Mesa Musings:

This newspaper’s masthead used to read “Orange Coast Daily Pilot.”

No longer. The “Orange Coast” was discarded a few years back.

If you look around, however, you’ll note that lots of local businesses, agencies and organizations go by that name: Orange Coast.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia defines “The Orange Coast” as a “string of cities and neighborhoods fronting the Pacific Coast in Orange County,” running from Seal Beach in the north to San Clemente in the south. That string of cities includes Newport Beach (though not Costa Mesa — a gaffe of major proportions, as you’ll see later).

Increasingly, we residents of Newport-Mesa identify ourselves as being from the Orange Coast.

Dozens of Orange Coasts are listed in the local White Pages, including: Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center, in Fountain Valley; Orange Coast Dodge, in Costa Mesa; Orange Coast Thermography, in Cypress; and Orange Coast magazine, a lifestyle publication in Newport.

“Orange Coast” is almost as ubiquitous in these parts as “Orange County” or “The OC.” But, are you familiar with the derivation of the term? It used to be my job to know such things.

The first Orange Coast-anything surfaced in 1946. The initial organization to be dubbed Orange Coast was (cue the fanfare): Orange Coast College of Costa Mesa. Yes, the first Orange Coast was established in a municipality that’s presently not on Wikipedia’s roster of Orange Coast cities. Hmmm. A faux pas, to be sure!

For a number of years prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Orange County’s coastal residents dreamed of establishing a community college in their midst. The campaign was put on hold during the war.

Fullerton College was founded in 1913, and Santa Ana College followed two years later.

Those institutions remained the only community colleges in Orange County for more than three decades. The residents of the burgeoning coastal cities of Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Seal Beach, Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente felt strongly that their educational needs were not being served.

An aggressive campaign for a new college resumed at the end of the war and, in January 1947, voters made OCC an official entity. OCC offered its first classes in September 1948.

The institution was headquartered on a sparsely populated plateau above Newport (to be incorporated in 1953 as Costa Mesa), on 240 acres of former Santa Ana Army Air Base property.

The name of the nascent institution was determined in December 1946. A Huntington Beach resident, Margaret Elliott, is credited with improvising the moniker.

While dozens of people were “working outside the box” on catchy labels, Elliott suggested a common-sense approach to naming the college. She offered her husband, Raymond Elliott, then superintendent of the Huntington Beach Union High School District, who was serving on the college’s planning committee, a crackerjack solution.

Raymond recounted the occasion in a chapter he penned for “Tumbleweeds to Roses,” a 1965 book about the founding of the college.

Shortly after the war, Raymond Elliott became involved with an organization committed to establishing a junior college on Orange County’s coast. The organization was called the Orange County Coast Assn.

“[Margaret and I] usually did the evening dinner dishes together, the only sure way to escape a houseful of children,” he wrote in “Tumbleweeds to Roses.”

“After many attempts to find a suitable title, she said, ‘Why not work on Orange County Coast Assn. College? Just strike out ‘county’ and ‘association,’ and you have it: ‘Orange Coast College.’”

Brilliant!

Venturing slightly further with that technique, I suppose we could have been saddled with County Assn. College. Yawn! Sounds much too bureaucratic.

From our perspective 60-plus years down the line, it seems we were fated always to be Orange Coast. What a great choice!

Now, if we could just convince Wikipedia that Costa Mesa deserves “Orange Coast” city status.

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.