WHAT HAPPENED TO BAL WEEK

For rent, Easter Week: 3-bedroom party house with view, patio and fireplace. Only two house rules: no opium smoking in elevators and guests must bury their own dead.

--1960 classified ad for a Balboa rental

Sleep? Who could sleep? There was too much cruising to do, too many parties to go to, too much dancing, too many knockout girls, too many cute guys, too much sun, too much beach, too much surf, too much music and noise and laughter and pure screaming fun.

And just one week to do it all!

But it was Bal Week, and you could do it all if you could keep going for seven days. If you didn’t die of pure sensory overload, you could have the time of your life. It was just you and your pals and your cars and thousands and thousands of kids and one week of glorious springtime without mom and dad.

Bal Week.

Those were holy words to any Southern California kid. For more than 40 years, Easter Week in Balboa was a sacred quest for the most fun you could possibly have in one school vacation.

From the late 1920s to the late 1960s, until police and landlord crackdowns cooled the fervor, legions of students swarmed the peninsula. They filled the local cash registers with a sudden infusion of money, filling the ramshackle little rental cottages with dozens of their friends, filling the air with music from thousands of radios and the throaty rumble from thousands of souped-up engines and, sometimes, filling the Newport Beach Jail.

“In the early days, it was the only place,” said Robert Gardner, 78, a retired appellate court judge who spent his first Easter Week in Balboa in the 1920s.

“Nobody went anywhere else. It was roaring great in Balboa through the 20s and 30s. I grew up in it. I was a part of it then, and in those days it was loud and rowdy. At that time it was just a little honky-tonk resort town, and (during Easter Week) the population doubled and tripled. The town only existed for Easter and summer vacation. There was a very small year-around population, in the hundreds, and all the rest were rental cottages. They were these little ramshackle places that the kids couldn’t hurt.”

Not that they didn’t try. Landlords’ horror stories were legion.

It was common practice for a small handful of students to rent, say, a three-bedroom apartment for the week and, once the deal was signed, throw the doors open to 20 or 30 of their friends.

One well-circulated story involved a group of restless Bal Week boarders who decided to improve the decor of their cottage by frying up a couple dozen eggs and nailing them to the walls.

Another group of students, supposedly trying to cook a small meal over a fire in an ashtray, found themselves staring through a hole in the floor when the heated ashtray burned through and fell into the living room on the floor below.

The tradition of silliness was firmly solidified by the time Bob Snyder showed up at his first Bal Week in 1943.

“Boy, this was the place,” said Snyder, now the manager of the Balboa Island Ferry Co. “It was the natural thing to come here. Every night was a different adventure. I was in the service and I came out here from Ohio, and I’d never seen so many people in one crowd before. It was pretty wild. There were some big fights, and there was trouble with drinking, but I think the kids did a lot of things that were fun. They had a great time. And there were lots of parties. Lots of parties.”

They went on all night, said Snyder, 67, who returned to Balboa after the war and began working on the Balboa Island Ferry in 1950.

“It seemed that everyone, at one time of the day or night, had to hit the ferry once or twice,” he said. “There were times at night when we couldn’t even haul cars, there was such a big mob of people (on board). We’d quit about 2 in the morning, but the cars would cruise the streets all night long. And then at about 10 in the morning, you’d see the kids start to hit the streets again. I imagine they lost a lot of sleep that week.”

But they always managed to get themselves, nearly every day, to the one spot that was the undisputed focal point of Bal Week revelry: the Rendezvous Ballroom.

“The Rendezvous was the center of everything,” said Gardner, who worked as a ticket-taker at the ballroom as a student.

“All day long, everybody went to the beach and got their white skin all sunburned and drank and then they went to the Rendezvous at night. It was the place to go. Any kid worth his salt was going to be at the Rendezvous.”

The Rendezvous Ballroom, which stood on the ocean side of the peninsula between Washington and Palm streets, was such a constant in Bal Week lore that veteran Bal Week aficionados referred to it simply as The Place.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, a house band played there most nights, but there were frequent short runs or one-night stands by bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Les Brown, Harry James, Guy Lombardo and others. Stan Kenton’s band became a semi-regular at the Rendezvous.

The Rendezvous was a meeting place, a social touchstone and a magnet. But when the big-band era faded, so did much of the music at the Rendezvous. Until Dick Dale showed up there in 1955.

Dale and his Del Tones inaugurated what came to be known as the surfing sound at the Rendezvous, characterized by a twangy electric guitar lead. Dale eventually became known as the King of the Surf Guitar. And during Bal Week, the kids ate it up.

“Cars were lined up bumper to bumper all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway, and all the kids were playing ‘Let’s Go Trippin’ ’ on their car radios,” said Dale, who now lives in Twentynine Palms.

“It was the thing to do during Bal Week to come to the Rendezvous and see Dick Dale,” he said. “Bal Week was the explosion week when everyone let their hair down.”

Dale added to the explosion, he said, by testing the new amplifiers being made at the time by the Fender Corp. He said he blew 40 of them at the Rendezvous.

“Fender figured if they could withstand Dick Dale they could withstand the public,” he said.

Dale, who had a record store on the peninsula in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, said Bal Week in that era had everything but privacy.

“You could not go out of your house and expect to drive to the store,” said Dale, who still ends his telephone conversations with “surf’s up.” “Once you were on the peninsula, you couldn’t get off. Everybody had a party on every single front porch. There were about a hundred kids on everybody’s porch.”

And if they weren’t on the porch, they were in a car. And the cars were probably hot-rods. But, Dale said, there was one car that everybody wanted to drive to Balboa in the early ‘60s: A Ford wood-paneled station wagon. A woody.

“We had a 1940 Ford woody, and ahhh, it was so bitchin’,” Dale said. “We used to bleach the wood and take the tailgates down and chrome them, and the girls would jump in, and we’d pack a lunch and go surfing. Everybody had to have a surfboard sticking out of the back of their woody.”

But those days were numbered. Newport Beach in the early ‘60s was quickly turning from a resort town into a city of mostly permanent residents. The number of rental properties available to Bal Week vacationers decreased--as did landlords’ tolerance for misbehavior.

Police tolerance waned too. A new police chief, B. James Glavas, promised tighter control of Bal Week activities, and arrests increased. In 1966, officers made 347 arrests during the first three days of Bal Week alone.

“We worked 12-hour shifts and a one-hour briefing before we went out and a one-hour post-briefing, so we were working a good 14 hours a day” during Bal Week, said Newport Beach Police Sgt. Dave Elliott, who was a patrol officer during Bal Weeks of the ‘60s. “Our biggest problems were traffic and the party houses, and there were a lot of fights and alcohol and that type of thing. But we didn’t have the near-riotous scenes you sometimes see today in other situations. We didn’t have rock and bottle throwing.”

Still, Bal Week was doomed. As the ‘60s wore on, students began to go to Palm Springs or the Colorado River for Easter Week. Today, Elliott said, Easter Week in Balboa is considered more of a family holiday than a high school and collegiate blowout.

Some Bal Week veterans say the last true Bal Week was in 1969, when one Times story reported that “the wild shenanigans that once marked Bal Week appear to have ended.” Others point to the previous year, when a sort of Requiem for Bal Week appeared in a Times editorial.

Others, however, say Bal Week came to a sadder and more poetic end on Saturday, Aug. 7, 1966. At about 4 that morning, the big building at 608 E. Ocean Front was consumed by flames. When the sun came up, the Rendezvous Ballroom was a pile of ashes and scorched brick.

The next morning, someone scrawled on a piece of standing brick with a piece of charcoal, “Goodbye. We loved you.”

Condominiums stand on the site today.

Will Bal Week be resurrected? Probably not, say those who remember.

“I don’t think you could do it the same way in this day and age,” Snyder said. “Back then they were good, clean kids. Today I’m afraid you’d have more trouble.”

“Those days were wonderful,” Dale said, “because of the cleanliness of the people. I never saw the kids get out of control. Balboa always stood for romance in those days. And it’s another beautiful memory in my life. But it can never be the same again.”