TELEVISION REVIEW : Sunshiny ‘Story of Orange County’

If you’re looking for a critical, detailed history of Orange County, don’t look for it on KOCE-TV’s “The Story of Orange County,” which airs tonight at 8 p.m.

The 90-minute program--really a series of three shorter segments--paints the history of the county in broad brush strokes and, for the most part, in a favorable light.

Orange County is “one of the most affluent and technologically advanced counties in the country,” the program’s narrator tells us up front. “A dream come true.”

Well, yes and no. Orange County may be a realized dream for thousands of affluent homeowners and the descendants of early county settlers interviewed in this program, which is also being made available to local schools. But “The Story of Orange County” skims--or ignores completely--the history of less fortunate groups in the county.

Certainly there is much to marvel at in Orange County, and producer-director Bill McGarigle has done a good job of obtaining original photos and film and interviewing people who made history in the county, or their descendants.

The program attempts to cover a lot of ground. It begins with the American Indians who populated the area before the Spaniards, the program says, wiped them out with foreign diseases. It concludes 90 minutes later with Santa Margarita Co. President Tony Moiso talking about the challenges that lie ahead for county developers, who, like the Spaniards of yesteryear, unwittingly introduce new environmental and cultural afflictions in the interests of evangelizing all concerned to their notion of proper life style. (The Santa Margarita Co. is also one of the show’s sponsors.)

There is plenty of useful, interesting information in between. The show’s first “storyteller,” Paul Apodaca, curator of folk art at Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum, tells us that American Indians in what is now Orange County were blessed with abundant food sources and had enough time to become world-class artisans. One wonders why, given that same abundance today, Orange County is not more of a cultural powerhouse.

Bernardo Yorba, a descendant of Jose Antonio Yorba, a member of the first Spanish expedition into the area and recipient of the first land grant, tells of the early ranchos , the huge, private landholdings that helped determine the master-planned character of south county development more than a century later.

The program draws other parallels between past and present: Orange County voters have been shortsighted and tight-fisted for more than a century. Voters in what later became Orange County opposed floating bonds to pay for expansion of railroad service into their area in the 19th Century, just as voters shot down a sales-tax increase a few years ago that would have paid for new roads to help relieve the traffic on crowded old ones.

And Bob Main, a Garden Grove builder, says that driving around Orange County during the postwar suburban explosion, it “seemed like there was a new project somewhere every day.” Some things never change.

The show makes no mention of some of Orange County’s darker chapters: the last lynching in California, the power wielded by the Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society earlier this century, the internment of some of the county’s prominent Japanese farmers at Manzanar during World War II, and discriminatory laws and practices against Mexicans and other ethnic groups that continued even after the war.

“The Story of Orange County” is a history of high points--Disneyland, the Big A, the freeways, the oil explosion, South Coast Plaza and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and the remarkable economic growth of the past two decades. All of that is without question part of Orange County’s history, but it is only that--a part. The rest of “The Story” remains to be told.

“The Story of Orange County” airs at 8 p.m. tonight on KOCE Channel 50.