Fan-Omatic of a Future Bypassed : In his retroactively space age home in Santa Ana, Anthony Reichardt can get lost in the ‘50s every day. Complete with aluminum Christmas tree, it’s one of four houses to be featured in a holiday tour Saturday.

Remember the movie “36 Hours,” where the Nazis go to great lengths to fool James Garner into believing World War II has been over for years, so he’ll spill the beans about D-day?

OK, now suppose you were the leaders of the Democratic Party in decline, and you’ve kidnaped Newt Gingrich in order to pry from him the details of the Republican agenda. Your only hope of doing so is to convince Newt it’s not 1994, but, rather, that he’s back in the cozy days of the Eisenhower Administration. When the knockout gas wears off, it’s crucial that his surroundings give no hint that 3 1/2 decades have passed since that atomic time.

If the locale were Anthony Reichardt’s Santa Ana home, consider the job done. The Postal Service truck driver has made his 1930’s Mediterranean-style home into a model of ‘50s style, and the sensation of time-warp is only heightened by the seasonal decor. There’s the duo-level kidney-shaped Formica coffee table, the Jetsons-looking curtain designs, the boomerang-shaped ashtrays, the Electrolux vacuum cleaner in a corner, gleaming like a Buck Rogers rocket pack. By the living room’s front window is a seven-foot, chrome-bright aluminum Christmas tree, lit by a rotating color wheel. Topping the tree is an illuminated opaque satellite, with clear and gold spires.

His table settings are all in the space-age Franciscan starburst pattern. The kitchen counters feature a pink plastic GE radio, pink flour and sugar containers and a matching foil and wax paper dispenser. There’s a milkshake machine, an electric “Can-omatic” can opener and other amenities with futuristic brand names.

“A lot of things had ‘--omatic’ in their titles then,” Reichardt noted. “Everything had to be automatic.”

Look out Reichardt’s back window, and see 10 pink lawn flamingos in frozen cavort on the lawn. Out a side window, two 1959 Cadillacs sit in the driveway, with the whimsical, fabulous and utterly useless fins that once drove Nikita Khrushchev into a rage.

Gingrich might never see Reichardt’s home, but you can. It is one of four being featured in a Tea and Holiday Home Tour to be held Saturday in his Wilshire Square neighborhood. The others, built between 1926 and 1946 in the Renaissance Revival, Mission Revival and Early Ranch styles--will each express a different style of holiday decor. The home tour, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., costs $7. The tea sittings, held in an additional two homes, will be at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and cost $18, including the home tour. Call (714) 549-1478 for information.

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Reichardt participated in a summer home tour and was told his house was a real hit. His is a strangely compelling bunch of stuff, touching off waves of nostalgia, perhaps made more strong because it is essentially a nostalgia for a future we never got to see.

The ‘50s were the jet age, the space age and the atomic age, which is a lot of ages for one decade. America’s response to the fears of all that change--which included the entirely new bother of nuclear annihilation--was to act is if that change had already settled and we were already in the future.

We subsumed the inconceivable into the ordinary. We may not have understood the sonic booms that shook our homes, but they were homes stocked with aerodynamic, jet-wing-shaped furniture. The Russians have a satellite in outer space ? No matter, we’ve got one on our Christmas tree. The atom may kill us, but in the meantime, its image looks cool on appliance logos.

Curiously, Reichardt didn’t live through the ‘50s. Being 33, he wasn’t even born until they were good and over.

“I wasn’t there for it, but I think it’s like it was with my parents, where the things they liked were things they remember as kids that their parents had. It’s like that with me. A lot of these things overflowed into the ‘60s when I was growing up,” he said.

Growing up in Watertown, Wis., and Santa Ana, “everybody had the horrendous Formica and blond furniture and stuff like that, and sofas with this ‘industructalon’ material here,” he said, stroking the textured surface of his couch.

Some of his furnishings come from his family: his TV with the picture tube hovering over the console like a robot’s head, for instance.

“My grandmother did what any woman in the ‘50s would do after getting in a car accident: She went and bought living room furniture with the settlement. The TV was one of the things she bought. It works--we just watched the Christmas parade on it the other day.

“That chair over there was called the ‘naughty chair’ when I was a kid. It swivels, and when you were bad you had to sit in it and face the wall. I don’t use it for that anymore. That’s the third reupholstering it’s had,” he said.

Most of the vintage items, though, are more recently acquired, as is Reichardt’s interest in them.

“This happened by accident really,” he said. “I had got a condo that was all brand-new and perfect and modern, so I had put all this new furniture in it--glass and chrome. I sold the place, and that furniture didn’t really fit anywhere else, so I figured I’d sell it off and start over when I bought another house. So, in a series of apartments I started off with just a TV and two beach chairs.

“Then I’d go to the swap meet with my friends, and say, ‘Oooh, look at that ugly lamp, and it’s so cheap.’ and I’d bring it home. Then I’d think, ‘I could get a cheap weird table to put it on too.’ Then pretty soon I started realizing as it all came together that it didn’t look so bad. It looked kind of neat together because everything was shaped strange. Now, it all looks like art to me, and every piece also has a story . . . of how I got it.”

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Though he only started accumulating ‘50s items five years ago, he amassed so many--rotating the best ones into his house--that his garage was overflowing. When he took some of it to sell at a swap meet, he found he was far from the only interested collector. With friend Eric Wittman, he started a business a year ago called Groovomatic; they now sell excess ‘50s items in an Orange antique mall.

He still has a lot more fun buying items than selling them. For three years he’s spent his vacation driving back to his Wisconsin hometown with a friend, usually Wittman.

“I’ve been a slave for the post office for 15 years, since I was out of high school, and it’s nice, but it’s not especially fulfilling. So this is what’s fulfilling to me. When I leave there, this is what I do.

“Each summer I take a trip on Highway 66 in my ’59 Cadillac and drive the two-lane (road) through the main streets of all the little towns and go into every little shop and every dopey diner. We refuse to go to McDonald’s or any of that stuff. We want the greasy spoons and mom-and-pop motels. It’s more exciting, fun, something to remember,” he said.

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A ‘50s Cadillac can hold a lot--stories abound of whole bands, and their instruments, touring in them--but Reichardt has found they have limits.

“That dinette set in there almost proved to much,” he said, referring to a marbled Formica masterpiece in a breakfast nook. “This trip last summer, I found that in Oklahoma. By that point the car was basically stuffed. But I couldn’t leave it there because it was so danged cheap, and I wanted it bad. We sat out front of the place we bought it and took every nut, bolt and staple off the thing to break it all down into pieces. It was like putting a puzzle together when I got home.

“Then, a couple of years back we were stuffed already and on our way home, but you still can’t help stopping at places. You’re force-feeding things in at that point. And in St. George, Utah, we made one ‘just one more stop’ at a place, and coming out of the driveway the car was dragging so bad that it tore the straps off that held the gas tank on.

“We’ll probably take a truck next time. I put 6,000 miles on the car each time, and I’m starting to feel I’m pressing my luck.”

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He has to take such trips because ‘50s items are getting tapped out locally, though he still finds pieces at swap meets, thrift shops and estate sales, the latter being the best places to look, Reichardt says.

Some things are still bargains. His aluminum tree was picked up by Wittman at a rummage sale in Garden Grove for $2.50. It was just the thing Reichardt needed.

“I always remember as a kid driving by windows that had these and being fascinated watching the colors change,” he said. The reason the trees are typically lit by a color wheel floodlight instead of traditional tree lights is that--along with looking cool, “The tree is metal, you see, so if you put a string of lights on it and any part of the tree contacts with the electricity, it’s curtains.”

His tree, by the way, is decorated with vintage Christmas 45 records. In another corner is a Christmas scene Reichardt found in Barstow, with a Santa, a clear plastic tree and a kaleidoscopic rotating plastic stained glass window. His black vinyl bar waits, appointed with festive glassware and colorful appointments, and the Phil Spector Christmas album sits ready by the stereo.

“I really like Christmas, especially the music,” Reichardt said. “Sometimes in July I’ll pull out my Connie Francis Christmas album just to listen to it. And like everyone, I think Christmas is a great time to entertain your friends, to drink and laugh. And it’s an excuse to pull out and use every Donna Reed relish tray I have.”

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Though he’s totally into having a ‘50s house--his two concessions are a microwave and CD player--that totality has a structure.

“The thing I try to do is be authentic rather than make fun of it. Some people get this stuff and overkill with it. I try to put it as if it were the way it was, not with 50,000 cocktail shakers on display,” he said.

Though his neighbors don’t share his taste in ‘50s decor, the homes and lifestyle in the neighborhood hearken to those times.

“It’s an amazing little oasis here in Santa Ana. When you tell people it’s near McFadden and Edinger they go, Uggh, but then you see how nice it is, all the homes and how they’re kept up. You see the people pushing strollers and wagons with their kids, having block parties.

“I’ve only been here since April. I hadn’t even moved in yet, and people were coming up and introducing themselves. My power was out when I was moving in, and one neighbor came over with an extension cord in his hand. . . . This sweet 80-year-old neighbor to this side is always calling and saying, ‘Oh, I was baking something; come out to your fence, and there’ll be a plate there.’ This is like Mayberry.”

It’s enough to make one want to live in an era he’s never known.

“I don’t know if it’s that I was born too late,” he said, “but I like everything from it, even driving my two old cars with all the problems they have. Everything from that time, just the way it was all made was so stylish and outlandish. Nothing was ever square and perfect; instead it was all sweeping and curving and jagged. And I like that. It was like adventurous .”