Decorator Plays With Toys 365 Days a Year--Loves It

William M. Lewis, 43, has lived most of his life in a Christmas fantasy land.

Oh, he’s worked for “straight” employers like a telephone company and the City of Placentia, but then he developed a new taste in life by decorating areas of Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, two make-believe worlds in Orange County. “Working there was like escaping reality,” Lewis said.

As a youngster, he built what his mother called a motorized “do-nothing” machine, his original fantasy. “All it did was turn some gears,” he said, “but it fascinated me.”

Now, his life is really fun, said the Fullerton man, who motorizes elves with moving arms and legs for commercial and residential Christmas displays. Besides that, he decorates Christmas trees, including one in South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

“I get to play with toys 365 days of the year, and that suits me because I enjoy life and I enjoy fantasy,” he said. “Besides that, I guess I’m also very sentimental.”

The sentiment refers to the days when major department stores--Bullock’s was one of his favorites--would put Christmas displays in their windows for young and old to enjoy as a prelude to Christmas. “That’s all gone now,” he said wistfully, remembering his visits to downtown Los Angeles to view elegant and sometimes whimsical yule window displays.

“Now we have malls and shopping centers and the days of window dressing are all gone,” he said. To satisfy his longing for those days, he is planning a Christmas display for next year that would run the entire length of a mall.

It would show Christmas by using decorated modules to present such areas as Santa’s office, toy workshop, bakery, stable and glass ornament factory. That idea, he believes, would get customers to walk the length of the mall to do Christmas shopping..

“Now, all I have to do is find someone who’s interested in this,” said Lewis, who will spend about 60 hours putting 3,000 lights on his own 9-foot-high and 12-foot-wide Christmas tree. He uses one-of-a-kind ornaments and 60 pounds of metal tinsel to deck the tree.

Besides making a comfortable living for his wife, Linda, and three children, Lewis said his work will give children of today a chance to share the happiness he enjoyed as a youth watching animated elves in department store windows.

Taft Elementary School Principal John Bennett passed this word about an unnamed fourth-grader who was caught up in the spirit of the school’s canned food drive for Thanksgiving Day.

Bennett said the youth scoured his Santa Ana neighborhood, collecting discarded aluminum cans that he later sold at a recycling center for $7. With money in hand, he traipsed to a supermarket and spent that amount on canned food and the next day deposited his purchase with cans other students had brought from home.

While many schoolchildren show concern for those in need, the fourth-grader was an exception, Bennett believes.

He said the boy is from a family of 11 children and probably would meet the criteria to receive some of the food he donated.

June Urschel, 38, of Tustin is going to have a high-flying New Year’s Day party when she and nine other sky divers will jump from a plane and fall at 130 m.p.h. in a synchronized competitive drop.

“I’m not much for watching football on New Year’s Day,” said Urschel, a Newport Beach engineering firm bookkeeper who has made 875 sky dives in three years, including one on Thanksgiving.

After solo jumps, Urschel turned to team jumping, which gives chutists 35 seconds to complete the formation or scrub it. “I’m really wrapped up in sky diving,” she said. “It’s like an addiction.”

And an expensive habit at that. “It costs $15 just to get on the plane,” she said, “and that becomes expensive when you take five jumps a day.”

Before sky diving, Urschel spent her weekends water skiing, horseback riding, skeet shooting and hunting birds.

Why the change?

“It’s the thrill of it,” she said. “My life is in my own hands and it’s up to me to save it. That’s exciting.”

Acknowledgments--Harold Kravitz, of Costa Mesa, former president of Temple Beth Emet in Anaheim, named president of the Pacific Southwest Region of United Synagogues of America, an umbrella group composed of Conservative synagogues.