Walter Storm, the owner of Western Brass Industries and several other firms in Harbor Gateway, had purchased 15 vacant acres adjacent to his businesses in the early 1960s with an eye toward eventually expanding his operations.
Born in Texas, the industrious Storm had moved to California as a 20-year-old in 1924, where he proceeded to start several businesses. He settled in Rolling Hills in 1956, where he and his wife Lisa raised a family of four daughters: Alexandra, Claudia, Georgia and Elizabeth. (A fifth daughter, Paula, died as a one-year-old in 1954.)
The Storm girls rode horses when they weren’t working at their father’s businesses, some of which manufactured riding equipment. They would go on to start businesses of their own.
Born on Nov. 22, 1995, Georgia graduated from Miraleste High in 1973 and went on to UC Santa Barbara, where she played volleyball for the highly regarded Gauchos team. She eventually earned her degree at the University of Colorado.
She met and married Dominique Claessens, moving with him to Holland in the early 1980s. After four years there, they moved back to Rolling Hills, where she would raise four children of her own.
She rejoined her father’s business, and, along with her sisters, started several of her own under the overall name of Storm Industries. All of them were based on the Storm property on Sepulveda Blvd. east of Western Ave., just beyond the Torrance city limit.
Meanwhile, the adjacent surplus property her father had bought for expansion never had been developed. It was being used as a storage lot for recreational vehicles and a dumping ground for old machine parts.
Wanting very much to start a new business of her own, Georgia began eyeing the land. “The property was being used to store RVs and people’s junk,” she told the Palos Verdes Peninsula News in 2006.
Her first thought: build a mobile home park. But her lawyer disabused her of the notion, citing the complex legal thickets involved in owning and operating such a venture. An avid golfer, he suggested she use the property to build a driving range instead.
Though not a golfer, she began researching the idea and determined there was a need for such a facility in the area. This led her, in partnership with her sisters, to begin brainstorming plans for a much broader entertainment complex.
They began to sketch out a family entertainment complex that both children and adults could enjoy without breaking the family budget. Marketing research revealed a dearth of such low-cost options.
The driving range idea was retained. To it would be added practice greens for chipping and putting, a pro shop operated by Plaza Golf in Torrance, batting cages, a 50-game indoor arcade, two 15-hole miniature golf courses and a restaurant.
Unlike child-oriented businesses such as Chuck E. Cheese, which offered very little for parents, the complex aspired to have activities all members of the family could enjoy.
Taking the name from the golf term for getting a do-over stroke after a poor shot, they named their $2.5 million project Mulligan Family Fun Center. The center opened at 1351 Sepulveda Blvd. in Harbor Gateway on Dec. 26, 1993.
It proved to be an immediate and enduring success. Its operators stressed providing a safe environment, hiring its own security personnel and going so far as to require teen boys to not wear baseball caps backwards while at the park.
Later additions to the center included two go-kart tracks eventually refitted to use electric cars, a Lazertag area and a rock climbing wall. The driving range closed in 2007, its place taken by industrial buildings.
Claessens spent many hours on operating, maintaining and expanding the business. She opened two additional Mulligan centers, one in Murrieta in 1996, the other in Palmdale in 2005. Both remain open.
Georgia Claessens’ death at age 60 on Feb. 27, 2016, following a horse riding accident, seemed to shake the Harbor Gateway operation. Three years later, in October 2019, the Mulligan Family Fun Center announced it would close on Feb. 17, 2020.
A message on its website announcing the closure stated: “Without her (Georgia’s) vision and love for the industry, it simply is not tenable to continue operating the Torrance Fun Center.” Its 75 employees lost their jobs, and families who had enjoyed the center over the years mourned.
Shutdowns related to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic probably would have hurt the business had it not closed. Its president, Robert Thomas, did tell the Daily Breeze’s Nick Green that the business was still doing “fine” at the time its closure was announced.
Before her death, Claessens had obtained the defunct cement factory next to the Mulligan property with an eye toward developing it. Both the Fun Center and the factory now stand vacant on the property. Plans for its future development have yet to be disclosed.
On March 2, 2021, a fire broke out in the main building at the park, completely gutting it. Firefighters battled the flames for 90 minutes before extinguishing them. The cause of the blaze could not be determined immediately.
(Credit: Daily Breeze photo by Jerry Kelly)
Sources:
Daily Breeze files.
Findagrave.com website.
“Georgia Storm Claessens, 1955-2016,” Legacy.com website.
Los Angeles Times Files.
Palos Verdes Peninsula News files.
