Before Orange Coast there was the Tahitian Terrace.
Ruth Ko, publisher of Newport Beach-based Orange Coast Magazine, once was a Polynesian dancer alongside Hawaiian crooner Don Ho at Disneyland’s Tahitian Terrace.
The gig was part of Ko’s life before advertising and publishing, when she was an actor and performer. She was in commercials and TV shows, such as “Charlie’s Angels,” “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
Now Ko is known for building Orange Coast, where she’s spent 30 years, more than half as publisher. She recently was honored for her work at the Business Journal’s 11th annual Women in Business luncheon on May 26 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
“I was honored to be chosen,” Ko said.
Ko said she switched gears in 1975 in a hunt for job security.
She landed a job with Hughes Ad House in Newport Beach, which bought Orange Coast a few months later.
(Interestingly, the magazine got its start a year earlier as Nieuport, a name dreamed up by then-publishers Stuart Karl and Ron Guccione, cousin of Penthouse Media Group Inc. founder Bob Guccione.)
Ko started as an account executive. She juggled tasks, including sales, collections, even cleaning the restrooms.
By the mid-1980s, she became Orange Coast magazine’s executive publisher and owned 17% of the company.
She bought Orange Coast from its majority shareholder and president, J. Wayne Stewart, who had declared personal bankruptcy, in 1992.
It was a gamble. Ko was up against two other bidders in the bankruptcy hearing.
She financed the buy by borrowing against her home, taking cash advances against her credit cards and later getting a loan against the company’s receivables.
She spent the next decade building the magazine into an OC fixture. The monthly publication, which has circulation of 50,000, is known for its glossy covers of movie stars, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Pierce Brosnan and Jay Leno.
The move hasn’t always been a popular one.
“You know, some people have criticized us for putting celebrities on our covers,” Ko said in a 2004 Orange Coast article. “They ask what Hollywood has to do with Orange County. Well I say, ‘We go to the movies, too, don’t we? They don’t just belong to Hollywood.'”
Orange Coast also covers OC social events and socialites. Ko said she’s worked to expand the magazine’s coverage to include people of different ethnic backgrounds.
“It’s so important to me being a minority growing up,” said Ko, who dropped out of high school in 10th grade and moved out of her family home in the San Fernando Valley at 15 to work.
Ko’s mother is Cherokee and French. Her deceased father was Chinese. She said the two couldn’t get married in California in the early 1940s because it was illegal for Asians and whites to wed.
They went to Seattle to get married, she said.
Ko has fought to protect Orange Coast’s name. In 2002, the magazine squared off against Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc. and its Coast Magazine in an unsuccessful bid to get its rival to drop “Coast” from its name.
“That’s a trademark that I’ve spent so much money to keep,” Ko said.
The biggest challenge, according to Ko, is keeping the magazine “fresh.” She said her staff of about 20 workers, mostly women, is “phenomenal.”
“We are a magazine that others emulate,” said Ko, who recently married and lives in Irvine. “I don’t want that to be said of us.”
