Sourse: The Orange County (Calif.) Register
One of James R. Kikta's earliest memories of El Toro is watching U.S. troops come home from Vietnam.
His last will come in June or July when he is ordered to leave.
Land developer Lennar Corp. won the Navy's auction of the former Marine base last week, bringing Kikta closer to the end of his term as the unofficial mayor of El Toro.
Kikta, 51, has worked at the base on and off, as a Marine and then as a civilian, since 1972.
He has managed the day-to- day business since the base's closure in 1999, overseeing the groundskeepers, golf course, horse stables and 2,300 parked RVs, among other things.
"There's always something going on,'' he said, sitting in his office, where a photograph of him flying over Kuwait hangs on one wall and boxes of documents are stacked upon one another.
As the Department of Defense's representative during the auction, Kikta remained neutral while those around him battled for control of the base.
"We didn't care if it was an airport, we didn't care if it wasn't an airport,'' he said.
In the end, Lennar will spend nearly $1.05 billion to build an entire community surrounding a Great Park. When the sale is final sometime this summer, Kikta will move on.
"It's not hard to let go,'' the Lake Forest resident said of his impending departure. ``The hardest thing was seeing it shut down.''
Kikta is hardworking and humble. He's climbed Mount Whitney. He's been to Antarctica. He earned his driver's license and pilot's license in the same month when he turned 16. But he doesn't brag.
He was 19 when he and his junior high school sweetheart, Marlene, made the move from Cleveland to El Toro.
Back then, U.S. troops were in Vietnam, and El Toro was surrounded by miles of farm fields.
In 1975, three years after Kikta arrived, the El Toro Air Show was canceled because Vietnamese refugees were being processed at the base.
He and his wife raised their three children -- Matt, 25, Shelley, 21, and Chad, 19 -- sometimes in Lake Forest and sometimes at bases where the military sent them.
During the '80s and into the '90s, Kikta flew C-130 Hercules cargo planes in and out of El Toro hundreds of times.
In 1991 he was deployed to the Persian Gulf War.
But coming home is how he'll remember El Toro.
"Those are the good memories, coming back ... coming back to El Toro,'' he said.
When Kikta was forced to retire from military service in 2001, he got a job with a contractor working on behalf of the Navy at El Toro. He never switched offices. As he puts it, ``Just the uniform changed.''
Kikta will continue to watch over the base until the sale is completed. He predicts that will be in June or July.
"I'll probably move on to another base,'' he says of his future.
But it won't be the base where he celebrated his children's birthdays with lavish parties. It won't be the same base where he was the last official Marine.
Kikta doesn't get emotional about these sort of things -- for now at least.
"We had a base we liked, but the politicians shut it down, and we had to deal with that,'' he said. ``The hard part's done. The base is sold.''
