Star-Studded Palmdale : History: A former resident says the town long ago was a getaway or workplace for Hollywood luminaries and other celebrities.

Although the Palmdale of today is all suburban houses and shopping centers and commuters, there was a time before. Before the housing boom of the 1980s, before the word aerospace meant anything, back when residents used hand-crank phones and had no freeway, there was a different Palmdale.

In the World War II years and after, one resident of that era recalls, the remote desert town was a getaway where millionaire Howard Hughes flew airplanes and brought female companions, where Western stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans stayed while making movies, and where other Hollywood stars and prominent figures took rest or refuge.

Those tales are not part of Palmdale’s established history and are somewhat difficult to verify 50 or so years later. But 92-year-old Mary J. Courson swears that they are true. From about 1941 until she left in 1957, Courson says, she and her husband were hosts to those and other celebrities.

Courson and her husband, one of Palmdale’s leading citizens in those days, first opened a motel along Sierra Highway and then a hillside guest ranch. Both were known as El Rancho Courson. The rich and the famous, she said, stayed in the ranch’s cabins or, at times, in the couple’s house, considered the town’s finest at the time.

The motel has been gone for years, although the adjoining cafe survives as the Edelweiss German restaurant.

But the hillside house--which some want to preserve as a local landmark--remains, hidden behind a fence above Lake Palmdale, unused, little known and for sale. Hints of its former elegance are such features as a poolside cabana, ornate brick fireplaces and picture windows overlooking the valley.

“It has a view that was unbelievable. Everybody thought it was a mirage. We started to entertain just as soon as we got in there,” said Courson, who has lived in Hancock Park since leaving Palmdale. She related the stories of that era during a recent five-hour interview.

The ranch’s other guests during those years included Laurel and Hardy, and John Wayne and Jean Arthur, while both of the pairs were filming nearby, Courson said. Hughes, who often escorted Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses, brought companions that included Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and Faith Domergue, she added.

Courson’s daughter, 64-year-old Mary Courson Cowley Steelsmith, who spent her high school and college years in the 1940s working at the family’s businesses, supports many of Courson’s recollections. Steelsmith said she remembers Hughes and his companions, Rogers and Evans, and others.

For instance, Steelsmith said, Hughes used to eat a favorite breakfast of pancakes with ice cream at the family’s cafe, and had dinners of flank steak and canned peas and carrots there. Often wearing an old overcoat and tennis shoes with no socks, he looked like “a poor old derelict,” she recalled.

Apart from the celebrities, the many historical details of Palmdale in that era related by the Coursons and the history of their ranch matched closely with accounts by others and information contained in public records.

And although the lore of the ranch is little known among Antelope Valley history buffs, Courson related the same stories of the celebrities in the recent interview as she did some 20 years ago in an obscure letter she wrote as part of a collection on history in the area.

Research and interviews with others of that era establish that Hughes, who died a billionaire recluse in 1976, was in the Antelope Valley during the World War II era to flight-test airplanes in Palmdale and at what is now Edwards Air Force Base.

Domenic Massari, a 99-year-old former city councilman; former hotel employee Berta Sheffield, and Lockheed Skunk Works founder Clarence (Kelly) Johnson in his autobiography recalled Hughes in the Antelope Valley area.

Wayne, who died in 1979, and Rogers and Evans, who now live in Apple Valley, shot scenes for Westerns in and around Antelope Valley in those years, their relatives said. But Wayne’s son Michael said he does not remember his father mentioning El Rancho Courson. And Rogers’ son Roy Jr. said his father, decades later, doesn’t remember it either.

But neither ruled out the possibility that their parents stayed at the Palmdale complex. Rogers lived in nearby Lake Hughes on property called the Sky Haven ranch during the mid-1940s, his son said.

Ross Amspoker, who established Palmdale’s first law practice in 1950, remembers the Coursons talking of Hughes. And Amspoker said Courson’s husband once took him to lunch with Rogers when the actor was filming a movie. “I chatted with him. It was fun,” Amspoker recalled.

If anyone in Palmdale played host to celebrities in those days, it probably was the Coursons.

Melville J. Courson, a real estate agent from Long Beach, and his wife moved to Palmdale in 1941 to build a motel at the suggestion of actor Don Ameche’s father, who had a local business at the time.

Courson, with $3,000 he borrowed, opened the dozen-room motel in late 1941 about the time of the United States’ entry into World War II was bringing many servicemen to work at airfields in Palmdale and Edwards, then known as Muroc. The couple’s business boomed. They rented out rooms for a then-hefty $3 a night, Courson said.

About a year later, the couple added a cafe and eventually bought a house that had been recently built, according to Courson, by Beatrice Veryl Pantages, then recently divorced from Rodney Pantages, son of the founder of the Pantages theater chain.

Records show that the 2,450-square-foot house--with three bedrooms, three baths and a vine-covered veranda--was built in 1941 and valued at nearly $8,000, then a costly amount. The Coursons moved into the house in 1942 or 1943 and bought it in 1944 from Charles Taylor, who Courson said had become Beatrice Veryl Pantages’ new mate.

The Coursons’ association with Hughes, Courson said, dates to a call they got from the Muroc base in the early 1940s inquiring whether they had a motel room for Hughes. Because the motel was booked, Courson and her daughter said, Hughes ended up sleeping on a cot in its office.

By late 1943, according to building records, Mel Courson was already building the first of about 17 bungalow and cabin units that would surround the ranch. And in early 1945, the records show, he built an add-on to the house’s garage that Courson said was sought by Hughes as a regular place to stay.

Hughes may have been testing the second of his A-11 or FX-11 reconnaissance planes at Muroc after crashing the first in Beverly Hills in 1946, said Edwards’ chief historian, Jim Young. And Hughes also was involved in test-flying Lockheed’s then state-of-the-art Constellation transport at a Palmdale airstrip.

In his autobiography, Johnson recalled a harrowing Constellation flight with Hughes from Lockheed’s Burbank base to Palmdale, presumably in late 1945 or early 1946. It was just before Hughes’ famous February, 1946, cross-country flight to inaugurate new TWA passenger service with the plane.

After Hughes made about six of what Johnson called “atrocious” takeoffs and landings at Palmdale with the Constellation, an angry Johnson ordered the plane back to Burbank. But, he wrote, Hughes returned to Palmdale one weekend to make 50 or 60 circuits around the field and “was flying right up to takeoff time for the cross-country flight.”

Other accounts paint a compatible portrait of the Coursons in those days. In the letters of Palmdale history collected in the early 1970s, Clyde and Lorna Wallace said Mel Courson, who died of cancer in December, 1952, “was the best booster for Palmdale and the valley that the valley ever had.”

The Wallaces remembered: “Mary opened their lovely home on many, many occasions to entertain officials from the aircraft industry, the federal, state and county governments, Edwards Air Force Base personnel, all for the interests of Palmdale, and usually half the town was there.”

In her letter, Mary Courson said the family cafe “had people driving out all the way from Los Angeles to dine because we raised our own beef, chickens, pigs, etc., and had real butter, which was practically unheard of during those war years.” Plus, Palmdale then had few other accommodations for visitors.

The town, with only 500 to 1,000 people to start the 1940s, was little more than a few businesses along Sierra Highway near Palmdale Boulevard--a couple of inns, a market, a drugstore, a post office and several other concerns. And surrounding it all were miles of alfalfa fields and farms.

In the hills above the lake, though, the Coursons had a ranch with what Courson said was the first swimming pool in the Antelope Valley. The earth excavated for the pool had been used to make the house’s adobe bricks. The ranch had stables, and the home’s interior was laced with pine panels.

The Coursons sold the motel after World War II but kept the ranch. During those years, Mel Courson’s real estate business prospered and his office still stands across from City Hall along the railroad tracks. After his death, the County Board of Supervisors named Palmdale’s Courson Park for him.

Mary Courson kept El Rancho Courson for five more years until selling in 1957. At the family’s peak, they owned about a square-mile area. Subsequent owners ran the guest ranch as recently as the 1960s. But a buyer in the mid-’60s tore down some of the units.

San Fernando Valley businesswoman Sylvia Siebert, the present owner, and her late husband, Robert Lowry, bought the house in 1978, but stayed there only periodically in past years, Lancaster realtor Richard Hendrickson said. The present 2.5-acre property, now just outside the city of Palmdale, has an asking price of $350,000.

It was Hendrickson, a former Antelope Valley College instructor, who helped flesh out the ranch’s history by tracking down Mary Courson after hearing a mangled version of the property’s past from Siebert. Hendrickson, Courson and her daughter now say the house ought to be preserved as a local landmark.

Courson did not know that the property was for sale and had not been there for 30 years until a recent visit with Hendrickson, Steelsmith and her daughter.

“That was the first really nice house ever built in this town. It would be nice for Palmdale to have such a piece of history,” Steelsmith said.

Famous Former Residents of the Antelope Valley

John Wayne: Then known as Marion Morrison, he attended Lancaster Grammar School for a year or two starting at age 7 in 1914 after his family moved from Iowa to homestead a farm. Wayne’s son Michael says his father acquired the nickname “Little Duke” because of an Airedale dog named Duke that used to follow him. After the family’s impoverished farming venture failed, partly because jack rabbits ate their crops, the family moved to Glendale, where Wayne graduated from Glendale High School and went on to USC. Wayne, who died in 1979, often spoke of Lancaster, learned to shoot there and for years as an adult owned land in the area, a son said.

Judy Garland: Then known as Frances Gumm, she grew up in Lancaster after her family moved from Minnesota in the spring of 1927 when she was nearly 5 and stayed until about 1934. Gumm attended Lancaster Grammar School and often sang with her two sisters at the Valley Theater, then the town’s only movie house, run by her parents, Frank and Ethel. The performances paved the way for her entry into the Los Angeles entertainment business and ultimate contract with MGM in 1935, according to the 1975 book “Young Judy.” Before her 1969 death, Garland called her Lancaster years “miserable” and residents “barren and harsh,” but neighbors said she had a happy childhood.

Aldous Huxley: The author and his wife, Maria, spent the World War II years in the tiny community of Llano east of Palmdale. A relative recalled in a 1975 newspaper article how Huxley enjoyed the desert but was plagued by summer allergies that forced his returns to Los Angeles. During Christmas, 1944, Huxley wrote a children’s story for his niece titled “The Crows of Pearblossom,” referring to a nearby community. The story, published in 1967 four years after Huxley’s death, also mentions Palmdale and Littlerock. He once won a prize at the Antelope Valley Fair for a drawing, but was noted only as “Mr. Huxley--brother-in-law of Rose de Haulleville,” she recalled.

Pancho Barnes: The legendary flier founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club, a famous and ribald hangout for test pilots that hit its prime in the late 1940s and early 1950s near what is now Edwards Air Force Base. Barnes earlier was the film industry’s first woman stunt pilot, working in pictures such as Howard Hughes’ 1930 World War I spectacle “Hell’s Angels.” Born Florence L. Lowe in San Marino, she moved to the Antelope Valley in the 1930s, starting with 80 acres, but had 380 acres by 1947. She had a bitter legal battle with the Air Force in the mid-1950s over its acquisition of part of her property. She died in Boron in 1975.

Frank Zappa: Zappa attended Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster during the late 1950s while his father worked at Edwards Air Force Base. The 1958 yearbook shows Zappa in the senior orchestra. In a somewhat caustic 1990 book, Zappa says he was a drummer kicked off the marching band for smoking in uniform. Zappa also recalled forming a multiethnic high school band called the Black-Outs that raised eyes around town. He said he was jailed overnight once for vagrancy in what he called an attempt to stop the band from performing. For recreation, Zappa recalled listening to records and going to Denny’s.

Miscellany: Domenic Massari, 99, one of Palmdale’s original City Council members, recalls actors Noah and Wallace Beery running a fish farm and restaurant east of town in the 1930s. Bob Bland of Lancaster, whose parents ran the Palmdale Inn for about 10 years starting in 1927, recalls that James Stewart and Shirley Temple were guests. He and many others recall Don Ameche’s father later running the place. Isabel Michiels recalls the Mission Bell Ranch west of Lancaster as a popular Hollywood hangout in the 1930s and ‘40s. And Edwards historian Jim Young notes that part of the Red Sea scenes of the original “The Ten Commandments” were filmed on the base’s lake beds.