Cypress: Midwest Spirit in Orange County : Families are attracted to this down-home community with its folksy neighborhoods.

By JOHN CHARLES TIGHE

June 11, 1989 12 AM PT

<i> Times Staff Writer</i>

When the owner of Cypress’ only golf course closed the links to make way for a 167-acre commercial development, citizens rose up in protest and voted down the developer’s plans in a recent citywide election.

Hollywood Park Realty Enterprises might not have known what it was getting into when it began its wrangle with the down-home Orange County community, described by one civic leader as a “spirited tiny town like you might find in the Midwest--and we intend to stay that way.”

It’s the type of town where children decorate their wagons on the Fourth of July and parade around their neighborhoods.

It’s a town where longtime resident Joyce Nicholson can’t go to the Albertson’s supermarket without being stopped by a dozen other residents who want to talk not only about the price of produce but also the latest town gossip.

“We grew up with Ozzie and Harriet. We wanted that when we grew up. And here we have it,” said Cheryl Matuz, who moved to town two years ago with her husband, Ed, and their twin sons.

T-Ball and Soccer

The Matuz boys are only in kindergarten, but already they’re busy several days a week on T-ball and soccer teams. Ed Matuz is coach for the baseball team, and Cheryl is team mom in the baseball league, which is part of the town’s extensive recreational system.

So popular is the recreation program that residents from bordering cities often use the address of relatives in Cypress to try to get in.

The folksy neighborhoods and ballparks that characterize Cypress were part of a master plan for a residential and business community in the 1950s, when cows were ordered out and the name Cypress replaced an area that had been known as Watertown and Dairy City.

Near the western edge of Orange County, Cypress became a popular settling place for middle-income families who wanted bigger homes and yards than they could afford in Torrance or Long Beach, where they worked.

Cypress was on its way to becoming a sleepy bedroom community when the Cypress Citizens’ Assn. formed in the early 1970s to oppose a residential development proposed for an area earmarked as part of the city’s business park.

“We had to have mixed-use developments or we would simply be a bedroom community that would just founder with no tax base,” said Nicholson, who led the successful fight. “We needed more businesses, but city officials said we were in a bad location to attract them.”

The business center has since become one of the most successful in Southern California and is now the American headquarters for Yamaha Motor, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America and Panasonic Technics, among other Asian firms, and it is the corporate headquarters for PacifiCare Health Systems and McDonnell Douglas Automation Division.

Ironically, the citizens’ association was revived in the 1980s at the start of the Hollywood Park Realty controversy to fight against what the group considered too much commercial development.

When Hollywood Park Realty wanted to transform the former public golf course surrounding Los Alamitos Race Course in Cypress into a business park and office complex, the association fought the development. And in February, voters soundly defeated the proposal.

The growing number of large companies, attracted to Cypress because of its proximity to freeways and to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, greatly enhance the tax base and employ thousands of workers. But most of their workers come from other towns, and most Cypress residents drive to jobs outside the city.

Ed Matuz commutes to Long Beach for a sales job with Douglas Aircraft. The Matuz family moved from Hacienda Heights in 1986 because houses were more affordable in Cypress than in nearby towns, and the neighborhoods were full of young families with children.

“Neighbors watch each other’s kids here,” said Cheryl Matuz, who works part time as a dental hygienist in nearby Los Alamitos. “In Hacienda Heights, neighbors didn’t know each other. I wouldn’t have imagined letting anyone watch my kids.”

Joyce and Jerry Nicholson moved to Cypress in 1969 from a neighborhood in West Garden Grove, also because of their children.

“Although Cypress was small, it had a college, which said something about the town and the type of people who wanted to live there,” said Jerry Nicholson, who is a schoolteacher at North High School in Torrance.

“On a practical level, if the kids didn’t want to go to a university, Cypress College was an option,” Nicholson said.

While the town can be ideal for young, middle-class families, its neighborhoods also can be homogeneous, with very few homes displaying either poverty or great wealth.

“It’s a middle market,” said Joyce Nicholson, who also works as a real estate agent. “If you want to move up, you typically have had to to move out. . . .”

Few New Homes

Nicholson said the most expensive homes sell for about $425,000. Most characteristic is the three-bedroom starter home, which Nicholson said sells for about $210,000, compared to a little less than $180,000 a year ago.

Nicholson and her husband said that with their children now grown, they may soon be looking for a newly built home, also a rarity in Cypress, where most homes are now more than five years old.

The former “Texaco tank farm,” the site of crude oil tanks for years, is now being developed by Cypress Homes Inc., with 670 homes planned, the first expected to open in the fall of 1990.

Aside from the Hollywood Park Realty land, the tank farm is the last area to be developed.

To stay in their home as their tastes get more expensive, the Matuz family is now in the middle of a major remodeling that has meant ripping out carpets and sanding the hardwood underneath.

A new family room has been added to the four-bedroom, two-fireplace home, and other additions include French doors and windows, a potbellied stove and a Colonial mantel.

Although Joyce Nicholson characterizes the style of Cypress as Midwestern, it lacks some attractions of towns in the Heartland. There is no downtown, and there is not even a regional shopping mall, nor is either planned.

And with the city’s master plan nearly complete, the last major issue for the city’s growth will be the settlement of the Hollywood Park property, which now has an uncertain future, said Darrell Essex, city manager of Cypress since 1962.

On Nicholson’s wish list for part of the land is a civic theater complex, which might be home to the Cypress Civic Theatre group and a new pops orchestra that has recently formed.

Whatever happens, residents said it’s likely that Jerry Nicholson and others will have to go to another town if they want to play golf.

AT A GLANCEPopulation

1988 estimate: 45,835

1980-88 change: + 3.3%

Median age: 33.7 years

Racial/ethnic mix

White: 76%

Latino: 14.2%

Other: 8.4%

Black: 1.3%

Annual income

Per capita: $15,974