Southern California Tunes In, Absorbs News of War : Reaction: Schools, businesses, government agencies and families are all a bit stunned by developments.

It promises to become one of those moments frozen in time--Jan. 16, 1991, 3:35 p.m., PST. It was at that moment a war was announced.

At the Los Feliz Elementary School, teachers converged around a radio and television set in the office of Principal Betty Castaneda.

“Everyone is on the edge of their chair,” she said. “We don’t understand it yet. It hasn’t hit.”

Downtown, in Los Angeles Superior Court, Judge Harvey Schneider interrupted a civil case. “Well, . . . I can tell you we have started bombing Baghdad.”

A gasp was heard in the courtroom, and Schneider urged lawyers to wrap up their arguments for the day.

“I think we all want to get home,” the judge said, “and see what is happening to our world.”

Minutes later, the courthouse emptied.

A few floors down, 10 couples waiting in line to be married before a justice of peace changed their plans on the spot. It was not a good day to celebrate.

“Everybody just cleared out. . . . They just walked away,” said Sally Chavez, deputy commissioner of marriages.

War had begun, and all over Los Angeles and throughout its neighboring cities, Southern Californians stopped what they were doing to listen to the first bulletins from Baghdad and attempt to absorb the meaning.

War had begun, and in minutes it riveted Southern Californians to television sets and radios, it stunned worry-wrenched families whose sons and daughters would be fighting in the Persian Gulf, it sent excited whispers and exclamations down the corridors of offices and schoolhouses, and it flooded from the radios of commuters locked in bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic.

Sharon Bell, 17, was home alone watching television in National City, south of San Diego. Her mother, Linda Kay, is a petty officer on the destroyer tender Acadia, deployed in the Middle East.

“I am wondering where on Earth my mother is, if she is going to get hit, if she is in any danger,” Bell said tearfully. “I am worried.”

Kay’s husband, Navy petty officer Jesse James Bell, said his mind went blank. He raced home from work to be with his daughter.

“I feel kind of alone--I feel terror in my stomach,” he said. “My heartbeat is probably 10 times quicker than normal.”

In the working-class Latino La Colonia neighborhood of Oxnard, in Ventura County, customers in laundries, bars and barbershops stood transfixed as they took in radio and television reports, the mundane chores forgotten.

“The reality is we are fighting with our blood for oil and the blood is young,” said Roberto Cangas, who was at the laundry. His son is a soldier in Saudi Arabia.

At a shopping center in Encinitas, Terry Daniels sat in her parked van, crying.

“I support the President,” Daniels, 41, said as she listened to the news on her car radio. “It’s just breaking my heart to think of people having to die in this century for something like this.”

In Twentynine Palms, a desert town on the edge of the sprawling Marine Corps air-ground combat center, Tamara Shaw, 25, received a telephone call from a friend. Fighting had begun.

“She said, ‘Tamara, it’s started.’ I grabbed the remote control, turned on the TV, and there it was. War.”

She began to cry, but only briefly.

As Shaw recalled the moment, she bounced her cranky 6-month-old daughter Destynee on her knees. Her husband, Brad, is a Marine corporal stationed near the Kuwaiti border.

In Glendale, the sounds of bomb blasts and machine-gun fire bounced off the wall at a crowded video arcade on Brand Boulevard. About half the young players said that, after learning of the outbreak of war, they had come to try their luck on the video war games.

Jimmy Thompson, 12, was playing “Violence Fight.”

Had he heard about the war start?

“Yeah,” he said, flipping the game’s toggle switches.

Any reaction?

“Oh, prices are going to go up . . . a lot. Food, gas.”

A shroud of silence fell over about 100 students at UC Irvine. “Everyone is too shocked to have a reaction,” said the student body president, Todd Schubert.

It seemed as though almost every homebound commuter down the Harbor Freeway had tuned to the news on the radio, voices of announcers with the latest bulletins floating from rolled-down car windows. Traffic was slow, even though rush hour had just begun, and faces were tense.

Cynthia Foster, an accountant from Tarzana, heard the news on her car radio and rerouted herself to the Federal Building in Westwood, where she knew there would be a peace demonstration.

“I just didn’t think it would happen,” she said tearfully. A best friend is a member of a morgue unit deployed in the gulf.

“Her job is in the morgue. Her job is to i.d. the bodies, to make lists of the dead.”

Across town, Rogelio Guillen, 52, watched the developments on Spanish-language television at his apartment in the Aliso-Village Housing Projects in Boyle Heights.

“I feel pain because I don’t know if our son is going to come back or not,” he said in Spanish. Son Raul Hector Guillen, 20, is in the Marines.

First word of the invasion came from his 16-year-old daughter, who was tuned to an English-language broadcast in her bedroom. His wife, who had gone to run errands, had not yet heard of the fighting.

The children of at least four neighbors in the housing complex are in the Middle East, Guillen said.

“There will be many casualties from here,” he said in Spanish. “We know we will lose someone. We’re prepared for that.”

In few places was the despair as profound as in the living room of Fuad Killu, an Iraqi native who resides in Glendale with his wife Ayda Rashid.

Killu’s three children all live in Baghdad in a home near a refinery that was reported struck by U.S. forces. He listened in quiet disbelief as a CNN commentator described the city’s bombing.

“The children will be crying,” he said. “There will be smoke, black smoke from the oil refineries all over the sky. And all the bombs dropping. And the fire in the sky. My God, at this moment I don’t know if my children are dead or not.”

In Santa Barbara, the veterans of earlier wars began dropping by the Vet Center, an outreach office established by the Veterans Administration.

“I was driving when I heard the news, and I headed right over here,” said Marco Whiley, 44, a former Marine Corps sergeant in Vietnam. “I wanted to talk to some people who were feeling what I was feeling . . . This whole thing brings a lot of it back.”

In the Fairfax District, foot traffic outside the delicatessens and small bakeries seemed lighter than usual, as though people had stayed at home or were inside somewhere, searching for information.

“I’m really scared,” said Christine Mimey, a waitress at Cantor’s Deli, whose grandmother had worked in the French Resistance during World War II. “Are we safe in this country?”

In the Los Angeles County Treasurer-Tax Collector’s office, Paula Brown, secretary to the chief investment officer, monitored the news from the Persian Gulf on a computer used to check the prices of securities.

She was reading a story headlined “White House Announces the Start of War.” Radios could be heard blaring in the background. “Usually, we don’t have radios on,” she was quick to point out.

In Supervisor Ed Edelman’s office, the staff was huddled around a TV.

Meantime, the public address system used to broadcast supervisors’ meetings to county offices continued to play Muzak.

And at Ninth Street School near Skid Row, news of war spread quickly across the playground.

Third grader Angel Star said she believed that people’s dependence on oil is the main cause for the war, but that isn’t a good enough reason to risk lives. “Oil is not important,” she said. “It’s people’s blood that is more important.”

Some children rushed up to comfort Isabel Morales, 23, who helps supervise the after-school latchkey program. Morales’ boyfriend, Marine Lance Corporal Michael Villarreal, was sent to the Middle East three months ago.

“You just feel so helpless,” said a teary-eyed Morales. “There is not much we can do.”

Times staff writers Laurie Becklund, Bettina Boxall, Miles Corwin, Shawn Doherty, Faye Fiore, Jane Fritsch, Charisse Jones, Jesse Katz, John H. Lee, Anthony Perry, Bob Pool, Christopher Pummer, Kevin Roderick, Richard Simon, Ronald L. Soble, Sheryl Stolberg, Lois Timnick, Hector Tobar, Jenifer Warren, Elaine Woo and Nora Zamichow contributed to this report from throughout the region.