SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Buchheim Resigns From City Council

Lawrence F. Buchheim, a San Juan Capistrano city councilman for 13 years and a member of one of Orange County’s pioneer families, has announced his resignation from the council because of health problems.

Buchheim, 64, the city’s mayor pro tem, said he was leaving city politics reluctantly and on his doctor’s orders.

“I don’t particularly want to leave, nobody likes to quit, but physically I can’t handle it anymore,” he said.

He will serve until Dec. 1, then a successor will be appointed to finish the remaining year of his four-year term.

Buchheim, a founder of the city and whose brother, Carl, was San Juan Capistrano’s first mayor, first served on the council in 1978. An appointee, he filled the unexpired term of Richard McDowell and went on to win the seat in three consecutive elections.

“Larry represents everything about San Juan we all moved here for--the agriculture, the history, the family closeness, the storytelling of his adventures, all of that stuff that represents small town living,” Mayor Kenneth E. Friess said. He called the loss “the end of an era.”

The Buchheim family arrived in Orange County in the 1880s and settled on a farm near what is now 17th Street and Grand Avenue in Santa Ana, where a shopping center was built on land still owned by his family. About the turn of the century, the family purchased 400 acres of land in the Capistrano Valley, where the Buchheims maintained a cattle ranch and citrus farm until 1972.

Buchheim’s arrival on the council came at a critical time in the history of the city, when the community was split between the no-growth and pro-growth activists, Friess said.

“He was the peacemaker,” Friess said. “He brought the factions together. It was really under his leadership that the differences were mended and people started talking again.”

Buchheim, who has a heart condition, still yearns for the old days when disagreements were settled not by attorneys in court, but “out in back, between two people.”

“You’d bloody each other, and then come back inside and share a drink,” Buchheim said. “Today, petty arguments across the back fence turn into city ordinances. Five people writing a string of laws can take away your freedom piece by piece.”