Stephen Gould (1947-2020)

The byline from Gould’s Tustin News column, “Tustin Remembrances.”

 Stephen Louis “Steven” Gould passed away August 22, 2020, at age 73. He was a member of a pioneer Tustin family, a prolific self-published author of local history, and the founder of One-by-One Ministries. He was also perhaps the most persistent student in CSUF’s History Department. He began taking classes there sometime in the 1960s and continued well into the 2010s – eventually earning a B.A. and M.A. in history. Indeed, Gould seemed a permanent fixture on campus, haunting the History Dept. and the Center for Oral and Public History and giving out free hamburgers to hungry students in the quad every Friday through his ministry’s “Hamburger Fellowship” program. 

Gould and his ministry also worked to help those overcoming addiction to drugs and alcohol and made regular trips to Mexico to feed the hungry and spread the gospel.

From one of Gould's articles in the Tustin News.

Most, if not all, of Gould’s books were printed and bound either at copy shops or by Professor Gary Shumway’s genealogical vanity press. Most of them covered ground already well-trod by historians rather than expanding significantly on the topic at hand. But Gould did go back and dig out the original sources himself. It seems to me that most of his books were artifacts of his ongoing personal learning process rather than an attempt to be the first to break new ground.

This pattern changed somewhat in the 1990s, when he began to write more about the history of his own family, which came to Orange County in 1888. His father, Jack, had farmed on the Irvine Ranch and the Goulds attended the little Irvine Community Church on Sand Canyon Ave. His family stories and personal anecdotes provided snapshots of life in Orange County not recorded elsewhere.  

Books written by Stephen Gould include…

• The Economic Religious History of Tustin from 1868 to 1894 (1988)
• An Annotated Bibliography of Orange County Sources (1988)
• The Effect of the Railroads on the Development of Santa Ana and Tustin (1988)
• Chinese in Tustin (1989)
• Orange County Before it was a County (1989)
• Orange County, its Towns and Cities: an Annotated Bibliography (1989)
• Fourteen Eras in Orange County History: an Illustrated Catalog of the Centennial Exhibition, September 1 - October 31, 1989, University Library Gallery, California State University Fullerton (1989)
• 1990 Directory of Orange County Historical Agencies, Historical Societies, Museums and Historical Libraries (1990)
• Californiana: A Bibliography of California Bibliographies (1990)
• An Illustrated History of Modjeska, Sienkiewicz and Salvator: the Polish and German Speaking Writers of Los Angeles and Orange County from 1870 to 1910 (1994)
• The Burning of Santa Ana's Chinatown (1994)
• Politics, Government, Labor, Racism and Segregation: California, Southern California, and Orange County Sources (1995)
• Growing Up on a California Mini Farm (1995)
• California, Southern California, and Orange County an Illustrated and Annotated Bibliography (1995)
• Tales of California: True Stories from Three Generations of Californians (1996)
• Life in Southern California: An Illustrated History of the Pre-1930's Era (1996)
• Walter Knott and His Knott's Berry Farm (1998)

Rather than working through a publisher or distributor, Gould would periodically go on road trips, driving up and down the coast of California, peddling his books (and those of other organizations) to libraries, museums and universities.  This echoed his approach to researching his bibliographies – by driving up and down the coast visiting libraries and archives rather than tapping into the usual library resources. It was, said one of his professors, an “expensive and rather unorthodox way to proceed.”

I never actually met Stephen Gould, but many in our local historical community were well-acquainted with him. Certainly, if you were involved in history at CSUF, he was a constant presence. In earlier decades he was also very involved in the Orange County Historical Society and even served on the board in the early 1970s. But with the whole world focused on COVID-19, his death seems to have gone somewhat under the radar. Although I'm probably not the best one to do it, it seems only right that someone in our community mark his passing and highlight some of his efforts.