Editor’s Note: The Business Journal’s Special Report this week is on Meetings & Conventions (see page 19), and includes our annual list of OC’s largest hotels based on meeting space, for which Anaheim has three of OC’s four biggest. Harry S. Rinker is an Orange County real estate icon who built thousands of homes and several shopping centers in what’s now Garden Grove, Anaheim, Stanton and Buena Park. After reading the Jan. 6 Leader Board based on an excerpt of a Richard Snow book, “Disney’s Land,” the 98-year-old Rinker wrote the following letter to Snow.
I am sure that we have never met, but your article in the Orange County Business Journal, “How Walt Disney Picked Anaheim,” triggered a great many memories of myself at that particular time.
My partner, Bill Tietz and I had been building tract homes in Tacoma, Wash. after the end of World War II and moved in 1952 to Garden Grove and started building tract homes in 1953 and continued till the end of 1960 when we split up the partnership and went our separate ways.
As you correctly note in your article, Orange County at that time was “a sea of orange groves” typically 10 to 30 acres owned by individuals who lived on the site, had the oranges picked and made a modest living in their sale. We tract builders, at that time, would purchase the acreage to build tract homes that was promptly and easily approved by all the cities including Anaheim, Garden Grove, Buena Park, etc.
We typically put one of the small farms of 10 to 30 acres in a four to six month escrow then submitted a subdivision housing tract to the City Planning Commission, which they approved in about 30 to 60 days, and then we obtained a loan commitment and was able to close the escrow, record the trac map and put the loan on all in one day.
This ease of processing contributed to our ability to sell the homes mostly “GI” at an appraised price of $9,500 for a three-bedroom, three-bath home with a two-car garage on a 7,000-square-foot lot.
I recall quite clearly in 1957 looking for more subdivision land and found an attractive site on the northwest corner of Harbor and Katella. I went to the farmers who lived on the site. I offered them our top price of $6,000 an acre, $60,000 for the 10 acres. They contemplated for a couple of weeks and I would go back two or three times and they finally said to me, “As you may have heard, Disney is buying the property adjoining us to the north and west” and I had not heard that. They said, however, we decided we would sell it to you for $6,500 an acre or $65,000 total.
I agreed, we put it in a typical four-month escrow, which I extended a couple of times to a total of about eight months and during that period I was able to negotiate a lease on the Harbor and Katella corner with Union Oil Company for a Service Station and Union arranged for us to borrow $60,000 on their lease from their bank for a loan as the cost of construction of the service station was $32,000. I then sold off the remaining property to some motels and small shops.
The reason in 1957 I failed to recognize the eventual value of that 10 acre corner was that neither I nor anyone else at that time thought Disneyland would be anything more than a wide place on the road with a few of the amenities they put in; i.e., we didn’t anticipate at all what was eventually to come. I’m sure Walt Disney personally did not have the foresight either to visualize what he created would become.
You mentioned the names Keith Murdoch, the former Anaheim city manager, and Ernie Moller brings back some great memories, I knew both of them very well and interfaced with them many times.
After I had broken up the partnership with Bill Tietz, I continued to live in Garden Grove and started developing service stations and later into shopping centers.
During that time, I happened to meet a Disney executive and asked them, “Why in the world didn’t Disney purchase that 10 acres on the corner of Harbor and Katella?” Their response was, “He just didn’t have the additional money.” Around 1960, Disney built a hotel with a restaurant on the northwest portion of their site and we would go there every day for lunch.
I have continued in the real estate business developing mostly shopping centers. However, when I occasionally drive by the corner of Harbor and Katella today and observe all of the five and 10 story buildings on that 10 acres, I recognize that the greatest mistake that I have ever made in my life was failing to retain that property, which I quite easily could have done.
The reason I can’t recall all the details of those times is that I have a little age on me, I’m 98 years old and in a few days will be 99. Time does go by very rapidly, doesn’t it?
I would enjoy an opportunity to meet with you and discuss old times any time you are in Newport Beach.
Cordially,
Harry S. Rinker
