Detour through Los Angeles

I know, I know,... WRONG COUNTY! But the land that is now Orange County was once part of Los Angeles County. That all changed in August of 1889, when we left the fold and set up shop for ourselves. Today's image is the cover of an old (1920s?) promotional brochure from the impressive collection of William Hockinson.

Orange County Historian Jim Sleeper once told me about an L.A. newspaper reporter who came to him to ask questions about Orange County's "provincialism." Jim answered his questions the best he could. Near the end of the interview the reporter asked one more question: "So, how often do you visit Los Angeles?"

"Hell," Jim replied, "I wouldn't drive to Los Angeles to watch Jesus Christ wrestle a grizzly bear!"
I'm told that quote ended up on the front page of the newspaper.

I can understand Jim's sentiments. Growing up in Southern California, most of my experiences with Los Angeles built a picture of a dangerous, smoggy, dirty place with way too much traffic.

But author, artist, neon expert and Los Angeles enthusiast J. Eric Lynxwiler recently convinced me to visit Downtown L.A. for a tour of its historic sites. I figured any tour Eric gave would be more than worth battling the traffic, but I remained wary.

Then he threw in an offer to visit "behind the scenes" of L.A. Public Library's massive History & Genealogy Collection. This sounded even better than watching Jesus wrestle a grizzly bear! I was in.

What I didn't realize was that Eric would bring along yet another L.A. expert and L.A. Conservancy tour guide, Shannon Simonds. I was suddenly a tour group of one, with TWO of the city's best tour guides. And for our tour of the library, we were led by yet a THIRD expert, Christina Rice, Acting Senior Librarian of the Photographic Collection.

My visit to our "mother county" was fascinating and a lot of fun. (Major thanks to all three of my guides!) I would try describing the whole day to you, but I think my photos tell the story better. To see them, check out this link to my Downtown L.A. photo series.

Festival of Arts

Looking for something to do this weekend? The Festival of Arts is on in Laguna Beach. Here's an event program from the 1950s.

Nixon exhibits, Anaheim's Founders' Park, etc.

Today's photo takes some explaining. You see, the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda was started by the Nixon Foundation, which is composed of Richard Nixon's friends and supporters. But the National Archives wouldn't send Nixon's presidential papers to the Library unless they were given control of the place. It's my understanding that in the end, the Foundation only ended up with control over a few areas of the facility, including the lobby and at least part of the gift shop.

Recently, the National Archives folks opened a new permanent exhibit on Watergate that some Nixon supporters saw as an attack. Soon thereafter, the Foundation placed this sign (shown above) in the lobby. It's a quote from President Clinton, which reads, "May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close."

Belated congratulations to Anaheim on their new Founders' Park, which opened to much fanfare two weeks ago. The park includes the beautifully restored Woelke-Stoffel House (1894), the Mother Colony House (1857), a carriage house, a pump house, a windmill, other samples of Anaheim's agricultural past, and a ginormous fig tree which served as a model for Disneyland's Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse. I've been watching the park's progress, and can't wait to see what the final product looks like! A lot of good people put a lot of long hours, blood, sweat, and tears into this project.

The Register covered the Founders' Park grand opening, but used different headlines for the online and print editions of the story. The print edition's headline was, I think, correct in calling the Mother Colony House the oldest wood frame home in Orange County. The headline for the online version simply called it "O.C.'s oldest home." There are quite a few people living in adobes who would be surprised to hear that. Let that be a lesson to us all: The act of putting an article -- even the exact same article -- on the Internet immediately makes it less accurate. What chance does a blogger have?

The Dana Point Historical Society has announced Oct. 2nd (11am-4pm) as the date for their annual home tour. Keep an eye on their website for forthcoming details.

DPHS also has an article on their website about William Goodwin Dana, (a relative of town namesake Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,) who ran the prosperous Rancho Nipomo and served in public office in early Santa Barbara. His adobe home is currently undergoing restoration work, but it seems that tours are still available. Okay,... The Orange County link here is a bit tenuous. But any excuse to visit California's central coast is a good excuse.

Aliso Viejo's Ten-Cennial

Anniversaries are a good time to publish local histories. Huntington Beach got Joe Santiago's Ebb & Flow for its centennial, for instance. Well, this month the City of Aliso Viejo turned 10, and sure enough, here comes a new book.

Images of America: Aliso Viejo by Bob Bunyan and the Aliso Viejo Community Foundation comes in at 128 pages, total. Of those, only 13 pages deal with that particular chunk of land from pre-historic times up through the 1960s. And of those 13 pages, almost half the space is taken up with modern images of Acjachemen village re-enactments.

Of the remaining 115 pages, 28 deal with the activities of the Mission Viejo Co. in the 1970s and 1980s. The rest of the book -- that is to say, the majority of the it -- deals with Aliso Viejo proper, from development in the 1980s and 1990s through today.

I'll leave it to you whether or not this counts as history yet. But if you love Orange County's newest city, and want a keepsake, this is your go-to book.

Judge Pleasants and wolves

The photo above shows Judge J. E. Pleasants in about 1900. I briefly discussed him in my last entry and said that "Much, much more can be said about Pleasants, but that's a whole 'nuther post." Some wiseguy soon responded, "...Get with it and follow-up with articles on 'the judge.'" 

That was already my intention. But the more I dug into the story, the more I realized that to do any kind of justice at all to the man's story, one would need to write a book. So I've started a Pleasants file, and maybe the book will happen someday. Short of that, I offer you this link to a biographical thumbnail sketch and timeline, from the finding aid for the Pleasants Family Collection in UCI's Special Collections. 

For a small sample of the kind of colorful stories omitted by such summaries, I offer the following tale, told by Pleasants and quoted in Terry Stephenson's Shadows of Old Saddleback. The story took place in the 1860s, when Pleasants was foreman of the Rancho Lomas de Santiago.

"In the upper Canada de Las Ranas [a.k.a. Peters Canyon], the Precitas [Canyon] and the Limestone [Canyon], a pack of seven big timber wolves pestered our stock. ... Among the vaqueros was one of Spanish descent named Aramente who had a 7-year-old son named Stanislaus. One evening the boy was sent afoot by his father to bring in a horse. ... The boy found him feeding on the plains out where the golf grounds were afterward located. Stanislaus caught the animal, but was unable to mount him, so with his little dog trotting along beside him, he was leading the horse toward home... when the pack of wolves swooped down off the hills and rushed at him. By waving his arms and by his cries, the little fellow kept the wolves off. They ran round and round, jumping at him, snapping their jaws. They would have killed the boy, I am sure, if the dog had not intervened. That plucky little dog got his teeth in a wolf, and the whole pack turned on him. While the wolves were killing the brave dog, the boy ran toward home. "Becoming anxious over the failure of Stanislaus to return... Aramante and I rode out to look for him and had just reached the crest... when we saw the boy running toward us nearly exhausted and in a terrible fright. The wolves, sensing our approach, had turned and we glimpsed them fleeing over the hills."

Who knew Orange County had wolves?

Of course it doesn't anymore. After this harrowing experience, the pack of wolves was made "enemy number one" on the rancho and didn't survive long. And we've heard of no local wolf sightings since.

I tell you this to ease the concerns of those readers who may have built their condominiums out of straw or sticks.

Billy the Kid was in the closet

I recently visited Helena Modjeska's home at Arden. (If you haven't driven out to see it, please do. It's now one of Orange County's Historic Parks, and definitely worth scheduling a tour.) One of many curious things that caught my attention was a closet where most of the wallpaper had come off, revealing old newspapers underneath! Hardly anything is as historically interesting as old newspapers, but it's damned near impossible to read them upside-down and backwards in a dark closet. With that in mind, I asked for permission to photograph some of the closet walls so I could decipher them later. Today's images both come from that set of photos.

The first one, above, was easy. One article begins "Las Vegas, N.M. -- The Gazette has positive... ...ion that Billy the Kid, the notorious murderer and outlaw who for several years has been the terror of New Mexico cattle men, was on... inst. killed by Pat Garrett ...[Sheriff] of Lincoln county. Garrett... been on his trail for some... overhauled him... [Fort] Sumner and shot... was a native of... his real name..." (The ellipses indicate physically missing portions of the article.)

Garrett shot Billy the Kid on July 14, 1881. So the paper was probably printed shortly after that date. The reference to the Gazette makes me wonder if this was a copy of the Anaheim Gazette, which seems likely. Someday I should check it against the microfilm at the Anaheim History Room.

In any case, this scrap of newspaper also included the following gem: "A contemporary commenting on 'Clara Belle's' the fashion writer's statement that 'during the coming season ladies will wear nothing but longitudinally striped hose,' observes, 'The printer must have overlooked her copy describing her other apparel.'"

But most interestingly of all, this 1881 newspaper pre-dates Modjeska moving into and expanding the house. These papers were most likely put in place by "Judge" Joseph Edward Pleasants, who had owned the property previously.

This will be blasphemy to some, but I personally find Judge Pleasants a more interesting local historical figure than Modjeska. A true Orange County pioneer, he moved to the Santa Ana Mountains a few years after his first visit to the area in 1859 and he never left. As well as being one of the first white settlers in that area, he became the foreman for William Wolfskill's ranch, conducted the first recorded bear hunt in Orange County, helped found the first Orange County Fair Association, judged horse races (hence his honorific), kept bees, and was one of the first members of the Orange County Historical Society. Much, much more can be said about Pleasants, but that's a whole 'nuther post.
This second newspaper remnant proved to have a bit less wow factor, but was fun to puzzle out anyway. First, I found a reference to U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms Richard J. Bright, who served in that position from 1879 to 1883. Another article mentioned that the U.S. Census was running out of money, so that put it around 1880. But the article about James B. Doyle being sentenced to ten years in prison for bond forgery pinned down the date to late June or early July of 1881.

It will be interesting, as I go through the rest of these papers, to see if all of them are from Summer 1881 or not, and whether they contain any local news. If I find other cool stuff in Madame Modjeska's closet, I'll let you know.

Tacos and websites

Today's photo shows the grand opening of the 100th Taco Bell in the chain, at 400 S. Brookhurst in Anaheim in 1967. There's still a Taco Bell near the same location today, but don't expect to see our little fiberglass friend out front, or the colorful signage, or the bell, or local officials in business suits. [Update: Thanks to Gustavo Arellano for pointing out that the current restaurant is in a newer building at an adjacent location. Sometimes I should just "Ask an Anaheimer" to begin with.]

I'm down with a cold-type bug right now, so I've had time to check the links on my blog. I fixed a number of them, and stumbled across some other items of potential interest:

1) The Heritage Museum of Orange County (that's the place with the Kellogg House, dontchaknow) is now on Facebook. Go friend the heck out of them!

2) The Nixon Foundation is now offering a blog to help you keep up with all things Nixony.

3) The Orange County History group on Flickr now has over 4,000 images.

4) Both the Seal Beach Historical Society and the Orange County Mexican American Historical Society seem to have completely given up on their respective websites. If you know about new URLs for these groups, please let me know and I will update accordingly.

5) I also added a link to the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

If you know about other sites I should link to, or have other updates for the ol' Roundup, please let me know. Your comments are appreciated.

Capistrano, Placentia, Santa Ana, and silent films

This is the plot plan for Mission San Juan Capistrano created as part of a Works Progress Administration's Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), back in the 1930s. This image, along with many other drawings and photos of the Mission, are available on the Library of Congress' website. In fact, the HABS section of their site has this kind of detailed information for thousands and thousands of historic structures all over America. Other Orange County HABS surveys were done in Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Tustin, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Anaheim, and Irvine.

Speaking of Capistrano, right now, the Mission is featuring an exhibit entitled, "Mission Treasures: Historical Collection Revealed." The exhibit includes historic artifacts from the Mission that have not been seen in decades, including rare paintings, religious artifacts, and documents related to the Mission's history. The exhibit runs through Sept. 5th, and is open daily, 10am-5pm.

The Santa Ana Historic Preservation Society has presented their 2011 Preservation Award to the Boukai family.

I'm sad to report that the Placentia Library's history room now has extremely limited hours. It's best to call and make an appointment if you want to go in and do research.

On a positive note, the Friends of the Santa Ana Library have purchased a microfilm machine for the Santa Ana History Room, so historians can get back to digging through the old newspapers. Of course, that collection also has short hours these days, so be sure to check their website to see when they're open.

And finally, a reminder that you can still see the exhibit, "On Location: Orange County in Silent Film," at the Old Orange County Courthouse, 211 W. Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana, from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, until Aug. 5th. It's free to the public.