Ethnic Shift at Hollywood High Is Test of Tolerance

After teaching science at Hollywood High School for 25 years, Harry Hughes might be expected occasionally to dwell in the past.

When the feeling strikes, he hauls out an the same old yearbook--a red, dog-eared annual from Hollywood High’s class of 1968--from a stack of chemistry and biology texts and passes it among his students.

Last week, Hughes fetched the book for yet another class. As it passed through rows of newly arrived immigrant students, handed off from Salvadorans to Armenians to Vietnamese to Nicaraguans, Hughes listened to their shocked gasps and waited for the familiar question.

Whites Once Dominated

Finally, it came: “Why,” asked one baffled student, “were there so many white people?”

The faces of white, all-American teen-agers once dominated the pages of Hollywood High School’s yearbooks. For decades, the affluent children of the Hollywood Hills used Hollywood High as their college preparatory school. They stocked the school’s football teams and cheerleading squads with the most athletic and winsome among them, while teachers like Harry Hughes propelled them on the path to inevitable adult success.

But those days are long gone. As Hollywood High reels from successive waves of immigrants, first from Soviet Armenia, then Southeast Asia, and now Central America, the remaining American-born students, who now make up less than 20% of the school’s 2,100-population, have become a dwindling, uneasy minority.

Most Find Rewards

Most American students have found that their contacts with Hollywood’s immigrants have led to rewarding friendships and a deeper appreciation of cultural differences. But some acknowledge yearning for more of their own. And some Americans complain that their education is sometimes hampered by classes that are largely made up of English-poor immigrant students, a grievance often echoed by their teachers.

At least a third of the school’s 100 teachers have been at Hollywood High long enough to remember when American-born students were in the majority. Many, like Harry Hughes, have adapted to Hollywood High’s new world. Others have stubbornly continued teaching methods no longer suited to the school’s ethnic mix. A few have simply given up and retired, still clinging to visions of the Hollywood High that existed when they were in their prime.

“The whole situation was just so overwhelming,” said Harry Major, 53, a Shakespeare scholar who taught at Hollywood for 28 years before taking early retirement last year. “Students were checking in and out of my classes all the time. Hardly any of them understood what I was trying to teach. I never knew if I was getting in a new crop of kids . . . . I used to try to put a positive tone on it, but after a while, I realized I didn’t know where to even begin with them.”

Academic Excellence the Norm

When Major joined Hollywood High’s faculty in 1956, he came to a teacher’s paradise, a school so accustomed to academic excellence that teaching openings were hard to find.

“It was like moving to a small New England prep school,” said Willard Hansen, who taught English between 1954 and 1962 and returned to Hollywood last year to become the school’s principal. “None of the teachers ever left, because they had it so good.”

Hollywood’s scholastic reputation was no fluke. Students were required to write a flawless English composition to graduate. A solitary misspelled word or run-on sentence could mean the difference between passing or flunking.

“The goal was to program kids for college,” said John Swinford, a 1967 Hollywood graduate who now heads the school’s English department. “Not everyone went, but even if they went into a white-collar job, they had a good education behind them. Hollywood High was a steppingstone to life.”

Few Anxieties Then

Whether they came from affluent families in the hills or middle-class homes in the Hollywood flats, the vast majority of Hollywood’s students were white and monied enough to live without worrying about life’s difficulties. Anxieties came only when their grades dipped or their social lives suffered.

The most golden among them were the “soshes,” wealthy students from the hills who drove down to school each day in Mustangs and Chevrolet convertibles. They always looked good, wearing school fraternity and sorority jackets over their stylish madras shirts and long, A-line dresses. Most of the school’s student leaders came from their ranks and they often appeared in dramatic productions attended by Hollywood talent scouts.

The school had other crowds, too--surfers who lived only for sunny weekends, leather-jacketed hoods who were the first to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs and, as might be expected in a school with a bookish bent, intellectuals who looked down on all of them.

‘A Little Weird’

John Swinford hung out with the intellectuals, usually taking the bus to school, but sometimes sheepishly showing up in his father’s Cadillac. “We were the sort who would put blindfolds on at lunch and feel each other’s lunch bags, kind of a sensory-deprivation experiment,” he recalled. “When I tell my students about it now, they think I’m a little weird.”

Hollywood High’s insulated little world was rocked in 1968, when the school district decided to shrink the school’s attendance boundaries. Students had once come to Hollywood from as far north as Studio City. But the redistricting placed the northern boundary at Mulholland Drive, atop the hills, effectively cutting out some of the school’s most affluent neighborhoods.

“That was the turning point,” Harry Major said. “In one blow, we lost the cream of our students.”

In the decade that followed, the move proved even more decisive. The middle-class white population in Hollywood’s flatlands fled, replaced by a succession of immigrants. And, as the immigrant population grew, more and more of the remaining white families in the hills apparently began placing their children in private schools.

Many of Hollywood High’s remaining hillside students have friends in private schools. Often, they have to correct misleading horror tales whispered by their friends about Hollywood students victimized by gang members or caught up in rampant drug abuse.

Given a Choice

“You wonder where some of these stories come from,” said Teddy Guggenheim, 16, a junior. “As far as I know, drugs are worse in private schools.”

Donovan Leitch, 17, the son of folk-singer Donovan, said his parents gave him a choice of attending a private school or Hollywood High. “There was no contest,” he said. “I chose Hollywood. There’s more reality here. I didn’t want to be sheltered. I haven’t regretted it.”

But students like Guggenheim and Leitch are the exceptions to estimates by school officials that this year’s class has the lowest percentage of American-born students in Hollywood High’s 82-year history. American-born white students now make up less than 12% of the school’s 2,100-member student body; American-born black students, many of whom transferred from schools outside the Hollywood area, make up another 8%.

American-born students tend not to keep to themselves. Most find friends among immigrant students who came up with them from elementary and junior high school.

Leitch, 17, who is student body president, says that American-born students have to be “a little bit like chameleons. There aren’t enough of us to stay together like the Armenians or a lot of the immigrants do. The American kids have to get along with everyone.”

In ‘Another Country’

Still, there are times when Georgina Rich, a 17-year-old junior, wanders the campus of Hollywood High and feels strangely dislocated. “When you see all these other kids who aren’t like you, you begin to feel like you’re in another country, that you’re not an American,” she said. “Sometimes I wish there were just a few more of us.”

John Swinford said that in his honors American literature course, only six of 29 students were born in the United States. While all are bright enough to read and comprehend difficult 19th-Century American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Swinford expected the American students to fare better, simply because of their backgrounds.

Instead, Swinford found that his American students either slack off because they feel linguistically superior to immigrant students or, even more surprisingly, learn at the same pace as immigrant students because they have been learning at the same level throughout elementary school and junior high school.