​When the Brave New Urbanists talk about the good old days of SanTana, the days before Mexicans destroyed the Golden City, they inevitably point to people like Arnold F. Peek.

Like the Brave New Urbanists, he wasn't originally from the area, hailing instead from Kansas. Like the Brave New Urbanists, he appreciated the craft of artisan food, operating the Fourth Street Meat Market in downtown SanTana. Like the Brave New Urbanists, he took an undue interest in the well-being of his new town, participating in many civic causes.

But unlike the Brave New Urbanists, Peek was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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​Brea is infamous in the annals of Orange County for its unofficial sundown town law for much of its existence, and for just being generally nasty toward minorities, but here's an interesting fact: Brea never had segregated schools for Mexicans. Reason? There was no need for it--no Mexicans in town!

The area's most famous Mexican resident was former California Supreme Court Judge Cruz Reynoso, born in the town in 1931. As he told an oral historian years later, there were two Mexican families in Brea at the time--two! In 1930s Orange County, the height of the area's citrus industry! Mexis knew better, you know? Judge Reynoso doesn't say it in the interview I linked to, but he's told other historians that one of the reasons he got into law was because of the racism his family faced in Brea.

Which leads us to William A. Culp.
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​Good news, all five readers of you: I've finally been able to move out all my Orange County history books from the catacombs into my new office, meaning I now have full access to all sorts of directories and local history books that I can match up with the OC Klan's membership roster from the 1920s! Yay!

This series was easy enough for me as it is based on my knowledge of OC esoterica; now, armed with these books, it'll be like finding pedophiles at a diocese. Take today, for instance, where all I had to do was flip open a book--and there was the name of Harry E. Inskeep.
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​One of the reasons why I love writing historical-themed cover stories is that it gives me the excuse to look through years of microfilm of the county's old newspapers--not just the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times, but the county's many long-gone dailies. Not only are they time capsules, but they are chockablock with bloggable treasures that still resonate to a modern-day audience--like the reprehensible caricature of a Mexican in an 1924 Fullerton Daily Tribune op-ed cartoon--which, of course, is after the jump.
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Wal-ly Beater, Wal-ly Beater...

​Blase Bonpane, religious rebel and renegade, has lived a life inspired by the prospect of peace in our world. Director of the Office of the Americas, weekly radio host of World Focus on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles, and author of numerous books, the tireless activist turns to the subject of his own life in his latest work, Imagine No Religion: The Autobiography of Blase Bonpane, which he'll be presenting at the Anaheim Unitarian-Universalist Church this Friday.

Of course, here in Orange County, we best remember him--even if we have never heard of a Blase Bonpane in our life--for his legendary scuffle with the late, great Wally George.
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As true today as in the 1920s

​You'll remember in Marisa's story last month about the many sins of the Fullerton Police Department both before and after their killing of Kelly Thomas how she talked to an older woman who was subjected to a home invasion without warrant by the city's bullies in blue. Turns out that fucking around with innocent people in the name of battling phantom drugs is nothing new from them.

In the rapidly decaying microfilm for the Fullerton Tribune held at the Fullerton Public Library are many stories of police tomfoolery. Time and illegible prints only allows me to tell one.
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​I'm not going to write TOO much about Arthur Koepsel here because...well, you'll read more this Thursday in our paper. But, of course, whenever it comes to the pioneers of Orange County, first we must consult their self-published bios as included in Samuel Armor's collection. So, let's hear it, Art!

"Prominent among the leading attorneys, who have steadfastly sought to maintain a high standard of ethics for the Orange County Bar," starts his mug-shot bio, "Arthur E. Koepsel, of the well-known firm of Eden and Koepsel, enjoys that esteem, both indicative of the confidence of his fellow-citizens in the past and desirable and  enviable as a guarantee of profitable patronage for the future."

Unless, of course, you were a minority, 'cause Koepsel was Klan.
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​The annals of Orange County's relations with its Mexicans will always be updated with the rank racism of the past (and today!), yet some anecdotes can still make any good person stop and shake their head. For instance: I knew that school administrators in segregated Mexican schools during the 1930s through the 1950s had schoolchildren participate in exercises they claimed would get them ready to join their family in the fields and orchards of la naranja--but I never knew that SanTana schools required their students to work as their janitors and gardeners.
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I think we gave out condoms for this issue...

​In the course of Marisa's investigations into what became her badass cover story on the evil Fullerton Police Department, I had her run to the Langson Library at UC Irvine, to go through their collection of the Weekly on microfilm. See, due to an incredibly foolish lack of foresight by previous administrations here, there exists no full online archives of the OC Weekly between our founding in the fall of 1995 up until 1999 or so--no easy access to the bulk of Moxley's Bob Dornan coverage, R. Crumb's recollections of Orange County in the 1950s, and so many more great articles.

Marisa encountered a surly librarian, who denied that they had the Weekly on microfilm; when Marisa informed him to the contrary, he summarily said, "If it were up to me, we wouldn't keep it."

And that got me thinking.
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​Out in the Central Valley town of Lindsay, Bastady Ranches continues the family's century-long tradition of growing oranges. They've been there since 1955, since Emanuel Bastady moved the family business from Buena Park, a business he inherited from his uncle Frederick, a child of Swiss immigrants.

"Held in high esteem as a useful and progressive member of his community," according to Samuel Armor's always entertaining collection of self-penned mug-shot bios, Bastady was the epitome of small-town Orange County virtue, serving as president of the chamber of commerce and also sitting on the local school board.

And, of course, Bastady was a Klan member.
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