Newport Harbor High alumni breakfast club eats to the memories
Restaurants may come and go, but memories last forever.
And memories are what a group of Newport Harbor High School alumni — who graduated as long ago as 1940 — seek each Thursday morning over breakfast, even if their meeting place changes.
The breakfast club — which dates back eight decades — recently was meeting at Mimi’s Cafe on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa before the location closed last month.
The former Sailors had breakfast there every week for about three years.
Before that, the alumni grabbed grub farther down Newport Boulevard at Denny’s — until it closed in 2013.
This Thursday’s breakfast was the group’s third at its new gathering place, Coco’s on Harbor Boulevard in Costa Mesa.
“If the rest of the places keep going out, pretty soon we’ll be all the way up to Santa Ana,” Paul Starn, a member of the class of 1961, said with a laugh.
At the table Thursday, the group passed around old photos and a 20-page packet about the breakfast club’s origins compiled by 1961 alumnus Jim Dukette.
“Wow, Jim, is there going to be a quiz later?” one of them joked.
Each of the alumni is a walking encyclopedia of Newport Harbor High history. Volumes from the classes of 1940 through 1971 were present at the breakfast Thursday.
Newport Beach resident Sparkes McClellan, class of 1940, has attended the longest among the current club members, having joined sometime in the 1980s, when the meet-ups were intended for current Newport Harbor faculty. He wasn’t a faculty member but was welcomed anyway.
Newport Harbor’s first athletic coach, Ralph Reed, and first principal, Sidney Davidson, inadvertently began the breakfast tradition with morning meetings at a cafe downhill from the school shortly after the campus opened in 1930.
Reed later invited a few teachers to the breakfast. Class of 1943 alumnus Bill Neth was the group’s first former student to join, according to Dukette’s journal.
“As time went along, the teachers slowly dropped out and a new group of [former] students came in,” McClellan said. “If you’re a Harbor alum, you’re welcome.”
There are a few exceptions.
Ivan “Danny” Dan graduated from Glendale High School in 1941 but attends the breakfast in place of his late wife, Joan Dodd, a Newport Harbor alumna who was known as the “Balboa Bay mermaid” for her accomplishments as a student swimmer.
Since moving their meetings to Coco’s, the alumni say they miss Gladys, their regular waitress at Mimi’s, whom they considered part of their group.
“We’re a bunch of clowns, but she would clown right back,” class of 1954 alumnus Howard Hall said, noting that she always had a way of remembering their breakfast orders.
The group is still searching for Gladys in hopes of sending her the annual Christmas tip from the club.
But the crew is beginning to settle in at Coco’s with the usual quips and table banter.
Classmates Starn, Dukette and John Fitzgerald joke of how women from their class once attended but must have been scared off.
But class of 1948 alumna Dolores Perlin, the Pirate Queen of the back-to-school Spirit Week in 1946, regularly joins the mostly male group.
Neth’s younger brother Roger passed around a copy of the student newspaper, The Beacon, that was published in 1940, his freshman year at Newport Harbor.
“Being here, we get taken way back when to memories that have faded in the distance,” Roger Neth said. “It’s a lot of ‘Do you remember so and so?’ and how we remember it the same way.”
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
