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.