A Country Oasis Girds for Change : As Problems Mount, Rancho Santa Fe Looks for Answers

Victor Mature is on a mail run. On a carbon-copy glorious morning in paradise, his trademark red Rolls-Royce golf cart is drawing to within 9-iron distance of the Rancho Santa Fe post office.

As he has every day since anyone can remember, the aging star of 73 films is making his morning jaunt along the eucalyptus-shaded streets of his adopted home, blasting Big Band music on a portable tape player, waving a swarthy hand at smiling passers-by.

“Hey, Victor!” calls out a local attorney. Mature nods as he whizzes past, all the while extolling the virtues of life in this semi-rural collection of 1,800 homes and estates that local residents affectionately call The Ranch.

“I’ve been all over the world and this place beats ‘em all,” said the 74-year-old former on-screen Sampson, whose still-rugged good looks recently garnered him a film offer to play Sylvestor Stallone’s father.

He swerves his golf cart with the flashing red light and fireman’s helmet hood ornament onto deserted Paseo Delicias, the main drag of Rancho Santa Fe’s tiny business district.

“Can you believe this?” he said. “We’re downtown. And there’s just no action here. No traffic lights, no traffic. This place is Utopia, a country town in the shadow of the city.”

For three generations, Rancho Santa Fe has been safe harbor for a wealthy cadre of residents seeking to escape the constant change of the outside world, many of them attracted by its legendary Covenant that for 63 years has strictly maintained status quo throughout the hamlet.

Nestled along the wooded slopes of a winding river valley, 5 miles east of the Pacific and half an hour north of downtown San Diego, the ranch is home to aging Hollywood icons, self-made millionaires, politicians and power brokers as well as celebrated businessmen, doctors and scientists from around the world.

Actor Robert Young lives there. So do Bert Parks and Patti Page, broadcaster Dick Enberg, best-selling crime author Joseph Wambaugh. They’re all neighbors to former astronaut Wally Shirra, ex-Universal studios president Sy Salkowitz and Glenn Bell, who founded the fast-food Taco Bell chain.

Howard Hughes once kept a home there. So did Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Bing Crosby--who brought his first family to the then-unknown oasis to protect them from the 1930s kidnaping scares.

Then there’s the Chicago Pritzker family--owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain--who recently completed an elaborate 18,000-square-foot mansion in which the glass alone cost $100,000.

Last year, Market Statistics of New York ranked the Ranch’s 92067 ZIP code the second wealthiest in the nation, behind only Beverly Hills.

Most homes within its 10 square miles are built on 2 acres or more. On the Ranch, many residents can gaze out their front windows and never see another house.

Over the years, the area’s secluded country atmosphere has helped establish it as some of the most valuable property in Southern California. Served by no less than 85 realtors, the area’s median home prices approach $2 million and even condominiums can sell briskly at $1 million apiece.

Until 1973, long after the Civil Rights Act, the ranch’s Covenant--its super set of governing CC&Rs--still; outlawed blacks and Asians who weren’t domestic servants.

Even today, a hot-selling item is a locally produced videotape on how to communicate with your Spanish-speaking maid, and newcomers sometimes wait months, even years, before being invited to local parties. Even admission to the local Garden Club requires sponsorship.

But now, some residents say, the Rancho Santa Fe lifestyle is on the endangered list.

Its 6,200 acres are nearing buildout as a new generation of up-and-comers seek to move within its boundaries--invoking new arguments among old neighbors and increasing the number of lawsuits filed against the Rancho Santa Fe Assn., which oversees enforcement of Covenant rules.

Last summer, more battle lines were drawn over incorporation.

Some of the ranch’s 5,000 residents insist that cityhood is the only way to control traffic as residents from sprawling inland communities turn their scenic, winding roads into a shortcut to the coast.

“For a long time now, Rancho Santa Fe has been a solitary island in a sea of development--but urbanization will bring new traffic and crime problems to this beautiful place,” said attorney Dick Scuba, an incorporation advocate.

“The anti-incorporation people look to the past. They say the Covenant has served us well and will continue to do so. We say the Covenant is neither designed nor equipped to deal with the future problems we’ll face.”

In Rancho Santa Fe, the Covenant rules are more than just the law. They’re the Bible.

“The Covenant is God here,” said Lorine Flemons Wright, a reporter for the Rancho Santa Fe Review. “No, that’s not quite it. The Covenant is up here and God’s down here underneath. That’s how strongly people believe in it.”

For more than three generations, the 51-page document has lent a sense of order to the Ranch community by methodically dictating the changes that take place there.

Stringently enforced by an art jury of local residents, the building-design rules limit housing styles to the Spanish colonial archetype introduced by architect Lilian Rice in the mid-1920s--with the specific goal to ensure “a uniform and reasonably high standard of artistic result and attractiveness.”

This means that new homes must be painted off-white--never red or canary yellow. Outdoor clotheslines must be hidden and “for-sale” signs are limited in size and number.

Garages cannot directly face the road, so that, according to one resident, “none of us have to look in at somebody else’s dirty old paint cans.”

Despite the narrow guidelines, self-made millionaires, company presidents--men and woman who are used to making up their own rules--follow them religiously.

“It’s like the Constitution--for years, that Covenant document has preserved the status quo around this place,” said Joe Coberly, a 72-year-old retired Los Angeles automobile dealer who has lived on the ranch for half his life.

“Sure, it’s kept some pretty rich and powerful people from sometimes doing what they wanted. But it’s also kept their neighbors from erecting a flock of plastic pink flamingos in their front yard.”

Changes to the Covenant rules require a two-thirds vote of residents and often inspired long legal battles over even the slightest word variation.

As a result, residents say, the document has been amended only three times--most notably in 1973.

A decade after the Civil Rights Act ensured equal rights regardless of race, the Covenant still forbade residency to blacks and other non-Caucasians unless they served as maids, chauffeurs or gardeners.

Even today, residents know of few Asians--and no blacks--living within the area ruled by the Covenant. But longtime resident Al Frowiss still defends what he called “an unfortunate oversight.”

“Sure, that clause was there longer than it should have been--in light of the Civil Rights Act,” said Frowiss, who has run unsuccessfully for an association board post.

“But you can’t expect us to run right out and change a document just because people in Washington do something.”

The story shows just the deep feelings Rancho Santa Fe residents have for their community. And restaurant owner Bertrand Hug likes to tell it.

Not long ago, two elderly residents were dining at Mille Fleurs, the French restaurant that Hug operates in the downtown business district.

The two women listened intently as their waiter described the desserts of the day--including the fresh peaches he assured them were locally grown. Not good enough for them.

“They wanted to know,” Hug recalled, “if the peaches were actually grown within the Covenant.”

Maintaining the hallowed status of the Rancho Santa Fe Covenant area--which only last year was named a state historical landmark as one of California’s first planned communities--has become a particular passion on the ranch.

In recent years, some outsiders have even attempted to redefine its boundaries, to inch them just across the street or so, in order to gain admittance to the Covenant.

“Many people have tried to move the Covenant boundaries to include their properties,” said Walt Ekard, manager of the Rancho Santa Fe Assn. “Few have succeeded.”

Success would mean more than just a social coup--including privileges at the Rancho Santa Fe golf course and tennis club as well as perks such as family wedding announcements in the Review, now restricted to Covenant residents.

It’s also a matter of money. Real estate values can rise tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars within its boundaries, Ekard said.

It’s a matter of atmosphere as well.

Mail isn’t delivered at home; Covenant residents still prefer to pick it up each day from the central post office-turned-community center where the locals meet to gossip and extend social invitations.

Fear of the wrong kind of change has driven Ranch imaginations for years, recalled O. Rea Mowery Jr., a local bank president.

As association manager, he was once summoned at dawn from his home in San Diego by an irate Ranch resident who had spotted a sign hung near the famed Inn at Rancho Santa Fe.

“It was put there overnight as a prank,” Mowery said. “It read ‘Future Home of A&W; Root Beer.’ ”

The idea for Rancho Santa Fe was hatched almost a century ago as part of a grand corporate gamble.

The area was first developed in the early 1900s by a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railway in an experimental project to grow eucalyptus trees for railroad ties.

The project soon failed, as the eucalyptus ties warped and twisted after the spikes were driven in. Eventually, the development company financed the construction of nearby Hodges Dam and used a filtration system to introduce numerous citrus groves in the area.

By the late 1920s, the railroad began selling the land to private interests, who created rural estates that often incorporated hundreds of acres of fruit groves. The area was renamed Rancho Santa Fe and the Covenant’s bylaws were drafted.

In the early days, some older residents recall, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would show movies to guests seated on the lawn of his home. But in the late 1960s, the completion of Interstate 5 changed Rancho Santa Fe forever, attracting a new breed of successful resident who lived in the country--but who went to work each day in the city.

It was at that time, residents say, that privacy became a driving passion on the Ranch.

Back then, Howard Hughes rented a hideaway home there and reportedly kept a stable of rooms at the nearby Inn at Rancho Santa Fe. Resident Joe Coberly recalls the army of security guards Hughes posted on the private drive they shared.

Living next door to the most reclusive man of the 20th Century had its drawbacks. Hughes apparently wouldn’t allow his guards to use the bathroom at his house. So the men began using the woods near Coberly’s house, littering his drive with papers and beer cans.

When he complained, none of the surly guards would even acknowledge that Hughes even lived there. “All they would ever say, to any question you asked was, ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ ” he recalled.

In the late 1960s, a nudist colony flourished among the Ranch’s sometimes dense foliage where even today neighbors can go months, even years, without exchanging a greeting.

“I’ve never talked with the woman who lives next door to me,” said restaurant owner Hug. “She may be very nice. She may even be a customer at my restaurant. But I’d never know it.”

Recently, the seclusion has lured a new breed of loner: drug czars.

In the mid-1980s, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration opened a North County office to help agents keep tabs on the illicit drug money being invested in wealthy North County suburbs--especially Rancho Santa Fe.

Since then, at least one home--a $5-million mansion within the Covenant--has been confiscated by agents, who find that the Ranch’s wooded lawns and houses set back on narrow, winding driveways afford potential drug czars excellent cover.

“Many of these people don’t want to be ostentatious,” said Joe Moody, resident agent in charge of the DEA’s Carlsbad office. “They want quiet. That’s why they prefer Rancho Santa Fe.”

The unwritten code of wealth in Rancho Santa Fe goes something like this:

Don’t flaunt it.

“We don’t like people to move in here with the idea of making a grand gesture--the big Gatsby house, the 12-car garages, the chauffeured limos,” said Dan Royce, whose family owns the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe.

“If they’re trying to say, ‘I’ve arrived’ in any grand way, our response is ‘So what?’ People around here just don’t care.”

Jack Manion, a local realtor and longtime Ranch resident, added, “To most people here, saying they’re wealthy is a dirty word--they’ll deny it to your face.

“And it’s true--a lot of people aren’t really wealthy here. Many may be property rich but they live on fixed incomes. They get Social Security checks. And whether they’re rich or not, they just don’t like to show it. If you see a Rolls-Royce around here, you know there’s a newcomer in town.”

John Ferguson, the mechanic at the Covenant’s only gas station, tells about the millionaire horse owner who drives a 5-year-old Buick and prefers to dress in faded blue jeans and an oily old sweat shirt.

“That’s just the way people are around here,” he said.

The way to throw your money around Rancho Santa Fe, people say, is to invest it into the community.

And the Covenant is filled with benefactors. It has an active Rotary Club, a historical society, and a library guild that has raised money to augment librarians’ salaries at its own county-run facility--and even build an addition for children’s books.

Residents have bought their fire department state-of-the-art dispatch computers and once purchased a mobile home-turned-operating room on wheels specifically for injured Ranch residents.

But it’s at the local Rancho Santa Fe School for students from kindergarten through the 8th grade where local passions are most obvious.

Often, parents attend meetings imploring school officials to say what they need to improve the school--which already offers specialized computer education, art and music courses as well as teachers’ salaries that are among the highest in the county.

“Parents have high expectations of their children here--and they have even higher expectations of themselves to be able to provide for their school,” Supt. Roger Rowe said.

“For us, that means all we have to ask is ‘Do we really need this?’ And if we do, we have those people we can go to help us get it.”

Victor Mature’s blazing red golf cart zigzagging along the village streets symbolizes a basic truth about the hamlet:

For years, golf has been king of the Covenant. Golfers dominated local politics and often made important Ranch decisions under the shade of the majestic acacia trees lining Rancho Santa Fe’s private, 6,950-yard course.

Last spring, for example, a couple whose estate lines the golf course erected a red steel sculpture that most golfers considered--well--out of bounds.

They petitioned the association board, which devised a solution that some residents say typifies Rancho Santa Fe politics: they voted to build a dirt mound in front of the sculpture so the golfers wouldn’t have to look at it.

“In a lot of other communities, a bunch of golfers wouldn’t think they had a say about someone else’s private property,” association manager Ekard said. “But not around here.”

But changes are coming. For the first time, non-golfers are being elected to the association’s seven-member board of directors. Insiders hope the interests of the Covenant’s younger residents will begin to receive equal attention.

Slowly, the Ranch’s median age is declining. Once called Rancho Seven O’Clock for the time retired residents supposedly went to bed, the area is now home to a new generation of fortysomething parents concerned about how the community provides for their young.

“There’s been some tremendous building here of late, attracting a divergence of people with interests beyond golf,” said Paul Thomas, association board president and a non-golfer.

“They’re younger people with concerns about the athletics of their children and whether there’s enough playing fields for them in Rancho Santa Fe. Right now, that’s a major political issue here.”

Add the increased traffic woes caused by surrounding growth as well as a stagnating business district that has shops and restaurants closing in favor of banks and real estate offices, and Victor Mature’s Utopia starts looking like any other modern community with up-to-date problems.

Incorporation, some locals say, is the only way Ranch residents can maintain control of their future and speed construction of two proposed county roads that could one day bypass traffic around their beloved ranch.

“A lot of people around here haven’t gotten off the golf course long enough to realize that this little piece of paradise is in serious trouble,” said longtime resident Frowiss, an incorporation advocate.

“It’s not like the old days. We don’t have this area to ourselves anymore. There’s more people moving in all the time, homes going up all around us.

“A lot of people won’t wake up until they hear the bulldozers to realize that Rancho Santa Fe will never be the same. Some of us already hear the bulldozers. We hear them loud and clear.”