With the Fair, she’s royalty

From the Costa Mesa home she now shares with her adult daughter, 79-year-old Betty Trichler Ficovic remembered one recent afternoon how incredulous she felt when she was crowned as the first queen of the OC Fair at its permanent home in Costa Mesa in 1949.

“The announcer said ‘ No. 8’ and I looked at my friend on one side of me and she was No. 7 and the gal on the other side was No. 9,” Ficovic said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Wearing a strapless white sundress with a flared skirt her mother made, hair curled like Marilyn Monroe, Ficovic was just 19 years old when she was crowned “The Girl of the Golden West,” in keeping with the Western theme of the fair that year.

Black and white photographs and old news clippings of Ficovic from 1949 show her with platinum blonde curls and an electric smile.

“I was a platinum blonde, but that my hair color came from a bottle was my secret,” Ficovic said with a grin, remembering how she appeared on stage 50 years ago, with a fur-lined robe and scepter. Then-county Supervisor Willis Warner crowned Ficovic as she sat atop a wooden throne.

The fair had just moved to the site of the old Santa Ana Army Air Base in 1949 when Ficovic was crowned, which has since become the OC Fairgrounds. OC Fair officials couldn’t say last week when exactly the practice of crowning a fair queen ended, only that the annual event hadn’t had a queen in many years. Ficovic remembers going back for subsequent fair queen pageants as recently as 1980, when she got to meet the late entertainer Bob Hope on stage.

“People said I stole the show from him,” Ficovic said.

As its queen, Ficovic was escorted around the OC Fair by two U.S. Marines in dress uniform in 1949.

“They were quite handsome, I wish I would have had more time to get to know them,” Ficovic said. “It wasn’t for security reasons, it was just to look nice.”

She also got to view various events at the fair from a special box seat.

“I just had to smile and look pretty,” Ficovic said.

Ficovic’s reign as queen garnered the attention of the 20th Century Fox film studio, which later gave her a screen test. She lived on the studio lot for a time with other young aspiring actresses, taking acting classes and going to parties.

She dated actor Hugh O’Brian for a time, known for his role in the television show “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” which ran on ABC from 1955 to 1961.

Ficovic also had a few dates with Johnny Stompanato, the famed bodyguard of gangster Mickey Cohen, who was later stabbed to death by actress Lana Turner’s teenage daughter.

“He was really handsome,” she said.

Eventually, Ficovic got tired of Hollywood.

“I got homesick,” she said. “The studios back then were crazy; if you wanted to get anywhere, it was a ‘be my buddy’ type deal — it wasn’t for me.”

Ficovic married and moved back to Orange County.

Her daughter, Costa Mesa resident Linda Nemchock, grew up hearing her mother’s stories of being a beauty queen and old Hollywood.

Nemchock now keeps all of her mother’s old newspaper clippings and photographs and hopes to make a scrapbook from them.

“It was really neat to see all the old pictures and hear the stories,” Nemchock said.

O.C. Fair History

 The Orange County Community Fair Corporation was formed not long after Orange County was created in 1889. The group put on its first fair in Santa Ana in 1890.

 The first fairs were mostly livestock exhibitions and horse races.

 The fair moved to Huntington Beach after World War I, where it stayed for two years before moving back to Santa Ana.

 The Orange County Farm Bureau took over the fair in 1916, and the first OC Fair Board was elected in 1925. The Fair then relocated to Anaheim and added a rodeo and carnival to the event.

 The State of California bought the site of the old Santa Ana Army Air Base in what is now Costa Mesa in 1949 and the place eventually became the OC Fairgrounds.