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Omg pleaseeeee let this be fake!! 😭😭😭

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to lose Daveigh Chase, who passed away yesterday at 35, taking a massive piece of the early-2000s pop culture we grew up on with her. She leaves behind an unmatched legacy of iconic performances, from voicing Chihiro in Spirited Away (2001) and Lilo in Lilo & Stitch (2002), to giving us pure nightmares as Samara in The Ring (2002) and playing Samantha in Donnie Darko (2001).

Marian Croak — the mind behind foundational technology powering Zoom, FaceTime, and WhatsApp — has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining the ranks of history's most influential innovators. With more than 200 patents to her name, her contributions to voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) technology fundamentally reshaped how the world communicates.

Croak's early work in VoIP laid the groundwork for the video and voice calling technology that billions of people now use every single day without ever thinking twice about the engineering behind it. Long before remote work and video calls became part of everyday life, her innovations were quietly building the infrastructure that made all of it possible.

Her induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is a recognition not just of technical brilliance, but of decades of work that has had an immeasurable impact on global communication. Marian Croak didn't just invent technology — she helped redefine how the world stays connected.

This. Story. Is . Incredible.

Willa Bruce told the Los Angeles Times in 1912, "I own this land, and I am going to keep it." She had just paid $1,225 for beachfront in Manhattan Beach and built the first Black-owned beach resort on the West Coast.

In 1924 the city took it from her by force, and she died in 1934 without it. A hundred years late, she was right.

On February 15, 1912, a woman named Willa Bruce signed her name to a strip of California oceanfront and paid $1,225 for it. The lot sat on the bluff between 26th and 27th Streets, ten months before the town around it was even incorporated as Manhattan Beach.

She bought it herself. Her husband Charles was a chef on the dining cars of the trains running between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, gone for days at a time, so the land and the lodge and the books were Willa's to run.

A reporter from the Los Angeles Times came out to ask why a Black woman wanted beachfront in a place that plainly did not want her there. Willa Bruce did not soften her answer.

"Wherever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort, we have been refused," she told him. "But I own this land, and I am going to keep it."

She meant it.

Her buying it was news. The Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald, and several of the Black papers all ran the sale, and the Times noted she had paid a steep price for a lot that far out.

Willa and Charles had come west from New Mexico, part of a wave of Black families leaving the violence of the South for whatever California might give them.

What she built started small. A pop-up stand on the sand that sold food and cold fizzy drinks to the few Black families who could find their way out to her.

She poured the money back in. Willa's earnings from the stand and Charles's railroad wages went into buying up the lots beside the first one, until they had room for something real.

By 1923 it had grown into a lodge with a café, a bathhouse where a family could rent a bathing suit, and a floor upstairs wide enough for dancing. On the weekends, Black families rode out from across Los Angeles to a stretch of coast where nobody told them to move along.

Her family later put it plainly. The place had become, in the words of her descendant Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a citadel for African Americans coming there for leisure from all over southern California.

That was rarer than it sounds today.

In the whole of Los Angeles County, there was only one other stretch of shoreline a Black family could use, a small strip of sand down in Santa Monica.

Everywhere else, a Black family that wanted to put its feet in the Pacific got turned around before it reached the water. Willa Bruce had told the paper she wanted a little breathing space at the seaside where they might have a little holiday, and on her own bluff she made exactly that.

Word spread.

By 1919, six more Black families had bought lots near hers and built their own cottages by the water.

People had a name for the place by then. They called it Bruce's Beach, after the woman who started the whole thing.

The trouble came almost as fast as the dancing did. White neighbors did not want Black families on that sand, and getting them gone became a steady, organized project.

What the neighbors said out loud was that property values would fall. What they meant was that they did not want a Black resort thriving on the best sand in town.

George Peck, the developer who owned the land around the Bruces, roped off the beachfront and posted no-trespassing signs so guests could not walk straight down to the ocean. They had to go a half mile up or down the coast just to get their feet wet.

The city found its own ways to help.

Officers put up parking signs by the lodge that gave a visitor ten minutes and nothing more. There was even an ordinance making it illegal to change into a swimsuit inside your own parked car.

Every rule pointed at the same thing, making a day at Bruce's Beach more trouble than it was worth.

When the rules did not break them, the threats came. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the area, and one night someone set fire to a mattress shoved up under the main deck of the lodge.

A Black-owned home nearby went up in flames the same way. Guests who left their cars overnight came back to find the tires cut open.

Willa Bruce stayed.

The families stayed too, because the bluff was theirs and fear was not a good enough reason to hand it over.

So the city stopped trying to scare them off the sand and moved to take it outright. In 1924, the Manhattan Beach City Council came after the property with eminent domain, the government's power to force a private sale for public use.

The reason on paper was a park. The council claimed the town needed a public park on that exact run of bluff, and the Bruce family and its neighbors happened to be standing on it.

It was never only the Bruces. The condemnation swallowed more than two dozen properties, nearly the whole Black community that had grown up along that shore.

A court injunction pushed the sale through. The family was paid roughly $14,000 for land they said was worth closer to $70,000, then put off the ground Willa had promised to keep.

The same power was being used up and down the state to take land from Japanese and Latino families, all of it dressed up as public need.

It broke them.

The resort had been the family's whole financial footing, and once it was gone, Willa and Charles Bruce went back to cooking in other people's kitchens. The woman who opened the first Black-owned beach resort on the West Coast finished her life in someone else's kitchen.

She never got the ground back. Willa Bruce died in 1934, ten years after the city forced her off her own land, still robbed of the one thing she had sworn to keep.

Charles died not long after, the same way she had, still waiting on it. Neither of them lived to see a single foot of that coast handed back.

The land itself did not stay urgent for long.

The lodge, the café, and the dance room were all torn down in 1927. Then the bluff just sat there.

The public park the council simply had to have did not go up for another thirty years, not until 1956.

Weeds and ocean wind filled the place where a Black family had lived and worked and danced. The lot stayed vacant for three decades, while the reason they were ever forced off it fell apart in plain view.

For most of a century, that was where the story stopped. The land kept changing hands, its value climbed into the tens of millions, an estimated seventy-five million by the time anyone went looking for the Bruces, and the family name slipped off the bluff that had carried it.

Then people started pulling the records back out. A historian named Alison Rose Jefferson gathered the documents, and a Manhattan Beach councilman named Mitch Ward, the first Black man to hold that seat, pushed in 2007 to put the Bruce name back on the park.

The city eventually looked at its own history and admitted what the park had really been about. A report tied to Manhattan Beach concluded that the land was taken because white neighbors resented the resort's success and the prosperity of its Black owners.

The family came forward too.

Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a Bruce descendant, said they had been fighting for ninety-six years to get the land and the justice back.

In September 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a state bill clearing the legal path to return it. The next summer, Los Angeles County voted to give the ground back.

It happened in July 2022.

The county placed the deed in the hands of Marcus and Derrick Bruce, the great-grandsons of Willa and Charles. It was the first time in this country's history that a government returned seized land to a Black family.

"This is a day we weren't sure would ever come," said Anthony Bruce, another great-great-grandson of the couple who started it.

Janice Hahn, the county supervisor who pushed the return through, named the stakes. The descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, she said, could finally begin rebuilding the wealth that had been denied to their family for nearly a century.

Then the family did the one thing Willa never got the chance to do. They turned that ground back into money for the people who came after her.

In January 2023, the Bruce heirs sold the bluff back to Los Angeles County for $20 million. The same strip of coast the city had once taken for about $14,000 came home as twenty million dollars in the family's own name.

Willa Bruce put her name on that land in 1912 and told a reporter, flat out, that she was going to keep it. It took a hundred and ten years and four generations of her family, but the deed to her bluff carries the Bruce name again, and this time no one is taking it back.

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