James Bernard Byrnes

After the abrupt and stormy departure of Newport Harbor's first director, Thomas Garver--who left in the fall of 1972 to take a curatorial position at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco--the museum board decided that it needed someone with more substantial administrative experience to lead the museum into its second decade.

After the abrupt and stormy departure of Newport Harbor's first director, Thomas Garver--who left in the fall of 1972 to take a curatorial position at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco--the museum board decided that it needed someone with more substantial administrative experience to lead the museum into its second decade.