Jim Tippins: a Community’s Connector

Jim Tippins’ secret blend of cornmeal on buffalo catfish is only part of what draws hundreds of people to his place each week.

The other is that the Santa Ana restaurant is a rare place for blacks to meet in Orange County.

Tippins Sea Food Connection is aptly named, customers say. A noted gathering spot for blacks scattered throughout the county, the restaurant provides more than fresh fish, fried Louisiana style.

“He does more than just fish,” said Ellen Ward, Santa Ana’s superintendent of community services, who said she makes it to Tippins at least once a week. “He refers people to hairdressers, churches. He’s kind of an information center. He connects people to what they need to connect to.”

Tippins, 57, greets his customers by name, shaking hands and offering flyers for upcoming black plays or musicals. Black newspapers line the lobby counter.

On Thursdays, Tippins features traditional meals from the South such as red beans and rice, smothered pork chops, chitterlings and greens for “Soul Food Night.” But the Friday-night fish frys draw the biggest crowds.

Tippins said the value of the Sea Food Connection, with its picnic-style tables and bottles of hot spices, extends beyond entertainment. Tippins, vice president of the Orange County chapter of the NAACP, said blacks need more places like this in which to meet and talk about issues that affect them.

“It’s real important that people can come here and feel that relaxed. People run into people they haven’t seen in a long time. If you don’t meet ‘em in church or the barbershop, then where else are you going to meet ‘em? You’ll pass ‘em on the freeway.”

A Florida native, Tippins said he grew up in a predominantly black area where most people had businesses of their own.

It was there that he spent his high school years cooking in hotels under the direction of his father, who had cooked on railroad dining cars, and dreaming of opening his own business. But at 18, Tippins left Jacksonville, joined the Marine Corps and put cooking aside until he retired from the military nearly 22 years later.

Tippins and his wife, Dolores, who have three grown children, bought a house in Santa Ana while he was stationed at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

But a year later, he decided that Orange County had an untapped market for his kind of cooking.

Some 17 years later, Tippins said, he has only begun to tap that market, and he plans to buy the lot next door to expand.

But success hasn’t come easily. At first, bankers and fish suppliers wouldn’t give him a loan or credit.

“The fish brokers in L.A., they wouldn’t even take a check,” he said.

“I had to go to the bank to get cash every time.”

Today, he said, “I can get anything I want.”