You’ve Got It in Writing--This Is a Great Place to Live

You can figure that a good many of us weren’t born and raised here, with Orange County’s population past 2.5 million. That’s almost double what we were in 1970.

I smile now looking back at my own first contact with the county that would become my permanent home. A friend offering me a job called me where I worked in southern Indiana. He said he was calling from Costa Mesa.

He might as well have said Shangri-La. Costa Mesa. I saw swaying palm trees and wide beaches and beachcombers at sunset sipping purple drinks through crazy straws. I looked on the map. Newport Beach. Sunset Beach. Laguna. Garden Grove. What a place. (Hey, maybe you don’t consider Garden Grove so spiffy. But when you’re sitting under 2 feet of snow and the roads are iced over, Garden Grove sounds most romantic.)

You Orange County natives might not be too delighted that we joined you in such large numbers, but you just had too much we couldn’t resist--and all wrapped in sunshine.

Round Table West, a large and growing literary group that meets monthly at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, recently held a writing contest called “Orange County & Me. How I Got Here and Why I Stayed.”

I loved a winning entry from Carolyn Roos Olsen, who has homes other places but lives permanently on Balboa Island. She writes: “In Brentwood, our neighbors kept to themselves, whereas on the Island, we soon felt like we were part of a big family.” A walk around Balboa is a favorite family activity, especially in the off-season when the crowds are down.

But she adds: “But please, don’t tell anyone else about all of this. Best to tell ‘those others’ that we get a lot of fog.”

Local real estate agent Thomas Reynolds, the first-place winner, wrote about a close friend’s move to the county in 1931, and how that first day “the smell of white orange blossoms wisped through the car’s open window.”

My favorite came from Emily White, called “One Particular Harbor” (from a Jimmy Buffett song.) She writes that she was so sick of her Midwest job--and her boss--that she jumped in her car one morning and started driving west.

“The road ended at the smallest park I had ever seen, just five trees and a huge rock with a plaque on it telling me this was Newport Bay. Then I heard waves crashing beyond the park. The roaring sound of my dream--and followed it.” That’s when she thought of those lines from Jimmy Buffett: “. . . one particular harbor, shelter from the wind, where the children play on the shore each day, always safe within.”

Fast forward nine years, she writes: “In the last few months my car was stolen (it had a bullet hole in it anyway), the company I work for moved to Georgia, one of my carpool partners was arrested for murdering a boyfriend (at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion), the SWAT team stormed the house two doors down . . . and my mailman quit taking his Prozac.”

Who is this Emily White? She’s the daughter of philanthropists John and Donna Crean of Santa Ana Heights.

“Born and raised in Orange County,” she says with a laugh. “The essay is a composite of a lot of different people I know who have moved here.”

She actually had me, until I checked our file and learned there has never been a murder reported at the Haunted Mansion.

No Mud Wrestling: It’s mudslinging time today at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Volunteers, led by local city leaders, will get their hands in the mud to apply it to the mission’s historic adobe buildings, which are more than 200 years old. The mud acts as a seal to protect the dried adobe bricks.

Says administrator Jerry Miller: “Adobe buildings by nature erode. Despite modern technology, when it gets right down to it, the only way to save these structures is to have volunteers roll up their sleeves and apply mud to the walls by hand.”

Simpson & San Clemente: The local Chamber of Commerce in San Clemente will install new officers and give a few awards tonight at the Pacific Golf Club. But this one’s going to be more than the usual business dinner. Guest speaker is Tom Lange, one of the two principal Los Angeles police investigators in the O.J. Simpson case who was left most upset about the results of the jurors’ nondeliberations.

Carrying On: The next generation does care about tradition. Witness the all-day powwow at Cal State Fullerton today on its Performing Arts Lawn. It’s being put together by the Inter-Tribal Student Council on campus.

“This powwow is an opportunity for the public to view and even participate in a traditional Native American celebration,” says spokesman Chris Sandoval, who’s with the Acjachmen Juaneno tribe. “It’s also a way of teaching Native Americans about each other. My tribe is the indigenous people of Orange County, but most don’t know us.”

Wrap-Up: Round Table West is operated by two longtime business partners, Margaret Burk and Marylin Hudson. They founded it in 1977 with the late journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns. The several authors who speak are usually well known. (Next month Harold Robbins.)

The writing contests, Burk says, are included with a nod toward St. Johns, who died in 1988.

“Adela said she wanted to do something that would inspire people to read, and to write,” Burk says.

The next writing contest is on mothers.

Says Burk: “One fellow said he didn’t really like his mother. I said, write it anyway. Maybe you can let out some of your emotions.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or sending a fax to (714) 966-7711.