GOOD OLD DAYS:

In the ’50s, Elvis was king, T-birds ruled, guys sported black leather jackets, and girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes wore their boyfriend’s high school ring on a chain around their necks.

Those days were revisited Thursday as Las Commodoras, the women’s auxiliary group of the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club, celebrated the Club’s 50th anniversary with a “Fab Fad Foods of the Fifties” progressive luncheon and home tour.

Jeanie Lowry, a past president of Las Commodoras, lives on the Balboa Peninsula and said the women’s group was founded in the early 1980s because the ladies needed their own group.

“We wanted to create camaraderie among the women and be a service group for the Yacht Club and the community. In time, we also became a fundraising group,” Lowry said.

The women, some dressed in scarves, cat-eye glasses, pearls and capri pants, posed for pictures in a baby blue 1957 Ford T-bird convertible parked in front of the club’s entrance, then headed to three Corona del Mar homes hosting the luncheon.

Las Commodoras President Terese Ivory coordinated the menu items, asking women to bring specific dishes. She said the recipes came straight out of the book found in most 1950s baby boomer kitchens — the red and white, hardback edition of the Betty Crocker Cook Book.

Deviled eggs, tuna-noodle casserole, Spam salad and corn flake-crusted chicken were some of the foods available for sampling. Cosmopolitans were the drink of the day.

Elvis memorabilia collector Linda Tasooji’s house was the first stop on the tour. The King’s tunes played inside and out, and her collection was on display.

Member Ann Carter thinks she was lucky to be a teen growing up in late 1950s Texas.

“It was fun and innocent. The worst thing we could do was drink a beer,” Carter said. “I saw Ricky Nelson and Elvis in concert in Fort Worth. The music [back then] had such a good beat, and you could understand the words.”

Cosmo in hand, another former Las Commodoras president, Doretta Ensign, recalled growing up in Laguna and driving her Ford with the top down. Her husband was a lifeguard, she said, and they’d hang around the local beaches looking like something out of the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “Beach Blanket Bingo” movies.

Each woman had memories unique to the times. A soda fountain shop in town, eating French fries, drinking cherry Cokes, and listening to other legends of rock ’n’ roll like Little Richard and Chubby Checker.

Juin Foresman, 83, has been a member of the yacht club since it was founded, even though the family didn’t relocate to Newport Beach until 1980. Living in Claremont, she and her husband owned a house on Balboa Island. She said the minute school was out they’d pack their four kids in the car and head down to the beach.

They’d spend the entire summer in Newport, staying until the day school started again.

“I’d shop for school clothes at Fashion Island, dress them, then drop the kids off at school for the first day on our way back home.”

The big store at Fashion Island then was J.C. Penney’s, Foresman said, and in the ’50s, life was so much more wholesome.

“We expected less, and we thought we had it all,” she said.

SUE THOENSEN may be reached at (714) 966-4627 or at [email protected].