Eastern Buena Park, 1942. It’s a chilly,...

Eastern Buena Park, 1942. It’s a chilly, pitch black autumn night. A teen-age girl with a flashlight steps gingerly along the path to the outhouse. From a distance a faint buzz can be heard overhead. It gets louder and louder until finally adolescent curiosity gets the better of her and she searches the heavens for its origin. She spots a low-flying plane coming from the north and on an impulse, flashes a series of dots and dashes upward.

“I flashed the V-for-victory sign and the airplane blinked its lights back at me! I got so excited, I ran all the way back to the house to tell my father. He told me never to do that again,” said Roberta Knisley, now curator of the Whitaker-Jaynes House, which doubles as a museum and is the home of the Buena Park Historical Society.

“We could have gotten into serious trouble, but as a kid, you don’t think about those things” like wartime cautions about overflying planes, she said.

Iva Shelden, a resident since 1928, who had just dropped by the museum to show off a painting and to chat for a minute, well remembers the time shortly after Pearl Harbor. “They (the Japanese) say they bombed the mainland. The government denied it. But all I know is that guns roared, lights flashed, our windows rattled and our whole house shook.”

Both women remember the impact that World War II had on the lives of the people in the community. Shelden gave up her business, Shelden’s New and Used, a secondhand store that sold machinery, heavy equipment and the like, leased her building to Renaker Mortuary and went to work at McDonnell Douglas as a riveter. Knisley remembers the rationing, long lines, scarcity of gas, air-raid drills, always having to keep the windows covered and interminable blackouts. “I couldn’t believe it when they turned on the lights after the war. We were all living in the dark for so long, it was an amazing sight,” Knisley said.

The war nearly wiped out Buena Park’s economy. What started as a “paper town” in 1885 on the drawing board of city founder James A. Whitaker weathered the Depression and came back to prosper, was devastated by the Second World War but came back with equal vigor when the soldiers returned home and the area experienced a real estate boom.

“It’s shocking how fast Buena Park grew,” Knisley said. “My husband worked construction building those flat-roof houses,” added Shelden. “A two-bedroom house sold for $3,000 and a three-bedroom sold for $4,000.”

And eastern Buena Park became a typical ‘50s neighborhood. It was a small section of town where everyone knew each other, and, according to Knisley, everyone knew all about their neighbors’ private lives.

It was a safe place where little boys camped out at the artesian well during the summer, children played outside until well after dark and mothers needed only to stand on the front porch and scan the horizon to spot their youngsters and call them home. That’s why the community was so stunned by the incident at the Valuski Theater.

The theater was an institution. It had been on Beach Boulevard since the 1920s and attracted everyone from big Hollywood stars to local kids who would save their nickels to be able to go to the movies. Children always found the theater a safe harbor and a fun diversion. So it was quite a shock when a transient took a little girl from the theater, walked with her hand in hand to a nearby cabin, molested and murdered her and then methodically bathed her, wrapped her in a bedspread and dumped her body in a vacant field.

The Valuski Theater is no longer; it deteriorated and the Pussycat Theatre chain bought the building in the late 1960s. It has been showing adult films ever since, much to the chagrin of local residents, including Shelden, who has protested. The theater stands there, a tough, if not suspect, monument to First Amendment rights. It has braved protests, petitions, raids, court battles and even a botched city redevelopment/eminent domain attempt.

In the next block, the homes directly in back of the theater are boarded up, but across the street, carefree children play outdoors while a steady stream of adult men sit inside the dark, air- conditioned theater, their eyes adjusting to the dark. And parents hope children are the furthest thing from their minds and that the history of the theater will not repeat itself.

Population Total: (1990 est.) 6,231 1980-90 change: +16.2% Median Age: 26.3

Racial/ethnic mix: White (non-Latino), 55%; Latino, 34%; Black, 2%; Other, 9%

By sex and age: MALES Median age: 27.0 years FEMALES Median age: 25.5 years

Income Per capita: $10,210 Median household: $22,319 Average household: $24,932

Income Distribution: Less than $25,000: 56% $25,000-49,999: 34% $50,000-74,999: 7% $75,000-$99,999: 2% $100,000 and more: 1%