Old Point Loma Lighthouse

This guide to the Old Point Loma Lighthouse in San Diego centers on keeper Robert Decatur Israel, who tended the light here for eighteen years with his wife Maria and their children, and on a strange nightly ritual he kept up with a shotgun by the door. You'll hear why a lighthouse perched some four hundred feet above the water needed a gunshot at all, and how its French-made lens fared against San Diego's fog after it was first lit in November 1855. Stand in the small stone keeper's room and picture the family who lived their whole working life inside that routine.