Pendleton’s Golden Year : Marine Base’s 50th Anniversary Highlights Its Powerful Presence

A quarter of a century has passed, but somebody still won’t let Colleen Richardson O’Harra forget the raw contempt she flaunted in Oceanside. In this, of all places.

O’Harra was a defiant anti-Vietnam War activist who marched through the streets of this heartland of the U.S. Marine Corps. Now she is running for the City Council, and recently two of her campaign signs were branded with the angry, black spray-painted message: “Remember Vietnam.”

“It saddens me that it is still an open wound with so many people,” O’Harra said.

But it doesn’t surprise others, like Paul Graham.

“People have got long memories,” snapped Graham, the retired commanding general of neighboring Camp Pendleton. “Marines don’t forget, and they don’t forgive.”

It is like that in Oceanside, where the Marine Corps’ roots go deep and patriotic emotions burn hot.

Camp Pendleton, the vast military base that virtually defined Oceanside, turned 50 years old Saturday, and a thinning line of old Marines commemorated the glory and terrible sacrifice that lengthened the legend of the corps at such hellholes as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima during World War II.

During the decades since 1942, the Marines have done far more than make military history abroad. They also have seized north San Diego County, producing political leaders, influencing crime and the economy, and giving the region a measure of ethnic diversity.

For example, Oceanside has the largest population of Samoans outside the islands, people who first came here in the early days of Camp Pendleton. The “Marine Corps Hymn” is sung at many Samoan weddings.

Collectively, the Marines have hardened into a granite feature on the local political, social and economic landscape.

“Almost everybody in town came here because of the military,” said Oceanside Deputy Mayor Melba Bishop.

She is just one example, having married a career Marine. Two of her City Council peers are former Marines. The mayor of nearby Carlsbad was a Marine. The mayor of Vista settled here because she married a 26-year Marine. The city manager of San Marcos is a Marine reserve major. Graham, the base commander from 1974-76, was elected mayor of Oceanside after he closeted his khakis.

When it comes to local commissioners, board members, teachers, policemen and other professionals, the list of former Marines who have become the mainstream of the communities is seemingly endless.

After 50 years, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Marines have landed, and they are here to stay even as the Corps is reduced from its current 196,000 to 159,000 by 1997 as part of an overall military cutback. Camp Pendleton’s contingent of 37,000 Marines is predicted to hold fairly firm.

If anything, as other bases close and units are consolidated at Camp Pendleton, this 196-square-mile expanse--the largest undeveloped stretch of coastline in Southern California--will remain a pillar of the nation’s military structure.

“Camp Pendleton is not going away,” said Col. Nick Hoskot Jr., assistant chief of staff for operations and training.

It has been a long, sentimental and sometimes tortured relationship between the Marines and neighboring civilians since Sept. 25, 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated part of an early Spanish land grant for a massive training base for the war effort.

Named for Maj. Gen. Joseph H. Pendleton, a decorated hero, the base became the world’s largest amphibious training facility. Old veterans relish the memory of then-Col. Lemuel Sheppard, the future commandant, marching the base’s first Marines up from Camp Elliott in San Diego.

The 55-mile march, which was retraced by some of the original participants last week, took four dusty days, and Sheppard, a walking stick in hand, arrived with his battle-dressed 9th Marines as the drowsy hamlet of Oceanside waited, somewhat warily.

Four thousand townsfolk were told to expect 25,000 Marines, and that, once they came, community life would never be the same. Suddenly, troops on liberty swarmed into the little downtown. Wives and girlfriends also flooded into Oceanside, yearning to spend the precious, and perhaps final, time with their men who were headed to a frightening worldwide war.

John Steiger, then a young bank teller, remembers how friendships were quickly sealed as the war seemed to speed up time.

“I was best man at a lot of weddings,” said Steiger, who has kept social relations with the Camp Pendleton brass nearly his entire life. “Sometimes they just borrowed me for a witness.”

Sure, the boys got a little rough once in a while, but Steiger recalls that people generally took good care of the young warriors.

“The town treated the Marines like they were our boys. The police, if a kid had a snootful, took the boy to the gate and gave him a little talk,” he said.

It was a nation and a community unified in a cause, and Bill Bell, a crusty retired sergeant major who also served on the City Council, still sees in his mind’s eye those slap-’em-on-the-back days when “you would walk into a bar and everybody would buy you a drink.”

Gloria McClellan, however, remembers those days differently. The Vista mayor was a teen-ager when she married her career Marine husband, “Mac,” back in 1943.

She moved out from Salt Lake City to be with him, but found a chilly reception at rental housing in Oceanside.

“In those days, signs were up saying ‘No Marines, No Children, No Animals,’ ” she said. She and Mac found for their home a 16-foot trailer with watery paint that never dried. Everything was stress and struggle, and McClellan believes she lost her second child during pregnancy because of the hardships.

“There wasn’t a real friendly feeling,” she said. But she tries to understand the pressures on the community. “It was a little town suddenly inundated by people from all over the United States.”

Still, a bond formed between the Marines and the city that has survived and flourished.

In 1948, the then-base commander, tough-talking Gen. Graves Erskine, virtually went to war with the Oceanside school district in a nasty public dispute over providing education to military children. At one point, Erskine threatened to put the whole town off-limits to Marines, and frantic downtown merchants pulled political strings to get the controversy settled.

Over the years, other chronic frictions developed as some merchants hawked grossly overpriced Bibles, jewelry and other gaudy merchandise to gullible young Marines, many of them away from home for the first time.

Eventually, the city banned sidewalk peddling, company sergeants gave their troops stern lectures about the wicked ways of the city, and the local Chamber of Commerce stepped in to clean house and erase the ill-will felt by the downtown’s biggest customers.

The chamber “has made an effort to clean up the merchants. A lot of shabby clip joints have left Oceanside,” said Lynn Gardener, chairman of the chamber’s military affairs committee.

“There has been a tremendous improvement over the last 10 years,” he said. “If we find out there is a merchant in town putting the shaft (to Marines), we go down and talk to them.”

By far the darkest days were during the Vietnam War, when a wild segment of Marines took the downtown by storm. There were murders, rapes, beatings, drugs, drinking, and more of the ever-present prostitution.

It was like a wide open, frontier honky-tonk town with every conceivable kind of bar.

“You had cowboy bars, black bars, Oriental bars, gay bars,” said Lt. Bill Donnelly, who joined the Oceanside police when he left the Marine Corps after fighting in Vietnam.

Many Marines were different then, before the Corps was composed of all volunteers with at least a high school education. Then, many Marines were drafted, or joined out of dire necessity.

“It was common for judges to make you a deal,” Donnelly said. “ ‘I can put you in prison for three years, or you can join the Marines for four.’ ”

As the war divided the nation, some Marines found a way out of combat: getting in trouble stateside. “You had people smart enough to know if they were placed on legal holds, the Marine Corps had to keep them here and not send them to Vietnam,” Donnelly said.

On July 4, 1973, a riot involving 1,200 people--mostly Marines fighting Marines--broke out downtown. A strike force of military police was summoned from Camp Pendleton to help beleaguered local police. The town has never forgotten.

It never got that bad again, and as the war ended, the downtown calmed in the mid ‘70s. Still, some Marines languished in the local drug scene after they were mustered out. Oceanside’s reputation as a barroom brawl capital for Marines seemed unshakable.

In 1979, nearly 50% of those arrested for crimes in Oceanside were military people, a rate that was still a grim 30% only a decade ago. Today, that figure has plunged to between 3% and 4%, and local police say Marines are usually the victims rather than the agents of crime.

However, if one crime problem is eternal in Oceanside, it is the 25 to 35 prostitutes who typically work downtown on weekend nights.

Donnelly said 7 out of 10 hookers are male transvestites, but young Marine customers are usually so inebriated they cannot tell their partner isn’t quite anatomically correct.

A year ago, police began a ride-along program, taking Marine officers out on patrols to see for themselves where their men go and what they do on weekend nights.

To the terror of young Marines, sometimes their colonels and first sergeants emerge from police cars to correct errant deeds in no uncertain terms, Donnelly said.

But a certain number of problems are expectable. As Oceanside Mayor Larry Bagley pointed out about Camp Pendleton: “I look at it as a neighbor with 20,000 teen-agers.”

While community leaders are satisfied the crime situation is under control, over the decades Camp Pendleton has been transformed into an institution affecting the politics, economics and racial balance of a broad area.

Retired general Graham remembers earlier times when the base “was very much an independent part of the social structure. . . . It really was a world apart.”

The majority of Marines were single, had no car, and lived on base while an enclave of married Marines lived in Oceanside, sometimes occupying almost entire neighborhoods. Today, more than half the Marines are married, and better military pay allows even privates and lance corporals to buy a car.

Greater mobility and a demand for family housing in numerous communities are the result.

“You have got the young Marine off the North County Transit bus and into his car. He could go anywhere he wanted to go,” Bishop said.

Base housing officials say active-duty Marines who once converged in Oceanside are spread throughout the area. Eighteen thousand married Marines live off base and 5,200 married Marines remain on base.

When Bagley came to Oceanside in 1959, it was truly dominated by Marines. The city population then was 22,000, while the base population was 35,000, he said. (During the Vietnam War, the Camp Pendleton population varied, but at one point reached 57,000.)

Now, with 133,000 people, Oceanside is far bigger than its military neighbor, and probably no longer deserves to be painted as a garrison town. In fact, when 21,000 Marines were deployed during the Gulf War, it was Carlsbad, not Oceanside, that suffered the greater economic loss.

Illustrating the broad economic impact of the Marines--whose yearly payroll is $420 million --even Vista was hurt by the deployment as the normal 4% apartment vacancy rate topped 14%.

The Marines also bring racial diversity to the area, especially blacks and Samoans, who number 10,129 and 1,218, respectively, in Oceanside alone, according to the latest census. The percentage of blacks in Oceanside is more than double that of North County as a whole.

Among the minorities Camp Pendleton has brought is Reginald Owens, who saw the world, including several tours of Vietnam, and retired to Oceanside as a sergeant major in 1986 after 30 years in uniform.

“I felt at home here,” said Owens, who as a civilian completed his college education, became the veterans program coordinator at MiraCosta College, and has joined the colony of former Marines who are active in the community.

Owens is past president of the local NAACP chapter, managed an unsuccessful campaign for a black City Council candidate, and serves on the city’s Housing Commission. He belongs to a socially active population of retired Marines, people who are involved with school, church, and service organizations and other community activities.

The politics of retired Marines are generally conservative, centering on patriotism and the traditional family. Although the Marines tend not to vote as a bloc on a specific issue, they certainly can make the difference when a former serviceman seeks public office.

When Graham retired and won the mayoral election in Oceanside, he got a lot of help.

“I think what did it was the Marines in the community going out and talking about one of their own,” Graham said.

The community and the base have had their political scrapes.

Oceanside tried in 1983 to annex the base but failed to overcome clenched-jaw Marine opposition. Recalls Bishop: “I knew they would fight down to the last PFC.”

Again in 1986, when communities approached the military about locating a landfill site on base, the Marines wouldn’t yield ground.

The latest steward of Camp Pendleton is Brig. Gen. Don Lynch, who, besides being a military man, is essentially the city manager responsible for 500 miles of road, 10 churches, 14 mess halls, nine sewer plants, restaurants, recreational facilities, a fire department--almost anything a regular city has. It costs $100 million a year to run the base--almost twice as much as Oceanside, the largest city in North County.

To Lynch, the success of his command goes beyond keeping a proper atmosphere for Marines to train and live. It involves the complicated task of observing all the environmental laws affecting the base, which has more than 700 species of plants and animals, 10 of them endangered.

And he can count on it that San Diego County will continue to appreciate Camp Pendleton, even if only for one reason.

As Carlsbad Mayor Bud Lewis put it: “It is a buffer zone between (here) and Orange County.”