Circular Argument for Small Town’s Charms
In Orange, when they say life revolves around the Plaza, they mean it.
Take Steve Ambriz. When he got married, the first thing he did was drive the limousine into the Plaza and treat his new bride, Bridget, to a spin on the traffic circle.
They laughed. They honked the horn. They went around and around.
“It was great,” he says.
The postnuptials were the height of decorum compared with Ambriz’s days with the Orange High School football team. When the Panthers won--too rarely--the entire squad climbed aboard school buses and carried on a tradition that may have begun on a Model-A Ford in the 1940s. They did laps in the Plaza, hanging out the windows and yelling like banshees.
“It was awesome,” says Ambriz, 31, who, like many people born and raised in this quaint pocket of suburbia, never left.
The 130-year-old Orange Plaza--site of antique shops, movie shoots, street festivals, pep rallies, May Day parades, publicity stunts and high jinks--is more than just the sum of its historic brick storefronts and sidewalk cafes.
The soul of small-town America still lives at Glassell Street and Chapman Avenue, where the founders created a real town square. They lined it with stately two-story buildings. In the middle is a traffic circle and a tiny round park containing a fountain, benches and trees.
What happened as a result is too rich for simple explanation. Laughs happened. Cornball love stories happened. Kids grew up and bonded with the place--and with one another--and now they’re passing on that feeling, like a precious heirloom, to their own kids and grandkids.
“Stories just abound,” says Judy Schroeder, an art gallery owner who has collected a list of them for the high school’s historical calendar. Drunken horse-and-buggy owners, cars going backward around the circle, convoys of hearses and beer trucks and fire engines, teenagers trying to set records by doing laps all afternoon--the events seem somehow funnier now, all stacked up together.
There was a guy from the Orange High class of ’53 who looked up one night, saw a beautiful young woman in an upstairs window, and crashed his car. Another guy, class of ‘63, joined in Halloween revelry that consisted of drivers going in circles and flinging eggs and water balloons.
“We had 13 dozen [eggs] and didn’t hit anybody,” he wrote in a brief account, “but we sure got it every time our window went down.”
Not that every tale involves reckless driving. Some of the stories are simply life on display, jewels you might not find anywhere else.
Talk about loyalty? People who like each other? Check out the Orange High class of ’43. The first Saturday of every month they’re still meeting for breakfast at Watson Drug, the 102-year-old soda fountain on the Plaza’s east flank. A long table is set up for 25 people--no small turnout when you consider the inevitable number of deaths and illnesses and career moves that have occurred over almost six decades. And when you realize that the entire graduating class was scarcely 125 students.
“I have breakfast with kids I went to kindergarten with,” says David Hart, who has been part of the monthly ritual since it began after the 1973 reunion.
A varsity halfback in the fearful years of World War II, Hart remembers hauling four or five teammates on victory laps in his Model-A, but he isn’t sure if they were following an existing tradition or originating one. In any case, he’s particularly proud of the Plaza; his father ran the Orange Daily News when it moved there in the early 1920s, at a location that still bears the Daily News sign even though it is now a coffeehouse.
The Plaza is no longer an economic hub--the Block of Orange and the Orange Mall are the revenue producers for this city of 125,000. But the old brick buildings house one of California’s premier antique districts. Filming occurs so often that the merchants grouse, although they usually sign the petitions and let the cameras come in. The location has been featured in the movies “Gumball Rally,” “Crimson Tide,” “That Thing You Do” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
“When people find out where I live,” says Paige Davis, a writer and poet who rents an inexpensive flat above the Plaza, “they always ‘ooh’ and ‘aah.’ ” She is reminded of the town squares of Indiana, where she grew up.
Passions run deep--sometimes to the point of absurdity. One never-ending bugaboo is the name. Outsiders often insist on calling it the Circle, or the Orange Circle, names held as vile by proud old-timers.
“They’ll bite your head off if you call it the Circle,” says short-story author Orman Day, who also rents a second-floor flat. He knows because he has done it, “and I’ve been treated with absolute disdain. Now I find myself correcting other people.”
Addresses along the perimeter say Plaza Square.
“How can a square be a circle?” asks Ralph Linnert, a member of that notorious ’43 class, who helped spearhead a campaign some years back. The old-timers printed 1,500 bumper stickers--”It’s the Plaza, Not the Circle”--and exploited their political leverage to place them on city trucks and police cars.
Phil Brigandi got into the act. For a time, the author of “Orange: The City ‘Round the Plaza” took to reprimanding offenders--who were mainly newspaper reporters--by sending form letters. “I used to have . . . joke letterheads from the Society for the Prevention of the Term ‘Circle,’” Brigandi says. “Part of [the letter] said, ‘Surely you noticed more than just its shape.’”
Details matter. The park isn’t even round, Brigandi says. It looks round enough, but it’s actually elliptical.
The city just finished a renovation of the Plaza to restore the look it had in the 1930s and 1940s, the period considered most historic. It took years of fretting to settle on the plan. The $1.8-million project involved improving the street and drainage, removing heavy planters and tearing up brick sidewalks from the 1970s. The bricks gave way to stained pressed concrete typical of the war years.
Some are aghast.
“If they like the concrete so much, they should drive on the freeways more often,” complains Hank Mascolo, a barber and ex-sardine fisherman who has cut hair at the Plaza for 47 years.
Mascolo is its “honorary mayor”--he’s got the plaque on his wall--but he also is a self-confessed “thorn in the side of the City Council.”
He fought to keep out parking meters. “We tell them, ‘If it’s not busted, don’t fix it,’ ” Mascolo says. “We give them hell all the time.”
He will likely be here forever. His wife, Renee, runs a jewelry store across the way.
“We were the romance of the Plaza,” she says.
They got married in 1985. After the ceremony, they hopped in their Lincoln Town Car and did three laps around the Plaza.
“Three seems to be the lucky number,” Renee says, enjoying the memory. “It was about 4 in the morning. Then we went up to Norm’s and had breakfast. That’s the story.”