OCC airs prrride

As if trying to channel its aviation past, OCC celebrated its 60th birthday with a pirate jumping out of an airplane and landing in the middle of the campus Wednesday.

Thousands of students and community members gathered in the school quad, stared up at the sky and snapped photos with their cameras as sky diver Jim Wallace opened his bright green-and-yellow parachute and careened down, buccaneer-clad and wielding a sword.

He helped cut the 1,200-pound, white-and-orange birthday cake with Betsy Worthy, one of the school’s first graduates who earned her diploma in 1949, right after the campus was cobbled together out of the remnants of an Army air base that was used to train pilots and bombardiers.

Back then, the classrooms were mostly converted barracks, and the campus still had a strong aviation culture.

One of Worthy’s fondest memories is of a pilot who took her up in an airplane and circled around the campus with her.

“I just wanted to go to college,” the psychology major said. “It was fun. Everyone wanted to go after the war.”

In those days, just after World War II, OCC didn’t have the huge, diverse student body it does today.

Most of the students were war veterans and women reentering the workforce, according to historian Hank Panian, who taught at the school for more than 30 years, starting in 1956.

Orange County was still very much an agricultural town at that time. The adjacent area now occupied by Pier 1 Imports, Coco’s Restaurant and the car dealerships used to be pastures where hundreds of steers and sheep grazed.

“At certain times of the year you could arrange for a side of beef during butchery season. Those days are gone forever,” Panian reminisced.

While, old-timers and students had a chance to relax and reminisce, the day was filled with stress for chef instructor Amy Williams, who was in charge of baking and assembling the gigantic cake. She began laboring on the enormous pastry this summer, baking sheet cakes 10 at a time and freezing them.

Along with a team of culinary students she put together the cake under a tent in the quad, starting at 4 a.m.

“It’s like bricks and mortar. The individual sheet cakes are the bricks and the butter cream is the mortar,” Williams said.

So what’s the calorie count on such a huge dessert? “I don’t want to know,” she said.

After the cake was cut, hungry students swarmed the table it was set up on. Chaos ensued as the weary cooks who were out before the sun assembling the cake tried frantically to cut fast enough to feed everyone.

“I feel like I’m covered in frosting,” said culinary student Livi Bowser, looking down at her soiled white apron.

For more photos, click here.

DID YOU KNOW?

 OCC was established in 1948.

 The land it sits on used to be Santa Ana Army Air Base.

 Classrooms used to be temporary Army barracks.

 Since the 1950s, enrollment has increased from about 1,000 students to about 25,000 students.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at alan.blank@latimes.com.