Stories From the OC - Coast Magazine - November 2019

E D I TO R ’ S

L E T T E R

The joy of listening to each other My husband and I don’t always listen to each other. My excuse is that I’m hearing impaired, and I take my hearing aids out when I’m at home – which means that often I literally don’t even hear him.

But seriously, you might say that this failure to communicate is a consequence of balancing the many demands of our modern life. Yet maybe the biggest culprit is just the fact that we assume we’ve heard it all already. That after more than a decade together there’s nothing we don’t already understand about each other.

That’s why it was such a revelation to participate in the “Stories from the OC” initiative, which we cover in our featured story in this month’s issue, where we thought it fit nicely with our traditional November philanthropy theme, meant to celebrate all the ways we come together to support one another in the OC. The local story initiative is being put on by the developer FivePoint, but it’s part of a national movement established by the nonprofit StoryCorps. It’s a simple proposition: Have a person ask another person about their life and record the conversation. Then make those conversations accessible for everyone to listen to.

While the idea is simple, the results are profound. As the StoryCorps mission statement goes, “We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters.”

The “Stories from the OC” experience is set within a California

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campsite-themed installation at 703 Benchmark, in Irvine’s Cadence Park, complete with an Airstream travel trailer converted into a sound booth. The theme is meant to evoke the feeling of gathering around a campfire to share stories and memories, and I have to say for us it worked. While interviewing my husband about growing up in West Virginia and coming of age in Orange County, listening to him talk about both his career as a political operative and his raucous youth as a punk rocker, I leaned in, appreciating him and his journey in a way I haven’t made time for in a long while. You might say I remembered why I fell in love with him in the first place.

StoryCorps’ goal of creating “a culture of listening” couldn’t be more timely, or necessary. So why don’t you join in? Visit StoriesFromTheOC.com for hours at the physical location or to make an appointment to record a conversation. Bring some photos to prompt your memories if you’d like, and a list of questions to get the conversation going. A “storytelling guide” is on hand to help set up your StoryCorps account and offer tips for recording your story, as well as how to share it to “Stories from the OC” community page.

Go ahead – I’m all ears,

SAMANTHA DUNN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR

samantha@coastmagazine.com Twitter @SamanthaDunn

C O A S T :: N O V E M B E R 2 019 PHOTOGRAPHY BY RALPH PALUMBO

Stories FROM THE OC STORIES BY SAMANTHA DUNN AND PHIL WOOD PHOTOGRAPHY BY RALPH PALUMBO

“We can learn so much about the people around us, even people we already know, just by taking the time to have a conversation. And if you pay just a little attention, you’ll find wisdom and poetry in their words.” So says Dave Isay, founder of the nonprofit StoryCorps, a national initiative to record oral histories of everyday people around the nation (you may have heard the weekly segments broadcast on National Public Radio). The goal is nothing less than “to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.”

Now this initiative has arrived in Orange County. For the campaign “Stories from the OC,” developer FivePoint has created a recording studio in one of its Great Park neighborhoods, open through December to all county residents for free. Everyone is invited to share personal stories, memories and reflections, in any language, with a family member or friend in an interview setting. The recordings are then preserved through the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the largest single collection ever of digitally recorded human voices, with more than a quarter of a million conversations already gathered.

But what does that all mean, exactly?

Here we offer samplings from the conversations between some familiar faces from around the county. Want to record your own?

Go to storiesfromtheoc.com for all the details. Remember: Every story is a treasure.

Every story matters. ➠

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Emile Haddad

Interviewed by daughter Serene Haddad

The FivePoint Communities president and CEO, who came to America from Beirut, Lebanon, sat down with his daughter Serene. Here she askes him about how his life experiences have shown him how to improve the world: “Today if you are a kid with little means, you’re going to have to go to the public education system.

And the public education system, unfortunately, doesn’t provide you with the same opportunity as private schools, whether it’s the quality of education, the size of classes, extracurriculum – sports, music, cultural.

“So, you end up actually having one kid go through one system and go into society with a little bit less roundedness, and much more insecurity, than the other kid who had the advantages. By building public schools and allowing people who have money and people who don’t have money to share the same experience and have equal access, you allow kids to get the same education. Not only be able to excel, but also allow that kid with little means to have the same thing I had when I came to a foreign place – to not to be intimidated. To feel that I have the self-confidence to be able to jump in and compete and contribute.

“I think that’s really a big thing of why we do what we do: It’s to give that equal access, so the world doesn’t get much more segregated than it is between people who have and people who don’t have.

Because unless we start elevating certain groups of people up, that gap is going to start creating more social issues, and we are starting to see some of it in this country right now.” ■

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Noah Von Blöm

Interviewed by wife Marin Howarth Von Blӧm

Award-winning chef Noah sat down with Marin, his wife and partner in DirtySexyHappiness Hospitality Group, which owns ARC and ARC Butcher+Baker.

Here she asks him what he would want to say to his mentor in the food industry: “When I left The Ritz Prime Seafood, I didn’t leave as a protégé.

I was someone [Ritz founder] Hans Prager cared a lot about. But time and youth and distance are things that separate people forever. I’d like to sit with Hans one more time, because by the time I finally came back, he had already died, and we had never gotten to talk.

“I think it’s interesting that the circumstances of me being at the Ritz and being so young, I’m sure he never knew what an impact he made on my life. I think that sometimes, as we all look at how we act and who we are and what it is we try to teach people, even when they move on, we never know the impact we make on them. They never share it with us. We never get to have a conversation.

“I think part of that is because we are so caught up in trying to show these people, or ourselves or whomever, that we’re doing what they said and we’re becoming what they wanted. Even though we never actually have been able to take the time to tell them that they were a part of that influence, they’re a huge factor for us getting there. I think ‘thank you’ is always what I would tell Hans.” ■

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A.G. Kawamura

Interviewed by Mark Lopez

Owner of Orange County Produce, A.G., right, is the former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and co-chair of the nonprofit for sustainability Solutions from the Land. Here he and Mark, president of the Orange County Farm Bureau, are discussing what solutions are in place for tackling the problem of hunger in the county: “People were pretty amazed to hear that we were farming in between the runways at the old El Toro Marine Base. We looked at it and the ground was beautiful. It used to be the prized lima bean field of James Irvine. We started to see that there is every reason to think we can farm out there in between the runways.

“The thought of having a fruit-of-the-month club came up. More importantly, we also realized that new developments were going to be around us, built out of the Great Park itself. We all said wouldn’t it be amazing if we could create a location where all the 400 crops that are grown in California – there’s more than that now, when you include the herbs and spices that are starting to show up everywhere – are grown in one place. And that is the goal for our Solutions for Urban Ag Group right now. We’re going to create what we think could be an incredible botanical showcase using 21st century ag of all kinds.” ■

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Erik and Stacey Rees

Interviewed by daughter Shaya Rees

The Rees family founded the Jessie Rees Foundation to support children going through cancer treatment after 12-year-old daughter Jessie died from inoperable brain cancer in 2012. Here sister Shaya asks her father, Erik, and mother, Stacey, about the defining moment when Jessie got the idea for the foundation’s signature JoyJars.

Stacey: “We were leaving radiation or the clinic; I don’t remember which one it was. Jessie asked when all the other kids got to go home, because she went home each day. Erik had told her that not everybody gets to go home, that some have to stay in the hospital, and they spend long lengths of time at CHOC. She just sort of innocently asked, ‘Well, how can we help them?’”

Erik: “That desire for her to try to help them, the other kids who couldn’t leave the hospital, led to the creation of JoyJars.”

Stacey: “It started with a paper bag and Beanie Babies. We knew that she couldn’t give her Beanie Babies away, but she wanted to. It kind of evolved over a few days.

Between Erik and Jess, you came up with the plastic jar, and Jessie’s middle name was Joy. We put joy and jars together and it created JoyJars. She just put stuff in them.

“She wanted to make other kids smile. It started as a plastic jar that she filled with things that she found.

Every day after treatment, the thing that got her through it was that she wanted to stop at Target or the Dollar Store and get toys that she could put in the jar. So we’d go shopping.” ■

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John Gutierrez

Interviewed by Reuben Franco

Reuben, the CEO of OC Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, asks John, left, a chamber board member who is the owner and founder of OC Hospice Care, what made him leave a job in corporate America to start his own business: “I ran into [a doctor he had worked with] at a hospital and he said, ‘Come over to my kid’s birthday party this weekend in Huntington Beach. Bring your wife and kids.’ Unfortunately, my kids were sick that weekend and my wife couldn’t go, but she told me to go.

It’s interesting, because if I hadn’t gone to his kid’s party, OC Hospice would have never gotten started.

“At that party, he pulled me aside and said, ‘John, all these years I’ve known you, you’ve always helped build other businesses, whether it’s hospices or organizations, but when are you going to open your own?’ I’d never thought about it, but he said, ‘You should do it. You can build it; you’ve built other ones.’ He instilled in me that confidence.

“I went home and asked my wife, ‘What do you think about us starting our own hospice?’ and she looked at me, like, are you serious?

I called one of my old bosses who was retired and then my sister came in. Who would have thought, you know, helping each other out?

That doctor instilled that in me. It wasn’t planned, but I think that’s why nowadays I enjoy teaching and mentoring young kids to be entrepreneurs, because it’s exciting when you’re building something from scratch and seeing it grow like a plant.” ■

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