Oral Histories: Wilson Phelps

The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.

As part of my ongoing research on Fullerton history, I have been reading various Oral Histories conducted by The Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton. I read an interview with local resident Wilson Phelps, who was a banker/rancher/property owner in Fullerton. The interview was conducted in 1998 at Morningside Retirement community. Here’s what I learned from the interview.

Wilson Phelps was born in 1909 in Los Angeles. His father, John Phelps, was a tireless businessman. He owned several banks, a wholesale grocery, a paint factory, lots of land…and an orange ranch in Fullerton. The Phelps ranch was located at the corner of Orangethrope and Spadra (now Harbor Blvd)–where the Target shopping center is today. The ranch stretched for several acres between Fullerton and Anaheim.

Though they lived in Los Angeles, Phelps remembers taking the train to Fullerton to visit the ranch during the summers: “We had turkeys and chickens and rabbits and all the rest of it. It was great for kids. We had an old pump house with a windmill, and we had to pump our own water at the ranch. There was no city water.” Wilson’s father was also president of the Orangethorpe Packinghouse, located near the railroad tracks, where oranges were packed and loaded onto freight cars for shipment east.

After high school, Phelps got his undergraduate degree at Stanford, then moved to Boston and got a law degree from Harvard. During summer breaks, he would work in one of his father’s banks, or as a bookkeeper at the Orangethorpe Packinghouse.

He practiced law for two years in Los Angeles, but didn’t like it much, and ended up moving to Anaheim to run his father’s Southern County Bank. He recalls the difficulty of the Great Depression years on the banking industry: “That was tough going because the banks had all closed during a holiday, and some reopened and some didn’t. The Southern County was able to reopen. Originally, before the break in 1929, there had been four banks in Anaheim, but it ended up that there were only two, the Bank of America and the Southern County Bank.” One effect of the Great Depression, it seems, was the loss of small community banks, and the emergence of large banking conglomerates, like Bank of America.

Phelps remembers the devastating flood of 1938, which hit Anaheim and Fullerton: “The water broke through the dam, I guess, and roared down through the center of Anaheim and came in all the buildings. And a lot of these old buildings had basements which were flooded, merchandise of course all ruined. It came into the bank vault. We had about three inches of muddy water in the bank vault and over the whole floor. It was a horrible, smelly mess to clean up.”

During World War II, Phelps was not drafted, nor did he volunteer because, he says, “My father said I was essential to his bank, and that was an essential business.”

Phelps’ father died in 1947 and he took over many of his fathers banks and other businesses. After World War II, Los Angeles and Orange County entered a period of rapid transformation from agriculture to urban/suburbanization. The task fell to Wilson to begin subdividing his family’s vast land holdings, and this caused him to have a nervous breakdown. This was, according to Phelps, “the time that Orange County started to explode in population.  Form then on, it just went gangbusters.”

In the early 1950s, Phelps and his family bought a house in the affluent hills of Fullerton, and he became sort of a recluse: “That was a period that I was sort of in a rundown physical condition and just didn’t want to see people. I had so many people at me at various times that I wanted to be more or less secluded. And I suppose that was part of my problem of a breakdown.” He began to accumulate properties in less developed areas, to get away from the rapidly-changing landscape of Fullerton. He bought property on the Colorado River, a beach house in Balboa, and a large property in Temecula.

In 1964, Phelps entered into a deal with Montgomery Ward’s department stores, and turned his family ranch into a massive shopping center. This is now the Target shopping center at the corner of Harbor and Orangethorpe.  Phelps called this deal a “bonanza”.

After his retirement, Phelps traveled a lot, and went on to establish a scholarship foundation through Fullerton College: The Wilson Phelps Foundation. At the time of the interview, he (and a lot of other Fullerton ‘old timers’) was living at Morningside, and skeptical about the future of the area. “I don’t think I’d really enjoy being here fifty years from now,” he said, “Too many people.”