Can You Solve These Minor Mysteries of County’s Past?

I’m not exactly from a pioneer Orange County family, but I’ve been around here long enough to have seen a few things come and go.

Now I see that having spent 12 months celebrating the county’s 100th birthday with old stories and fond memories, everyone is all of the sudden ready to rush headlong into the second century.

Well, wait just one darn minute. There are a few more things I’d like to know before we go. For example, I’d like to know whatever happened to Serrano the Horse?

When I was a teen-ager growing up in Garden Grove about a quarter-century ago, it seemed that I used to come upon this nag everywhere. There was the horse and, if memory serves, a man who stood alongside. I’m sure the horse did something like pose with children for photos or give little kids short horsy rides around the man standing next to him. I think there was a sombrero involved too.

Of course, memory being what it is at my advanced age, I don’t recall all the details too vividly. I guess the horse may not actually have been everywhere.

Now that I think about it, Serrano and the man who stood next to him just might have been an attraction at Knott’s Berry Farm. But I am sure Serrano and his keeper also played their gig beyond the berry farm’s boundaries. It seems as if I used to see them along the roadside when I would hitchhike to the beach.

So, does anyone know? Whatever happened to Serrano the Horse?

And what about Tietz? Tell me that.

When my family first moved to Garden Grove, Tietz was a big name. He was a man, like so many other men, who apparently had no first name, because no one I knew ever called him anything but Tietz.

Actually he did not need a first name. He had a whole housing development. Right there in Garden Grove were the Tietz houses, tracts full of them. Skylark Terrace was one, I think.

In the mid-1950s in our Garden Grove neighborhood, Tietz carried a connotation something like Trump or Lyons or Warmington.

Well, OK, maybe not Trump. But we’re talking substance here.

Again, excuse the foggy memory. I was just 7 years old. But if I didn’t live in a Tietz house, I lived real near them.

So, whatever happened to Tietz? (And did he have a first name?)

I’m not through yet. Somebody tell me whatever happened to Fountain Moseby Hutchinson III.

We called him Sparky, as I recall. Without a doubt, he was the best-named person I grew up with, and I grew up with guys called Stubbs, Fish and Beetle and a girl called Rat.

Sparky was a heck of a nice guy. I guess with a name like Fountain Moseby Hutchinson III, he pretty much had to be. Does anyone know whatever happened to old Sparky, La Quinta High School class of ‘66?

Some people never look back. These forward-looking types go into lines of work like municipal bonds, architecture, strong-arm robbery.

Me, I’m a reminiscing kind of guy. Why else would I lie awake at night, wondering whatever happened to the Nike missiles that used to rise out of the ground a couple of blocks from my parents’ old house?

Does anyone out there know whatever happened to the missiles that appeared every now and then from their subterranean silos, where they hid along Katella Avenue, west of Beach Boulevard? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Those needle-nose, stark-white projectiles would slowly tilt upward until they aimed straight at heaven. Driving by them in the family car, you never really knew whether this was another make-

sure-the-lifting-mechanism-is-working practice, or whether the Commies had just launched World War III. As a diversion, it was unmatched.

But the Nikes have been gone for some time now, and I’ll bet there’s not a person out there who can tell me where they went or why.

Well, if you think I’m going to wrap up this column without mentioning the biggest unanswered question of all, you’ve got another thought coming, Buster.

What I want to know is whatever happened to Kicker Canfield? For those of you who never had the pleasure, Kicker Canfield was this writer’s first love, unrequited though it was. She was the most beautiful blonde ever to grace Orangewood Elementary School. We were in third grade and she would not give me the time of day.

Just about everybody else knew her as Julie. I knew her as Kicker. This is because that was the way she received my meek advances. Intermediaries (whom I suspect enjoyed the spectacle) would hand-carry my missives to Kicker Canfield: “I love you. Do you love me. Check one: Yes No.”

I don’t think she ever checked off Yes. But she kicked me in the shins a lot.

So, before the rest of you plunge into Orange County’s second century like so many municipal bond brokers and strong-arm robbers, indulge me this: Whatever happened to Kicker Canfield?