Owner, Wedding Album Are Reunited After Fire

The last thing Ana Steelman expected to find in Tuesday morning’s newspaper was herself.

The 21-year-old image of Steelman as a bride came from her wedding album, and once she saw it, Steelman moved quickly to put to rest one of the mysteries that arose from the wildfires that devastated Laguna Beach last week.

Firefighters discovered the album Monday, somewhere in the debris left behind by the fires. They took the perfectly preserved, brown leather-bound album to the Laguna Beach fire command center at El Morro School, without a clue about its owner and too pressured by time to figure it out.

Laguna Beach Battalion Chief Joe McClure examined the book carefully, but couldn’t find anything that identified the couple among its pages, so he put out a plea to the public for help.

That’s when Steelman, a bartender at the Backstreet Bar and Grill in Laguna Niguel, realized her album was missing.

“A friend came in to the restaurant and showed me my picture in the paper,” Steelman said, referring to an article about the mystery album in Tuesday’s edition of The Times. “I was shocked.”

Trying to remember how she lost the album, Steelman thought back to last Wednesday night when she arrived at her home near downtown Laguna Beach certain that she had only a few minutes to pack her most important mementos before out-of-control wildfires threatened her neighborhood.

“We took all we could--our pictures and our cat,” Steelman said. Terrified, she shoved three boxes and the feline into her landlord’s car, and sped to her brother-in-law’s home in Mission Viejo for safety.

The album “must have gotten dropped when we were loading, and we evacuated,” Steelman said.

Fortunately for Steelman, winds blew the fire away from downtown Laguna Beach and her home was spared. “Of course, the house was covered with ash” when she returned Thursday night, she said.

Although she divorced Jim Mitchell, the groom pictured in the album, 14 years ago, Steelman said the album is “very important” to her and she plans to pick it up from the Fire Department today.

“My daughter was the flower girl in the wedding, and she’s now 26,” said Steelman, 50, who has since remarried. “I am really happy to get the album back.”

No plans are in the works to notify her former husband, who now lives in Lake Arrowhead, about the rescued binder, but Steelman thinks he’ll find out about it soon enough. “He’ll be quite amazed,” she said.

McClure was unsure who found the album or where it was discovered. “One of the firetruck (crews) found it,” McClure said. “They thought it would be very valuable to whoever owned it, so they turned it in.”

McClure said he was relieved that the album mystery was solved so quickly. “There’s got to be something that comes out of this that’s good news,” he said.

“I’d like to know who it was that found it,” Steelman said. “I’d like to thank them.”