Diva of Marineland

Marineland of the Pacific is famous for lots of things, but not for being the first marine-life water park in the country.  

That honor belongs to Marine Studios of Florida, which opened in 1938.

Ten wildly successful years later, the Florida owners—with outside investor Henry Harris and a few others—decided to build an "oceanarium" on the West Coast. They purchased 65 acres known as Long Point from the Palos Verdes Corp. in 1953.

Architect William Pereira was hired to lay out and design the tanks, arenas and parkland. Pereira would later design LAX's Theme Building and the Disneyland Hotel.

Today, sits on the spot once occupied by Marineland.

As construction on the huge aquariums neared completion, a ship was dispatched to prowl the oceans and collect marine-life specimens to stock the tanks.

Capt. Frank Brocato and his godson Boots Calandrino signed on to work as marine-life collectors a mere 32 days before the park opened.

“It was all trial and error at first,” Calandrino recalled decades later in an interview for Westways magazine. “No one had ever done anything like that before.”

All sorts of animals were trapped and put into holding pens off Catalina Island. Days before Marineland’s opening day on Aug. 28, 1954, specially equipped boats transferred the marine creatures to their new home: a round tank 80 feet in diameter and a heated oval tank, 100 by 50 feet in size.

The helmeted diver that fed the fish thrilled crowds from the first day, and in September, four trained bottle-nose dolphins were  flown in from Florida's Marine Studios to perform in California.

Calandrino and Brocato took on a new partner—Bene Falcone—and kept catching. They brought in sharks, sea lions and Omar, the 100-pound octopus. In spite of their efforts, Marineland lost money during its first 18 months.  

A new manager told the catchers they needed a wow factor. Perhaps a whale?

It was 1957, decades before Shamu or "Free Willie." No whale had ever been captured alive and put on display. No one knew if whales could even be trained. But just having a whale in the tank that visitors could watch—now that would bring in the crowds.

Brocato and Calandrino studied whales they came across and devised some innovations for their ship, including a catwalk that overhung the bow. From there, Calandrino thought he might be able to lasso a small—very small—whale. The lasso was made of both net and rope.

The female pilot whale who would later be called Bubbles was about 12 feet long, swimming with a pod of larger, older leviathans. Calandrino lassoed her, just like he’d planned. To no one’s surprise, the whale was not pleased.

“It took 2 1/2 hours to wear her down enough to land her,” Calandrino told Westways writer Timothy Branning. “She started thrashing and jumping about, banging up against us. She was too big to get on board, so we slid our life raft under her and inflated it to lift her out of the water ... I thought I was going to break my arms holding onto her.”

The men towed the whale back to port, pouring water on her throughout the five-hour trip. Her first Marineland pool proved too shallow and resulted in her getting a sunburn on her dorsal fin, but once she was moved into the big oval tank, Bubbles did fine.

She moped a bit through spawning season, obviously lonely, but by November Bubbles was delighting audiences with tricks, allowing men and women to shake hands with her flipper and catching and retrieving toys.

The name Bubbles, by the way, was one of several choices voted upon by schoolchildren. She was very nearly Mabel the Whale.

Bubbles was an original and became famous around the world, but she was not "the one and only." As Jim Patryla pointed out in his book A Photographic Journey Back to Marineland, when star performers get sick or old or simply die, they're replaced.

"The replacement animal inherits the star's name and the show goes on as scheduled," he wrote.

By the early 1960s, additional female pilot whales had been caught and trained, ready to become Bubbles when needed. 

In 1987, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which already owned Sea World, bought Marineland only to shut it down. Bubbles was one of the many marine animals transferred to Sea World in San Diego.

Sea World notes that Bubbles, now 48 years old, is the grande dame of performing whales. She still delights San Diego crowds, starring in the “Blue Horizons” extravaganza.