GOOD OLD DAYS:

Snow in Costa Mesa? It seems as likely to freeze over as the Sahara.

Decades ago, however, the foreign white stuff fell on Orange County — not just once, but twice in three years.

It was the week of Jan. 15, 1949, and Don Knipp, 18 at the time, was a senior at Newport Harbor High School. One cold evening, a cold rain got a little bit brisker, and floated down on Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, he said.

“We all made snowmen out in front of the house with the neighbors,” Knipp, 77, said. “By the end of the day, of course, it was gone.”

Along with the snowmen, Knipp remembers running around his front yard, tossing snowballs at his brother, Bruce.

For Ted Millett, also 77, who lived down on Peninsula Point at the time, the snow came as a quite a shock.

“Those days you didn’t know what kind of weather you were going to get anyway,” he said. “There wasn’t the weather man on television to tell you.”

Like his classmates, Knipp wanted to ditch school and enjoy the freak weather at his family home on 23rd Street, where he still lives, but his parents objected.

“There was snow at the beach,” he said. “A lot of kids ditched school that day. I actually had to go, because my parents wouldn’t have it, and those were some empty classrooms.”

The sight of snow on the beach was strange and didn’t last long, Millett said.

“I would call it a dusting,” he said. “The next morning it was white, but as soon as the sun came up you lost it.”

But the sight of mountains covered in snow was too tempting to resist, he added.

“The thing is you looked around and you saw Saddleback and the Santa Ana mountains and it was just sparkling white,” Millett said. “We all got in our cars and drove up to the slopes of Saddleback, where you had substantial snow.”

It wasn’t even the first time that decade that the area saw snow, Knipp said.

He holds more photos showing his front lawn all white, dated to 1946.