Glendale seniors prove it’s never too late for the prom
Pete Minkler, being pushed on the dance floor by Noemi Scarlatta, joyfully high fives fellow dancers during the Scholl Canyon Estates Senior Prom on Thursday, April 28, 2016.
The senior residents at Scholl Canyon Estates dressed up in their finest Thursday night for a second chance at attending a prom that several of them never had the opportunity to experience when they were teenagers.
Marybeth Maloney Thicke helped organize the prom with fellow staff of assisted living facility, who ordered balloons and laid out appetizers and punch around 4 p.m. in the room where the seniors typically dine.
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There would be dinner, a cake and the crowning of the night’s King and Queen, before they would make room to dance in the dining room.
Throughout the evening, students from St. Francis High School waited on the seniors by providing them with food and drinks, or simply talking with them.
“Now that they’re retired and slowing down and enjoying life, it’s nice to give back to them what they gave up,” Thicke said. “They grew up in a very hard time during the [1930s] and ‘40s. I just thought it would be nice to throw them a party they never had.”
Ray Victor, 92, was a student at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights in 1942, when he played the trombone in a local band.
But his school’s band director hired Victor’s band to play at the prom.
“I danced one dance,” Victor recalled. That was after a girl, who was always teasing Victor, asked his band director if Victor could sit out for one song so he could dance.
Of having a chance at a prom again, Victor said with a smile, “It’s my first and last.”
Fellow resident Lorrain Titus, 88, also missed her prom after dropping out school in Oklahoma City at 16 years old.
She met her husband while roller skating and, a few months later, they were married. He was 18, and in the U.S. Navy, and would soon be stationed in Virginia.
“I left school and went to be with him. So I missed the prom, but that’s all right,” she said.
Walter and Nancy Scheun were crowned King and Queen Thursday night after residents cast their votes.
They married in 1954, two years after meeting each other in Los Angeles.
Walter Scheun, 89, dropped out of school at 16 to begin working as “an office boy” for a company in Chicago.
He eventually went back to school to earn his high school degree.
Nancy Scheun, 86, missed her prom for a different reason.
“I was never asked,” she said.
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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com
Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
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