Heavy Traffic Fails to Dim Christmas Spirit at John Wayne

It took Mission Viejo’s Harry Bruce a while to get into the Christmas spirit Wednesday.

When H. W. Basham first asked Bruce to help him jump-start his car in front of John Wayne Airport, he declined.

“At home normally we help everybody,” said Basham, 67, a Texas grandfather, shrugging off the initial refusal. “Here, they don’t seem to care.”

But Bruce, a retired banker, changed his mind. He nosed his Buick Park Avenue alongside Basham’s cream-colored Lincoln Continental, hooked up the jumper cables and with one turn of the key Basham was on his way.

At Orange County’s bustling airport on Christmas Eve, it took more than balking cars, delayed flights and lost baggage to overcome the good cheer. Even traffic cops, who could have treated themselves to a white Christmas, papering windshields with parking tickets, looked the other way as cars triple-parked in the airport’s forbidden white zone.

“It’s really busy, but people have been patient and handling everything pretty well,” said Darla Tuttle, who spent most of the day fielding questions about lost children, relatives and flight times at her airport information booth. Kermit Redd worried that his little dog, Charlie, might be lost when it took a while for him to emerge from the underbelly of the jet that flew the family in from New Jersey.

Redd and his wife, Mildred, were met by their daughter, Marilyn Myers, a travel agent from Santa Ana, and their two grandchildren. Asked how he was going to spend his Christmas vacation, Redd said, “With my daughter and grandchildren and my dog, of course,” adding in a whisper: “I’m also going to the track at Santa Anita.”

While about 10,000 travelers passed through the airport’s gates Wednesday, loaded down with shopping bags and suitcases filled with gifts, airport and state highway officials reported that traffic into and out of the airport was fairly smooth. The problems for drivers were not there, but on the freeways around the county’s malls--in Mission Viejo, Brea and Costa Mesa, for example--where traffic was backed up to a standstill during the afternoon, according to California Highway Patrol dispatcher Joanne Losenna.

“There’s the normal hectic traffic in the (airport) terminal building,” said John Escobedo, an airport noise control specialist at John Wayne. “But not as bad as Thanksgiving. Over a longer holiday season like Christmas, the traffic is a little more spread out.”

There were, however, a few scattered problems with luggage, according to Michelle Alvarez, Pacific Southwest Airlines’ customer service representative.

“Thirty bags arrived this morning that should have arrived last night,” she said.

At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, an hour after her plane arrived from Minneapolis, Rita Ballantyne was one of the unlucky few still looking for her luggage.

“I’m in good spirits, still,” she said, smiling and rolling her eyes.