Gaye LeBaron: Remember the sonic booms that came from the Hamilton Field?

If I were to say, “I went to Hamilton a couple of weeks ago and found it both interesting and surprising,” responses would differ, depending on age. Millennials and Gen Xers would certainly ask me how I liked the show, maybe even hum a few bars.

But old-timers may get my drift, responding that they hadn’t thought about that special place in 20 years - or offering a poor imitation of a sonic boom.

Those answers could come from a few of the boomers (baby, not sonic) - but mostly from the silent generation, as those beyond their mid-70s are called these days.

The well-remembered sonic booms that rattled the North Coast in the 1960s came out of Hamilton Field, the Air Force base that dominated northeastern Marin County. They punctuated the curiosity about the place that was clearly off-limits but right alongside on the road to San Francisco.

Both the Redwood Highway and the Sears Point cutoff passed along its edges, and motorists watched as military aircraft took off or landed as they passed by. It was one of the significant ways that war came ever so close to home in three fearful eras: World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam.

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It was the First World War that clearly showed the new flying machine called the aeroplane to be the weapon of the future. The Army’s Crissy Field on the bay shore of San Francisco’s Presidio would become useless for military craft as the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rose up and aircraft got bigger and faster, requiring much more space.

By the 1930s, the War Department’s search for an air defense site on the Pacific Coast was well underway. The Marin County Board of Supervisors took a chance, levied a 40% override parcel tax to buy 776 acres known as Marin Meadows, offered to sell it to the War Department - for a dollar - and got itself an airfield.

Construction began in the early ’30s. It was intended, according to the supervising architect, to be beautiful and was, indeed, regarded as the “prettiest airfield” in the Corps. With its Spanish California arches and roof tiles and artistic bas-relief on the larger structures, it earned the nickname “The Country Club.”

One of Hamilton’s last commanders observed for a video history that it was such a favorite that “it would have sunk into the mud if everyone who wanted to be stationed here had been.”

By 1938, there were 200 planes in nine hangars, including B-12 bombers, soon to be nudged aside by the B-17 “Flying Fortresses,” in turn replaced by pursuit planes, P-36 through 40. Later it would be the West Coast home of the F-104s and subsequent F-106s, capable of speeds over 1,500 mph that routinely broke the sound barrier.

The arrival of the “Jet Age” produced the aforementioned sonic booms that rattled the windows, scared the kids, made housewives jump and run and strong men flinch, and wakened sleeping babies. Chicken ranchers said the booms scared their flocks of hens out of laying the standard number of eggs, while a few dairymen claimed the sound disrupted milk flows.

Complainants got no sympathy from the military. The Air Force stood firm in the conviction that this was simply the new manner of defense and, according to a Hamilton Field handbook from the 1960s, was of little consequence. “While it may break a few windows,” the book said, the booms were “a blunt fact of life” in the supersonic age and the citizenry must learn to live with them.

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MERCIFULLY, the supersonic age became less sonic with progress. But the ongoing evolution of flight and weaponry, leading to ground-to-air missiles and beyond, made fighter planes less relevant by the ’70s. In 1973, Hamilton’s 1,500-acre airfield was deactivated. It was formally decommissioned the following year and passed to the Air Force Reserve and the Army as caretakers. In 1988, it was closed by the Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure program and ultimately offered for sale.

It was a rocky road to development for Marin, particularly for the then-small city of Novato that made a bold move to annex the base. After lying stagnant for a decade or more, redevelopment was accomplished, and today there are handsome town houses and single-family residences where the runways used to be. Hangars that sheltered four generations of military aircraft and provided temporary quarters for the “boat people,” refugees from the Vietnam War in the ’80s, have been converted to spacious, light and airy office, commercial and industrial spaces, with 21st-century tenants including Visual Concepts, video game companies 2K Sports and Toys for Bob, Sony’s Imageworks, Republic of Tea and Birkenstock’s Distribution.

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WHEN THE BOOMS ceased and the base closed, when the highway widened and traffic moved a lot faster, Hamilton Field fell off Sonoma County’s radar, no pun intended. The Press Democrat’s archival references to the air base after the closing are mainly in obituaries, more than 100 of them, for “locals” who commuted to work at the base, who were stationed at the base or who married someone who was. We have never even bothered to count, in all the traffic and commuter coverage, how many Sonoma County residents work at the “new” Hamilton.

The “territory” of a print newspaper is defined by its circulation area. The PD’s domain stops at San Antonio Creek (the county line), and the Marin Independent Journal takes over from there. The IJ’s archives are a record of the decades of trial and error, the expansion of the Novato city limits to include the base and the surrounding community of Ignacio, and the hopes and dreams, starts and stops of conversion plans.

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THERE ARE A FEW salient points about this Hamilton story that the northern neighbors should hear.

It was named for WWI Lt. Lloyd Hamilton, the first American to fly with the British Royal Flying Corps, who died in France just 13 days after being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Hero that he was, there was considerable grumbling in the neighborhood because Hamilton was a New Yorker and many felt it should have been Darby Field, honoring a Marin WWI pilot.

The busy Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport’s beginnings are as an auxiliary to Hamilton. By mid-December of ’41, bulldozers were in the hopyards of the Laughlin, Talmadge and Slusser ranches north of River Road, carving runways for the Army. The Army Engineers stationed at “Camp Wikiup” built the base, which shed Hamilton parentage in ’44 and, at war’s end, became the Sonoma County Airport (later named for Schulz).

Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Western Army Air Corps, officiated at Hamilton’s dedication in ’35 and would be around to keep an eye on the new base. He and his wife, Bea, made their home in the Sonoma Valley, north of the Sonoma Golf Club on what was known as “the Back Road.” Then, in 1947, the Air Corps became independent of the Army, and Hap Arnold was its first commander and the only general ever to wear five stars in two branches of the military. That’s when the Back Road became, officially, Arnold Drive.

Not only did scores of veterans who had been stationed at Hamilton come home to live in Sonoma County, but there were also at least 1,000 county residents who worked civilian jobs at Hamilton in the war years. Many stayed on to retire as aircraft mechanics, sheet metal workers, in armaments, in office work, even as barbers like the late Gilbert Gray, a founder of the Sonoma County NAACP chapter. Hamilton had its “Rosies,” as did Marinship and Mare Island, the other two WWII destinations for workers. Women at Hamilton worked not only in the offices but also in the metal and fabric shops, riding carts out on the runways for repairs alongside the men, earning not only welcome wartime wages but also considerable respect.

We can’t leave any discussion of Hamilton without talking about the wild pigs. In the early days of the base, wild hogs were misidentified by the military as razorbacks - but they were just the old familiar farmers’ hogs gone wild, whose progeny still vex us. They developed a taste for the gunnery targets at the base perimeters. What they didn’t eat, they destroyed. Armed foot soldiers patrolled the perimeters with orders to shoot on sight. There is no record of those missions’ success or failure.

There may also have been a detachment assigned to restore a herd of Holsteins that had wandered north to graze between the runways to their home pasture at St. Vincent’s Orphanage. One report put the number of wayward cattle at 50.

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LAST MONTH, finally, I paid a visit to the Hamilton development and was surprised to find that, like so many others, I have been driving past the old gate for decades without a notion of what was inside.

I got a tour from Gene Marcinkowski, a Cloverdale resident who is a docent at the Hamilton Field History Museum. Gene’s story is a familiar California tale. He grew up in Gary, Indiana, joined the Air Force in his late teens, arrived at Hamilton Air Force Base in 1960, married a Sonoma girl and is still here.

The visit - I’ll admit my ignorance - was a surprise. A lot of the old base is still there, preserved as a historic site. There are the Mission-style buildings, palm-lined streets, parks, a swimming pool, a movie theater, a contemporary art museum, the Hamilton history museum and a very Italian restaurant called Beso Bistro.

And one more important thing: There is a SMART stop just outside the main gate.