Bill O’Connell married a hometown girl from the Midwest but had to take a job near Disneyland to do it.
“I grew up in Warren, Ohio, but my family moved to Arizona in 1957 when I was 15.”
The eldest of seven children headed to OC a few years later to run hotels. His kids, Bill, Bryan and Shannon, are now involved in the work.
He met his future wife, Jean, while there. They knew the same neighborhoods in Ohio as kids, but “I went to Catholic school, and she didn’t,” so they only began keeping company when he got to OC.
Jean had come west with a cousin of Bill’s to train as flight attendants with what was then Continental Airlines. When Continental switched gears to train Hawaiian crewmembers for new service to the islands—general commercial air travel was just taking flight—Jean’s initial idea was then on standby. She took an apartment in Santa Monica and a job with McDonnell Douglas.
The space-themed hotel Bill ran had a shuttle van with a rocket ship on top.
When he drove to see her in it, “she made me park two blocks away, and we took her car” on the date.
Despite his ride, they married in 1965.
— Paul Hughes
