Centennial’s Legacy: a Boost for Local History

Robert A. Slayton, an assistant professor of history from Chicago who hired on recently at Chapman College, was taken aback by what he couldn’t find in libraries about Orange County.

Slayton, who says he was accustomed to libraries full of local history books and manuscripts, discovered “a real lack of historical writings” about Orange County. “These people are hungry for their history, and there just isn’t that much of it here,” he said.

But Slayton and other historians in Orange County say things are looking up, thanks to the less spectacular side of the yearlong centennial celebration, which ends Tuesday, the county’s official 100th birthday.

Eclipsed by fireworks shows, mass bicycle rides and music festivals, some of the Orange County Centennial Committee’s efforts to stimulate local history research have had some success. Both historians and centennial organizers say that could wind up being the centennial year’s longest-lasting legacy.

Jim Sleeper, who has published numerous books and almanacs on Orange County history and is generally considered the dean of local historians, said much of the local history published during the year has been “largely pictorial, celebratory and sanitized in nature.”

“This past year’s output should have been sufficient to collapse any coffee table, not to mention any potential reader,” Sleeper said.

Yet there have been developments that have been widely praised in local history circles:

- A huge bibliography listing virtually every local historical source in every library in Orange County is nearing completion and will be published by the Orange County Historical Society as a hard-cover book later this year. The bibliographical listings now cover 600 computer-printout pages, and a detailed index will cover perhaps 200 more.

“If the bibliography fulfills its purpose, it will serve the next generation of researchers as an indispensable starting point for Orange County studies,” wrote the compiler of the bibliography, Roger Berry, head of the UC Irvine Library’s department of special collections.

“This is the service to scholarship that the Orange County Historical Society wishes to provide as a legacy of the centennial,” Berry wrote.

- Chapman College and the county historical society, using a $2,000 grant from the centennial committee, held the Conference of Orange County History at Chapman in Orange last October, and it proved so successful it has become an annual event.

About 500 professional and amateur historians plus local history buffs attended the sessions, and the college history department published a 300-page volume containing the approximately 40 historical papers submitted. Slayton said the college plans to continue holding the conference and publishing its papers. The second conference is scheduled for Sept. 23 and 24, free to all comers.

Last year’s conference “was the first time all the academics and historical societies had come together in one place,” Slayton said. “That gelling, that really sets up the basis for Orange County history in a somewhat more cohesive way,” he said. “If you did this in New York or Chicago, it would be no big deal, but here it really fills an important niche. It’s breaking ground, definitely.”

- KOCE, the public television station at Golden West College, is producing 90-minute videotapes of its three-part history, “The Story of Orange County,” for distribution to every county school. Included will be instructional materials that suggest class activities and field trips.

Darrell Metzger, president of Orange County Centennial Inc., said students were the primary concern of the committee’s board of directors from the outset. Even before the centennial celebration began last July 31 with a fireworks show and a tour along county streets that attracted 13,000 bicyclists, the board had raised enough money to set aside $300,000 for scholarships, Metzger said.

The community events and shows “were fun, very enjoyable, but I expect most people have forgotten about them now. That was a year ago. But people will not forget about our scholarship fund,” he said.

Scholarship Fund

The surplus from the committee’s $1.6 million in revenues--$1.4 million of which was donated by corporate sponsors--will also go toward the scholarship fund, although Metzger declined to specify the amount. He said the committee’s ending revenue and expenditure figures will be announced Tuesday, when a time capsule will be buried at the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana.

According to Metzger, scholarships will be awarded to seniors graduating from an Orange County high school who have attended three of the previous four years in the county. Scholarships will be awarded according to academic and student-activities achievements and will not be based strictly on need.

Scholarships may be used at universities, community colleges and technical schools, Metzger said. Students born in 1989, the centennial year, will be eligible for extra funds.

“We didn’t build a monument. We don’t have a statue of John Wayne or me or whatever. Our board wanted to contribute to things of lasting value,” Metzger said.

FESTIVAL WEEKEND Festivals in Irvine and Costa Mesa cap yearlong centennial celebration. Calendar, Page 20.