Popejoy Plans to Relax--After July 31, That Is : Resignation: Orange County’s CEO plans to stay busy working on bankruptcy crisis until he leaves office. Then, it’ll be a family vacation trip far away from here.

During his five months as Orange County’s chief executive officer, William J. Popejoy always had a tug of personal regret: The job would make him miss his annual summer vacation with his only grandson, 9-year-old Nicholas.

Now that he has quit the high-profile post four months before his contract expires, Popejoy and his wife are busy slapping together plans for an August retreat traveling through Canada with the boy.

“That’s just utter joy for me,” Popejoy, 57, said in an interview Thursday.

“I didn’t spend a lot of time with my kids--I just didn’t. My life was too money-driven: It was always, ‘Next job, better job,’ ” Popejoy said several weeks ago when asked what he would do upon leaving the embattled Hall of Administration. “I don’t want to miss out on that again.”

But until he leaves July 31, Popejoy refuses to take a short-timer’s attitude. Instead, he plans to:

* Meet with local leaders who opposed Measure R, the half-cent sales-tax hike voters rejected last month, to discuss alternative bankruptcy recovery plans.

* Prod county department heads to each identify 10 priorities so the incoming chief executive can easily understand county operations.

* Complete recommendations on the downsizing and privatization of the Environmental Management Agency.

* Finalize an updated budget due Aug. 1, and set in motion a plan to slash the expenses of bankruptcy-related consultants.

“The operations of the county are going forward. . . . Let’s not have the perception, or the reality, that until we get a new CEO, we’re adrift,” Popejoy said. “People shouldn’t be adrift. We’ve got to keep paddling.”

On a personal level, however, Popejoy plans to jump ship, steering away from county government and local politics, save, perhaps, for a spot on the volunteer charter commission trying to restructure the county bureaucracy.

He also said he would be willing to keep negotiating with Merrill Lynch Chairman Daniel Tully to settle the county’s $2-billion lawsuit against the brokerage firm--if officials want him to.

A millionaire who started as a union shop steward and ended up trying to save the largest failed savings and loan in the country, Popejoy said his rendezvous with the public sector left him a bit cynical and disillusioned about civic responsibility.

Perhaps nothing was more disheartening than the June 27 election on Measure R.

“Nearly 70% of the registered voters didn’t even go to the polls on the most important thing to happen in their county, ever,” Popejoy said Thursday. “I am worried. I think this county, this country, is headed downhill. We just don’t participate, and I find that worrisome.

“It’s a corny thing, but there’s a monument in Washington, D.C. . . . [that says] ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’ We’ve lost our vigilance.”

Now that he has resigned, Popejoy said, he would like to rejoin the boards he sat on as a director before volunteering as the county’s first-ever CEO on Feb. 10, including a Harvard University project about derivative investments that he called “a mental crossword puzzle.”

There have been some job offers, but the millionaire savings-and-loan executive seems eager to return to his early retirement of tennis and travel.

“You want me to go back to work? You know I don’t work well!” Popejoy joked to a longtime colleague and friend who telephoned Thursday after hearing of his resignation. “I have a hard time holding jobs.”

Rumors abound at the Civic Center and in the state Capitol that Popejoy’s resignation might trigger a move by Gov. Pete Wilson to install a state trustee to run the county, and that he might tap Popejoy for that post. But a Wilson spokesman said Thursday, “Any talk of who is premature.” Popejoy himself said, “I’m not going to be that presumptuous.”

Would he run for a spot on the Board of Supervisors with whom he battled?

“No, no,” Popejoy said. “Hell, no.”

How about another political post?

“I don’t have any local office I’m interested in,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to commute to Sacramento, and I have no intention of commuting to Washington, D.C. That’s not in my horizon.”

Instead, Popejoy plans to return to a life of tennis matches three to five times a week.

“I love to wake up and have nothing planned for the entire day. Not to do nothing for the day, but to not have to do anything specific,” Popejoy said on election day, as he watched the sales tax he supported die at the voters’ hands.

“You know what’s kind of a fun thing to do on a summer’s day?” he mused then. “You start to clean your garage, you drink some beer, you have honky-tonk music in the background. . . . And at the end you look around and say, ‘It looks as bad as it did before.’ ”

Times staff writers Eric Bailey, Matt Lait and Rene Lynch also contributed to this report.