I have a friend who’s lived in San Diego for more than 20 years but grew up in the Old Money enclave of Washington, D.C. I’ll call him Andrew. He claims his parents weren’t Old Money, meaning (by his definition) possessors of family wealth that predates the 20th Century. He says in the nation’s capital, such people are known as “cliff dwellers” or “cave dwellers” (because “they’ve been there forever”). His parents arrived in Washington during the Second World War. After many years, they did get into the Chevy Chase Club and the Social Register, and Andrew attended St. Albans School, one year behind Al Gore. Had Andrew remained in Washington, had he married and raised a family there, he still wouldn’t have been considered Old Money because of his family’s recent arrival. But his credentials in the Old Money circles would have been impeccable.

Andrew disliked the complacency he detected in some of his peers. He says he “didn’t want to end up in my 60s, lounging around the pool at the Chevy Chase Club and feeling that I couldn’t have made it on my own.” So he moved to San Diego. It seemed free of the kinds of social “filters” that abounded in his hometown. Today he thinks there’s no such thing as Old Money here. All the wealth was created after 1900, and he deems it all “nouveau.”

Andrew’s standard for what constitutes Old Money is the most stringent I’ve encountered. Less restrictive is the one spelled out in Old Money, a 1988 treatise by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. The scion of an old Rhode Island family, Aldrich asserts that “in the last analysis,” Old Money is “the imagination working on money to create the impression of a social class that is different from other classes.”

One of the best-marked entrances to this estate, Aldrich suggests, has been to render service to the class. The fastest way (“and the only one available to those who are merely, newly rich”) is to “give money to the welfare and cultural institutions that are Old Money’s extended patrimony,” he writes. The “service” may be rendered in other ways, performed from “family offices, law firms, and banks” or more personally, by “teachers, horse trainers, gardeners, architects, art dealers,” and others.

The closest Aldrich comes to California in his book is a few brief references to San Francisco; the southern half of the state appears to be beyond the edge of his world. But I’ve found support here for the notion that, within the San Diego context, second-generation wealth can be considered Old Money. “If you’re in Philadelphia, you have to date yourself back to Thomas Jefferson. But I think the further you move west, the shorter the time that it takes to be considered Old Money,” says Maryl Weightman, the immediate past president of La Jolla’s prestigious Las Patronas group. Weightman comes from a small town in Texas, where “if you had family that dated back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, that’s old.” In San Diego, she thinks, the line might be drawn as recently as World War II.

A good-natured woman with a strong Texas accent, Weightman is proof of the loose grip exercised by San Diego’s Old Money upon the town’s social institutions. Weightman and her husband and daughter arrived here in 1988, and she says, “I was very aware from the moment I got here that this was a really social setting. You’d have to be blind and stupid not to realize it. I mean, from the first moment I came in, we heard about the Monte Carlo Ball or the Jewel Ball or the Ritz party at the zoo. You heard about these big parties. And it was hard to get an invitation. And I thought, well, I’ll never be invited.”

As she settled into working as a realtor, Weightman came to believe that San Diego’s Old Money families were “pretty entrenched” in the local social scene. But she says she found “that they’re not cold, as far as blocking out anybody else.” One of the beauties of this area, she thinks, “is that it’s a charitable environment.” She added, “I’m by no means wealthy. And my husband doesn’t have a high-profile job here. But we’ve been very accepted.”

Weightman says one of the first things she did after moving here was to join St. James By-The-Sea Episcopal Church and look for a way to volunteer. She offered to prepare the altar for the earliest Sunday morning services. For the white elephant sale, she toiled in mid-August in the fur department, set up in a hall that lacked air-conditioning. “You know, you have to work your way up.”

Weightman joined the pta, first at Muirlands Middle School and then at La Jolla High, where she became vice president. That work introduced her to other causes. She met a lot of the women who were involved with Las Patronas, and they asked her to join the group in 1995. Weightman says she worried about making a seven-year commitment, a requirement of the group, “But I felt like it was so important. The money they give out throughout the community was so important.”

She reassures newcomers who confess to feeling nervous about the social scene. “I hear it all the time. A lot of people who come in, like wives who are moving here with their husbands, say, ‘It’s gonna be snobby.’ And I just say, ‘It’s not!’ There’s such a variety of people.”

San Diego’s Old Money differs from the Old Money of the East in other ways, according to Ross Porter. “The key is that there never was much money around here. As my grandfather used to say, it was a town of slow notes. Except for the occasional millionaire philanthropist like Spreckels, Scripps, or Timken, the money that came to town was from people who were retiring here. Money was tied up in real estate, so there was wealth but not much cash.”

Edward Hall, the grandfather to whom Ross refers, was a prominent real estate and civic leader, as was Roscoe Porter, the grandfather after whom Ross was named. (“As a land developer and auto accessory manufacturer, he made his first million dollars before he was 30,” Roscoe’s 1957 obituary declared.) Ross’s parents, David and Kay (Hall) Porter, have been lifelong patrons of the local arts. Community betterment was “like my mother’s religion,” Ross told me. He was struck by this last year when attending the gala that celebrated the 25th anniversary of the San Diego Foundation. Ross says when he saw his mother nodding her approval of all the speeches, it reminded him of “the way my grandmother had nodded when my sister Leslie got married after five years of living in sin. It was that solemn…single…nod, with a finality that indicated this was Serious Business. And I realized that the religion I was brought up in was: ‘Give back to the community and make a difference. Don’t live just for yourself.’ Those are Old Money values…Old Money virtues.”

After Ross graduated from San Diego High School (as valedictorian of the Class of 1976), he went to Yale, where he obtained a degree in economics. He lived for ten years in New Mexico and Kansas City before returning to San Diego, where he works as a communications director for the American Lung Association. When I e-mailed him and broached the topic of Old Money, he shot back a 720-word essay. “There’s a tension that can be explored in the relationship between Old Money and Big Money,” he reflected. “I think this tension is to be found in all dynamic economies; the Roman word for classless new money was Parvenu (you probably knew that!) and the quest of New Money is to develop the gravitas of Old Money. In San Diego the way this has been done seems to be through striking gestures of civic improvement or charity. I think the San Diego Foundation is today’s chief scrubber of souls in this regard. Some modern examples: Sol Price, the Krocs, and the guy who owns Gateway.”

Ross later expanded upon his view of what distinguishes Old from New Money. “It’s really about the institutions and the culture that you decide to pursue and the lifestyle that you choose. New money has always been associated with flashy material acquisitions; with wine, women, and song. With burning the candle at both ends. And Old Money is always associated with…appreciating the high arts and attempting to preserve the cultural identity and helping the community.” But in America, if people act like Old Money, “then others tend to think of them as Old Money, no matter how new,” he offered, adding, “I think that’s really true about San Diego.… Even in terms of our California society, there was never money in San Diego.” A look at the most recent Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans reveals an absence of concentrated wealth here. Of the 107 California residents on the year 2000 list, 64 live in the greater Bay Area, 26 can be found in and around Los Angeles, and only 5 call San Diego home: Gateway computer founder Ted Waitt, Joan Kroc (widow of McDonald’s founder Ray), Qualcomm’s Irwin Jacobs, grain-processing heiress Margaret Cargill, and newspaper publisher Helen Copley. (Despite Wal-Mart heir John Walton’s frequent residence here, Forbes lists Durango, Colorado, as his hometown.)

Ross speculates that if San Diego had long ago experienced an outpouring of wealth from oil or gold, “It could have formed a different sort of community. But as it was, this is a shallow soil to grow a fortune in. You had to work it all the time. And you needed help from everybody around.” He cites the “very communitarian” sense that animated the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. “There was that mass subscription of everybody, giving money to make it happen…that sense that we were all in this together and we had to contribute.”

Because the city for so many years was so small and so removed from sources of wealth, the city’s moneyed people lacked “sufficient power unto themselves to be able to hold themselves separate, if they wanted to get anything done,” Ross thinks. “A minority of them could hole up on estates and live out their fantasies, but for the most part money seeks power and respectability also, and for this it’s necessary to relate to the civitas.” He says members of the oldest and most prosperous families “rubbed elbows with one another on streetcars, at civic clubs like the Rotary, in church, and in the public schools. There wasn’t much of an opportunity to have a rarefied atmosphere.”

They did create some yacht clubs and country clubs, but “these do not have a very high standing in Old Money Society,” writes Aldrich. According to him, patrician New England Society instead became synonymous with men’s and (“to a lesser extent”) ladies’ clubs whose “essential function in Old Money’s scheme of things…is to furnish a place where inheritors of the estate, along with their most clubbable retainers, educators, and entertainers, may take refuge from the world of doing and simply be.”

Such institutions have never existed in San Diego. Ross Porter asserts that, “When we [San Diegans] have established retreats for cultural development or mental development or recreational development, we’ve been a meritocracy. We’ve been open to the finest participants. Our prejudices have always been at a fairly low level here.” The city’s multicultural heritage may explain that, he speculates. “Remember, the Old Money here in 1860 was named Bandini, and they were all Californios.”

“This has always been a very fluid city,” concurs Jerry Williamson. Born in San Diego in 1928, Williamson was the daughter of Everett Gee Jackson, an artist and faculty member at San Diego State University. Williamson’s mother, Eileen Jackson, was a newspaper reporter who began covering San Diego society in 1930 and reigned over that subject for the next 60 years. Eileen died in 1996, at the age of 92, and not long afterward, San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Neil Morgan urged Williamson to write her mother’s biography. She began making her way through a mountain of journals, clippings, and scrapbooks. Williamson recounted the story of the woman and her work in Eileen, a book published by the San Diego Historical Society at the end of last year.

As a very young child, Williamson tagged along with her mother when Eileen visited one of her “favorite socialite friends,” Mrs. Claus Spreckels, in her oceanfront mansion in Coronado. This woman’s father-in-law, John D. Spreckels, had been born into a San Francisco sugar fortune and went on to create a shipping empire. He had moved his family to San Diego after the 1906 earthquake. Here he’d owned both the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune, as well as the Hotel del Coronado, the San Diego–Coronado Ferry System, and a couple of local railways. His son’s wife, Ellis Moon, writes Williamson, “was a beautiful blonde…a woman of great wealth who sailed through the Depression years as though she were still living back in the carefree 1920s. In the thirties she often traveled to Europe, and she had a butler, a chauffeur, and a governess for her children.”

Had the Spreckels family remained in San Diego, Ellis’s progeny might provide the ultimate example of San Diego’s Old Money. But after Claus Spreckels died, his widow married a prominent Los Angeles surgeon and “From then on she spent most of her time in that city,” Williamson records.

Williamson had personal experience with another pillar of San Diego society early in the 20th Century, the Scripps family. When publishing magnate E.W. Scripps moved to San Diego, he had already made a fortune, and in 1891 he began building a country mansion in the area that’s still known as Scripps Ranch. Inspired by the castle of Maximilian and Carlota in Trieste, Italy, Scripps’s 47-room ranch house at Miramar encircled a courtyard that covered three-quarters of an acre. Turrets towered over the corners, and the master bathroom “was bigger than most living rooms,” according to Williamson. She attended Francis Parker School with two of E.W.’s grandsons, and, she says, “Their chauffeur would take me out there to play.” One time she and another little girl went to a Halloween party held at the mansion. “We were told to go in one room and change into our costumes, and then to join the party. Well, we made a mistake and started the wrong way. We went through room after room after room until finally we were sobbing.” A teacher rescued them. Williamson has warmer memories of the Christmas parties held at the ranch during the 1940s, after E.W.’s son Robert had died and his widow had remarried a man named Hawkins. “All of social San Diego would go to those parties,” Williamson says. “They were just gorgeous.”

Back in the ’30s, when her mother began creating an index card for each of the subjects who appeared in her columns, many of the names in her card file “were from old San Diego families,” Williamson writes. “She knew that one man’s mother was a Jessop; that another man’s wife was a Fletcher; that Mrs. Henry B. Clark was Lena Sefton Wakefield when she founded the Charity Ball. Eileen also knew which San Diegans were descended from President Ulysses S. Grant.” As the years passed, “the file grew larger and larger,” Williamson states, “for Eileen’s column was always an inclusive one.”

When I asked Williamson why that was, she cited two factors. First, her mother’s nature was outgoing and gregarious. “As my dad said, she loved people. All kinds of people. So I think her personality fit in with a town that had a lot of newcomers.” At the same time, Williamson suggests that inclusivity is “a California thing. So many people come here from other places. You get into some city like Charleston, or some of those older cities, and they probably have their social groups established. Nobody new need apply. But in San Diego, people were coming from other places just constantly.”

Even before the Civil War, local civic boosters began working to entice more settlers here. If San Diego lacked oil and gold, it had land that could be developed, and every influx of new residents promised to fuel an economic boom. Maybe today, Williamson allows, with our freeways congested and our wilderness shrinking, a sizable number of San Diego residents would be glad — at last — to see the influx slow or stop. But throughout most of her mother’s tenure as social scribe, city leaders “were always encouraging people to come.”

Williamson thinks “that’s why social San Diego has always been so incorporating.” The city establishment could hardly lure people here, then turn a cold social shoulder to them. “There’d be people like the Clayton Braces,” Williamson says, referring to the former general manager of Channel 10 television, who arrived with his wife Jeanne in 1963. “Within seconds, they were part of things! They didn’t have to work their way in.”

“Everyone was very aware when a new person came along that you kind of looked after them,” says Justine Fenton. In 1932, she and her husband were the newcomers. Attracted by San Diego’s climate, they arrived here from Barnesville, Ohio. “We only knew one couple in Los Angeles,” she recalls. Compared to Los Angeles, San Diego then “seemed like an awful little town. Of course there weren’t any freeways. And the only high-rise hotel we had was the El Cortez.” There were a couple of country clubs, including one in Emerald Hills owned by a wealthy farmer who had acquired immense tracts of land in San Diego’s North County. A golfer, Justine started to play at this club, and after a while, she says she ranked as the city and county champion.

Her social life expanded when she married Henry Fenton, owner of the club, in 1944. (Her first husband by then had died.) Eileen Jackson covered the wedding, and in the decades that followed, Jackson reported on other social events at the Fentons’ ranch in the San Pasqual Valley. “We had the opera up there for two different fund-raisers,” Justine says. “And we had the San Diego Museum of Natural History several times. And the museum of art. We just seemed to know everybody.”

Williamson expresses a similar sentiment. She says her friends and acquaintances have commented about her book, “Oh, it’s so nice to read about people we knew.” When her mother wrote her column, “Everyone social knew each other.” The upper stratum “had its little groups that kind of ran things for a long time.” If you were a daughter of one of the women who did so, “You belonged to the zlac Rowing Club when you were 15, and then you’d go into the Junior League, and then the Wednesday Club or the Thursday Club.” At the same time, newcomers (like Justine Fenton) or others who bypassed that curriculum could win inclusion in Eileen Jackson’s column “if they seemed both well bred and sincerely interested in their new community,” according to Williamson.

To an Eastern eye, the social picture could appear odd. Williamson recalls how Town & Country decided in 1960 to turn its attention to her hometown. For models, the magazine wanted to draw from the ranks of San Diego’s young socialites. “And they couldn’t get over the fact that some of our old families were people like the Jessops and the Marstons. Because they owned stores,” Williamson recalls. (A member of the Jessop family still has a downtown jewelry store, but Marston’s merged with the Broadway-Hale department store chain in 1961 and later became the Broadway.) “The Town & Country people said, ‘It’s not usual that your social people are…merchants!’ They were quite snobbish about it. But then everybody out here persuaded them that, yes indeed, these are the old families of San Diego.”

Who are some of the others? Luce, Gildred, Klauber, Clark, Frost, Starkey, Sefton, Evans, Copley, Fletcher, Hazard — all are names (and there are others) that possess both prominence and tenure here. Do their bearers constitute Old Money? One social insider who has lived in San Diego for over 40 years discussed with me the prickly aspects of this question only on the condition that I conceal her identify. Consider the Frost lumber merchants, she suggested, adding, “I just saw in the paper a couple of days ago that they were getting $15 million in some kind of settlement for property that the ballpark was going to occupy. Well, that startled me, because I had thought of the Frosts as being one of the prosperous, rather than really rich, families. But people like that are apt to have real estate, which has increased tremendously.” The Jessops were another example. “I know they’re prosperous,” the source said. “But I don’t know if they’re really, really rich. Or the Klaubers — I would classify them exactly the same way. They could be. But you just don’t know.”

Defining the social position of the wealthiest San Diego residents can be just as tricky. Margaret Cargill, worth $850 million, according to the most recent Forbes 400 list (which listed her age as 80 and her residence as La Jolla), inherited a chunk of the largest private company in America, the Minneapolis-based Cargill grain-trading enterprise. It dates back to 1865 — long enough ago to qualify as Old Money even by Washington standards. But although she has maintained a home here for at least 16 years, Cargill has played no public role in community activities. If the Old Money ethos dictates a commitment to community leadership, she would appear not to make the cut.

Helen Copley (77 years old and worth $825 million, according to the most recent Forbes list) was a secretary when she married the boss. Until his death in 1973, Jim Copley ranked as Old Money in the eyes of many San Diegans. He had inherited his newspaper empire from his adoptive father, Colonel Ira C. Copley, who had bought the Union and the Evening Tribune from Spreckels in 1928. And in the early years of their marriage, Jim and Helen filled glittering roles on the local social stage. In the fall of 1965, for example, they opened their La Jolla estate to 525 guests of the Inter-American Press Association. “To enchant them,” Eileen Jackson reported, “the Copleys’ garden acreage obliged by blooming extravagantly to fill the French Provincial red brick house and the outdoor areas with hundreds of choice chrysanthemums and roses.” After cocktails at a seafood bar set up on an imported dance floor that covered a sunken garden, the revelers were directed to poolside dinner tables. “The entire area…was covered with a pearl gray tent pitched by 40-foot-high poles roped in lemon leaves to match those in which lemons nested on each round table,” Jackson wrote. Six huge crystal chandeliers hung from the tent; beneath them, strolling musicians entertained.

Today, however, Helen has become a near-recluse, and her role in the direction of Copley Newspapers is unclear. Joan Kroc (worth $2.5 billion) would seem to fall into the New Money category. Much of Ray Kroc’s success in creating McDonald’s came after his marriage to Joan (his third wife), and he only became an important figure in San Diego with his purchase of the Padres in 1974, ten years before he died. His widow doesn’t participate in the broader San Diego social scene. “She has her own coterie of friends, and she simply does not go to things. She just chooses not to,” says someone who knows her. The fact that she is funny and amusing, in combination with her spectacular local philanthropy, would win her entrée into any social group within the San Diego realm, this person attests. “But she just travels with her own little band and whisks them everywhere.”

John Walton also acquired a fortune amassed during his lifetime, by his father, Sam, founder of the Wal-Mart empire. Though not philanthropists on the scale of Joan Kroc, John and his wife Christy have become patrons of the Natural History Museum, and John has given a lot of money to education-reform initiatives. But more than their charitable largesse, the Waltons’ avoidance of ostentation smacks of Old Money and belies the recent provenance of their wealth. Their San Diego home, a beautiful old Victorian, is located in a working-class National City neighborhood. Christy “looks as though she dresses from Wal-Mart — and with no apologies,” according to one observer.

If it’s difficult to say who constitutes San Diego’s Old Money on the basis of financial history, it’s impossible to find any social function that’s definitive. “There’s not a social mountaintop,” one woman told me. “I’ve often thought there are foothills, but not a peak.” Another social insider commented, “It’s very hard to know whether you’ve arrived or not. There’s no one membership or one title or one event that can make it for you.”

The event that perhaps comes closest to Old Money is the annual Charity Ball, a fund-raiser for Children’s Hospital since 1954. Back in 1952, Eileen Jackson judged it “the most significant social event of the year,” one which “has strengthened, even made social reputations.” Lena Sefton Wakefield, resplendent “in a creation of gold satin trimmed with [a] heavy band of wrought gold embroider,” chaired the first one in 1909, Jackson informed her readers. From its inception, the ball’s guest list was “crowded with names that continue to matter greatly in San Diego,” according to society journalist David Nelson, who compiled an updated Charity Ball history for San Diego magazine in February 1999. “Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Klauber were there,” Nelson wrote about the first Charity Ball, “as was Miss Nellie Grant, who attended at the invitation of Roscoe Hazard (he was then a bachelor; his son Bruce now hosts an annual Fourth of July party that remains one of the hotter tickets on the establishment calendar); James and Alonzo Jessop found themselves the choice company of Mr. and Mrs. P.J. Benbough, Mr. and Mrs. John D. Spreckels, architect Irving Gill, department store magnate George Marston and his wife (and other members of this leading family), Edgar A. Luce, the G.H. Frosts, Mr. and Mrs. W.S. Hubbard, Mr. and Mrs. G.W. Fry, James D. Forward and the stately Mrs. Sands Forman of Coronado.…”

The Depression and the Second World War sent the Charity Ball into hiatus from 1935 to 1945, but it returned in 1946 and since then has always been held at the Hotel del Coronado. One of its distinctive features is the inclusion of 60 “boxes” that surround the Grand Ballroom’s dance floor. The boxes are “simply groups of ballroom chairs — eight to a box,” San Diego Union columnist Burl Stiff reported in 1997, a year when the Charity Ball honored families and individuals who had held boxes for 20 years or more. “Guests pay from $750 to $1,400 for a box, depending on the row it’s on,” Stiff wrote. “Once you’ve bought it, you have first dibs on the same box the next year.” Among the hereditary box holders in 1997, the William Evans family topped the list with 51 years and three generations. They were followed by Abbie and Donald Giddings (43 years), Justine Fenton (42), Gwen Stephens (41), Mary and Dallas Clark (38), Virginia Lynch Grady (36), B.J. and Hal Williams (36), Charlotte and Falck Nielsen (36), Clara and George Hatch (34), Mary and Douglas Giddings (30), Fran and Ken Golden (30), Alice Klauber Miller (28), Ruth Whitney Robinson (28), Betty and Alex DeBakcsy (27), Kay Stroop (26), Mary Ward (26), Virginia Burnham Hickey (25), Jeanne and Gordon Frost (24), Mary and Rear Adm. Rob Roy McGregor (23), the Harold Starkey family (22), Ruth and Bill Dick (21), Pat and Hugh Carter (20), and Alison and George Gildred (20).

At the same time, newcomers do show up among the 700 or so attendees every year. Sandra Walrod, who chaired this year’s event, says it included about 150 first-timers. Walrod adds that an interested newcomer could get an invitation by calling Children’s Hospital and asking to be put on the list. “It is definitely not a dying institution,” Jerry Williamson commented. “It is very lively, very engaged, and there are lots of youngish people.” Williamson says the common comment among the Old Guard is, “ ‘Who are all these people?’ Because they’re not the people we used to know.”

The local debutante balls are even less an exclusive province of Old Money. In fact, for a long time, San Diego had no formal debutantes. By the early 1960s, however, that sentiment had begun to waver. “Women met and debated” whether to start debutante organizations, Williamson writes in her book. “Some of the groups backed off; some went ahead.” She records that her mother “noncommittally wrote up the balls that did take place, and described the young girls in their long white dresses. Within a few years many of the ex-debutantes were protesting the Vietnam War, dressed as hippies. Eileen’s job then was to listen sympathetically to their mothers’ agonized complaints.”

Today debutantes have reappeared on the San Diego social scene in several incarnations. There are African-American and Filipino dinner dances, and various chapters of the National Charity League’s Tick Tockers stage debutante “presentations.” Highest in status is the ball staged (more or less annually) by the La Jolla Debutante Committee at the Hotel del Coronado. But even its standing is dubious. “It’s run by people that you never see and never hear of and who do not have a lot of money,” one well-placed source told me. “And the mixture of girls is amazing! You have one or two sort of old, good-family people, and the rest you never heard of.” The result is that presentation at the ball “doesn’t really mean much,” this source stated. “It’s just a question of whether the girl wants to put up with it or not — have an expensive dress and promenade around the Hotel del Coronado ballroom.”

San Diego also lacks a Social Register, though on two occasions someone tried to start one. The first occurred in 1934, when a man named O.L. Hopper published an 88-page volume bound in black moiré. Writing about it more than 50 years later, Eileen Jackson noted that Hopper included such “distinguished residents as the famous contralto Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink of Coronado; General Pascual Ortiz Rubio, a former president of Mexico; Amelia Timken; George and Anna Marston; and best-selling author Max Miller of La Jolla. (His book, I Cover the Waterfront, had been published in 1932.)”

I don’t know why Hopper’s Social Register never caught on, but I did talk to Betty Page Alexander McLean about her more recent experience with trying to launch something similar. McLean is a friendly blonde who has roots in both Texas and La Jolla. She was born in Ft. Worth in 1934, but her parents used to flee from the summer heat, and every August they stayed at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. Later, McLean married a Californian, and in 1957 she settled with him in La Jolla, where she threw herself into the life of the young society matron. She joined the San Diego Junior League in 1961 and became the group’s vice president. She served as president of Las Patronas in 1965. But she always maintained her listing in the Ft. Worth social directory, which “had been started by the mother of my oldest and dearest friend.”

The mother later bequeathed the publication to her daughter, and McLean’s friend began nudging McLean to start a social directory for San Diego. Around the mid-1980s, McLean thought the time might be right. She and a partner named Nancy Sommer composed a letter explaining that their publication would include “the prominent movers and shakers of San Diego.” They sent out thousands of application forms. To compile the mailing list, “I called all my friends at the San Diego Country Club and the San Diego Yacht Club and so forth and so on, and I borrowed all their rosters,” McLean says. “I know at least ten people out of every organization.”

Completed applications “came in by the droves!” she claims. In the fall of 1987, she and Sommer compiled the responses and they produced a sturdy, red-leather volume for which they charged $40 in advance ($50 post-publication). “And I think everybody felt that it was wonderful,” McLean says. “They loved it.”

There were some naysayers. “Judging from the number of San Diego social lights who are not in the maiden effort…the response has been somewhat underwhelming,” writer Zenia Cleigh pointed out in a February 1988 San Diego Evening Tribune article. She continued, “For example, old-time La Jollans Ellen and Roger Revelle are in but Ted (“Dr. Seuss”) and Audrey Geisel are not. Bank board chairman Gordon Luce is in but famed scientist Dr. Jonas Salk is not.… When it comes to San Diego’s wealthy old families, Walter Fitch III is in but Dallas and Mary Clark are not.” Also missing, the article noted, was “the socially impeccable Anne Evans,” along with “such fixtures of the San Diego old guard” as Jo Bobbie MacConnell, Gordon and Jeanne Frost, Ord and Midge Preston, and any representatives of the Hazard or Jessop families. “The way it turned out is just not a Social Register,” Cleigh wrote, quoting “a member of one of San Diego’s old families who is listed but regrets it.”

Undeterred, McLean and Sommer published a second volume at the end of 1990, but the response to it was poorer. Looking back on the venture, McLean insists, “It wasn’t that we didn’t have the right people! Lord knows, I know most of them.” She believes many potential listees demurred “because they felt that they were on so many other country club rosters — as I am! I have La Jolla Country Club and La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. I’m also a member of the Junior League, so I have that roster.” Faced with yet another directory, “It was like: how many rosters do we need?”

McLean also conceded that perhaps the shifting social sands in American society had worked against her, making people uneasy with any attempt to peg their position within it. Or perhaps, I suggested, they identified social registers with Old Money but felt that it had fallen out of grace.

Others have made this argument. Newsweek six years ago was heralding “an epochal moment in American sociology, the birth of a new class.” Dubbing this “the overclass,” the magazine made it clear that members were “not the old-fashioned, discredited, morally bankrupt aristocracy.” They were affluent — “consisting of the top 5 percent in household income, roughly 12.5 million people with incomes starting at $113,182.” But inherited wealth didn’t count for much, the article announced. The overclass judged people “mainly on ‘merit,’ a quality that can be demonstrated only by a continual and strenuous accumulation of academic and professional credentials. Even more than money, it values competitive achievement.”

The New York Times has pontificated upon the same theme. “Once upon a time,” it informed readers in a November 15, 1998, article, “there was no doubting which [kind of money] was preferred, at least among the taste makers on the East Coast. New Money was grasping and crass (think: your typical Texas oilman); Old Money was refined (think: David Rockefeller). New Money yearned for respectability; Old Money had it. New Money flaunted its wealth; Old Money believed there was no greater sin.”

Today, however, the article continued, “It’s Old Money that has become ever so slightly disreputable — with its associations of undeserved connections, ‘coupon clipping’ and third and fourth generations that were messed up because of their inherited wealth. Meanwhile, the act of trying to get rich quick by, say, starting an Internet company has become virtually the sole requirement for entering the ranks of the national elite.”

As meritocratic graduates used their diplomas to gain entrée to positions in business, journalism, education, and other professions, wasp hegemony in those realms crumbled. By end of the 1980s, sociologist Robert C. Christopher was documenting this declining influence (in Crashing the Gates: The De-wasping of America’s Power Elite) in nine different categories of American life. Other forces by then also had helped boost the social status of the self-made man. Aldrich has argued that the Reagan administration, with its tacit support for hostile takeovers in the 1980s, encouraged the overthrow of one Old Money family-dominated company after another.

Rather than indulging in the ostentation associated with the nouveau riche, some of them “are leading very simple lives, well below their means,” according to Valerie Jacobs. A local marriage and family therapist who has specialized in the psychodynamics of wealth, Jacobs says many want to engage in philanthropy. But she says some are searching for new ways to use their money to bring about good.

To the latter, she stands ready to offer guidance. Jacobs grew up in Pasadena in a household that she describes as comfortable but middle-class. Her father, the son of poor Lebanese immigrants, ran a thriving chemical-engineering and construction firm that went public in the early 1970s. “That’s really when we found out that we were wealthy,” she says. “And almost immediately he told us that he was going to give most of it away.”

Jacobs says she and her sisters “said, ‘Fine.’ Because we really hadn’t had any expectation of inheriting anything. And he said, ‘We’d like you to help us give it away.’ And we said, ‘That would be wonderful!’ ” She says her father ended up giving her and her sisters “what he thought was a nice cushion but not anything that would support us over a long period of time. But he gave it to us in terms of stock in his company, and what happened was that in 30 years it’s multiplied and split and gone up, and it ended up being a lot more than he thought it was going to be. But all of us, all three girls, have careers as well.”

Valerie moved to San Diego in 1975, and in 1981 she started a private marriage and family therapy practice. Eight years later, her family created a family foundation, and she says “that’s when I started attending conferences and became really interested in what philanthropy was all about.” She adds that her family’s foundation took a very different turn from others of its kind. “It has never been a check-writing foundation,” she explains. Instead, the family “has been very hands-on, very involved” in all its eleemosynary activities. An example is the project taking shape on a 20-acre site behind the trolley stop at the southwest corner of Market and Euclid. The Jacobs family bought the land and is overseeing the construction of a commercial center that will be owned by the community. “We have involved the community in every aspect,” Valerie boasts. She adds that the family foundation has acquired a lot of land around their Market Creek Plaza, and they dream of transforming the entire neighborhood “into a hub of education and culture.”

She says yet another unusual aspect of the project is the relationship between her family members and their beneficiaries. “People know us on a first-name basis. They have our phone numbers. They feel totally comfortable with us. We are accessible.” She contrasts this model with that practiced by what she calls “the society queens.” They put on “this gala and that gala or this ball and that ball, raising money for worthy causes. But at the same time they’re spending $1000 a person on fabulous meals, and everybody goes out and gets a new designer dress every time they attend one of these. To me, that’s the worst of philanthropy. It’s very, very paternalistic.”

To promote a more personal and activist model of philanthropy, Jacobs started a consulting service, Family Philanthropy Resource. She and an associate work with both individuals and family groups (“in all stages of their philanthropic quest”) plus she gives speeches and leads workshops about the impact of wealth on people’s personal lives. “The stereotype,” she declares, “is that wealthy people don’t have problems, and if they do have problems, they’re trivial.” But the reality, she asserts, is that wealth confronts its possessors with many challenges. For one thing, there’s the question of “how do you motivate your kids to be productive individuals? Nobody really wants their child to sit and watch TV and buy cars and jewelry all day.” To protect their offspring from such a fate, a number of prominent “overclass” figures have vowed to follow the example of the senior Jacobs and give away most of their fortunes.

How will San Diego’s Old Money be viewed in the future? What will the social life of the city be like in 50 years?

When I asked Eileen Jackson’s daughter for her opinion, Williamson gave a gentle laugh. Then she ventured that if there is a social scene 50 years down the road, “It will be widespread. It won’t be the little family thing that we had. We just accepted when we were young that we would do what we were told and be in these things.”

Her own children came to mind. “My daughter lives in Scripps Ranch,” she said. “She’s recently married, and I don’t think she’ll ever live the kind of life that I lived. She doesn’t particularly want to. And I don’t blame her.” Williamson also has two sons who live in San Diego. One’s a doctor and one’s a lawyer; both are Stanford graduates. “They’re the kind of people who would have gone to balls in the old days, if they were told they had to. But they aren’t doing the balls and the things that we did.”

I asked why not. “I don’t know!” she exclaimed, intrigued by the question. “They have a lively, active social life with their friends.” But they have no taste for the old-style social high life. “They don’t miss it,” she said. “They don’t care.”