El Toro's Scribe and Lake Forest's Mystery Lady

Today I’d like to introduce you to someone who’ll be playing a major role in our El Toro & Before story.

She wasn’t famous like . On the contrary—and despite her considerable artistic talents—the subject of our story, Clara Mason Fox, generally kept a low profile and rarely, if ever, spoke about herself.

Or, as one of Clara’s nieces recently observed, “You could talk to her for three days and not know a thing about her.”

Why, then, is Clara Mason Fox so important to our story?

Well, to begin with, she served as one of the area’s first schoolteachers. 

It’s also a fact that Clara and her husband built a beautiful home on Cherry Street—a home, incidentally, designed by Clara herself—and that for many years she and Mr. Fox were highly regarded not only by residents of El Toro but folks living throughout the Saddleback Valley.

A MYSTERY, WRAPPED WITHIN AN ENIGMA?  

Perhaps Clara’s greatest contribution to long-ago El Toro—as well as her most lasting legacy to all of us in present-day Lake Forest—is an intriguing little volume, A History of El Toro, which 60 years later continues to be required reading for all rangers, not to mention a tremendous source of information for local history buffs—yours truly included.

It’s interesting to note, however, that although A History of El Toro includes the names and histories of hundreds of people living within the  Saddleback Valley—from the days of the vaqueros, all the way to the late 1930s—Clara makes only a few references to her husband’s family and even fewer regarding herself.

And of the latter, those references are confined to the book’s preface.

“In the summer of 1937,” she begins, “the El Toro Woman’s Club asked me to write, with the cooperation of Charles Salter, a history of El Toro.”

Charles M. Salter—not to be confused with the current principal of Aliso Viejo’s Aliso Niguel High School, Charles T. Salter—was one of the area’s earliest settlers, having moved to El Toro in 1888.

Unfortunately, Clara adds, soon after the club members made their request, Mr. Salter and his family moved away. Then, to complicate matters, Clara says, she fell victim to “months of illness.”

GOING IT ALONE

It’s tempting to contemplate that Clara’s long illness might have been brought on or at least exacerbated by the daunting prospect of tackling El Toro’s history entirely by herself. 

Whatever the case, Clara says it wasn't until about a year later when she began to research El Toro’s history. Then she dug in, and, in time, presented 30 pages of script to the ladies of the club.

"I thought the work was about done," Clara writes.

Not! Because although the ladies appreciated what she'd already created, there was so much more to tell: "the grain-farming, the old adobes, the Serranos and the Avilas, the stage robbery ..." And so forth.

Also, it should be mentioned that while much of Clara's initial research had relied on various Orange County publications, now an even larger portion of her research involved interview after interview with knowledgeable—though more-likely-than-not garrulous—El Toro old-timers.

At this point, in fact, Clara admits she ran into a problem common to anyone who asks multiple people about the same subject.  

“I have been astonished to find how recollections, carefully and honestly recalled, can differ,” she writes.  Her solution?  “I have taken a consensus of recalled facts, to find the true one, and have taken pains to make verifications, when memories conflicted.”

And then, wishing her readers well, she ends the preface and begins the story of El Toro.

But what of Clara’s own story?

That, gentle reader, will unfold next week.