CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : COMING OF AGE : WE SHALL RETURN!

World War II put an end to the county’s bucolic existence as thousands of servicemen arrived for training at bases that sprang up overnight. Many of them, obviously captivated by the area’s charms, vowed to come back when hostilities ended. Here is the story of three such veterans.

In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Orange County was a predominantly agricultural area with a population of 130,000. Almost overnight, the county underwent a dramatic war time transformation.

Enemy-aircraft-spotter stands, manned 24 hours a day by civilian volunteers, cropped up along the coast. Anti-aircraft artillery units were installed in Irvine Park, La Habra, Fullerton, Anaheim and Orange. A squadron of 16 P-38s, stationed at Orange County Airport, flew patrol.

The county became home to half a dozen military installations, including the U.S. Naval Reserve Aviation Base in Los Alamitos, the U.S. Naval Ammunition and Net Depot in Seal Beach, the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, a Coast Guard station in San Clemente and the Santa Ana Naval Air Station with its two cavernous dirigible hangars built on Irvine Ranch land just south of Tustin.

But the military installation with the largest number of personnel was the Santa Ana Army Air Base, which offered preflight training for aviation cadets who would go on to become pilots, bombardiers and navigators.

Located between Santa Ana on the north and the tiny, country community of Costa Mesa on the south, the base ultimately sprawled over more than 1,300 acres of farmland that now encompasses Orange Coast College, the Orange County Fairgrounds, Southern California College, Costa Mesa High School, Davis Intermediate School, Costa Mesa City Hall, TeWinkle Park and the College Park and Mesa del Mar residential tracts.

The base, with an orange-and-white-checkered 500,000-gallon water tower as its tallest landmark, boasted 39 miles of road, 28 miles of walkways and more than 800 buildings--classrooms, barracks, mess halls, supply buildings, a gymnasium, fourchapels, three theaters and one of the largest hospitals in Southern California.

In mid-1943, at the peak of its four-year operation, the base population swelled to 26,000 servicemen and nearly 1,000 civilian workers. Between February, 1942, when the first cadets arrived, and March, 1946, when the facility closed, an estimated 220,000 flight cadets and returning combat veterans were processed through the base.

Through the Newport Boulevard gate opposite the Santa Ana Country Club passed a host of familiar names who would spend part of their military careers in Orange County: Jimmy Stewart, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gene Autry, All-American ex-Michigan football star Tom Harmon, future Los Angeles television news anchorman Jerry Dunphy and baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, who served as a base physical education instructor.

On weekends, if they didn’t head for the bright lights of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the servicemen were drawn to such places as the Cadet Cafe and Fountain in Costa Mesa, the Balboa Bamboo Room, the Balboa Beer Depot and the Home Cafe in Santa Ana, which offered a “home-style” Thanksgiving dinner for $1.50. Other favorite haunts were the USO in Santa Ana and the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, where such big bands as Stan Kenton and His Orchestra and Harry James and His Music Makers played regularly.

But the cadets didn’t always have to travel to be entertained: the big bands of Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington, and Kay Kyser and his “Kollege of Musical Knowledge,” were among those that played at the base, and Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor did live radio broadcasts from the base theater.

Today, all that remains of the base are a dozen-odd buildings and a memorial garden at the Orange County Fairgrounds--scattered remnants of the important role the site played in World War II.

But each year, in March, the Costa Mesa Historical Society holds a reunion at Orange Coast College for those who served at the base. Several hundred men usually turn out. It’s a time to reminisce about the days when the world was at war and they were young and far away from home.

For many who spent time at the base, it was their first glimpse of the fabled California life style, and their time in Orange County made a lasting impression.

Indeed, World War II was a watershed in the county’s history and growth.

Thousands of servicemen returned after the war, moving into the tract houses that sprang up in the ‘50s and ‘60s on land where beans and orange trees once grew.

Here are the stories of three such veterans: Larry Acosta, 71, of Newport Beach, an aviation cadet from Chicago; Rusty Rostvold, 69, of Laguna Beach, an Army buck private from Nashwauk, Minn., and Roy McCardle, 69, of Costa Mesa, a base finance officer from Lewistown, Pa.

WHEN AVIATION CADET Larry Acosta stepped off the train at Santa Ana’s 4th Street depot in February, 1942, he was wearing a brown fedora, a fur muffler and his “pride and joy,” a brand-new camel’s-hair overcoat.

The 24-year-old mechanical engineer had left behind subzero temperatures in Chicago and was expecting more of the same in California.

“Boy, was I surprised,” he says. “It was a bright, sunny day. The temperature was in the high 70s, and here I am all wrapped up.”

From the Santa Fe depot, Acosta rode in a military van down Main Street, which ran directly into Newport Boulevard and on to the Santa Ana Army Air Base.

“It was wide open,” Acosta recalls. “We passed through Delhi, a little farming community near where Newport and Main met. At that intersection you could see the base, which was still about three miles away. Everything was flat. You could see the old sugar beet factory and the big dirigible hangars out in the open. It was very pleasant. Coming from a hustling, bustling city, this was like a vacation.”

Acosta was one of the first cadets to arrive at the base, and at first, he says, “it was very rudimentary. We were disorganized, and everybody was just feeling their way around. But it only took a few weeks before it developed into a highly polished system of instruction.”

Reveille was at 5:30 a.m. “They’d give us about a minute and a half from the time they woke us up to be in formation in front of the barracks in uniform. Then they said ‘Dismissed’ and we’d go do our personal hygiene bit. Then we’d fall out for breakfast.”

The cadets spent their days going to classes, doing military drills and undergoing physical training. “There was quite a bit of physical training, calisthenics and trotting--we didn’t call it jogging then.”

Acosta recalls that the cadets were restricted to the base for two weeks before they received their first weekend pass.

“Us city boys ran straight down to the beach. I sent pictures back to Chicago and wrote: ‘Hey, look at this!’ ”

A weekend pass began at noon on Saturday and lasted until about 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, when the cadets had to be in formation for an inspection before the 3 p.m. dress parade. Acosta says he and his buddies raised a little hell when set loose on the weekend.

“We were young. We used to take the Red Car or hitch out to Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach. All the stewardesses lived out there. We were the glamour boys! All you had to do was put your arm around them. They’d see that you were a flyboy and they’d go just like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis: “We realized it wasn’t hard to have fun.”

Although they were not yet officers, the cadets wore officers’ uniforms, minus the gold second lieutenant’s bars they would receive upon graduation. But because they looked like officers--at least to civilians--many cadets took advantage of the situation, boasting to young women they’d meet that they had just returned from Europe, where they had shot down half a dozen German Messerschmitts.

Acosta was not about to let a good thing go to waste, but it backfired one afternoon in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, which was always filled with hundreds of soldiers, sailors and Marines waiting for buses to take them back to their bases.

Acosta said goodby to the “little cutie” he had met earlier in the day. She had to start her shift at a war plant, and just as her bus began to pull away from the curb, she stood in the doorway and shouted, “Goodby, captain! I’ve had a wonderful time!”

“Everybody heard it,” Acosta says. “Jeez, did I have to run the gauntlet. They were calling, ‘Attention! Make way for the captain!’ Oh, jiminy cricket, I was glad to get out of there. That was embarrassing as hell.”

If they didn’t feel like going up to Los Angeles, Acosta and his buddies usually went down to Balboa.

“There was a lot of fun on the island and peninsula,” he says. “Servicemen pretty much had the run of everything in those days. There were very few bars where you had to pay for drinks. The uniform was respected.”

Unlike other cadets who generally spent 13 weeks at the base before going on to primary flight instruction, Acosta wound up spending 15 months at the base after being eliminated from flying status for health reasons, a “bad report,” he says, that he fought successfully. He served as a drill instructor and drew ship and aircraft identification charts and maps that were used as training aids.

During this period, Acosta’s “Chicago sweetheart,” Roslyn, came out, and they were married in St. Anne’s Church in Santa Ana in November, 1942. They moved into a $15-a-month house on the beach three blocks north of Newport Pier, which then was the center of town.

“We loved it here,” he says. “It was a completely different style of living to me. The ocean appealed to me very much, and the people who lived here before it became a veritable rat race made friends easily. It was a far more casual method of living then. What contributed to the peaceful nature was that the wartime speed limit was 35 m.p.h. And we drove with blackout headlights: The headlights were taped over with just a narrow strip in the center.”

Acosta remembers that houses on the ocean side of the peninsula had black-out curtains and that the air-raid warden would walk down the sidewalk blowing his whistle and shouting, “Pull your blackout shades down!”

Just walking to the Lido Theater, which stood in the middle of a field about three blocks from the nearest building, was an experience in itself on a moonless night, Acosta says. “You couldn’t see where you were going. It was absolutely pitch-black. We’d hear footsteps and pretty soon some obscure figure would pass by and say, ‘Good evening.’ ”

In May, 1943, Acosta was shipped overseas to Wheeler Field in Hawaii, where he was put in charge of a supply depot. After his flying status was reinstated, he briefly co-piloted a C-47, flying supplies and personnel to various American-occupied islands in the South Pacific.

Although he dreamed of returning to Orange County as soon as he was discharged, Acosta settled in Phoenix, Ariz., where his wife had moved to be near her mother when Acosta was shipped overseas.

He landed a job in the engineering department of a big steel firm and, he says, one year led to another. But while he made frequent visits to Orange County over the years, the twice-divorced Acosta didn’t get his chance to move to Newport Beach until 1968.

“I loved this area,” the retired structural engineer says, “and it was the Army base that convinced me this is where I wanted to live.”

AS RUSTY ROSTVOLD puts it, he hit “Shangri-La land” in August, 1942. The red-haired, 23-year-old Army buck private from Minnesota had completed two months of Army administration school at Ft. Logan, Colo., when he received orders to report to Santa Ana.

Rostvold and his Army buddy, another private named Herb Rhodes, thought it would be “an interesting adventure” to hitchhike to Southern California. They were right.

Late in the afternoon on their second day of hitchhiking, they were standing on the outskirts of Albuquerque, N.M., when a man and a woman in a 1941 Chevy two-door sedan stopped to give them a lift. The man turned out to be a Hollywood producer who, after taking them on a side trip to Hoover Dam and Las Vegas, drove them into Hollywood.

“I’ll never forget the evening coming over the Cajon Pass and hitting Foothill Boulevard, which was the original Route 66, and here was this Shangri-La land of citrus trees,” Rostvold says. “It was really overwhelming. It was approaching sunset and it was just beautiful--an ocean of citrus groves. And those were the days (when) the air was pristine and clear.”

Once they arrived in Hollywood, the producer bought Rostvold and Rhodes dinner. Afterward, he drove them to a hotel, saying, “I’ve made provisions for you for four nights. Enjoy it.”

Rostvold and Rhodes still had four days until they had to report to base and so, for the next 96 hours, they “did” Hollywood: They sat in the audience of several network radio shows. They went dancing at the Palladium Ballroom. And they went to the Hollywood Canteen, the USO where movie stars waited on the thousands of GIs who came in for coffee, doughnuts and a chance to dance with the likes of Rita Hayworth or Marlene Dietrich.

Rostvold didn’t get to dance with Hayworth or Dietrich, but Fred MacMurray served him a cup of coffee. “I remember vividly all of those beautiful movie people,” he says. “They were so friendly and natural and giving. They really made us feel at home.”

After “four great days” in Hollywood, Rostvold says, “we hopped a Red Car and rode to Santa Ana.” From Santa Ana, they hitchhiked to the base, where Rostvold’s first assignment was typing the payroll.

In fact, Rostvold says, he typed Sgt. Joe DiMaggio’s first paycheck himself. The legendary “Yankee Clipper,” who had left his $43,500-a-year job with the Yankees to volunteer in the Army, lived in Rostvold’s barracks. “He used to give us rides to Santa Ana in the evening in his gray Cadillac convertible. He was very generous. He was a very quiet person but very nice.”

Rostvold says that there was a baseball diamond on the base and that DiMaggio was a member of the base team. “I must say, when Joe DiMaggio hit the ball with his bat, it sounded different. It was another dimension. So you can see I came out of a quiet Minnesota mining town, and in six months this is all unfolding.

“I can remember, shortly after arriving, going to Newport and Balboa for the first time and finding this ocean and this beautiful beach and, in a sense, discovering a way of life.”

Orange County during the war, Rostvold says, “was a very different world. All the communities were separated by what I call the citrus moats. Citrus dominated the character of the whole area. The Irvine Ranch, of course, was lying in its natural state of beauty, and there was beautiful, clear air. In the wintertime, the sweet smell of orange blossoms was almost overwhelming. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Most evenings after work, Rostvold and his buddies would head down to Balboa--often to the Nippa Hut, a popular restaurant on the bay side of the peninsula, or to the Rendezvous Ballroom on the ocean side.

“I remember the first time going to the Rendezvous,” says Rostvold. “That was my introduction to this strange Southern California dance, the Balboa shuffle. I must say it didn’t take me long to learn it because it’s a fantastic dance. Seeing all those beautiful, suntanned couples dancing the Balboa shuffle was really quite a sight.”

Evenings, if he didn’t go to Balboa, Rostvold would hitchhike to Santa Ana.

“Santa Ana was much quieter in those days,” he says. “There was a small USO on the corner of 4th and Main. They had records and dance music, and there would always be young ladies there, volunteers who would dance and talk and be friendly.”

Rostvold says the local people treated servicemen “just like family. There was a little coffee shop on South Main in Santa Ana called Mary’s. It was very popular. We’d go in for a milkshake in the evening, and Mary and her husband befriended us.”

Rostvold says he’ll never forget his first Christmas away from home. Hearing Bing Crosby sing “White Christmas” on the radio didn’t help: “That was a toughie, being here in Shangri-La land and being away from family and friends.”

He wasn’t alone for long. On one of his visits to the USO in Santa Ana, he met a 16-year-old volunteer named Virginia Faubion.

“She was very young, very cute and a very nice person,” he says. “She invited me over to her family’s home in Anaheim, which meant a lot. She had very friendly parents, so that became a routine. I’d hitchhike up Harbor Boulevard to Anaheim in the evening, and that was solid citrus trees from the base to Anaheim.”

The couple were married in a church wedding in Anaheim in February, 1945, two years after they met. Says Rostvold with a grin: “I had to let her grow up. I was robbing the cradle.” Rostvold spent the remainder of the war at the base. After he was discharged from the Army in December, 1945, he worked on the base as a civilian property auditor until June, 1946. He then returned to college on the GI Bill, majoring in accounting at Stanford. He taught economics and accounting at Pomona College from 1952 until 1966, when he opened his own economic consulting firm in Claremont.

Divorced and now married to Rosemarie, his wife of five years, Rostvold lives in Laguna Beach and has his own economic consulting business in Laguna Hills. Rostvold moved back to Orange County in 1977, after having had a mobile home at El Moro mobile home park north of Laguna as a weekend retreat since the early ‘70s.

“Having discovered Shangri-La land in August of 1942, it was very easy when the time was right to move back,” he says. “Orange County and the air base just had a tremendous influence on my life.”

THE YEAR 1942 WAS a busy one for 23-year-old Roy McCardle.

He graduated in June from Benjamin Franklin University in Washington, D.C., with a master’s degree in accounting. He got married in July. And he was drafted into the Army in August.

“I had tried to enlist, but they wouldn’t take me at the time,” he says. “My eyes weren’t 20-20, and they were being particular. Like everybody, I wanted to fly.”

After he was drafted, McCardle was assigned to the Medical Corps and sent to Morrison Field in West Palm Beach, Fla. When he heard that the base finance office needed help, he immediately volunteered: “They were glad to get me,” he says, adding, “I can’t stand the sight of blood anyway.”

In June, 1943, after graduating from Officer Candidate School, McCardle was sent to the Santa Ana Army Air Base, where he spent the remainder of the war as the base deputy finance officer.

McCardle’s wife, Alyce, accompanied him and landed a temporary job working in the office of the base PX. They rented a bedroom in the home of an elderly couple in Santa Ana.

“I liked Orange County. Who wouldn’t? I like being near the ocean. As soon as we got out of that house, we got a place on Balboa Island: a two-bedroom furnished apartment for $37.50 a month.”

McCardle recalls that there wasn’t much traffic during the war.

“That was really nice, but trying to drive home from the base during a blackout was something else. I can’t remember driving around much at all. Everything was rationed. Gas was rationed. Tires were rationed. Being married and not living on the base, it was just like working someplace else. I’d go to work in the morning and come home in the evening.”

To this day McCardle retains vivid mental snapshots of Orange County during the war:

“The orange groves. The snow-capped mountains. The desert nearby. That’s why we’re having problems today. People watch the Rose Parade (while they’re) sitting in snow, and they all want to come out here.”

After he was discharged in April, 1946, McCardle and his family returned to his hometown in Pennsylvania.

“I guess like so many people, you wanted to go home,” he says. “That’s when you realize what it was like out here.

“Lewistown is a typical little industrial town. After being out here, it was very dull. There was no growth. But the winter is what really did it: The trees are bare, and it’s raining. You just get your belly full of that in a hurry. So we turned around and came back.”

When the McCardles and their two young children returned to Southern California in 1948, McCardle planned to move to Los Angeles and get a job in accounting, but then he realized he didn’t want to live in the city. A friend who owned a citrus ranch and nursery “right where Angel Stadium is” offered him a job.

“We lived on the ranch in a one-bedroom shack for the hired hand, which was me,” he says.

After he had been with the nursery for a year, McCardle was told by an Army buddy who worked for a Costa Mesa title insurance company that the firm needed an escrow officer. McCardle worked at Bay Escrow for two years, then went to work for a real estate firm in Costa Mesa, where he had bought a house.

Even by the early ‘50s, says the twice-divorced McCardle who still sells real estate, Costa Mesa was starting to grow. He remembers that Republic Construction began building what they called the Freedom Homes, a tract of 1,000 houses on the west side of town. The three-bedroom, one-bath houses sold for about $6,000.

“I thought those guys were going to go broke,” says McCardle. “Where would they get all these people?”