Print Rows of Quonset huts off Costa Mesa’s 17th Street have always seemed to hint at a storied past, but now a recently painted mural and the man who commissioned it aim to bring that story into clearer focus. Recently, local muralist Nancy Hadley signed off on an outdoor painting of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber, whose wingspan stretches an impressive 65 feet from tip to tip, on the exterior wall of a Quonset hut at Pacific Mesa Properties, on a portion of the erstwhile Santa Ana Army Air Base. That’s where, for a crucial period during World War II, the U.S. Army housed and trained the pilots, engineers, bombardiers and navigators who would work with and operate the craft in combat.