Catalina Converts

Before William Wrigley Jr. died in his sleep on the morning of Jan. 26, 1932, his long grey-brown mountain in the sea off Southern California (purchase price $3,000,000, improvements $20,000,000) had become a profitable combination of poor man's Nassau and rich man's Coney Island. Last week, when the U.S. Maritime Service opened its second largest training station for merchant seamen on Catalina's crescent-shored Avalon bay, only the shape of the island remained as William Wrigley left it.

For thrill-loving tourists, for the great, near-great and notorious, Catalina had been nepenthe. President Harding was enroute there when he died in San Francisco. Winston Churchill fished for marlin off the island in 1929. Aboard his yacht, Errol Flynn allegedly was host to 15-year-old Peggy Satterlee, sailing from Catalina to San Pedro.

With the war, tourist business fell away, then was halted altogether. Catalina lay in a restricted war zone with only one customer--the U.S. Government. By August 1942, the normal summer population of 10,000 had dwindled to 1,500. Last week, 600 newly arrived Maritime Service trainees completed Catalina's wartime conversion.

The famed glass-bottomed boats, through which avid-eyed tourists once stared back at opal-eyed bass, were tied up at the docks. The $2,000,000, twelve-story casino, on whose Moorish-Spanish exterior thousands of weekenders penciled their names, was a part time classroom; the expensive St. Catherine Hotel was a training headquarters and barracks; the Wrigley-built Hotel Atwater was a school and dormitory for marine stewards, cooks and bakers.

Of all Catalina's changes, Maritime Service trainees lamented one great paradox: in the ballroom of the St. Catherine the hot band of Maritime Service Lieut. (j.g.) Phil Harris played music worthy of the island's hottest days, while in all of Avalon were only 14 single girls old enough for dates.

Trainee plaint: "If they'd just bring over one girl to three guys, it'd make a good dance."

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