For This Couple, There’s No Home Like a Restored Home
The old Spanish adobe house near the ocean in San Clemente is prime property, a place where Joyce and Frank Thompson will set up housekeeping after restoration of the 1929 home once owned by the Warner family.
There’s no question, the Thompsons said, that the house--once listed for $340,000--will be a good investment, but that’s hardly their motive. “When we see all these lovely and old historic buildings being demolished,” said Joyce Thompson, a California native, “we felt that we wanted to save some of our California history and that maybe the people who come on after us will say, ‘Yes, this is part of our history.’ ”
Glen (Pop) S. Warner, one-time Stanford University football coach who developed Pop Warner youth football, lived there for 15 years and was just one of the historic Warner family members to reside there.
Joyce Thompson said it has only been in recent years that anyone has been active in preserving old California buildings and points out that even young couples are restoring old Victorian and adobe homes rather than buying new houses.
“It’s disheartening to see lovely old historic buildings being demolished,” she said. “You don’t see that happening on the East Coast or in Europe.”
The retired couple, who live in Laguna Hills, will move in about two months when the work is completed. They said they have long “fantasized about how wonderful it would be to restore something. If we could have done this when we were younger,” she added, “we would have done it. When you get on in years you have to uncomplicate your life and this is complicating our lives. But I think we still have a few flings left.”
There’s some question whether the finished adobe will be considered a city landmark, said Charles Ashbaugh, San Clemente’s historian. “They rehabilitated it instead of restoring it,” he said, noting that the Thompsons added a new wing to the building. “It won’t be original.”
The Thompsons, however, feel that the city Historical Society will look kindly on the restoration.
Coming in second in the recent California Mother of the Year contest was a disappointment to Cynthia Garner, 36, of Irvine, not so much for the glory of it all, “but it would have given me a wider forum for my thoughts on career and motherhood.”
Besides, she said, “the most important title I’ll ever own would be that of mother.”
Garner, mother of two who earned a six-figure salary from her two businesses before chucking it to concentrate as a full-time housewife and mother, said her forum “is to tell women they are truly the heart of the home and to reevaluate why they’re working. The pendulum is swinging back to family tradition and family life.”
Garner, president of the Orange County Chapter of American Mothers Inc., is currently writing a book titled “Motherhood Is Not a Four-Letter Word.”
Last year real estate broker Phyllis Salyer-Carruthers, 60, of Huntington Beach volunteered to help clean up the city, figuring that it would benefit her business and make her community look nicer.
She was quickly appointed a team captain for Huntington Beach’s 1985 Clean Sweep Day program, which removed 15 tons of litter. Her report so impressed members of the city Environmental Board that they appointed her to a vacant board seat. And later because of her good ideas for 1986 Clean Sweep Day, the board put her in charge.
“It happened so fast,” she said. “I just wanted to get involved, and the next thing I know I was the chairman.”
And now that she’s in charge, Salyer-Carruthers wants action. “I want people who live here to volunteer to help clean this city,” she said, “and I’m telling people who don’t live here to either dump their litter in a trash container or take it with them when they leave.”
Later this year there’s going to be coastal sweep to clean the beaches after the summer season ends.
“I’ll be involved,” she promised. “I love things like this.”
How’s this for a valuable player. Girls’ softball pitcher Nicky Lane of Cypress High School tossed a perfect game, retiring all 21 batters, against Katella High. She also punched out a single to score the winning run in the 1-0 victory.
But wait, there’s more. The Cypress team has a 14-4 overall record, and Lane, a junior, has the same 14-4 record. She’s the team’s only pitcher.
Acknowledgments--Huntington Beach High School Athletic Director Bill Boswell, 51, was named one of eight throughout the country being considered for Athletic Director of the Year by National Coaches Assn. In addition, Boswell received the Huntington Beach Masonic Lodge Cap Sheue Education Award. Sheue, a retired coach, once had Boswell as a student.
