Mesa Musings:

Editor’s Note: This week’s column and the next will describe how the Carnett family came to Newport-Mesa in 1942.

When Hitler’s army invaded Poland in 1939, it precipitated the deaths of tens of millions. It also brought about the existence of millions who wouldn’t have been born otherwise.

My mom and dad first met at Santa Ana Army Air Base in 1943, were married in 1944, and had their first child — me — in 1945.

My maternal grandparents, William M. and Effie Fay Thomlinson, moved to Southern California from Coffeyville, Kan., in 1936. My mother, 12-year-old Betty Jean Thomlinson, accompanied them.

Bill had fallen in love with California years earlier during a visit to the West Coast.

For five years, my grandparents owned a restaurant in Tulsa, Okla., about 60 miles from Coffeyville. In ’36, they hitched up their 17-foot trailer and headed to Santa Monica. In January, they moved into a palm-fringed trailer park off Ocean Avenue near the Santa Monica Pier. It became strikingly evident that they were no longer in Kansas!

For a year, Bill was executive chef at Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, a racy roadhouse on Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades. The café catered to the Hollywood crowd as well as underworld types. Miss Todd, a popular comic actress, died under suspicious circumstances — officially labeled a suicide — just prior to my grandparents’ arrival.

In 1937, Bill and Effie drove their trailer north to Monterey, where they managed an inn for a year. They returned to Santa Monica’s sunshine in 1938.

My grandfather went to work as assistant chef at the Earl Carroll Theater, a Hollywood nightclub at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street, reputed to have the “most beautiful girls in the world.” A Hollywood film, “A Night at Earl Carroll’s,” was produced in 1940.

“All the famous stars went there,” my mom said. “I’d go to Hollywood with mother on the Red Car on Saturdays, before daddy got off work, and we’d watch people come and go from Earl Carroll’s. I saw Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and many others.”

For several years, Effie worked breakfasts at the coffee shop at the Rosslyn Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She took the Red Car into the city at 5 a.m.

When my mom graduated from the eighth grade she enrolled at Santa Monica High School.

“On Saturdays, mother and I would stroll Sunset and Hollywood boulevards and see a movie before picking daddy up,” my mom said. “On Sundays, Daddy and I would pick up mother from the Rosslyn and then window shop on Broadway.”

Germany invaded France in 1940, sustained an air assault on Britain in 1940-41, and attacked the Soviet Union in ’41. Japan brought the U.S. into the war on Dec. 7, 1941, with a sucker punch at Pearl Harbor. At the time, my dad, Bill Carnett, a young G.I. from San Diego, was stationed at Schofield Barracks, also a target of the Pearl Harbor attack.

In 1942, my grandfather, Bill Thomlinson, was recruited to remote Orange County to work as a civilian at the newly established preflight training facility, Santa Ana Army Air Base. The county’s population was less than 140,000. The base ended up training more than 150,000 aviation cadets, including my father, during the war.

Bill Thomlinson was hired as executive chef of the base’s 11 mess halls.

“All mess hall employees, early on, were civilians who’d worked in the restaurant industry,” my mom said. “The cadets were given the best food imaginable.”

Bill Thomlinson went to Orange County alone in the spring of ’42 and rented a room in Santa Ana. That summer, my grandparents parked their coach at a trailer park on Newport Boulevard, north of Del Mar Avenue in what would become Costa Mesa, close to the base’s main gate.

One Saturday in ’43, my grandmother met with a real estate agent on Balboa Island.

“That evening she told daddy she’d bought a house on the Island — just like that!” my mom recalled.

The home, which consisted of a two-bedroom house downstairs and a second-story apartment over the garage, cost my grandparents $7,500!

Like most new arrivals, they fell deeply in love with Newport-Mesa.

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.