Saltarelli’s County Ties Began at El Toro Station

Don Saltarelli came to Southern California for the first time during the 1960s as a young officer from Pennsylvania assigned to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. He left a captain, one of dozens of former servicemen who would go on to sprout roots in the area and assume the mantle of leadership in Orange County.

As a politician, Saltarelli would later help usher El Toro and the Tustin Marine Corps Air Facility into a new era that begins Friday, when both bases will be decommissioned.

Saltarelli, 57, who left public office in 1996 and now devotes himself to his real estate business, vividly recalls being at the base in 1965 during El Toro’s worst disaster. More than 80 Marines bound for Vietnam perished when their Air Force charter plane crashed into the Saddleback Mountains after takeoff.

He remembers arriving to find emergency crews working feverishly, and normally stoic Marines in grief. Navy corpsmen brought in to assist in the recovery effort carried the badly burned bodies into a hangar for identification.

“It was one of the most horrible scenes I’ve ever seen,” Saltarelli says, his voice grave as he recalls the day. “The way they had to identify the bodies was by making plaster casts of their teeth.”

Later, as an Orange County supervisor charged with overseeing plans to turn El Toro into an international airport, Saltarelli discovered safety assessments contained no mention of the horrific crash.

At first, staffers thought Saltarelli must be mistaken. There was no such crash, they insisted.

“I said, ‘No, I was there. I’ll never forget this accident,’ ” Saltarelli says.

Further research confirmed the terrible crash had indeed occurred, a result of pilot error. It had failed to show up in Marine records because the aircraft that crashed was an Air Force plane.

While serving on the Tustin City Council, Saltarelli said one of his biggest triumphs was his city’s successful annexation of Tustin Marine Corps Air Station in 1974. When it appeared on Pentagon closure lists in 1991, it was a boon for the city, which plans to transform the base into a mixed residential and commercial development.

Saltarelli was handpicked by Gov. Pete Wilson to fill an opening on the Orange County Board of Supervisors in 1995 and later voted with the majority to reuse El Toro as a commercial airport, one of the most controversial land-use decisions in county history.