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

Attitudes toward war have changed over the years in Fullerton. During World War I and II, people organized parades honoring returning soldiers. However, during the Vietnam War, people voiced their dissent. Demonstrations at Cal State Fullerton, included “a draft/Vietnam war protest, which brought the police SWAT squad to campus” (Fullerton: A Pictorial History).

A transcript of a 1968 interview for the CSUF Oral History Program includes a fascinating conversation between a college student and an elderly judge, former Fullerton city attorney Raymond R. Thompson about changing attitudes toward war in Orange County and Fullerton:

Student: In seeing the reactions of the country—Orange County especially—to World War I, World War II, Korea and now Vietnam; when Company ‘L’ left from Santa Ana in World War I there were fanfare parades, the people backed the men and gave them little presents and things. Then in World War II the people seemed to have more of a community spirit with the Guard or with the Army companies that went in. I may be looking at it with more of a subjective attitude because I attend college, where I think reactions in general seem to be different, but now it seems to have changed. Whether the people think the war is right or wrong, the community doesn’t seem to be backing these companies any longer in the way they did. Would you attribute this to size?

Thompson: Well, in World War I and World War II, no one had the slightest doubt or misgiving about the propriety of it there. You are absolutely right, if you were even to intimate or give the slightest clue that you had any second thoughts about it, it would just be unthinkable, because of the complete dedication and fervor in favor of the war. No doubt that it was right against wrong, but now in this Vietnam situation, people are very free to speak their objection. If a young man burned his draft card in World War I or World War II, especially World War I, why he would probably be lynched.

Student: That he would. Do you think that education had affected this, the changes in education, if there had been any?

Thompson: I don’t know, I think maybe we were really absolutely right, in those two instances, fighting the Kaiser who was out to conquer the world, then fighting Hitler, who was out to enslave the world, and had murdered millions of innocent Jews and other groups that he didn’t like. In fighting something like that, there isn’t much room for argument. But way over there (Vietnam) and to send our boys over there to be killed, take sides in a scrap, well, maybe not. You probably have your feelings about it. At least you know how free people are to express their doubts about this particular enterprise.

Student: The youth of the country now seem to be voicing more dissent. In 1930 or 1920, thereabouts, do you think the youth were busier, had more work to do, say, on the farms? Maybe because it was a farming community less leisure time didn’t make dissent that available?

Thompson: That’s probably part of it.

Perhaps the spirit of dissent that characterized the 60s and early 70s dissipated some in the 80s and 90s, but I do not remember there being much dissent regarding the Persian Gulf War or the Iraq War, or the War in Afghanistan, at least not in Fullerton. I remember a few scattered (and sort of small) protests when I attended Cal State Fullerton from 2004-2007.

A Daily Titan article from 2007 describes one such protest: “Nearly two-dozen California State University-Fullerton students marched in protest at the Quad on Thursday while holding anti-war signs and chanting, “We want freedom. We want peace.”

However, as was typical of Iraq War protests in Fullerton, “there were Students supporting the war in Iraq assembled on the grass holding signs of their own. “Freedom isn’t free,” they yelled over the protesting crowd” (Daily Titan, 2007)

I recall a protest in the early 2000s on the corner of Imperial Highway in Brea Blvd where, on one side of the intersection, people held signs that said things like “No Blood for Oil,” and on the other side of the intersection, people waved American flags and held “Support Our Troops” signs.

I suppose the best characterization I can give of current attitudes toward war in Fullerton is…conflicted.

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

Earl D. Gage was born in Nemaha County,  Kansas. As a young man he worked on his family’s corn farm.

In 1890, he moved out west to the newly-established town of Fullerton, and worked in horticultural and orchard work. The following year, he helped his parents move out to Fullerton as well.

In 1900, Gage purchased thirty acres from Edward Atherton, who at one time owned the California Ostrich Farm. Instead of ostriches, Gage grew orange trees, and had his own nursery, from which he sold buds and trees. He also grew avocados.

He, like many local ranchers of this time, joined the Placentia Orange Growers Association, was a shareholder in the Anaheim Union Water Company, and built a house on his ranch.

In 1909, he married Mayme Clark. They had two children, Lydia and Mildred.

He was a Republican and advicated for prohibition of alcohol, along with his wife. He attended the First Baptist Church where he was a trustee.

This Friday, February 3, I’ll be giving a free lecture on the topic of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who lived in Fullerton and Santa Ana in the last years of his life. Some of his most acclaimed works–including A Scanner Darkly and VALIS–are set in Orange County.

The lecture will take place at ModelMania (232 W. Commonwealth Ave.) in Fullerton during the Downtown Fullerton Art Walk, from 6-9pm.

Anyone who has seen the films Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, or The Adjustment Bureau is at least familiar with the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who was one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed writers of the 20th century. He earned science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award, in 1963 for his novel The Man in the High Castle. In his lifetime, Dick published 44 novels, and approximately 121 short stories.

The impact of Philip K. Dick’s ideas about modern life cannot be underestimated. In a 2002 article from the New York Times Review of books entitled “It’s Philip Dick’s World, We Only Live In It,” Laura Miller explains Dick’s influence on postmodern literature: “Dickian devices and themes–implanted memories, commodified identities, simulacra–haunt contemporary literary fiction…The naming of years after corporate sponsors in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the downtrodden, stigmatized souls in George Saunders’s futuristic short stories, with their degrading theme park jobs, the dream worlds Haruki Murakami’s characters tumble into and out of–all partake of Dick’s peculiar mixture of wretched ontology and underdog sympathies.”

Philip K. Dick’s place in the pantheon of contemporary American writers is well-established and well-known. What is NOT well-known is that this literary titan spent the last years of his life in Fullerton, California, and that some of his best and final work (like A Scanner Darkly) is actually set in Orange County. He moved here after a mental breakdown in 1972. “There is nothing more reassuring to someone who’s gone through an acute identity crisis than clean plastic apartments, streets, restaurants, and furniture,” he wrote, “Nothing gets old or worn of dirty here because if it does the police come in and kill it.”

It was at his residence in Fullerton that Philip K. Dick had his famous “Religious Experience” after being mesmerized by the Christian fish necklace of a prescription delivery woman. His visions of God and the afterlife were documented by cartoonist Robert Crumb.

It was in PKD’s final years in Orange County that he sought to integrate a lifetime of learning and searching into searing explorations of “What is Real?” and “What is Human?”

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

Frank K. Kirker was born in Kentuky in 1868, the son of James  M. Kirker, captain of a steamboat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As a child, he worked with his father on the  steamboat.

Later, according to biographer Samuel Armor, “he studied the science of refrigeration and for years traveled for the York Manufacturing Company of York, Pennsylvania, selling and installing large refrigeration plants…and in his travels he covered the entire West, installing notable plants in Winslow and Tucson, Ariz.; San Francisco, Santa Rosa, and Sacramento, Cal.” 

In 1907, he decided to settle down from his travels, and bought 20 acres of land on East Orangethorpe Avenue in Fullerton, and planted an orange ranch, building a house on the ranch. He became a shareholder in the Anaheim Union Water Company, and marketed his oranges through the Placentia Orange Growers Association of Fullerton.

In 1905 he married Harriet H. Schwinge in Los Angeles. They had three children: James, Catherine, and Helen (who died in  infancy).  

As were so many businessmen of his time, Kirker was a Mason.

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

Fred Strauss was a German/Jewish immigrant who moved to Fullerton in 1909. For many years, he worked for the Stern and Goodman’s store, the first general store in Fullerton.

During the 1930s, when Hitler came to power in Germany, his Jewish relatives in Germany began to write him letters, begging him to help them escape. “Everybody was crying that they wanted to come, come, come,” he recalled. They were hard times for Jews in Germany. “My brother was standing on the sidewalk one time and the storm troopers put him in a concentration camp,” he said.

During the Depression, Strauss did not have a lot of money to help out his suffering relatives, but he did manage to help many of them come to the United States, with great difficulty. He recalls the story of how he managed to help them escape the Holocaust:

“I decided I was going to bring them over and I had such a time. I had to go to the judges; I had to go to the police department; I had to go to everybody else. I had to have a photostatic copy of my bank account, which I had to lie a little bit about because it wasn’t what it should have been. It cost me quite a little sum of money and I couldn’t get them out. I had a friend by the name of Howard Irwin who was very well-acquainted with our governor [Frank] Merrian who was our governor of California then. Howard was living in Long Beach and he went to bat for me. He went to the governor and asked if he could help me. So the governor sent a wire to the American Consul in Stuttgard, Germany to release my folks at once. In fourteen days my mother, my brother, and his wife were on their way to this country. Of course, Hitler took everything away from them, they didn’t have anything at all.”

As dramatic and inspiring as this story is, it disturbs me that it was so difficult for Strauss to get his suffering family out of Germany. If he did not know a guy who knew the governor, his family would most likely have died. “If it wasn’t for Governor Merriam, not one of them would have been here,” Strauss recalls, “They would have all been killed.” I wonder how many Jewish Americans during the Holocaust were not so fortunate as Strauss to have this rare connection. I wonder how many people died because of bureaucratic red tape.

Source: CSUF Oral History Project, 1976

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

Charles Clark came to Fullerton in 1908. He began work with the Post Office in 1911 and served as Fullerton’s Postmaster from 1952 until his retirement in 1957. In 1971, Anne Riley interviewed him for the Fullerton College Oral History Program. Here are some of his recollections of early Fullerton.

On why he moved here

“We were going to Los Angeles and there was a big sign there by the depot. It said, ‘three thousand carloads of oranges shipped each year and two hundred carloads of English walnuts.’ I always liked English walnuts and oranges, so I thought that’s where I’d like to live, and so did my folks. So we located there.”

On who picked and packed the thousands of carloads of oranges

“Mexicans.”

On the smallest park in the United States

“They had the smallest park in the United States by the mail box down in front of the post office there on Commonwealth. It was twelve by twelve. It had a little fence around it and sweet peas grew. It was advertised as the smallest park in the United States. People came from all around to see it.”

On the flu epidemic of 1918

“So many people died. One time, down at the depot, there were eighteen coffins there to be transferred back east…Here in Fullerton, for about two or three weeks in the post office they’d call up there and want somebody to be pallbearers. For one or two weeks there, I was pallbearer three or four times…It was sad…Here, there were just so many people that died.”

On fingerprinting Germans during WWI

“There were so many Germans, and there were quite a few Germans here who’d never been naturalized. So I had to take fingerprints of the Germans. These old German ladies that I knew, I’d take their fingerprints, and I’d sit down with them and they’d cry and I’d cry. Some of them are prominent citizens here now, that I know.”

On war bonds

“If people wouldn’t buy war bonds, pressure would be put on them. I know one prominent citizen here who was a very rich man. He was German. He said, ‘To hell with them.’ He wasn’t going to buy any bonds. But when he came up to town he couldn’t buy any food. He couldn’t buy anything. People wouldn’t sell him a cigar even. So he came through with five thousand dollars.”

On the Ku Klux Klan

“It was quite active here, believe me. I didn’t join it, but I had a lot of invitations. A lot of the prominent people did. They’d get everybody kind of up in arms, you know. They had a big sign right on the corner of Commonwealth and Spadra (how Harbor) there, ‘KKK.’ We didn’t have any black people here at all. I don’t know. It was just one of those things, I guess. But now, look back and see how foolish it was.”

On who delivered vegetables

“Chinamen.”

On taking baths at the barbershop

“We didn’t have all the conveniences we have now. We didn’t have very sanitary plumbing. I don’t know if many had hot water heaters. A lot of us took a bath uptown there at the barbershop. It cost twenty-five cents to take a bath. That’s where a lot of us fellows took a bath.”

On pigeon racing

“We had pigeon racing in those days. Kids now have, oh, everything they see, television, radio, motorcycles and everything else. But in those days, we had pigeon racing. Once I had a five hundred miler [race] from Marysville, California.”

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

Victoria Consuelo Celestina (nicknamed “Jessie”) Corona de Montoya was interviewed in 1975 by Esther Katz for the CSUF Oral History Program.

A Yorba Descendant

Jessie (born around 1906) was a descendant of the pioneer Yorba family on her father’s side. Her father was Jose Maria Corona and his mother was Manuela Vejar, a direct descendent of Don Bernardo Yorba, a son of Jose Antonio Yorba, who came with the Portola expedition to California in 1769.

Her mother Romanita Aguilar was born in Arizona. Her parents met at a dance, and were married in a church in Anaheim in 1894 or 1893, with “a big feast that went on for three days.”

Her siblings were Ramon Francisco (Ray), then Orlando Antonio, Alphonso Filiberto, Lorinda Dulcinea, Juan Alejandro, Arturo Jose Maria, and Eduardo Lorraine. Three of her brothers served in the first World War.

Her family lived on Raymond Avenue since 1915, when most of the land was agriculture–citrus and walnuts.

Childhood Memories

As a young child, she sometimes went to live with her grandmother (on her mother’s side, who was part Native American), who lived on a small plot of land where the Prado Dam is now. 

Montoya lovingly recalls her grandmother’s deep knowledge of growing and preparing food: “She raised squash, tomatoes, corn…when she harvested all those vegetables, she dried them in the sun. She dried her corn and string beans, and then she saved them in little sacks that she made, until wintertime. When wintertime came, she dropped these vegetables in boiling salted water, and it was just like they were just picked.” Near the garden, her grandmother had plum, apricot, and peach trees.

She remembers the native remedies she learned from her grandmother, such as sauco, yerba del manso, mansanilla, and yerba buena, which she continued to use.

She remembers, as a young child in Fullerton, swimming in a local irrigation ditch.

“There was an irrigation ditch on Orangethorpe and Raymond that was to irrigate all the orange orchards and walnut orchards that were around our home,” she said. “This little ditch was about two feet deep and maybe about three feet wide. In the summer, when it got so hot, that’s where we’d swim. A lot of times if the zanjeros that cleaned these ditches didn’t come around and clean them, they were full of moss and real slippery. A lot of times we wouldn’t step in, we’d slide in. That’s how we cooled off–that’s where my brothers and I played.”

She would walk about two and a half miles to school from Raymond Avenue through orange orchards where she went to the old brick grammar school on Lemon and Wilshire, which has since been torn down.

The family had a horse, and she remembers when “all three of us were on that horse riding through the orange orchards. We had a friend who had a flatbed wagon. Without my parents’ knowledge, we’d all climb onto this wagon and ride up to the Bastanchury Hills where St. Jude’s Hospital is now to pick watermelons.”

Her younger brother John had two whippet dogs, greyhounds and she remembers going into the Bastanchury hills to hunt rabbits.

Jessie has fond memories of the large family get-togethers of her childhood. The Spanish and Mexican families of early California, from which she descended, were very large.

“It seems like all the pioneers, if they weren’t related, they liked to believe that they were just one big family,” she recalls. “The Sepulvedas from Pomona, the Vejares, my grandmother, oh, I could name so many.”

“The family was so large that my parents would plan to meet, maybe in the Santa Ana Canyon where the river runs, and everybody would take something to picnic. It was usually carne asada, tortillas, and salsa,” she said. “I guess there were as many as forty to sixty people that attended…if there was a baptism, a marriage or other occasion for a party, or a get-together, we would have one. Sometimes they would last the whole weekend.”

She remembers that there was always somebody who could play the guitar or a violin. Her mother sang beautifully and would often sing Spanish songs while her brother played the violin.

Disease Epidemics

Jessie remembers two disease epidemics of early Fullerton–the first being a smallpox epidemic.

“We were quarantined. Our doctor was Dr. Clark here in Fullerton and Dr. Truxaw from Anaheim,” she remembers. “the health authority came with a very big sign, “In Quarantine.”

The second was the flu pandemic of 1918.

“I think there were six of us sick at one time and my dad and mother taking care of us, six in bed with the influenza…a lot of people died. There were lots and lots of deaths from that,” she remembers.

A Family Tragedy

Her father started out as a rancher, with fifty acres of land in Riverside County. The family didn’t own much land in Fullerton, mainly just the house and a bit of surrounding land. After her father quit farming, he worked as a foreman in a rock and gravel company.

Her father was a Republican who was very interested in politics. He served as a school trustee for the grammar school, and played the tuba in the first city band.

She remembers a trip her father took to San Clemente Island around 1919 to shear the wild sheep, back when civilians were allowed to go there (it is now wholly owned and operated by the U.S. military). Jessie still had a pillow filled with the wool her father brought back.

Her father tragically died in 1922 in a work accident in which he was burned to death. He was 55. Jessie was 13. Her mother, on the other hand, lived to be 99.

Racism in Early Fullerton

The ancestry of the Coronas was a mixture of French, German, Mexican, and Native American. Thus, some of the members had blonde hair and blue eyes, and some were darker-skinned. This variety of complexions and mixed ancestry led to a lot of confusion and conflict in the 1920s in Fullerton, where discrimination against Mexicans and African Americans was fairly widespread.

“In the twenties, there were people that weren’t allowed anywhere,” Jessie recalls, “Mexican people, even blacks…they wouldn’t serve them, just because they had a dark skin.”

Describing her experiences going to the movies at the Chapman (later called the Fox) Theater, she remembers, “Another thing that was really bad, I thought the worst, and was so humiliating was when you went in a theater and they flashed a flashlight on your face, to see what color you were.” In those days, “the blacks and other races sat on the left-hand side, in a little small area.”

Jessie recalls an experience where she and her siblings went to the public pool in Fullerton. To enter the public pool, they had to go though a turnstile. Her youngest brother, Edward Lorraine, had blonde hair and blue eyes, and he was allowed in. Her sister, who had light brown hair and an olive complexion, was allowed in. When one of her darker-skinned brothers tried to get in, the man at the turnstile said, “You can’t come in, we have a day for Mexicans to swim.”

This made her older sister, Esther, really mad. Jessie recalls, “She grabbed the man and she pulled him over right close to her face and she said, ‘He is my brother. His skin is darker than mine. How come you let the blonde one in? They’re from the same father and mother.” Esther, in a rage, “hit him one time, she grabbed him…by the hair. She grabbed him by the neck and she punched that man until somebody called the police.”

When the police came, Esther held her ground.

“What’s this all about?” the police asked.

“He wouldn’t let us in for swimming. We paid our way; we had money. He let those two in and then when this brother was ready to go in, he wouldn’t’ let him it. So when he said there was a certain day for Mexicans to swim that made me awfully mad because we are Americans, and I never knew we were anything else but Americans.”

The police man looked at the beat-up turnstile man.

“Did you do this to him?” the officer asked Esther.

“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll do it again.”

“You let them go on in and swim,” the officer said.

“I wouldn’t go in there if he paid me,” she said, and took her siblings home.

Jessie recalls another incident where her family was at the movies in Anaheim and a couple teenagers called her father a “Kraut” because he had blonde hair and blue eyes. This was during WWI, and her brother was actually overseas fighting the Germans.

“That made us very angry,” she recalls, “We were twelve, and maybe seven and eight…so all three of us in unison jumped over dad and mom, over the next seat where those two young men were, they were teenagers, and beat up on them. We were outlaws, I guess.”

Marriage and the Depression

Jessie married her husband Patricio very young (at age 16), and they had two sons, Eduardo Patricio and Ronaldo.

Her husband was a brickmason and during the Great Depression had trouble finding work locally, so he found work in Santa Barbara, and then in San Simeon, working on the construction of Hearst Castle.

She remembers her husband telling her about how William Randolph Hearst would fly his mistress, Hollywood actress Marion Davies, to the castle. He told her of the lavish parties Hearst would throw with many celebrities.

After the Depression, Jessie and her family moved back to Fullerton, and stayed there, raising her two sons Eduardo Patricio and Ronaldo.

At the time of the Interview, Jessie showed to the interviewer some of the handicrafts that she learned from her grandmother that she continued to do, such as woven baskets and hand-painted gourds.

Reflecting on the past, Jessie says she misses the large family gatherings that her large extended family used to do regularly: “It seems like they have just drifted apart. How come we don’t get together? I’ve a lot of cousins, a lot of relatives, but we don’t have those big get-togethers, the picnics that they had long ago.”

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

Paul John Lotze was born in Germany in 1884, the fourth of seven children born to William M. and Augusta Lotze. 

In 1899, he emigrated to the United States, settling first in Kansas, where he worked on a farm for three years.

In 1902, he moved to San Bernardino, where he lived for six years, and learned the plumbing and sheet metal trades.  

In 1908, he moved to Fullerton and established his plumbing and sheet metal business. He did the plumbing for Fullerton high school.

In 1920, he built a shop at 124 West Commonwealth Avenue.

In 1910, he married Amelia Matilda Holve, also a native of Germany, who came to California in 1907. They had three children: Clarence, Walter and Lucille.  

The family home was located on South Highland Avenue, where he planted an orange grove.

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

E.C. Miles was born in Keokuk County, Iowa in 1867, the son of Daniel Miles, a farmer who fought in the Civil War for the Union Army.

The oldest of 11 children, Miles was educated at a rural school and later attended a business college in Colorado, after which he worked in the grocery business.

In 1911 he moved to Fullerton, and bought an orange grove, and became secretary and manager of the Fullerton Mutual Orange Association.

He married Alice Richardson in 1892 and they had two children: C. Neal and Bessie.

Fraternally, he was a Mason and a member of the Woodmen of  the World. He was also a director of the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Fullerton.

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

Hubert C. Ferry worked for the Union Oil Company from 1918-1956, first in Los Angeles, and then in Fullerton. Although his degree was in law, he was something of a renaissance man for the company. He worked “in a supervisorial, managerial, legal, administrative, or official capacity.”

As I read the transcript of a 1975 interview with Ferry for the CSUF Oral History Program, my initial impression of Ferry is that he was a very well-informed, service-oriented man who really believed he was working for a service industry. He said, “Considering the magnitude and hazards involved, the petroleum industry is performing a miraculous service with an outstanding safety record.” I’m not sure he could make that claim today.

But what really strikes me about this interview is how deeply embedded Ferry was, not just in Union Oil, but in the political, municipal, and civic life of Orange County:

He was on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

He was on the Advisory Board of St. Jude Hospital.

He was on the Orange County Planning Commission.

He was on the Advisory Committee of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution District.

He was on the Advisory Committee of the State Board of Health.

He was Chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Orange County Transit District.

He was Chairman of the Committee that financed the building of the current City Hall in Fullerton.

What business does a guy who worked for a major oil company for 38 years have on all these civic and municipal committees? I have to wonder whose interests he was representing on all those committees and boards. I suspect he was representing his employer, Union Oil. It is more than a little disturbing that a guy from an oil company was so deeply embedded in governmental and civic affairs.

A Google search revealed that there is a Hubert C. Ferry reservoir in Fullerton at 2011 N. Acacia Avenue that is leased to Spectrum cable for their Community Antenna Television (CATV) facility.