MAKING A NEW KIND OF LIFE; FARMS GIVE WAY TO TRACTS AS FOLKS SEE HOUSES AND FEEL RIGHT AT HOME.

Byline: Steve Carney Staff Writer

How could they stay in Dubuque or Des Moines once they'd seen all this?

Palm trees swaying hypnotically in the warm breeze. The air redolent of jasmine and citrus blossoms. High-paying factories seeking workers. Home developers wooing buyers.

Hordes of servicemen deployed through Los Angeles during World War II remembered what they had seen here, once peace returned them to their homes across America. And what they found back home couldn't compare to what the San Fernando Valley was offering.

``They said, Hell - I'm going back to California,'' said Charles Bearchell, author of ``The San Fernando Valley: Then and Now.''

``It was the American Dream,'' said Joe Estavillo, 71, who came here in 1949 after he got out of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. ``For a GI the best place to live was in the Valley.

``There was nothing but olive groves and orange trees and they were starting to build tract houses,'' he said.

The Arizona native even helped build some of those houses, digging foundations for homes in Encino during the day. At night he went to barber school, a trade he's been practicing for 50 years now.

Estavillo bought his first home in 1951, in North Hollywood, for $9,800. Using GI Bill loan guarantees the federal government gave veterans, he paid $211 down and made initial payments of $64 a month.

With others grabbing the same opportunity, Estavillo said the Valley sprouted ``GI homes by the thousands.''

``It was clean. On weekends the neighborhoods got together. You'd do a barbecue one week and another guy would do it the next week. The big thing was going to the drive-in theater on Friday nights and getting a hamburger and a malt. And everyone wanted to come to the Valley because the Valley had the best schools.''

A headline in the Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet on Feb. 3, 1947, blared, ``Eyes of Building-Minded Nation Are Focused on Valley.''

In the accompanying page-one article, one of the directors of the Building Contractors Association of California called the Valley ``a new frontier.''

``The San Fernando Valley is the most important spot in the United States, if not in the world,'' director Ed Waters continued. ``Everyone from everywhere wants to come here.''

So they did.

California, here I come

In 1950 Lloyd's of London called the San Fernando Valley ``the fastest growing area of the world.''

Its population swelled by more than 700,000 from 1940-1960, quadrupling the number of people who lived there before World War II. Only New York City added more people to the United States during that span.

A house bought in the Valley for $5,000 in 1940 was worth $18,050 in 1960. And newspaper classified pages were black with advertisements for homes throughout the Valley - ``Cozy little rancho,'' ``Out of the smog in Woodland Hills,'' ``GIs with $1,000, hold your breath

''

``Real estate developers for years have touted the marvels of living in California - the climate, the beach, skiing, food orchards, motion pictures,'' said Bearchell, a professor emeritus of marketing at California State University, Northridge.

But newcomers especially accepted the offer in droves in the 1940s and '50s, because available land meant plenty of new homes, the GI Bill enabled many veterans to buy homes they otherwise couldn't afford, and booming industries meant jobs were available, too.

But as construction workers hammered together thousands of new houses, they drove nails into the coffin of a way of life that had exemplified the Valley for generations.

Another invasion for GIs

The farms and ranches that once covered the Valley like a verdant quilt sprouted a new crop after World War II - housing tracts.

Land became too valuable for farmers to earn a meager living from crops. Businesses gobbled up acreage for factories. Subdivisions grew on land that once held fields of citrus or walnuts or olives or alfalfa.

The number of homes in the Valley increased from 170,000 in 1950 to more than 315,000 in 1960.

``This was a peaceful invasion, but it was still an invasion,'' said Catherine Mulholland, a Valley native and historian, whose father raised citrus and walnuts on 700 acres between Chatsworth and Northridge. ``They came here with different values and different dreams.''

By this era Mulholland, 76, was in college at Berkeley, but her visits home became snapshots of a changing Valley. Each trip revealed a new subdivision or factory or shopping center.

``It was somewhat killing to see old groves rooted out and a whole way of life vanish in front of my eyes,'' she said.

In 1948, the Valley's agricultural harvest was worth only $18 million. By comparison, 60 horse farms spread around the Valley boasted $25 million worth of thoroughbreds that year.

In 1950, water use in homes, businesses and industries exceeded farm use for the first time in Valley history, 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent.

Peaches, plums and apricots, lemon and grapefruit, beans and sugar beets all began disappearing, giving way to housing tracts and business parks.

Just 40 years earlier, Sylmar had 4,000 acres of olive trees - one of the largest groves in the world. By 1948 its processing plants had to import olives from Spain.

By 1959, farm revenues had plunged to a mere $10 million. So little farmland remained, a drought that year had scant effect. As City Councilman James Corman declared, ``Farming in the Valley is a leftover from a bygone era.''

Mulholland's father, Perry, had taken over the ranch from his father, William, in 1914.

It was William Mulholland, Catherine's grandfather, who made large-scale farming and home building possible in the Valley. As chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department, Mulholland hatched the plan to build an aqueduct carrying water from the Owens River in the High Sierras to the San Fernando Valley in 1913. Without that water supply, the parched Valley wouldn't have been able to support the farms and thousands of homes that sprang up in the years that followed.

By the 1950s Perry Mulholland finally relented and sold developers the western segment of his land. ``By the mid '60s, it was gone,'' his daughter said.

``He couldn't have been rejoicing,'' Mulholland said. She says it's no coincidence that during this period her father suffered two heart attacks, contracted colon cancer, and died.

By the time he sold, a neighborhood had already sprung up beside his farm, with residents reveling in their new homes and their bucolic, semirural surroundings.

One morning, instead of leaving the job to the developers, Perry Mulholland began pulling up his walnut trees.

``A delegation of homeowners came flying over to protest,'' and confronted her father, Mulholland said.

``One of them shouted at him and said, `You're destroying our way of life.'

``He just pointed at him and said: `You destroyed my way of life.'''

`Leave it to Beaver'

The men and women who had farmed the Valley since before the war were losing a lifestyle they cherished. But the residents moving here were enjoying a new lifestyle they couldn't have imagined before.

``We just thought we had died and gone to Heaven,'' said Vanita Metcalf, 79, who moved with her husband, Blaine, from Idaho in 1940.

``He was working on a farm with no possibilities of getting ahead,'' toiling seven days a week while they rented a house for $10 a month in ``a little old hick town in Idaho,'' she said.

Her husband and brother saw a magazine advertisement for an aircraft school in Los Angeles, and decided to take the leap. Afterward Blaine Metcalf, 85, got a job at Lockheed, where he stayed for 38-1/2 years. And in 1949 the family bought a two-bedroom, one-bath house with a double fireplace and a pool in Burbank for $12,750. There they raised two sons and a daughter.

``California has been wonderful to us,'' Vanita Metcalf said.

Like so many others who came to the Valley, Sael Perrin came looking for a job and a better life for his family, said his son, Michael Perrin, 51, of North Hollywood.

The elder Perrin moved in the late 1930s from Hoboken, N.J. - where he lived down the street from Frank Sinatra - and brought his family to Los Angeles. He came with two friends who also found success in California - producers Joseph Hanna and William Barbera, creators of the Flintstones, Yogi Bear and other cartoons.

Perrin said his father went to work at Lockheed as an artist and model maker, and in 1952 he bought the family's first home in Pacoima for $7,500. ``You can't buy a car for that today,'' he said.

``We lived the life of `Leave it to Beaver,' though we didn't have the money, or the size of the house or the cars. But we pretty much had everything we needed,'' Perrin said. ``We thought we were doing very well. We had clothes on our backs and food and family around us. What more do you need?''

The Valley was a land of opportunity even for a woman on her own, said Bettye Hawley, who bought a home and opened her own bar and restaurant while her husband was away during the war.

The eldest of 13 children, Hawley, 86, left her home in Toledo, Ohio, to visit her brother in Los Angeles. She had $4 in her pocket when she arrived.

She gave up her $5-a-week waitressing job, and waited tables in Los Angeles for $10 a week - ``I thought I had the world by the tail.''

``I wanted to buy my first house, but they weren't giving women loans to buy property,'' she said. But a Bank of America manager - a regular customer - trusted her and approved the loan so she could buy a $5,000 house in North Hollywood in 1943.

That same year she opened her own restaurant in Woodland Hills, Tough Steaks, whose menu joked ``the service is terrible, but people don't mind waiting, because the food is worse.'' She was so successful she relocated to a larger restaurant in Sherman Oaks in 1950, and had her own cooking show on local television.

Jane Newfield's parents came to Sherman Oaks in 1947 from New York. Her father was a retired Navy captain, decorated for heroism in the Battle of the Solomon Islands, who worked as a surgeon and general practice doctor.

``It was a choice of either settling in New York or Florida or out here,'' Newfield said. But her parents didn't want cold weather or humidity, so ``that sort of pulled them out here.''

``They'd heard so much about California. Things were easier here. The pace of the lifestyle was so different from New York,'' she said. ``But it seems to have caught up.''

Her father, Samuel Isquith, opened a practice on Ventura Boulevard, walking distance from the home where Newfield lived for 22 years.

``We used to go roller skating, have Hula-Hoop contests and lemonade stands,'' Newfield, 49, said. ``I try to describe these things to my daughter and she can't even imagine them.''

Estavillo also bemoaned the changes to the idyll he once saw around him.

``I have seen paradise in this Valley, and today I can't say that,'' he said. ``I don't know if it's overcrowding, too many people. Older people can't go out at night. We've got triple locks on the doors. In my day we didn't even lock the door.

``There will never be a valley like this Valley in the '40s and '50s,'' Estavillo said. ``It was a dream.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo: (1) Bettye Hawley sits on the porch of her first home, which she bought for $5,000 in North Hollywood in 1943.

Photo courtesy of Bettye Hawley

(2) Bettye Hawley strikes a casual pose, shortly before her first restaurant, Tough Steaks, opened in Woodland Hills in 1943.

Photo courtesy of Bettye Hawley

(3) Bettye Hawley is shown with her first husband, Burt Urdank, who was overseas when Hawley joined in the early migration to the Valley.

Photo courtesy of Bettye Hawley

(4) Jane Newfield, by the pool in Sherman Oaks, says, ``We used to go roller skating, have Hula-Hoop contests and lemonade stands.''

Photo courtesy of Jane Newfield