Throughout Life, El Toro Has Been His Base

For many, the closing of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station next July will be significant but impersonal. We recognize its place in the county’s history, but most of us have rarely been past its secured gates.

For a few, those like E. Roger Ciampa Jr., El Toro’s closure will mean losing a piece of themselves.

Ciampa taught and trained at El Toro during World War II and the Korean War. He went on to fly scores of missions in those wars. “A Marine’s Marine, an Aviator’s Aviator,” a plaque displayed at the base in his honor says about him.

Ciampa arrived at El Toro in early 1944, just two years after the urgency of war pressed the Marine Corps to shape the base’s original 3,000 acres out of James Irvine’s lima bean farm. Ciampa’s life has remained tied there, the last 10 years as a major part of its Command Museum.

Last week, Times photographer Mark Boster and I spent a morning at the base listening to Ciampa reminisce. Now 77, he’s battling crippling leukemia. He also suffers from eye disease, which forces him to wear dark goggles to reduce the pain of daylight. But he energetically talks about the history of the base and the vintage airplanes on display there.

While showing us the historic planes, he gazed at the base’s airstrip. We could see him wandering back five decades.

“I lost a lot of friends there,” he said.

With the Marines under pressure to get fighter and dive bomber pilots to the Pacific during World War II, he explained, the intensity of the training at El Toro resulted in tragic accidents.

“We’d come in during the morning and see black clouds from the airstrip, and we’d fear learning who had gone this time. Sometimes we were losing one a day.”

We had gone to see Ciampa because he’s got his own role to play as the base prepares to close. Ciampa is one of 13 docents left at the Marine base’s Jay Hubbard Command Museum. The docent program is named after him because he organized it and trained the first docents when the museum opened 10 years ago.

The museum bears the name of its founder, retired Brigadier Gen. Jay Hubbard. Hubbard had been one of Ciampa’s flight students. Later, he was the executive officer of Ciampa’s fighter pilot squadron in Korea. When Hubbard started piecing the museum together, he asked for Ciampa’s help. Now Ciampa is preparing to train new docents at the Miramar Marine Corps Aviation base in northern San Diego County, where the museum will be transferred early next year.

As much as Ciampa loved El Toro during the war years, he spent most of his time trying to get away from it. What Ciampa desperately wanted was to be in the thick of the fighting.

“From the time I was 7 years old, all I ever wanted to do was be a Marine fighter pilot,” he said.

That’s how old he was when he became awed by flying after Charles Lindbergh’s solo trip across the Atlantic. Later, Ciampa got a chance to meet his first hero at a training session.

But during World War II, Ciampa’s dream of flying a Corsair fighter plane had to be put on hold. The greater need was for dive bombers. So Ciampa flew the SBD Dauntless in the Philippines. His targets were enemy-controlled railroads, bridges and highways. He flew so low his plane was struck not just by enemy firepower, but from the shrapnel of his own bombs.

Ciampa finally was assigned to a Corsair fighter-plane squad for a planned attack on Japan. The night before he was to join his new unit, he was at a movie with friends. It was interrupted for an announcement that the war had ended.

But Ciampa’s love affair with the Corsair wasn’t over. He flew one in Korea, again following a year of teaching at El Toro.

Naively, I asked Ciampa how often his plane got hit.

“Every time,” he said. “There’s only one explanation for how I survived--just plain lucky.”

He was forced to make seven emergency landings in the two wars. His scariest moment came in Korea, when his guns froze in the cold weather, and a team of Russian-made MIG-15s headed toward him.

“Two Corsairs saw me in trouble and joined me as wings. What we didn’t know was, their guns were frozen too. I led them straight at the MIG-15s, and we played chicken. Got so close I could see the leather helmets on the enemy pilots. They finally turned and we survived.”

Ciampa didn’t see another MIG-15 until the Command Museum opened at El Toro. There’s one in its parking lot. There’s also a Corsair in one of its hangars. Ciampa patted its wing the way some people might rub the head of a pet dog.

“Best fighter plane ever made,” he said proudly.

Ciampa had settled his family in Orange County before he left for Korea to fly that plane. It’s been home ever since. He became a high school science teacher after retiring from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel in 1964. He would take his students on field trips to the base and for many years flew in its private aero club. Ciampa is also a docent at the San Juan Capistrano Mission, where he lives nearby, and at Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park.

He does it, he said, “for the kids. Kids have a great enthusiasm for learning.”

The first time I ever saw Ciampa, he was talking Marine history to a group of schoolchildren sitting under the wing of a Phantom F4S. The wing, he says, provides the best shade on a hot day.

Tom O’Hara, curator at the Command Museum, said he always tries to arrange for Ciampa to get the school groups, because nobody can match his patience with youngsters. It’s the children he’ll miss most, Ciampa said, when the museum moves.

I asked Ciampa if he planned to be at the base July 2, the day it is scheduled to close.

“If I can keep from crying, I’ll be here,” he said. “It’ll break my heart, but I want to come that day, to say goodbye.”

Boster and I, both baby boomers, had listened in awe as Ciampa talked intimately about the base’s rich past. As we were about to depart, I was at a loss what to say to this hero of two wars. The base’s preparation for closing is a sad time for him. He also faces difficult days, with radiation treatments for his leukemia. Fortunately, my colleague Boster was not so tongue-tied.

“Thank you for what you did in those wars,” Boster told the older man. “It meant a lot to those of my generation.”

Ciampa smiled. “I suppose not everybody feels the same way about serving in the Marines as we did. I’m just glad I had the chance.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com