Plane Spoken : Aviation: After 38 years of doing business at O.C.’s airport, feisty Cliff Fraizer could be evicted. And, as usual, he has something to say about that.

John Wayne Airport--home of corporate jets, of new, modern facilities, of big plans for the 21st Century.

And home of Cliff Fraizer’s A&E; Inspection Service, a small, weathered, concrete-block shed on an asphalt apron that remains a lake long after the rain has stopped.

Inside it looks like a barnstormer movie set. Spread everywhere is 38 years of clutter: ancient airplane instruments, models and pictures of airplanes that long ago disappeared, a heavy, black telephone whose dial clicks when it turns.

One of the artifacts is Fraizer himself, who at age 86 is still strong, active and usually dressed in a World War II bomber jacket and leather Harley-Davidson cap. So much time has passed, it’s hard to see in him the face of the 19-year-old barnstormer whose portrait hangs on the wall.

The county-owned airport, too, was born in the barnstormer era, starting as a privately owned, dirt airstrip in 1923. But nowadays the airport’s only link to its dusty, makeshift past is Fraizer. And once again that link is on the verge of breaking.

Once again Fraizer, whose small-airplane maintenance service is the oldest continuously owned business at the airport, is daring his landlords to evict him. For five years he has refused to pay a rent increase the county says is specified in his lease. Next month his security deposit will have been drawn down so far it will no longer cover the difference, and it will then be up to airport authorities to decide what to do.

“It’s sheer cantankerousness on his part,” says Max Vossman, who has subleased space from Fraizer for 22 years and stands to wind up in the street if Fraizer is evicted. To keep his instrument service going, Vossman had paid the approximately $300 monthly disputed rent increase for five years until January, “when I got fed up.”

“Cliff digs in and wants to fight, and to hell with me or anybody around him,” Vossman says. “He was born a rebel, and the Marine Corps taught him to be bullheaded.”

Fraizer does not deny it. A self-described “motorcycle hooligan” and ninth-grade dropout, he found a home as an aviation mechanic in the Marine Corps in 1932. He made it to warrant officer before being prodded into peacetime retirement 25 years later.

“You’re supposed to be a fighter in the Marine Corps. They encourage it. They don’t encourage some pacifist. I spent 25 years under that.” He’s dug in, he says. If the county wants to evict him, “Let ‘em try; let ‘em try.”

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Fraizer says he won’t pay the rent increase because the entire lease is unfair. His biggest gripe: He’d been promised a 25-year lease renewal but only got 10 years, he insists.

“He definitely is an anomaly at John Wayne,” says one former airport official. “There has been that feeling for a long time that it would be easier if Cliff wasn’t there. There were times when we looked at that east side redevelopment [of the airport’s general aviation area], and if we didn’t have Cliff’s one sliver in there, we would put that all together and package it. But here was Cliff, always in the middle.”

To some fliers at the airport, Fraizer is a link to aviation’s romantic history. A true barnstormer in his youth, a Marine Corps aviation mechanic and dive bomber gunner, a flight instructor with a prodigious 7,000 hours of instruction, he’s the longest-tenured businessman at the airport.

In 1957, when it was called Orange County Airport, “he basically picked a parcel, moved in and started doing business,” says Christine Edwards, former manager of airport operations. “One of the first managers of the airport after the county took it over found Cliff on the airport doing business. He made Cliff sign a lease and start paying rent. After that, everything the county has done is wrong, as far as Cliff was concerned.”

Fraizer’s self-declared war has been against change at the airport. And against the county administrators who want change. And the county supervisors who hired the county administrators who want change. And anyone who wants to tell him what to do, even if it’s only to keep his gate locked. One such order from a federal aviation inspector prompted a 15-minute lecture on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

He has taken out newspaper ads to berate county officials and their decisions. He has attended county budget hearings, waving a five-dollar gold piece to demonstrate “real money,” as opposed to “deficit money.”

He has paid his airport rent and taxes in nickels, dimes and quarters.

“I’m not sure I understand Cliff,” says Edwards, the former airport administrator. “There were times when he’d be very frustrating, and we’d be very angry.

“But I really do like him. When I first met Cliff, he had a very strong sense of humor about going out and doing battle with the county. He was not abusive. Over the years, I think the sense of humor has eroded.”

“He was born in the wrong century,” says Ron Dugan, a private pilot now living in Michigan who is a friend of Fraizer’s and a former customer. “He’s the personification of the libertarian: ‘Get off my back.’ We’re in the age of the bureaucrat, and we’re used to being bullied or bought off. But right or wrong, he refuses to be, and he won’t quit. He just does not fit.”

Do airport administrators think he’s just nuts?

“Maybe I am, “ he says, “but I’ve had a good life.”

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Mementos of that lifetime are spread around him in the little airport office/workshop. Photograph after photograph of him as a Marine, of airplanes he’s flown and repaired. The Nativity set his late wife painted. Patriotic mottoes. Law books. Documents demonstrating government injustice and his written replies.

And a portrait of Fraizer as a boy in aviator’s leather cap and fleece-collared jacket. It was taken in 1928, the year he became a genuine barnstormer.

That career path got its start, Fraizer says, when he was driving a taxi in Oakland and a fare, apparently in high spirits after visiting a speak-easy and bordello, dropped a particularly large tip in Fraizer’s lap. He used it to rent a car and take his girlfriend to Oakland Airport for a ride in an airplane.

The experience so impressed him that “I decided ‘I’m gonna fly.’ I went out to a little field in San Leandro and said, ‘Hey, what do you do to learn how to fly one of these things?’ ‘Just step right up,’ the guy said. That’s where I started. I worked for them, and they gave me my first job.”

Soon he was doing real barnstorming: flying to small Northern California towns on Wednesdays, tacking notices to fence posts, flying back on Saturdays, doing a few loops and spins to attract attention, then giving rides for $5 a head.

“If you ever saw the picture ‘The Great Waldo Pepper,’ that’s what that was really all about,” Fraizer says. “I ate that stuff up.”

He joined the Marines hoping for steady meals and assignment to military aircraft but was refused pilot training because of his lack of education, he says. Nonetheless, he stuck with the Corps as an aircraft mechanic and stationed at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station when he retired. Within a few months, he had opened his flight training and aircraft maintenance service at Orange County Airport.

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In the late 1960s, Fraizer began to appear at Board of Supervisors meetings, first to complain about the injustices of his lease, then about the injustices of county government in general.

“He was pretty aggressive,” recalls former County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district included the airport. “I had a special relationship--I was also a former Marine--but he felt no budget session could go by without telling us about our lack of intelligence and financial knowledge.”

Now the airport is a major airline destination. “When the airport began to change, that challenged some of the ways he was used to. I think his character is [to challenge] change.”

Raise the topic of county government nowadays, and Fraizer’s amiability dissolves. He grits his teeth and talks about arrogance, stupidity and outrage. “He just goes ballistic,” says his friend Dugan.

He shows you the dozens of documents displayed in his office like trophies, all letters and petitions of protest to county actions and plans.

He points out the weather-blackened wood framing across from his office. The county airport administrator told him he hadn’t gotten permission to build, he says, “and I told him I didn’t need his permission.” Fraizer won that confrontation, by his estimation. He didn’t complete the building, but he didn’t tear down what he’d built.

The building was for Vossman, his tenant. Fraizer may have made his point, but Vossman is still without his promised addition. “I’m not saying the county’s blameless,” Vossman says, “but he promised us that expansion 10 years ago. He gets into a fight with the county and so he stops,” Vossman says.

Airport administrators say they are sending Fraizer notice this week that if he does not pay full rent and restore his security deposit next month, they’ll resort to eviction.

Fraizer says he has no fear of the impending deadline. “What the hell can they do? I know the Constitution, and that, by God, is what I go by. The county is continually violating my constitutional rights.”

Whatever is in store, the county should not count on the easy way out, Edwards advises.

“My impression of Cliff is that he would probably outlast all of us, just out of sheer cantankerousness.”