FOR THE KIDS : SANTA PAULA AIRPORT : Vintage Fun : Once a month the owners of the antique planes proudly put them on display at the airfield.

Go out to the Santa Paula Airport and you’re just as likely to see a vintage biplane lumber down the runway as you are a sleek, fast, late-model airplane.

The little airport is world famous for its antique planes and the owners who laboriously restore and tinker lovingly with them in their spare time.

They’re not bashful about showing them off. On the first Sunday of every month, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., they put them on display at the airport and jaw with airplane buffs and kids who have never seen a biplane up close.

There’s a story behind every airplane. Don Dickenson’s 1937 Spartan Executive is a five-passenger executive aircraft that was used by U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson during World War II. Only 34 were built, and now 10 are left.

“A guy later wrecked it and it layed in a pile for 10 years,” Dickenson said. He heard about it in 1968, paid $1,000 for the remains and hauled it to Santa Paula.

“Everyone said it couldn’t be rebuilt,” said Dickenson, a Santa Paula rancher whose father, Ralph Dickenson, was one of 19 aviation pioneers who founded the airport in 1930.

There probably is no other airport like it in the country. It’s privately owned and has never accepted any public funds. The 200 shareholders are mostly people who own airplanes and hangars at the airport.

“This all belongs to us,” said Perry Schreffler who owns two of the 30 or so vintage airplanes based at the airport. Like many of the owners, he is a retired airline pilot--34 years with TWA--who favors the old over the new. He owns a German-designed biplane that was used to train pilots in the Czechoslovakian air force. A Nazi swastika is painted on the tail.

Schreffler bought it in Germany in 1969 and he and his family spent the next five years restoring it. “It’s fully aerobatic,” he said.

Some of the airplanes at the airport date back to the late 1920’s. One was used as an ambulance carrier during World War II. Some are worth more than $150,000.

Pictures of the vintage planes and early day pilots line the walls of the Airport Cafe, a no-frills eatery where the pilots and airport personnel hang out. It will soon be torn down and replaced by a new restaurant.

For now, the walls yield such treasures as a picture of actor Cliff Robertson flying upside down in his vintage plane, which he houses at the Santa Paula Airport.

Actor Steve McQueen, who owned a ranch in Santa Paula, also was a familiar face at the airport until his death from cancer. Although the old biplanes are capable of stunts and the airport is home to a number of stunt pilots, stunt flying is not allowed.

“We have a lot of student pilots and we don’t want them distracted,” said Dickenson, president of the airport association.

But there are few rules at the airport, and Dickenson thinks that’s just fine.

The airport has always encouraged pilots to work on their planes at their hangars, something other airports frown upon. You might see someone working on a 1932 German engine or someone else asking around for an obscure part for an old plane.

“We have more expertise in antique aircrafts than anywhere else in the world,” said Dickenson. “That expertise is being passed on to the younger ones.”

* WHERE AND WHEN: The Santa Paula Airport is located right off Highway 126 between the Palm Avenue and the 10th Street Exits at the Southeast end of the city of Santa Paula. Antique airplanes are on display on the first Sunday of every month, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.