Willard Courtney is a 95 year old man who has spent his entire life in Southern California. He currently lives near Dover Shores in Newport Beach with his wife. Over the course of his life he has seen southern California and develop into what it is today. He has seen everything from the effects of World War II on Orange County to the development of the highway systems that turned Los Angeles into a bustling metropolis.

Willard:
Well do you want me to give you a brief resume?
I will be 95 in August and I was born in Watts. I lived there until ’47, after the war, and came back to work, worked hard, and prospered. All in all I think I’ve done a pretty good job. I have one daughter Kathy; She has two daughters. One is a doctor, and one is a lawyer. She is married to a dentist. And that’s me.

Alexandra: So Willard, why did your family move out to California?
My dad was quite a guy. He married my mother, and I’ve never known how they met and so on, but he does tell me how he traveled with a circus and he made parachute jumps from hot air balloons. So I don’t know whether my mother thought that was quite a thing or not, I don’t know. He went to business school in Kansas City but he developed “consumption” (as they called it) and it was really tuberculosis. And the doctors told him that he needed to go west to drier and warmer country. They moved to Sonoma and he got a job on the railroad as a fireman. I really don’t know whether it was my grandparents who came first or not, nonetheless he got better and my mother was really a concert pianist and worked in Arizona in the Harvey house. Do you know what the Harvey house was?

Alexandra: No I am not sure what it was.

Willard: Well it was a place where people from the railroads would stop for the night and they had a dance hall and performers. My mother played for people to dance at the Harvey house. Then my father went into business for a short time with my grandfather White. Have you ever been to orange? Well you should go sometime. The story of orange is very interesting in orange there is a building that was a drug store with a restaurant in it. It is in the next block beyond the circle of Orange in the middle of town. This building was one of the first buildings built in orange. There was a dry goods store and my grandfather sold yardage and he was an interesting and small man who dressed properly. He always kept a pair of scissors in his pocket. And when he would lie out the yardage they would stick it on the end and he would use the scissors to tear the fabric. This restaurant, Watsons, you should go in there if you ever go, so we went over there a couple of times and I asked if I could see the manager and he came over and I told him that I believed that was the same building my grandfather started his business in. The name of it was CW White mercantile company.

Alexandra: Your daughter Kathy told me there were certain topics you knew very well. She said that you witnessed Lido Isle’s transformation?
Willard: The change is almost unbelievable to imagine. Santa Ana, where I really grew up, had less than 25,000 people. It was a nice little town and practically one hundred percent Caucasian, which is not the case now. Not that it’s bad or good or otherwise, but it has changed considerably. We always went and came down to the beach and my dad loved to go swimming. But in the early days there wasn’t really much as far as Newport Beach was concerned. So looking at it now, its really hard to believe that it could’ve changed that much in my life time. I do remember things back when I was four and five, and the county was originally was agricultural and English walnuts were a big crop. The walnuts were here before oranges. Probably about the turn of the century, but oranges became the thing, and everyone began putting in orange groves. It was wonderful, and in the springtime the orange blossoms were so prevalent that the whole area would smell like them and not like an exhaust system like the county does now.

Alexandra: Can you tell me about the earthquake along the Newport-Inglewood fault?
Willard: Yes I can tell you about my experience with that. I came home and my mother had the table all set, with water glasses along the table, and we were waiting for my dad to come home. There was a big jolt, things began to shake and I ran to the front of our house and looked across the street, and there was a big walnut orchard across the street. The walnut trees were dipping over and the things on my mother’s table were sliding off. The water had almost completely flowed out of the glasses. We tried to phone my dad, but we couldn’t get through because the phones were out. We lived on a fairly new street called Louise Street and we waited for dad. While I was looking for him, I stopped by our tire business, which was part of an old hotel brick building, and had entire parts of the walls were missing. It was mostly the threading equipment for the tires that held it the rest of the building. I finally found a man who directed me to where my dad was, but we had to take all of the money out of the shop since there was no way to lock it with it in ruins.

Alexandra: So how have the small business changed?
Willard: Well I think that most of the business back then were small mom and pop type things, we always felt that we were somewhat away from the big cities and big businesses here but they did become as they realized the market out here over hear and that made a big difference. It was nice that there were more jobs, not so much agricultural jobs so much as more manufacturing jobs and so on. But for the most part it stayed agricultural until after the war. The war had a tremendous impact on this area. The government began to take over and establish army bases. They also established the marine base. They established the Santa Ana Army Air Base, which is where Orange Coast College is now, and after the war OCC came in and began to take over the areas that were left and made them into a college. From that it kept growing.

Alexandra: How has the real estate changed here?
Willard: Land was much cheaper then, even way back to the ranchers. They bought their land, but they bought it for almost nothing. The Santa Ana Air Base was established; The Coast Guard, the Los Alamitos and the Navy Ammunition were established. Thousands of guys came through, especially to the Santa Ana army air base, which was a pre-flight training center. After the war was over the guys thought “hey this is a pretty nice area” and they decided to stay and came out in droves and the construction of houses started.

Alexandra: How did the area change when the free ways were built?
Willard: It made a huge difference. Los Angeles to Santa Ana was quite an undertaking before. You had to go up through Anaheim and Fullerton and then turn west where the road was called telegraph road. There were lots of cross streets and stop signs and it took quite a long time to get there. Now you can hop on the freeway and get there in forty minutes. Another thing you really must consider as a big thing for Southern California and Orange County was the water system. This originally was a desert and we did not have enough water, especially for what we have now, and Governor Brown put in the water system (and there was a lot of opposition to it). But he did get it through, and started bringing water from up north from the Sierras and that was a big thing as far as the growth of southern California. We had to have water.

Willard: I also would like to tell you about the only time I’ve ever seen snow in Southern California. We woke up in the morning and our yard was covered with snow and all the houses were covered too. I was so amazed I got in the car and drove to Newport where it was perfectly clear and I could see Catalina, which looked icy. I only saw it that one time in all of my years, but it did, it snowed.

Willard Courtney Interview: April 2010

Alex Stimpson is a student at Newport Harbor High School.