ANAHEIM’S MAKEOVER BEGINS : Growth Just the Ticket for Center Veteran

Oh, Larry Robinson will laugh--but not with his usual gusto--if you call the disc-shaped Anaheim Convention Center a pregnant oyster or a flying saucer, the way some jokesters do.

You want real laughter? Ask the 68-year-old box office manager about the time Elvis played there. (“There were sleeping bags out to Katella!”) Or the time Robinson talked comedian Red Skelton into the box office to sell tickets to his own show. (Skelton wore the center’s orange ticket-seller’s vest onstage.)

You see, Robinson loves the place he has watched grow from five ticket windows to 14, from one exhibit hall to five, from 100,000 to 985,000 square feet.

Tuesday’s announcement of the biggest changes in the center’s history prompted a little crowing on Robinson’s part. Plans call for a $150-million expansion of the Convention Center, which would complement a second Disney theme park to be built across the street.

“All the big shows won’t go to McCormick Place in Chicago,” said Robinson, a gleeful man who wore a tie decorated with golden retrievers. “All of them won’t go to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. . . . [Now] we’re as major a player as they are.”

The Convention Center started out as a place for the city of Anaheim’s talent show and retirement parties. It opened in July 1967 with a flock of doves, a skydiver and ticket takers in perky candy-striped uniforms.

Robinson, one of 750 employees, joined the center in 1969 from Anaheim Stadium. He was a box office junkie, hooked on being part of the scene (he can’t tell you how many times friends have asked him for tickets). He got started in the early ‘40s, selling tickets to games at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles because his eyes weren’t good enough to play baseball.

He was in heaven at the Convention Center.

In the early days, people kept their concert tickets in scrapbooks. The old tickets looked like mini-concert posters, nothing like the faceless tickets that roll off computers now. Robinson saved dozens of the old tickets, some of which he designed himself.

In the ‘70s, all the big names came to the convention center: Chicago, Steve Martin, Jethro Tull, Aerosmith, the Beach Boys.

And Elvis.

The 1973 concert was a quid pro quo for circus tickets.

Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, who lived in the area, had cajoled front-row tickets from the Convention Center for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Parker told the general manager: Get me circus tickets and I’ll get you Elvis. And he did.

Fans lined up three days before tickets went on sale, Robinson recalled. In those days, there were no elaborate rules for lines at the box office, as there are now. Fans simply policed themselves, using bits of duct tape or scotch tape to affix numbers to themselves and secure a place in line.

Back then, the Convention Center was the place for touring bands to stop in Orange County.

“We used to have all the big shows,” Robinson said, a little mournfully. “Now, [the center] has sort of disappeared from sight. The people who used to come here to see the Elton Johns and John Denver, they go to the Pacific Amphitheatre [in Costa Mesa] and Irvine Meadows and places like that.” And some fans even forgot about the center.

“Now, it’s like, ‘Are they still there?’ ”

In the ‘80s, the center’s bread and butter was trade shows and special events: The Miss Anaheim pageant, “All About Ice Cream” for ice cream vendors, and California Oranges team tennis. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the center hosted two wrestling events.

Meanwhile, other convention centers began expanding and renovating; Anaheim tried to keep up and compete for the big trade shows (the center has bookings through 2000).

Even the old employee uniforms--the orange polyester sports coat and brown clip-on tie--which replaced the candy-striper ones in the early ‘70s--were ditched in 1987 for burgundy blazers and gray pants.

Robinson thinks more about his job than the proposed changes.

He is the one who hired Greg Smith, now Convention Center general manager, to work for him in the box office in 1973.

He is the type of box office manager who will hand stamp 12,000 tickets with a distinctive mark to thwart scalpers, something he says other venues do only with machines.

Once, he had to chill the cavernous exhibit halls for live minks at an animal show by cranking down the air conditioner. “Minks go crazy, I guess, in the heat,” he said.

He’ll do whatever it takes to make the Convention Center a player. He doesn’t want it to disappear from anyone’s mind again.

“The Anaheim Convention Center,” he gushed, throwing up his hands in salute, “it’s on the front page now!”