FULLERTON – After reaching the CIF-SS Division 4AA semifinals for the first time in the school’s 101 years of existence, the Garden Grove boys basketball team wanted to make more history.

Miguel Ortega scored 21 points and grabbed 14 rebounds to lead the Argonauts to a 45-39 victory over host Sunny Hills on Tuesday night.

Garden Grove (21-8) heads to its first ever CIF final and will host Fullerton on Friday, Feb. 25, at 7 p.m.

“I’m going to keep telling you guys, he is one of, if not the best player in North Orange County,” Garden Grove coach Brian Girard said of Ortega. “I can always count on him to be stable. When we need something, we give him the ball. Whether it is on the outside giving someone the assist or making the buckets.”

Postgame interview with Garden Grove coach Brian Girard as his Argonauts are headed to the CIF-SS Finals!@ocvarsity @ggusdathletics @coachrcepeda @GGHSArgos pic.twitter.com/gE8RFlhHCE

The Argonauts avenged their 67-45 loss to Sunny Hills (24-8) on Dec. 4.

Garden Grove’s boys basketball team beat Sunny Hills 45-39 in the semifinals of CIF division 4AA. The Argos will play for their first CIF Championship at HOME on Friday! #ggusdbasketball @ocvarsity @OCSportsZone @MAlvarez02 @GGUSD @SteveFryer @ocvarsityguy @DavidDelgado_OC pic.twitter.com/CmNjrPkzfV

— GGUSD Athletics (@ggusdathletics) February 23, 2022

Garden Grove was in trouble early in the first quarter after Ortega drew two quick fouls.

The Argonauts only trailed by two at the end of the quarter, and was down by five at halftime. Sunny Hills’ Justin Shim (11 points) made a lay-up at the buzzer.

Garden Grove regrouped and took the lead, 31-28, at the end of the third quarter thanks to Landon Mendoza’s seven points.

Postgame interview with Landon Mendoza of Garden Grove. 7 points for Lendoza as the Argonauts host Fullerton for the CIF-SS title!@ocvarsity @ggusdathletics @GGHSArgos @coachrcepeda pic.twitter.com/HZqAf1KRr6

“We have to keep it a close game and finish at the end,’ Ortega said. “Just like the last game (against University in the quarterfinals), we kept it close and took over. We worked as a team and pounded down low.”

Postgame interview with Miguel Ortega of Garden Grove. 21 points, 14 rebounds as the Argonauts head to the CIF-SS Finals for the first time in school history!@ocvarsity @ggusdathletics @coachrcepeda @GGHSArgos pic.twitter.com/303NxAHyzp

Sunny Hills retook the lead, but Lawson fouled out of the game with 14 points and 10 rebounds. That gave Ortega the advantage in the post, which helped the Argonauts take the lead for good.

“We knew that was going to be a key factor in this game,” Sunny Hills coach Joe Ok said. “Who is going to keep their big man in the game? Obviously, it is very critical with one play here and one play there where calls get made. Their guy was out for the early part of the game and our guy fouled out early. That makes a big difference.

“Credit to Garden Grove. They played great defense today. They definitely made adjustments from the last time we played them. They played real hard tonight.”

Johann Kwon had 10 points for Sunny Hills, which will look to regroup and get ready for the CIF SoCal Regional next week.

Garden Grove will look to battle another Freeway League team on Friday, and it hopes make more history.

“We have to play our defense,” Mendoza said. “We have to get our rebounds. We have to do what we do inside the paint and get this win.”

FREEPORT — American Metal Bearing Company, now a California-based defense contractor, will move its headquarters to Freeport within the next 18 months.

The company's move to an 11-acre industrial park site will initially bring 15 of its current 30 employees to the city, and the firm plans to hire an additional 15 to 20 people as it establishes itself locally, CEO Michael Litton told the Walton County Board of County Commissioners at their Tuesday meeting.

The company's work includes development and manufacturing of bearings, which control motion in various types of machinery. Its products are mounted aboard Navy submarines and its larger surface ships. American Metal Bearing also does contract machining work, and has built aerospace parts and parts for use in oilfields.

Walton County's economic outlook:Military moves, strong tourism could make 2022 a banner economic year locally

The century-old firm traces its beginnings to a California garage. It later moved to Los Angeles, and is currently in Garden Grove to the south. Among its achievements, the company produced all of the bearings used in the "Liberty Ships," a class of cargo ship built in World War II.

"We conceive, engineer, produce, test, and ship our product, from soup to nuts," Litton said.

Following his presentation, Commissioner Danny Glidewell called the company's plan to come to Freeport "a game-changer" in local economic development that will likely move "toward us getting higher-end defense and other contractors."

"I think you're the pioneer and the lure that's going to bring some more folks here," Glidewell told Litton.

The company is moving from California for a number of reasons, Litton said.

Among them is that "costs and taxes are spiraling out of control in California" to the point that housing is all but unaffordable for employees, he noted.

Also, "As we move into secret programs and things of that nature, we need to have security around the building," something that can't be done adequately at its Garden Grove site.

The company's Freeport building, planned to be 60,000 square feet or possibly somewhat larger — in addition to being on a larger parcel than in California — will include an SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to facilitate secure communications with clients when needed. The SCIF will mean that the company "can do more advanced naval and aerospace projects when we get down here," Litton said.

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Litton told commissioners that the "Navy had nudged us quite a few years ago that we needed to look at " ... moving our business to the Southeast to reduce our costs."

"We took a long look at all the Southeast and wound up picking here," he said. "Walton County is growing" and "it offers our employees the beach, the bay," and the opportunity to live in uncrowded rural areas, if they choose, where "they can have cows."

There were also some strategic reasons for choosing Freeport, including the large number of military installations in the area and the former military personnel that the company would like to employ, Litton added.

"We hope here we can capture some of the military people who have also had some experience in engineering," he said.

Litton didn't talk specifically about salaries, but noted that the company needs highly skilled engineers and machinists, and will be paying at the top 1% of the salary ranges required under federal contracting rules.

"Even though we're a production company, we're mostly an engineering company," he said.

The region also made sense due to its proximity to Tyndall Air Force Base in neighboring Bay County, and Eglin Air Force Base, Litton told commissioners.

American Metal Bearings hopes to get work at both bases.

"We're looking at entering their markets and helping them out quite a bit," he said.

Last month The Tribune did an interview with Lisa Kim, Garden Grove’s director of community and economic development (and assistant city manager) for our semi-annual update on new businesses planned (or under construction) in the City of Youth and Ambition.

She gave us a lot of information about plans for the Willowick Golf Course, Harbor Boulevard hotels, downtown projects (including the Cottage Industries), etc.

But we didn’t have room to cover it all, so here’s “part two.”

At the Brookhurst Triangle, the first phase of Brookhurst Place housing is completed. The project, in the area bounded generally by Brookhurst Street, Brookhurst Way and Garden Grove Boulevard, is to be divided into five phases.

The next phase is 118 rental apartments in the now-vacant land at the southern part of the lot. It’s in plan check and permit issuance is anticipated in the first quarter of 2022. The retail component will come in phases four and five.

In the area of Brookhurst Street and Chapman Avenue, the new Sprouts Farmer’s Market recently held its formal grand opening. Also under construction will be an Ulta beauty store, Mattress Firm (presumably a firm that sells firm mattresses) as well as eateries The Habit (burgers, etc.) and Jersey Mike’s (sub-style sandwiches).

The developer is the Sterling Organization of Florida.

Frankly, Sterling gets high marks here for the speed with which they pressed forward to get the building constructed and opened, and its ability to attract high-appeal national retailers.

Could there be more goodies from them in the future?

“Sterling is overwhelmingly interested in other properties in Garden Grove,” said Kim.

Hmmmm …. Well, we do have a little list …

At its last meeting, the Westminster City Council voted to change the name of Park West Park to Tony Lam Park. Generally speaking, we don’t think favorably about changing long-standing names in favor of local politicians who are eventually forgotten.

But this time, it may be the right thing to do. For most people, Lam’s claim to fame was being the first Vietnamese-born person elected to public office in the U.S. Owner of the Vien Dong restaurant in Garden Grove, he was active in a wide variety of community involvement.

He was elected three times to the city council. His support came not just from the Vietnamese population, but also from across the whole city. Perhaps his finest hour came in 1999 when a video store operator in the Little Saigon area of Westminster made the unwise – but constitutionally protected – decision to display a poster of Ho Chi Minh and the communist flag of (North) Vietnam.

Angry demonstrations followed, and Lam was drawn into controversy by refusing to join in the protests. We like to think he recognized that in America, free speech of all kinds is allowed even if unpopular.

A politician in Westminster with widespread support across ethnic lines and unwilling to play the “communist sympathizer” card every election year? This All-American city could use more like him.

“Usually Reliable Sources” appears on alternate weeks, trading places with Jim Tortolano’s “Retorts” column.

GARDEN GROVE, Calif. — There are few pipe organs in the world that have a nickname, a feminine pronoun and a Facebook fan page.

The Hazel Wright organ – just “Hazel,” to her admirers – was removed piece by piece in 2013 from Christ Cathedral’s shimmering sanctuary in Southern California’s Orange County, and shipped to Italy for repair. At the time, the fifth-largest pipe organ in the world was suffering from an infestation of bugs. Its pipes were melted, its trumpets corroded.

Nearly a decade and $3 million later, Hazel is back in the fully remodeled sanctuary, and heavenly chords from her pipes once again ring out in the vaulted nave of the iconic church.

“It was amazing to see people’s reactions to this powerful instrument,” said David La’O Ball, a Juilliard-trained organist and head of music ministry at Christ Cathedral, where Hazel was played for the public for the first time this month during a Mass on World Marriage Day. “Their eyes widened, and they were turning their heads from side to side to see where these sounds were coming from. You can really feel its visceral power with every note.”

The organ “is huge, but also very intimate,” Ball said.

Named for its original benefactor, the Hazel Wright organ was heard by millions worldwide during the heyday of what was then known as the Crystal Cathedral, founded by the televangelist, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, who hosted the weekly Christian TV program, “Hour of Power.” The Garden Grove church is a local landmark and tourist attraction, with its majestic spire visible from some of the freeways that crisscross the county.

After Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy, the organ was acquired along with the building in 2011 by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which later launched a $72 million renovation of the sanctuary that was completed in 2019.

Resuscitating the organ was a top priority, regardless of cost, said the Very Rev. Christopher Smith, rector of Christ Cathedral. While $3 million may seem like a hefty price, he said it would cost five times that or more for a brand-new organ of comparable scope.

“It is an iconic instrument with a tremendous history and heritage,” Smith said. “It also represents an ancient craft, and we felt bringing it to the 21st century is significant. To me the pipe organ is just like our church where so many diverse people come together in harmony, just as so many diverse sounds in an organ converge to make this beautiful music.”

The organ was crafted in the late 1970s under the supervision of master organist Virgil Fox and dedicated in 1982. The Fratelli Ruffatti – or Ruffatti brothers – a multigenerational company of specialists in Padua, Italy, grafted an Aeolian-Skinner organ purchased from New York City’s Philharmonic Hall with one made by Fratelli Ruffatti in 1977, to create the Hazel Wright organ.

Its rehabilitation has been arduous.

It went back to the Ruffattis’ Padua factory in 2013 when it was time for the repairs. After extensive work, the pieces were shipped back to Orange County where they sat in a temperature-controlled storage facility for four years as the cathedral was renovated. Then in late 2019, Piero Ruffatti, who originally built Hazel, returned for the reinstallation.

But that was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, which early on hit Italy as hard as any other country. Ruffatti paused work on the project and took the last flight out of Los Angeles on March 17, 2020, to return home. He finally returned in November 2021 after travel restrictions eased and completed the job in late January.

“It’s been an amazing experience building this organ not once but twice,” Ruffatti said, speaking from Italy. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

The organ originally featured 270 ranks, or sets of pipes, ranging in length from 4 inches to 32 feet; five keyboards; and the largest draw-knob console in the world to control the sound.

In its current iteration, it has some 17,000 pipes in 293 ranks and, according to Ball, is the largest pipe organ in a Roman Catholic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere.

Ruffatti said that due to the remodel of the sanctuary, the acoustical environment for the organ is better than ever.

“It helps blend the sound together, and there is more reverberation than before,” Ruffatti said. “This organ is capable of producing so many different sounds. It could take several months even for the most accomplished organist to understand all the possibilities.”

Frederick Swann, who played the organ almost every Sunday at the Crystal Cathedral from 1982 to 1998, served as a consultant on the project and agreed that it sounds better in the renovated building.

Swann, 90, reminisced about one of his most memorable experiences – playing the organ with a tiger cub sitting on the console, one of the live animals featured in the Crystal Cathedral’s famed “Glory of Christmas” pageant. He’s delighted to see Hazel alive and well.

“This organ is special. Because of its size, it has so much more color and range than an ordinary church organ. It can go from a whisper to an, ‘Oh my gosh!’” Swann said. “This is one of the most known instruments around the world, and I’m relieved and thrilled to see it back in action.”

But fine-tuning the delicate instrument remains an ongoing process that won’t be done for a few more months, said Kevin Cartwright, president of Los Angeles-based Rosales Organ Builders, which has been contracted to maintain the instrument at a cost to the diocese of about $75,000 a year. That requires him to scale ladders several stories high.

“The organ must be tuned for the building,” Cartwright said. “Each pipe must be individually tuned.”

Hazel has had her own Facebook page since 2009: The Hazel Wright Organ Society, which now has a little over 2,400 members.

“To be an inanimate object and have that type of following is amazing, particularly for an archaic instrument like the pipe organ,” said Trisha Longo of Dickson City, Pennsylvania, one of the page’s founders and an ardent fan. “It holds a mystical appeal.”

Another founder, Matt Morrison, a California school teacher and organist who sang in the “Hour of Power” choir as a teenager, said that “worshipping God is timeless, and the music of the church transcends millennia.”

“Hazel can be used for liturgy, just as she can accompany a rock band. The organ is so versatile,” Morrison said. “Really, it’s bigger than any one genre of music.”

In the latest installment of Plant PPL, Houseplant Nation’s Tammy Ha describes her career trajectory, from selling rare plants at her mother’s water store in Santa Ana to becoming the owner of two plant shops, five miles apart.

I don’t know if it’s a success. But we have fun. People tell us they love the store and how we decorate. I love Yuko Kitchen because it reminds me of the water store. Someday I want to make a stable income, but honestly I don’t want to make it so big that I can’t manage it.

Our two shops are five miles away from each other. You can hit both of them in one day. We host plant swaps, small business pop-ups. We provide tables and tents for people, and the community comes out to support them. We host free classes: repotting, making moss poles, how to propagate.

I really want to do a lot more events and fun stuff. I work with some really great people who live here and do events for free, and I collaborate with them often. People like the Plant Chica (@theplantchica) do so many community events; I love that. I am still learning and want to do a lot more for my community.

I feel like everybody has a job, and my job is to bring people relief to even out all of the negativity. In Huntington Beach, I have a giant rainbow because I support the LGBTQ community. In my bathroom, I have a sign that says “Inclusive.” People can see that we are open and welcoming to others. I am peaceful, but I support anyone that fights for racial equality. That’s how I am. I am introverted. That’s why I’m into plants.

I do this because I love it.

I grew up in Vietnam and came here with my mom when I was 19. Back in 2018, I started doing succulent and fairy garden arrangements for fun and created a small business working for friends and family. People really liked them and asked me to do events. In a short period of time — about a year — I got a contract with the Resort at Pelican Hill down in Newport Beach to create succulent pumpkins for them.

When I visited different growers to purchase succulents for the arrangements, I started buying plants because I couldn’t resist them. It got to the point where I purchased more houseplants than the succulents that I was supposed to be buying!

My mother and I owned a water store in Santa Ana, and I worked at a bank part time up until a few months ago. I started to bring plants in and hung them all over the place to try and make the store nice. Then, because I was selling succulents, people started to ask if they could buy the plants in the store. My mom suggested I try and sell plants on Facebook Marketplace. I started to do that for fun because I had a lot of free time at the water shop. That’s where it began. It took off when I started to collect rare plants. One customer asked me if we had variegated monstera, and I fell in love with them. I started to collect plants. It’s fascinating and interesting when you are collecting plants — common, rare or not. I love them all.

Because of the limited space at the water store, I only put out plants that I cherished. We propagated many of them, and I started to sell them to local people. That took off because people really liked our unusual setup — a water store that sells rare plants. People told me, “It’s like a secret rare plant shop.” I did that for about a year until my mom retired. I really wanted to have a plant community and host events like plant swaps. But we didn’t have space.

When my husband, Joseph Nguyen, lost his job as a structural engineer during the pandemic, we decided, “Now is the time to open a plant store.” Everything happens for a reason.

We found a small space in Huntington Beach, and the grand opening was in September of last year. A lot of people came and supported me. The community was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was in part due to social media influencers: Jolene Foliage posted a video of the water store on her Instagram @foliagelove_r. Sharina Tallada of @sharinawiththeplants posted a video of our shop on YouTube. Our growth has been due to word of mouth.

I opened the second store a few months ago because we ran out of space in Huntington Beach. I still didn’t have enough space for workshops. People were asking me for all kinds of different things. My sister Tu Ha is a crazy plant lady too so when she came from Vietnam, we rented a bigger space in Garden Grove that we could use as a venue. It is roomy and has 25-foot ceilings, and we can fit a good amount of people in there for events, workshops and classes.

My husband and I wanted to create a living wall. There is only so much space ... unless you go up. We always admired living walls and aroid walls that collectors create in Florida and thought it would be cool if we could create our own. We wanted the aroid wall for people to touch and see in person and not just on Instagram.

My husband loves to build stuff, so he put that wall in place with the help of my sister (it was very expensive) and then we put the plants on the wall. We hunted for them, and half of the wall is from my collection from my greenhouse; the other half are ones that we purchased. It took a week to prep the plants, put them up, and install a drip system to support and water them. We have a fish tank underneath with koi fish and use the fish poop to fertilize the plants in an aquaponics system.

I’m into big plants. I like anaconda and interesting Adansonia that are as big as me. It’s not so much about the rare and expensive plants but what fascinates me. How did the Raven ZZ plant change from green to black? I love anything with holes in it or the patterns like Begonia maculata. One time we found a half moon variegated ficus and I screamed. ‘Why? How?’ I find happiness in little things like that. They keep me going every day. I feel blessed and lucky to be able to build a small business that I truly love.