SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : She’ll Soon Be Gone--but Not History

Whenever engineers, historians or reporters have questions about the city’s rich past, they usually call Pamela Hallan-Gibson.

The 51-year-old San Juan Capistrano native, a seventh-generation Californian and author of three books on the city, has for years been the unofficial historian.

At the end of this month, though, Hallan-Gibson is moving to Sonoma to take a job there as city manager, and local residents are wondering how they’ll manage without her.

“Nobody has the knowledge that she has and the expertise in doing historic research,” said Mary Tryon, spokeswoman for the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society. “Anyone who has done research on the city of San Juan has had to call her at some point. Basically, her family, her history, everything’s in San Juan.”

Hallan-Gibson said Monday that leaving won’t be easy, but Sonoma has a long history too, and the setting reminds her of San Juan Capistrano in earlier times.

“What makes it OK is that I’m going to a town that is so similar yet doesn’t have the urbanization,” Hallan-Gibson said. “It’s like San Juan 20 years ago. Every so often I get this attack of cold feet. But change is good. It makes life interesting.”

Besides her treasure trove of old photographs, Hallan-Gibson is leaving behind friends, relatives and her hometown.

But she says she won’t miss the daily commute she has been making for the past five years to her job as city manager in La Palma. That 76-mile round trip, she says, can take as long as an hour and 15 minutes each way.

“I’m moving somewhere where I’m picking up two and a half hours a day that I can spend writing a novel,” she said.

Hallan-Gibson wrote her first book in 1975 for San Juan Capistrano’s bicentennial. The book, “Dos Cientos Anos En San Juan Capistrano” was the first of six she has published, all about Orange County.

In 1976, Hallan-Gibson landed a part-time job with the city of San Juan Capistrano as an administrative assistant and eventually became assistant to the city manager.

In 1986, she became assistant city manager in La Palma and, in 1990, that city’s top hired official.

Hallan-Gibson, who is married and the mother of two grown children, figures that not everyone with questions about San Juan Capistrano’s history will stop calling just because she’s leaving. “They’ll find me in Sonoma,” she predicted with a smile.