Dave Moore at Orange County Airport, August 19,1967

I might have taken a bus to Orange that summer. Although I took driver's training in high school, I didn't end up getting my license until after I got to East L.A. Junior College that fall.

Three Air California Electras are in the background of the top photo. In both photographs of the new (at the time) Orange Country Airport terminal, you can see that, even in the middle of the day, the airport does not appear to be very busy.

Air California only started service between Orange County and San Francisco in January of 1967, using Electras, as PSA had done several years before. But PSA never seemed to have much desire to serve Orange Country Airport. Bonanza Airlines was the only airline to service Orange County up until then, flying south to San Diego and east to Las Vegas. I took Bonanza a couple of times when the "terminal", such as it was, was only the old tower building. The first floor was where passengers gathered before boarding and where the small ticket counter was also located.

I had sent Dave a letter on one occasion, that I was intending to fly down to meet him, and he could pick me up at the airport. I gave him my arrival time. So I took the bus to LAX, and then flew down to Orange County. But he never showed up. I called his house repeatedly, but nobody was home or answered the phone the entire day. So I sat in the modest terminal building to wait for my return flight that evening. The only time I left was in the early afternoon when I hiked across the dirt parking lot to a restaurant across the highway for lunch at the counter.

Obviously, if Orange County wanted more airlines to service the area, and give Air California a chance to grow, a much nicer terminal building had to be constructed, and was, by the looks of the lower photograph (they still had not installed the mosaic artwork for the front of the terminal, facing the street). But even by August, traffic would not be heavy but was slowly building. And, of course, Air California slowly expanded their service to San Jose and Oakland in Northern California, and Burbank and Ontario in Southern California.

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