Cityhood Was Pretty Impromptu

Thirty years ago, a handful of local citizens gathered together in a storeroom next door to the Swallows Inn saloon and did something never before done in this then-185-year-old community: They held a City Council meeting.

“Someone in the group, I don’t know who, said: ‘Carl, you got the most votes, maybe four or five more than Bill Bathgate, you should be mayor,’ ” recalled Carl Buchheim, a local rancher, now 78. “So I got elected.”

Today San Juan Capistrano is celebrating its 30th birthday as a city. On April 19, 1961, the state government in Sacramento declared its cityhood official. Eight days earlier, the small farming community had voted, 358 to 88, to incorporate.

Compared with the long and bitter South County cityhood struggles during the past three years--during which Mission Viejo, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Hills and El Toro have all either incorporated or voted to do so--San Juan’s drive was swift and decisive, Buchheim said.

Nobody had even heard of a feasibility study back then. “At that time in history,” Buchheim said, “state law governing annexation was totally foreign from what it is today. It was much easier. All you had to do was circulate a petition, get the board of supervisors to sanction it and have a vote.”

Carl’s brother, Lawrence F. Buchheim, 64, a current San Juan city councilman, remembers how little government there was during the 1950s in the South County.

“In the old days we always used to say the county government stopped at the southern border of the Irvine Ranch,” he said. “The only time we saw a politician was during a total disaster or at election time.”

But times were changing. What got the ranchers riled up enough to circulate cityhood petitions was word that the only real city in the then-sleepy South County, San Clemente, was about to annex some cattle-grazing land next to San Juan Creek and turn it into a heavy-industry area.

“They wanted to annex everything on the east side of San Juan Creek,” Carl Buchheim said. “That really got us concerned. Once you go into heavy industry, you create all kinds of problems. Industrial uses, in the eyes of today’s environmentalists, can be pretty sinful, especially right next to San Juan Creek.”

The rivalry between the farmers of San Juan Capistrano and the more citified San Clementeans had been simmering for years, said Lawrence Buchheim, who was then a school board member.

Much of the ill feeling centered on the old Capistrano High School, which was across the street from Mission San Juan Capistrano--much to the chagrin of San Clemente folks, he said.

“The people in San Clemente, and even Dana Point, looked down on us as a bunch of dumb farmers,” he said. “They made no bones about it. They wanted their kids out of San Juan Capistrano and wanted a high school associated with San Clemente. We had wars over that.”

There were other issues too, such as water, said Bathgate, now 66, a citrus farmer who still lives on the farm where he grew up.

As so often happens in California history, water was the precursor to development. For the first time, imported water from the Metropolitan Water District was going to be piped into San Juan Capistrano, he said.

“San Clemente was getting a pipeline, and we were going to tie into it,” Bathgate said. “We knew that meant growth and development, and we had to be prepared.”

On a Friday afternoon, the Buchheim brothers met with Fulton Shaw, Reginald Erickson and Henry Stewart at Jose Rosan’s ranch and drew up the city boundaries. Their first plan was to incorporate nearly all of the unclaimed territory, all the way to Monarch Bay, including the land the Ritz-Carlton sits on in what is now Dana Point. They enlisted the support of George Capron, who owned most of the coast.

“By that time, the Dana Point people had found out we were up to something,” Lawrence Buchheim said. “So they protested, and the Board of Supervisors told us we were grabbing too much. But that was OK, we had a fallback position, which was our current city borders.”

He said cityhood was won on the Sunday before Election Day, when Msgr. Lloyd Russell of Mission San Juan Capistrano gave his blessing.

“We never have made a move without Monsignor Russell knowing,” he said. “He gave a sermon that Sunday and mentioned we were going into an election for a new city, and he thought it would be favorable. That sealed the verdict right there.”

Thirteen days after the election, Carl Buchheim, Bathgate, Antonia Olivares, Don Durnforth and Edward Chermak were seated as the first City Council. Their first order of business was to seek financial help, Buchheim said.

“We had no money, we had nothing,” Buchheim said. “So we headed to a Los Angeles bank, hat in hand.”