IN PERSON : Patriarch’s Memories Illuminate San Juan’s Past

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Dick Mendelson is honorary patriarch of a historic city he hardly recognizes. Friends he grew up with are gone; buildings he loved have been torn down.

But Mendelson still has memories. Those and his collection of photographs and century-old documents are comforting reminders of a past that he now shares with townspeople whenever he makes appearances in his role as goodwill ambassador.

“I really miss some of the old spots and the people,” said the 84-year-old Mendelson, his still-bright eyes fixed on an old black-and-white picture of himself and six siblings, the last of whom died three years ago. “Everybody’s gone, except for me.”

Mendelson, a father of three grown children, grandfather of 12 and great-grandfather of 14, is like a walking local-history book. His recollections of San Juan Capistrano are a tableau of an era when the law was a constable, not the Sheriff’s Department; when Camino Capistrano was lined with hitching posts, not concrete sidewalks; and when a patch of land in the center of town held the Mendelson family’s hotel, not weeds and dirt.

“I guess in my generation we’ve seen the biggest changes ever,” Mendelson said, referring to the differences in San Juan Capistrano today versus San Juan Capistrano circa 1920. “I know it’s all about progress.”

Yet one thing has remained constant over seven decades: the lessons of sacrifice and friendship he learned as a young boy. His father died in 1912, his mother in 1914. Mendelson was an orphan by age 4.

A woman named Tibie Marquez helped one of Mendelson’s uncles rear the Mendelson brood, instilling a sense of responsibility and loyalty.

Mendelson, who moved away at age 15 to learn the meat cutting trade in Los Angeles, didn’t return to San Juan Capistrano until 1973 to retire. He still owns property in Highland Park where his butcher shop stood.

“I only made it through the eighth grade, but came out pretty well,” Mendelson said, smiling at the thought. “I don’t remember my mother or father. And I didn’t want to be a burden on my brother and sisters.”

Mendelson, who stayed in contact with Marquez after he left his hometown, received a letter from the woman in 1933 that made him cry. She and her husband, Frank Hunn, had fallen on hard times and couldn’t pay overdue bills.

“She wrote, ‘Can you help? I have to go out and steal carrots and potatoes at night,’ ” Mendelson recalled. “I was down the next day. It still hurts to think about it.”

Mendelson had stood up for the woman a few years earlier when Father John O’Sullivan of Mission San Juan Capistrano balked at officiating a wedding in which Marquez planned to marry Hunn, a man 20 years her junior.

O’Sullivan also happened to be Mendelson’s godfather; Hunn was one of Mendelson’s good friends.

Mendelson said he chewed out Father O’Sullivan “something terrible.”

“When he wouldn’t perform the wedding, Tibie and Frank ended up going to Santa Ana and had a justice of the peace do it,” he said.

Mendelson paused. “Their marriage only lasted 50 years.”

From the house on a quiet cul-de-sac he shares with Myra Mendelson, his wife of 62 years, the patriarch can hear the bells of Mission San Juan Capistrano, where he was once an altar boy. He can also see a hillside to the west adorned with a large white “C,” signifying Capistrano, that he helped put up in 1921. And he can watch the wind rustle the tops of trees that shroud the Los Rios Historic District, a neighborhood considered the oldest in California, which was a boyhood haunt for Mendelson and Clarence Lobo, former chief of the Juaneno Indians.

“We used to get a bunch of rocks and throw them at rabbits,” Mendelson said of his childhood buddy.

One of his strongest memories is of a time he, Lobo and a handful of other chums happened upon the old jail on the way home from school. Inside the single unguarded cell a man had hanged himself, claiming in a note that he’d been wrongly accused of theft. The boys notified the town constable of the death.

“We called him 90-day Tom,” Mendelson said of the constable, Tom Forster. “If you got in trouble with him, you’d usually get 90 days in the Santa Ana Jail.”

Today, San Juan Capistrano’s jail cell sits unused and rusted in the Los Rios Historic District.

But many other links to the past are gone, as Mendelson discovered when he returned to his hometown. Where ornate old buildings once stood, there were modern structures of the 1970s.

The 219-year-old mission remains the city’s crown jewel, but the Mendelson family’s hotel was knocked down in 1933, a victim of termites and the Great Depression.

Reverence for history turned comical once when archeology students from Cal State Fullerton came to town in 1975 in search of Indian artifacts.

The students didn’t know they were digging in an area near the hotel, where Mendelson, two of his brothers and a cousin had buried hogs that had to be killed due to an outbreak of cholera.

“They came across these hog bones and they thought they’d found an Indian burial ground,” Mendelson said.

The story is one of many Mendelson tells at San Juan Capistrano Historical Society-sponsored functions. The group chose Mendelson as the city’s patriarch earlier this year after Paul Arbiso, a longtime mission bell ringer who held the honorary title for 30 years, died in November.

As the end of the century approaches, Mendelson predicts more change for this historic city.

It’s simply a matter of how much, he said.

“There’ll always be history if you hang on to it,” Mendelson said, nodding toward one of his many photograph albums. “Thank God we hung on to those crazy things.”