Vacation Memories : A Palm Springs Honeymoon, 1942

“Roger, Centaurian One X-ray Tango,” the tower voice radioed.

“Those are our call letters,” my daughter, Marti, explained, pointing to the figures on the instrument panel.

“Each letter of the alphabet has a corresponding word,” she continued as her husband Bill, following instructions from the voice on the radio, maneuvered his plane into place behind five others waiting in line to leave John Wayne airport on a Sunday afternoon.

From his seat beside Bill, my husband grumbled, “Even in an airplane you can’t escape weekend traffic in Newport Beach.”

We eased forward, waiting our turn. With a lilting swoosh the plane lifted off and I nervously began my first ride ever in a small private plane.

I flinched as something went bump.

“It’s OK, mom,” Marti said. “Just the landing gear retracting.”

Looking down, I could see the familiar asphalt of Jamboree Road, the green of Big Canyon Country Club and the silty gray of the back bay. We circled over Spyglass and watched Crystal Cove and the Pacific disappear on our right.

The plane plunged into the thinning clouds that had delayed our takeoff for Bullhead City, Ariz. I wasn’t too comfortable with those clouds but we had left them behind by the time we reached Lake Elsinore. Now we were on automatic pilot, Bill explained, while I picked out the familiar peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains.

We slipped smoothly through Banning Pass and I gazed at snow-streaked Mt. San Jacinto with the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway glistening in the sunlight. I saw little O’Donnell Golf Club tucked between the city and the base of the mountain and, suddenly, I was a bride again in the Royal Palms Annex with the Chi Chi Club next door and the golf course across from the apartment parking lot.

“We are flying at 11,500 feet”--Bill’s voice pulled me back from 1942.

Hal was watching the shadow of our plane slip over the rough desert below. “Wonder if those are the same rocks I slept on when we bivouacked about here with Patton’s army?” he mused. I knew that he, too, was back in the 1940s.

He was a new second lieutenant and we had just received his orders. Expecting that he would be sent to the East Coast or, worse, directly overseas, we couldn’t believe our good fortune when he was assigned to Desert Center California.

Southern Californians from birth, we knew Desert Center. It was just out of Indio, only a few hours from our family homes near Los Angeles.

Having spent summers at my parents’ cabin at Big Bear Lake, I had many friends in Palm Springs and Indio. In those days most of the people who worked the hotels and concessions at Big Bear, Lake Arrowhead and Catalina in the summer traveled the circuit and took winter jobs as bartenders, juke box repairmen, waitresses, store clerks or concessionaires in the desert resorts.

Even rental horses did the circuit, plodding mountain trails in summer and desert sands in winter. Each September they were rounded up and driven for several days down the San Bernardino Mountain slopes and across the then mostly open country to Palm Springs, with riders camping out along the way. In May the same horses were herded back up the mountains to rental stables in the pines.

Our Lucky Star

Hal and I sublet the Palm Springs apartment of a bartender friend who was being drafted. Our lucky star was burning bright. Rentals were rare, with thousands of soldiers already in the desert training to fight against the German army of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Africa.

Friend Johnny’s place was a tiny room with a double bed, dresser and table. It had a minuscule kitchen (with resident cockroaches) and a closet pass-through to a shower and washbowl.

A door beyond the shower led to a toilet cubicle that we shared with the people next door, an artillery colonel, his wife and two children who were living in an apartment the same size as ours. Upstairs was a tank corps major, wife and baby. We were outranked but warmly welcomed to the encampment.

Our lucky star flickered when Hal reported to Desert Center. He was sent by train to a place called Knob Siding, and trucked to a camp in the middle of the Arizona desert wilderness. I saw him three times during the four months that I spent in Palm Springs getting a glorious winter tan.

On a rare overnight leave, Hal started out from Yuma only to have the train run into a flash flood, backing up 20 miles to the Yuma station because the tracks ahead were washed out. Determined to find a rental closer to his camp, I took a Greyhound bus to the dirt-floored Yuma bus station.

After fruitlessly hiking up and down the streets looking for housing, I discovered that there was not a hotel room left in town for the night, and no more buses to Palm Springs. In a chair in the lobby of the Evangeline Hotel I tried to block out the noisy all-night poker game of visiting lettuce buyers and the Indian who was pushing a rackety vacuum.

At breakfast I sleepily listened to a real estate agent describe farm chicken sheds and outhouses that were being rented to military personnel for Yuma housing. I took the next bus back to the Royal Palms Annex and our shared toilet.

With tourism severely curtailed by gas rationing and other transportation shortages during World War II, the military kept the Palm Springs economy alive. Soldiers roamed its streets from the tower of the El Mirador Hotel (then serving as an Army hospital) on the north to the gardens of Nelly Coffman’s Desert Inn on the south. At night their Army drab-clad bodies jammed into bars and restaurants and lined up for the movies.

On weekends the resort hotels and Charlie Farrell’s Racquet Club filled with officers and their ladies. One spa was leased to the military for an officers’ club, its banquet room rimmed with clanking slot machines.

Soldiers on Leave

Freed from the windy, barren, all-male desert for a few hours’ leave, soldiers from all over the nation roared into town and roistered up and down the streets. When my fellow service wives could get a baby sitter, we sometimes went to dinner or a movie or had a drink at the Chi Chi. We always went in a group. It was not safe to be a woman alone on the nighttime streets of Palm Springs in 1942.

Daytimes I folded bandages with other Army wives at the Desert Inn or gathered up the kids in the apartment annex and took them across the street to the pool at the main hotel. When they could save enough gas stamps, my parents visited.

A few girlfriends spent rare overnights and we would get up early and walk through the spring wild verbena and daisy fields that flowed across the desert, which began just a few blocks beyond the Desert Inn.

It was an easy hike to Taquitz Canyon where the lower trail (now closed due to pollution) ended at a tranquil waterfall that plunged into a pool deep enough to swim in and cold enough to give you frostbite.

Hal, meanwhile, was crunching his coccyx riding over the rough desert on the hard seat of an Army jeep. Days were spent in practice battles and forays, nights in sleeping bags under cold, magnificent, starry skys.

Logistical exercises were often the order of the day to test equipment, maintenance and supply tactics under desert combat conditions. One gallon of water was issued to each man each day. This had to be used for drinking, bathing and shaving. Lucky was the man who had enough left to wash his filthy socks at sunset.

After four months of intense training for desert survival, Hal was sent to the South Pacific. Instead of having to subsist on a gallon of water a day, he found himself trying to keep dry in the constant tropical downpours of the New Guinea jungles.

“There’s the Colorado!” Marti exclaimed. The distant river split the three corners of California, Arizona and Nevada like a great spill of blue ink. Soon we were making a turn over it, a palate of emerald, silver, black and blue, as it spread grandly between the buff-colored desert and the green, tan and brown patches of cultivated land.

The radio came alive with landing instructions for One X-ray Tango. We circled over foaming white water on the Davis Dam spillway before easing down on the Bullhead runway. Climbing out of the Centaurian, we dashed across the highway to catch a ferry to the Nevada side of the river for a bit of gambling.

Seated on the ferry, Hal and I exchanged smiles that said we shared the same secret. Marti and Bill were happy that I had enjoyed my exciting first ride in the Cessna P-210 to Bullhead.

Only Hal and I could know that the little plane had also carried me back 42 years to my lonely honeymoon vacation in Palm Springs.