Holiday Mix of Activities : County Honors Its Dead and Celebrates Living

Orange County celebrated Memorial Day with a mixture of solemn tributes and holiday-style fun.

Activities Monday morning were largely devoted to the ceremonies for which the national holiday was intended: remembering the war dead.

Wreaths and flags were placed, collectively or individually, to mark the graves of veterans. A haunting, recurring theme was the playing of taps, usually on a solitary bugle.

Ceremonies were held at Loma Vista Memorial Park in Fullerton, the Grand Army of the Republic plot in Santa Ana Cemetery, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress and Memory Garden Memorial Park in Brea.

Traffic ‘About Average’

During the afternoon, county residents, along with thousands of visitors and tourists, celebrated the holiday with picnics, beach outings and trips to parks, amusement areas and shopping centers.

Freeway traffic was “about average” for a Memorial Day holiday, said California Highway Patrol dispatcher Marcella Ozenne. No major accidents occurred in the county Monday, she said, “just a bunch of fender benders.”

An estimated 275,000 people showed up at county beaches, even though the sun made only occasional appearances, lifeguards said.

A teen-age boy at Huntington Beach State Park, whose friends were playfully burying him in the sand, stopped breathing when the friends put a towel over the boy’s face and poured sand on top, said lifeguard Richard Ozzelle.

The boy, Ed Montano, 16, of Anaheim, was blue from lack of oxygen but was breathing on his own by the time paramedics took him to the hospital, authorities said.

He was in fair condition at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, where he was admitted for observation, a spokeswoman said.

The friends “thought he could breathe through the towel, but obviously they were wrong,” Ozzelle said.

Water Warmer Than Air

It never got warmer than 65 degrees in Newport Beach, although San Clemente and Seal Beach temperatures reached the low 70s. In Newport Beach, the air temperature was topped by the water at 66 degrees. “And that’s where most of the people spent the day,” said lifeguard Mitch White.

“The sun never broke through; it was just hazy overcast all day,” said lifeguard Scott Melvin at Bolsa Chica State Beach, which lured a “well-behaved crowd” of about 28,000. The beachgoers were still out in force by late afternoon, he said.

“People are die-hards when it comes to weekends like this,” said lifeguard Richard Chew at San Clemente’s city beach, where 20,000 showed up despite the gray skies.

“They come down with their backpacks and their charcoal. Their money’s in the meter. They refuse to leave because they’ve committed themselves, dig themselves in and they’re here for the duration,” Chew said.

But at San Clemente State Beach, only 1,000 turned out. “That’s about one-twentieth of what it was yesterday (Sunday),” when clear and sunny skies heated up the sand, said lifeguard Debbie Friedman.

Anaheim Parade, Service

In Anaheim, about 300 people took part in a parade that preceded a memorial service at Anaheim Cemetery. Fred Mason, post commander of American Legion Post 72 in Anaheim, who marched in the parade with other veterans, said he was pleased that a large number of young people were participants or spectators. “Every city should have a parade on this day,” he said.

“It’s a day we go out to the cemetery to remember our comrades who have died.”

Mason, 53, a shop foreman from Fullerton, is a Korean War veteran. “I was 17 when I went in,” he recalled. “I believed it was my obligation.” Mason was sent to embattled South Korea, in the Pusan area, where American and South Korean forces held a perimeter against invading North Korean communist forces in the early 1950s.

Because the Pusan area was so heavily shelled and pock-marked by fighting, Mason remembered, “we didn’t have to dig any foxholes.”

Now, more than 30 years later, polls show that younger generations remember Korea mainly because of a long-running television show: “MASH.” But Mason said his memories are still of the bitter fighting along the front lines of that far-off, undeclared war of the ‘50s.