CELEBRATE! : ORANGE COUNTY’S FIRST 100 YEARS : FORGING AN IDENTITY : THE IRVINE SAGA

‘He was a great, great lover of land. I think the money was secondary. It was a great expanse of land that he loved and cherished. I always thought he was married to his land.’

In 1889, the year Orange County won its independence from Los Angeles County, James Irvine Jr. made a long journey from his boyhood home in San Francisco to look at the 108,184-acre ranch he had inherited from his father, who had died three years earlier. The adventurous mode of transportation the 22-year-old heir chose for his trip to Orange County--pedaling atop a high-wheel bicycle--gave some indication of the bold style that would characterize his 50-year stewardship of the ranch.

James Irvine Jr., known as J. I., was criticized as being stern, autocratic and tightfisted. But those who knew him best forgave those traits. They say that toughness was required of the man who owned about a fourth of the county’s land and constantly was called upon to protect his interests against squatters and cattle thieves.

J. I.’s force of personality is credited with having turned rangeland that supported only sheep, cattle and chaparral into one of the state’s most profitable agricultural holdings. A man of vision, he supervised the planting of lima beans, citrus, sugar beets, asparagus and other crops that yielded a fortune for himself and his descendants long before the Irvine Ranch gained national prominence as a mecca of planned community development.

While J. I. had many interests--he liked to hunt and fish and played the piano as well as a mean game of bridge--no one disputes that his biggest passion was the family ranch.

“He was a great, great lover of land. I think the money was secondary. It was a great expanse of land that he loved and cherished. In fact, I always thought he was married to his land,” says Athalie Clarke, who in 1929 married J. I.’s elder son James (Jase) Irvine III.

During J. I.’s early tenure, what is now known as the Irvine Ranch was called the San Joaquin Ranch after one of three Mexican and Spanish land-grant ranchos that once were owned by the Sepulveda and Yorba families and together formed the Irvine family’s land.

When a drought crippled Southern California’s ranchos in the 1860s, J. I.’s father, James Irvine Sr., joined three business associates, Thomas and Benjamin Flint and Llewellyn Bixby, and bought the bulk of the land that became the Irvine Ranch in two purchases--one in 1864, the other in 1866--for a total of $25,000. For decades, local newspapers touted the land acquisition as “about the most remarkable transaction in real estate ever known in this section.”

In 1876, James Irvine Sr. bought out his partners for $150,000 and became sole owner of the ranch, which he used principally to raise sheep because the disruption of cotton production during the Civil War had sent wool prices soaring.

Irvine, of Scotch Presbyterian ancestry, had been born in Ireland in 1827. He set out for the United States in 1846 to seek his fortune. After working a few years in paper mills in New York, he joined the gold stampede to California, where he made more money selling provisions to miners than from mining gold. He went into business as a San Francisco wholesale produce and grocery merchant and reinvested his considerable profits in real estate.

When James Irvine Sr. died in 1886, his estate was valued at $1.28 million. The ranch he left in trust to his son, J. I.--who would receive his inheritance at age 25--was appraised at $748,500.

Trustees of the ranch almost sold it at an auction before J. I. got it. But the official timekeeper at the auction became momentarily confused and designated one person, then another as the successful bidder. A judge ultimately determined neither bidder was entitled to the ranch.

Like his father, J. I. was attached to Northern California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and maintained offices in San Francisco as well as Orange County. In 1892, J. I. married Frances Anita Plum, who bore him three children--James, Kathryn Helena and Myford. The family initially made its home in San Francisco, but the San Francisco earthquake and fire 1906 prompted Irvine to permanently move his family to his Orange County ranch, which he had incorporated in 1894 as The Irvine Co.

Unlike his father, J. I. had no interest in raising sheep. He wanted to be a farmer.

Clarke recalls that when she came to live at the family ranch house as a young bride, her father-in-law took her for long walks and talked about his agricultural plans--and especially about the need to provide the often drought-plagued ranch with a sufficient supply of water. Through his efforts, an extensive system of wells, irrigation canals, dams and storage reservoirs was built on the ranch.

THOSE WHO LIVED IN THE family’s white-frame, two-story “mansion” on the ranch remember that although Irvine loved his children and grandchildren, he could be gruff and autocratic. Clarke recalls that every morning she heard a gong at 6:45 alerting family members that they must be seated for breakfast at 7:30 sharp. After breakfast, J. I.--invariably dressed in a well-tailored suit, tie and felt hat--took the short walk from his home to his ranch office and was at work by 8 a.m. J. I. also could be outrageous. He raised bird dogs, half a dozen of which trailed him everywhere he went, whether it was to the ranch office or to the homes of friends giving dinner parties. Clarke says that sometimes, to enliven after-dinner conversation, J. I. would toss a ball into a lighted fireplace in his living room, “and all the dogs would go rushing into that fireplace yelping. One dog would come out with the ball. J. I. would laugh and laugh. He got a big kick out of that.” And even when J. I. was in his 60s, Clarke says, without fail every Fourth of July he would hold a beach party at Irvine Cove, where he enjoyed tossing firecrackers under the chairs of his women guests. J. I.’s sometimes irascible behavior and his frequently stern countenance is said to have reflected the many family tragedies he endured. His wife Frances Anita died in 1909 as a young woman, and before his own death, J. I. saw the deaths of two of his three children.

A handsome man in his younger years who sported a thick shock of hair and a Teddy Roosevelt mustache, J. I. in his early 50s suddenly went bald and even lost his facial hair, including eyebrows. Clarke believes the hair loss was due to a nervous condition stemming from J. I.’s deep grief over his daughter’s death. (Other speculation about the possible cause of J. I.’s hair loss ranges from a mysterious disease that J. I. may have contracted during an African safari to his deep dismay over the appropriation of some of his best bean fields by the U.S. government for military bases.)

Eddie Martin Airport opens on leased Irvine Ranch property just north of today’s John Wayne Airport. Eddie Martin, who began making local aviation history in the 1920s, was no relation to pioneer aviator Glenn Martin.

Newcastle disease hits county poultry, killing more than 10 million chickens for a $20-million loss.

Residents vote to make Mission Viejo the county’s 27th city.

J. I.’s daughter Kathryn Helena, who married lawyer and war veteran Frank Z. Lillard in 1919, died on the ranch in 1920, three days after giving birth to a girl named Kathryn, who was raised by J. I.

Dorothy Yardley, a longtime Newport Beach resident who was fond of Kate, recalls: “She was a strong woman, and she ruled the roost.” Acquaintances said she acted as something of a diplomat for J. I. in the community. She founded the Assistance League of Santa Ana, a women’s charitable organization that initially met in her home.

Sleeper, he forbade central heating in the ranch house. When a relative suggested it would be hospitable to house guests to install a furnace, J. I. retorted, “If they’re cold, let ‘em wear these things.” He then pulled up his pants to reveal some much-mended long johns.

Now 68, Kathryn Wheeler says of her grandfather’s difficult personality: “He lived alone for so long that he did things the way he wanted to.”

In retrospect, Wheeler says, her grandfather was “a good guy” and “a self-made man with great vision.” But, she adds, “I was in awe of him when I was very young because I didn’t understand him.”

Wheeler says her grandfather softened somewhat when, in 1931, after 22 years as a widower, he married a buxom San Francisco divorcee named Katharine Brown White. Five feet, 10 inches tall, the woman affectionately known as “Big Kate” attracted a lot of attention because of her size, flamboyant hats, brash comments and entourage of eight yapping Pekingese.

Dorothy Yardley, a longtime Newport Beach resident who was fond of Kate, recalls: “She was a strong woman, and she ruled the roost.” Acquaintances said she acted as something of a diplomat for J. I. in the community. She founded the Assistance League of Santa Ana, a women’s charitable organization that initially met in her home.

J. I.’s INTERESTS WERE far-reaching. In the early 1900s, he went on an experimental, 20-minute flight with aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin, whom he allowed to use Irvine Ranch land for a runway. He also allowed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert A. Michelson to use a mile-long strip of ranch land for an experiment to measure the velocity of light.

J. I. formed a cooperative to build a factory for processing locally grown sugar beets, and he constructed a plant on Upper Newport Bay to produce salt from solar evaporation.

On a less scientific note, J. I. was a leader in organizing Orange County’s first nine-hole golf course, built on the ranch in 1899. He also donated 160 acres in Santiago Canyon to the county as a picnic area, now known as Irvine Regional Park.

J. I. was a staunch Republican with an abiding interest in local politics both in San Francisco and Orange County, Clarke says. She recalls that during elections J. I. would instruct her to go to the ranch office and drive workers to the polls. He added the warning, “But don’t you drive any Democrats.” J. I.’s primary interest, however, was farming. After his first wife died, he traveled the world and brought back tropical and exotic plants for experimentation. Clarke remembers that her father-in-law invited many agrarian experts to the ranch. “He was always looking for something new.”

Wheeler says that her grandfather was such an astute farmer that “he could pick soil up and tell you what was in it.” She recalls that a young visiting scientist was skeptical of J. I.’s ability until he substantiated J. I.’s soil assessment with his own laboratory tests.

J. I. developed agriculture on the ranch in large part by promoting sharecropping. Local historian Judy Liebeck noted that J. I. was under pressure from a homesteader-controlled state Legislature to start allowing others to farm his land as tenants or risk losing chunks of land to persons who might claim ownership by exerting squatters’ rights. So, Liebeck said, J. I. selected farmers to whom he leased a house, barn and farming equipment for $6 a year. He also demanded a share--generally a third--of the crop they raised on the ranch.

Orange County historian Jim Sleeper says that in the 1890s J. I. had to “force” his tenant farmers to grow lima beans where they had been raising hay and grain. But the farmers stopped objecting when demand for the beans burgeoned during World War I. At peak production in 1918, the ranch had the largest bean field in the world, covering 17,000 acres. By then the settlement of bean growers now known as East Irvine was nicknamed “Beanville.” In later years, however, beans vanished from the ranch and were replaced by asparagus, strawberries and oranges, crops with a higher return on investment.

Bill Cook, 87, who came to the Irvine Ranch as a tenant farmer in 1929 and later managed the Irvine bean-and-grain warehouse for 22 years, recalls that J. I. kept a close eye on his tenants. “Nobody did anything on the ranch without his knowing about it.”

CLARKE SAYS SHE and her husband Jase often accompanied J. I. on rides around the ranch. It was then, she says, that his frugality would show. “If he saw (irrigation) water running down the road, he would say, ‘Jase, find out where that water is coming from. Who is wasting that water?’ ”

She says J. I. also was frugal in his life style. He drove modestly priced Plymouths and Dodges and watched his savings grow. For years, according to Sleeper, he forbade central heating in the ranch house. When a relative suggested it would be hospitable to house guests to install a furnace, J. I. retorted, “If they’re cold, let ‘em wear these things.” He then pulled up his pants to reveal some much-mended long johns.

Clarke says that during the Depression J. I. told her “if the Depression lasted for 10 years, he could ride it out” because of the money he had stashed away.

“J. I. kept wages down, and that affected the whole county,” says Cook. On the other hand, he adds, J. I. seldom fired anyone.

J. I.’s most loyal supporters say he could be very generous to people he felt were deserving. Because J. I. shunned publicity, they say, most of the good he did was not widely known.

Cook once told J. I. that the widow of a warehouse employee was at the end of her financial rope. He informed J. I. that the woman, whose husband previously had been the sole warehouse worker to refuse to participate in a strike for higher wages, was unable to survive on the $11 a month she was receiving in Social Security. Later, Cook says, the ranch bookkeeper confided to him that J. I. had begun sending the widow $150 a month.

Eddie Martin, 86, recalls that in 1923 J. I. allowed him to establish an airport on 80 acres of leased land on the Irvine Ranch. Martin says that J. I. let him continue operating the airport during the Depression when he was unable to make lease payments. J. I. subsequently reduced the rental rate and canceled the old lease, deciding instead to do business with Martin “on a handshake.”

Martin’s business encounter with J. I. illuminated the meaning of a sign over the door to J. I.’s office that read, “Often the best way to show warm sympathy is cold cash.”

J. I. WAS ABLE TO TRAVEL extensively in his later life largely because he could entrust management of his beloved ranch to his elder son Jase, who shared his proclivity for farming and was being groomed as his successor.

However, J. I.’s plans were shattered in 1935, when, at age 42, Jase died from a bout with flu and double pneumonia. So, in 1937, J. I. formed a charitable foundation, directed by some of his old farming and business buddies and his surviving son Myford, to take control of the ranch upon his death. The James Irvine Foundation, to which J. I. bequeathed 54.5% of the Irvine Co.’s stock, is still in existence and has provided millions of dollars to charities and private schools. According to J. I.’s edict, recipients cannot include organizations that are tax-supported.

After Jase’s death, J. I. started spending a lot of time with Jase’s daughter, Athalie Anita (Joan), an exceptionally pretty and strong-willed child.

Clarke, Joan’s mother, says that Joan “looked so much like her father and had so many of her father’s ways and manners that J. I. just wanted to be with her whenever he could.” The two fished, hunted and rode horseback together during summers on the ranch, and J. I. often visited Joan and her mother, who after Jase’s death had moved from the ranch to Beverly Hills. In 1947, J. I., 79, died from a heart attack while fishing in an icy stream in Montana. His son Myford, then 49, was chosen to replace J. I. as president of the Irvine Co. But because Myford, a talented musician who previously had been an investor in San Francisco, had little expertise in farming, he entrusted responsibility for handling most ranch business to his boyhood friend, Brad Hellis, who became general manager.

In 1959, Myford was found dead in the basement of the family farmhouse with two shotgun blasts through the stomach and a slug from a .22 rifle through the brain. After extensive investigations, the coroner ruled that Myford’s death was a suicide, although J. I.’s granddaughter Joan and her mother remain skeptical.

Even before Myford’s mysterious death, Clarke and Joan, who at age 24 took Clarke’s place on the Irvine Co. board of directors, had begun to question the way the Irvine Co. was being managed.

They alleged that Hellis, then both a member of the Irvine Co. board of directors and a director of the James Irvine Foundation, was taking advantage of his corporate position to buy land on his own account or in partnership with the company’s real estate broker, Walter Tubach. They claimed that Hellis had improperly cut himself into land transactions that the Irvine Co. was making in the Imperial Valley. After Joan and her mother said they intended to file a stockholders’ derivative suit against Hellis, Tubach and the Irvine Co., Hellis agreed to resign from the board and the foundation.

That was only the beginning of Joan’s showdowns with the foundation members who sat on the Irvine Co. board of directors and controlled the company founded by J. I. She fought in public to get her way, prodding other company directors into giving 1,000 acres to the regents of the University of California to develop an Irvine campus. And she tried to accelerate the company’s land-development efforts.

Joan--whose contrariness and persistence are said to have evoked memories of her grandfather--succeeded in getting enacted two provisions of the 1969 federal Tax Reform Bill that required tax-exempt foundations to divest themselves of holdings of more than 50% in any one company and required foundations to give to charity a percentage of their total assets each year, a percentage that far exceeded the amount the Irvine Foundation was dispensing.

In 1975, Joan filed a lawsuit to prevent the foundation from selling the Irvine Co. to Mobil Oil Corp. in a deal, she complained, that would have squeezed her mother and herself out of the company. She also objected that the $200 million Mobil originally offered to pay for the company was far too low.

In 1977, Joan’s lawsuit spurred a bidding war for the Irvine Co. that attracted national attention.

Joan Irvine Smith, four times divorced and the mother of three grown sons, joined a group of business magnates who made the highest offer and bought the company for $337.4 million. She sold her 21.1% interest in the old Irvine Co. and bought an 11% interest in the purchasing company. Although she had succeeded in wresting the Irvine Co. from the foundation’s grip and proved that her higher valuation of the company was correct, it turned out in some respects to be a Pyrrhic victory.

Joan almost immediately started complaining that she was unable to trust Donald Bren, a debonair Southern California builder in the purchasing consortium she had joined. Bren subsequently attained control of the Irvine Co. by buying out other large shareholders from Detroit and New York, including Detroit shopping center developer A. Alfred Taubman.

So, in November, 1983, Joan decided to sell the 11% ownership interest that she and her mother still held in the Irvine Co. She thus forever severed herself from the heritage of land that she and her grandfather treasured. Two other Irvine family members, Myford’s daughter Linda Irvine Gaede and his stepson William T. White III, together still own about 2% of the Irvine Co.

But it is Joan Irvine Smith who again is in the news. She is waging a lengthy court battle with Bren over how much money she should get for the stock that she and her mother agreed to sell in 1983. She claims the company was worth about $3 billion at that time, making the 11% interest she and her mother held worth up to $500 million, including interest. Bren, who valued the company at $1 billion in 1983, is offering her $88 million. His lawyers argue that the other shareholders were satisfied that Bren paid them a fair price when he bought their shares in 1983.

Until the court case is settled, Joan refuses to leave the county, even to visit her horse-breeding farm in Virginia. She spends most of her days watching the Irvine Co.’s every move. She and her representatives attend local water board and City Council meetings to make sure the company does nothing that will harm the value of her stock. As a diversion, she has developed a stable for show horses near San Juan Capistrano where she holds jumping competitions.

If J. I. were alive, he probably would cringe at the public controversy his ranch has generated--and at the fate of his choice farmland. At a quick clip, citrus groves and field crops in the past two decades have given way to housing developments, shopping centers and industrial parks, although about 60,000 undeveloped acres remain.