Donkey Tale : Burros Bespeak Couple’s Legal Battles, Personal Beliefs

Jack and Jenny seem oblivious to the bustle of the 1st Street traffic as they loll around a patch of dirt sprinkled with cactus plants--even if they do look a bit out of place here in the midst of such urban sprawl.

But their landlord and owner, Carl Stevens, says the pair of donkeys couldn’t be less bothered by the noise, old auto parts and retail stores and businesses that surround them.

“Jack and Jenny are perfectly happy out there,” the 62-year-old Stevens says simply.

And Stevens is perfectly happy with the donkeys, his own symbols of liberty. After several battles with the city, the donkeys have reaffirmed his belief that he can keep whatever he wants on his property.

Stevens brought the donkeys to his auto-parts business property about a year and a half ago, after a court battle with the city over an adjoining lot in the 900 block of 1st Street.

His wife of 43 years, Marian, remembers the city asking Stevens to hide junk on the property by replacing a chain-link fence with a block wall. But Stevens refused, Marian says, because he thought that would only lead to equally unsightly graffiti.

“He wouldn’t probably admit this,” she says, “but I think Carl enjoys the fight. He’s a very hard man in terms of ‘Don’t tell me what I can do with my own property.’ And I agree with that.”

Although the court decision was split, a judge ruled that Stevens did not have to improve his property until the owners of every lot within two blocks of his business did the same. Stevens celebrated by buying his first donkey, Jack.

“I always wanted one since I was a kid,” Stevens says, confiding that he bought the donkey at the time to see if he could “get away with it. They didn’t say anything to me, so I went out and bought another one.”

And soon, partly through anonymous contributions tossed over the chain-link fence that fronts 1st Street, Stevens’ small farm grew to include guinea hens, ducks, geese, a goat and chickens. The geese and goat have since been stolen, he says.

Some at City Hall thought that maybe Stevens placed the donkeys on the property just to irritate them. City inspectors did come around and complain about the animals, but it turned out that Stevens was not in violation of city codes.

With its old auto parts and assortment of animals, the property may be an eyesore to some, but to Carl and Marian Stevens, whose family has owned the land for 67 years, the 3-acre site holds a collection of memories.

Among the old farm equipment in the donkeys’ pen is a yellow tractor used by Carl to plow the fields of local orange groves in the late 1940s.

Hanging from the rafters of one of the storage barns is a rusted and bent tricycle given to Marian by her father when she was 6 years old, on the day she had her tonsils removed. Underneath it, a dust-covered canvas tarp protects one of the Stevenses’ Model T Fords, a 1923 touring car they drove to Lake Tahoe twice as part of weekend excursions with their children.

Their lives began in Santa Ana in the late 1920s, when living in the country was as close as the Grand Avenue exit off the Santa Ana Freeway.

That’s where Marian lived when, at the age of 13, she met Carl while searching for a lost horse on the two-lane road that later became Grand Avenue.

Marian says the family relocated to 17th Street in 1948, forced out of their Washington Street home to make room for the freeway. They soon moved to a larger house two doors down. Two years ago, after 40 years on 17th Street, they left Santa Ana for Tustin after a utility company condemned their 2-acre home site to build a substation.

A photograph of their 17th Street home is one of many snapshots covering a wall in the office trailer of the auto-parts business that document their past. One shows the couple in a 1936 Ford that took them on dates. Another shows a 1984 Olympic torch carrier running past their business.

But the centerpiece is a photograph of their business property when it was occupied by Richards Machine Works, the company owned by Marian’s father.

That property too was affected by city condemnation in the early 1980s. The city took 30 feet off the front of the property--forcing the demolition of the original machine-parts building--to make way for the widening of 1st Street.

Just before bringing Jack and Jenny to the property, the Stevenses braced themselves for a fight with the city that never transpired.

As part of redevelopment plans, city officials had once considered clearing the area to build fire and police training communication facilities. But while the city “would love to see it redeveloped someday,” says Cindy Nelson, executive director of the Community Development Agency, there are no plans to change the area.

“I know that in good business, you can’t stand on sentiment always,” his wife says. “But it’s a very sensitive area for me, because I feel very strongly about things that you inherit, things that are given to you.”

Her husband ponders the question. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s my whole life.”