OCC retrospective

COSTA MESA — Late Tuesday morning, a huge white truck pulled up behind the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion and unloaded an essential piece of Orange Coast College history.

The items the workmen were carrying didn’t look like much from a distance: six canvas slabs wrapped heavily in tape and plastic. Inside, however, was a memento from the days before OCC even became a school. The canvases contained a pair of murals depicting life at the Santa Ana Army Air Base, which stood on the campus during World War II — and which now kicked off OCC’s exhibit covering its first 60 years.

“Everybody’s contributing,” said Sylvia Impert, the dean of fine arts, as she waited for the truck to arrive. “We’ve been getting e-mails from people offering personal stories from the time they were at OCC.”

When the show opens Feb. 2 at the Doyle Arts Pavilion, there will be more than enough stories to go around. The exhibit — the first in the recently completed gallery — includes photographs, posters and artifacts from OCC’s history, including a band uniform from the 1950s and the bell from the campus chapel that burned down decades ago.

Then, of course, there are the gremlins. As the workmen lugged the canvases into the gallery, OCC’s core faculty — President Bob Dees, media relations director Jim Carnett and foundation director Doug Bennett — gathered to have a look at the central attraction.

The two murals, painted in a service club at the air base in 1943, show airmen suiting up, marching and performing other everyday tasks. The most notable part of the scenes, however, are the tiny, bug-eyed creatures that skulk around the corners with spears and pitchforks. During World War II, those invisible pests were part of American lore — and an easy scapegoat for botched missions.

“It’s kind of a whimsical look at military situations,” Carnett said. “They used to say in the Air Force that gremlins would get in the machinery and gum up the works.”

The murals went on a wild ride of their own by the time they arrived back at OCC in 1997. After the war, the service club turned into OCC’s gymnasium, where the murals hung for 13 years before being shipped to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. — and then a number of sites around the country. The campus nearly gave them up for lost until 1997, when they were discovered minutes away in a vault at the Costa Mesa Historical Society.

That year, the murals hung at OCC as part of a 50th anniversary exhibit. After a restoration job by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, they returned this week looking cleaner than ever. The exhibitors had only one difficulty: the ceiling of the Doyle Arts Pavilion is slightly less than 15 feet high, which means that the 16-foot murals will have to tilt against the wall.