Oral Histories Tell Fascinating Tales of Old Orange County

Marguerite Noutary of Fullerton lives in the same house she was born in 81 years ago. In an era of urban hassles and rapid change, there’s something I find both inspiring and comforting about that.

Harvey Asbury Shaw, 75, has Orange County roots that go back about as far as any I’ve heard of. His grandparents settled in Silverado Canyon in the 1860s. Shaw still owns part of the original homestead.

If you love to immerse yourself in tales of what this county was like before most of us got here, take a look at the four new oral histories jointly produced by Cal State Fullerton and the Orange County Pioneer Council.

Noutary and Shaw are two of the interview subjects. A third is James Kobayashi, 77, who played halfback on Santa Ana College’s 1940 national championship team. A fourth is Mildred Spicer Collins, 84, whose father owned the Spicer department store in Santa Ana, ranked then as the third largest west of the Rockies.

All four were honored at a Pioneer Council luncheon Wednesday at the Santa Ana Country Club. I stopped by to meet them after reading their richly intriguing oral histories.

Cal State Fullerton’s Oral History program has now produced more than 60 volumes for the Pioneer Council over the past decade, all interviews with elder residents who have been active in the community. You can read copies yourself at several places: the Santa Ana city library or the libraries at Chapman University, Cal State Fullerton or UC Irvine. Also, American Title & Trust in Santa Ana keeps copies.

Oral histories give you a flavor and sense of time that you don’t find in standard books about past events. For example:

Most of you know Cook’s Corner, the tavern at El Toro and Live Oak Canyon roads. Here’s Shaw talking about it:

“My father and Jack Cook went to school together and were always great friends. . . . I happened to be present when Jack Cook made the decision to make that a pub. It was the day after Prohibition was over. . . . He said, ‘I think I’ll start a beer joint.’ ” Shaw’s father lent Cook his portable honey house to use for a beer stand until after the war years.

Shaw can even tell us where the Cook’s Corner building came from: “After the war, just across the street from what is now John Wayne Airport, there was a small Army Air Force detachment for P-38 pilots. It had a single-story mess hall with a great big walk-in refrigerator. They moved that building all the way up there [to Cook’s Corner], the one they’re still using.”

Shaw inherited 10 acres of remote mountain land in Silverado Canyon, where he still grows fruit for family use.

“I promised the property never to be sold. I want to pass it down and pass down the history with it.”

Shaw, whose own career was in the Air Force, says of his father: “He was what you’d call a cowboy. He mended fence and helped round up the cattle and brand them--all the chores that go with being a cowpuncher.”

Mildred Spicer Collins’ family owned a nice home in the heart of Santa Ana. The Spicer store was at the corner of 4th and Sycamore Streets, across from the Spurgeon Building that still stands. (Any of you around long enough to remember the old Bank of Italy next door to it?)

When Collins’ father died in 1925, local residents were in awe that the president of the Marshall Field’s store in Chicago flew in for the funeral in his private plane, a rarity at the time.

Collins was an artist who for many years worked on behalf of the Bowers Museum. She says in her oral history that she is one of only two people still left in the county who attended the museum’s opening in 1936:

“Everyone was so thrilled with the museum and its courtyard. The ceiling is what I was so fascinated with. It told the history of Orange County from the Indians and through the early pioneers. It was so beautifully painted.” (And is still there today.)

James Kobayashi grew up a farmer’s son in Stanton. Laws early in this century prevented Japanese immigrants from owning land. To purchase ground, they had to put it in the name of a relative who had become a citizen.

Kobayashi’s later football stardom couldn’t get him a pass when the war broke out. Like other Japanese Americans, he was sent to an interment camp, with his mother and siblings. His father was sent to a separate camp, forced off his land without notice the day after the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Kobayashi explains why: “My dad had belonged to a Japanese group, the Ehime Prefecture. . . . It was a Japanese farmers group; people who farmed.”

But because his father was an officer in the group, he was sent to a high-risk security camp in Missoula, Montana. “My dad said it was what he imagined jail to be.”

Kobayashi told me Wednesday that when he thinks of his youth, what comes to mind is his father’s courage to break away from a life of poverty in Japan and make it to America. And against great odds.

“What he did for his family, that’s what I remember most,” Kobayashi said.

And finally, there is Marguerite Noutary, who spent her career as an Army nurse, both active duty and reserves. During World War II, she served in China, Burma, India and Pakistan, where the hospitals were teeming with wounded. In Burma, Noutary said, “We’d get a planeload of just DOAs, dead on arrival. That was sad, very sad. You had to be sure the dog tags were around them.”

Noutary’s father had been a caretaker at a house on Claire Street in Fullerton. He later bought the house and raised his family there. Noutary has remained there since.

Among Noutary’s most treasured possessions is the document listing her parents’ arrival in the U.S. through Ellis Island in 1900. It notes that the two French immigrants each arrived with $30 and nothing else.

Noutary’s house, built in 1899, is now listed as a historical site. She told me she’s thinking of a party for its 100th anniversary next year.

“I’ve looked at other places to move to over the years,” she said. “But each time I think, ‘What place can have the memories that this house has?’ ”

I like the way she thinks. It’s to our benefit that she and the others took time to record those memories.