Mickadeit: Edinger Avenue, we barely know thee

Edinger Avenue at its western terminus, looking north. FRANK MICKADEIT, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

O.C. trivia question: What street or road connects Huntington Harbour and Dana Point Harbor? If you say Pacific Coast Highway, you would be wrong. PCH (called Coast Highway through Laguna Beach) will take you very, very close. But only one street actually connects the entrances to the two harbors. It is called Edinger Avenue/Irvine Center Drive/Moulton Parkway/Street of the Golden Lantern.

You'd be crazy to use that route to get from one harbor to the other, of course, but indeed, it is one continuous street that changes names four times as it passes through 11 of O.C.'s 34 cities. This musing was prompted by a question sent me by one Jean Mahlberg, 88, of Laguna Woods. Her question, however, required more than just retreating to the giant Thomas Bros. map on our newsroom wall. Her question was: How do you pronounce "Edinger"?

She explained: "In 1952, we bought a small, new tract house on South Poplar Street, two blocks west of Bristol and Edinger (in Santa Ana). At that time, the only way to pronounce the 'g' was as in 'finger' or 'humdinger.' Now, all I hear is 'g' as in 'ginger.' I like the different topics you discuss in your column and perhaps an old-timer (not you of course) can answer my question. We lived in that home 40 years."

For some reason, I found this interesting. I used to live just off Edinger in Huntington Beach. I have referred to it and heard it referred to countless times in my 25 years in O.C., and I don't ever remember anyone pronouncing it with a hard "g." Could we have been pronouncing it wrong all this time?

I emailed Stan Oftelie, an amateur O.C. historian whose book "Nothing Rhymes With Orange" is nothing less than a manifestation of his interest in O.C.-related pronunciation issues.

Oftelie not only knew the answer, but he had actually been in the Mahlbergs' back yard on Poplar Street about 40 years ago for the wedding reception of the Mahlbergs' daughter.

Oftelie proved to my satisfaction that Mahlberg was correct: At some point, the county began collectively mispronouncing the name of one of our major streets, one that was named after one of our county's pioneer families. Oftelie figured it out by very ingenious means, probably the next best thing to finding a recorded oral history.

Edinger Avenue, Oftelie reports, is named for Christopher C. Edinger, a Santa Ana vegetable farmer and mayor. Edinger was a progressive who bolted the Republican Party in 1894 and ran for Orange County supervisor under the banner of the farmer-friendly People's Party.

He lost. but during the campaign, the long-defunct Santa Ana Independent had reported that Edinger's last name rhymed with finger.


"I can only imagine that newcomers changed the street name pronunciation over the years, drifting away from the way C.C. Edinger pronounced his own name," Oftelie says. "When Mrs. Mahlberg moved to Santa Ana, there very well may have been people in the area who still knew or remembered the prominent Edinger family and pronounced the family name correctly."

By my odometer, the superstreet is 36.1 miles long, from the entrance of Sunset Aquatic Park at Huntington Harbour to where it spills into the parking lot at the intersection of Dana Point Harbor Drive. Broken down, it is Edinger for the westernmost 16.1 miles; Irvine Center Drive for 6 miles between the 55 freeway and Lake Forest Drive; Moulton Parkway for the next 7.6 miles to Crown Valley Parkway, and Golden Lantern for the last 6.4 miles.

You pass by 23 gas stations, four Starbucks and two city halls. Having been armed with Oftelie's scholarship, I was pronouncing it with the hard G all the way.


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