‘Bal’ Week was a simpler time

Lolita Harper

It was an innocent time full of innocent fun, when teenagers from all

over Southern California flocked to the Balboa Peninsula. It was

“Bal” Week -- short for Balboa -- and it was good clean fun.

Nita Middleton and Lucille Stafford, now neighbors in West

Newport, recounted fond memories of their weeks of revelry in the

1940s, during which they would escape the halls of academia for

Easter week and travel from inland Pasadena to the beaches of

Newport.

The groups of giddy girls would save their money all year to rent

a house on Balboa. When school let out for spring break, they would

head down to Newport Beach “to let off some steam” after spring

finals.

“Mainly, the girls would ogle the boys,” Middleton said. “We would

all sort of vie to see who had the cutest swimsuit, then get our hair

all fixed up, line up our beach towels and watch the boys play

volleyball.”

Each girl would scope out her choice for a dance partner that

night and do her best to catch his eye, she said. When they weren’t

flaunting their stuff on the beach, the teenage girls would head into

town for ice cream and snow cones.

When the sun went down, the spring breakers would converge on the

Rendezvous Ballroom for the nightly dance, she said.

“We just had a ball,” Middleton said. “A little devilment, but

pure fun.”

Stafford remembers the dances fondly and can recall the “Balboa

Hop.” It went one, two, three -- hop! It was very simple and caught

on fast, she said.

“You can imagine, with a room full of people doing the same dance,

when you got to the hop part, the floor would shake,” Stafford said.

Stafford and her girlfriends from Pasadena would pay a pretty

price to travel to the beach because it was a time of war and the gas

was rationed. Each girl had to pitch in for gas tickets to get three

cars to the coast, she said. Stafford visited Bal Week in her later

teen years and therefore avoided the hassle of a chaperon, she said.

But most of the other teenage girls were watched closely, while the

boys were allowed to roam the streets as they pleased.

“It was really an innocent time then,” Stafford said. “It was

really innocent fun.”

She does admit that many of the boys got fake identification to

buy beer, but that was about the extent of the mischief, she said.

“There was no dope,” she said. “No hard stuff.”

* LOOKING BACK runs Sundays. Do you know of a person, place or

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