Archive Committee keeps Orange Coast College’s history alive

We’re an earnest bunch as we gather Wednesday mornings in Orange Coast College’s library.

The five of us have collectively logged more than 150 years of career service to the college. And, even though we’re retired, we continue to hold deep feelings for the place. Not as deft as we once were, we’re still capable of giving something back.

I’m fairly new to the group –- the last six months. But this volunteer committee has been meeting since 2003. Labeled the Archive Committee, its mission is to document and preserve the college’s rich heritage. Historical materials are maintained in the Archive Room on the second floor of OCC’s Library.

Our group has done a masterful job. I perused the Archive, as it existed, a decade ago, and it was a disheveled mess. It’s since been greatly expanded, cleaned up and organized.

Bob Clifton, a retired professor of aviation technology, heads the archivists and is hugely responsible for the current condition of the Archive. His impressive organizational skills keep the rest of us on our toes.

Others on the committee include retired head football coach, athletic director and professor of physical education Dick Tucker; retired assistant football coach, head tennis coach and P.E. professor George Mattais; retired head athletic trainer, sports medicine instructor and P.E. professor Leon Skeie; and myself.

We do lots of work during our three hours together each week. We also carry on a fair amount of kibitzing, reminiscing and telling of tales. I first heard some of these stories –- from the same sources -– in the early 1970s.

Tucker tells them best. He always has. He coached the Pirate football team for 24 seasons, and led the Bucs to two national championships — in 1963 and 1975. He’s a masterful storyteller.

Skeie ranks second to Tucker in spinning a yarn. Leon’s weakness? He gets to laughing so hard just before delivering the punch line that he has difficulty breathing.

The archival records were maintained somewhat haphazardly in the Library for a number of years. When I retired in 2008, after 37 years as director of community relations, I boxed up stacks of campus publications and materials that had been collecting in my office for decades. I forwarded everything to the Archive.

My office sent five or six decades’ worth of issues of the student newspaper; an array of catalogs, schedules and printed materials; books; manuscripts; correspondence; minutes from meetings; decades worth of press releases and feature stories; photographs; videos; films; annual reports; scrapbooks; two campus oral history projects; TV news media coverage; and newspaper clippings.

Though I served in the office from 1971 to 2008, a substantial portion of the materials sent by my office to the Archive dated from the late 1940s and ‘50s, into the ‘60s.

In 1972, we had a water line rupture in our photo storage room in a former Santa Ana Army Air Base building and lost hundreds of irreplaceable photographs and negatives. It was then that I realized the vulnerability of our historical stash. We began taking precautions.

In 1987-88, I was responsible for coordinating the college’s 40th anniversary celebration. As I examined the collected artifacts, I began to appreciate how inadequate the Archive was for an institution our size. To me at the time, it seemed OCC had preserved precious little of its history.

That’s changed.

A decade later, I coordinated the college’s 50th anniversary observance. During the two campaigns, I conducted a couple of oral history projects documenting the first 50 years of the college. I interviewed dozens of faculty and staff members and students. Many were quite elderly.

Not a trained historian, I fell in love with the documentation process.

The current Archive Committee spends much of its time sorting, organizing, cataloging and filing. In recent months, we’ve been identifying individuals and groups in thousands of photos and negatives in our files.

We, the “Fab-Five” of archive sorting, feel like we’re contributing something of value to Orange Coast College.

And our spirits are always uplifted by a good joke!

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.