10
Chapter One - The Origin of the Rancho Santa Margarita, 1841 – 1972
Today’s City of Rancho Santa Margarita was once the northernmost part of the
Rancho Santa Margarita. The area, first described in the diaries of conquistadors who
were part of Gaspar de Portola’s inland expedition of California in 1769. Santa
Margarita was named in honor of Saint Margaret, the patron saint whose feast day, July
20th happened to fall on the day these first Europeans reached the area.1 The land was
home to Native Americans long before a European presence occurred.2 Originally, the
area known a Santa Margarita was located in the San Luis Rey Valley and fell under the
jurisdiction of Mission San Luis Rey.3 Following secularization of the mission Rancho
Santa Margarita became the largest Mexican land grant in California history. In 1841 Pio
Pico, a wealthy Californio and soon to be California’s last Mexican Governor, received
the grant and combined it with another grant to form Rancho Santa Margarita y Las
Flores. This property accounted for 133,440 acres. During the Mexican American War,
Pico fled to Mexico and Juan Forster, his brother-in-law, combined the ranch with
properties he owned including Rancho Mission Viejo, 46,433 acres, and Rancho
1
Herbert Eugene Bolton. ed., Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast 1769-1774.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927) 132.
2
Michael Edward Thurman, “A History of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores to 1882” (Master’s
Thesis, University of Southern California, 1960) 4.
3
Ibid. 7-28.
11
Trabuco, 22,184 acres. After a costly court case known as Pico vs. Foster in 1873, all the
property collectively known as Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores totaling 202,058
acres became the property of Juan Forster. This court case, prolonged droughts, and new
California Law requiring ranchers to fence in their property drove Forster into
unsalvageable debt. 4 Forster’s death forced his heirs to liquidate the ranch in order to
pay creditors.5
James Walker (1818-1889) from his stay on the Rancho Santa Margarita depicted ranching in his work
entitled “Cattle Drive #1” Courtesy of the California Historical Society, Fine Arts Collection.6
4
Paul Bryan Gray, Forster vs. Pico: The Struggle for the Rancho Santa Margarita (Spokane: The Arthur
Clark Company, 1998). 11 passim.
5
Thurman, 104.
6
James Walker, Cattle Drive #1, oil on canvas, 1877, California Historical Society, Fine Arts Collection,
FN-16020.
12
James Walker (1818-1889) “Roping the Bear, Santa Margarita Rancho of Juan Forster," ca. 1870
Courtesy of the California Historical Society, Fine Arts Collection.7
The size of the property varied over the years as the ranch acquired and sold
various parcels. According to Jerome O’Neill Baumgartner the ranch included between
200,000 and 270,000 acres or 355 square miles; roughly a fourth of the size of Rhode
Island.8 John Baumgartner’s figures note a 233,000-acre property but “210,000 acres
under fence.”9 Details of the acreage drafted by the Rancho Santa Margarita Corporation
in November 1930 reveal a property of 203,573.97 acres.10 The following map shows the
property totaling 202,058 acres in comparison to the neighboring 96,030 acre Irvine
Ranch. Before 1941, Rancho Santa Margarita spread into three California Counties. The
ranch ran 35 miles from El Toro in Orange County to Oceanside in San Diego County. It
7
James Walker, Roping the Bear, Santa Margarita Rancho of Juan Forster, oil on canvas, 1870, California
Historical Society, Fine Arts Collection, FN-00881, FN-30658.
8
Jerome W. Baumgartner, Rancho Santa Margarita Remembered: An Oral History. (Santa Barbara:
Fithian Press, 1989) 5.
9
John J. Baumgartner Jr., Reflections of a Scion of the Rancho Santa Margarita. Interviewed by Shirley E.
Stephenson (California State Universtiy, Fullerton Oral History Program 1982) San Juan Capistrano
History Project 5.
10
Ibid., Appendix 9-12.
13
stretched between 15 and 20 miles inland to the towns of Temecula in Riverside County
and Fallbrook in San Diego County. In 1942 under the Second War, Powers Act the
Department of the Navy acquired the lower two-thirds of the ranch. The remaining
68,000 acres remained in tact as what is known today as Rancho Mission Viejo, which
encompasses the most southern ten-percent of Orange County.
The original Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, Rancho Mission Viejo, and Rancho Trabuco Grants11
11
Jerome W. Baumgartner, 6.
14
Exclusive ownership of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores began with the
purchase of the ranch by Richard James C. Flood, of the Comstock Silver fortune, in
October 1882. Flood, at the request of his friend and fellow immigrant Richard O’Neill,
bought the ranch from Forster’s heirs. Under a verbal agreement, sealed in a handshake,
between the two men Flood would contribute the capital and O’Neill the management
responsibility for the property. Both would share one-half interest in the vast property.
On 3 January 1923, the ranch incorporated to form the Rancho Santa Margarita
Corporation. A corporate history compiled in 1930 reveals that fifty percent of the entire
capital of the Rancho Santa Margarita, 8,750 shares, went to James L. Flood son of James
C. Flood. The remaining 8,750 shares went to Jerome O’Neill son of Richard O’Neill.12
In doing so, James L. Flood honored the verbal agreement of his father made over forty
years before to O’Neill and his clan. On 1 January 1942, the Oceanside News reported a
three way split of the Rancho Santa Margarita.13 The Flood heirs received the southern
one-third portion of ranch including the main ranch house. This was the most valuable
parcel including the Santa Margarita River and various Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe
Rail Road Depots. Jerome O’Neill’s heirs split the remaining two-thirds. The middle
third of the ranch went to the Mary Baumgartner Family, related by marriage and the
Richard J. O’Neill Family received the most northern parcel. Accounts as to the division
of the ranch remain unclear and vary from necessity, based on the intended use of the
land to drawing lots.14 Sources do agree that at the time the Floods intended to sell their
12
John J. Baumgartner Jr., Appendix 3.
“Historic Old Ranch To Be Split Into Parcels,” The Oceanside News, 1 January 1942.
14
Anthony R. Moiso, Interview by Patricia R. Petring, 20 April 1972. O.H. 1149, transcript Center for Oral
and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.
13
15
portion and invest their earnings. The Baumgartners intended to maintain a ranching
operation and the O’Neills continued to allow tenants to farm their portion.
The 1941 division of the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores
15
The Navy’s plan of the acquisition of Camp Pendleton coincided with this
division of Rancho Santa Margarita.16 When it occurred, the government paid the
Baumgartners and the Floods $4.25 million dollars for the land south of the Orange
15
16
Jerome W. Baumgartner, 160.
“Soldiers May Replace Riders,” The Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1941
16
County line.17 The O’Neills continue to own the parcel of the ranch in Orange County
known as Rancho Mission Viejo.
Rancho Santa Margarita in the wake of the United States Navy’s 1942 acquisition 18
Steven Schrank Executive, Vice President in charge of development at Rancho
Mission Viejo stated the property is unusual in that one entity controlled such a vast
property over such a span of time.19 Few properties of this size in the nation and even
17
Jerome W. Baumgartner, 161.
Ibid., 162.
19
Stephen Shrank, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 5 April 2001, interview not cataloged and not
transcribed. Rancho Mission Viejo Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program.
18
17
fewer in the state have demonstrated such ownership over time. Since 1882, Richard
O’Neill and his heirs owned, controlled and managed the ranch land. Today, Anthony
Moiso, the son of Alice Marguerite O’Neill Avery, directs the property as President and
Chief Executive Officer in the interest of the family.
For much of the family’s history, the management of the property revolved
around daily hands-on agricultural involvement. However, over time they began to
remove themselves from the ranch’s operation. After the 1942 division of the ranch,
Rancho Mission Viejo primarily leased the land to tenant farmers or hired individuals to
oversee day-to-day ranching operations. This allowed the O’Neills to reside in Los
Angeles and still benefit from the ranch’s earnings. Upon the passing of Richard J.
O’Neill in 1943, the property fell into a trust held by Crocker Bank, formerly the Citizens
National Trust & Savings Bank, for the benefit of his children Alice Marguerite O’Neill
Avery and Richard Jerome O’Neill.20 At times Daisy O’Neill, wife of the late Richard J.
O’Neill, contemplated selling the property but due in part to the encouragement of John J.
Baumgartner, Jr., a successful rancher, she held on to the property.21 Daisy O’Neill
demonstrated her resolve to maintain family ownership in the ranch when the trust on two
occasions attempted to sell the property to pursue other investments. By 1960, this led to
a more active stewardship of the family’s ranch land.22
In 1963, various builders approached the family as urbanization encroached upon
Rancho Mission Viejo. From these meetings, the family decided to develop the northern
most 10,000 acres of a now 50,000-acre property under the direction of Donald Bren. By
20
Warren Wilson, Interview by Patricia Petring, 29 March 1972, OH #1151, transcript. Community History
Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program.
21
John J. Baumgartner Jr., 35f.
22
Anthony R. Moiso, 20 April 1972.
18
January 1964, the Mission Viejo Company emerged and purchased the land from Rancho
Mission Viejo for the purposes of developing the 100,000-person community of Mission
Viejo. To finance this venture the family collaborated with the Phillip Morris Company
to provide the necessary capital in order to achieve its goals. This orderly liquidation of
Rancho Mission Viejo land allowed the funds to continue the family’s agricultural
business. However, it did not provide the autonomous management the family once
enjoyed.23
In September 1967, the O’Neill family sold the Mission Viejo Company to Phillip
Morris Company resulting in what Anthony Moiso recalled a “rude awakening.” The
sale of the Mission Viejo Company required that Rancho Mission Viejo relinquish
control of the development and immediately relinquish any say in the future development
of the land. From this point, the Phillip Morris Company developed Mission Viejo until
its completion in 1993. Today members of Rancho Mission Viejo are proud of the
company’s involvement with Mission Viejo and the fact that it has become a desirable
city to live and work. Yet, at the same time, they remain reluctant from ever
relinquishing control of a development company that they created to a conglomerate that
will develop a community that will be in their immediate vicinity.24 One of Moiso’s
greatest regrets is the lack of open space in the home packed Mission Viejo community. 25
23
Ibid., 8-15.
Anthony Moiso, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 13 December 2000, OH #2904, not transcribed. South
Orange County Incorporation Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program.
25
“Big Open Space Offered,” Orange County Business Journal (Irvine), 6-12 November 2000
24
19
Voices of the Land before Construction of Rancho Santa Margarita
The following two oral histories are a testament to the Ranch’s operation prior to
the planning or construction. The first is that of Warren Wilson conducted by Patricia
Petring in March of 1972. Originally transcribed by Petring, this oral history is archived
in the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton as O.H.
1151. Wilson had been the trust officer of the O’Neill property since 1958 and he
assumed full responsibility for the trust when Elmer Peterson, the previous officer, retired
from Crocker Bank in 1961. Wilson was responsible for maintaining the value of the
property for the benefit of Daisy O’Neill and her children, Alice Marguerite O’Neill
Avery and Richard Jerome O’Neill. In doing so, Mr. Wilson oversaw contracts with
tenant farmers and various forms of business activities related to the ranch.
The second oral history also conducted by Petring in April 1972 is that of
Anthony R. Moiso. Transcribed by Suzanne Walter in September 2000, it is archived at
the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton as O.H.
1149. Mr. Moiso is the son of Alice Marguerite O’Neill Avery and the great-grandson of
Richard O’Neill who acquired Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores in 1882. Mr. Moiso
explains some brief history of his family’s ranch and their desire to take a more active
role in the future of their land entrusted to Crocker Bank since 1943 as O’Neill
20
Properties. Most importantly, Mr. Moiso explains how O’Neill Properties or the O’Neill
Ranch became Rancho Mission Viejo and how it was once part of three other ranches:
the Santa Margarita, the Las Flores, and the Trabuco. Furthermore, he explains that the
Mission Viejo Company was created in 1963 to acquire land from Rancho Mission Viejo
for the purposes of developing the community of Mission Viejo in the northern most
section of Rancho Mission Viejo. Interestingly, toward the conclusion of the interview
Mr. Moiso eludes to future development of the Rancho Mission Viejo and specifically the
Plano Trabuco section that would become the community of Rancho Santa Margarita
almost fifteen years later.
21
Warren Wilson, Trust Officer for O’Neill Ranch Rancho Mission Viejo
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Community History Project
INTERVIEWEE:
WARREN WILSON
INTERVIEWER:
Patricia R. Petring
SUBJECT:
O’Neill Ranch
TRANSCRIBED BY:
Patricia R. Petring
DATE:
March 29, 1972
PP:
This is an interview with Warren Wilson for the Orange County Community
History Project by Patricia Petring at 24272 Fordview in El Toro on March 29,
1972, at 8:00 o’clock in the evening.
Warren, what has been your background, how did you get into this
business of the O’Neill Ranch and trust officer for the Crocker Bank?
WW: Well, it’s sort of a long story but to shorten it up as much as possible, I started
with the bank a little over thirty-one years ago just before I joined the Navy and
when I came back after the second World War which was about 1947, I worked in
the Transit Department which was an evening operation while I was going to
U.S.C. And after about two years, I was transferred into the Trust Department, I
guess that was 1948. And from 1948 until now, I’ve been in the Trust
22
Department and in 1961, I think it was, Mr. Peterson, my supervisor retired with
compulsory retirement program at 65 and he was then 65. And the bank decided
that I would, among my other functions, would take over the operation of the
O’Neill Trust and the principle asset of the O’Neill Trust, which the bank had had
since 1926 was the O’Neill Ranch or more commonly known as Rancho Mission
Viejo in the south portion of Orange County. And about that time, the south,
southeast portion of Orange County became very active and began to urbanize
and so it was impossible to operate the ranch from downtown Los Angeles so
very shortly I was able to get transferred to the Santa Ana Trust Department just
to make it closer to the operations back, oh, eight or nine years ago. And then
after things got more active, I just moved on down and moved my office to the
administration building that Rancho Mission, that O’Neill, well, let me get it right
here, that Mission Viejo Company built which is their center of operation for the
development of the community known as Mission Viejo, California, and so my
office has been there ever since and this has been about five years now. Since
that time, I’ve moved my family down here and we’re still here and the ranch is
still very active. So, I don’t know whether that answers your question, Pat, or not,
but little by little the ranch became more active and more active and a
development transaction was negotiated with Mission Viejo Company which in
those days was known as the Fuller-Bren entity which later became Mission Viejo
Company. And gradually we got out to the ranch and it’s still as active as ever.
The ranch operation is just as active as before the urbanization started at Mission
Viejo Company in the northwest corner. The ranch, with the exception of the
23
present moment, runs as much cattle as it ever did. The reason the present
moment is excepted is because the rainfall this winter has been so terrible that
there’s just no grass out there and so the cattle have moved out.
PP:
Have you moved out most of them now, or how many are there?
WW: We’re in the process right now. Last week, shipments headed for northern
Nevada where the O’Neill interests have land and there will be probably 4000
more head of cattle between now and three or four weeks from now headed in the
same direction. The ranches there are in very high altitudes and the snows are just
now melting and so it will be a little while before that ranch, it’s known as the PX
Ranch, by the way, which we’re renaming the North Fork Ranch, and it’ll be able
to carry about 9000 head of cattle by the time the snows are melted. The O’Neill
interests have acreage in Mexico, also. We have about 7000 head of cattle in
Mexico.
PP:
Now, will these cattle from Mexico be sent directly to Nevada?
WW: Most of them will go directly to Nevada, right.
PP:
What kind of cattle do you raise?
WW: The cattle from Mexico are cross-bred and that means they have about everything
you can think of in them, all kinds of breeds including dairy breeds and they’re
very homely cattle but they do very well. Their health record is good, very good.
PP:
Does the ranch ever, have they ever tried raising Charolaise, I believe?
WW: Charolaise? No, we have, I think we have nine or ten Charolaise bulls that we’re
using for cross-breed purposes but we’ve never really bred for pure-bred
Charolaise.
24
PP:
I thought I had seen them on the hills one time when I was driving by and I was
just curious.
WW: Some of them we got from our neighbor, Rosenbaum, Ed Rosenbaum.
PP:
Well, what happens when you have these spring roundups. Now, you just
finished one this year, didn’t you?
WW: Yes. Well, not a great deal. It’s the same thing that’s been happening I guess for
about 200 years more or less. Only this year and in recent years, the activity has
been less in volume, considerably less in volume, than the older years. For
example, if you go back about six or seven years, the entire cattle operation was a
cow-calf operation, the white face Hereford cow-calf operation, and we had a
great number of calves born every year. The breed herd was between 1800 and
2000 head of cows and with a calf crop of 80, between 80% and 90%, we always
had thirteen, fourteen, sometimes fifteen hundred head of calves every year and
about this time of the year, they were reaching the age where they could be, they
were strong enough to be processed weighing four hundred, four hundred and a
quarter, something like that. And so they were of the age where they could be
rounded up with their mothers and cut out in the corrals and treated, that means
de-horned and the bull calves castrated so that they became steers and both the
steers and the heifers were branded for obvious reasons. They were inoculated
and I’ve probably already mentioned de-horning. That’s quite a shock to the
animals, but since we started the Mexican operation, we’ve received a great
number of four hundred, four hundred and fifty pound animals from the Mexican
operation so we don’t look to the breed herd as much as we did in the old days
25
and the breed herd has been cut back. Now we have probably 450 breed cows as
compared to 1800 to 2000 breed cows in the old days. So, the roundups nowdays
coming from, say, 400 to 450 cows with an eighty per cent calf crop only small
amounts to about 300 to 350 calves over maybe three days of activity. So we
brand and process only about 120 calves per day for about three days. This past
year which just ended as far as their annual roundup is concerned just a week ago,
we branded on, rounded up and branded on Wednesday and Thursday of last
week and then on Saturday, we left about 120 head to be branded, rounded up and
branded on Saturday and invited a little over a thousand of the old time friends of
the ranch to, as always, to come in for the annual roundup and it’s a day of
festivity and the cowboys on the ranch as well as our neighboring cowboys from
the Irvine Ranch, from the Moulton Ranch and our friends who, some of our
friends who, by the way, might be doctors or attorneys, are still very good
horsemen. And they like to come in and join with us for a day or two and help
round up the cattle, starting at daybreak and, in spite of the fact that they’re
behind a desk or encumbered with a stethoscope half of the time, they still remain,
strangely enough, they remain pretty good horsemen and they do a real good job
on the roundup. I rode last Wednesday, for example; I’d like to do that at least
one day myself a week, I mean each year and it’s always good to see the friends
that come in. But it’s a fest, the last day of the roundup, even though our
roundups are very small compared to the old days because of the stocker cattle
that do not need, they’re already processed by the time we get them and we don’t
have to process them as we do the native calves. We still have a token effort and
26
last week happened to be the time of the year when that happened. And so, all the
friends came in and we saved, as I’ve mentioned before, about 120 calves to be
processed during this festive occasion on Saturday when about a thousand friends
of the O’Neills came in, straddled the fence and watched all the activities and
joined in the barbecue and that sort of thing.
PP:
You said branding. Is there still rustling going on?
WW: Well, I really don’t know how to answer that question. I know the local press this
past year carried an article or two on that. All we know for sure is that we’re
short quite a lot of cattle in certain areas. This past year, for example, we were
short about thirty-five, my memory is probably not exactly accurate, but I think it
was in the neighborhood of thirty-five head of cattle in the southwestern portion
of the ranch which is in those pastures near the city of San Clemente. But there’s
no way of telling where they went or what happened to them, so your guess and
your conjecture is as good as ours. We have our own private thoughts based on
activity over the last five decades but since it involves people that are still living
today, we prefer not to mention any names or anything.
PP:
What stands out as some of the incidents that have happened on some of these
roundups that you have been, ridden for?
WW: Well, I don’t know that anything in particular has been outstanding on the
roundups. That’s not my particular end of the business although I enjoy going
along on the roundups. I would say, and it’s going to be a nebulous and very
general answer, the most interesting part of the roundups are the people with
whom you ride. For example, last Wednesday, it’s a week ago today, isn’t it?
27
PP:
Right.
WW: Last Wednesday, the three riders that were riding with me in the portion of the
ranch that we were assigned to to flush cattle out of particular canyons and that
sort of thing was a fellow named Tad Devine and it wasn’t until we were just
about finished that I discovered that his father was Andy Devine. Tad was a very
interesting fellow. He lives in Newport Beach. He’s a friend of the Moisos.
Tony Moiso lives in Newport, Corona Del Mar, which is, I guess, a part of
Newport. And there were a lot of other people that arrived every roundup
weekend. I’m trying to think at the moment, some of the old western cowboys.
Well, I’d have to ask my wife about this one that used to show up at her
elementary school in Long Beach and give roping lessons to her students. It’s not
Tom Mix; he’s long dead.
PP:
Monty Montana?
WW: Monty Montana, right. This is the first year, as a matter of fact, that Monty
Montana hasn’t shown up for many years and I he’s not under the weather or
anything, but he and several of the other old timers liked to show up at the
roundups. What I’m saying, I guess, is that the people are really more interesting
than the cattle. (Laughter)
PP:
Yes, I can believe it.
WW: The cattle sort of do the same thing every year and it’s the people that I find more
interesting than the cattle.
PP:
I was going to ask you about the master plan that was drawn up. Did you have
anything to do with that or was that taken care of?
28
WW: Well, yes, we. In 1962, I think it was, about ten years ago that we first decided
that we better have a t least a broad brush approach to a master plan and after
several contacts, we decided on a firm in Los Angeles called Kobig and Kobig
and we signed a contract with them ten years ago to do a master plan, a rather
broad brush approach because it was still totally a cattle operation at that time.
And after, I’m going to guess, seven or eight months, they finished this particular
study and we have a Kobig study, I think there’s a copy upstairs, as a matter of
fact. And it’s been very helpful over the years although I would say that as of two
or three years ago it’s pretty obsolete and it’s not very helpful to us, although it
certainly served its purpose and was a very good investment as far as the plan
itself is concerned. When we finished that plan, I think it was in 1963 that Kobig
finished it, we decided, now “we” being the bank which held the entire interest in
the ranch that the bank being in those days Citizens National Bank, later became
Crocker Citizens and today is Crocker, period, that is, Crocker National bank,
decided that the plan should be updated at least every five years, well, its ten
years now and we haven’t gotten around to updating the master plan yet, but it’s
something we probably should do. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done anything
since the Kobig study in 1962. Four or five years ago, Mr. George Jones was
retained to do a fragmentation study of the ranch which took about two years and
was very helpful and we have those studies in the office. But a formal revision of
the master plan is, has not yet been undertaken since the Kobig study. Mission
Viejo Company, of course, has undertaken considerable study, not only of the
potential land use, but marketing studies since they are involved in the creation of
29
a total community, they have to be concerned, not only with the land potential but
with the marketing potential and what the housewife wants as far as a home is
concerned and the design of the home and the color schemes and all that. And so
they have done considerable work in the northwestern portion of the ranch which
they have developed. Their development has covered approximately, between
four thousand and five thousand acres and the only thing that the ranch has to do
with the Mission Viejo Company is that we are the source of their raw land, the
bulk land that they use in the developing of the community. And along that line,
they have an option agreement with the ranch covering the balance of about six
thousand three hundred acres which with the four thousand plus that they have
already developed would bring the total community to a little over eleven
thousand acres which is a pretty good size development. Based of the rate of
influx of people, I think they have about eighteen thousand people living there
now, the community starting about six years ago, based on that influx the land
that they have under option from the ranch, which is really a minor part of the
ranch, should be enough land inventory for their community development over
the next thirteen to fifteen years. The important thing is that there’s no assurance
that the Mission Viejo Company, that community, can grow any further than that,
although that would be a pretty fair size community, I think fifty or sixty thousand
people by that time because the balance of the ranch or the majority of the balance
of the ranch would be in an agricultural agreement with the county, a land
conservation agreement.
30
PP:
All of that land that’s left after the eleven thousand acres and there’s what, fifty,
that doesn’t include the fifty-two thousand now?
WW: There would still be about forty-one thousand acres left after that’s finished.
PP:
And all of that is in this agricultural preserve?
WW: Not all of it, but most of it, approximately twenty-nine thousand acres of it is in an
Agricultural Agreement with the county which means, in essence, and this may be
an over-simplification that that land can be used for no other purpose than
agricultural purposes and it can’t be used for urban development or industrial or
commercial. It has to be sued for agriculture or uses compatible to agriculture.
PP:
Now, what does that mean?
WW: Well, let me think. In most counties in California, if not all counties except
Orange, land uses include everything that would be allowed under what Orange
County called A-1, they still have it A-1 zoning which is agriculture. And under
the A-1 zoning in Orange County, you can farm, you can grow dry crop barley
and Sudan, you can grow irrigated crops such as strawberries or carrots or any
kind of vegetables that you can think of, cabbage and cauliflower or you can grow
tree crops, oranges, and lemons and limes, or nut crops such as walnuts, and that
sort of, or avocadoes, that sort of thing. And under the A-1 zoning in Orange
County, you could also extract sand and gravel and clay and that type of activity.
PP:
Now there’s quite a bit of that going on, too, isn’t it?
WW: Yes, there is, but the supervisors in Orange County, I know the reason but you
wouldn’t gain much to explain why. The supervisors simply didn’t understand
the operation of the agricultural agreements and because of that we did not oppose
31
the specific land uses that the Orange County supervisors established for
agriculture agreement areas and in Orange County, the agriculture agreement
areas have thirteen specific agricultural uses and sand and gravel and clay
extraction and rock quarrying are not among those uses. I think Orange County is
unique and in all other counties, I think that’s allowable. It doesn’t make a bit of
difference to us. As a matter of fact, it’s a long story which I won’t get into now;
it really benefits us to have it that way. Now the supervisors, particularly Mr.
Baker who is still on the board, didn’t quite understand this. He felt that
establishing the agricultural preserves, followed by the agricultural agreements in
those preserves, would give tax benefits to the landlord or to the landowner and if
it were leased, it would give the benefits to Owens-Illinois or Philco Ford or
Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge, Consolidated Rock Products, all of whom are
tenants of ours, and that’s not true, of course, but they felt that that was the case,
that the benefits under the land conservation agreement would filter down to these
big industrial people or firms and because of that, they didn’t want these benefits
to go to those people who were involved in the extraction of sand and gravel and
that sort of thing. But, by these comments, I’m not running down the abilities, the
mental acumen of the supervisors because they have many other things to be
concerned with. But they just simply didn’t understand how it worked and it
didn’t hurt us a bit. We just simply excluded those areas from the land
conservation agreement and everybody was happy and we were particularly
happy because then the assessor couldn’t come along later and say that, well, now
that extraction is permitted and, by the way as I meant to indicate it was not, it
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was excluded, but in most, I think all of the counties in the state of California,
mining and extraction activities were permitted in the agricultural agreements.
The assessor couldn’t say, well, since Owens-Illinois is extracting silica sand
south of Ortega and there are six square miles, and there are, by the way, silica
sand north of Ortega, and it’s legally permitted under the agricultural agreements
that the extraction can’t take place, I will asses them as though they could be
extracted and used. And so the assessment will go up accordingly. O.K., we
were prepared for that, but since supervisor baker didn’t understand it and I don’t
think the other supervisors did. Incidentally, Mr. Allen did; he tried to explain it
to his cohorts, but they didn’t quite understand. They excluded those areas and in
so doing protected us from the assessor. I don’t know whether I’ve been very
clear or not on this point, and it is very complicated. Through a
misunderstanding, we were considerably benefited by it. The end result is that we
have only the thirteen specific legal uses in the agriculture preserve and because
of this, we excluded all the extraction activities from the agriculture preserve.
They have no tax sheltering of any kind which doesn’t mean anything because
they pay the same taxes even if they’re in the agricultural preserve and
conservation agreement. So, a little misunderstanding on a very complicated
thing, it doesn’t seem complicated to us, frankly, but if you were a supervisor and
had to worry about all the other aspects of county operation, it probably would be
fairly confusing, understandably so.
PP:
What happens, do you have any plans for this area that’s been, where the
extraction has taken place? What are you going to do with it now?
33
WW: Well, that’s pretty difficult to answer. The Consolidated Rock Products area in
the San Juan Canyon is fairly new. They’ve been there, I think, six years now
which may seem a long time, but really isn’t and there are enough deposits in that
canyon to last probably four or five times that period of time. Mother Nature has
a tendency over forty or fifty years to replace all of the extraction that you might
have in the canyon like that and, for example, if you were a geologist, you would
talk in terms of a fifty year storm and a hundred year storm and the fifty year
storm would bring such gigantic floods down the canyon that all of the sand and
gravel that you, you being in this case ConRock, Consolidated Rock Products,
would extract over a period of five, ten, even fifteen or twenty years, replace that
almost over night during this flood and bring all the sand and gravels from miles
up in the Santa Ana Mountain area down into and fill those little pockets which
we look at as big pockets which to Mother Nature look like little teeny pockets
would fill them all back up again with sand and gravel. And we’re living in an
era of the ecologist, as you know, and unfortunately, that pendulum which has
been on the wrong side during my lifetime is now swung over to the other side
and they get extremely upset when they look at those canyons and see the sand
and gravel extracted from a hole, it’s usually called a ‘pit’, and they think that
that’s a desecration of Mother Nature, but you just wait for that fifty year flood
which might be tomorrow, you know, and it might be next year, it might be four
years, but it’s like the roll of the dice, it isn’t going to come every fifty years, but
over a period of thousands of years, it’ll average once every fifty years according
to our engineers and geologists. And Mother Nature is going to erase it just like a
34
pencil over a piece of lead marking and so, I don’t know, I don’t get too excited
about what the sand and gravel companies are doing, simply because that heavy
storm is going to completely erase everything they’re doing including the plant,
by the way. The plant goes out also, at least every fifty years and has to be
completely rebuilt but that’s part of their program. In their cost of operation, they
have to amortize that plant completely over much less than fifty years and they
just write it off. If Mother Nature takes it completely out into the middle of the
ocean, well, they figure that would happen, you know. Well, I didn’t mean to
wax philosophical, but the ecologists are on a pendulum that’s swinging over to
their side. It’s too bad that we can’t go down the middle of the road instead of
having this whiplash of wasting, perhaps, natural resources and then finding that
the pendulum all at once has swung the other way so that we get ridiculous in the
conservation of assets to the point where we’re strangling ourself.
PP:
Now, I have a question that I’m really unclear on, and that’s the mineral rights of
the ranch. Isn’t silica considered a mineral right and what happens in a situation
like that?
WW: Well, as far as I know, the owners of the ranch, and there are a three trusts
involved, the old bank trust which is now Crocker. Crocker distributed two-thirds
interest in the ranch in 1968, April 1968, to the two principle beneficiaries, Alice
O’Neil Avery as to a third, and her brother, Richard O’Neill as to a third and
retaining the other third, of course, which we retain today. With these interests in
the ranch, in the real property, contain the mineral rights and there’s been no
parting that I know of in the mineral rights on the ranch since it was owned by the
35
King of Spain back in 1769, from 1769, I guess, until 1841 when it was conveyed
to Pio Pico. The mineral rights are still intact. We’ve leased those mineral rights
from time to time to Texaco and Standard Oil and the last leasing of a small part
of the mineral rights was to a man named George Guthrie who is an instructor in
geology over at Orange Coast College. A real fine gentlemen, I talked to him
about a week ago, as a matter of fact. That lease is now quit-claimed, totally
extinguished, but during the process, during the course of that lease, he
transferred or signed most of his interest to a Canadian drilling company called, if
I can remember the name, North Lode Exploration, Limited, and they drilled a
well in the Capistrano area, not on the Rancho Mission Viejo, but on the outside
portion that they’d also had signed up on the Visbeck or Reeve ranch, I forget
which, and that was a dry well. It was down below the four thousand feet depth.
They didn’t find anything. But the point is that the ranch still has its mineral
rights and, to my knowledge, hasn’t parted with any of the mineral rights on the
ranch.
PP:
Well, when the trust was divided into thirds, is this when the O’Neill Properties
Company was formed?
WW: That’s exactly when the O’Neill Properties was formed. The bank had been in the
picture since 1926 when Jerome O’Neill died. Jerome O’Neill named the bank in
his will as his executor and as his trustee which followed the probate. And that
trust that he established in his will still exists although, as we just mentioned, twothirds was distributed out of that trust in 1968, April 1968, with the approval of
the court in San Diego. The Probate Court which is the Superior Court in San
36
Diego has to approve all of the accountings by the bank for the simple reason that
the descendant, Jerome O’Neill, died in San Diego at the time. His domicile, his
legal residence was the ranch headquarters of the Santa Margarita Ranch which is
now the middle of Camp Pendleton and is the commandant’s headquarters and
actually, the commandant’s residence on Camp Pendleton. But, the important
thing is, that that is part of San Diego and because that was his residence when he
died, that is county that handles the probate and the Superior Court in San Diego
is the court to whom we submit our annual accountings as we’ve done since 1926.
I think I’ve digressed and strayed from the point.
PP:
No. I find all this very interesting. What does the O’Neill Properties Company
do? Does it handle…?
WW: The O’Neill Properties Companies, Incorporated, is, as you mentioned just a
second ago, is a corporation which formed in 1968 when the bank distributed
these fractional interests. And no one likes to see a large land operation or any
other operation for that matter divided, cut up and distributed into pieces where
each of the subsequent owners decides that they want to operate a certain way and
you have divided management and no uniformity of direction, that sort of thing.
That does happen, unfortunately, in many cases where a well-knit corporation or
entity is divided quite often by the death of one of the partners, something like
that, and strange people arrive on the scene and they have their own ideas as to
how much dividend should be declared and what the company should start
manufacturing, all that sort of thing. And the typical result is disaster. And the
bank when it petitioned the court for approval to distribute these two-thirds, one-
37
third to Richard O’Neill and the other third to his sister, Alicia Avery, the bank
was very interested as these other people were interested in continuing uniform
management. And so, in the same package, the management corporation was
decided upon, O’Neill Properties, and it was decided that each of the three owners
after the distributions was made, that is, Richard O’Neill and Mrs. Avery and the
bank, would contract with this new management agency, a corporation, and form
O’Neill Properties to mange each of the thirds and so that’s exactly what
happened and O’Neill Properties manages not only Richard’s third and Alice’s
third but the old Crocker third as well. The bank allowed me as an old officer,
I’ve been with the bank thirty-one years now, to become vice-president of this
management corporation and continue doing about what I’d been doing before
when the bank had three-thirds interest in it. So nothing startling happened except
on paper. We had worked with Richard and Alicia and their attorney, Jim West,
who is now president, by the way, of O’Neill Properties, as quite properly he
should be. He’s represented all the O’Neills for many, many years. So, we were
working together before O’Neill Properties and so we continue to work together
now. Not much really has changed except that their interest is now officially on
record. They are truly one-third owners, now, but the bank listened to them just
as though they had been record owners before because the time was gradually
arriving when, of course, they took their share of the old trust and when their
mother dies and Marguerite O’Neill is now about 94, I believe, when their mother
dies, the Crocker trust terminates completely and they get the balance of the other
third. So they would then be owners as to one-half, you see, the third third being
38
dissolved at that time. And hopefully, she will live to be many more years old,
very alert mentally and very interesting person, Marguerite O’Neill. But time
harvests all of us and eventually the bank’s trust will terminate at her death and
then Alice O’Neill and Richard O’Neill who incidentally hold their one-third
interest in their trust, they created their own trusts to hold their particular interests.
It’s really not too complicated.
PP:
Sounds like good sound business management.
WW: In other words, the bank’s days are numbered, but then they’ve been in the picture
forty-six years now. So they don’t have any complaints. They’ve served a long
period. Actually, if you check back, they’ve been in the, legally, they’ve been in
the ownership title of the ranch as trustee for longer than, I think longer than
anyone except the King of Spain whose title ran from 1769 to 1841.
PP:
I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s true.
WW: Much longer than the Forsters, incidentally, who were the intervening owners.
PP:
That was only, what, sixteen years.
WW: Not too long. The Forsters came into title in 1864 and they parted with title in
1882. So, whatever that is. You’re right, eighteen years. You’ve spent some
time with this, I see. (Laughter) Eighteen years, it would be.
PP:
Well, I’m still interested in the O’Neill Properties. Do they go out and find
industry that might be interested in something? Do they find lessees for
agriculture?
WW: No, not really. We’re not actively seeking that sort of thing. I don’t know why
we shouldn’t necessarily, but the ranch is pretty well tied up in that when you
39
subtract from the fifty-two thousand three hundred original acres of Rancho
Mission Viejo the eleven thousand acre planned community for Mission Viejo
Company, now that’s the four or five thousand acres they’ve already developed
plus the five or six-thousand in the option which is the eleven and you can’t really
plan too much on the option area because tomorrow morning they legally could
exercise their option and acquire the whole thing. So, you sort of have to leave
that all to one side and you legally have to be very careful about what you do with
that because of the rights of Mission Viejo Company to come in and exercise their
rights and purchase the whole thing or any part of it. Well, not any part of it.
They have to exercise their option in certain increments. But, let’s suffice it to
say, that that eleven thousand acres is cut aside and must be forgotten as far as a
bridge is concerned. That’s Mission Viejo Company’s inventory for future
development. That leaves a balance of about forty-one thousand acres and of that
forty-one thousand acres, twenty-nine thousand is in agriculture conservation
agreement and that’s a ten year agreement which every January takes on another
year. So it remains ten years always. We call it ten years forever and it doesn’t
erode unless you give notice that you’re canceling and nobody has given such
notice, by the way. So, every time it drops back to nine years, come January first,
it goes back to ten again. So it’s always ten years.
PP:
Now, if you’d cancel, though, does that mean that you couldn’t do anything for
ten years?
WW: That’s right. If we cancelled, it means that it would take ten years before you’d
reach the point where you could do anything other than agricultural uses with it,
40
but if you’re interested in the terms of the land conservation agreement here in
Orange County, it does mean that the assessor, if the land owner gives notice of
termination, taking ten years to come out, the assessor can assume that the ten
year period is five years gone immediately and he can assess the land at the half
way point between the agricultural value which is very low and the highest and
best use which is urbanizing, of course, and so he can send you a tax bill for half
of that immediately although for the whole ten years you can grow only carrots or
vegetables or barley or whatever. So, it’s a very, very burdensome thing as far as
the landowner is concerned and for that reason, and there are other reasons, I
don’t expect the owners, even if Crocker is out of the picture on the death of
Marguerite O’Neill, I don’t expect the owners to ever give notice of termination,
frankly, because that’s a terrible burden to be assessed during the whole ten year
period starting at one-half o full market value immediately and yet being
restricted to agricultural uses only. I think that the county will be the one that will
eventually give notice terminating, not the whole piece, but maybe five thousand,
ten thousand acres at a time, and when that happens then the assessor has to
regard the coming out process as starting from zero and going up gradually to full
market value, not starting at the five year mark at the half way mark and then
coming out which is the case if the landowner gives notice. So it’s a contract and
the land conservation agreement which is favorable to the county in these
respects, but, in this particular case, I don’t think the O’Neills resent that because
there’s a great amount of land and a very few people, Dick and Alice, and their
mother who’s very old right now. And even if urbanization stops when this
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eleven thousand acre piece in this part is exhausted in about fifteen years, the land
profit from that turnover is enough to keep, not two people, but probably two
thousand people in very comfortable circumstances. So, the circumstances are
very unique and you don’t have three thousand stockholders demanding quarterly
dividends. You have two people and their ancestors have been associated with
the property for about ninety years. So they’re not speculators and they don’t
have the profit motives that you’d normally expect to see in that type of asset.
That’s all a big plus as far as Orange County is concerned, I think.
PP:
I think so.
WW: I think they’d be happy with, I’m guessing, at least I would be, with the, you
would be too, with the fruits of eleven thousand acre development. Good grief,
you know, you could live on the Riviera for fourteen lifetimes and still wouldn’t
even scratch it. So, we do have unique circumstances in that we have two owners
instead of three thousand stockholders demanding dividends and they can do what
they feel is right and what they feel is proper. And they can leave that twentynine thousand in a land conservation agreement for as many decades as you’d like
to imagine. And that’s not possible in a corporate holding where they have just
recently purchased it at full market value and the stockholders want a reasonable
return, properly so, six per cent from that investment. See, this investment comes
from ninety odd years ago and you don’t have those demanding investor hews and
cries that you would have in a corporate situation. Now, I’ve gone astray her
again, digressing, but the circumstances are unique and it’s all a big plus I think
for Orange County. The Orange County Board of Supervisors have gained
42
tremendous powers in the establishment of these controversial land conservation
agreements. And when they see that Orange County has reached the point where
there’s a scarcity of land and that the desirable industries and the desirable influx
of people are no longer coming here because there’s such a scarcity of land
available, raw land for development, you know, scarcity creates price. It’s the
same as peaches. If there aren’t any, you have to pay more in the market. Same
thing with land. When they see this situation occurring, they can touch the magic
button, it means a clerk sends us a notice that, you guess, four thousand five
hundred acres is terminated on the agricultural agreement. That means, Mission
Viejo get ready. That much has to come on the market because the agricultural
conservation agreement is terminated on that portion so you better get ready to
put it on the market. Get your master plan going and develop a beautiful
community for that part because the land conservation no longer is in force. And
we, we being maybe my descendents, I probably am retired by that time, whoever
follows me has to get ready and put that back into highest and best use which
means making it available through Mission Viejo Company Number Two or
whatever might be the case then. You get out the drawing boards and you have to
get this ready for highest and best use. In other words, the county now has a big
powerful tool. If they find that the county needs more land to continue its growth,
they can reach in their great big wallet and say, well, we’ve got thirty thousand
acres here, twenty-nine actually, at Mission Viejo and all they have to do is just to
send us a notice before any January first and we have to unload that and put it
back on the market. You can see what tremendous power this gives the
43
supervisors they never had before and they can make land available for the market
whenever they want to. They just wave their magic wand and it becomes
available. So it’s a good thing for the county if it’s treated properly and it’s a
good thing for the land owner. They, in no event, will get hurt. As a matter of
fact, if they were extremely selfish people, and they are not, the best thing that
could happen would be for the county to end, terminate, the agriculture preserves
immediately and they can just market it to fourteen developers, how many, get
their money, buy bonds and clip coupons for the rest of their lives, not worry
about, you know, land and all that sort of thing and they would probably
quadruple their income. So, money is not the object at all. A lot of the opponents
to the land conservation agreements feel that we just that way of passing the tax
burden on to the urban people. You know, you and me here on Fordview, for
example. That couldn’t be more ridiculous. If they were interested in dollars
during their lifetime, the best way to do is to instruct me and anybody else who
would have the power to do it is just to put it on the market and sell it, just sell the
whole thing. You can’t sell the whole thing because there’s nobody that I know
of, except maybe Mr. Hughes, that is capable of buying the whole thing to begin
with. Fifty thousand acres at about seven thousand dollars an acre, whatever, the
bank carries, this shouldn’t be for the record, but a hundred million dollar. In any
event, it’s an awfully large piece and liquidating it and converting the market
value into something that yields, say, four or five per cent would be equivalent to,
at least, quadrupling the income that they have now from beef which is a very
44
minor, as far as yield is concerned, a very minor yield off their land. But the
average critic doesn’t have a chance to realize that that’s the situation.
PP:
Sometimes perhaps the papers and all don’t make it too clear, either.
WW: A lot of people have a tendency toward persecution complexes and feel, they have
a feeling that the big landowners, somehow, are imposing on them and they’re
not, but they like to think that way.
PP:
Well, you, or the O’Neill Company has something to do with the agricultural
leases. Is that the way they…
WW: O’Neill Properties, right.
PP:
…farm out the land or rent the land out?
WW: Well, going back just a few years, the ranch used all the land themselves and they
irrigated land they used for the production of alfalfa, for example, and they just
did it all themselves, that’s all. And the thousands of acres of dry farm, barley
and Sudan, they handled themselves, and they, as I mentioned just a minute ago,
used the irrigated land which is very valuable agricultural land for the production
of alfalfa, primarily which meant that they not only sold alfalfa to the local dairy
industries but they managed to bale a lot of alfalfa, about four cuttings average
per year, and stored it in the hay barns of the ranch so that in the fall at the end of
the season, they tried to have about three thousand tons of alfalfa hay and barley
hay by that time. That operation is completely changed now, and our present
cattle superintendent who is, reason I’m hesitating, he’s a very capable man, he’s
been promoted to vice-president of operations, so he’s really more than a cattle
superintendent now. His name is Gilbert Aguirre, by the way, a fairly young man,
45
thirty-five, I believe. He doesn’t believe in storing a great amount of hay such as
that three thousand tons that I mentioned each year that we used to store. He likes
to feed off the hay crops in the field; in other words, take the cattle to the hay and
not use all the expensive manpower and labor in cutting and windrowing and
drying and baling and hauling the bales into the cow camp, then hauling the bales
back out to the feeding areas and feeding the cattle. That’s not my field, by the
way, so he’s been with us for, I think about five years now, Mr. Aguirre, and
we’ve been very successful in this part of our operation so we’re almost required
to say that he’s right. And so we don’t really put up much hay of our own. We
grow a lot of hay crops through agreements with, for example, the Changala
family that are prominent in our community here. You may know some of the
Changalas and they are excellent barley farmers, incidentally, and also Sudan and
we have contracts every year, most oral, handshake agreements which you don’t
see in business much anymore, with the Changalas. They grow a lot of Sudan, a
lot of barley for us. Alfalfa has disappeared completely off the ranch, by the way,
because the vegetable crops that are grown in, primarily in the San Juan Canyon
are just simply a lot more valuable than the old alfalfa crops that we used to grow.
We used to net in a good year about sixty-five dollars an acre through alfalfa with
four cuttings a year and the vegetable crops, our rental is approximately a hundred
and twenty-five dollars an acre. In other words, it’s almost double. The ranch
does not ever want to get into the point where they’re doing the vegetable farming
themselves. They’re willing to raise cattle; they know cattle over many, many
decades and they know the dry farming, of course, they barley which the
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Changalas help us with mostly and the Sudan. Those are real rough cattle feed
type crops and we feel comfortable with that, in partnership with the Changalas,
our neighbors. But we don’t want to get into carrots and strawberries and
cauliflower and that sort of thing. So we lease the land that can be used for that
very high value use, and it is truly a high value use, to the people who make their
entire livelihood with it and their whole profession turns around it and it truly is a
science. For example, about five hundred or so acres are leased to Highland
Ranch Corporation and that’s the present and I guess the principle owner there is
a gentleman named Toby Tsuma, T-S-U-M-A, who lives in San Clemente with
his family, a real wonderful family, a great man, I think. And his total life, his
whole life, has been devoted to this science of growing vegetables competitively,
and it really is a competitive business, truly. The marketing alone is a science,
much less the growing of the vegetables and we’ve learned that every man should
keep to his field and we’re content to be producers of beef and raw feed grains for
the beef, like barley and Sudan, and where we have good bottom land such as in
the San Juan Canyon and Trabuco Canyon with good ground water, then we’ll let
the Toby Tsumas, and the Hiroo Okumas, they’re other tenants of ours, use that
land with their talents and they’re extremely more talented than we are and we’re
eager to admit this, in using that land for its highest agricultural use and that is the
production of vegetables which is in the market place tremendously more
valuable than the rough hay crops that we grow for the animals on the ranch.
PP:
Do you have any acres in oranges, or avocados, or anything like that?
47
WW: Yes, I’m glad you mentioned that, because that’s the exception. The ranch does
have a citrus department now as of several years ago and we have a young man
whose name is Bob Clark who, not too many years ago, graduated, I believe, from
Cal Poly and has turned out to be an extremely good man, I think, and is our
citrus foreman. He has about forty-five thousand trees on the mesa, the plan of
Trabuco up on the north part of the ranch and some of them are old enough to be
bearing fruit now and his is in charge of some fairly large acreage in the San Juan
Canyon about eight or nine miles south of the mesa. That’s an assortment of
citrus, a great amount of lemons as well as Valencia oranges and limes.
PP:
Isn’t it unusual to grow lemons and limes in Orange County?
WW: Yes, especially limes. As a matter of fact, we have, oh, I’m going to guess now, I
think we have about fifteen acres of limes on the ranch which doesn’t sound like
very much, except that before we planted the first limes, there were only four
acres of limes in the entire county. So, we have trebled and almost quadrupled
the lime production in Orange County.
PP:
Oh, that’s most interesting. I think that this concludes the interview and I thank
you very much.
WW: You’re welcome.
PP:
I really appreciate it.
48
Anthony Moiso, CEO of Rancho Mission Viejo
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Community History Project
INTERVIEWEE:
ANTHONY R. MOISO
INTERVIEWER:
Patricia R. Petring
SUBJECT:
O’Neill Ranch
TRANSCRIBED BY:
Patricia R. Petring
DATE:
April 20, 1972
PP:
This is an interview with Mr. Anthony R. Moiso at the Mission Viejo Company,
La Paz Plaza, Mission Viejo, California, on April 20, 1972, at 9:30 a.m. Mr.
Moiso, would you tell me a little bit about your childhood, where you were born,
who your parents are, and where you lived, where you grew up, and what sort of
things you remember while growing up.
AM:
Okay. First of all, it’s sad that I can’t relate that I was born on the ranch and that I
grew up on the ranch in Orange County. Quite honestly, I was born in Los
Angeles. My mother, Alice O’Neill Avery, is one of the owners of the Rancho
Mission Viejo and part of the O’Neill family. But I was born in Los Angeles and
raised in West Los Angeles, and it really wasn’t until 1965 that I came to Orange
County. I say it’s sad because it certainly has been great for the past seven years,
49
being part of this ranch and being part of the development of the ranch and the
ongoing cattle business of the ranch. But I grew up in West Los Angeles, and I
didn’t come down here too often because at the time I was growing up, the ranch
was being managed by the then Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank, and we,
the family, just didn’t really have an opportunity to come down here. We were
invited from time to time for various picnics, and we did come down for some of
the roundup picnics and some picnics I can remember in the summertime. I can
remember coming down to the manager’s house- at that time a man by the name
of John Salisbury and later a man by the name of Arlie Leck – as a youth and
enjoying the warm summer sun, but that’s about all. I remember they had big
barbecues and sides of beef, and to me, it was something that was very strange. It
was our ranch, but it really wasn’t our ranch.
So then, as we grew older, the world caught up to the ranch. The freeways
came. And I think at that time the bank realized that this was more than just a
portfolio in a drawer, and certain things happened that we may go into later in this
interview that caused us, the family, to take more positive action and to assert
ourselves. And through a series of events beginning in about 1958 or ’59 and
ending about ten years later, we petitioned the bank to distribute the trust, and we
then formulated what is now O’Neill Properties, and we run the ranch. So that’s
basically where I grew up and who my parents are and why I wasn’t at the ranch.
PP:
Well, then, what happened? Nobody had anything to do with the government
taking over two-thirds of the ranch? I mean, that was between the government
and the bank, is that right?
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AM:
No, well, that’s really not quite true. The Rancho Mission Viejo that we have
today was one of the four ranches that made up the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las
Flores. There’s the Santa Margarita, the Las Flores, the Trabuco, and Rancho
Mission Viejo, or La Paz as it was called at one time. And my great-grandfather,
Richard O’Neill, came from San Francisco in 1882 and he bought the ranch. And
that’s ninety years ago. And his son, Jerome, ran the ranch after his father’s death
from 1910 until 1927 when he passed away. And then, after that time, it was run
by a series of managers, one of whom, on a casual basis, was my grandfather, his
brother Richard O’Neill. And also associated with the ranch very much at that
time was a man by the name of John Baumgartner, who is my mother and my
uncle’s first cousin. He’s the son of Richard O’Neill, Jr., and Jerome’s sister from
San Francisco. And he had gone to Davis, and he was part of the family, and he
had planned to run the ranch. So, up until the outbreak of the war, the family was
still pretty much in charge, although the bank was in the picture and a trust had
been established.
But for one reason or another, the Flood family, which at that time owned
half of the ranch, was desirous to liquidate its asset, or to sell its portion of the
ranch for cash. They desired money. They lived in San Francisco. They came
from time to time to the ranch, but it really was the ranch that the O’Neills owned
and operated. So, in their quest for money at the outbreak of the war when the
Department of the Army and the Department of the Navy were looking for west
coast training centers, the Flood family - as I understand it from talking with my
grandmother – lobbied to have this site selected. As the story goes, President
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Roosevelt’s son was a personal friend of the Floods, and so they went directly to
him and persuaded him to persuade his father to take this site over one that was in
the Santa Barbara area. So, in anticipation of the government’s taking the land,
the ranch was divided into three parts. There are some conflicting stories, but
apparently, the ranch was divided into three parts, and then they drew straws to
see who took what part. That’s one of the conflicts. Another one is that the
Floods made up the deal and took the bottom part because they knew that was
going to be the part that was sold to the government. At any rate, the bottom onethird, or the present headquarters site of Camp Pendleton, was taken by the Flood
family. The middle one-third, or the area of San Onofre and San Mateo Canyon,
was taken by the Baumgartner side of the O’Neill family. And the upper onethird went to my side, or the Richard O’Neill family. Then the government came
and bought the ranch, or the 130 some-odd thousand acres, for an amount more
than $4 million, and the Baumgartners and the Floods took their money and went
back to San Francisco.
The way we got into this long answer, I think the question was, was the
family part of all this? And the family was. There was a desperate effort on the
part of our side of the family and John Baumgartner to dissuade the government
from taking the ranch. He had groomed himself, he had been raised on the ranch,
he went to Davis, he was going to be the heir apparent, and all of a sudden it was
just vanishing. So he made many trips to Washington, D.C. He was accompanied
from time to time by my grandfather, and they tried desperately to convince the
government that it was more important to raise cattle than to raise men to defend
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the country. But that argument didn’t carry much water. So they lost. And the
day that they lost the ranch, or it was sold, that was when my grandfather suffered
his first series of setbacks, which in just a couple of years – although he was an
older man in his early eighties – led to his passing away.
The family even tried to get it back when the war was over. Again, John
Baumgartner, through a series of political maneuverings, I guess you’d call them,
had “greased the deal” to resecure the ranch when it was over. He had a friend
who was a state senator at the time, and he went back to Washington, and
supposedly, everything was taken care of. But when he got there, the picture was
a little different than it had been painted for him, because the commandant of the
Marine Corps was there and the chief of staff, and in about a week all of his hopes
had been dashed. Therefore, when it was sold, the family tried to get it back and
were unsuccessful. And then we realized that it was gone forever. So, although
Citizens Bank – now the Crocker National Bank – has been part of the ranch, the
ranch has been the family’s business for all these many years. It isn’t as if we
were living in Los Angeles and never came down here or were never part of it. I
hope that answers the question.
PP:
It does. Then you said that about 1958 – now, this would be ten years or so after
you had petitioned the government to have Camp Pendleton returned to the
family. By 1958, then what did you do to have more say?
AM:
What happened is, after the war, as I understand it – and you have to realized that
I was not really not a party to any of these discussions – we gave this talk that was
in early October. And I did spend some time with John Baumgartner, who is now
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in his early seventies, and with my grandmother, who is ninety-three, and
researched as much of this as I could and interviewed them just as I’m being
interviewed, so I think that the facts that we’re giving here are pretty close to
accurate. My grandmother tends to expand upon the truth from time to time, but
Baumgartner is pretty reliable still. And talking also with my uncle and with Jim
West, we were able to piece the thing together. But after the war, the ranch was
operated by a series of managers, the control literally in the bank. We refer to it
as “The Bank,” but there was always a trust officer. Warren Wilson has been the
trust officer since about 1958. The man before him was a man by the name of
Elmer Peterson. The day-to-day managers were these men I’ve already
mentioned, John Salisbury, Arlie Leck, then a fellow whose family was part of the
ranch history, Tom Forster. And then after Tom Forster, a man by the name of
Frank Burris was with us for a couple of years, and then in 1967 we secured the
services of Gilbert Aguirre.
So what did happen? What got us to where we are today? Well, it’s a
very involved story. I said before that the world caught up with us; the freeway
came. At the end of the war, my grandfather had passed away, and the bank, for
very valid reasons, thought that it would be wiser for the O’Neill family to
dispose of the property and take the revenues realized and invest them in
municipal bonds or something that would be a little bit more secure for the
beneficiaries of the trust that they administered. So my grandmother came down
here one day for a picnic in 1944 and went up to the office just to say hello to the
manager, and she saw a man whom she recognized to be James Irvine. And she
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said hello to Mr. Irvine and apparently asked him why he was there, and he said,
“Didn’t you know, Mrs. O’Neill, I’ve come to buy the ranch?” And her answer at
that time was, “The hell you are because I’m never going to sell it.” And she
went down to Capistrano, called up the bank and, she says, gave them hell, and
then sued the bank in the courts in San Diego. The result of the suit was favorable
for her. She saved the ranch, and the bank was precluded from ever selling the
ranch without securing the signatures of the three beneficiaries, i.e., herself and
her two children, my mother and Uncle Richard. So she had saved the ranch
once.
So then we swing into the late 1950s and this man Elmer Peterson. Elmer
Peterson was approached by a man by the name of Graves, who was going to pay
some $35 million for the property. And again, without making contact with the
beneficiaries of the trust, he entered into an option agreement with this man to sell
the ranch for $35 million. Well, of course, at that time, everyone was up in arms
that the bank had gone out again and done this. By that I mean had literally
started to sell the property without the knowledge of the ultimate owners. And
after a long and furious court battle, and waiting to see whether or not this man
Graves was going to come up with $35 million, and a suit by Graves for us to sell
the property to him, and some interesting days in court with Melvin Belli in a
black cape with red satin inside and cowboy boots, we were able to win back the
ranch. But what this led to then was our being able to tell the bank that the ranch
and our family’s affairs were bigger than the trust department and, therefore,
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while my grandmother was still alive, certainly, we welcomed the bank’s help,
but we really desired to run the ranch ourselves.
All of this led in 1958, ’59, and ’60 to a committee being established. The
committee consisted of Jim West, my mother and my uncle, and Warren Wilson,
who took Mr. Peterson’s place. And my brother and I, when we weren’t in school
or in the army, would participate in these discussions. The committees were set
up. Then, in 1963 certain people came to the family – actually, it was John
McLeod of Macco Corporation and a Donald Bren, who was a builder in his own
right in Orange County – came to the family and wanted to develop the ranch.
After another series of wining and dining and Mr. McLeod sending my
grandmother flowers and my wife and I a television set when we were married,
the family elected to go with Donald Bren. So a Mission Viejo Company was set
up, and Mission Viejo Company purchased some land and had an option to buy
about ten thousand of the northern most acres of the fifty thousand acre ranch. I
went into the army in 1963, and the sale was just about set up and then was
finalized in January of 1964, I think. But what we then emerged with in January
of ’64 were two companies. One was Mission Viejo Company, a separate entity,
which was buying land from the family and developing, and the Rancho Mission
Viejo, which was the balance of the poverty.
Then the history even gets a little more involved in that the family owned
a portion of Mission Viejo Company, but as things turned out, the relationship
established in the summer of ’63 that eventually led to the company being formed
in ’64, didn’t work out for many, many reasons. So the family came back – my
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brother, myself, Mr. West – and we brought all of the other people out of the
picture. So therefore, we emerged in 1967 with a Mission Viejo Company with
one set of stockholders, some of whom are family members, and then this Rancho
Mission Viejo, the balance of the property.
Where our little tale leads us now is, if we can visualize being in 1967, the
trust had really outlived itself. It was established in 1927 for the benefit of my
mother and my uncle and a life estate for my grandmother. My grandmother at
that time was approaching her ninetieth birthday, and we felt that we had matured
to the point where we could run our own affairs, so we petitioned the bank at that
time to distribute the trust, to vest the property in my mother and uncle, but to stay
in the picture and to watch out for my grandmother’s affairs and to manage her
affairs. So Warren Wilson, who had spent all this time with us anyway, although
he’s still a bank employee, was loaned out to us and became a full-time employee
with us, at least for the duration of my grandmother’s life, and she’s stringer than
any of us now, so she’ll probably go on forever and then probably even
afterwards because Warren plays a vital role in our day-to-day operations. Then
when it was distributed, we established a company known as O’Neill Properties,
which is a management company, and this company manages the affairs of the
landowners. It recently has expanded so it handles the affairs of almost all the
family members. So what we have as we move into ’67, ’68, and ’69 then is a
Mission Viejo Company developing the land and an O’Neill Properties managing
the balance of the lands.
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Even since that time, the picture has really expanded, and I don’t know if
it’s worth going into that or not, but Mission Viejo Company…maybe we can
zero in there a little bit because that is an exciting project. It has grown quite a bit
and is developing in other places. Although it was originally designed just to
develop this ranch, it builds homes in Phoenix, Arizona, and now it’s building a
Mission Viejo Company in Denver, Colorado. And the O’Neill Properties end of
the business, the cattle business has expanded into Mexico and into northern
Nevada. I hope that that little dissertation then brings us from the end of the war
until the present.
PP:
That really does. It shows both sides now, because it gets a little confusing for a
lay person to understand how the two companies work together. I would be
interested in knowing your part in the Mission Viejo Company. From the little
article in the paper the other day, it sounds like it could be very involved with, not
only the personnel and the administration of the company, but also the political
and legislative areas that you cover for the company.
AM:
Well, I’ll do my best. I think before we zero in on any one person, it probably
would be a good idea, for the record, to try to organize this whole little world for
those persons who may listen to this tape. What we have, again, if you’ll bear
with me, is O’Neill Properties. O’Neill Properties is a management company for
the benefit of two people, and those two people are Alice O’Neill Avery and
Richard J. O’Neill, the owners of the ranch. And O’Neill Properties is run by four
people: Jim West, the family’s attorney who came on the scene in about 1949,
although he had grown up with my uncle in Beverly Hills and had been part of the
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family (he’s fifty-one years old now) for forty years. So West is the president,
and I’m the second in command, or executive vice president. And we have
Gilbert Aguirre, who is the day-to-day operations manager, or the cattle manager,
of all the different ranches, and Warren Wilson, who handles not only the
administrative details but all the leases, all the relations with the tenant farmers,
much of the political world that we live in. I said there are four people, but there
are others. There’s my brother, who is going to be moving up to Nevada to run
these cattle ranches up there; Evelyn McNutt, who is in our world as it expands is
our personal accountant who provides us all the information to know exactly
where we’re going, all the management tools to make the kinds of decisions that
we want to make. We’ve got a pretty good team. We probably need more people
as we continue to get bigger.
That’s the O’Neill Properties side of the ledger, and that’s more the hidden
and less glamorous side. The glamorous side is this Mission Viejo Company.
The Mission Viejo Company has grown from six or seven people…I remember
the Christmas party when I came back from the army in 1964. I was in the army
from ’63 to the fall of ’65. I came back, and I think it was Christmas of ’64, and
there were seven or eight people in the company, and now there are 350 people,
and with the new project we have, Omni Housing Systems, which is a
manufactured home, we’re going to add another 150. So it’s quite a company in
its own right. What we’re trying to zero in on here is that my specific role in
Mission Viejo Company, as outlined in the little article you were talking about,
perhaps can be somewhat misleading. As a person who owns, 25 percent of this
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company that’s growing, the day-to-day challenge of building a house is not my
bailiwick. My rule, as is the rule of almost any owner, is to make sure that the
team that you’ve assembled continues to do the job in a harmonious manner and
you can make your projections and make the type of profit that you’ve outlined or
geared yourself up to do.
Perhaps a little more explanation is needed. As we grew from 6 to 350
people and then on to 400, 500 people, we realized that we needed to become a
little more sophisticated. We had to provide the kinds of security for people that
all of us in this world are looking for. So, that’s where I got a little bit involved in
personnel, in trying to establish incentive compensation plans for these people,
stock option plans, pension plans, a working environment that was pleasing. We
took care of their health needs, their medical needs. And so my personnel
responsibilities are in that area, and they led me to hire a director of personnel, so
we’ve done that, so I just oversee that to be sure what we want to happen is, in
fact, happening.
From the political standpoint, or governmental relations, I think that
anyone who is involved in any large company that’s trying to accomplish
something in the modern world, especially here in Orange County, must be in
tune with those decisions that are being made, whether at the local level or the
state level or the national level, that are going to influence their chances for
success. I’m certainly involved in that area, but so is everyone else at the top of
the ladder. My uncle, Dick O’Neill, is the chairman of the Democratic Party in
Orange County and very active in politics. Phil Riley is a staunch Republican and
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is very active in that area. We support, quite honestly, those people who can help
us reach the goals that we want to reach. And we want to develop this Mission
Viejo Company. It’s programmed for 100,000 people to live in the community of
Mission Viejo, the 10,000 acres. We want to be able to do that job. We want to
be able to do it in a first-rate manner, and there are certain people who could
inhibit the success of the company, so we support those kinds of people. And my
little role in that area is to be in tune with what’s happening, just as anyone else,
to try to keep a step ahead of decisions so that if decisions are being made, you
can influence some of the decisions, and I think that that’s no different from any
other company.
For example, if you put on our Mission Viejo Company hat right now,
Mission Viejo Company is associated with Philip Morris, the makers of
Marlborough cigarettes, Miller beer, American Safety Razor Company, all of the
Marlborough products. Obviously, Phillip Morris, with tobacco being at the
forefront of the newspaper headlines during these times, is very, very much
devoted to securing a good relationship with whatever governmental agencies
affect their future. So, we being part of the Philip Morris world, have to be
certain that we are in tune with their party line too. And the mission of Phillip
Morris, perhaps, for the record here, it would be a good idea to maybe explain that
relationship a little bit.
Mission Viejo Company, in late 1968, 1969, realized that in order to
accomplish our goals we really didn’t have the money, just as any growing little
company. We had been successful, but we didn’t have the money to continue the
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development on the large scale that we wanted to do. So we thought, as any other
group of young guys, we ought to go public. We’d sell our stock, raise a lot of
money, and we’d go from there. And we investigated that opportunity as
thoroughly as we could. And we grew up a little bit and realized that the most
sensible thing would not be to go public but to find someone who was interested
in getting involved in real estate, and we were very fortunate to be introduced to
Phillip Morris. And we struck a relationship with Philip Morris whereby they
loaned us quite a bit of money. They haven’t bought anything yet, but they’ve
loaned us quite a bit of money, and if they desire to participate in the company on
an ongoing permanent basis, the amount of money that they loaned us can be
converted to an equity position. In other words, we issued a convertible
debenture, and we pay interest. They gave us the money, they loaned us Xmillions of dollars, and we pay interest every year. And as time goes on, at
certain dates, they can elect to convert the money loaned to us to an equity
position in the company. So, although they don’t owe anything, they’re on our
board, they control a lot of the decisions, and we’re part of their world.
So that, more than perhaps anything else, demonstrates the difference
between Mission Viejo Company and the Rancho Mission Viejo. Mission Viejo
Company is a development company “owned” by Phillip Morris, which is, by
chance now, developing the ranch here as well as other properties throughout the
western United States. The ranch sits back in the hinterland and continues to be
just that, a ranch, and a ranch that is perhaps undergoing an orderly liquidation,
which provides the funds to continue in the ranching and farming business as well
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as to expand into other areas that are more suitable in southern Orange County for
farming purposes.
So that was a pretty long answer. What you asked was what was my role
in Mission Viejo Company. But I think it explains, perhaps, and in a little more
detail precisely what’s going on here.
PP:
I realize this is not a very intelligent question on my part, but how do you know
the political feelings, really, of the area? How do you go about finding this out?
What would be the best way to go?
AM:
That’s a good question. I hope I can give you an intelligent answer. It’s quite
challenging, to be very honest. Obviously, when one starts to deal with a human
being, if you have twenty thousand human beings, you’re going to get twenty
thousand different feelings or different answers. And we have now living in
Mission Viejo twenty thousand people. So we have that segment of our little
society to deal with. Moreover, we have to deal with those people who are in
decision making positions, i.e., the county supervisors and those people at the
state level who can influence our little world.
So let’s go back to Mission Viejo itself. In Mission Viejo, we have
nurtured the community image. We have a monthly publication that we started
when the company first started called the “Mission Viejo Reporter.” It’s a little
newsletter that was originally designed to help sell homes. That is does, but it’s
also our way of keeping the community identity intact and keeping the people in
Mission Viejo in a situation where they feel like they’re part of Mission Viejo. It
also – and this is my point – keeps the company close to the people. Unlike
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another builder who might go to Huntington Beach and build a lot of houses, and
then he builds his four hundred houses and then he leaves, we’re here forever so
we better get to know these people. So, to be specific, how do we keep in tune for
the feelings of the people of Mission Viejo? From time to time we send out
questionnaires. We’ll use the local youth groups, the Boy Scouts or the Future
Farmers of America or the Little League or the Pee Wee Football people, who
always come to us for a little financial aid, to go out and distribute these things,
and then we pay them for their time; therefore they raise money. And the
questions on the questionnaires could be in many different areas: Hi. What do
you like about your house? If you had it to do over again or you could suggest to
Mission Viejo Company how they could do it over again, what would you
suggest? What kind of amenities do you like? Do you play the golf course?
Would you support a recreation center? What if we had a stable here? What if
we did this? What if we did that? So in that way you keep in tune with the
people. And then you also have the area where they can write in any other
suggestions that they might have. And also, we established what is known as the
Activities Committee, and the Activities Committee, obviously, involved those
people who wanted to become involved, and those people who want to become
involved generally are the most vocal of the people. Those are the ones who are
going to influence what goes on and what doesn’t go on. And we have, very
fortunately, quite a number of people who work for Mission Viejo Company who
live in Mission Viejo and are part of the community, and so, therefore, just by the
very nature of where they live and what they do in their spare time, are in tune
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with what goes on in Mission Viejo. So that’s one area of how we find out, or
how we keep in touch with reality as we sit up here in our ivory tower and plan.
The other area is even a little more delicate. And that is keeping abreast of
what’s happening in the county and the county feelings. In those areas, you just
have to be part of that world. I don’t know if it’s that enjoyable. My uncle does
enjoy it. I don’t know if the rest of us really do, but you just get into the political
swing of things, get to know the supervisors, bring them down, talk with them.
Certainly there are many “lobbyists” around, informants, governmental relations
“experts” with whom you can establish relationships which will keep you in tune.
There are many publications that are distributed periodically that keep you in tune
with what’s going on in the state. I like to believe if you play a lot of golf, you
can meet a lot of people on the golf course. The golf course opens a lot of doors.
I don’t think we’re any different than anyone else. We try to get to know the
people in the county, in the county offices. I was kidding about the golf, but there
are certain events in the county’s calendar year. The county administrative officer
has a golf tournament. He has it here, and we participate, and we get to know the
people. So it’s actually just making the effort to get to know the people, I think.
And to take it one step further, I think it’s important to note that here we
sit with a great natural resource. We have fifty thousand acres in southern Orange
County. Again, ten thousand of it is Mission Viejo Company, but forty thousand
of the rest of the ranch, the forty thousand other acres are just out there, and
there’s just Jim West, myself, Warren, Uncle Richard, and a few of us who run
this whole ranch. And 34,000 of the 40,000 acres are presently in what is known
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as an agricultural preserve, and an agricultural preserve allows us to continue
farming, or continue ranching, because it dictates to the county assessor that he
must appraise the land for agricultural purposes. We’re very fortunate too that the
eleven thousand acres that Mission Viejo Company is developing is divided from
the rest of the ranch by a great natural barrier – Trabuco Canyon. So we’re able
to stand and tell the county and tell all those concerned people that here we’re
developing this part of the ranch, but the rest of it, all of the rest to the south, is
for agricultural purposes. I try to mention this because the agricultural preserve in
Orange County is a very sensitive, very delicate subject. The Irvine Company
and, more specifically, other landowners have placed portions of their ranches in
the agricultural preserve and then have made an agreement with the county to
hold down the taxes. And now, moves are beginning to be made to get the lands
back out so they can be developed. I say “back out” because once you make an
agreement with the county, you are precluded from doing any development for
ten years. We are very fortunate. We have the Mission Viejo Company, which is
developing a portion of the ranch, and we’re sincere when we say that the rest of
the ranch is an agricultural preserve and is going to stay in there. I got into this,
again, because of the political relationships. Here, other people in the county are
trying to pull these things out. Obviously, if they’re trying to pull them out, they
were not sincere when they placed the lands into the agricultural preserve
because, obviously, what they were looking for was just some tax savings for a
number of years and then they pulled them out. So we try to keep in touch with
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any rumblings throughout the state that might tend to overthrow this agricultural
preserve setup that we have.
PP:
What plans do you have for the 34,000 acres? Strictly ranching? I know there is
some truck farming. I know there are a few industries leasing land down there.
AM:
That’s a darn good question because just on this past Tuesday we sat in our
weekly coordinating meeting and realized again that there is just a vital need for
us to do some long-range planning for the balance of the ranch. Because we
really have been sincere in our desire to continue the cattle operation and the
citrus farming and the row crops, we really haven’t done very much. So to answer
your question, obviously, in Orange County, as the years go by, that area will be
developed too. And we’re both looking up here at the map on the wall, but it’s
from the purple line where it says “sand and gravel, sand and gravel.” All of the
rest of the ranch, about twenty thousand acres south of the Ortega Highway,
which is Highway 74 from Capistrano to Elsinore…there are another twenty
thousand acres above the Ortega Highway and east of the present community of
Mission Viejo. If you look all the way to the top of the map, you can see that
there’s a very flat area known as Plano Trabuco. It’s over 3,500 acres as flat as a
billiard table, and it’s presently just the site of citrus groves. We’ve had, from
time to time, inquiries for dairies. Yesterday I was called and people want to put
an airport on the plano. A lot of things are happening, all of which indicate that
some day – and that someday is ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, but quite
honestly, that’s just around the corner – that the rest of the ranch will be
developed, and what has been a rural community, Orange County, will be part of
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a great megalopolis which will exist between Los Angeles and San Diego. So
that’s what’s going to happen. But for the immediate future, it’s still a cattle
ranch and citrus.
The Plano Trabuco would one day become the community of Rancho Santa Margarita.
Map courtesy of the Santa Margarita Company, 1992
The county planners do their homework in a very efficient manner. There
are parks planned; there are lakes planned along the Ortega Highway. Presently,
the county is going to condemn, or have made noises they are going to condemn
nine hundred acres south of the Ortega Highway on the west part of the ranch
immediately behind the city of Capistrano for a solid waste disposal site, or a
dump site. That sounds like it would be awful, and it’s in a beautiful setting. You
sit up there and look out and you can see the ocean, and it’s a beautiful place. But
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not only is it going to be a solid waste disposal site, but it’s going to be a public
park, and the land is going to be divided into seven areas. One of the parcels is
going to be the fill area where you dump all the rubbish, but the rest of it is going
to be a park, and so they’ll work through it efficiently over the next twenty or
thirty years, and when it’s all said and done, it will be a beautiful park. Again, it’s
just an indication of what’s to come, and that is the expansion of growth, I guess.
PP:
It’s interesting to think of solid waste disposal becoming a beautiful park.
AM:
I think that all of us are more in tune with the ecological needs and the great need
to preserve the beauty of the land that we have, but you got to get rid of all the
rubbish too, and that’s one of the ways you can do it. And it’s worked. Up behind
the University of California at Irvine there’s a huge dump, and eventually it will
be a park or a golf course, or even a place to develop, a place to build upon.
Again, this ranch has been in the family for ninety years. And my
grandmother, who was born in 1879 when Los Angeles was smaller than
Capistrano, has watched the growth of Southern California. It’s an interesting
story. It’s not just about our family but also about the history of California. The
man O’Neill came on January 1st, 1850. He missed being a Forty-Niner by one
day. And he grew up with San Francisco as San Francisco grew up, and the state
grew. He came just two years after the Great Americanos took over the state in
1848, so it slices through the American history of the state of California. And
especially this area, for sure.
PP:
It certainly does. I would like to ask the date you were born and where you went
to school and also you said you were in the army. Where did you go in the army?
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AM:
First of all, I was born in 1939 in Los Angeles, and my little girls are the eighth
generation born in California, so that makes me the seventh generation. I suspect
the first one probably walked up with Portola. Probably was an Indian, or
something. I grew up, as I said, in Los Angeles. I went to high school in the Los
Angeles area, and I graduated from Stanford University in 1961. I was in the
army until 1965, and I was in the Infantry. I was in ROTC at Stanford, so
therefore I was an officer, and I went to the Infantry school at Fort Benning,
Georgia. And then I was very fortunate, I guess, from a selfish standpoint,
because I was able to come back to California, and was stationed for the rest of
the time, the two years, as basic training company commander at Fort Ord. So I
wasn’t exposed to many of the dangers, I suspect, that an Infantry officer could be
exposed to. And then, as I said, after ’65, then we came down here.
PP:
And you’re down here now trying to take care of and preserve your ranch.
AM:
Well, as we were just saying, we were very blessed in this family to have this
great natural resource. A lot of people have accomplished quite a bit. I mean,
we’ve all been very successful. But I think the smartest guy in the whole chain of
command, or the whole chronology of this ranch, was the guy, the butcher, by the
name of O’Neill who came down here in 1882 and bought this place. A lot of
people can be born into some very fortunate situations, and certainly this is one of
them. But the great challenge is to take this natural resource and to do something
with it that’s good not only selfishly for your family, but perhaps even more
importantly in this time and age for those who are going to come after we leave.
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And that’s what Mission Viejo, the community, is all about. And that’s what the
rest of our business involvements are all about.
PP:
Do you have anything you would like to add, Mr. Moiso?
AM:
We were just talking about this man O’Neill and this man Flood in San Francisco,
and what I’M about to relate I learned from John Baumgartner and from my
grandmother, Mrs. O’Neill. But just as Richard O’Neill grew with San Francisco
– came on January 1st, 1850, and grew and prospered as San Francisco grew and
prospered – this man Flood also grew with the city. He was a bartender and then
he owned a bar, and the bar was next to O’Neill’s butcher shop. As the story
goes, they drummed up the first free lunch in San Francisco. They’d make roast
beef sandwiches and hustle them over to the bar to drum up business for the bar.
Well, anyway, the miners would come down from the gold country, and they’d
leave their money with Flood in his safe so they’d have a little bit when they came
back, and they trusted him and he was honest. Unlike a lot of the people, if you
remember the stories of the Barbary Coast where the guys were shanghaied and
money was taken and they’d be out of business when the guys came back from
the mountains. So anyway, that little bar, as the story goes, grew to be the Wells
Fargo Bank. And then, of course, Flood, through his involvements, became a
very wealthy man in his own right without even any consideration of the bank
because he was one of the California Big Four when you think about Stanford and
Huntington and those people who were so successful in the mother lode country
and the great silver mines of Nevada. My grandmother says that, yes, the bar
grew to be the bank, but the real reason for the bank’s existence was that Flood
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made so much money he had to have someplace to put it. And he made a lot of
money, and therefore, he was wise enough to realize that he could make his
money work for him, I suspect, and he became the banker that he did.
And that’s how, when O’Neill was able to be fortunate enough to be
exposed to this ranch and his other sources of funds, and English syndicate that he
had sold the ranch to in Chowchilla fell through, and another man by the name of
Barney Murphy, who was a lifelong crony of his, literally died two days before
putting up the money, that O’Neill went to his buddy Flood and said, “I really
want to have this ranch, but I don’t have the money,” and Flood said, “Okay.
We’re partners. I’ll put up the money and you put up your time and your energy
and go and work this ranch,” and they shook hands, and they were partners from
the beginning. But it wasn’t until O’Neill was in the last few yeas of his life that
Flood’s son formalized the handshake agreement of 1882 by giving O’Neill his
half interest in the ranch on paper.
PP:
And then it was shortly after that that O’Neill gave the management of the ranch
to his son Jerome.
AM:
His some Jerome is another fascinating tale. That’s exactly right. Jerome had
come down with his father to live on the ranch. He never married. He was a
paraplegic; he couldn’t walk very well. And the story goes – and my
grandmother knew all these people first-hand – the vaqueros would take him out
in the morning, and there was a little kind of ladder that he would climb up, and
they’d put him on his horse, and he’d ride all day with all of them, and then
they’d have to help him down. So this man grew up on the ranch and learned the
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ranching business while my grandfather stayed in San Francisco and was an
accountant, worked in the Wells Fargo bank, in Flood’s bank. And he was quite a
carouser from what I understand, because his best friend was a guy by the name
of James J. Corbett, who was the heavyweight champion of the world, and these
guys would go around and stage fights in Sausalito and promote fights, and
Corbett would fight the guys, and they’d put up the money. And the bank would
close every day about four o’clock, and they’d just go out in San Francisco and
have a grand time. Again, as my grandmother says. Then when you add it all up,
I think the story is true because he didn’t get married until he was fifty-four years
old, and I think as his father started to fail, he was kind of told to get down to the
ranch, and help out and do something. Jerome was the guy who was at the ranch,
and it was to Jerome that his father gave the whole ranch. The whole ranch was
given to Jerome, not to Richard or any of his sisters. There was quite a settlement
with the other members of that generation. But Jerome had the ranch, and it was
Jerome who built it into the great empire that it was, and then at his death, it was
Jerome who set up this trust we’ve been talking about for the benefit of his
brother and his sister, Mrs. Baumgartner, and the next generation, or their
children. So it was Jerome who played a very vital role in the growth of this
ranch as a great ranch. I suspect that when he died in 1927, a real glamorous era
really ended. It hasn’t been downhill since then (chuckle), but it certainly has
been a different way of life.
So as we go through and look here at our little series of notes, there are a
lot of things that are fascinating to talk about. I think it’s fascinating because I
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enjoy history too, as I’ve admitted here on the tape. It’s kind of fun to talk about
your own relatives. Although you certainly can’t put them on a pedestal. I think
that anyone who talks about their family tends to mislead whoever is listening
because they do put them on a pedestal.
And my grandmother, who I hope will speak into the microphone in the
not too distant future, she really puts everyone in their place. She remembers
these mythical characters: O’Neill and his sons. She just referred to them as a
dirty bunch that lived up in a house that didn’t even have any floors. It was just
dirt floors, that ranch house was, when she first met them. She met them July 4th,
1900, down in Oceanside. She said the O’Neills were a dirty bunch. And she
would go out, and they would have big barbecues every Sunday. Anybody who
was going by could come in for the barbecues. It must have been quite a life.
They had Chinese servants. You say Chinese servants, but maybe it was just a
bunch of Chinamen that were here and cooked the food. They had their own
railroad track and a railroad car from San Francisco on a siding. It must have
been a magnificent way of life. They would go to San Francisco, because that
was it in those days, that was the center of everything.
PP:
That’s where everything was.
AM:
I’m sure it was. Anyway, that’s a tale, I think.
PP:
Well, I certainly appreciate the time that you’ve given me so that I could have this
interview. I want to say thank you very much.