In 1917, Hollywood was beginning to mushroom,...

In 1917, Hollywood was beginning to mushroom, the citrus industry was booming and military planners were rediscovering balloons as World War I raged in Europe.

It was a time when the call to arms was still heard as a summons to great adventure. By June of that year, more than 42,000 of Los Angeles County’s 1 million residents had registered to serve in the armed forces.

The next year, Los Angeles County bought 185 acres of the vast rancho once owned by Elias Jackson (Lucky) Baldwin, the wealthy landowner who founded Arcadia.

That land was deeded to the federal government, which turned it into Ross Field, an observation balloon training school for Army artillery. The country’s first balloon school had opened a year earlier in Omaha but strong winds and a severe winter made the War Department look for a milder climate.

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Over the next two years, 3,500 members of the Army Balloon Corps would train at Ross Field, named for Cleo J. Ross, the first balloonist killed in action during World War I. The corps trained spotters, who directed artillery fire from their gondolas as the balloons ascended above enemy lines. It was hazardous duty. German pilots delighted in shooting the balloons from the sky, a tactic for which some Allied pilots showed a similar enthusiasm.

Architect Myron Hunt designed the balloon school, with grounds that included a swimming pool fashioned from an old reservoir, a hydrogen manufacturing plant, a guard house, a 25-bed hospital, a photo laboratory, a machine shop, a garage, supply houses, barracks and classrooms. The balloon school even had its own marching band.

A ground crew of up to 60 men supported each balloon, controlling it by a winch and cable anchored to heavy military vehicles.

Residents of Arcadia’s quiet neighborhoods craned their necks as balloons with four-foot-high wicker gondolas--carrying two officers, a sighter and a radio man--took flight daily and directed planes dropping smoke bombs over the San Gabriel Valley in simulated warfare.

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It was only fitting that Baldwin’s land would become a site where troops prepared for battle. Baldwin had survived a scrape or two of his own. When Baldwin was confronted by a relative of a woman whom he had scorned in one of his many affairs, he escaped a bullet fired from three feet away with only a grazed scalp and a lost patch of hair.

He was luckier with money. He once misplaced the key to his safe deposit box, preventing his broker from selling stocks that later jumped nine times in value to $5 million.

Baldwin was 70 when he moved from San Francisco to Southern California, where he rebuilt his fortune. He acquired tens of thousands of acres of land and cut a flashy figure about town, wearing a black frock coat and Stetson hat and carrying a pearl-handle pistol.

The balloon school was built on Baldwin’s private racetrack, which had sat idle since 1909, the year Baldwin died and the state banned horse racing.

He left a reputation as a ruthless, lecherous, blasphemous scoundrel, whose funeral “was the only funeral of a famous man where not a sob was heard or a tear seen,” one newspaper reported.

His vast land holdings in the San Gabriel Valley included what are now the cities of Sierra Madre, Monrovia and Arcadia. Baldwin Hills, Baldwin Park and Baldwin Street were all named after the swashbuckling millionaire.

After World War I ended in 1918, the Army began to gradually vacate the facilities at Ross Field. It had a brief breath of new life four years later when hundreds of people gathered at the air field, waiting for the landing of the Army’s C-2 blimp as it completed a transcontinental flight from Langley Field, Va. Military and private planes met the blimp in Riverside and escorted it to the applauding crowd in Arcadia.

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But the neglected Balloon Corps training site fell victim to the Depression, becoming an eyesore at the same time that Arcadia needed land for parks. In 1935 Congress deeded the land--bounded by Santa Anita Avenue on the east, Campus Drive on the south and Huntington Drive (once known as Falling Leaf Avenue) on the west and north--back to the county with the provision that it be used for recreation. In 1936 the Works Progress Administration began construction on Arcadia Park and a golf course.

When Arcadia Park opened in 1938, two bronze plaques were placed at the base of a flagpole just east of the park’s bowling greens. One pays tribute to the WPA workers and the other, which has since disappeared, praised the airmen who trained for battle in balloons at Ross Field.