Museum Supporters Get Their Irish Up

The luck of the Irish was upon the Discovery Museum of Orange County when Bob and Cleva Howard hosted an Irish coffee on Sunday to drum up support for the museum’s future science center.

About 100 friends and museum supporters, many wearing green in honor of St. Paddy, showed up at the Howards’ spacious Mediterranean-style home in Newport Beach to drink Irish coffee and enjoy brunch on a patio overlooking the harbor.

Irish Tradition

The Howards, who are both Irish, Scotch and English, have been holding their Irish coffees for about 20 years to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and to support a favorite charity.

“It’s just a happening, something we thought would be fun,” said Bob Howard, president of the museum board.

The coffees have been held to support the Discovery Museum for the past seven years. When Cleva Howard started the coffees, they were for women only. A member of the Assistance League, she invited fellow members to bring goods for the league’s thrift shop to her first coffee.

“It’s always been for charity,” said Cleva, who wore a shamrock-green silk dress.

“It’s a way of saying thanks to everyone for being involved in the museum,” Bob said.

Seeing Green

Toy leprechauns and teddy bears sporting St. Paddy’s hats dotted the Howard home.

On the patio, guests watched a bartender mix Irish coffees--a blend of Irish whiskey, hot coffee and brown sugar topped with whipped cream and green sugar.

A small mountain of food filled a large round table inside. The buffet included traditional Irish fare and brunch favorites: Irish pudding, soda bread, baked new potatoes, baked stuffed apples, sliced ham, muffins and strawberries.

The Irish specialties were familiar to Catherine Thyen, a board member of the museum and an Irish native who speaks with a pronounced brogue.

“St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated with much more exuberance here,” she says. “Back (in Ireland) everyone just goes to church. They’re very sedate.”

Pot o’ Gold

A goal of this year’s coffee was to raise public awareness about plans for the museum’s new science center.

The Discovery Science Center will be an 88,000-square-foot building in Santa Ana with an state-of-the-art IMAX theater and three floors of hands-on exhibits.

So far $14 million has been raised for the center, and another pot of gold--$23 million--is needed for its scheduled completion in 1995.

“Some people carry around pictures of their grandchildren. I carry around a picture of the science center,” said Karen Johnson, executive director of the museum, showing off a model of the contemporary-looking center.

Johnson has personal as well as professional reasons for wanting to see a science center built in Orange County. “When my son and daughter were attending school in the Bay Area, they both took a physics class where they spent half of their time learning photography . It was pitiful,” said Johnson, who holds a degree in chemistry. “It’s too late for my kids, but not too late for hundreds of thousands of kids in Orange County.

“We really need to get children involved in the magic of science again.”

Others who attended the Irish coffee: Anita Ferguson, Lillian Fluor, Charles and Nora Hester, Jerry and Maralou Harrington, Nora Jorgensen, Tom and Barbara Peckenpaugh, John and Linda Petersen, Margaret Richardson, Supervisor Thomas Riley and his wife, Emma Jane.