Crisis Is a Break From Tightfisted Tradition : History: Orange County’s past treasurers were a conservative bunch--so much so that one pulled all the funds from the bank and put them in a safe in his office.

In 1908, a crowd gathered in Santa Ana to hear E.T. Langley, a Civil War veteran, dedicate the new cannon on the courthouse lawn.

This gun is silent, he said, but if this county government ever misbehaves, “the people of Orange County will take it quickly and make good use of it.”

The cannon now sits at Irvine Park, still silent although polls show Orange County is hopping mad and feels betrayed. Robert L. Citron, their treasurer until he resigned a month ago, presided over the collapse of the county’s investment fund, eventually driving county government into bankruptcy protection.

The magnitude of the loss, now estimated at $2.02 billion, is only the aftershock, historian Jim Sleeper said. Viewed from a historical point of view, the biggest shock is county government’s seemingly sudden departure from a long tradition of “Scrooge McDuck” treasurers, men so protective of county funds that one withdrew them from bank accounts and kept them within arm’s reach in an office safe.

“Orange County’s famous conservatism actually is, and always has been, fiscal conservatism,” Sleeper said. “That’s what makes this situation today so out of character.”

It was typical of the prevailing attitude toward county funds that while the brand new county in 1889 used donated rooms and spent no money on office furniture, it bought an expensive, 1 1/2-ton safe for the first county treasurer, William B. Wall, a physician.

Wall was a Democrat in a Republican fortress, but he won in a landslide after a Santa Ana newspaper revealed that his Republican opponent had once filed for bankruptcy. When it came to tax money, voters preferred a careful Democrat to a reckless Republican.

Wall was the first in a series of one-term treasurers until Josiah C. Joplin, another Democrat, was elected in 1898 and remained in office through 1930--except for a lapse of one term. He was out of office between 1903 and 1907 because, according to one account, he needed to tend to his wife’s failing health or, according to another, he lost the election because large numbers of votes for him had been marked in pencil, disqualifying them.

Joplin, a rancher and beekeeper, had been a campaigner to form Orange County from a section of what was then Los Angeles County. But in the agrarian county of the 1890s, he gained more prominence for winning medals with his canned fruit at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Under Joplin, the treasurer’s office became firmly rooted. The previous treasurer had moved his office into the First National Bank in Santa Ana, since that’s where the money was. It was a boon to Joplin, he said later, because when he took office “I was absolutely unqualified” and needed the coaching of bank employees.

It was during Joplin’s tenure that the treasurer’s office moved into what is now the Old County Courthouse and experienced some of its more colorful moments.

In 1916, the county ordered a “screw-door, manganese steel safe” capable of holding “$700,000 in gold” to be installed in the treasurer’s office. A month later, Joplin withdrew from local banks all county funds not drawing interest and locked them in the safe--$406,188.37 in gold and silver coins and currency. The firms that bonded the county immediately begged off, saying they considered the new safe not particularly safe.

Apparently county officials were nervous as well. They decided to stop revealing the amount of cash in the safe. And when a visitor to Joplin’s office accidentally set off the alarm, a panicked sheriff’s deputy sprinting to the scene “ruptured himself and is now in the hospital for a hernia operation,” according to one news account.

The county had to pay for the operation. It was decided to put the coins and currency back into local banks.

Probably the most bizarre event in the treasurer’s office also occurred during Joplin’s term in 1923. A man appeared at the treasurer’s office and presented a $5,322 county warrant, a type of check issued by the county to its suppliers that orders the treasurer to pay up.

The clerk was suspicious, however. The man wore an overcoat, a hat pulled down over his eyes, dark glasses and a mustache that had slipped, revealing the gum gluing it to his lip. Unnerved by the clerk’s silent stare, the man left.

More than a year later, $10,000 was found to be missing from the treasurer’s safe, and Joplin mortgaged his ranch to make good the loss until the thief could be found.

Near the end of 1924, Charles B. Wheatley, a local newspaper reporter, was arrested on suspicion of both trying to cash the warrant and snatching the $10,000 while he was researching an article in the treasurer’s office. He paid $10,000 to Joplin, the charges were dropped, but Wheatley went to prison anyway after pleading guilty to cashing a fraudulent personal check at a Santa Ana bank.

Actual county employees with sticky fingers were extremely rare.

In Prohibition years, a high-ranking deputy sheriff was arrested on suspicion of stealing 140 cases of seized contraband liquor from the courthouse basement.

In 1936, a judge ordered white-haired Justine Whitney, the county recorder for 21 years, out of office because she chronically turned in her funds to the county treasury far past legal deadline. Employees later confided that Whitney was using county funds to play the horses and had to wait for winners before she could turn in the full amounts due.

During his term, Joplin refused to join in a request that state legislators raise the salaries of county officials. Joplin said he was paid well enough--sentiments that further endeared him to Orange County taxpayers.

The most beloved of the county’s treasurers, however, came after Joplin.

Terry Stephenson, a Republican, was appointed to the post in November, 1935, after the elected treasurer, E.B. Trago, died in office. By that time, Stephenson was one of the best known people n Southern California.

After graduating from Stanford University around the turn of the century, Stephenson went to work for the San Francisco Examiner. While attending his sister’s wedding in Santa Ana in 1906, he was offered part ownership of the newest newspaper in town, the Register, and he accepted, serving as its managing editor through 1927.

In 1919 he helped found the Orange County Historical Society and as one of the earliest local historians wrote several books, two of which, “Caminos Viejos” and “Shadows of Old Saddleback,” are now collector’s items. In 1923, he became Santa Ana postmaster.

Stephenson’s terms as treasurer were uneventful, his most notable contribution being a somewhat jury-rigged burglar alarm system to detect anyone crawling over the courthouse partitions and into the treasurer’s office.

But he was so revered that when he died in office during World War II, county citizens gathered five railroad carloads of scrap metal in his honor. It was enough when donated to the war effort to have a liberty ship christened the S.S. Terry Stephenson.

“Just about all of them from Stephenson on back were from the same mold,” said Sleeper, whose grandfather, County Assessor James Sleeper, a Democrat, held elected county office 34 years, longer than anyone.

“Democrats, Republicans, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of difference then. The county was so small everyone knew them personally. These politicians were answerable to people they actually knew.

“Now their constituents are sort of a mass of vague faces, and I think that makes a big difference.”