Golden West’s golden days

When Golden West College opened in 1966, it was surrounded by farmland, built on a bog, every structure had to be anchored with cement pillars reaching 68 feet into the bedrock below and it was run out of an old farmhouse. John Wordes knows. He was there.

Wordes, 74, who came to the school as a faculty member in 1966 before the doors even opened for students, curated the school’s 40th Anniversary Exhibition, which will be on display in the school’s Fine Arts Gallery through Feb. 23.

Golden West’s staff felt confident that he was the best man for the job, as they consider him the school’s unofficial historian.

Most of what is on display in the Fine Arts Gallery for the exhibition Wordes experienced first-hand. He is among a handful of staff remaining from the 1960s.

“I came with the dirt,” Wordes said.

Former dean of both the Fine Arts and Business and Information System departments, Wordes retired in August of 1995, only to be rehired on a part-time basis to organize special events.

“I didn’t want to break the umbilical,” he said.

He spent the last summer poring through thousands of slides and black-and-white photographs looking for what would best exemplify the school’s five decades of happenings.

Photos of the 1965 groundbreaking ceremony, scholarship ceremonies, graduations, Fourth of July parades for Huntington Beach, copies of course catalogs and the first student identification card given to the first student body president pull the viewer into the Golden West of years past.

But Wordes is not about living in the past. Hoping to offer a dichotomy of the Golden West experience, the retired art and photography instructor, paired a number of shots representing the early stages of an event or piece of history beside a contemporary counter. Photographs of the college’s first graduating class sit to the left of pictures of the 2006 graduation ceremony. Also, two aerial views of the campus — one in the 1960s and one in 2005 — show just how much the grounds have evolved.

“I wanted everyone to see how styles change,” Wordes said.

The time shifting is illustrated in photos, from the school’s first President Dudley Boyce operating a Dictaphone to jot down a note to current President Wes Bryan operating the Internet while making calls from a Motorola Q smart phone.

“I think it’s a good blend,” gallery Director Donna Sandrock said. “It allows students who don’t know much about the college to come in and see the history, and we have an art collection.”

The collection includes one of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints.

Probably the largest focus of the exhibit, aside from the display of staff photos across the top, centers on the school’s decades-long relationship with technology.

Nicknamed Electronic U. in a 1973 Saturday Review of Education article, Golden West hosted one of the first personal computer labs on an Orange County community college campus, Wordes said with pride.

“Other universities were coming here because we represented for them what was in their future,” Wordes said. “Most people don’t even know that we’ve been here 40 years until we bring it to their attention.”

The first lab had nine Mac 2 units, now they have hundreds, he said.

Three glass panes on display near the entrance of the exhibit are all that remain of the Lewis farmhouse, the school’s original administration building. The land on McFadden Avenue, at the north end of the property, was often affectionately referred to as “Dub’s Dump” in tribute to President Boyce’s tenure.

He was a real jokester, Wordes said, adding that sifting through decades of memories evoked a lot of emotions.

“I feel some sadness going through portraits of staff — we’ve lost a number of people,” he said.

But that did not stop him from including a row of black-and-white prints wrapped around the top of the exhibit walls pulled from a staff phone directory from the early 1990s.

“I wanted to surround it with faces of faculty and staff,” Wordes said. “They are here for the students; I wanted to give them their share of credit.”

“From day one, what makes it is the people,” he said.

The exhibit’s not just about the past. It also includes architectural renderings of two proposed building projects and a 3-D model of the new Health Science Building.