‘Ernie’ Chapman, 91; O.C. Pioneers’ Scion Left Own Mark

Irvin C. “Ernie” Chapman, a link between Orange County’s rich agricultural past and its modern face, died late Monday at age 91.

Son of the man who created the booming Valencia orange industry in Orange County, Chapman helped usher in the urbanization of the county after the Depression and World War II when he sold off the family’s Fullerton orchards for housing and commercial developments.

He was also the longest-serving university board member in the nation, having been a trustee at Chapman University, named for his father, from 1934 until his death.

Family members, friends and colleagues remembered him Tuesday as quiet, principled and astute in business.

“I consider Ernie Chapman the embodiment of ... the culture of this university,” Chapman University President James L. Doti said. “He spoke more eloquently and did more than anyone else to preserve the spiritual connection and our value-centeredness--that Chapman was not just a place to go to get credits and learn skills, but a place to develop one’s character.”

When Richard Nixon spoke at the university after his resignation, Doti was surprised to learn that Chapman and the former president were old friends. It turned out Chapman had beaten Nixon in a college debate competition decades before, when he was a student at California Christian College, later renamed Chapman University after his father rescued it from near bankruptcy, and Nixon was at Whittier College.

“He beat Nixon before JFK did,” Doti said.

Chapman, keenly aware of being a member of one of the region’s most prominent families, made his own mark. Besides running the family business and serving on the university board, he was mayor of Fullerton from 1948 to 1950, was the first chairman of the city’s Planning Commission in 1938, and sat on the Orange County Fair and Exposition Center board longer than anyone.

He was the kind of man who never missed a Kiwanis Club meeting in 62 years, the county’s oldest Eagle Scout and a lifelong member of the First Christian Church in Fullerton, of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), his wife said.

A tall, athletic man, Chapman was an avid football player while in college. He was overjoyed in 1994 when Chapman reinstituted varsity football after a 62-year hiatus, playing in a stadium named for him.

Chapman met his second wife, Edy, more than three decades ago at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, when he saw her playing tennis.

“He told me it was love at first sight for him,” she said Tuesday. He courted her for six years, and they were married 26. “It was the happiest 26 years of my life.”

Chapman, who had suffered from cancer and pneumonia, is survived by his wife, daughters Cherie Harrison and Claire Nichols from his first marriage, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending. He will be buried with his parents at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles.