Once-Placid Orange Jolted by Urban Woes : Change: Rising crime, traffic and an influx of illegal immigrants have put city’s longtime residents on edge.

Like an aging starlet who avoids her reflection, this city has preferred memories of its old-time charm and small-town traditions to the painful glare of the present.

From Orange Plaza’s landmark traffic circle to the classic rolling campus of Chapman University and the fiercely guarded Victorian homes in the Old Towne area, the 103-year-old city clings to its image as a friendly place steeped in simple values and history. It’s a place where a power lunch with city leaders may mean eating at the soda fountain of the corner drugstore.

For many, Orange long was the model of a mostly Anglo, middle-class, bedroom community that made the transition from agriculture to business. During the 1980s, more than 2,000 companies received licenses to operate in Orange, and the city, flush with success, stashed away a surplus of $10 million.

But recently, the looking glass has revealed a different image: Now it shows transients sleeping on the plaza’s wooden benches and behind the historic buildings downtown. It finds dingy apartment buildings overcrowded with growing numbers of legal and illegal Latino immigrants. It spotlights a crime rate that has risen 23% in the past five years. And it illuminates snarled traffic on once-quiet suburban streets.

In September, the mirror cracked. The federal Immigration and Naturalization Service raided an apartment complex and rounded up nearly 200 illegal immigrants. The raid unleashed an outpouring of emotion from residents--a response unlike any that city officials can recall.

Some citizens were angry, both at the immigrants and the INS. But most were frustrated and sad; the incident, many said, had forced them to realize that their town has changed.

Some people have responded by organizing to fight unfamiliar social problems. Others created programs to build bridges between cultures; a few say they have no choice but to move out of the city. And yet, the city still has its admirers, for whom Orange is still a place of opportunity, a town with a future.

Don Adams can’t remember the last straw. But after 20 years in Orange, he attended his first City Council meeting in October to say he’d had enough.

From his manicured lawn on Shasta Street, Adams, 70, watched his daughter walk down the block to elementary school in the 1970s. He built a den where he and his wife, Donna, spent evenings side-by-side in matching armchairs, chatting while the cool evening drifted through the back door. These were reasons he loved the city.

Then, about four years ago, Donna Adams said she became afraid to leave the back door open in the evenings. One morning, Adams was baffled to find his garden hose and nozzle missing. Up and down the block, his neighbors’ hoses had vanished too.

He began to notice strangers walking by day and night. He discovered, to his horror, human waste each morning in his side yard. Jalopies began to take over his parking spots in front of the house. He began to watch the street each evening, and chased away the Latino drivers, telling them their cars wouldn’t be safe if they left them.

Today, he’s not sure his daughter would be safe walking to school.

“Now the neighbors don’t like to come out after dark,” Adams says, leaning forward in his chair. “The taste has been put in my mouth from the thefts and the gangs. . . . So now I’m careful when I pass them (Latinos) on the street at night.” Adams, a tall, white-haired man, was one of more than 200 residents who jammed City Hall recently to support the city’s policies toward overcrowding and immigration. But for Adams, political action may not be the answer. He pulls out a stunning color photo of a home for sale in Washington state. The brick house overlooks a pristine mountainside of tall fir trees.

“I’ve got it strong in my mind to leave,” Adams says wistfully. “When I feel these are the years I should be enjoying life, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting battles.”

Any dream Tavita Garcia held of making a better life for her family disappeared the night she was attacked by bandits while trying to illegally cross the border from Tijuana to the United States. An illegal immigrant, Garcia was sent back to Tijuana by the INS during the September raid of the Orange Park Villas Apartments.

She is now back in Orange but is making plans to return to Mexico, to her three sons and husband.

Perched on the edge of a couch crowded with tattered pillows, Garcia, 30, says shyly that she has had no work for three months. She shares a dimly lit two-bedroom, $800-a-month apartment with her sister, five other adults and three children.

Garcia is aware of complaints about the Latino immigrants in the city but says everyone is being blamed for the actions of a few. There are problems at her apartment complex, she admits, some drinking, some drugs and robbery. Unable to find much work, Garcia has not had the success she had hoped for in moving to Orange.

“I think they know that there are innocents among the guilty, but they don’t care,” she says.

Garcia marched on City Hall with about 300 other Latinos to protest the INS raid and to demand rights for the undocumented.

Garcia marched, she says, “not because I was angry. I was afraid.”

She says she realizes that there are those who say because she is an illegal immigrant, she has no rights. Recounting the morning that she was deported, the shy smile disappears. She covers her face and begins to cry.

“How can they say we have no rights?” she said, her eyes wet. “Those people who complain don’t know how hard it is for us. They don’t know I had to sleep in the streets of Tijuana for four days” to get back to Orange.

Some would say that Fred Barrera’s blood runs orange. Barrera, 68, was born and raised on the city’s west side, married a hometown girl and ran a successful neighborhood gas station for 40 years. If reelected in 1992, Barrera will serve his 20th consecutive year on the City Council.

Barrera remembers rides on the nickel streetcar to Santa Ana as clearly as he recalls classes at a segregated elementary school and summers picking oranges with the boys who, like him, later became city leaders.

He has seen more change than most and to hear him tell it, Orange is “100% altogether better” than it was when he was growing up. He points to good management, relative affluence, responsive services, a solid infrastructure--and cultural diversity.

“We’ve been a stepchild to some of the bigger cities for so long,” Barrera says. “It’s nice to be respected on your own for being a well-run city. We’ve made our mark.”

Not that there aren’t problems, he admits. But Barrera predicts that big-city issues such as traffic, homelessness, illegal immigration and crime will subside as Orange grows up.

“Understand that you can’t stop progress,” he says. “All you can do is plan for it.”

Barrera also believes that when the city catches its breath, its multiculturalism will be seen as a plus.

“It’s all new now,” he says of the cultural differences. “With every generation you have these (complaints), whether it’s the Irish or the Germans or the Jewish. In time, whatever you see wrong now is going to get better. Diversity will prove itself. It’s proven itself in the 200 years of our country. It’s just like a stew, it only gets better with time.”

Last summer, Lorna Deshane watched her 85-year-old father get mugged near her home in the middle of the day. And she wasn’t surprised.

She grew up just a short walk from W.O. Hart Park. From an oak armchair in her cozy living room, she gazes past a lace curtain toward the park’s stonewall boundary. She reminisces.

“We lived in the park,” she says, recalling her first swim, daily bike rides and annual Mother’s Day picnics at a special table.

Now others live there. In the mornings, homeless men sleep on wet grass under pepper trees. And in the afternoon, a privately operated lunch program that began feeding a handful of needy people five years ago attracts a bad lot of 200 transients and illegal immigrants, Deshane says.

Neighborhood children come home with hypodermic needles they found while playing in the sandbox. Deshane keeps track of soaring neighborhood crime on a police radio she bought two years ago.

“This is my neighborhood!” she exclaims, pounding on the arms of the chair. “We let it go too long.”

She is on a crusade to move the lunch program and take back her childhood park.

“We’re all afraid to say (the homeless) are mostly Mexican because people will think we’re bigots,” she says. “If they were white we’d say they’re white. Crime is crime and I don’t care what color they are. You don’t want drunks wandering around your neighborhood. . . . Some of these people are filthy.”

Moving the lunch program “will help our park, but it won’t solve the problem,” Deshane admits. “All we’re doing is dispersing them, and they become someone else’s problem.”

Just blocks from Deshane, Mary McAnena, 88, the lunch program founder, oversees vats of vegetables, huge casseroles and several volunteers as they prepare the day’s meal in her tiny kitchen.

McAnena knows little about the city’s negotiations with the St. Vincent de Paul Society to move the program to an industrial area and create a center that would provide job counseling and meals for the homeless.

In her soft Irish brogue, she says simply, “I’ll leave it to God. But I’ll tell you, it isn’t the answer.”

After 12 years as the city clerk of Orange, Marilyn Jensen serves as the eyes and ears of City Hall. Some residents tell her they plan to leave Orange. Senior citizens say they can’t take the crowded neighborhoods and crime while young mothers claim that their children get lost in bilingual classrooms.

“People are coming out of the closet and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to take this any more,’ ” she said. “They haven’t liked it for a while and now they are finally coming out.”

Jensen said her own neighborhood is “arming” itself with security fences and alarms to keep out rising crime.

After 38 years in Orange, Jensen said she no longer has answers for residents who ask her advice.

“My husband and I have said: ‘Do we want to cope with this when we retire?’ And the answer is no. We’ll probably leave the city and even the state.”

Wading gently through a sea of chattering first-graders, Tom Saenz, principal of Prospect Elementary School, attempts to talk above the playground din.

“This school has gone through a lot of changes,” he says. “It used to be primarily Anglo. Now it’s close to 80% Hispanic.”

When Saenz, 52, started with the district in 1969, the student population was about 11% minority. Today 43% of the district’s population is ethnic minorities. Together, they speak 43 different languages.

A boy about 6 runs up to Saenz and tattles in Spanish that a classmate has splattered his shoe with ketchup. Saenz bends down and holding the arm of each boy, he tells them to make peace. “ Perdon, “ the offender apologizes.

About 60% of the 562 students at Prospect speak little or no English. Saenz, a Latino who is fluent in Spanish, started at Prospect this fall after 17 years as administrator of special programs for the Orange Unified School District.

The rising number of immigrant students at some schools has “caused some families to leave the district or go to private schools,” Saenz admits sadly. While these families may have “legitimate concerns” about their children’s education, Saenz says more problems arise when the immigrant student population becomes segregated.

“If we want the immigrant population to truly assimilate and learn English, (children need to) learn from one another the American way of life,” he said.

Saenz has hired three Spanish-speaking teachers and three aides to rejuvenate the school’s bilingual education program. After hours, he translates for Spanish-speaking parents at the Parent-Teachers Assn. meetings.

“It’s not easy for us here or for anyone with a school like mine,” Saenz said. “But we’re trying. . . . What I’m trying to do is create a supportive climate for all teachers, students and parents.”

Tom Slocombe came to Orange last summer and he quickly fell in love with the Old Towne area near the traffic circle.

Slocombe, 43, is a new assistant professor of management at Chapman University who moved to Orange from Missouri in August. He calls his luck in finding an affordable apartment within walking distance of work an “impossible dream.”

The city itself Slocombe describes as “a peaceful oasis in the suburbs,” a quaint slice of Americana with historic buildings and friendly neighbors.

“We know our neighbors here better than just about any place we’ve lived,” Slocombe says with unblinking enthusiasm.

Sitting in his impeccable office in the school’s Reeves Hall, Slocombe chooses words such as great , wonderful and beautiful to describe his new home in Southern California. These adjectives are not always easy to elicit from the city’s old-timers, but for newcomer Slocombe, contemporary Orange is still a city of charm and opportunity.

Slocombe is impressed that the corner drugstore, just a block away, still has a soda fountain. He exclaims that a downtown antique store he patronized was “like a museum.” He relishes a four-block walk to campus each morning and is unafraid to walk home in the dark after a late class.

While he is a novice to the city’s problems, he is not blind. He notes the traffic congestion and neighborhood density are unlike anywhere he has lived before. But during his brief months in the city, he has been largely untouched by the city’s social problems.

“I am fortunate enough to live in a particularly nice part of Orange,” Slocombe says. “We’re aware that some neighborhoods have a different flavor to them but our neighborhood is very comfortable. . . . I don’t know if I’d like my wife walking through (Hart) park at night, but that’s true of anywhere.”

Lt. Timm Browne of the Orange Police Department discovered one day that he could no longer do his job the way he once did.

“I would be sitting in the watch commanders’ office and I would get these calls: ‘ Policia ! Policia !’ ” Browne recalls. “And I’d have to say, ‘ No hablo espanol ,’ and I’d have to go look for someone to speak Spanish. Some of those calls went unanswered because people would hang up.”

One Saturday while patrolling the city, Browne sped from crisis to crisis, only to be stumped by language barriers when he arrived.

“I rolled on five consecutive emergency calls, a drowning and a family dispute and no one spoke English,” Browne says. “This one guy could have bled to death before we found out what happened.”

Browne put aside his own frustration and realized that unless the Police Department caught up with the city’s rapidly changing population, its officers would soon be unable to serve their community.

After a little research and a lot of brainstorming, Browne contacted the police department of Queretaro, Mexico, Orange’s sister city, and set up an exchange program with his Mexican counterparts. Browne and four other officers returned with new language skills and sensitivity to the Latino culture.

“I not only improved my Spanish, I learned about why they do the things they do,” Browne says. “Like, why the hell do they stand out on the street corners at 10 at night?”

Browne discovered that it was because after a long day’s labor, meeting on the corner is the traditional way to share community news.

“When you realize and understand some of those things you come home with a totally different perspective on some of the problems we have here.”

Still, Browne says he misses his rookie days of 20 years ago when it “seemed everybody got along.”

“I know that’s kind of Pollyanna,” he adds. “But today it just seems the rubber band is wound tight and people are just hanging on.”