By Jack Williams
                  UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
                  March 3, 2004
 

                  To fellow swimmers, he was a chiseled senior who defied age as gracefully as he
                  swam. To fellow business owners, he was a daring,  hands-on visionary who
                  never stopped exploring new ventures.  Jim Eubank, a world champion age-group
                  swimmer and record holder who founded Old California Restaurant Row in San Marcos, died
                  Monday at Tri-City  Medical Center in Oceanside. He was 88. The cause of death was
                  complications from a stroke he suffered Feb. 23, said his son Jerry.
                  Virtually unbeatable in age-group swimming during the past decade, Mr. Eubank
                  set two world records and five national records in 2001, when he was named
                  Masters Swimmer of the Year among males 85-89.
                  The next year, in the World Masters Championships in New Zealand, he won four
                  of the five events he entered, losing only a 50-meter sprint in a virtual photo finish.
                  He accomplished such feats with a pacemaker installed after he suffered a stroke in
                  1983. While recovering at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, he persuaded doctors
                  to allow him to work out on a stationary bicycle provided by his family.
                  "At the end of two weeks, he was cycling up to 40 minutes," said his wife, Vera.
                  Last year, Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly, taken aback by Mr. Eubank's
                  prowess in the pool and youthful visage, challenged him to a 50-yard race.
                  Reilly, half Mr. Eubank's age, lost by a length but wrote, "He could've beaten me
                  by about the length of Omaha Beach." To loosen up, Mr. Eubank did 70 more laps,
                  adhering to a regimen he followed daily – usually in a three-lane heated lap pool he
                  built himself.
                  Noting his taut 5-foot-11, 160-pound frame and full head of hair, Reilly wrote, "He
                  looked like Lloyd Bridges at 50. Or Dorian Gray. I demanded to see a birth
                  certificate."
                  Mr. Eubank won his division of the annual La Jolla Rough Water Swim for 50 years
                  and won the annual Labor Day Pier Swim in Oceanside as early as 1937.
                  "You've got to go out there and capture those world records," he told The San
                  Diego Union-Tribune in 2000, explaining his commitment to set age-group records.
                  "I check the obituaries to see my competition."
                  In the May-June 2002 issue of Swim Magazine, P.H. Mullen wrote, "I want to be
                  Jim Eubank in my late 80s. So should you."
                  On the business front, Mr. Eubank was seemingly no less competitive.
                  "He didn't know how to slow down," said Ann Chevalier, real estate manager for
                  Mr. Eubank's Old California Restaurant Row, which includes 16 restaurants and
                  five retail shops.
                  "Bob's mind was always going," she said. "He wanted to build a waterfall that you
                  could see from Highway 78, and he wanted to buy the Sears building adjacent to
                  us and expand Restaurant Row."
                  Said Dave Nutley, co-owner of the San Marcos Brewery on Restaurant Row: "He
                  was one of the most energetic, creative men I've ever dealt with. He never ceased
                  to amaze me with his creativity."
                  Mr. Eubank defied conventional wisdom in proposing a restaurant row on a
                  then-remote strip of San Marcos Boulevard in the mid-1970s. "At the time, there
                  were 20 chicken ranches in the neighborhood," his wife said.
                  "I recognized that this was a place that ultimately would grow," he told The San
                  Diego Union in 1984. "There was an ocean on the west, so growth would have to
                  be easterly. Camp Pendleton was on the north, and San Diego to the south. ... San
                  Marcos couldn't miss."
                  Mr. Eubank began his venture with a fruit stand before lining up an array of
                  international-themed restaurants. "People said you couldn't put restaurants next to
                  one another," his son Bob recalled. "His philosophy was that they would be varied
                  enough to provide a choice."
                  Determined to create his dream from the ground up, Mr. Eubank drove a forklift and
                  helped with the sandblasting.
                  "He had a hands-on, seat-of-the-pants, shoot-from-the-hip and make-it-happen
                  attitude," Bob Eubank said. "He might not have had the schooling or the
                  background, but he charged ahead anyway."
                  To promote the business, Mr. Eubank staged dances and international-themed
                  days. "We were pretty hillbilly around here," his wife said. "Sometimes it took
                  people sitting on straw to bring people out."
                  In 1995, the San Marcos Chamber of Commerce named Mr. Eubank Business
                  Person of the Year.
                  Mr. Eubank, who lived on a 43-acre ranch in Oceanside, was born in Seattle and
                  was raised in Inglewood.
                  "His roots were from poverty and he had to make it on his own," Bob Eubank said.
                  "He never lost sight of these humble beginnings, working shoulder to shoulder
                  with people of any race or social status throughout his life."
                  As a youth, Mr. Eubank would bike to the beach, where he taught himself to swim
                  in the ocean. He worked as a lifeguard in Los Angeles County before being
                  recruited by the Coast Guard during World War II to serve in an elite underwater
                  swimming squad, a forerunner of the Underwater Demolition Team.
                  Among his assignments in Burma: performing maritime sabotage and
                  reconnaissance missions.
                  In 1998, he received an honorary green beret and membership in the Special Forces
                  Regiment for his valor as a squad leader during World War II.
                  After the war, Mr. Eubank made his first real estate investment, an $800 duplex. His
                  first major ventures were Stone Canyon, a residential development in the San
                  Fernando Valley, and the pioneering Fashion Village mall in West Los Angeles.
                  He swam in ocean races for decades and body surfed at the daunting Bonzai
                  Pipeline on the North Shores of Oahu and The Wedge in Newport Beach.
                  "He would go out past the surf line on rubber rafts before the days of Boogie and
                  body boards," Jerry Eubank said. "He was a very serious big-wave body surfer."
                  Mr. Eubank showed another talent in the late 1980s, applying divining rod skills he
                  learned from an uncle to discover a water source in a vacant lot behind Old
                  California Restaurant Row. The 1,386-foot-deep well caught the interest of the
                  Vallecitos Water District, which reimbursed him for his well-drilling costs and
                  agreed in 1990 to buy water from the well.
                  Survivors include his wife of 58 years, Vera; sons, Jerry of Honolulu and Bob of
                  Encinitas; and two grandchildren.
                  Services are pending.

Jack Williams: (619) 542-4587
 jack.williams@uniontrib.com