GOOD OLD DAYS:

Somewhere toward the end of the Great Depression and before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Costa Mesa was home to a colorful but forgotten festival. For one day each year from 1938 to 1941, scarecrows of all shapes and sizes were displayed in the streets of Costa Mesa. They had names like “Town Gossip,” “Bad Man from Brimstone” and “Lady Flirt.”

There were Japanese dancing girls with gourd heads and stuffed Mexican trinket peddlers complete with ponchos and sombreros. The local tile shop even made a scarecrow out of linoleum.

“’Tis a unique stunt that the Mesa Chamber is staging in its scare crow contest,” mused the Newport News newspaper in 1938. “Probably some folks that never even had a speaking acquaintance with one.”

The annual event began in 1938 to attract tourists during the Great Depression. About 5,000 attended the first carnival on June 14, 1938.

“This scarecrow idea is as sensible as some other celebrations in Southern California,” quipped Los Angeles Times columnist and scarecrow festival judge Ed Ainsworth in 1939. “Everything is glorified with a celebration, from cow fodder to Swiss wrestling. Only things left without a fete in their honor are stinging nettle, poison ivy and rattlesnakes.”

By 1940, Costa Mesa’s Carnival of the Scarecrows included a street dance, a parade and a scarecrow contest with prizes for the most creative dummies in numerous categories. The quirky festival even was featured in Look magazine in 1939.

It made national headlines when a lady-like scarecrow named “The Belle of the Nineties” was kidnapped from an evening dance at the carnival in 1940. The disgraced lady was found the next day propped up like a beggar on the main drag in Tijuana, according to “A Slice of Orange: The History of Costa Mesa,” by Edrick J. Miller.

“Why must certain persons be destroying something to be able to enjoy themselves?” read one newspaper editorial after an episode of scarecrow theft. “Now what good would an old scarecrow do anyone — Some people are just full of Cussedness.”

Middaugh’s Shoe shop took home first prize at the carnival in 1940 with a gigantic rooster made out of gourds and perched on a split rail fence. The entry was accompanied with a sign that read “Costa Mesa — Something to Crow About,” according to contemporary accounts from the now-defunct Newport-Balboa Press. The grand prize was $10 cash.

The festival ended with the U.S. entry into World War II.

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.