Blue Angels Forced to Break Formation

TUSTIN —  There were only a few of the characteristic hand gestures of fighter pilots--one hand pursuing the other through the air--at the 27th and last Blue Angels dinner Tuesday night. The guests were too busy getting a final eyeful and earful of each other before the tradition ended.

The main dining room at Nieuport 17 restaurant, made to resemble a German hunting lodge, was awash in camaraderie and nostalgia, with legendary veteran fliers rubbing elbows and trading flying stories with the latest square-jawed team of precision fliers. It was fighter pilot heaven for one last night before the final air show at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station this weekend, and eyes were bright.

This was a roomful of people who could fly you to Jupiter and back in a winged refrigerator and land it without a hiccup, young F/A-18 jocks sitting beside men with gray heads who once wore the blue uniform and flew the blue planes.

They had been coming to Nieuport 17 since 1970, when the restaurant’s owner, Bill Bettis, first invited the Blue Angels, prior to their appearance at the El Toro Air Show, for an evening of drinks. Then, as now, the pilots were not flying the next day.

“We just called them up,” said Bettis, a former Navy flier, “and they said they usually went to the general’s garden party and then back to the crummy transient BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters] and then to McDonald’s. We said that anybody who showed up in a blue coat could drink for free.”

They showed up.

“The first year, it was totally impromptu,” said Kevin O’Mara, a Blue Angels team member from Mission Viejo who attended that first soiree. “We had our schedule of events, but we were invited to this local restaurant and we said OK. We were just treated royally. I think we were still in our flight suits, and it was just for drinks. But we asked to come back to dinner later, and Bill said certainly.”

The Blue Angels have been coming back nearly every year since. O’Mara said the only thing he can recall that made him miss a dinner was his tour of duty in Vietnam.

“When I’m home,” he said, “I’m here.”

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Lt. Clark Merritt, one of the current team members, said it’s “kind of sad that it’s ending. We get to meet all these nice people here, all the guys from past years. It’s really a privilege.”

Current and veteran Blue Angel team members said the Nieuport 17 dinner was a kind of breather in the often taxing schedule of appearances in a long flying year.

“Everyone says that the Nieuport 17 dinner is the big event of the year,” said Dr. Brian Buchanan, the Blue Angels’ flight surgeon.

The setting could hardly be more fitting. Nieuport 17 is known for housing one of the country’s most extensive collection of aviation art and memorabilia. Its walls are covered with paintings and photos, many of which feature regular guests at the Blue Angels dinner. And throughout the restaurant are hung photos of Blue Angels teams dating back several years. With each dinner, a new set of photos goes up on the wall.

“It’s the only place they go where they’re not on stage,” Bettis said. “Here, they’re here go be entertained. And the number of people at the tables just grew and grew over the years.”

The event, which had begun as a cocktail party, became a formal dinner. Such aviation luminaries as Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle attended, and the guest list--formerly all male--swelled to more than 70 and included wives and girlfriends of fliers old and new.

Other stick-and-rudder men who have made the dinner an annual event, and who were there Tuesday, are legendary test pilot Bob Hoover, World War II double ace and 1954 Blue Angel Zeke Cormier and Al Taddeo, a member of the first Blue Angels team in 1946.

The respect is reciprocal. Current team “boss” George Dom nodded toward Cormier and said evenly, “This is like talking to the burning bush.”

“Bill’s kept us together all these years,” said Taddeo, 77. “It’s a tragedy that it’s ending. I’m hoping something will happen to keep it going. There’s so much camaraderie. Here, we all speak the same language.”

Said Bettis, “I found aviators were a truly special breed. Things like integrity and loyalty with a little bit of the devil thrown in.

“It’s been a great ride.”