All Our Yesterdays – February 2026

    From its inception in 1970, the Orinda Historical Society (OHS) has been an essential part of the local community, providing guided downtown walks for schools and clubs, speaker events and holiday dinners, as well as showcasing artifacts and documents that hark back to Orinda’s origins.
    But over the decades, as the number of OHS volunteers diminished, visitors to the Orinda History Museum frequently encountered locked doors, while phones went unanswered. School kids who once relied on the OHS to provide all the necessary intel for their time-sensitive essays no longer came by.
    By 2019, the OHS was being dismissed by fellow Contra Costa County historical societies as “dead” – as in, “we don’t want to end up like OHS.”
    But then came COVID-19.
    And instead of sounding a death knell for the Orinda Historical Society, the 2020 lockdown actually provided some necessary breathing space. What else was there to do but stay close to home and fix things?
    Little by little, a new team of volunteers emerged – enthusiastic, knowledgeable, utterly focused on the job in hand – all eager to set about reinventing their moribund historical society and watch as a new improved version slowly rose, phoenix-like from the ashes to become, once again, a vibrant part of Orinda.
    Generous grants from local associations like the Orinda Woman’s Club and Orinda Community Foundation, as well as donations from altruistic Orindans, helped raise OHS-awareness, but undoubtedly a major paradigm shift in the Society’s engagement with the local community came via two transformative grants from California Revealed, a non-profit organization whose statewide initiative has, over the last 15 years, provided free digitization, preservation and access services, along with funding support, to more than 450 Californian libraries, archives and museums.
    Many older Orindans will doubtless remember the Orinda Sun – a local newspaper that chronicled the progress made in unincorporated Orinda between 1948 and 1972.
    All 824 issues make fascinating reading and have more to offer than just the regular “hatches, matches and dispatches.” As much as anything, this glimpse into social history comes from the advertisements scattered throughout their pages bearing witness to everyday life with their unpretentious ads for gas and real estate, shoes and ground beef, which all appear remarkably cheap now.
    In 1972, when the Orinda Sun folded, 24 years’ worth of newspapers were bound and handed over to the OHS for safekeeping. Huge and unwieldy, the binders ended up in an anonymous storage facility many miles away, where they rarely saw the light of day.
    But thanks to the diligent efforts of OHS Archivist Teresa Long in securing the first of two grants from California Revealed in 2022, a huge slice of Orinda’s history is now available to anyone with a computer or smart phone.
    It’s been a massive game changer! Anyone anywhere in the world can now access Orinda’s history 24/7. No more frustration with locked museum doors or unanswered phones.
    Orinda Sun newspapers, from 1948 to 1963, are now available online through the OHS website (orindahistory.org) as well as California Revealed (californiarevealed.org) and the Internet Archive (archive.org).
    The second California Revealed grant, in 2023, allowed OHS to also digitize a number of irreplaceable oral histories and audio/visual files. Many of these recordings were still on archaic media, so it was critical to transfer them to a digital format before the tapes degraded any further.
    With OHS now firmly dragged into the 21st century, the decision was taken to subscribe to CatalogIt, a cloud-based software for managing and sharing collections. Thanks to its dedicated volunteers (chief among them, OHS Recording Secretary, Vivian Ricci, who undertook most of the work), OHS was able to organize and store information about their archives and records for every item donated to OHS since 1970.
    Sadly, just when OHS was riding high, it was suddenly “game over” when, in March 2025, Executive Order 14238 (a.k.a. “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”), dismantled the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), an independent agency that had hitherto awarded federal grant funding to libraries and museums across America.
    Up to that point, California Revealed had been fully funded by the IMLS through the Grants to States program and, with $15 million committed to California in 2025/6, OHS had finally been able to offer their community an online digitized and accessible collection simply by using keywords. It was quite a breakthrough.
    California Revealed responded to DC’s action by going into full fundraising mode, swiftly gaining 501 (3)(c) status.
    Six months later, the game changed again when 21 District Court judges ruled Executive Order 14238 to be “unlawful.” It remains to be seen what happens next.
    Things may change again, but in the meantime, OHS can be proud of how well it has served its community.
    With easy access to Orinda’s history, OHS has provided, in the last year alone, selected highlights from over 40 newly-digitized recordings of past residents (many of whom are no longer with us) and used its newly-digitized archives to create Orinda’s “Road to Incorporation.”
    The resultant display boards proved extremely popular at last year’s Classic Car Show, as well as the City’s 40th birthday celebrations (although perhaps not quite as popular as the endless ice cream that followed the many speeches).
    Educational establishments like Miramonte, Del Rey, Glorietta and the Orinda Network for Education (ONE) have all profited from the Society’s new lease on life, and their audio and video recordings proved invaluable when the Orinda Theatre celebrated its 83rd anniversary in 2024.
    As one of the OHS volunteers who worked closely with California Revealed, Ricci hit the nail on the head when she said, “So much of our local history wouldn’t be readily accessible without California Revealed’s help – including the examples of leadership from past generations of Orindans that make our town so special, and which will hopefully inspire future generations.”
    The Orinda Historical Society is located at 26 Orinda Way, Room 106, beneath the Orinda library, opposite the elevator.