Fayette Birtcher, Founder of Development Firm, Dies

Fayette E. Birtcher, founder of the family-run, Laguna Niguel-based Birtcher development company, died last Wednesday at the Rancho de Dios family compound in San Juan Capistrano after a brief illness. He was 82.

Birtcher retired in 1965 after a heart attack, and sons Arthur B. and Ronald E. Birtcher, now co-chairmen of the company, built it into one of the largest developers on the West Coast in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fayette Birtcher, also known as “F.E.,” started the company in 1939 and built homes, as had his father, Justus, who came to Santa Ana from Philadelphia in 1907. Birtcher had studied entomology at Oregon State and UCLA but quit during the Depression and began buying farmland cheap.

He ran the company quietly and conservatively, a practice that continues through his sons and grandsons.

Long a family-run company, Birtcher began to hire outsiders for important jobs in the 1980s. The family’s control has been diluted still further since the Japanese trading firm Mitsui & Co. bought a half interest in the company in June.

Fayette Birtcher also owned several other businesses over the years, including a skateboard factory and a dry cleaner. According to family lore, oranges he grew on his ranch were among the first to be used to make frozen juice concentrate. He is also said to have commercially introduced the pepper mill to the United States from England.

The company remained small for 30 years. In the 1940s and 1950s it built many simple concrete industrial buildings. In 1970, though, his sons swung a deal with the Southern Pacific Railroad to develop the railroad’s huge real estate holdings.

Since then, the company has developed industrial parks--the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, for example--and is now building high-rises such as Lakeshore Towers near John Wayne Airport.

Since his retirement, Birtcher had lived quietly in the family compound on a hillside in San Juan Capistrano in a house set between his two sons’ houses.

He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Mary Louise; sons Ronald and Arthur; Ronald’s sons Brandon and Baron, both executives at the company, and Ronald’s daughter, Shelley Birtcher McCroskey; and Arthur’s two children, Wendy Birtcher Andersen and Blair Birtcher.