After 50 Years, Dana Strand Is Still a Place to Start Out : Housing: Half a century ago, the project provided cheap accommodations for war workers. Now it is home to welfare recipients and the working poor.

It has been 50 years since Floyd and Addie Worley and their two sons first laid eyes on the two-story apartment at 427 Wilmington Blvd. in Wilmington, in the Dana Strand housing project.

Fresh from a farm in Arkansas, drawn like thousands of others to the booming war industry jobs in Los Angeles in the early months of 1942, the apartment seemed to the Worleys almost like a palace, a $37-a-month dream come true.

Last week, on the eve of the Dana Strand Village’s half-century anniversary celebration, the Worleys came back to visit, and to remember. They seemed surprised at how much--and in some ways, how little--the place had changed in 50 years.

“Yes, this was home, all right,” Addie Worley, a diminutive white-haired woman of 83, said as she and Floyd, 84, and their sons Jim, 58, and Marvin, 63, stood before their old home, one of 384 units in the 21-acre housing project. “We were one of the first families to move in, on the Fourth of July, 1942. We thought it was just wonderful. We felt real lucky to get it.”

“Hasn’t changed too much since then,” Floyd Worley added. “Outside, anyway.”

There have been changes, of course. Fifty years ago, when the Worleys lived there, their neighbors in the project were virtually all white, supported by income from relatively high-wage defense industry jobs; today, almost 80% of the project’s 1,400 residents are Latino, a mixture of welfare recipients and working poor. Their average monthly family income is $841; their average monthly rent is $203.

The current resident of No. 427, Vikki Ruelas, 21, has lived there for 11 years with her mother and brother and, most recently, her 13-month-old son. In contrast to the residents of 50 years ago, who raved about the place, Ruelas says living at Dana Strand is “OK, not great, but OK.” Another difference is that back then, 21-year-old women did not, as a rule, sport tattoos and nose rings.

Still, for the residents then as well as now, Dana Strand was a place to live at a reasonable price. In the consistently tough L.A. housing market, that was and is a godsend for many families.

Dana Strand Village was conceived as a low-income housing project, part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Depression-era program to provide housing for the disadvantaged. The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, temporarily changed that. With “war workers” pouring into L.A. for jobs in the shipbuilding and aircraft industries, and with private housing at critically low levels, the Dana Strand project was created as housing for those war workers.

Floyd Worley was one of them. Hearing there was work to be found in sunny Southern California, Floyd left his farm near Malvern, Ark., in early 1942 and came to Wilmington, where he found a job as a welder trainee at the shipyards on Terminal Island--at a breathtaking starting pay of 56 cents an hour. Addie and their sons followed shortly thereafter, driving cross-country in a Model A Ford with a top speed of 35 m.p.h. and, of course, no air conditioning. They arrived in April, 1942.

The family lived for a while in a small motel-like apartment in East Wilmington while the Dana Strand project was being completed--at breakneck speed and a cost of $1.2 million. (It was one of 14 public housing and war worker projects that opened in the L.A. area in 1942, six of them in the Harbor area.)

When they finally got to move in, the electricity wasn’t hooked up, the lawns hadn’t been planted and the trees were saplings. But the apartment had two bedrooms and a bathroom they didn’t even have to share. The rent was $37 a month.

The Worleys thought it was wonderful.

“Back then, getting a place like this was like a gift from heaven,” Marvin Worley, who was a teen-ager then, remembers. It was especially pleasant for youngsters. There were hundreds of other children around, all sons and daughters of war workers; there were USO movies and sing-alongs on the lawns; there was no crime, no drugs, no danger except for the recurring fear of air raids.

Two years after they moved in, Floyd Worley got his draft notice, and the family moved out of Dana Strand and back to the family farm in Arkansas. A few months later, after the draft board decided not to induct him, Floyd and his family moved back to Wilmington, although not to Dana Strand. They now live in a house on Neptune Avenue. Marvin Worley, a retired post office employee and onetime postmaster of Wilmington, also lives there; Jim Worley, who works for TRW, lives in San Pedro.

Dana Strand Village, meanwhile, reverted to low-income public housing after the war, under the L.A. city housing authority. In recent years it has developed a reputation as a high-crime and drug abuse area, although project manager David Levine notes that the project’s crime problem is not significantly worse than that of Wilmington as a whole.

“(The project’s current residents) have the same hopes and dreams as everybody,” Levine said--that is, jobs and better lives for their families.

In that sense, then, not so much has changed at Dana Strand Village in the past half a century.