ROOMS WITH A PREP VIEW : Apartment-Dwellers in Anaheim Watch Games From Their Windows

It’s 6:30 on a Thursday night, and Western High School’s Handel Stadium is slowly coming alive. Cheerleaders giggle and chatter. A marching band honks, booms and toots. Coaches bark last-minute instructions. The smell of hot, buttered popcorn wafts through the air.

Although the game won’t start for another hour, high school football fan Jim Hughes is already hyped, scouting the action from his favorite vantage point:

His bedroom window.

Hughes, a 1984 graduate of Western High, lives with his wife in a small, one-bedroom unit of Westchester Square Apartments, a 424-unit complex bordered on one side by Handel Stadium’s football field.

From their bedroom, parallel to the west end zone, Hughes could almost fall out of his window and find himself in a goal-line stand.

For some, living a pompon’s throw away from a high school football stadium equals a headache of Super Bowl proportions. The crowds, the lights, the loud bursts from the band. . . . At Handel Stadium, home field to not one but four high school teams, game night comes two, sometimes even three nights a week.

Westchester Square manager Jollene Dillanwater says prospective tenants are not forewarned about the possible noise from the stadium. She said most just make do.

“Actually, if you can’t watch the game (from your window), you go to the game, because you can’t sleep,” she said.

Others think it’s terrific. Heck, for $525 a month, you’re not only getting a place to live, you’re getting a stadium luxury box.

“When we first decided to get married, I said, OK, but only if we get an apartment up here so I can watch the games,” said Hughes, a 25-year-old driver for an Anaheim courier service.

To this, Dolores Hughes rolls her eyes.

“Jim, we rented the apartment, not the football field,” she said dryly.

Hughes doesn’t hear her.

“It’s really neat,” he said excitedly. “You can see everything. You can hear everything. When they score a touchdown, it’s so great, all the cheerleaders run down jumping for joy, the band plays louder, people are screaming, the announcers yelling, everyone’s going nuts . . . I mean, it’s really intense .”

Hughes, who on game nights stocks the apartment with pizza and diet soda and invites over friends, points to his white cat, Snowball, sitting on a custom-made blue furry window perch designed so she, too, can watch the action below.

“See, even Snowball gets into it,” Hughes said.

There was a time, in fact, when even Western football Coach Jim Howell enjoyed the view. After he and his wife married in 1965, they rented a first-floor apartment in the complex and watched the games over their fence. Howell, then a junior high football coach, had yet to coach a high school game.

Of course, not everyone at Westchester Square is so captivated by the football games. For instance . . .

In Apartment 21, an upstairs corner unit, John and Susan Harris can see and hear the goings-on, but they’d rather not. John, a 32-year-old production manager for a Fullerton electronics firm, is a jazz saxophonist who played in the marching band while at El Rancho High in the mid-1970s.

“As a musician, hearing the bands makes me reminisce,” John said. “But it also makes me remember, as a purist musician, how much I hated marching band. Fight songs are so boring to me.”

True, the theme song from “Bonanza” can wear on you after a while.

In Apartment 18, Terry Hansen, a 36-year-old mechanic, has one of the better views of the field, but it’s hard for him to watch because he’s on crutches.

Hansen broke his left leg a few weeks ago playing croquet. Now, while the bands play on, Hansen plays Nintendo.

Apartment 15 is the home of Laura Espinoza, mother of Anthony Espinoza, 2 1/2. Anthony loves football, his mother doesn’t. Still, she supplies him with a large spoon and a frying pan so he can play along with the Western band.

Anthony likes the football even better.

“He’s hung out that window to watch them play ever since he was 1 1/2 years old,” Laura Espinoza said. “He’d rather watch that football than cartoons.”

Said Anthony: “Football! Football! . . . Ka-poom! Ka-poooom!”

Apartment 14 is the home of South Korean natives Tea and Mija Yun.

“My husband likes to watch,” Mija said. “I’ll watch, but only if I’m bored.”

Downstairs, in Apartment 3, Judy Fox and her 16-year-old daughter, Anitra, live in the shadow of the bleachers where you can hear teen-agers chat all sorts of chit-chat. The Foxes don’t mind.

“I love it,” Judy said. “The only thing I don’t like is when they clean the stands at 11:30 at night and make a bunch of noise. That drives me nuts.”

The close proximity of their apartment is a big help, though. Anitra is a member of Western’s color guard, and Judy is the team mom.

“Whenever someone’s uniform rips or a button pops off, all we have to do is rush over and have my mom sew it,” Anitra said.

Next door, Vera Judge, one of many senior citizens in the complex, said the noise doesn’t bother her too much as long as she keeps herself busy. During a Magnolia-Western game last Thursday, she and two friends played pinochle.

In the adjacent building, 70-year-old Roger Anderson has a good view of the field from Apartment 7, but he hasn’t been watching the football games lately.

Why?

“Because Western hasn’t been doing a diddly-damn,” he said.