Angela “Romee” Romero — who launched a one-woman mission to share San Pedro’s history, spurred the ongoing effort to build a heritage museum dedicated to the port town and launched a campaign to erect a statue of iconic local writer Charles Bukowski — has died. She was 43.
Romero died earlier this month of complications from uterine cancer. She was surrounded by her father, siblings, nieces and nephews.
News of her death stunned many in the port town who had taken part in Romero’s popular walking tours, lectures and pandemic-era virtual meet-ups dedicated to telling San Pedro’s stories.
“It’s a terrible loss for San Pedro, it really is,” said Joshua Stecker, editor and publisher of San Pedro Today magazine, which ran Romero’s monthly column for a decade.
The next issue will be dedicated to Romero.
“She was full of curiosity and she just loved San Pedro,” Stecker said. “She had a passion for this place that was unmatched.”
Services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 28, at San Pedro’s Mary Star of the Sea Church, with a reception to follow.
Earning a distinctive place in the push to preserve the town’s past, Romero, in 2018, founded a nonprofit dedicated to establishing the San Pedro Heritage Museum — online for now, but with a vision for a brick-and-mortar location — to more widely share the town’s vivid history.
“We’re still reeling from the news,” said developer Alan Johnson, who, through the years, spent hours over coffee or lunch discussing San Pedro’s past and future with Romero. “It was a shared love of local history” that brought the two together.
Romero, who often went by the moniker “Romee” and referred to herself as a “San Pedro nerd,” explained it this way in a 2012 Daily Breeze interview: “I tell my friends, ‘If San Pedro is a church, I’m a nun.’”
And she had a mission.
Romero learned valuable research skills working with the late Anne Hansford, who ran the San Pedro Bay Historical Society’s research archives for many years. And she became dedicated to finding innovative ways to bring the town’s fascinating past out from behind what she saw as the archive’s cloistered walls.
“You couldn’t find anybody who was more into San Pedro history than Angela,” said former Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Geraldine Knatz, who has written several books about the area since moving into a professor’s post at USC.
Knatz served as a mentor to Romero as the latter honed her research skills, once taking her along on a “fun-filled,” daylong trip to the archives in Riverside.
“Angela made it her life’s work to learn everything she could about her beloved San Pedro and share it with others,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn, a San Pedro resident and another fan of Romero’s.
While largely self-taught and driven by an insatiable curiosity, Romero took the academic craft of historical research seriously, going back to school to earn a bachelor’s degree in history from Cal State Long Beach in 2020.
She was a standout student and warned her professors early on that she’d find a San Pedro angle for any papers she wrote. Her essay on StarKist’s iconic Charlie the Tuna cartoon mascot won an award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society.
But here’s a curious fact: Romero didn’t always love San Pedro.
Angela Romero was born on Sept. 16, 1978, at Kaiser Permanente South Bay Medical Center, to Maria and Juventino Romero. She was a fourth-generation San Pedran and the eldest of four children.
Romero attended Bandini Street Elementary and Dodson Middle schools.
But she felt like an outsider for many of her younger years, Stecker said, so when it came time for high school, she shunned her hometown San Pedro High. Instead, she followed friends who decided to attend Narbonne High School, in neighboring Harbor City, for the magnet program there.
Actually, said younger sister Regina Ritter, 41, now of Huntington Beach, the two “hated San Pedro” when they were growing up in the neighborhood near Peck Park, where they were kept busy participating in myriad team sports, swimming lessons and junior lifeguard activities.
“It felt so suffocating here,” Ritter said about growing up amid the community’s small-town feel. “We thought no one leaves San Pedro unless they escape.”
Romero graduated from Narbonne High in 1996 — and then attempted to “escape” her hometown.
Romero had a one-semester venture at the University of Boulder in Colorado. But the out-of-state tuition fees proved too expensive.
She came home deflated, Ritter said.
Romero took up theater classes at Los Angeles Harbor College, in Wilmington, and was then hired by the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising firm. She did some volunteer work for the Grand Vision Foundation run by Johnson’s wife, Liz Schindler Johnson.
When Romero, still paying off debt from the college stint in Colorado, was laid off from that job during the Great Recession — and couldn’t immediately find another, despite a long and intense search — she wasn’t sure which way to turn.
Her late mother’s solution to lift her spirits each day: Take a walk.
And so began what would spark her life’s mission.
Intrigued on her initial walks by the houses and hillside street scapes overlooking the Port of Los Angeles, Romero soon got a crazy idea: She’d walk every street in San Pedro. And she meant it — every street, over 12 square miles of them, up and down hills, in her signature Vans slip-ons. And then she would blog about it.
It took her nine months and during that time she drew a growing audience of “Block by Block” blog readers, including some from as far away as Australia.
Her fascination with San Pedro’s history and culture was also born during that time.
“That’s where her attachment to San Pedro really started,” Ritter said.
And a life’s vision was launched.
After that, Romero offered walking tours of old San Pedro, the waterfront and the town’s many filming sites under the banner of her Townee Tours, which began in 2011.
She led everyday residents, history buffs, Girl Scout troops and school groups through the streets of San Pedro to learn about the town’s important events and figures.
It wasn’t exactly a money maker. She cleared about $200 in her first year. But the tours were popular and filled with San Pedro trivia.
In 2013, she started “That’s So Pedro,” a podcast and blog exploring San Pedro news and culture. Along the way, Romero also produced house histories for homeowners and developed local history programming for grade school students.
She served on the board of the San Pedro Bay Historical Society and, as far back as 2012, began dreaming about opening and running a cultural-historical museum dedicated to all things San Pedro.
It was that goal, along with encouragement from Knatz and others, that led her back to school to up her historical research skills.
She was hoping to start work soon on a master’s degree, Stecker said.
Romero was also close to finishing a freelance writing job for Temple Beth-El in San Pedro for the congregation’s upcoming 100th anniversary.
“She was my go-to person,” Johnson said of his local history questions, recalling how she helped him pull together a history section for the Business Improvement District’s new website.
“We really wanted to have it right, and that was what she was so good at, really digging in” to find the correct information, Johnson said. “She was like an encyclopedia.”
Romero also brought energy and enthusiasm to what can sometimes be a dry endeavor, Stecker said.
“She loved telling the stories,” Stecker said.
Megan Barnes, a senior administrative analyst for Rancho Palos Verdes, was a close friend of Romero’s. Romero mastered a style that connected with people, Barnes said.
“Angela brought history to the people, rather than keeping it on a shelf,” Barnes said. She celebrated San Pedro culture in a way that “brought it into people’s news feeds and onto their doorsteps.”
Romero remained exceptionally close to sister Gina Ritter and her three small children, using FaceTime, along with frequent personal visits and doing “nanny” duty over the past several years.
In recent years, Romero joined in the concern about the rush of development sweeping through the quiet and homey hillside community, which once drew fishermen from Italy and Croatia and Spain.
“We talked about it,” Stecker said, and her last column in December addressed the issue in a piece that became a cover story: “Keep San Pedro Cozy.”
“That was her way of bridging the old and new San Pedro,” Stecker said. “It was basically a warning to old San Pedro that ‘new’ San Pedro is happening and we’d better be prepared and not lose sight of who we are as San Pedrans.”
As for the museum, there will be a push to keep the idea going, other supporters said. Johnson and Stecker are both on the Board of Directors for the San Pedro Heritage Museum and will forge the way forward on the project.
Romero led a final walking tour through Ports O’ Call Village once it was closed and, with the permission of the landlord — Port of Los Angeles — saved several signs and other mementoes that she hoped could be displayed someday in the museum or, possibly, on the new waterfront.
“Angela knew there wasn’t another community like (San Pedro),” Johnson said. “It’s tragic, but the positive thing is that she got this thing rolling, she planted a seed in people’s heads and there are folks who want to continue that.”
Beyond her dream of a brick-and-mortar San Pedro museum, Romero dedicated herself to the port town in multiple other ways.
She served on the Northwest San Pedro Neighborhood Council, for example, and was a studio artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center.
She served as a guest speaker at numerous luncheons and for local service organizations.
And in 2018, she started a project to create a community history image database — called San Pedro Built — and a fundraising campaign to erect a statue memorializing San Pedro’s prolific poet and novelist, Bukowski, an effort that drew international attention.
In 2019, the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce recognized Romero as one of its Women’s History Month honorees.
Even the coronavirus pandemic couldn’t stop Romero.
When the pandemic hit, she continued hosting her “Heritage at Home” history talks by transitioning it to a virtual format.
Her short play, “The Grief Sherpa,” was selected to be put on by the CSULB Theatre Department in 2021 and, in that same year, Romero was invited by the Los Angeles Public Library to give a virtual talk on the San Pedro-raised civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama.
She also had been invited to serve on the Los Angeles City Historical Board but had to decline because of health challenges.
Romero, who died April 8, is survived by her father, Juventino; siblings Regina, J.R. and Emily; and nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her mother, Maria.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the San Pedro Heritage Museum at sanpedroheritage.org or by mailing a check to San Pedro Heritage Museum, C/O San Pedro Today, P. O. Box 1168, San Pedro, CA 90733.
A GoFundMe page is accepting donations to help cover funeral expenses at gofund.me/91570fdb. Left-over money will be donated to the San Pedro Heritage Museum project.