Couple with deep OCC roots celebrates 70th anniversary

Cathy Turner, 88, believes that a strong marriage needs love, understanding and a “go-with-the-flow” temperament.

“Don’t get upset with the small things,” she said. “Having a great family helps too.”

In the 70 years that she and her husband Bill, also 88, have been married, they have had four children, all of whom have graduated from Costa Mesa High School and attended Orange Coast College.

Evidently, these four apples didn’t fall too far from the tree. Their father attended OCC the year it opened, 1948, and served as the first student body president.

He still remembers his election opponent.

“He was younger,” he said. “He just graduated from high school, from Newport Harbor, I think.”

Bill carried a different set of experiences under his belt: husband, father, veteran.

When Bill enrolled, he had already been married for three years.

The eventual sweethearts met at Francis E. Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, Cathy joked.

“I didn’t really even know of him,” Cathy said. “I do remember during school, he was 4-foot-11 and then suddenly he grew to 6 feet. Then he was hard to miss.”

They married on Aug. 6, 1945, one year after they graduated from Santa Ana High School.

Soon after, the Army sent Bill to the Philippines and Korea. When he returned, he went back to school.

He and Cathy found that Coast had one thing most community colleges in the area did not have — married student housing.

The couple moved into their apartment on campus for the 1948-49 school year. During the student body president election in October, their first son Mike, now 66, was born.

“I remember while I was running [for student body president], a reporter from the school newspaper wrote about how I had a wife and a baby and that we lived on campus,” Bill said.

After the article ran, Bill said he recalls earning 355 votes on a campus of 550 students.

The couple went on to have three more kids Mark (now 63), Kim (60) and Scott (56), raising them in the Costa Mesa home they bought in the mid-50s and still live in today.

Bill had a career as a teacher and school administrator. Cathy was a homemaker.

Scott remembers when the 405 Freeway was farmland.

“I used to ride my bike right where they had it paved,” Scott said. “As a kid during that time, you could go outside to play the whole day. The only rule we had was to come home once the streetlights came on.”

The four all lived at home while attending OCC. The campus was within walking distance.

When Mike graduated from Coast in 1968, the college invited his father to be a guest speaker at commencement.

“I never really heard him speak in front of an audience until that day,” Mike said. “I honestly don’t remember what he said, but I remember everyone there being quiet. When a good speaker is talking, people listen.”

Bill and Cathy now have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. The whole family will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary Aug. 8.