A LOOK BACK:A will to drill and a drink that’s hard to swallow

Two years after the discovery of oil in Huntington Beach, the landscape changed dramatically. The city was transformed from a small beach community of less than 1,000 residents to a bustling oil town of 7,000.

In 1922, there was still a small section between 17th and 23rd streets along the coast that was closed to drilling. That neighborhood was reserved for the homes of the town’s elite. Around the town there were still fields of lima beans, acres of celery and mountains of sugar beets waiting to be processed into sugar at the Holly Sugar factory.

But downtown there was plenty of evidence of a thriving oil industry. Oil fueled the economy of our town, its people and its government.

It was also in 1922 that Col. Charles P. O’Connor arrived in California. He bought a home in Newport Beach, but he often headed to Huntington Beach for his early morning swims. While here, he got interested in the oil boom.

Little is known about O’Connor in his early years except that he was raised on the East Coast in a well-to-do family.

During World War I, O’Connor served as an army officer in Germany. When the Armistice was signed in 1918, O’Connor was stationed in the German city of Coblenz.

After leaving Coblenz, O’Connor traveled around Europe. He was in Paris when William Randolph Hearst was kicked out of the Hotel Crillon because the management objected to an anti-French editorial that had ran in one of his newspapers.

On March 3, 1922, O’Connor returned to America, arriving in New York with his unit, the 1st Engineers. In the fall of that year, he settled down in Newport Beach. He rented an office in the Macklin building, 302 Pacific Coast Highway, and started acquiring property. He bought all available lots between 17th and 23rd streets, paying the owners well above market price — in cash.

He wanted to drill for oil there, but when the town was developed, this section was originally planned as a choice residential area, and restrictions prevented him from drilling on his property.

An able speaker and a man of impressive wealth, O’Connor led a fight to remove those restrictions. His main weapon was money. He spread it around and, naturally, it was as effective then as it is today.

Even though many of our city’s prominent citizens felt that it would be a mistake to sacrifice such a beautiful residential neighborhood for oil derricks, O’Connor’s lavish spending was too persuasive.

At the April 12, 1926 election, a ballot measure passed 2 to 1 allowing O’Connor the freedom to drill on his property. A change in the City Council removed any other hurdles.

It would not take long before more than 300 houses were either demolished or moved elsewhere in Huntington Beach and replaced with drilling machines.

O’Connor amassed a good deal of money, but eventually he left Huntington Beach and to live in Aberdeen, Md. He once told a friend back here that he was the only Republican within 80 miles of his estate.

During the same year that O’Connor arrived in Newport Beach another man attempted to make his own fortune — not in oil, but in a beverage he had concocted.

Louis A. Steck, a rancher from the Wintersburg area, with the help of his father, created a drink they believed would put Huntington Beach on the map. He named the beverage “O-B-D.”

Steck organized a company in Watsonville to manufacture the syrup from which the drink is made. He approached several businessmen in Huntington Beach, hoping to interest them in selling his healthful product. (The syrup contained celery, malt phosphates and tonic made from bark.)

I wonder if the name O-B-D stood for old, bad and dreadful?

Who knows? Maybe someone today will market it to people of Surf City and it will become a hit — we could call it Café Oilee.

I think I’ll stick with just a plain old cup of coffee for now.