‘This Was One Invitation I Never Wanted to Get’

For almost 50 years, Helen “Bennie” Boillot was the one licking envelopes and mailing invitations to galas, parades, ceremonies and the annual air show at El Toro.

Today, the retired secretary to El Toro’s base commanders is pleased to be on the receiving end, a veritable VIP, she declares with delight. But the moment is also one of mixed emotions.

“This was the one invitation I never really wanted to get,” she says of the monogrammed slip of paper on her kitchen table in Santa Ana. It is an invitation to the ceremony that will mark El Toro’s closure, an event she says will break her heart.

Boillot reported to work at El Toro from 1946, when she took her first job to help pay for college, to 1993, the year she retired in a ceremony attended by some of the highest-ranking officers in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In between, she served 27 consecutive commanding generals--some of who would come to half-seriously call her the real commander.

The list of who she has met over the years reads like the index from a history book of the latter half of the 20th century: Joe DiMaggio, Billy Graham, John Wayne, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, just to name a few.

Boillot shrugs modestly: “They weren’t coming to see me. They were coming to see the general. I just happened to be in the way.”

She talks animatedly of the history she witnessed: President Lyndon B. Johnson addressing troops departing for Vietnam, and of the scene a decade later, when thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived to start new lives.

Once, she got a tour aboard Air Force One.

She retired in 1993, just weeks before it was announced that El Toro would close. Observed some: It was as if the Marines had conceded they couldn’t go on without her.