Nobody built these airports for you

Long Beach's terminal spent the war billeting soldiers, Palm Springs opened as an Army emergency strip, Oxnard was 3,500 feet of dirt. One field on the list was built as an airport from day one, and even that one was built for the wrong kind of flying.

Long Beach's Streamline Moderne terminal was set to open on December 8, 1941. Pearl Harbor postponed the ceremony, and the building spent the war camouflaged, with soldiers billeted inside, before it opened in 1942 to the job it had been drawn for, a year late. Multiply that by the region. The fields you charter from in Southern California were built for something else, or borrowed for something else, before private aviation moved in: a barnstormer's flight school, an aircraft factory, an airline's hub, an Army strip, a barracks. One of them was laid out as an airport from its first day, with a name and an opening ceremony, and even that one was laid out for the wrong kind of flying. What each was built for is still on the ground: the runway, the terminal, the name.

Van Nuys: the exception, and what it proves

Start with the exception. Metropolitan Airport picked its opening day on purpose: December 17, 1928, the 25th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight, and the private owners who carved it out of Valley walnut and peach groves wanted that date on the record. So this one was an airport from the start, and a privately built civil one at that. It was an airport for the flying of 1928, though. The business it runs today was on no one's drawings. Then the war arrived, and the military ran it as Van Nuys Army Airfield through World War II. It took its current name in 1949 and grew into the busiest general-aviation field in the country, a title it has traded now and then but never strayed far from. Private money first, the military next, private use again after. Today it is the center of gravity for LA private flying, on ground that grew peaches, in a field laid out for a kind of flying that is gone.

Burbank: 7 names and 1 lost title

The field opened over Memorial Day weekend 1930 as United Airport, with a Spanish Revival terminal and an air show, and for a time it was the largest commercial airport in the Los Angeles area. LAX overtook it after 1946. Lockheed built aircraft on the field through World War II. Then came the renaming, and few American airports have been through as much of it: United Airport, Union Air Terminal, Lockheed Air Terminal, Hollywood-Burbank, Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena, Bob Hope, and today Hollywood Burbank. 7 names is what it looks like when a field keeps getting handed to whoever needs it most that decade: a commercial hub, a factory, 3 cities, a celebrity. The airline title went to LAX. The runways stayed.

Long Beach: the terminal the war borrowed

Ground broke in November 1923 on Daugherty Field, named for barnstormer Earl Daugherty, who ran one of the world's first flight schools here. That made it Southern California's first municipal airport. The terminal came later, as a city project, and you know what happened to its opening day. What came back to civilians in 1942 still has the WPA-era mosaics by Grace Clements, 1.6 million hand-cut tiles, in the building. Long Beach is the clearest case of the pattern: a flight school, then a city project, then a barracks, then, a year late, the airport it was drawn to be.

Oxnard: a tent on the dirt

Ventura County opened Oxnard in 1934 as a 3,500-foot dirt strip. Its best story is from those early years: Howard Hughes pitched a tent on the field to shelter his H-1 Racer, the aircraft he had set the world landplane speed record in, and flew test flights off the dirt. The county paved the runway in 1938. A record-holding aircraft, a tent, and 3,500 feet of dirt: a test field, not a terminal, and the scale it was built at.

Van Nuys flew the war as an Army airfield, Palm Springs opened as an Army strip, and Long Beach's terminal spent those years as a barracks. What came back to civilians afterward is the map you charter from.

And the rest

John Wayne traces to 1923, when pioneer aviator Eddie Martin leased Irvine Company ranchland for a flying school. Orange County renamed the airport in 1979 for the movie star and Newport Beach resident who had died that year. Santa Barbara's Spanish Colonial terminal, commissioned by United Air Lines in 1942, remains one of the more beautiful places in California to catch a flight. Palm Springs began in 1939 as an Army emergency landing strip on Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians land, chosen for the desert's famously clear flying weather. Ranchland, an airline's terminal, an Army strip: 3 more fields built for somebody else.

Every one of these fields is a working private-aviation airport today, and where the region's empty legs depart from. The ground you board on has been doing this for a century.