Ex-Mayor Keeps Eye on City He Helped to Grow

Donald Shipley likes the view from his favorite booth at Terry’s, a family-run coffee shop on Main Street in downtown Huntington Beach. He spends his mornings here, sipping coffee, reading the paper and watching the comings and goings in the city he has called home for 30 years.

Shipley has spent 12 of those years on the City Council, including four terms as mayor, helping to guide the city in its transition from a sleepy collection of seaside businesses and quiet farms to a sprawling community of more than 186,000 people.

Today, the nature center at Huntington Central Park is named for Shipley, as is a local street. In leading a visitor on a tour of the city, he can tell the story behind seemingly its every building--and vacant lot. But there was a time, when he first showed an interest in city politics, when he was shunned as a newcomer.

“They called me an outsider,” remembered Shipley, 75, at his home, a 1930s Spanish-style rambler in an old Main Street neighborhood. He came to Southern California in 1953 to teach at Cal State Long Beach, then just a collection of temporary buildings with an enrollment of a few hundred students, and organized some of the first environmental studies classes there.

He moved to Huntington Beach in 1958. “As soon as I saw Main Street, I liked it,” Shipley said. “It reminds me of a New England street.” Shipley grew up in Stamford, Conn., and his accent still betrays his New England roots.

His first brush with city affairs came when he noticed work crews removing Monterey pine trees on his street. A visit with the city attorney led to a halt of the tree removal, and before long Shipley was regularly attending council meetings.

Later he was recruited by then-Recreation Director Norm Worthy to join the city Recreation Commission. Shipley was rejected for the post several times by the City Council--thanks to the “outsider” tag--but he was eventually confirmed.

At the time there was one park in the city. “Today we have 57 or 58 parks,” said Shipley, proudly. “I helped (Worthy) to no end in pushing for a park system.”

At the urging of some friends, Shipley ran for City Council in 1964 and won, becoming mayor that year. He is perhaps remembered most for his efforts to save open space and historical sites in the rapidly developing city, at a time when the preservationist ethic was not yet fashionable in conservative Orange County.

He helped establish Huntington Central Park, which is still one of the top bird-watching locations in the county. He also headed a fight to save the historic Newland House from demolition and later from being moved to a different location. “There’s no point in moving it,” he said. “You don’t move Mt. Vernon (out of Virginia).”

Since retiring from the council in 1976 and from his teaching post in 1977, Shipley has kept an eye on city affairs. But he only makes the trek to City Hall occasionally, picking his fights carefully. “If you go all the time, you make yourself a pest,” he said.

These days, when he’s not watching the world go by at Terry’s, he can often be found watching birds at Bolsa Chica or Huntington Central Park. “I’ve been a bird watcher all my life,” he said, ever since he was voted president of the Junior Audubon Club in his fifth-grade class.

Shipley, who never married despite several engagements, shares his home with a small, black, mixed-breed dog named Hanby. He calls his house a museum, and it’s easy to see why--photos and other mementoes cover his wall from floor to ceiling and flood his shelves and tables.

There’s a picture of Helen Keller, a good friend of his mother’s and her classmate in the 1904 graduating class at Radcliffe. There are personal letters from every president since Lyndon Johnson, and photos of some of the scientific figures he has met, from Thomas Edison to Margaret Mead.

There are also thousands of books on every conceivable subject, including a prized copy of “My First Summer in the Sierra” signed by one of his heroes, John Muir. And there are innumerable souvenirs from his travels--he has toured 75 countries and cruised around the world six times. And each item has a story, which Shipley will share with little prodding.

Inside his walls, time seems to stand still, but outside the changes are getting harder to ignore. When he first moved to Huntington Beach, he said, “you could drive all the way to Santa Ana and see nothing but cabbage fields, and beets and asparagus.”

These days, high-density condo and apartment developments crowd around his aging but well-kept neighborhood.

“I’m not against change and progress,” Shipley said, “but does Huntington Beach have to be another Los Angeles?”