Fond Memories of an Outdated Airport : Air travel: Not all recollections of John Wayne Airport are unsavory. Some remember a facility that was small, but friendly.

By most descriptions, it hardly seems like an airport a traveler would love.

Lines from the airline ticket counters snake into corridors of cracked, speckled tile. Another line forms outside the only women’s restroom downstairs. For the weary, there are few seats nearby. There are none at the snack bar, where the entire breakfast menu consists of doughnuts, coffee and orange juice.

Once past the security checkpoint, passengers walk across a spotted, gray carpet to sit in tattered plastic chairs. They look out on a panorama of the airfield--hulking airliners awaiting baggage, small planes taking off and landing, passengers trudging across the tarmac. The high-pitched whine of aircraft engines pours into the terminal and mixes with the sounds of flight announcements and babies’ cries.

Almost everyone who has been through the John Wayne Airport terminal in recent years will admit that the 23-year-old facility is cramped, noisy and outdated--a far cry from the gleaming new terminal, 12 times bigger, that will open Sunday morning as part of the $310-million airport expansion. After all, the old terminal originally was designed to handle 400,000 passengers a year. In reality, 4.5 million a year squeeze through its tiny portals.

But as the last hours of the old terminal draw to a close, some people say they would not trade it for any other airport in the world.

“I love flying in here,” said Tim Hamilton, 41, a manager of commercial real estate based in Minneapolis, as he stood at the snack bar and stuffed a hot dog in his mouth.

“It’s so convenient,” Hamilton said. “You fly in, pick up your bags, walk a few feet across the street and get your rental car. Where else in the country can you do that?”

It’s an airport small and friendly enough that jets have been known to wait while a late passenger has run to catch a flight.

Paul Sjolin, a manufacturing administrator for Coca-Cola in Houston, recalled this week that he once “got tied up in the bar” on the terminal’s second floor as he waited for his flight to Las Vegas. Looking out at the airfield and checking his watch, he suddenly realized that his plane had already boarded, the door was closed and it was ready to leave.

“I literally ran to the plane. They pushed the ramp up to the plane and opened up the door again, just for me,” said Sjolin, 41. “There were 100-plus-some angry people, all eager to get to Las Vegas and start gambling, who were looking at me when I got on. But a lot of other airports wouldn’t have done that. They’d have said, ‘Sorry, the doors are shut and we’re gone.’ ”

When Becky Anslynn of Dana Point got off her flight from Colorado this week, she and other passengers had to stand around while another jet pulled out onto the runway. But she did not mind in the least.

“I thought it was just fine. Everything can’t be slick,” said Anslynn, 44, who will move her family to Aspen next month to escape the rapid growth of Orange County. “Everyone in their fancy clothes, holding their briefcases, had to wait for that plane to move. So what? Sometimes you have to sit back and wait. I realize the new terminal is necessary, and I’m sure it will be beautiful. But I like the older ways.”

Grace Spadoni, who has worked at the airport’s cubbyhole of a gift shop for five years, also will miss the old terminal.

“After five years, you grow attached,” she said, selling someone a pack of gum. “That place”--she nodded in the direction of the new terminal--”will be so big and impersonal. Right here, everybody and everything is within walking distance. It feels like home.”

Still, even for those who say they love the old terminal, the transition has tested their affection.

About half of the public telephone booths at the old terminal no longer have phones in them, and many of the ones that remain have “out of service” stickers plastered over the coin slots. The once-convenient public parking across the street from the terminal was eliminated earlier this year and the space was handed over to car rental companies. Since then the public has had to use a parking garage, a quarter mile away, that is part of the airport expansion.

What’s more, it has been confusing to drive to the old terminal. Fluorescent orange traffic cones and construction dust line the airport entrance, and all the new signs directing traffic point the way to the new terminal.

And not everyone is sorry to see the old terminal close.

“This is the junkiest airport I go to, and it’s my home base,” said James G. McWalters, a managing director of PM Realty Advisors, based in Newport Beach. On the shuttle bus from the old terminal to the new parking garage, he was asked if he had any nostalgia for the old facility.

“Zero,” he replied.

“Ditto,” added his colleague, Pete Hammer.

“We catch a lot of planes, and the airport in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was better than this,” McWalters said.

Both are looking forward to the new $63-million terminal’s extra space, streamlined check-ins for frequent fliers who are members of airline clubs, and especially the addition of “jetways”--the covered passageways that allow passengers to get on and off the planes without trekking across the asphalt.

Hammer said he will not miss the quaint walk across the airfield.

“In bad weather, it’s crazy, and an umbrella doesn’t cut it,” Hammer said.

Mechanical engineer Dawn Gregg of Santa Ana likewise has no fond memories.

“It’s disorganized, cluttered, crowded and unattractive,” she said as she waited for her flight to Tampa, Fla. The new terminal “will be nice. It will give a more professional image to Orange County.”

She realized that her return flight Sunday will deliver her to the new terminal. “That’s great. So I get to say goodby to the old now and say hello to the new.”

Bryan McClung of Austin, Tex., 25, a J.C. Penney summer intern, was not displeased with the old terminal when he arrived at John Wayne Airport this week, only surprised.

He had boarded his flight at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, a Texas-size, modern terminal. Landing in Orange County, he stepped off the plane onto the old-fashioned staircase pushed up next to the aircraft and walked to the tiny terminal.

“It was like stepping into one of those movies you see from the 1940s or ‘50s,” he said. “It was kind of a shock.”