Newport Beach natives band together to connect and help charitable causes
Tom Stillwell suspects there is probably a former Newport Beach resident in just about every country, on every continent in the world, though the jury’s still out on Antarctica, he joked.
He knows the membership of his Facebook group certainly has enough people to tout the possibility. In 2010, Stillwell launched the group with the assistance of his daughter and called it “I grew up in Newport Beach BEFORE it was The OC,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to “The O.C.” television show that debuted in 2003. Stillwell said he started the group at what he describes as the lowest point of his life, and when he was trying to think of a time when he’d been happiest.
It had been when he was growing up in Newport Beach, he concluded.
“All of us had gone through so many things, whether it’s the deaths of people we love, war or just politics, any one of a number of things, but what you find [in this group] universally is the pleasant memories of what it was like to grow up there,” Stillwell said. “It was an amazing place to grow up. One of the things that people say a lot is that you didn’t realize at the time how lucky you were. You just took things like sailing, going to the beach like — ‘Well, yeah. Doesn’t everybody do that?’”
Stillwell hadn’t expected the Facebook group to grow the way it did.
He had thought maybe a couple hundred of people would join it, but today the group boasts of a membership of around 22,600 people by Facebook’s metrics and is still going strong. Not all members are active, but he estimates at least 10,000 members contribute to conversations and share stories and pictures.
Stillwell, like many of the group’s members, no longer lives in Newport Beach. But he can tell you any number of memories he has from there and businesses he remembers that don’t exist anymore. He was a Carden Hall graduate in 1970 and grew up in Dover Shores from 1965 until he left for Tennessee, where he went college in 1978 and has remained ever since.
He’s a strict group moderator and focuses on letting in only those that might have remembered Newport Beach between the end of WWII until the mid-1980s to 1990s — a window of about 50 years. He said that doesn’t mean Newport Beach got worse after that time period but that it changed from what he and his members describe as the “golden age” for what they considered a small beach town.
Christie Silsbee Poor, who now lives in Santa Ynez Valley, said she graduated from Newport Harbor High School just a year ahead of Stillwell and joined the group about a week into its existence. Poor remembers being named an outstanding candy striper at Hoag Hospital in 1973 and going to Five Crowns with her parents for dinner every time she visited until they passed away. Poor left for college in San Luis Obispo and settled in the Central Coast, but she remembers fondly sailing around the harbor in her hometown.
Poor said selling her parents’ house after their deaths was “traumatic,” especially when the house she grew up in was demolished.
“Here again, I could get online and talk to people who had their houses destroyed. Nothing can destroy our memories. We still have those. Even though our parents have passed [and] we may not be living there, we remember riding our bikes, sailing our little Sabots,” Poor said. “It was a special time in our past, holding onto that and being able to share it with people that also appreciate it is priceless.”
For Jackie Little Bisset, the memories of life in Newport Beach are fresher. She and her husband lived in the city until 2003, when they decided to move to Chandler, Ariz. She joined the Facebook group about a day or two after it launched when a friend called her to let her know about it.
“The first picture I saw [on the group’s page], I fell in love,” said Bisset. “It was the classic picture of Dover [Drive] and Coast Highway with the bait shop. I fell in love with it, and there was no going back. When it first stared out, it seemed like it was a group of locals remembering old Newport before ‘The O.C.’ Over the years, [the group] has grown very much. It’s gotten a lot larger and it’s still an awesome group and has a lot of wonderful contributors.”
But Bisset lamented it didn’t have much of the same small-town feel of when she lived there. She feels the Facebook group is important to her to stay connected to her hometown. She remembers Villa Nova, which closed in 2013, which she said had the best Italian food ever, and remembers she and her sister hitchhiking down to the beach to surf. She remembers body surfing at the Wedge and finding the waves over at Newport Pier. She also remembers walking from Big Corona to Little Corona.
Philanthropic efforts
Stillwell said his Facebook group stumbled into philanthropy by accident, after it was suggested its members meet up in person.
“After a while, we thought, ‘Maybe if we’re going to have a party, let’s make it a purposeful party. That would’ve been a year after [heroic lifeguard] Ben Carlson died.”
They reached out to the Ben Carlson Foundation, which welcomes donations.
“We sold $13,000 of clothing with a logo for the party, had a party at the Newport Dunes, and we ended up with $10,000 to the Ben Carlson Foundation from the proceeds.”
The gift-giving efforts have continued via sales of customized merchandise that includes caps, clothing, mugs and more. The group has held fundraising efforts for Toys for Tots and other charitable organizations in Newport Beach and greater Orange County. It’s currently fundraising for the victims of the Maui wildfires through its online merchandise store at nbb4oc.com.
Stillwell said a number of the group members had close ties to people in Lahaina, and after his son-in-law designed a new logo to turn attention toward Maui, they were off to the races. The group has now successfully raised about $9,000 to go toward mutual aid groups and other organizations on the ground and will continue to raise funds through December even after the news headlines long disappear and attention is turned elsewhere, Stillwell said.
“I used to say that you can b— about that Reuben E. Lee’s isn’t here anymore, or that you can’t water-ski in the Back Bay anymore. These are all things you can whine about, and say that the people who live here now ruined the place. But, the attitude I try to instill in people is that for the people who live in Newport now, it’s as amazing a place as it was when I was a kid in the 1966. It’s just different now,” Stillwell said.
“I wish I could bring back all the hills, but that’s why it’s important for me to have this so that people who might not have ever lived during that time can get a sense of what that town like back then. [The Facebook group] is not a ‘Let’s trash Newport Beach,’ but a ‘Let’s remember how nice it was in our youth.’”
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