Not so ancient history

Young Chang

Pamela Hallan-Gibson can rattle off who’s who in Orange County,

both from today and the more obscure yesterday.

The author’s favorite character in the history of this area is a

San Juan Capistrano woman from the late 1800s named Modesta Avila,

the first convicted felon. She was arrested and convicted for

obstructing a train with a line of laundry strung up across the

tracks. She was sentenced to San Quentin State Prison, where she

died.

Hallan-Gibson’s just-published “Orange County -- The Golden

Promise,” a second edition with revisions from its 1989 predecessor,

offers such fun, anecdotal touches as well as a broad and

approachable look at the county’s history from 1769 to present day.

The retired city manager of Sonoma, in Northern California, spoke

at the Orange County Fair on Saturday. She says her favorite story

from Newport-Mesa involves actress Helena Modjeska, who was Polish

and moved to Orange County in the late 1800s. She began acting to

make money. She later lived in Newport Beach, on Bay Island.

“She was just a famous person who happened to live on Bay Island,”

said Hallan-Gibson, who worked, at one time, as a journalist for what

was then called the Orange Coast Daily Pilot.

Another little factoid from the book that might surprise

Newport-Mesans, not to mention the many fair-goers nowadays, is that

there used to be a town named Fairview in Costa Mesa. It was wiped

out after a 1918 earthquake cut off the water flow from hot springs

located where the fairgrounds are today.

“The Fairview Hot Springs disappeared as did the town for which it

was named,” the 58-year-old writer said.

Hallan-Gibson wrote the first edition of her book for the Orange

County Centennial more than a decade ago. She had majored in history

at UC Riverside, and had always been curious about how things were

way back when. But even more than a natural inquisitiveness, the

author first started her historical foraging because it reminded her

of something close to home.

“I was born and raised in San Juan Capistrano and I literally grew

up in the shadow of the missions. My playground when I was a child

was the mission ground. I just fell in love with the place. It

comforted me when I was sad and it cheered me up when I needed

cheering up,” said Hallan-Gibson, who has also written three other

books just about her hometown.

It followed naturally that the author would investigate her

favorite place and learn how the South County city came to be. As a

Pilot staffer, she wrote many a history feature on other county

cities too. She eventually also wrote two county-related books -- “A

Century of Service: A History of the Orange County Sheriff’s

Department” and “The Bench and the Bar: A Centennial View of Orange

County Legal History.”

Her ties to home led her into politics, as she has served as

assistant to the city manager in San Juan Capistrano and city manager

in La Palma.

The writer’s historical involvement has always been broad. Her

credentials include serving on the Orange County Historical

Commission, the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society and other

commitments throughout the county.

“I remember a wonderful quote by [John] Steinbeck: ‘How do we know

who we are without our past?’” Hallan-Gibson said. “To me, the only

way [people] are going to be interested in preserving their past is

if they have something broad and general to read and pictures to look

at that’s going to make it interesting.”

Don Dobmeier, a member of the Orange County Historical Commission

based at the Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, calls

Hallan-Gibson’s work a “coffee table book.”

There are two kinds of histories, the historian said. The

scholarly kind, with a lot of gray and small-font footnotes, and the

coffee-table kind, which has interesting sidebars of trivia and tons

of large, vintage photos. Such a book also has an inviting glossiness

to everything, from its approach to its presentation, that makes it

casually open-able.

Which then makes a historical work more widely read.

“It acquaints people who have a casual interest in local history

with what was here before they arrived,” Dobmeier said.

Hallan-Gibson starts with the Franciscan friars who started

Mission San Juan Capistrano, acquaints her readers with the rancheros

who followed, the pioneer American settlers and later the immigrants

from Germany who cultivated vineyards near where Disneyland prospers

today.

She writes about oilmen in Brea Canyon, about the county during

Prohibition, about depressions and railroads and historical

Newport-Mesa celebrities like James Irvine.

In her new second edition, she fills in the holes between 1989 and

today. The fillers include histories on the El Toro Airport

controversy, the county bankruptcy and small revisions having to do

with buildings that stood 10 years ago but don’t anymore.

“I think the most important thing the second edition does is help

people understand fairly clearly the issues and the facts and the

drama surrounding the Orange County bankruptcy,” said the writer, who

lives in Sonoma Valley. “People hear about it and they scratch their

heads and think, ‘how could that happen?’ I tried very hard to

explain it as simply as I could.”

Hallan-Gibson compares her work to placing a magnifying glass on

different areas of the county.

She always gets a kick out of discovering a hill or two that

existed hundreds of years ago and still does today.

“I think it provides context and maybe continuity for those people

that are new or even those that aren’t new or have a sense of place,”

she said.

Dobmeier added that histories like Hallan-Gibson’s not only serve

the past, but the future.

“It gives you a little more insight as to how things should be,”

he said.