Harle Montgomery, 92, remembers the 1920s in tranquil La Jolla, when the population was just reaching the quadruple digits and automobiles began taking to undeveloped coastline roads. All the cars were Model-Ts — black Model-Ts, that is — so her dad painted his car bright pink, and she found it “most embarrassing learning to drive the only pink car in La Jolla.” Montgomery’s memory is one of many that has been collected by Bishop’s School student Bay ByrneSim in her effort to document and share stories of what it’s like to be a teenager in La Jolla from the community’s beginnings to the present day. ByrneSim approached The La Jolla Historical Society with the idea and it has dedicated space to display her research, as well as contributed additional oral histories collected in the 1970s and 1980s. The 11th-grader hopes to earn a Gold Award — the Girl Scouts of America’s highest honor — for the exhibit, titled “Identity,” which is on display at The Wisteria Cottage until Oct. 3. ByrneSim said one of her goals for the exhibit is to “reach across the boundary of years” and get teens more interested in La Jolla history. But her project also serves another noble purpose — to document history at the same time it is displayed. On a table in the display room lies a stack of questionnaires in which La Jollans are asked details of their own teen years, and these accounts will be preserved for posterity in the Historical Society’s archives. Brindah Byrne, 51, remembers “necking” with her now-husband at what she called the “bridge to nowhere,” which had dirt roads leading to and away from it. The spot is now the Interstate 5 overpass at Nobel Drive near the Whole Foods market. John Jarvis, who was a teen in the early 1980s, shared a memory of going fishing in the pond at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club and catching about two dozen crawdads. “I’m afraid to have anyone know this because we were probably risking life and limb in doing it,” he said. “They looked like little lobsters, so we cooked them like lobsters and ate them.” Archivist and curator Michael Mishler said ByrneSim’s project, which went on display Aug. 12, was originally only supposed to be up for a week, but it drew so much attention that the Historical Society decided to leave it up longer. “People tend to spend a lot of time in there,” he said. “When you get two or three La Jollans in there, they end up talking about it.” On being a teenager in La Jolla in the 1920s: “Finally I got up in the seventh grade in the La Jolla Junior-Senior High. We had 350 students there. Not all of them were La Jolla people because they didn’t have a junior high school down at a place called Pacific Beach. We called it Pumpkin Beach. The kids came up to La Jolla on the electric trolley. The guys in my class elected me to be the one to keep the Pumpkin Beach guys in their proper place.” — Gene McCormick “Jean Shafer and I were swimming and we had great fun and so we swam out to the barge … We suddenly got the idea that we would pull off our little top dresses and that we would swim in our Annette Kellermans — in our tight suits — and oh, we thought we were devils. We came back to the beach laughing and giggling and thinking what would they say if they knew we swam in our Annette Kellermans — not in the nude, mind you!” — Marjorie Hutchinson “There were no banks in La Jolla. There were no doctors living in La Jolla … We depended on San Diego for almost everything. It meant going backward and forward very frequently on the trains … I think the fare was only 15 cents … It’s more practical to live the way people in La Jolla live now, but it isn’t as fun.” — Dr. Joshua L. Bailey, Jr.