JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE

Orange County and the Coming of UCI

Leonard Caum Moffitt

2007

In Memory of Dr. Daniel G. Aldrich, Chancellor
 

 

 
     
  
    

JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE

Orange County and the Coming of UCI

Leonard Caum Moffitt

2007

In Memory of Dr. Daniel G. Aldrich, Chancellor
J.C. BERKELEY LIBRARY
CHAPTERS

1. Arrival and Introduction 3
Campus Planning 7

Irvine Ranch 13

A New Task 17

2._Orange County Before WW2 19
Key Factor Of Change 22

Power of Oil and Water 24

Local Politics 26

Inter-ethnic Factor 28

3._Orange County: WW2 To 1967 21
Local Governance 32

Public planning 35

Private Public-Planning 39

Small Town Challenges 41

Annexation Warfare 43

A Brief Update 44

4. Implications and Significance 45
Leadership and Politics 46

Maze of Regionalism 50
Communicative Linkages 52
Concepts of Community 54

Why Now 59
 
CHAPTER ONE

Arrival And Introduction

The 450-mile trip south---from Berkeley in northern California to Orange County
in southern California—had passed smoothly. Pulling a small luggage trailer with all of
my worldly possessions behind my old Chevy, | had left early that morning. It was the
start of September 1962 and | had listened to a Giants baseball game on the car's radio
along the way. My trip put me in Los Angeles at the height of evening rush-hour traffic.
To my delight, traffic turned out not as hectic as anticipated.

The State Highway Department's southern division, | reluctantly had to admit, did
a better job of posting directional signs on freeways than did the northern division.
Perhaps it had to, to handle such volumes. In any case, | breezed right through without
once getting confused in the crowded maze. Even LA’s infamous smog behaved itself
that day; | could actually see for a couple miles.

As | continued driving down the West Coast's first freeway now known as 1-5, |
paid little attention to indications of towns like Dairyland, Fullerton, Buena Park, and
Anaheim along the way. On that first day in Orange County, they meant nothing to me.
All 1 noticed driving by were areas packed with ranch-style homes interspersed with large
open spaces, some of them still farmed. The fascinating stories of how each of those
towns (and a couple dozen others, plus school districts and commercial centers) began
and grew would intensely capture and rivet my attention only much later.

On that day, | was simply looking for where to turn off into Santa Ana, there to find
a motel. The next day would start a new challenge. | would find my way out to the Irvine
Ranch headquarters where the embryo of what would become the University of
California’s Irvine campus had its temporary office. | was employee #5—after the vice
chancellor for physical facilities, the campus architect, and two secretaries. My role:
campus-community planner. Our chancellor, still based in Berkeley, would commute
back and forth for some months to come.

Ranch headquarters were easily found, out among a vast valentia orange
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orchard. The summer sun filtered through the leaves as | pulled into a parking spot. Our
University component had settled into the second floor of a stately old late-nineteenth
century mansion: the Irvine family home. Spacious once-upon-a-time family bedrooms
accorded us our new offices. It all impressed me: their cedar-lined closets themselves
seemed as large as any office | had ever worked in.

Raymond Watson and his Irvine Company planning staff took up the mansion’s
first floor, making it quite convenient for our cooperative endeavors. Ray turned out to
be a terrific colleague with a keen sense for how to deal effectively with all kinds of
people. He had to. A UC Berkeley grad (like me) and a Democrat in a company of
southern California Republicans, his solid accomplishments (and diplomacy) would
eventually take him to Irvine Company presidency, then on to head Disney enterprises.
(Like me after retirement decades later, he would conduct classes—Ray at UCI, | at
Oregon State. And he would annually make a sizeable donation to the University.)

Each lunch we joined Irvine Company administrators at the ranch dinning hall.
There we stood around a large table in order of rank until Mr. Thomas, the president (a
one-time Secretary of the Navy and one-time president of a major airline) sat down.
Then we all sat and did not stand again until Mr. Thomas rose, having seen that each
of us had completed another hearty meal designed for the needs of ranch hands who ate
in the adjoining mess hall.

It might sound rather stiff and formal, like an officers’ dinning room on a battleship.
But it really wasn’t. The food was delicious and conversation always most enjoyable.
Although my proper place was at the end, | had no complaints: | was single then and
could never cook for myself the quality and quantity of fare provided daily by the Ranch.
(Besides, Ray always gave me his dessert.)

We of the University were there because the Irvine Company board had decided
to donate a thousand acres to UC for a new 25,000 student campus. (How those old
conservative Scotchmen on that board were brought, most reluctantly, to make such a
huge gift was a story | learned only much later.) Since a fine new university already
existed in Fullerton under the State College system, it is uncertain that a new University
of California site would have gone to Orange County had the Irvine Company not made
such a generous offer. Two totally new UC campuses were then also under
development: one in southern California at San Diego; the other at Santa Cruz.

Planning for a totally new city of perhaps 100,000 t0150,000 residents around
the new campus had already begun by the Ranch. Much remained for resolution, of
course, between Ranch and University staffs. And nothing could provide a better
ambience for getting well acquainted than those lunches. (I looked forward to them
every day, and all weekend for Monday's.)

When | arrived, our future campus site could not even boast of a road in. We had
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either to hike or horseback into it as we conducted our planning work. Only some
magnificent head of black angus with a few attendant cowboys populated the ten odd
thousand acres of hills lying between the ocean on the right and a wide stretch of level
ground inland to the left with their hundreds of thousands of orange trees. The remaining
third of Irvine's 89,000 acres was mountainous. Together they occupied the central one-
fifth of Orange County—nine miles wide and 20 miles deep from ocean to mountain.

Originally the Ranch had 110,000 acres. That's three times the size of San
Francisco, to give it a scale we can comprehend. At least It did, until WWII when the
military took two sizeable bites out of its middle, one to base coastal patrol blimps, the
other for the El Toro Marine air base.

Within a year, we moved into a new ButlerBuilding on one corner of our campus,
again a temporary arrangement until the first “real” campus buildings could be
constructed. This initial move turned out to be fortuitous—even though it meant my no
longer eating at the Irvine Ranch. It was fortuitous for us because one night a few
months later that magnificent old Irvine mansion burned to the ground, taking with it an
unmistakable icon of an Orange County now rapidly undergoing transformation.

One task | had to take care of quite soon was finding a place to live on a more
permanent basis. Having just moved back from working in Hawaii, | sought a beach
environment. So why not Newport Beach by the ocean? The first place | looked at
seemed agreeable enough. Only slowly did | learn how relatively exclusive Newport
Beach was. From my apartment, more than once | saw young people drag racing their
parents’ Rolls Royces down the main boulevard. Next to thirty- and forty-foot yachts sat
supposed mobile homes occupying prime real estate on nearby Lido Island. Of course,
sitting on jacks, they were mobile in name only.

There was a time not too distant when oil and motion picture wealth flocked to
Newport Beach—before Palm Springs became the “in” place after WW2. | should not
have been surprised that longtime residents here took on superior airs toward the rest
of Orange County with its well established reputation as California’s Bible Belt. (Ironically
Newport Beach's original name, Cienaga de los Ranas, meant “swamp of the frogs.”)

Still, | was surprised. Especially after | encountered tales about bootleg
smugglers (even before Prohibition) shipping up from Mexico and dropping their cargo
a few hundred feet out to sea when tides and waves would wash their barrels in to shore.
There, local smugglers would collect and race them to distributors inland. It seems this
local style “mob” pretty well ran city hall at one time.

Respectable residents, of course, no longer spoke of those days. After all, though
little, Newport Beach by the 1940s did take the lead among Orange County towns in
modernizing and professionalizing local government. In contrast, many towns (a few
even into the 1960s) continued practicing what one local observer called “high button
shoes” government—rule by cronyism and nepotism.

Where rainfall barely exceeds that of a desert, water takes on utmost importance.
By the turn of the century, shots had already been exchanged between local folks inland
trying to protect their water rights. When towns in westernmost Orange County finally
quit fighting each other and began to pull together to form a regional water district,
Newport Beach refused to join. It would go on its own, having enough funds to purchase
the aquifer outfall water from neighboring Huntington Beach to supply its own needs.
More disruptive, just when the water shortage really began to drastically hit farmers and
towns throughout the rest of the county, Newport Beach used 200,000 gallons a day to
make mud for the filming of that WWI epic, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Then there's the way Newport Beach got the rest of the county to vote for a bond
issue to dredge and develop its silted harbor during the 1930's Depression, after voters
had rejected early bond issues. Its leaders had argued that establishing a harbor district
and using countywide taxes would create much needed employment. Newport Beach
lobbyists in Washington DC then logrolled the Army Corps of Engineers to cover most
of Orange County's share of costs. And this time, Irvine stayed out of the campaign.

Economic conditions were so bad just then that staunchly Republican Orange
County swallowed pride and joined Newport Beach’s appeal to FDR’s Democratic federal
administration for further financial assistance. As it turned out, the new harbor provided
a fine setting for the wealthy to keep their yachts but generated few jobs. About all it did
in that vein was construction of some wooden PT boats there during WWII.

That autumn of 1962, | began attending Orange County Philharmonic Symphony
concerts. The actual orchestra was the Los Angeles Symphony (under the direction of
a dynamic young conductor, Zubin Mehta) on contract with an Orange County label.
Despite the name, however, concerts occurred only at an Orange Coast Community
College’s new splendid auditorium near Newport Beach.

All might have gone on satisfactorily—at least for coastal patrons. But not only
was the actual orchestra from Los Angeles rather than home to Orange County; Newport
residents dominated its governing board and the Newport Beach's newspaper The Pilot
became a subsidiary of Los Angeles’s leading daily. Immediately up went red flags.

It all became too much for inland concert goers who lived in towns which had for
decades sought every which way to distinguish themselves from (horrors) big
domineering Los Angeles. Besides, if they wanted to hear Zubin Mehta, central LA was
as close as Newport Beach. They decided they had to establish their own orchestra.
Fortuitously, there existed a ready supply of professional musicians hungry to perform
serious music after earning their livings playing at Disneyland. This is how relatively
small Orange County could boast having two professional orchestras.
Campus Planning

| came to my post at UCI in a round-about way, going back several years. After
| completed my graduate work at UC Berkeley in 1957, one of my first jobs took an
unanticipated twist. Not content to work in the usual land-use regulation business called
urban planning, | hooked up with the Alameda County agricultural agent down the hall
from my office in Hayward, northern California. We began exploring possibilities for
something we came to call a “planned agricultural district.”

Only a few years earlier, Alameda County across the bay from San Francisco,
ranked among the top three percent of counties throughout America in agricultural
production. But rapid urbanization was gobbling up some of this country’s finest farm
land. We sought a far more effective way to save those lands, given the obvious fact
that traditional zoning and a slough of various tax gimmicks had proven quite ineffective.

Just about when the agricultural agent Harkens and | began to make some
headway in selling our idea, he went off to some remote place in Asia on a US aid
program and | received an offer | couldn't refuse: a chance to work as a planning
consultant in Hawaii. (While in Korea during the early part of that war, | would listen to
‘Hawaii Calls” over Armed Forces Radio as snowy winds swirled around my tent. |
resolved then and there that someday | would live in the islands.)

Working with Hawaii's state chamber of commerce agricultural committee, |
planted the “planned agricultural district” concept . It took several decades until it would
receive a half-hearted test—albeit when conditions were not longer suitable.
Incidentally, William Whyte mentioned our pioneering work in a 1959 LIFE Magazine
article on protecting agricultural lands from urban sprawl.

When | left Hawaii and returned to California, | dropped in to see the University’s
statewide Dean of Agriculture at Berkeley. Daniel G. Aldrich proved quite interested in
my planning efforts for agriculture. Our continued discussions, however, soon turned to
the needs of his new position, that of chancellor for the new campus at Irvine. Would
I like to join his nucleus of a team there?

Would I!! Nothing appealed more to me. Rare is the planner who has a chance
to participate in creating an entire city from scratch. This is how | came to arrive in
southern California that September 1962.

An internationally famous architect had a contract with both the University and the
Irvine Company to formulate an overall concept for an integrated campus and city.
Besides having that wonderful knack of getting the best from his staff (just as did
Chancellor Aldrich), Bill Pereira was an idea man par excellance. He was also very easy
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to work with—despite having his photo on the cover of TIME and having won two
academy award Oscars for movie set designs.

He was always just “Bill"to us and | enjoyed more than one private breakfast with
him as we discussed campus issues. One issue we amicably differed on: | argued for
a layout of married student housing that would allow areas for hanging out laundry. This
appalled him as cluttering his fine aesthetic designs. He won, of course.

One innovative idea of his built into the agreement between University and Irvine
board called for a campus shaped like a hand with fingers running out. In between those
fingers would be residential development for townspeople as a way, hopefully, to more
completely integrate what was called “town and gown,” more often than not elsewhere
a source of friction. Irvine Company's gift agreement also made it possible for the
University to purchase those 660 acres called “inclusion areas.”

University President Clark Kerr, never completely sold on this attempt at
integration, decided to exercise a buy-option for what were originally called “intrusion
areas.” Thus the stage was set for a meeting between Irvine Company board members
and our University staff headed by Kerr himself in late September 1962. And we of the
University staff dutifully marched behind our president into the Irvine boardroom.

For what seemed like hours (it wasn’t that long, but it certainly felt like it on that
particular day), Kerr did most of the talking. We all sat stiil, and without appearing to do
so, strained to hear the secretaries in the next room. On that day every Irvine board
member strangely happened to develop a sudden case of apparent deafness in need of
“hearing aids” plugged into their ears.

We all knew they weren't deaf, but we couldn’t discern whether President Kerr
even noticed. When a groan filtered through the walls from the secretaries assembled
around a TV set, we of the University staff from northern California knew the San
Francisco Giants had just scored a run. When we heard the secretaries shout and saw
smiles break out on Irvine faces, we knew the Dodgers had done something big.

All the while though, Kerr kept trying to negotiate a final decision apparently
unaware of what was going on. You see, it was the final game of a playoff series for the
National League pennant. Governor Pat Brown would comment quite aptly that for three
days all of California came to a standstill. All except that brilliant scholar, Clark Kerr.

When the game ended and the Irvine contingent unplugged their “hearing aids”,
it was astonishing how every item was settled in mere minutes and we could move ahead
speedily with campus planning. The University would purchase the inclusion areas and
integrate them into the campus rather than into the future town. Incidentally, the Giants
won that third and deciding game after a torrid surge in the last month of the season to
tie the previously dominant Dodgers and necessitate a three-game playoff.
It was not uncommon to lay out campuses with building clusters branching off from
a straight major corridor. In keeping with Pres. Kerr's academic concepts, Pereira
departed drastically from that practice. His major walkway corridor (over a utility tunnel)
formed a giant ring with six lesser corridors branching off somewhat like the handgrips
on a ship’s steering wheel. Five of the resulting clusters of buildings would each house
a different academic field: humanities & arts, biological, physical, and social sciences,
and engineering. Phys Ed would be off to the west, where an ancient whale’s skeleton
was uncovered in excavating for a swimming pool.

The sixth cluster would contain the initial library/administrative offices, student
union and main cafeteria. It would also provide the principal gateway to the expected
new city’s commercial center, much like that from Sather Gate to Telegraph Avenue in
Berkeley, or the south end of UCLA. Unfortunately for UCI, just beyond the limited space
designated for Irvine City's commercial center lay a wide flood plain. This limited
development of residences and student apartments, hence the amount of pedestrian flow
as potential customers and off-campus activity users.

One particular question was left hanging: how to put to optimal use the large open
space left in the middle of the campus’s ring. Pereira thought a splendid bell tower would
accent the unity of the campus despite its segmentation by major academic fields. |
suggested this central site as most appropriate for the eventual main library serving all
academic interests. Others preferred placing an eventual large student union building
here—to bring together the otherwise dispersed students.

Since a consensus never did emerge, we simply left it untouched until the campus
would have matured enough to know what would serve best in this most prime location.
Apparently no consensus to build something ever has materialized. To this day more
than four decades later, it remains open space—fittingly named Aldrich Park—for
outdoor concerts and a place for students to stretch out on the grass between classes.

Soon after the first classroom buildings were finished, the visual arts department
erected a large outdoor sculpture constructed of telephone poles and cables. It was
interesting enough as it sat there attracting only slight attention. Then one Monday
morning the arts faculty exploded with exasperation. Students over the weekend had
carefully decorated this sculpture with roll after roll of toilet paper.

| found myself a bit mystified by their reaction. | thought art was supposed to
generate interaction by viewers. Clearly this piece of art had stimulated viewer
interaction as few pieces ever do. Quickly the department shred away all that wonderful
toilet paper—much as administrators at UC Berkeley had reacted when a student over
a weekend had climbed up its iconic Tower to place a toy bear (UC Berkeley is, after all,
the home of the Golden Bears) on its sculptured top. They made a big fuss over having
to hire someone to, dangerously, climb up and remove that toy even though the next rain
would have accomplished it for free.
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Before all this construction could proceed however, a final design plan had to
secure University Board of Regents approval. Since Pereira had the contract as master
planner, we had to wait for his final submission. It came late one Friday afternoon: a
huge document that would have made a marvelous textbook for university students to
learn how the world’s great campuses function in their physical layout and design.

What a shock Chancellor Aldrich and his two vice chancellors experienced when
this voluminous tome dropped on them. Monday morning they arrived in our offices with
glummest of looks, each having spent many hours over the weekend wading through
this grand product. It was now the turn for the campus architect's and me to tackle it.
We immediately saw the cause of their anxiety. This was a fine study, but not a plan.

Pereira’s product had arrived at the last possible moment. In a few days—that
very Thursday—all University Regents would descend for the first time upon UCI to
decide, up or down, on a plan. We knew full well that a negative vote could likely delay
opening our campus for at least half a year. But Pereira’s report was simply not
appropriate for submission, regardless of his personal ties to the Regents.

With only a few short hours to grasp its entire package, they couldn't possibly
read it all. It simply had to be cut to one-fourth its length and simplified so that the major
concepts would come across utterly obvious. After all, the Regents had to deal with
many other major issues for the other eight campuses at their monthly meeting beside
just the future of UC Irvine.

What was to be done? Chancellor Aldrich, his two vice chancellors, the campus
architect and | met that Monday afternoon. Never have | seen such unanimity in
consternation among highly intelligent, exceedingly earnest men. That unanimity said
something had to be done. But what? And by whom? The chancellor and vice
chancellor for academic affairs were due the next morning at UC Davis in northern
California for a two-day statewide conference. The vice chancellor for physical plant and
administration would be totally occupied preparing for the Regents’ visit.

When no one could come up with a solution, | finally spoke up and volunteered
to take a stab at boiling down Pereira’s mammoth report to workable size and clarity.
What other choice did they have? They had to take a long-shot gamble on me. And so
at four that afternoon | began editing and rewriting the report. | made no changes to the
design (whether or not | had reservations, especially for its inadequate parking spaces).
| focused only on how best to present Pereira’s conceptual design.

By next morning | had large sections completed. While | cranked out the
remaining draft portions, our entire small secretarial staff began putting my scribbles into
readable typewritten form. We finished by mid-afternoon when | rushed off with a clean
draft to the nearby Orange County airport, grabbed a plane to Sacramento where a car
met me to whisk me to a conference attended by all of the University’s chancellors. |
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managed to get some food, my first in 30 hours, before huddling all evening with
Chancellor Aldrich and academic Vice Chancellor Ivan Hinderaker. They somehow
made quite readable my quickly assembled words.

Some time around 2 a.m. | fell asleep, my first in two days. | have no idea how
much longer they worked on it. When | awoke at 6 Wednesday morning, an edited draft
awaited my trip to Sacramento airport, a flight back to Orange County, and delivery to
our secretarial pool for final typing. (Now at last | could go home, shower, and change
clothes. No doubt by then my B.O. must have been a bit noticeable.) The Regents
arrived on time Thursday, listened to Chancellor Aldrich’s colorful pitch—he was a
masterful public speaker—and approved our plan on Friday without making a single
change, the first time anyone could remember their doing that.

Meanwhile, much had to be accomplished before the first students would arrive.
The vice chancellor for non-academic affairs, L.E. Cox, a retired Army Corps of
Engineers colonel, had to recruit a team to maintain the new buildings and landscaping,
ensure reliable utilities (water, electrical, waste services), establish personnel and fiscal
operations, contract for food service, provide campus police, and organize a host of
details that make a campus functional. The campus architect, Coulson Tough previously
at UCLA, had to assemble a team of architects, engineers, and landscape architects to
oversee contracts for design and construction of buildings, landscaping, interior painting
and finishing, then purchase the horrendous range of furnishings—desks, chairs,
cabinets, tables, etc—essential for professorial, research, and student needs.

These duties frequently encountered obstacles at higher levels of university and
state government. For example, although UCI staff could obtain better deals for furniture
locally, the state apparatus wanted to impose centralized purchasing, supposedly for
dubious economies of scale regardless of bureaucratic inefficiencies. Then there arose
controversy over floor covering for classrooms. Even though carpeting was less
expensive to install and maintain while as durable and better in appearance and
acoustics, state government demanded vinyl flooring solely because taxpayers might
think we were creating too luxurious a place for students and so stir up political trouble.

A hornets’ nest did erupt locally over UCI's initial student housing. Males would
occupy one wing of the same building as females in a separate wing. Some rather vocal
local groups—perhaps projecting their own carnal instincts—objected strenuously that
this arrangement would promote promiscuity, even though evidence from other
campuses indicated the reverse. The issue was one of how much “parenting” a public
campus must impose on people already old enough to vote. Sadly this issue brought
Governor Reagan and the Regents into the fray and quite possibly deprived Chancellor
Aldrich of succeeding to UC presidency for which he had been groomed.

While all of this work progressed to create a physical campus, Chancellor Aldrich
and his acting vice chancellor for academic affairs had a major recruiting drive to
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complete. They pulled together an outstanding academic team of eminent scholars to
head the various schools, departments, library, and research institutes. They in turn had
to locate and enlist the requisite complement of professors, plus research, admissions,
clerical, and counselor staffs—in addition to finalizing the academic plan. And all of this
had to come together in an extremely short time.

For planning purposes, one thousand seemed a critical mass for an initial student
enrollment. The actual number well exceeded that figure; many said they had been
waiting for UCI to open. What had transpired was the beginnings of a distinct new
community expected to reach 25,000 students with upwards of 10,000 faculty,
researchers, and staff—about the size of a small city nested within a set of communities,
ranging from Irvine city, to Orange County, to California state—and complete with its own
cultural/athletic activities and academic ceremonies for community self-identification.

With construction underway, staff had to deal with various other operational
matters including preparations for emergencies. Shortly before our first students began
classes, a college in Santa Barbara County was being engulfed by wildfire. It happened
on a weekend when only resident students were present. They had to mobilize
themselves ad hoc to prevent a worse disaster until county fire crews could arrive.

During my graduate student days at UC Berkeley, a rowdy mob of non-students
one evening invaded campus bent on a panty raid at girls’ dorms and sororities. (I just
happened to witness it on my way to a professor's home for a seminar.) The scene had
all the earmarks of a potential riot. But male students arose to the occasion and
diplomatically averted disaster before either campus or city police could intervene.
Consequently, Berkeley's then chancellor, Clark Kerr, knew nothing about it until news
reporters startled him early the next morning at home by asking for a statement.

With these incidents in mind, | suggested at a staff meeting that UCI might do well
to have a disaster plan that would put student energies to good purpose. Earthquakes
and fires can strike any time and seem to have a penchant for hours when professional
staff are absent. | suggested that, in such a situation, it would seem prudent to have the
resident students already organized to step up to the emergency until staff supervisors
could arrive—which in the case of a severe earthquake might take days.

Before | could utter that complete case, it ignited an explosion from the staff
member in charge of facility personnel. “No student is going to organize and operate any
disaster effort over my employees!” What could the chancellor do in the face of this
strident reaction except to let it rest? A disaster plan never did emerge then and still did
not exist when a few years later a protest demonstration against the war in Vietham got
out of hand and led to the burning of a local Bank of America branch building.

One decision was left entirely to that first class of students : picking a mascot and
fight yell. They garnered nationwide press attention by selecting “anteaters” with a cry
of “Zot!” from the then popular newspaper comic strip, B.C.
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An especially vivid scene | can never forget from those years at UCI. It was 22
November 1963 as Chancellor Aldrich, Bill Pereira, and several of us staff on the
planning team were intently engaged in a discussion. A secretary interrupted us in a
rather unusually strained manner. We tensed and she announced that President John
F. Kennedy had been shot to death in Dallas Texas.

To say the least, everyone of us was momentarily shocked speechless. Campus
considerations instantly vanished from thought. When at last we began to recover our
voices, all we could stammer out were: How could this happen? Was there a conspiracy
behind it? Could it mean war? What a tragedy to such a young dynamic leader as
Kennedy! What could happen next? We of course had no answers, only consternation.

Once again there surged through me that moment when as a young highschool
student | had heard the interruption to Toscanini’'s NBC Symphony radio broadcast as
my family ate our Sunday meal. It announced that Japanese armed forces had attacked
Pearl Harbor, and our world changed forever. It was somewhat, too, like the surprise
experienced that Sunday the 25" of June 1950 when we learned that North Korea had
invaded South Korea. Those of us in the armed forces stationed in Japan that day knew
we'd soon be personally involved. And we were.

Irvine Ranch

Somewhat of a history buff, | soon became fascinated with the Irvine Ranch and
how what | now encountered had come to be. One story | heard in particular spurred my
curiosity. It had to do with James Irvine's dramatic encounter with the Southern Pacific
Railroad, a major power in California during the late 1800s and into the twentieth century.

The 1946 epic movie Duel in the Sun (starring Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, and
Joseph Cotton) had a particularly tense scene in it. A railroad tried to run a line across
private property, a not uncommon real-life practice back in the late 19" century. Always
the railroad would construct its line over a weekend when a landowner could not get a
judge to issue a prohibiting injunction. Then with a fiat accompli, it would be too late.

In this movie, the railroad company had its crew, their rifles at the ready, all
formed up along the property line of a huge ranch which stood in its way. The rancher,
played dramatically by Lionel Barrymore, brought his equally well armed cowboys to face
the other men in what could have been open warfare—or at least mutual slaughter.
There they faced off.

That was a movie—supposedly fiction. But it depicted exactly what did happen in
Orange County when Collins P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific, for the first
time faced an adversary prepared to call the railroad’s bluff. Irvine ranch hands did
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stand their ground. The SP backed down and never did get a rail line through from Los
Angels to San Diego. It got no farther than Santa Ana. Instead, Irvine trustees in 1886
arranged for the Santa Fe Railroad, the SP’s bitter rival, to come through.

It seems that James Irvine and C.P.Huntington had come to California on the
same ship around the Horn. Something happened between them that festered into a
strong dislike or distrust for each other while in San Francisco, even before Irvine
acquired his ranch. The more my curiosity learned about the Irvines and their ranch, the
more colorful it sounded.

James Irvine Sr., a Scotch immigrant and successful San Francisco entrepreneur,
acquired this gigantic Orange County spread in 1874. Rancheros here had traditionally
raised cattle, as much for hides as for meat. With a shortage of fiber for clothing in the
US North and in Europe due to the Civil War blockade of Confederate ports, the new
Anglo owners switched to raising sheep for wool.

James Sr, living in San Francisco, continued that operation, even though by then
the market for wool had dropped markedly. This seems not to have mattered all that
much; the ranch remained merely a sideline to his San Francisco endeavors. Several
events, however, coincided about then to alter economic prospects and reorient the
Irvine focus.

One early non-ranching colony settled in what would become Anaheim. (These
German immigrants named it in German for the Santa Ana River flowing nearby and
source of their irrigation.) Although urban craftsmen by trade, they embarked on a
cooperative agricultural effort, beginning with grapes for wine and raisins. Just when
prospects looked good, a plague destroyed their vineyards. Looking for an alternative,
they hit upon oranges. Valencias from the Azores proved to thrive quite well here.

But southern California constituted a rather limited market with many locales quite
right for growing citrus. To the rescue just then came the newly invented refrigerated
railroad car. It opened up the entire US East Coast as a profitable market in the 1890s
and ever after. James Irvine Jr saw the possibilities, moved his family from San
Francisco to Orange County, and took direct control of operations after his father’s
death. When he sought a bank loan, he was refused. He vowed then never to borrow,
a vow he kept and at his death left a thriving company debt free with a multi-million dollar
bank balance.

His daughter, Joan Irvine, inherited her grandfather's spunk and shrewd sense.
It was she, as Irvine board member controlling the largest block of shares in the
corporation, who saw the future in urban development. What better means existed to
launch a new city of higher valued homes and attract high-tech industries than to have
a world-class research university campus on Irvine land?
15

It was she then who maneuvered other board members—all older, conservative
males—to offer the University of California a thousand acres. A resultant campus, new
city, and industrial park around the Orange County Airport (later renamed for John
Wayne) proved her vision correct. In fact, that industrial park, projected to fill up in ten
to twenty years, was almost fully developed in three.

In the course of planning the transition from strictly agriculture to a new role of
major urban developer, the Irvine Company hired Ray Watson and a small staff of
designers. Ray conferred with developers of new cities in America and inspected them,
such as Rouse’s Columbia MD. He even traveled to Great Britain to study what was
being accomplished there in creating totally designed new towns. He of course worked
with Bill Pereira and his staff. The resulting plan appeared to have great promise.

Not everything turned out as planned, however. But not due Irvine actions. The
Irvine Company had worked closely with the County Planning Department in what
amounted to a “planned community district”: an initial blanket zoning designation which
would leave specific site locations of a wide range of particular land-uses up to
integrated design considerations. The County Board of Supervisors fully agreed.

We were all aiming in the same direction. All except one party. And he held a
power to influence how land was used which no other public or private entity could
overrule. It was the County Tax Assessor.

The Irvine Ranch master plan had designated the low productive hill area around
the UC campus for a new city. The large central part of the Ranch could therefore
remain in highly productive orange groves for many decades into the future, perhaps
permanently.

The independently elected tax assessor had no responsibility for how land was
used; only for equitable ad valorem taxes. He simply saw only so many thousands of
acres of potential urban uses and proceeded to render tax appraisals for some tens of
thousands of acres as if every one of those acres could be and might be converted into
urban development the next year.

From what was happening to the west nearest Los Angeles County, he had an
obvious basis for his argument that zoning means nothing: It is all too often and too
readily changed. The 1950s had seen a terrible plague destroy one orchard after
another. Growers were being financially wiped out over night.

They had only one recourse: to sell their land to developers to meet a burgeoning
market for tract houses. And county zoning readily accommodated their needs. Only
the Irvine Ranch had the fiscal wherewithal to convert the ravished orchards to new,
plague resistant trees. And it was doing so to the tune of 120,000 trees a year.
16

Orange County's tax assessing convulsion did not start with Irvine lands, but it did
reach its apex there. Actually several small disruptions began in the late 1950s and
early ‘60s. Newport Beach residents, for one example out of many, complained about
their high taxes subsidizing the larger number of Costa Mesa students in their joint
highschool district. When they lost that appeal, they turned on the Irvine company’s low
agricultural tax rate.

Without knowing that they were spouting Henry George socialism, these politically
conservative residents claimed unfairness—that owners had no right to profit from land.
These protestors did not recognize either that even low taxed farm land paid more taxes
than the few public services received would warrant. In effect, ag land subsidized urban
areas, not the reverse.

Until then the tax assessor had dealt only with individual petitions one at a time.
He was quite unprepared for mass revolts. So he conveniently retired and left the issue
to his elected successor who attacked with a vengeance. Eventually as matters heated,
the latter demanded literally truck loads of documents from the Irvine Company. Far
worse, not even that institution could meet his heavy reappraisals for urban use of
heretofore ag land. He could appraise the orange trees as “developed.”

Consequently, instead of developing the new City of Irvine around the UCI
campus on the then unproductive hill land, they had to start destroying those highly
productive orchards. Irvine's fine plan required a drastic overhaul, and the campus sat
to one side without serving as town magnet and focal point as intended.

This story took another strange twist. Leaders of the once influential Farm
Bureau, oil producers, and County Chamber of Commerce met to find someone capable
of challenging this new tax assessor in the next election. If he could take on the Irvine
Ranch so boldly like this, their economic interests were definitely threatened too.

Not only could they no longer find a willing volunteer with a chance of winning.
Someone among them was a Judas who reported their entire strategy sessions to the
tax assessor. These once powerful men were utterly shocked to discover in this way just
how far their power had evaporated in that era’s rapidly changing world.

Knowing that no land-use remains forever unchanged, Irvine leaders decided
early on to handle their new urban development the way large estates did in Hawaii.
They would not sell sections to developers or individual lots to homeowners. Irvine
would retain underlying ownership of the land and only lease lots. This strategy would
facilitate redevelopment at some future date many decades off if appropriate.

It sounded reasonable in theory. But it did not reckon the political power of
thousands of homeowners reacting to marked jumps in their lease rent as time
transpired. At Irvine as in Hawaii, the power of a mass of voters counter-balanced the
17
traditional weight of a huge landowner. As in Hawaii, eventually that owner had to sell.

Another interesting complication arose in planning and developing Irvine City.
How does a private owner establish a system for “democratically” deciding on and
funding schools, water and sewers, parks and municipal services before residents live
there to vote to create the necessary districts and city government? None of us had an
answer. Chancellor Aldrich had me arrange numerous conferences with professors of
political science and urban planning from existing University of California campuses.
They willingly came and gave freely of their time and expertise.

One such workshop lasted almost a week. We explored every conceivable
possibility in what proved to be a rather stimulating intellectual exercise. But we had, in
the end, to conclude that no alternative existed or had a chance of legislative
authorization. New schools, public utilities, parks etc. would have to be financed as
Irvine front-end costs, and all other concerns of governance would have to wait until
enough residents arrived to incorporate.

Irvine would simply have to gamble that future residents would neither impose
further costly investments in infrastructure nor unreasonable design stipulations. Even
So, many newcomers conjured reasons for distrusting what they saw as too much Big
Brother. Irvine Company's overwhelming size touched off fears and suspicions among
new residents as it had for many decades among county and local town officials.

As Ray and | discussed various aspects of this proposed new city, a question
arose about what amount of population would likely prove optimal. To help us, the Irvine
Company contracted with the best known consulting firm on public administration. Much
to our surprise, it answered: between sixty thousand and one-hundred thousand for a
city within a well developed metropolitan region where large airports and world-class
cultural events were possible, as would be true for Irvine.

Data gathered from all over the state showed that with a population (and tax base)
below 60,000, a municipality might likely lack sufficient expert staff in all areas of
responsibility. Above 100,000, bureaucratic inefficiencies begin to creep in and ready
contact between citizens and administration becomes increasingly less free and direct.
After our initial surprise, we came to see the logic in these findings and could observe
them in existing Orange County municipalities.

A New Task

Having served with distinction as the University’s Dean of Agriculture, Chancellor
Daniel G. Aldrich knew what a valuable role the University could and did play in making
California so productive—one fourth of this nation’s food and an economy greater than
all but a handful of entire countries. Now that he would head an urban campus, he
intended to encourage and facilitate faculty members to prove equally valuable to the
18

urban scene. Public service, as well as teaching and research, constituted the
University’s mission and raison d'etre. To do so, for starters he needed himself to have
a far greater grasp on what made the immediate community of Orange County tick.

Now that my initial planning tasks were completed, he turned to me with incisive
questions about community. When | could not answer him to my satisfaction from social
science theory, he gave me two years to gather all the information | could about Orange
County and its emergence into the most rapidly growing standard metropolitan statistical
area in the US during the 1950s and ‘60s. Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Jack
Peltason (a future UCI chancellor and UC president) arranged the necessary fiscal
support for my research effort. Orange Countians readily provided the information.

This is how | came to interview a couple hundred city council members, county
and special district officials, school superintendents, community activists, developers,
and newspaper editors/publishers in every corner of the county. This is how | came to
learn about charities, symphony orchestras, patterns of telephone calls, elections and
recall elections, civic participation, leadership roles, changes in transportation systems
and commercial centers, to read numerous unpublished but well written local histories
and autobiographies by longtime residents, to track decades of census data, and to
attend a wide assortment of meetings including some by extreme radical groups.

One retired civil engineer, who had held various official posts throughout the
county, gave me free access for an entire week to his voluminous six-decade collection
of newspaper clippings about events in Orange County. Two years to the day after
receiving this assignment, | presented the chancellor with a 700-page (admittedly
unpolished) typed report, its highlights cited here.

In tackling this task, | made one basic assumption. Understanding how a
community—be it a town, a county, a region, a nation—functions and grows depends
upon knowing how it evolved over a long stretch of time: to fathom its inertia, its cultural
outlook, its complex inter-linkages. | therefore began with what existed clear back in the
early nineteenth century, before California became a part of the US, then sought to
follow how the growing mass of interests, factors, and forces interacted throughout this
process of change from then to now.

It did not take long to recognize that the advancing forms of transportation and
communication over this century and a half were crucial. They would provide a
convenient framework for seeing how all of the other ingredients fit and functioned—or
misfit and malfunctioned—together.
19

CHAPTER TWO

Orange County Before World War Two

Europeans began to make themselves felt in California by the 1770s. These were
mission settlements: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, etc. along the Pacific
coast up to San Francisco. San Juan Capistrano—made famous by a song about the
punctual annual return of the swallows—can lay claim to the initial European foot-in-the-
door to what would a century later become Orange County. It lay in a valley adequately
watered for irrigating crops on a self-sustaining basis for the mission.

Mexican independence in 1812 led to the secularizing of all mission lands by the
1830s, allowing large cattle-raising rancheros to reach their zenith. The initial “Anglo”
settlers here were not truly Anglos. They were German musicians, locksmiths,
shoemakers, and assorted craftsmen who settled Anaheim to take up agriculture at the
intersection of the mission road, which paralleled the coast, and a wagon-train road to
the coast used to ship out products from a Mormon settlement inland at San Bernardino.

Enterprising developer and town promoter, William Spurgeon founded Santa Ana
which would become the county seat and, for most of the time thereafter, the county’s
largest municipality. When the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1875 planned to send a rail
line southeasterly from Los Angeles, Anaheim leaders had a choice. They could either
have it run through their settlement and thereby aid town growth but wipe out some
community members’ holdings, or have it pass outside of town. After struggling over this
choice, they chose to keep the railroad outside rather than hurt a fellow settler.

Spurgeon in Santa Ana had no such problem with his choice. He wanted it as
close to the town’s center as possible. He managed to scrounge up whatever amount
of cash the railroad demanded. Meanwhile, Columbus Tustin had founded a nearby
town bearing his name. Alas for him, he could not or would not find the cash to attract
the railroad, and his town remained in the doldrums for some eight decades without
growing much beyond its initial significance as a stage coach stop.

Seventy-five years after the Southern Pacific arrived, Orange County's two largest
municipalities would face the same choice over the alignment of a freeway southeasterly
from Los Angeles. And again the two communities reacted as they had over a rail line:
Anaheim preferring to keep it out of town, Santa Ana welcoming it as close as possible.

Santa Ana and Anaheim would become fierce competitors for dominance in
20

Orange County, their newspapers in the 1960s running weekly tallies of which town’s
population had grown the most. Santa Ana leaders gained an edge early on by cleverly
rigging the votes for county seat when 795 square miles seceded from Los Angeles
in1889 to form a new county. The original map for the proposed county was more
rectangular than its current shape. To ensure a majority vote in favor of Santa Ana,
Spurgeon and friends managed to slice off the northern-most corner containing Whittier
which had favored Anaheim.

Incidentally, the entire resultant county only had 14,000 total residents back then.
Incidentally too, the name Orange County did not come from the citrus fruit which later
brought so much prosperity here; the first orange orchards were still quite new.
According to legend, it won that name in a card game for naming rights. A different
cutting of the cards might have brought something else, such as “Lemon County.”

Arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad set off a wild land-speculation and town building
craze. To attract settlers, this railroad offered fares from Chicago for as low as one dollar
The resulting land bubble of 1886-88 produced “cities” named Fairview, Carlton,
McPherson, SanJuan-by-the-Sea, St.James, Olive, Richfield, Aliso Bay, Aliso City,
Crestline, Catalina-on-the-Main, and Earlham, all promoted nationwide. For the most
part they died aborning, chiefly for lack of water.

It is next to impossible now to determine exactly where most of them once were,
except where a later discovery of oil touched off law suits over clouded land titles. Only
Fullerton and Buena Park, out of this tide, survived the 1890s’ speculative bust.

The next boom in town-founding came early in the twentieth century when H.E.
Huntington ran three inter-urban rail lines into Orange County from Los Angeles. He had
hoped to succeed his uncle as head of the Southern Pacific. When that objective failed,
he established his own railroad, the Pacific Electric soon to became famous for its “big
red cars.” Instead of using narrow gauge common for inter-urban lines, he built his with
standard gauge so that they could carry freight in off-hours.

Pacific Electric's first line into Orange County ran through the central farm area
to Santa Ana in 1904, planting farming towns along the way at Cypress, Stanton, and
Garden Grove. Almost immediately another line ran along the coast and encouraged
growth of resorts at Seal Beach, Sunset Beach, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach
which already had a freight line from Santa Ana to its harbor. The third line in the
northern hills fostered suburban developments at LaHabra in 1908, Brea in 1910, and
Yorba Linda in 1911 for professionals who commuted to Los Angeles centers of
employment and commercial activity.

Only Laguna Beach beyond Newport Beach stood up to Huntington and would not
permit the PE to proceed to San Diego as Huntington intended . Six decades later, true
to form, Laguna Beach was the first small town to keep the State from running a freeway
21

through (and thus destroying) it as it hugged steep hillside slopes above the ocean.

Quite likely H.E.Huntington may not have been aware of it when his inter-urban
rail company decided on these three lines. But they exactly reflected the social/
economic/geographical delineations that would characterize Orange County for at least
the next sixty years. This demarcation, in three bands of differing land-use/development,
held until overwhelmed by the post-WW2 urban boom.

Band one along the coast had resort towns largely oriented to Los Angeles. Band
two (traditionally the only segment of this county with a majority of registered Democrats)
consisted preponderantly of dirt farmers who would not incorporate into municipalities
until after WW2. In character, band three had much in common with older, staid, upland
towns—such as Fullerton and Orange—Iled by self-styled “ranchers” who raised citrus,
headed the county's premier banks, and for some, enjoyed the windfall of oil discoveries.

DIAGRAMMATIC MAP:

PRINCIPAL SUB-REGIONS

 
 
  

 
 
   
   
   
 
   
      
       
        
     
     

Irvine Ranch

La Habra

I
|
Yorba Linda
|
Placentia |

Fullerton

grazing

Anaheim

 
 

DE C— | Plein. GEDGG ARS | Smmmme  temenh  eowmt mest amwweetee  GURSWS) Swot come

 

 

 

 

grazing
tanton #5
Lf
Cypress . Garden Grove =
p amy | =a
Westminster BELT ea
®
© Fountain > San Juan
Alamitos Valley Capistrano
Mesa Laguna Dana
COASTAL BELT Beach Point I ve
Huntington Newport Beach

Beach

These three geographically differing demographic bands epitomized the
westernmost twoffifths of Orange County running only as far as the Irvine Ranch and the
easterly hills. Except for an early attempt at a fully planned community in the 1920s at
San Clemente in the county’s southeastern-most corner, little happened beyond the
Irvine Ranch until the 1960s when a pipe line could at last bring water.
22
Key Factor Of Change

Until the 1910s, urban development in Orange County proceeded shotgun-like:
myopic promotion of individual projects helter-skelter, rail lines tying isolated towns to a
Los Angeles hub, oil in scattered spots, and agriculture of some sort or other spread
generally. Each new settlement immediately brought formation of another local school
district until they numbered 56 at their peak, during which time only six lapsed or were
unified. After the First World War, the number of districts began to decline due to
consolidations. Only two new ones would form but 24 would consolidate by 1966, with
more headed that way for economic reasons.

Before WW1, attendance in both rural and town schools fluctuated in sync: up in
prosperous times, down during recessions. After that war, enrollments took the opposite
pattern. They increased in urban schools while decreasing in rural schools during
prosperity, then deceased in town while increasing in rural schools during hard times.
Even where circuses set up their tents changed markedly. Instead of stopping for a day
in each little town along a rail line, after WW1 they only played in the larger towns and
for several days at a time.

Something else happened. Where local settlements had fought tenaciously over
access to water before 1910—supposedly exchanging gunshots—by the 1920s Orange
County’s major towns pulled together to form a county water district (OCWD). They then

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY

SAN BERNARDINO

o 4 *

 
 
    

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

PACIFIC OCEAN

1965

METROPOLITAN WATER DISTRICT : iy
23

joined with San Diego and Los Angeles County governing bodies to form a unified
metropolitan water district (MWD) that would lobby for a dam on the Colorado River from
which they could import water to an almost always parched southern California.

The late 1920s had the cities of Fullerton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana create a
unified sewage outfall system to take their wastes to the ocean. Until then, they had
engaged in some unethical tricks of dumping their sewage in the vicinity of their
neighbors. The 1920s also saw creation of a county-wide chamber of commerce and
leaders’ reciprocated visits (complete with splendid picnics) to each others’ towns.

Quite apparently something drastic had occurred in the 1910s to create so much
change. Roots of that change were not difficult to discover. Community leaders quickly
recognized what had happened and proceeded to promote and plan for it, sometimes
ahead of most other California counties. That change involved paving roads.

In 1910, California voters approved a bond issue to construct a highway from the
Mexican to the Oregon border. It would follow the old mission trail through San Juan
Capistrano, across Irvine lands, through the cities of Santa Ana, Anaheim, and on to Los
Angeles. There quickly followed local bond issues to pave roads between towns starting
in 1912.

This soon meant that rural residents could easily reach one of the larger towns
for shopping or school or church and return the same day. In good economic times they
could desert their tiny local churches and schools and “cracker barrel” general stores in
preference for fancier churches (choirs, full time ministers), larger stores, and finer
schools in town. Saturday evenings on the town became a prominent feature. As the
several larger towns saw their “downtowns” prosper, local village life faded.

Increased pave roads also meant less dependence on Pacific Electric's inter-
urban lines. Usage peaked in the 1920s. By 1940 the Big Red Cars had almost become
relics. The comic movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit mentioned how the gasoline and
automobile interests had effectively lobbied to kill inter-urban rail lines in southern
California. (Viewers may have thought it just another of the movie's spoofs; it was
assuredly quite real.) Only shortages during WW2 gave PE a short reprieve. Once
people could again get autos after the war, commuter rail service breathed its last.

Three decades later, Los Angeles and Orange Counties wanted to revive inter-
urban trains. But the cost of repurchasing those now disposed rights-of-way proved
prohibitively costly. Desirable or not, vehicular travel came to characterize life in Orange
County. This evolution did have one plus side: Instead of being linked to (and
dependent on) the big metropolis of Los Angeles, local residents increasingly connected
with jobs, events, and shopping within this county. By 1930, sufficient paved roads (721
miles of them) existed to allow cars to go just about any where. Orange County had at
last become a self-identifying region on its own.
24

Power of Oil and Water

Wherever found in quantity, oil wields consider impact of one kind or another.
Orange County was no exception. Although an oil industry existed for thirty years in
Pennsylvania, no one had looked into the black ooze seepages in California until E.L.
Dohney began digging for it in 1892. By 1894 he had struck, and a new “gold rush” was
on, this time for “black gold.” Wildcatting began early in the 20" century in Orange
County and soon produced large operations around what it is now Brea, Spanish for its
tar pits.

Within a few years, oil production made the newly incorporated municipality of
Fullerton prosperous. Indeed, for the next half century, oil would on average pay an
estimated forty percent of all of Fullerton’s taxes. In contrast, discovery of oil in
neighboring Placentia in 1919 impeded that community’s incorporating; owners did not
want to pay urban-level taxes. When Placentia did incorporate after WW2, it
encompassed a minimum scant few acres.

Orange County’s largest pool of oil and one of the largest in all of California was
discovered in 1920 immediately off the coast at Huntington Beach. Newly developed
slant-drilling allowed its extraction and quickly allowed oil interests to dominate local
politics for decades to come. (Huntington Beach is probably best remembered by
travelers along the coast for its miles of oil-well heads bobbing up and down
continuously, monotonously, almost humorously, all lined up in a row.)

Originally laid out in 1901 by P.A.Stanton, a power in the Southern Pacific-
dominated state legislature, Huntington Beach began under the name of Pacific City, “the
West Coast's answer to Atlantic City.” Soon the Huntington Beach Company, a
subsidiary then of H.E.Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railroad, took it over and renamed
it for PE’s president. Later the PE became a subsidiary of Standard Qil, itself a dominant
power in California politics nearly equaling the Southern Pacific earlier.

For several decades, Huntington Beach served as a resort for the elite of Los
Angeles whose duck-shooting clubs (the “social register” of southern California) used
the Bolsa Chica swamps nearby. So powerful were those members that even the locally
influential Farm Bureau found it difficult to obtain an ordinance barring, for duck-pond
replenishment, the use of a woefully inadequate freshwater supply so critically needed
for agriculture and residential life elsewhere in the county.

When oil field development began on the bluffs above fashionable Newport
Beach, that municipality ran a one-foot wide annexation strip for several miles around
the field to prevent the closer, albeit as yet unincorporated community of Costa Mesa
from ever capturing it. Not for lack of trying, neither Newport Beach nor the Irvine Ranch
ever found oil within their boundaries.
25

Soon after WW1, a young agricultural engineer with the University of California
Agricultural Extension Service detected a pronounced, ominous drop in water levels
throughout the western portion of the county. Municipal engineers began making this
same startling discovery. The county then contracted for a full-scale study by a famous
water engineer to garner a fuller picture of this situation.

Where large areas of the county had always had too much water in the form of
swamps and floods, this consultant's detailed 1925 engineering report quantified what
farmers had begun to notice. Water in their wells was dropping. Markedly. Only a
decade later the water level would have fallen ten, twenty, thirty feet in varying places.
Two decades later: by fifty, sixty, even ninety feet on Irvine land. In many areas it had
fallen far below sea level making saltwater intrusion imminent.

His 1925 report shook the community. With a total county-wide population of
some 100,000, users already drew out more water than nature put in by 40,000 acre
feet—that’s nearly two billion gallons—annually. If this could happen with so small a
population, how could town boosters ever realize their grand ambitions for major growth
and economic development?

Leaders in Orange County envied Los Angels, blessed as it was with water rights
established by the Spanish pueblo settlement. Its municipal water system, started in
1901 and augmented by aqueducts constructed in 1913, assured continued urban
growth. Even so, LA’s famed city engineer, for whom the Mulholland Tunnel is named,
began to warn that even LA would soon run out of water. As a result, Fullerton hosted
a conference of representatives from surrounding cities and counties. They proceeded
to create a Metropolitan Water District and sparked a unified effort to promote the Swing-
Johnson Bill which would dam the Colorado River.

But all of this would take time. Besides, the Irvine Ranch, Newport Beach, and
towns in eastern Orange County had been initially rejected by MWD. In desperation,
Irvine Ranch in 1931 brought a lawsuit against major users of Santa Ana River water
in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. It soon became apparent that many other
water users and interests had a stake in what might happen. Each time it seemed a
compromise solution might materialize, new issues and/or new interests intruded.

Eventually this law suit would expand to include 3500 upstream users. In
particular, something had to be decided on letting more water flow from Prado Dam.
Then questions arose about how to handle waste water flowing from upstream. Some
of it might be injected along the coast to keep out seawater. But long-sought industrial
growth would bring “hot” wastes with dangerous contaminants.

Not until 1960 would some ways around the legal wrangling occur. Resolution
had become absolutely essential. Otherwise there could be no University of California
campus at Irvine, no new city around it, and only curtailed development in the eastern
26
two-thirds of the county.

Roadblocks arose. Some municipalities objected to what they saw as urban
users having to subsidize farmers. Los Angeles City, now that it was hemmed in by
dozens of incorporated municipalities, also objected to other cities using water
(supposedly paid for disproportionately by Los Angeles) as a tool for garnering desired
urban expansion and industrial development.

Obviously it would take some really hard arguing by the Irvine Ranch to get
permission for an MWD line. Until that line was completed in 1963, Irvine had to agree
to share its limited water supply with the small coastal towns to the east. They had
already formed their own municipal water districts in 1954 in order to join MWD but were
cut off from access by the Irvine Ranch.

Thirty years of this legal morass had failed to resolve the utter complexities of
establishing clear, workable, riparian rights in court and hence which users would have
to sacrifice by cutting back. One contentious aspect stemmed from the courts’ earlier
recognition of prescriptive rights. These granted “ownership” of water to a user for the
amount taken over a five-year period—even if that use was illegal. Eventually a
pragmatic solution did emerge, albeit in a most unexpected way and then only after
WW?2 when rapid urban development threatened ag lands in western Orange County.

Local Politics

Something else followed WW1 and the arrival of paved highways. Orange
County suddenly experienced an influx of new industries and new residents. It looked
quite promising for local town promoters and chambers of commerce.

At least it did until a totally unanticipated type of social “plague” struck. Small
towns all across America in the early 1920s saw an outbreak of rabid intolerance.
Racial and religious intolerance were not new, of course. They simply had never
exposed their ugliness so blatantly in the form of a neo-Ku KluxKlan in supposedly
“proper” society.

Anaheim in particular felt it most severely. Policemen there even directed traffic
dressed in their KKK white gowns and hoods. Animosity between KKK supporters and
opponents erupted with lasting bitterness. And the long-sought increase in jobs and
resident customers came to a sudden halt. The hiatus would last until after WW2 with
the coming of freeways. Orange County would not double its 1920's population of
100,000 until it reached 200,000 in 1950. Then it took off.

About the time people seemed to have put the KKK eruption behind them, a new
plague struck America and, with it, Orange County. That was the Great Depression.
27

Always having considered themselves rugged individualists and their communities quite
self-sufficient, local leaders now could not cope with this new kind of challenge. Men
who had always worked hard, supported their families, gone regularly to church—as
God-fearing men were expected to do—now found themselves out of work or unable to
sell their farm products. Undeserved defeat took a heavy psychological toll.

Faced with an inability to resolve locally a nationwide crisis, there began the first
murmurs of an eventual post-WW2 rumble questioning the wisdom and capability of the
old, entrenched set of community leaders and officials. Even staunchly Republican
people began to accept the prospect that they just might have to turn to Democratic-
sponsored national programs for unemployment and welfare assistance.

Their family’s and community’s survival were at stake. They could see no
workable alternative. New voices began to speak up. Then after WW2, a chorus of
new voices, from better educated ex-Gls who had seen a far bigger world, would seize
political control and inaugurate what they termed “good government” committees, most
prominently in Santa Ana but in other towns as well.

Several municipalities as early as the 1920s had attempted to convert their
commission forms of governance to what was billed as “scientific government,” with city
managers. But a lack of qualified, experienced, totally professional administrators and
experts left this reform movement to languish until after WW2 when a crop of veterans
could gain the requisite educations through the Gl Bill. Until then, the commission form
of local governance (county as well as municipal) would generally prevail with its
inherent system of cronyism, kickbacks, and too easily accomplished corruption.

Under a commission system, each elected county or city “father” would have sole
authority to run a particular function, such as roads & bridges, fire protection, parks (if
there were any), supplies and public buildings. Professional civil service did not exist
in most locales. An employee worked at the pleasure and whim of his commissioner or
county board-member—a continued 19" century spoils system. It even included police
who, in some places, were used to “influenced” votes, contracts, and the like. Seal
Beach would retain this system into the 1960s after all other towns had modernized.

Reliance on this sort of ingrown, mutual self-protection among myopic and often
incompetent “old boy” local governance would linger in some locales through the 1940s.
It did until a judge from Newport Beach, a grand jury headed by Knotts Berry Farm's
owner (a staunch conservative from Buena Park), and Pat Brown, California’s Attorney
General (a staunch liberal and future governor), worked together just after WW2.
Together they attacked corruption so concertedly that numerous local politicians and
gamblers fled, including even one official dogcatcher who took off for Mexico.

Although Richard Milhaus Nixon never engaged in local politics, his biography
throws some light on life and outlook in Orange County. His birthplace in 1913 of Yorba
28

Linda was an unincorporated village at the end of the northern Pacific Electric line.
Deeds for lots stipulated absolute prohibition of alcoholic drinks. Many of its residents
labored frustratingly to make a living from its stony soil.

Nixon's father, a rather stormy man who beat his sons, was especially
unsuccessful. When he saw profitable oil wells making alcohol-drinking Catholic
Mexicans wealthy in the village of Placentia down below Yorba Linda, he was so
outraged, he moved across the county line to Whittier. There he had a choice of two
lots to buy. His wife suggested one of them. He of course decided on the other one.

We can only imagine his rage when oil was discovered on the lot he did not
purchase; nothing on the one he did buy. Some observers have speculated that this
kind of home environment contributed significantly to Richard Nixon’s life-long
reluctance to trust anyone (his family could not even trust God not to treat them badly)
and a driving ambition to outdo people he encountered who came from a socially more
esteemed background—such as the Kennedys and so many of Washington DC’s power
brokers he had to deal with,

After college at Whittier and military service during WW2, Nixon represented part
of Orange County in Congress, first in the House and then the entire state in the
Senate. His successful campaigns were marked by some dubious ethics, charging his
opponents with unproven allegations and contortions of truth. He launched his
successful presidential campaign in Anaheim.

His presidency began to unravel partially from disclosures made in Newport
Beach by Martha Mitchell, wife of his Attorney General. And he retired to his magnificent
home in San Clemente at the other end of the county. In a way then, one might, with a
bit of justification, conceptualize Orange County as Nixon country.

Inter-ethnic Factor

One weekend as | strolled along the beach near my apartment, | saw a crowd of
teenagers excited about something in the water. The cause of their animation soon
became evident. A huge whale was slowly progressing north unusually close to shore.
Several of the boys started to swim out toward it but had second thoughts. One,
however, bravely approached the whale, apparently intent on touching it. Until he came
eye to eye with that behemoth!

From my vantage point, he looked utterly insignificant against that dark monster.
In an instant the boy beat a fast pace back to shore with none of the bravado he had
started out with. By then | had walked close enough to detect that this young man had
undergone a most unexpected moment of maturing: He was not king of the hill.
29

A much different sort of experience befell some visitors to that same magnificent
beach. With a US Marine air base not far away and the huge Camp Pendleton just
across the county line, it was only reasonable that marines would find their way here,
especially given the numbers of young ladies who gathered about. | soon discovered
that the marines were half-heartedly tolerated locally, provided they had white skin. But
let a Black marine show up where White girls sunbathed in bikinis. Some Newport
Beach police made it their business to hassle them out in not too gentle a manner.

This kind of human interaction here, | would learn, could take all manner of form.
In the 1920s for instance, prosperous Black businessmen from Los Angeles constructed
their own club quite isolated though not far from Newport Beach an a bluff overlooking
the ocean. In mere months it burned down, a victim of arson perpetrated, so the story
goes, by Newport Beach’s volunteer firemen. No one came to fight the flames, and
apparently no one was ever arrested for this act.

Then there was the time in the early days of the 20" century when Santa Ana’s
city council decided that they no longer wanted any Chinese living in their city. So, they
passed an ordinance giving all Chinese, as alleged carriers of plague, 24 hours to
leave. Then the City burned down their homes and little businesses. Not a single
attorney in all of California would take their case to claim damages.

| should perhaps also mention the incident that occurred about that same time
in another prosperous inland town. It seems several young men from prominent families
murdered an Amerindian in fun but (according to contemporary newspapers which |
came across) were left off scott free. In another case, however, the editor of one inland
newspaper stood with pistols aimed at a mob, convincingly threatening to shoot anyone
who actually tried to carry out an intended lynching.

We must note too that the Santa Ana Register, alone among large newspaper in
California, objected to the US military's herding Americans of Japanese ancestry into
concentration camps. After WWII, Fountain Valley was America’s first municipality to
elect a Japanese-American its mayor. The record here seems quite mixed.

During the Great Depression, orange growers poured oil on their excess fruit for
lack of people able to buy them rather than permit the desperately poor gather them.
The arrival of major league baseball received great hoopla in Orange County. As much
as people rooted for the Angels, they still would not sell homes to its Black and Latino
players.

Earlier, Olympics gold medal winner Dr. Lee found himself unable to buy a home
here too. Eventually, some sectors, particularly in Garden Grove and Westminster,
would have large concentrations of Asians where whole shopping centers would be
festooned with store names and daily specials in Chinese and Vietnamese writing.
30

About that time in the 1950s when newcomers began to flood western-most
Orange County, Anaheim’s school district tried to recognize its large Latino population
by naming a new elementary school after a famous Mexican. What a brouhaha that set
off. Incensed Anglo families shouted that only over their dead bodies would they permit
their children to attend a school with that kind of name. The elected school board, of
course, quickly caved in to this ruckus.

| don’t mean to imply that Orange County had any kind of monopoly on strained
inter-ethnic relations. These events occurred throughout the Southwest. Still today, one
of the hottest issues in towns and cities all across this country concerns Latino
immigrants. Recall, too, that during the 1950s-60s in places like Mississippi and
Alabama, Blacks were still being lynched over trivial matters, and persons working to
get Blacks registered to vote as provided in our Constitution were having vicious dogs
and fire hoses turned on them; some were even shot or tortured to death. It never got
anything like that bad in Orange County.

What is so ironic in southern California is the fact that this region only a century
earlier belonged entirely to Spanish-speaking families. They lived on huge rancheros,
their haciendas serving as social, cultural, economic, and political centers of life
here—until California became a part of the US under the Treaty of Hidalgo in 1845.

Quickly these Castilians (as they called themselves to distinguish from the
Amerindians and mixed-breed peasants) were forced to prove their ownership in English
through Anglo courts under Anglo laws they had no familiarity with. This meant they
had to hire Anglo lawyers to defend their claims which until then everyone knew were
true.

Ironically, this litigation cost so much for people never accustomed to a cash
economy, that many ended up having to mortgage and then lose the very land they had
fought to retain—even when they won in court. Indeed, every one of the 20 cases in
Orange County were decided in favor of the Spanish claimants most of whom lost their
land nonetheless, as did some of those new Anglos who acquired them this way.

That is how the Irvine family came to obtain three such huge rancheros. We must
not neglect to note, of course, that those Spanish families had earlier taken these lands
from native Amerindians who had no practical concept of private landownership and
whom the Spanish proceeded to brutally subjugate as serfs/slaves.

The more curious | became about Orange County’s history, the more evident
became the anomalies and impacts of repeated, often rapid change. Admittedly, my
work for the University meant that |, too, was making some small contribution to this
process of change here. Still, it increasingly piqued my curiosity, long before
Chancellor Aldrich had me explore Orange County’s evolution in detail.
31

CHAPTER THREE

ORANGE COUNTY: WW2 TO 1967

On that day in 1966 when Orange County's population topped 1,200,000,
residents made 4.5 million vehicular trips, used over 250 million gallons of water for all
purposes, conducted 6.3 million dollars worth of retail sales, read approximately
400,000 newspapers, and made nearly two million phone calls, 92 percent of them
between parties within the county with half of those to some one outside of their
immediate locale.

With a population exceeding that of fifteen entire states, Orange County had no
overall governing structure. The five-member County Board of Supervisors dealt with
some issues countywide, its jurisdiction limited to only unincorporated areas for a
different set of decisions. Other functions came independently under 24 city councils,
26 elementary and unified school districts, 4 separate highschool districts, 3 junior
college districts, 49 water districts, 37 lighting districts, 12 fire districts, 9 community
service districts, 8 maintenance districts, plus countywide districts for flood control,
harbors, mosquito abatement, and cemeteries, among others for a total of 436
governing entities with 1399 different tax rates. And all of them nominally nonpartisan.

It had taken almost thirty years for a population in1920 of 100,000 to reach
200,000 in 1950, most of that coming immediately after WW2. In the next ten years that
population figure would climb three and a half times to over 700,000. In the first six
years of the 1960s alone it would add another half-million. Orange County was then the
fastest growing large standard metropolitan statistical area in the country. Although the
rate of growth would slow down, actual numbers would continue apace.

Obviously a tremendous amount of change had come to Orange County from the
Norman Rockwell-like pre-WW2 ambience of small towns and rural villages. But how
and why did all of this happen—and so suddenly?

For starters, it was a case of a booming Los Angeles spilling over into
neighboring available open space. Then something unforeseen occurred to facilitate
and so speed up the influx of more new residents. A plague hit this county’s thriving
orange orchards just then. Virtually overnight an orange grower could see his entire
orchard wither as rodents carried the root plague from tree to tree.
32

Unlike those agriculturalist seven decades earlier who had to find a substitute
crop to replace their plague-ravished vineyards, orchard growers now had thrust upon
them a quick solution. They could sell out to developers seeking large tracts of land to
construct houses for a growing market of people looking for homes in suburbia.

As the movement of residents out of the big city accelerated, employers
eventually saw a distinct advantage in moving their manufacturing and (increasingly)
high tech industries out to where their employees wanted to live and where they could
expand on less expensive acreage. All this coincided with the State's decision to build
a freeway southeasterly through Orange County destined eventually to reach San
Diego, starting in 1947.

Between 1957 and 1963, Hughes, Ford Aeronutronics, North American Aviation,
Autonetics, Collins Radio, Douglas, Beckman Instruments, among others would open
centers here, some of them with as many as 20,000 employees. Their employment
(with families) alone accounted for as large a population increase as this county’s entire
1950 population.

Local Governance

As construction of the Santa Ana Freeway (it would become I-5) entered Orange
County in 1950, it set off what might be likened to a bow-wave in front of a ship. Before
this freeway actually reached any point along its route, large and ever larger new
subdivision tracts would spring up in advance so that an immediate flood of commuters
already existed to use each newly completed section.

Buena Park, already incorporated, was the first to feel this impact of change and
the first to go through what became a repeated (usually painful) pattern of adjustment
to change. Cypress, Stanton, Westminster, Garden Grove, and Fountain Valley in the
farm belt went through an even more traumatic process because they also had to find
a way to incorporate so as, hopefully, to control their own destinies if possible.

Newcomers sought escape away from the noisy, congested, dangerous
metropolitan center in anticipation of a more wholesome, bucolic life. Since a significant
portion of them had better educations and what they considered more prestigious jobs
than local long-timers, they expected a bit of the deference such status symbols had
received where they grew up before the war. In this expectation they received a shock.
Local folks had their own community networks and felt no need to embrace all of these
unknown arrivals who had yet to pay their local “dues” for acceptance.

As new subdivisions overwhelmed these rural communities, long-time residents
and town leaders quickly began to resent what they felt to be intruders and their
demands for urban-level public services. Such as in various places for urban sewers,
33

plenty of water, garbage collection, flood control, well equipped schools, and parks.
From these tract-houses came complaints about early morning noises (roosters crowing,
machinery) and barnyard smells from that bucolic scene they had thought they'd like.
For many, their dream of a strong sense of community turned sour.

One contributing factor to agitation arose from confusion over what community
newcomers actually belong to. Highschool and elementary schools did not always
belong to the same district. Municipal and school district boundaries often differed
markedly. In more than one place people resided in a city by one name, found their
children attended school in a district by the name of a different town, and even had
postal addresses by the name of still a different town. Where was community?

Initially newcomers, as strangers to each other, found their complaints either
ignored or at best unsatisfied. They had no ready organization to make themselves
heard. Old-timers ran the works. Within three years however, enough agitation
occurred for new residents to recognize natural spokesmen and become organized.
Stay-at-home-moms in particular grew active in organizing neighborhoods and then
pushing for reform movements town-wide. Even such seemingly minor matters as street
guards or signal lights near schools—minor to old-timers—could spark outbursts and
even demonstrations at city hall.

Between three and five years after the influx, there would occur recall after recall
election creating a revolving door of city council and local school board members.
Sometimes a mayor or city council member who lost a recall election would actually
receive more votes than the person who won as a replacement. In some of these cases
though, frustration and confusion gave rise to political extremists.

The Cold War just then had them seeing “communists” in every closet and
conspiracies behind every door. In one case they so viciously attacked a school board
member that they drove this decorated WW2 hero to an early death—all because he
defended the constitutional right of people to express differing political views. The John
Birch Society outbreak resurrected all of the hatreds and divisiveness of that 1920s’
KKK outburst with its devastating results.

For the most part though, after about seven years this process would fortunately
work itself out. Or residents would simply grow tired of protest meetings and
campaigning; they would by then have developed their own net of friends. Even though
each newly booming community had the experience of a neighbor community to its west
to learn from, they all had to go through the same cycle before settling down.

Huntington Beach, although incorporated much earlier, had a larger hinterland
than the other coastal towns and that farm belt hinterland experienced the same sudden
invasion of tract development, newcomers, then political unrest. Ironically, after
decades of government by clique, newcomers were astonished to learn from an Urban
34

Institute study that in reality no one was actually “minding the store” so to speak. A
presumed power structure no longer existed. Political influence had become so defused.

Costa Mesa and Tustin also incorporated in the 1950s. Like the rest of this post-
WW?2 crop of new municipalities, they did so hoping to control land-use zoning for
themselves. In contrast, incorporations before WW2 came about primarily from a
concern for obtaining a reliable source of water.

The large older towns of Fullerton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana had more firmly
established community structures. They were better able to accept rapid growth and
absorb the proportionally fewer new people coming their way. Initial agitation for
change here came not as much from newcomers as from younger local leaders who
sought less corrupt, more modern city administrations.

In 1946, Newport Beach instituted a city administrator form of government. Santa
Ana quickly followed suit. First Newport Beach in 1948, then Santa Ana and Anaheim
upgraded their city administrator to a city manager. By 1967, 23 of Orange County's 24
incorporated municipalities had either a city administrator or city manager. (City
administrators remain subordinate to mayors. A city manager becomes the chief
executive officer, his mayor simply chairing council meetings, signing papers, and
officiating at public ceremonies. Over time, this distinction faded in most places.) The
24" municipality, ultra-tiny Villa Park, had to contract for services from the county.

Both city managers and city administrators always claimed that they were simply
professionals bent on carrying out their city council's wishes. Not all council members
fully accepted this claim. They would soon recognize that an effective chief
administrator must keep his antenna out for what is happening in his community lest he
(they were only males back then) encounter voter resistance to necessary bond issues
for important programs and facilities. Whether deliberate or incidental, municipal CEOs
had to become political players however subtle that involvement might have to be.

Much the same happened in school administration. Where once school board
members spent their meetings arguing over how many pencils and light bulbs to buy for
the coming year, increasingly they depended on professional staff to handle these
routine matters as their schools burst with additional pupils. The needs of
professionalization contributed to increased consolidations of districts.

Like municipal CEOs, school superintendents after WW2 became thoroughly
professional with advanced college degrees in school administration. But they too had
also to know how to work with the public and deal with political turbulance. Some
encountered particular trouble where political extremists used young pupils to spy on
what teachers said in class.
35
Public Planning

Putting numbers on Orange County's growth might provide at least a minimal
picture of what occurred. Over the two decades between 1930 and 1950, long
established inland cities saw growth figures like these: Anaheim 33%, Santa Ana 50%,
Fullerton 29%, and Orange 24%, most of these coming just after WW2. In contrast,
ocean towns grew far more: Seal Beach 210%, Costa Mesa (then unincorporated)
225%, Laguna Beach 250%, San Clemente 325%, and Newport Beach 450%. (Little of
these increases came from annexations.) Then the picture reversed.

In the one decade of the 1950s alone, Fullerton would increase by 325%, La
Habra 407%, Anaheim 616%, Stanton 535%, Buena Park 716% (in only seven years),
Westminster 711%, and Garden Grove 2139%. Through just the first six years of the
1960s, Westminster would double its population again. Placentia and Tustin would
reach two and half times their 1960 population. Huntington Beach would see a seven-
fold increase; Fountain Valley, seven and a half times; and Costa Mesa by a multiple
of eleven.

Given the potential for huge profits from converting open space into urban
development, we can readily feel surprise that widespread bribery for rezonings did not
occur—not that Mafia bagmen did not show up to try. Given too the astonishing
looseness of what minimal zoning existed pre-WW2. (One colorful curmudgeon of a
county board member, for instance, would simply turn off his hearing aid to ignore any
complaints and petitions for stricter zoning protection.) Apparently though, the
cooperative housecleaning of corruption by the Grand Jury and State Attorney General
in the late 1940s must have proven effective. Only one town, Westminster, saw all of
its city councilmen and city administrator convicted and jailed.

Another factor may have been the professionalization of land-use planning during
this era of rapid growth, along with a professionalization of most city and county staffs.
In all of Orange County at the end of WW2, there existed only one professional planner
position and that one in county government. A decade later, county government had
a small staff, and several of the larger municipalities had begun to create positions with
the title of planner, albeit usually filled in the beginning with engineers or building
inspectors. By 1961, approximately half of the then 22 municipalities had hired
professionals with educations or on-the-job professional experience in land-use
planning, as distinct from others doubling as zoning administrators.

This trend led the county planning director, Harry Bergh, to establish a county-
wide organization of professional planners to meet monthly and discuss mutual
concerns and innovations. By April 1966, this group’s roster included 80 professionals
from 20 out of the then 24 municipalities, in addition to a 22-member professional
county planning department. Twenty-four affiliates, also professional planners but in
private or educational organizations doing work comparable to those in local-level public
36

units, brought the total to 126. And these did not include architects and landscape
architects who billed themselves as planners and occasionally attended as associates.

Another example of professionalization and effective planning involved roads.
The inherent duplications of effort and patronage grew so bad (as in all other counties)
until Orange County created a single road department for paved highways even before
the State Legislature mandated a county engineer in 1919. By 1920, Orange County
placed the construction and maintenance of all bridges and roads whether paved or
unpaved under this professional engineer. Board members did so even though it meant
that they had to forego the political advantages of awarding contracts on patronage.

Until the 1967 Supreme Court decision instituting a one-person-one-vote system
of political process, California’s legislature represented counties. Since there were
many more small counties in northern California than large counties in the south,
northern California reaped a majority of gas tax revenues.

With the new Supreme Court equation, a 40-60 split of revenues more closely
corresponded to the distribution of residents between the north and south. Despite (or
because of?) decades of disadvantaged tax distribution since 1927, southern California
generally took the lead in highway innovation. By 1935, municipalities began to receive
a portion of this gasoline tax revenue too.

As urban growth, populations, car usage, and roads proliferated after WW2, a
potentially horrible mess loomed as a most likely future. Orange County's chief
engineer early on started preaching the need for a countywide master plan of highways.
More incorporations meant decreased areas under direct county control.

Yet what would insure that a wide boulevard in one booming town would link to
a similar thoroughfare in the next town? What would insure that traffic would flow
effectively across the county if each jurisdiction continued to construct streets wherever
and however local politics might dictate?

Orange County’s chief engineer and its lone professional planner put together
an approach that would coordinate the location and design of all major roads. To gain
municipal acceptance and cooperation, their strategy would have to make it worth the
municipalities’ while.

By the mid-1950s, their proposal at last received a hearing. It would have the
county share a larger proportion of its funds with the cities than the law required. In
exchange, each municipality must agree to a concerted countywide network. After all,
they could argue, people travel all over the county without thought about which
jurisdiction they might happen to be in at any spot along their way.

Not surprisingly, not all municipalities welcomed this overture. Especially so
37

among the most recently incorporated ones who resisted thought of any larger
governmental agency dictating to them now that they had gained their “independence.”
In Orange County's case, the major factor for acceptance lay in who handled this
change. Both the county engineer and planner were by nature very low-key men who
readily listened to all manner of dissent. They understood what municipal leaders and
staff wanted and readily worked out solutions.

Out of their missionary effort, acommittee of professional planners and engineers
was created to submit recommendations to a review committee composed of elected city
and county officials. The caliber of both professional and lay oversight during the first
decade of this arrangement spelled its success in coping with major public concerns.
In this process, Orange County led the way for all other California counties.

Orange County took the lead in yet another crucial aspect of life in California:
namely water. Residents as well as farmers had been increasingly drawing out more
water than nature put in. Dire disaster loomed. Fighting court battles would not save
the situation. They had no reservoirs and a large enough one was impractical. They
had only the underground aquifer.

This left the only apparent solution: to buy excess Colorado River water and
spread it on their aquifer intake area by the Santa Ana River. In this way they could both
recharge the Orange County basin and prevent any further saltwater intrusion. The
issue then became, of course, how to raise enough funds to pay for this much water.

By late 1940s, the influential countywide Chamber of Commerce and the Orange
County Farm Bureau appealed to the County Board of Supervisors to levy a tax on all
property through its flood control powers. A tax was instituted, even for areas beyond
the basin. But revenues still fell short and began to generate political opposition. The
County then appointed a citizens task force to examine issues and possible options.

Out of these discussions there emerged a radical solution: put meters on wells
and charge according to usage. For city dwellers long accustomed to metered water,
this did not in the least seem so radical. But for rural folks accustomed to unlimited free
water, it was truly radical. No jurisdiction had ever tried it.

Selling this concept lay in casting it so that users would not pay for water
extracted which had always been free. Instead revenue so collected would buy water
for basin recharge. This “spin” might sound like splitting hairs, but it worked. Most city
councils, the Chamber of Commerce, and Orange County Board of Water endorsed the
replenishment concept through what came to be known as a “pump tax.”

State enabling legislation took effect in 1953. Under Farm Bureau leadership,
agricultural interests took an unheard of step. In effect they asked to be charged for
water from under their property which they had always believed belonged to them for
38
free as provided by Nature.

At first Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Fullerton were excluded because they had
already contributed so much to MWD. Then Newport Beach and Costa Mesa refused
to pay. Eventually all exemptions ceased; only Newport Beach continued to draw water
while stubbornly refusing to contribute to basin replenishment. Even so, at last enough
funds came in to buy enough water for spreading.

Despite Newport Beach’s political maneuvers, Orange County Water District
sunk 1,520,000 acre-feet—that’s 500 billion gallons of water—between 1954 and 1965.
In a typical year, half of the water which Orange County received from MWD—137,394
acre-feet out of 277,47—went underground for basin recharge.

Except for Seal Beach and Los Alamitos by 1965, fresh water levels had once
again risen everywhere above sea level completely to the coast. The overall water table
had risen more than fifty feet. By 1966, OCWD no longer needed to buy all of the water
available to it. Orange County had planned and implemented the most successful large
basin recharge effort in the world to that date.

CROSS-SECTION: HUNTINGTON BEACH TO YORBA LINDA

     
 

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w UEIIEEN CN sees oo WT nn 1
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500 times

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The real test would come over time. Would there always remain a surplus of
Colorado River water to purchase? Or, would threatened litigation by Arizona users
win the right to extract all of that water to irrigate golf courses and fill artificial lakes for
resort and retirement development in Arizona deserts? Would Orange County
eventually find it necessary to begin the costly option of purifying its sewage water
sufficiently for irrigation and coastal inject wells to “dam” off saltwater intrusion? As
Orange County farm lands convert almost entirely to urban uses, would the question
change from aquifer recharge to sufficient MWD water for cities?

Years later dependence on Colorado River eased at least temporarily when
39

surplus water from northern California rivers reached water-short southern California
via a mammoth project which first had to overcome an horrendous political fight between
many vested interests as well as between the two rival parts of this state.

Private Public-Planning

Two cases of what we might classify as private public-planning stand out rather
unique to Orange County: one, locating Disneyland at Anaheim; the other, conversion
of Dairyland to LaPalma.

Walt Disney, exceedingly successful with his Mickey Mouse cartoon and then
animated movies, conceptualized the idea of a theme park. No such thing existed. To
make it fully successful, he realized that location of the first one might likely prove
crucial. So he hired Stanford Research Institute in northern California to study southern
California for the best possible site. Much to his (and everyone else’s) surprise, SRI
pointed to Anaheim. Disney reportedly reacted: “Out there where there’s nothing?”

SRI investigators assured him (1) that the Santa Ana Freeway, when completed,
would become by far the major artery of travel in southern California, (2) that plenty of
open space remained still available for a theme park of major proportions, and (3) that
Anaheim would soon no longer lie so isolated given the rate of development there. With
Disney convinced, the next hurdle was convincing Anaheim for the requisite rezoning
and public services. And that meant winning over a very cautious Mayor Pearson.

A young man when the outburst of neo-KKK in the early 1920s had destroyed
Anaheim’s prospects for economic growth, Pearson wanted to make absolutely certain
that this proposed theme park idea was not just a fancy title for a honky-tonk which
would give Anaheim a bad name. Once he was convinced and all his stipulations were
met, construction of DisneyLand proceeded. It opened in 1955 and put Anaheim on
every Americans’ map.

Disney made one significant mistake, a mistake not repeated with his next giant
theme park, Disney World in Orange County Florida. He had not acquired sufficient
acreage to build the mass of motels which sprang up around Disneyland. While his
corporation took the big risks and made the big investments, private owners of the
surrounding motels and restaurants reaped much of the tourist dollars generated. With
Disneyland such a proven success, Anaheim was better prepared for and willing to
gamble on a stadium to land the Angels’ American League baseball franchise.

A totally different kind of planning challenge occurred a few miles to the west. Not
long after WW2, a group of dairymen, mostly of Dutch descent, moved across the
county line from Los Angeles. For a majority of them, it was their second or third
displacement by urban growth. This time they set their minds to remain here. Soon
40

though, they once again found themselves isolated by surrounding rapid urbanization
moving in on them, now from Buena Park.

Residential tracts in western Orange County mushroomed helter-skelter wherever
developers could talk a farmer into selling. Having little more than a one-man planning
staff, the county could do nothing more than grant farmers A-2 zoning which provided
no protection; it all too readily changed into an urban designation.

Up to this point, no identifiable community existed in this agricultural corner of the
county. The fifty dairy families and a few additional dirt farmers, some of them of
Japanese ancestry just returned from their wartime relocation camps, found themselves
segmented by three different elementary school districts and two highschool districts.
Not so much as a village center, much less a post office designation, ever existed to
give this locale an identifiable name. What alone did exist was a determination among
all dairymen and most of the small farmers to stay put.

This mutual determination and anxiety pulled residents together. In 1955 they
organized an incorporation drive that successfully gave them zoning control over an
area of 1.35 square miles. Since they intended to remain as is, they named their “city”
Dairyland with a single zoning, that of a agriculture. But therein lay a Catch-22.

Agricultural zoning kept land values exceedingly low. Meanwhile in neighboring
Buena Park, tract housing had sprung up so pell mell that school districts could not
keep pace. They had not reserved enough sites for necessary new schools. What
open space remained had gone sky high in value from speculators. Naturally enough,
school boards there eyed those low-priced open ag lots in Dairyland. Soon Dairyland’s
continued integrity became threatened mostly from the exercise of public domain taking
by other public agencies.

Faced with this crisis, Dairyland’s city council changed all zoning to industrial so
that their land values would become too expensive for condemnation action. But doing
so meant hefty increases in tax appraisals and hence in taxes, well beyond what their
businesses could afford. By this time they also encountered the buzz-saw of political
pressure by newcomers around them to rid the area of agricultural smells, dust, and
flies. Dairyland residents had come to a juncture.

They could simply give up on their dream and let landowners take their individual
chances. Or, they could stick together and replan for an eventual, orderly conversion
entirely to urban development. That first option meant some of them might get rich while
others suffered. The second option would require everyone to wait until they had
something worthy of their lost dream and cost of relocating again. They then would all
get out at the same time, thereby all sharing the burdens and the profits. It sounded
good but would demand conformity of wills for a concerted effort.

They hadn't far to look to see examples of the perils associated with their first
41

option. So, in 1964 the city contracted with a planning consultant for a totally new plan
and arranged with one of this region's foremost real estate companies to program the
entire citywide project. With a recently hired professional city manager, Dairyland
leaders moved methodically, even in selecting a new name for their municipality. They
chose “LaPalma.” By Spring 1965, residential construction began. Within four years the
human population would increase fifty fold to an expected 20,000 while the cow and
chicken population would have long since dropped to zero.

Small Town Challenges

Another agricultural community lay immediately to the southwest of Dairyland,
also along the county line. Extensively involved in dairy operations, folks in Cypress
gave their recently incorporated town the incongruent name of Dairy City. Although it
began with much the same objective as Dairyland, there similarity ended. Even though
this town had a long history as an identifiable place with its own distinct school district
and its own stop on the old Pacific Electric inter-urban line, even some tax base (a race
track), it failed to hold together the way Dairyland residents did.

When the post-WW2 boom first became evident, leaders met with similarly
concerned leaders in nearby villages known as Los Alamitos and Stanton. They sought
a joint effort toward incorporating a reasonably sized city. When those explorations fell
apart, residents of what became Dairy City carried out their own incorporation in 1955.
Within a year, the atmosphere changed. Not everyone here was a dairyman. Some
residents began to see profits in development. To start with, they had the town’s name
changed back to its much earlier designation, that of Cypress.

Tensions between these two orientations continued to mount. By 1960 charges
of bribery (albeit with no convictions for lack of evidence) brought recall action and
wholesale turnover among elected officials. They then fired their first city manager. The
second one soon resigned in disgust. Chaos seemed to have taken over the transition.

Further to the east lay another tiny community of farmers. Blessed with adequate
water for irrigation, it was known as Fountain Valley. Leaders here had no dreams of
remaining in agriculture. They incorporated in 1957 expressly to control anticipated
development to their own advantage.

Urbanization, when it started, came rapidly: more rapidly than ever contemplated.
Population shot up sevenfold, almost as fast as land prices. School attendance
increased 1400 percent in only four years. All of which meant an urgent need for new
public facilities and services—police, fire houses and equipment, new schools and
parks, all ready for newcomers the day they arrived. Fountain Valley had to cope with
the most extensive school building program of any district in California until then—and
with an horrendous need for tax revenue.
42

Alas, Fountain Valley did not sit on a rail line and so had no existing industry.
Worse yet, the county already had a twenty-year supply of industrially zoned land. Nor
had it a real tax base, or a prospect of attracting any. Unavoidably, property taxes
became burdensome, their skyrocketing rates driving farmers to sell out for whatever
profit they could make or go bankrupt waiting for a better deal. Unlike Dairyland, it was
a case of every man for himself with plenty of disagreement over how to zone the
changes and whether to go for quicker cheap houses/condos and small lots or seek
higher quality houses on large lots requiring more time and more costly amenities.

Until then developers did not have to contribute toward front-end costs for the
infrastructure and municipal operating expenses they generated. Yet without front-end
funds, a municipality and school district found themselves hard pressed to meet their
responsibilities, even if residents were willing to pay the bills through taxation later.

To accomplish what everyone knew had to be done, Fountain Valley's city
manager pioneered and council instituted a service fee on developers. Quite soon,
developers challenged this front-end fee in court and forced its abandonment; it had
never been authorized by the State legislature. Only later would this kind of fee, when
upheld in the courts, become rather standard practice elsewhere—but too late to help
Fountain Valley when it was needed most.

Laguna Beach presents an entirely different scene. Self-contained independence
became a cherished tradition, a way of life. Its small resident population represented
probably the widest range of social, economic, and political categories of any place in
southern California, certainly of any place in Orange County. Along with its sizeable
retirement contingent came everything from high-powered executives to misfits and
young artists. It even had two newspapers, one quite liberal, the other quite
conservative.

Instead of clique-dominated or class-run like some towns, Laguna Beach seemed
ever abuzz with a proliferation of social, cultural, political groups each lobbying its point
of view and most if not all of them continually undergoing change. This community
personified pluralism at its fullest and healthiest. In 1966 its chamber of commerce
counted 84 formally constituted local organizations among only 12,000 residents, the
highest ratio per population in the county.

Operating their own famous summer-arts festival (the Pageant of the Masters
where people modeled the most famous western masterpieces) and their own opera,
residents enjoyed a strong sense of community identity. Even without industry (other
than tourism), Lagunans managed to underwrite their public schools with both taxes and
support extremely well. Consequently, their school system tended to take a lead in
innovative education.

| fondly remember taking my four-year old son to a Pageant of the Masters event.
A large tent outside held an impressive showing of local artists’ works. As my son
43

gazed curiously at one really far-out painting, by pure chance all the other viewers just
happened not to talk for one moment. Of course, he took that very moment to speak up.
In his tiny child’s voice he said, “Daddy, some one spilled the paint.” Unable not to hear
him, people tried to suppress a chuckle. But the more they tried to suppress it, the
greater their urge until within a minute everyone was laughing heartily. Apparently my
son had voiced what others may have thought but would never have expressed.

Annexation Warfare

A desire to control land-use and development was not the only reason
communities in the farm belt opted for incorporation in the 1950s. Fear of being
swallowed up or at least being outmaneuvered by other towns’ aggressive annexation
efforts played a key role too.

In this, Orange County was not alone. A map of municipal boundaries in
northern California's Santa Clara County looked something like a swimming pool of
octopi with tentacles flailing in all directions. Though not so bad, Orange County did
have its share of annexation warfare. Westminster, for instance, had to incorporate and
quickly expand because its easterly neighbor, Garden Grove, sought to run an
annexation strip around it to take a large area to Westminster's west. Stanton had to
incorporate to avoid being chopped up by Westminster and Garden Grove.

Although the more frantic of these actions occurred among the newly
incorporated towns, the staid old large cities did their mischief too. Anaheim once tried
to grab some oil wells to its northeast. Buena Park scared most of its neighbors. No
doubt the most astonishing act came from Santa Ana.

Into the 1960s, urban development had occurred overwhelmingly in the county’s
western twoffifths. With one notable exception: a large retirement community on the
eastern boundary of the Irvine Ranch. Santa Ana’s city manager and council eyed it as
a plumb ripe for the picking. It would require few municipal services but generate a
sizeable tax base, given the quality of homes going in there.

Only the Irvine Ranch stood as an obstacle. Santa Ana tried anyway. lt filed a
three hundred foot wide annexation strip across nine miles of Ranch land to take in this
retirement community. Needless to say, it caused quite a stir. Obviously too, Irvine
objected since this annexation would chop right through future urban development, now
that the Ranch had become a city builder itself.

Indeed Santa Ana’s move was so blatant that the State Legislature found itself
forced to do something about all these annexation battles. It required that every county
establish a Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFC) to review and adjudicate all
proposed creations of a municipality or proposed change in boundaries of any city or
special district. Henceforth there would likely occur neither new Villa Parks (so tiny it
a4

had to contract for all services from a county or neighboring municipality) nor outlandish
nine mile long annexation strips. For, Orange County appointed retired Mayor Pearson
its first chairman of this important commission, and he set a no-nonsense tone to its
proceedings.

A Brief Update

in 1966, Orange County’s population had reached 1.2 million. Twenty-five years
later, it would double again to two and a half million. Several new towns would
incorporate and several more school districts would consolidate. Major urban
developments would now occur in the eastern portion of the county where large tracts
of open space still awaited. By the 1970s, several more freeways would open to form
an effective grid, an integral part of an extensive southern California regional network.

In early December 1994, nationwide news media revealed that Orange County
had filed for bankruptcy protection. If it could happen to one of the most prosperous,
highly educated/sophisticated metropolitan regions in this country, what were prospects
for less endowed places? This event severely jolted the Securities & Exchange
Commission and other watchdog agencies, even stock markets abroad.

It turned out that Orange County had taken a leadership role in pooling the cash
reserves of 187 municipalities, special districts, school districts, and county agencies
to gamble some twenty billion dollars on high return/high risk investments, most of it
through one of this country’s largest brokerage firms. Then interest rates rose sharply
and this consolidated fund lost nearly two billion dollars in a matter of a few months,
setting off a cascade of ramifications.

Some agencies could not meet operating expenses. New school facilities, roads,
and other needed projects went on hold and likely lost. Standard & Poor's credit ratings
fell to junk bond status thereby wiping out private bond holders. And public agencies
had to discharge good employees just when the worst storms in decades created a
desperate need for public emergency and clean-up crews.

The long-run implications, however, may prove even more interesting in a region
well noted for cynicism about government and for resistance to increased taxes even
for essential services (such as having repeatedly voting down bonds for flood control
in flood-prone areas). This crisis could have reversed Orange County's record of
pioneering innovations in public programs and the integration of city and county efforts.
Some people feared that all gains could fly apart.

But Orange County leaders did what “all the king’s men and all the king's horses”
could not do: They managed to put their fiscal house back together—and in only 18
months, much to the dismay of the skeptics and outside observers.
45

CHAPTER FOUR

IMPLICATIONS AND SIGNIFICANCE

Transformation of Orange County from a small-town, largely agriculturally based
locale into the modern post-WW2 world was certainly dramatic. Yet, it was more than
that. It created a new kind of community which would begin to emerge elsewhere in the
decades since then. A quarter century after my report to Chancellor Aldrich on Orange
County, Joel Garreau would find much the same thing happening in other major
metropolitan complexes all across America. He coined a term for it in his book, Edge
City: Life on the New Frontier. But Orange County had already cut the pattern for it.

One illustration: When the US Census Bureau established Orange County as a
standard metropolitan statistical area distinct from Los Angeles’s, it encountered a
dilemma. Its rules required all SMSAs to be named for their predominant city. Like Los
Angles and San Diego or San Francisco-Oakland for those metropolitan regions. But
Orange County had no “predominant central city.”

As much as Orange County officials argued that the county designation most
accurately represented this regional community, Census bureaucrats insisted that an
SMSA must have a predominant central city because at that time and up until then all
metro regions did have a clearly predominant municipality. They could not grasp the
post-WW?2 changes coming to America as exemplified in Orange County’s evolution.

When the Census Bureau ruled that the predominant city must have at least one
hundred thousand population, Orange County’s SMSA acquired the designation “Santa
Ana-Anaheim-Garden Grove.” By the time soon after, when Orange County had half a
dozen municipalities with that size population and more quite likely, the whole issue
became ludicrous. It was quite evident that Orange County no longer fit the old mold.
It was a new kind of creature, a far more complex community than traditionally
understood. So what is this apparently precedent-setting community system?

Answering this question requires our looking: first at how leadership and politics
have changed; then at how regional structures and communicative linkages have grown
in complexity; and finally at how new concepts of community—with an emphasis on its
systemicity—have had to replace the traditional, simplistic, sociological concepts current
back then and still somewhat prevalent in the general public. (Incidentally, the Census
Bureau later “resolved” the issue by lumping Orange County back under Los Angeles.)
46

Leadership and Politics

Until WW2, women took care of cultural affairs; men took charge of economic and
political matters, in accordance with their community status. With two large universities,
many high-tech aerospace industries, and their influx of well educated, more
sophisticated newcomers, this old delineation eroded drastically. Men took leadership
positions in symphonic and art programs. And women increasingly stepped up their
involvement in political decision-making. One case for illustration: mental health care.

Orange County voters approved bonds in 1956 for a psychiatric facility and the
County Board of Supervisors accepted federal funds to construct such a hospital. The
existing “snake pit” dungeon had drawn too much criticism as medieval. Yet once
completed in 1959, this new facility sat unused for years—its upper, hospital floors fully
equipped with everything except patients and staff. Mattresses lay for years on beds still
in their shipping cases. The obstacle: an ideological orientation opposed to mental
treatment as potentially harboring a communist conspiracy for brain washing.

League of Women Voters, sparked by Newport Beach members working with the
Coast Mental Health Association, decided to tackle this challenge and get the hospital
operative. Unlike previous proponents to a mental health program, League members
knew how the game was played. They did their homework. Frontal assault seldom
works as well as does subtlety. They had to offer political support needed by elected
officials to get them to move in a direction sought by League members.

Together with the County Board, they maneuvered to have a public hearing and
decision-making session just a few days before Christmas when opponents would likely
be too busy to notice what was happening and mobilize. Their ploy worked. The board
approved a program, and mental health went forward in an activated hospital.

Charities presented another way that change had come to Orange County. As
giant aerospace industries moved into Orange County, they sought to demonstrate their
civic mindedness and desire to “fit in.” Immediately their officials received invitations to
participate in local service clubs and charities. Since their plant locations usually fell
between towns, different officials from the same plant might serve on committees and
head charity programs in several towns simultaneously. They did not belong to any
single place-designated community.

Since at least the 1920s, each of the larger towns had its own Community
Chest—13 in all. When people lived in and worked in the same town and when small
local employers hired mostly local people, donating to a local charity for local needs
made good sense. As more and more people began to commute to other towns for work,
and as charity efforts took on a more countywide scale, difficulties began to arise.
Organizations had to prepare and make 13 different appeals.
AT

In 1947, these 13 Community Chest organizations formed a loose confederation
for pooling information, yet continued their individual (increasingly competitive) fund
raising campaigns. When the large industries arrived with employees living all over the
county, that old system became obviously awkward. The messiness of having 13
collecting agencies make 13 presentations for funds for 13 boards to each large industry
to fund operational agencies, which functioned on a countywide scale: this repulsed
efficiency minded managers of these ultramodern giant employers.

Since money came from countywide industries for countrywide purposes, why not,
they asked, have one countywide Community Chest or (by its new name) a United fund.
Moreover, consolidation would benefit the charities because people could no longer
claim at home that they gave at work while claiming at work that they gave at home. By
1965-66, a “blue ribbon” committee began the requisite exploration that would lead to a
fully amalgamated charity effort. Ironically, already these 13 organizations were headed
by only five executives; they were, on their own, already amalgamating ad hoc.

The new post-WW2 phenomenon of having humongous institutions present in
Orange County brought a new kind of leader to the fore. None were local entrepreneurs.
Everyone of their chief executive officers (whether heading a university or an aerospace
industry) was a professional manager who would likely move on eventually. Yet each of
them enjoyed instant prestige and deference in the community.

Being highly adept at running large enterprises, they encountered disappointment
in some of the archaic, or at least inadequate, ways of local politics when it came to
meeting needs for environmental enhancement and foresight. John B. Lawson, General
Manager of Philco Aeronutronics, recognized this feeling among his peers and proposed
a citizens’ effort to deal with countrywide planning issues. He chose the Fourth Annual
Orange County Economic Development Conference to make his call for a cross-section
of conference backers to form a board to head an organization he named Project 21 for
the twenty-first century.

Those invited to participate included six executives from the largest aerospace
firms, UCI's chancellor, three men in large-scale real estate development, one publisher,
three bank executives, a philanthropist, two utility executives whose companies paid the
largest taxes, Irvine Company’s president, commanding general of the Marine Corps
base, Farm Bureau’s executive, and current president of the local League of California
Cities. They included only one elected public official: the currently longest serving
member of the County Board of Supervisors who intended to retire soon.

In a handsomely designed PR brochure, Project 21 announced its lofty intentions
“to help guide Orange County’s growth into metropolitan greatness” toward the coming
.century. Lawson hoped this effort would become a “nagging conscience” for a rapidly
developing region, especially for the two/thirds of the county still not urbanized.
Congressman R.T.Hanna submitted a speech into the House record for 1 July 1965
48

about this “ideal example of what far-sighted, civic-minded Americans can do to insure
that growth we all know must take place will be a guided and orderly growth.” Even
President L.B.Johnson sent his personal congratulations to Project 21's leaders.

Then for two years these tycoons met month after month. Accustomed to
formulating policy and having subordinates fill in its details and implement it, they found
themselves talking to each other without measurable results. Project 21 had a staff of
one but no funds, other than what Lawson took from his company’s public relations
budget. While they all had some power of general influence, each must carefully
shepherd it in terms of his primary organization. They had virtually no leeway for horse-
trading to affect real-world politics in land-use and tax appraisal decisions.

Goals stated by Project 21 typified the worldview of this new kind of leadership.
They saw public salvation through education and gentlemanly discussion. They
presumed that people only needed enlightenment since naturally everyone acts
rationally, a presumption which effective politicians know better than to operate from.

Actually Project 21's goals were so antiseptically non-controversial that no
member could have been expected to stake much personal capital on them. They were
akin to being for motherhood and against sin—and about as effective. They were simply
the same expressions at county level that appear in all municipal master plans: an
avoidance of unpleasant realities in preference for platitudes which everyone can politely
agree to and promptly ignored for lack of any cost accounting for failure.

Although Project 21 was ineffective largely because it involved only high level
executives, the County Chamber of Commerce grew alarmed lest it steal some of the
latter’s reason to be. To mollify everyone, Democrat Hanna was called in to negotiate
between these two overwhelmingly Republican groups which, to further the ironies, had
overlapping memberships. Such was the nonpartisan nature of this entire affair.

For me, the primary factor in this Project 21 case is the tremendous difference in
the nature of these leaders from those who typified local leadership pre-WW2. These
were all professionals whose roots and whose professional antennas were linked to a
much larger world than a local town, or now a local county/region. Like the professionals
who now had come to manage municipal and school district operations, they based their
actions on what their professional peers nationwide set as criteria for judging success.
Seldom would they spend their careers in one slot, much less in the place where they
grew up. One term most aptly applied to them: they were “hired guns.”

In this light, the attribute of “leadership” has somewhat of a different connotation.
No longer operating as “good old boys” with all manner of local, family, and economic
ties, after WW2 these professionals managed. They did so because their base of
operation had become institutionalized. Whether a city, a county, a school district, their
base would continue to function whether they moved on to another job. For, someone
just like them—uwith the same sort of educational background, professional experience,
49

and outlook/commitment—would take up where they left off. Even at civil service level,
selection depended on passing a specialized test written by (or at least drawn from a
test by) a nationwide professional organization in one’s field of special expertise.

Although public functions may have transferred into the hands of professionals,
elected officials and news media still existed and exerted some influence, albeit a bit
more circumscribed than in the past. At local and county level, political ideology became
less important—is there such a thing as Democratic or Republican street paving or water
line? For many policy issues however, ideology can make a difference, especially in
terms of regulation and how to set priorities in budgeting limited fiscal resources.

Here, it seems, political consciousness remained at an earlier, a quite narrow
stage of sophistication and naivete. Citizens in the 1960s—and to a large extent even
today—continue to force all ideological positions into a simplistic right-left, liberal-
conservative continuum. This obvious fact struck me forcefully after | spent an entire
afternoon with Mr.Hoiles, owner/publisher/chief editorial writer of the Santa Ana Register.
| interviewed him for my research project because he stood out more than anyone in the
county as expressing views which both staunch conservatives and staunch liberals
denounced. Each side vehemently said that Hoiles belonged to the opposite camp.

When a political sociologist (who had been my fellow graduate student years
earlier at UC Berkeley) invited me to discuss my research for her UCI class, | tried an
experiment. | listed for the students ten quotes from the Registers editorial pages,
arranging them so that they alternated between sounding liberal or conservative in the
way those terms are usually interpreted. Then | asked her class to say which was which.
As expected, everyone gave the obvious classification. What a surprise when | revealed
that every one of those ten quotes were written by the same man. “How could that be?”
they reacted in alarm, their simplistic view of ideology obviously shaken.

First conclusion: a single continuum does not do justice to the political scene. |
then drew the following diagram on the blackboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Economic Sphere
Control Anti-control
Socio- Control "totalitarians" "conservatives"
cultural
Sphere Anti-Control "liberals" "libertarians"

 

The practical significance of this conceptualization, | explained back in 1967, lies
not just in its depicting some of the complexities less evident in the traditional right-left
continuum. It reveals the significance of consistency versus inconsistency. Two of the
30

blocks are internally consistent—either totalitarian control of both the economic and
socio-cultural spheres, or complete opposition to governmental controls per se. The
other two blocks are internally inconsistent; they accept controls on one of the two
spheres but oppose it on the other.

Since the “liberal” and “conservative” camps are inconsistent within themselves,
they must compromise in order to function. Having practiced internal compromise, they
are in better shape to work out compromised solutions with those in the other
inconsistent camp. Those in the two consistent blocks, however, lack the necessary
experience in forging workable compromises internally and so are less able to
accommodate divergences of opinion. They can more readily go to extremes.

Real-world problems are bound to arise when citizens and their political
representatives fail to reckon this picture—when they see someone in the other
inconsistent block as an enemy even though that person and that ideology constitute a
potentially valuable partner in opposition to people/ideologies in the consistent blocks.
More so when they become intolerant “true believers” in their inconsistent ideology.

| should clarify how the same person could author editorials with apparently
contrary ideologies. Simple: he was a Libertarian opposed to all governmental regulation
be it on cultural or economic issues. He also objected to public schools, public libraries,
even public fire departments by contending that they rested on taxation, itself a form of
confiscation dependent upon the threat of seizure of property if not paid.

The Maze of Regionalism

As we noted earlier, Orange County leaders recognized by the 1920s that local
towns could not resolve their water needs on their own. Necessity forced them to form
a county-level organization. Even this courageous step proved inadequate. They had
to join leaders of neighboring counties. Eventually a statewide effort became essential.

Highways also required a countywide, then multiple-county regional plan to
integrate the needs of both local and through traffic. So why not a similar approach to
air quality control, some people began to argue. After all, smog pays absolutely no
attention to jurisdictional boundaries. Others pointed to the needs for rapid transit.

The more people, industries, and vehicles congregated in southern California, the
more voices spoke for larger approaches to the inherent obstacles. And to every call for
a regional approach there arose voices against more governmental regulation, or at least
against letting regulation get too encompassing. Consequently the pattern of regional
efforts resembles nothing less than a patchwork quilt.

During 1959-60, numerous agencies in southern California formed the Los
Angeles Regional Transportation Study (LARTS) which imposed no membership fees,
51

only the requirement that member jurisdictions contribute land-use planning information.
Eventually 93 percent of all municipalities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San
Bernardino, and Ventura counties did participate. This step came with relative ease; it
cost them no prerogatives.

LARTS then evolved into TASC, Transportation Association of Southern
California, thereby losing its negative image of imposing Los Angeles on everyone else.
TASC, a staff-based organization, would serve as a standing committee within SCAG,
the Southern California Association of Governments whose constituent assembly
included only elected officials.

After the 1963 state legislature determined that any counties lacking regional
planning would come under the State's planning arm, the County Supervisors
Association pushed for locally created arrangements. The federal government
sweetened it with an incentive, namely eligibility for “701 grants” for regional parks.

Although Orange County’s Board of Supervisors played a key role in creating
SCAG, only 13 of this county’s 24 municipalities initially signed up. It took the county
itself two and half years to join officially. Costa Mesa’s mayor denounced SCAG as a
foot-in-the-door to dictatorial regional government. He proposed to have a countywide
organization of municipalities instead. Ironically, he was the last holdout against the
county’s proposed unified highway program earlier. But Orange County municipalities
did at least adopt mutual aid pacts for emergency fire and police protection.

As SCAG began to perform a clearing-house function and coordinating assembly,
it established RPPC, the Regional Park Planning Council in 1965 for channeling federal
funds. Then also came SCPC, the Southern California Planning Congress, open to
planning commissioners, professional planners, civic organization and interested parties.
It sought to provide a forum for constructive discussion toward stimulating greater
cooperation and coordination among municipal and regional bodies. At the same time,
RPA (Regional Plan Association) was born to provide a forum for non-governmental
interests to make their contribution to the ongoing enlightenment—or confusion.

Perhaps the mostimmediate observation from this alphabetic scramble concerned
the difficulty of defining what constituted a region. Orange County lends itself easily to
delineation because three of its four sides have distinct geographical boundaries, that
of mountains and ocean, and a flood control channel separates it from Los Angeles
County. All of southern California has enough geographical demarcation to constitute
a region. But functional issues—such as transit, smog, and land use—do not always fit
into either so limited or so extensive an area. “Region” then grew a bit fuzzy.

For example: State Highway District VII for freeways covered three counties.
TASC and RPPC, five counties. SCAG, six counties. SCPC, eight counties. RPA, nine
counties. Air pollution and rapid transit, however, remained for each individual county
to deal with. When the State Planning Department drew its concept of regions, it
ignored jurisdictional lines entirely, preferring geographical determinations without
52

resolving how such a region could do anything jurisdictionally.

Not resolved by any of these attempts at regionalism was how to neutralize (and
hopefully co-opt) each county's tax assessor who had the ability to implement an
unprinted, unreviewed, unadopted land-use plan extant only within that assessor's mind.

For me, the most interesting facet of this entire move toward regionalism of some
kind concerns when it first showed signs of emerging into an effective movement. |
would point to 1963 as perhaps the pivotal year. Why at that point did more local and
county leaders than ever seem willing at least to consider (if not actually take) the
plunge? The answer goes back to what happened late in the previous September.

That was when all of California, in Governor Pat Brown's words, came to a halt
for three days. That was when the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants
squared off for a decisive determination of which would take the National League
pennant. For three days people in southern California chanted the name Los Angeles,
up till then a repugnant name to many here for its dominance. During those same three
days, people in northern California chanted and cheered for San Francisco, a name
previously not always revered politically everywhere there.

After three days of collective chanting the iconic name representing either Los
Angeles or San Francisco, active civic boosters inadvertently—subconsciously and
against their instincts—may have gained a sense of regional identity they never had
before. If they had nothing else in common, leaders from the many dozens of cities and
counties could at least talk about “their” ball team and the excitement of that playoff.

It may have been an improbable base for regionalism with all of its real problems,
but it seems to have had its effect. Professional sports were becoming the principal ritual
of communal identification—not unlike what religious pageantry did for medieval towns
or college sports does to bring thousands of disparate students together. It encompassed
people from all walks of life, whether rich or poor, college educated or highschool
dropout, man or woman, old or young, Anglo, Black, Latino, or Asian American.

Communicative Linkages

We saw how the arrival of railroads shaped what became Orange County.
Railroads in the late 19" century and first decade of the 20" century determined where
towns would settle. But they also tied people in Orange County more to Los Angeles
than to people in other towns nearby.

Then we saw how paved roads radically changed where people went for church,
schools, shopping, and recreation. This increase of inter-action between towns within
Orange County facilitated their meeting challenges (such as water) through cooperation
instead of the previous undercutting. People in different towns found common interests
and mutual identity. Orange County could and did emerge as their larger community.
53

After WW2 came the freeway. If railroads and paved roads exerted significant
impacts, freeways would do far more to reshape both the socio-political landscape as
well as the physical landscape. We have seen how rapidly urbanization spread across
Orange County starting in the northwest and bulldozing southeastward. Far more
occurred, however, than just more people and less open agricultural fields.

Freeways brought new industries and contributed to the location of two major state
university campuses here. Freeways also set in motion new patterns of shopping. Just
as paved roads spelled the demise of old village “cracker-barrel” general stores in favor
of larger department stores in the towns, so freeways determined where major shopping
centers would locate. And those locations tended to lie between cities, much to the
demise of the recently predominant albeit limited “downtown” retail complexes.

These new giant shopping centers then had became regional, not local in terms
of identity and clientele. With a regional market to draw from, these new giant centers
needed advertising with a regional reach. For decades up until the 1950s, each little
town had its own newspaper—a weekly or semi-weekly if not a daily. Consolidation of
newspapers had already begun, but the rate of this change accelerated in the late 1950s
into the ‘60s. One by one the weekly and semi-weekly presses had folded, either when
their publishers died or dailies in larger towns bought them out.

With no Orange County-based television channel, newspaper advertising took
on more importance than in most SMSA regions which did have their own TV channels.
With the advent of super-sized shopping centers, only a few major dailies had an
advertising base sufficient to prosper. It was now the turn for the smaller dailies to bite
the dust or merge.

By the end of the 1970s, only a handful of newspapers survived. Eventually only
one could transform itself from a one-city institution into a countywide instrument for
news. That one was the Santa Ana Register which would become the Orange County
Register. In short, the greater the population, the fewer the number of distinct
newspapers on the scene. And local town happenings drew less and less attention.

Projecting ahead: if freeways, like paved roads and railroads before them, could
impose so much change, what kind of community system is emerging from impacts on
the social-psychological essence of community set in motion by the electronics revolution
of the 1990s with communication satellites, fibre-optics, internet and cell-phone use so
nearly ubiquitous? Changes in the non-face-to-face way people interact, in how they
think of themselves as part of or as separate from some sort of community . . . surely
these must do something how ever subtle to the way society adheres and functions.

Even commercial patterns are changing—from in-person store shopping to on-line
shopping. From social clubs in person to on-line chat rooms. From mandatory
commuting to and from work during “rush” hour to on-line work either from home or
satellite centers. Has this latest momentous period of change made people more
54

isolated socially albeit more in touch impersonally with a larger world? What kind of
community is it creating? What does it do to identity and personal responsibility?

Changing Concepts of Community

To compare my findings about Orange County with research findings elsewhere,
| dug into available social science literature for similar case studies as well as for
conceptual theories. Following the Lynds’ success in analyzing Middletown (1929 and
1937), there came Warner's Jonesville (1949), Hunter in Atlanta (1953), Seeley’s
Crestwood Heights (1956), Berger's working-class suburb (1960), Vidich & Bensman’s
Small Town (1960), Williams & Adrian’s four cities (1963), Wildavsky’s Small Town
(1964), Lowry in Chico (1965), and Gans'’s Levittowners (1967), among others.

All of them were thorough-going studies and | learned much from them. Yet |
found myself far from satisfied relative to my focus. Except for Williams & Adrian, all of
them dealt with a single town or context as if isolated in a laboratory. Although Williams
& Adrian examined four towns, they did so to display a range of types, not how numerous
communities might interact. Certainly Orange County offered enough diversity in
community characteristics to allow myriad combinations of differing prototypes
comparable to Williams & Adrian’s findings—if that had been my intention.

What came through strongest to me from my investigation was diametrically
opposed to these books. It concerned, more than anything else, the importance of
interactive linkages between community nodes—be they negative or positive for
community strength and identity— in making Orange County and its many parts what
they became and how they reached that state. Those famous studies suggested to me
that how we conceptualize “community” will likely affect quite severely what we look for
and hence what we see, especially if we narrow our focus myopically as they did.

Until WW2, much of Orange

County did resemble the Lynd s'model: >

a core of local leadership, surrounded marginal
by the majority of townsfolk who residents
conducted virtually all of their shop- aaa
ping, worship, recreation, and social x community ~
interaction within one town. There they participants oy
supported the schools and rooted for core

the home highschool football team. On leader-
ship

the social fringe were the misfits,
transients, and ethnic minorities who self-identified
members

    
    
 
 
   
     

    
 
 
 
 

   
  
  

were not accepted and who held no
identification with the place. These
people simply lived there but were not a
part of the community. What we have
then is this “bull's eye” concept of
community.

peripheral
individuals
55

By zooming in on one town at a time, even post-WW2 social scientists continued
to see community in terms of either a place or an interest (the business community, the
community of scientists). What happened was a blocking out of a tremendous amount
of wider interactions which went far in affecting how social, political, economic, and
cultural change transpired over time. Evidence from Orange County’s record strongly
suggested that those interactions subtly and not so subtly shaped the process of change.
And in Orange County’s case, change over time was the story.

As more and more observers of urban America grew dissatisfied with the old
limited concepts of community, they sought a more realistic comprehension. Some social
scientists focused on vertical social structures since American life seemed increasingly
organized hierarchically/bureaucratically whether in business, government, or semi-
public sectors. Others soon simply despaired and came to doubt whether anything still
remained to deserve the nomenclature of “community” in the complexity of that day; they
found it difficult to distinguish community from society and dropped it from textbooks.

A rather different direction of inquiry began among students of urban problems,
particularly having to do with vehicular circulation—such as works by R.B.Mitchell,
C.Rapkin, and J.Rannells in the mid-1950s. In his 1962 book on the theory of urban
growth, Richard Meier perceptively began to think of traffic as a functional system for
exchanging goods, services, and people. Melvin Webber, also at UC Berkeley, went on
from there to conceptualize community as a communicative switchboard linking people
to each other—linking people to activities and linking functions to other functions. From
Webber's perspective, propinquity no longer constituted a requisite characteristic. This
breakthrough spawned a new generation of analysis so completely centered on networks
as sometimes to ignore spatial, physical, and functional factors.

Already by the 1960s, even the
basic social unit, the family, no longer
belonged to a community delineated
only by place. One parent would work
in a distant town, the other parent
either worked or engaged in activities
in another place, while each child
developed his/her own network of
communicants. This burgeoning
importance of networks in people’s
lives did not, however, spell a demise
of everything place-related. Many
functions essential for biological
survival still remained place
based—water and sewer service,
schools and hospitals, fire and police
protection, to name a bare few.

 
56

These were provided by public jurisdictions as delineated by metes and bounds
place description and set into law. Commercial services, too, occurred in physically fixed
places (such as larger cities’ downtowns and then major shopping centers) identified by
locational names. Let any of these services be disrupted (by a broken water main,
flooding, strikes) and people grew quite aware of their unavoidable ties to a place.

On the other hand, a steady decrease in the cost of phone connections already
facilitated closer ties between people all across this country. Mass media (radio, then
television) increased Orange Countians’ identification with athletic and entertainment
stars as trend setters. Many people here were already more sensitive to those who
shared their professional, recreational, or religious interests thousands of miles away
than to a family in the next street. And this came before we had communication satellites,
fibre-optics, cell phones, and web sites. Still, where they lived did have importance.

Where local interactions instilled and reinforced a positive reaction, people
identified in a positive way with the functional system they lived in. And that functional
system took on positive emotional overtones which reinforced a sense of belonging to
a supportive, protective community. Where daily interactions leaned more toward the
negative (toward suspicion, ugliness, lack of public service, or hostility), there a negative,
emotional downward spiral could erode a sense of community. In this latter milieu, it was
not surprising to find people feeling alienated, bitter, even hopeless, with no concern for
others or for the community. For highly mobile self-centered people, though, sensitivity
to a community of any kind could become little more than a blah.

The communal interactions, then, appear to have both a symbiotic (a functional)
dimension and a symbolic (an emotional) dimension. At the same time, those communal
interactions may be either place-based or network-based as this diagram shows. If this
finding is valid, human community is far more complex than traditionally recognized.

 

 

COMMUNAL Symbiotic (functional) Symbolic (emotional)

INTERACTIONS

Place Based basic infrastructure, patriotic/festival/sporting
services, protection;for rituals; for locational
biological survival identity

Network Based exchange of cultural creativity, religion; for
info/learning: for intellectual | personal & associational
survival identity

 

 

 

 

This depiction does not, however, convey the full scope of that complexity. A
functioning and emotionally cohesive community can occur at a range of scales from
neighborhood to town to county to region/state to nation, all nested together with
linkages. Seeing this in the dynamic Orange County | studied, though, left me uncertain
57

because it departed too abruptly from sociological tradition. | had to test it elsewhere.

Upon completing my project on Orange County for Chancellor Aldrich in 1967, |
accepted an offer to participate on a Stanford Research Institute team in Vietnam. We
would study the complexities and possibilities for extensive land-reform during the height
of the war there. My role took me into remote villages throughout much of the southern
half of South Vietnam. This work provided (beside some rather scary moments) a
splendid opportunity to examine how community functions or fails to function in a quite
different culture and then to compare it with what | had discovered in Orange County.

To better comprehend what | observed, | immersed myself in Vietnamese cultural
history. It did not take long before | could sense immediately upon entering a village or
hamlet whether its people followed a single religion or several distinct religions. Where
everyone belonged to a single religion (whether Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Roman Catholic, or
a Buddhist sect), those villages appeared industrious and relatively prosperous, allowing
for wartime conditions and limitations. In those villages, men and women worked
together in farming, and the local defense force seemed more vigilant.

Where people belonged to competing religious/ideological blocs, those villages
appeared relatively more dysfunctional, their defense force sloppy. Farming and road
building (including breaking rocks with sledge hammers) were women’s work while the
men sat holding guns—supposedly guarding their women—all the while drinking beer.
Apparently community cohesion rested heavily upon how people identified themselves
so as to enjoy mutual trust, respect, and responsibility. Lacking these attributes,
community disunion (under the extreme tensions of that brutal civil war) bred suspicion,
betrayals, even murder just when a strong sense of community was most needed.

The Tet offensive of 1968 made it too dangerous for me to visit the rest of
Vietnam. On the way back to the States, | stopped to see former colleagues in Hawaii
and was recruited to work with citizen groups, first in two Model Cities projects, then to
assist small towns on windward Oahu to participate in public affairs while they underwent
rapid growth. Again | had an excellent opportunity to compare my Orange County
observations on other types of community. Once again | immersed myself in the cultural
history of the indigenous people and their interaction with imported cultures—as | had
done for my dissertation on the economic development of modern Japan by tracing
patterns of cultural and religious change over the previous sixteen centuries.

Later | conducted management audits of Hawaii State agencies and programs. For
several few years (out of more than two decades there) | served on the Governor's
Environmental Council, among other advisory appointments. This experience aroused
my curiosity about biological and ecological systems. At retirement | had an unusual
opportunity to concentrate on an intensive self-study of those living systems.

From all of these professional and research experiences there came a realization
that human community is remarkably like organismic and ecological systems. Indeed,
28

human community is a rather complex living system. We underestimate it at our peril
when we program and conduct educational, medical, social, justice, housing services by
focusing on individuals as individuals rather than on families, neighborhoods, and all the
other scales and dimensions of community in their highly interactive web.

The criteria, which all three systems have in common, quite well define living
systems and distinguish them from other kinds of systems. Those criteria are:

@ The whole is greater than, and distinctive from, the sum of the parts due fo the inter-
action of those parts.

e All parts of a living system are interdependent; an impact on any one part affects
all other parts.

@ A living system perpetuates itself both by reproducing and by self-adapting to a
changing environment.

Community, then, appears to entail an adaptive, multi-scaled, self-reinforcing,
synergistic process with back-up redundancies—to meet challenges, to cope with
members’ needs, and to interact successfully with other systems. It is, in essence, a
highly complex evolutionary process, not a homeostatic mechanism. It is a continual,
intricate, interactive process of self-organization. To the extent it can no longer fulfill
these criteria and characteristics, a community system becomes that dysfunctional.

This distinction for community could prove crucial as it distances itself from
previous systems-theory in the social sciences. For, it necessitates nonlinear (“chaos”)
thinking—which recognizes that, except in artificially limited contexts, there are no
independent variables in the big picture; everything is a dependent variable. The major
point here then lies in the utter dynamic nature of a community system. We do it a
dangerous disservice when we look at it as a “fixed” thing or place or relationship.

What about economic and sociological and political systems which people engage
in? Aren't they living systems too? Not really. They resemble more the sub-systems
which make up a biological living system—such as the respiratory, circulatory, endocrine,
and neurological subsystems. They are integral parts of a living system but cannot
function individually alone. At the same time, a failure of one of them can bring death
to the entire system or at least impede its ability to adapt to a changing environment.

One other facet of community: A culture delineates a society by marking whom to
trust and whom to be wary of. A society must, then, have and practice a particular culture
to have identity. Community seems to provide the theater stage upon which this
interaction of culture and society evolve themselves. Vitality in community systems
seems proportional to the extent society exercises responsibility for individuals and
simultaneously to the extent individuals exercise responsibility for society and its culture.
Difficulties inevitably arise in our highly complex modern context because each person
participates in several kinds and scales of community which have conflicting values. This
produces personal stress and can lead to communal disruption, litigation, violence.
52

Another way to look at community is as a process like that of music. In music we
neither listen to all the sounds at once nor as individually disparate pitches. Those
sounds become music only when they occur in relation to each other over time in a
rhythmic progression of cords and/or melody, just as the living system of community
occurs through the iteratively interactive progression of social, cultural, economic, and
political linkages within a functional and emotional format.

Why This Book Now?

For several reasons. Forty years have passed since | completed my 700-page
unpolished report on Orange County California for Chancellor Aldrich. What
transpired—the kinds of tensions, turmoil, and accomplishments—in that one region
seem to have happened and are happening in other rapidly burgeoning urban sectors
of this country and quite possibly elsewhere in the world. Understanding the basic
necessity of a viable community may well prove essential any where people congregate
and hence must interact. For far too long, though, the concept and significance of
“community” have been left fuzzy in the social sciences as well as in lay conversation.

Now nearing age eighty, | thought | had better share this important part of my
intellectual life while | can still do so—just in case others might find it useful. Although
various portions of this book were covered in greater detail in several of my previously
published scholarly works, this brief book brings those observations and analyses
together in an encapsulated form for a wider audience—for those focused on sociological
contexts and political dynamics, on American cultural evolution or on urban planning,
whether they be professionals or scholars in a related field, or students just beginning
to look and citizens concerned about modern life.

Rather than simply record historical events in one specific regional context, | have
sought to suggest, in a straightforward manner, an analytical framework for probing into
the essence of community generically as a highly complex process. This is why | chose
to write it in the style of a National Geographic-like first-person narrative. It traces my
journey of discovery over many decades and how findings from other cultures enhanced
the underlying meaning of what | had observed in Orange County.

| trust that by now you recognize that the word “essence” in this book's title refers
to community as a living system, and that this “journey” went via exploring the involved
processes of change over extended time. | have appropriately dedicated this
recapitulation to Chancellor Aldrich because he is the one who sent me off on what
proved to be a fascinating lifetime of investigation. Indeed, | am still striving to answer
his questions.

 
   
 
  
   
   

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