The Bell Curve:

I moved my family to Newport Beach from a Chicago suburb in 1959 and remember well the heavy fogs described so graphically by Jim Carnett in his Pilot column recently. He was in high school then, and I was one of the millions of GIs who passed through Southern California on our way to the Pacific war with a powerful determination to stay when we returned. It took me almost 15 years to finish a war, college, and to sell my writing consistently enough to make the move.

While sharing Jim’s recollections of fog, it occurred to me how natives and carpetbaggers from less anointed places remember the same area in quite different ways.

While Jim was remembering feeling his way through the fog on the wings of Carl Sandburg’s poetry, I was remembering how much of my living grew out of writing about the vicissitudes of the culture in my new and adopted Newport Beach home. The gap wasn’t easy to bridge. My first California congressman, for example, was a 70-year-old Santa Ana lawyer named James B. Utt. He had introduced a constitutional amendment to outlaw the income tax, suspected the Soviets were behind sex education in the U.S. and wanted to rescind our membership in the United Nations. In conversation, Utt made one word out of “criminalcommunist- conspiracy” much the same way the Confederate states still think “damnyankee.”

My first state assemblyman had once introduced a bill to outlaw the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in California public schools, and my state senator, John Schmitz, was a proud and avowed member of the John Birch Society hard on the scent of communist sympathizers. They, according to the Birchers, included President Dwight Eisenhower. About the only thing I had in common with these three men was that we all lived in Orange County.

We had moved there from what I thought at the time was a strongly partisan Midwestern suburb that would prepare us for whatever we might face in California. It didn’t take long for that bubble to burst. We were still unpacking — and a little breathless over the magnificent beaches a few blocks away — when my son came home from his new high school with an advertisement for something called a Christian Anti-Communist School. Parents were invited to sign a permission slip for their children to attend during regular school hours on the grounds that the experience would be “educational.”

It was. I went along with my son for I was anxious to be assimilated as quickly as possible into the local culture. So, for several hours in an Anaheim ball park, I listened incredulously to a view of this nation and the world right out of “Alice in Wonderland.” With overtones of Kafka, it was delivered by a fascinating assortment of former FBI undercover employees (not special agents) and Australian doctors. A few of the kids listened raptly, but most of them giggled and ate ice cream — maybe they were smoking pot, I don’t know — under the stands. The inattention was a blessing. Otherwise they would have gone home and sandbagged the front door against an imminent Soviet invasion.

Next day I called in all innocence at the school, and asked to speak to the principal. It was quickly clear that his problems up to then hadn’t included coping with transplanted liberals. I asked if he had looked in on the Anti-Communism School, and he said he hadn’t. I suggested it might have been a good idea before he sent his students off, and he replied that it had been strongly recommended by the Orange County Chamber of Commerce, and that was good enough for him. Relations were strained when we parted company, and the Anti-Communism School went on to play well-attended dates all across the county for several years before it finally moved off center stage, ridiculed unjustly — its supporters insisted — by the Communist dupes in our midst.

The arrival of the Irvine campus of the University of California poured some fresh and combustible material into the Orange County mix that I remember. I joined the English department in its first decade and watched some of the hair-raising brushes of new faculty members, recruited from all over the nation, with the entrenched political conservatives. In those early years, a lot of graying professors of “dubious” ethnic background began looking back uncomfortably at burned bridges.

An eminent social scientist, for example, found that flying his flag on the Fourth of July identified him with neighbors who wanted to impeach Earl Warren and considered the fluoridation of public water a Communist plot. Not untypical was a clipping I saved from the same period in which a vice chairman of the Republican State Central Committee from Orange County was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as urging the UCI administration to initiate “a program of recruitment that would hire young, shaven, all-American types to teach the kids something instead of trying to influence them politically.”

So it went in the good old days. Standing today in the shadow of the Performing Arts Center or feeling the creative energy and stature generated by the dean of the new Law School, it is hard to comprehend the distance we have traveled.

But when I remarked recently to a retired local judge, almost as old as I am, that at least we had rid ourselves of the John Birch Society, he shook his head and said: “They don’t need the organization any longer. They’re all in public office.”

This is an election year, and we can indeed hear them if we choose to listen. But we’ve come a long way since I moved my family to Newport Beach and attended that Anti-Communist School with my son. And the ocean and the concert hall and theaters, and the university and the glorious climate are very much present and beckoning. I can hear them, too.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.