The Melting Pot at Roosevelt High 50 Years Ago : Three Classes Return for Reunion, Recall the Way They Were

Ah, as Archie Bunker sings, those were the days.

Days when homes had one bathroom, one telephone--and no television. When gasoline was 10 cents a gallon and cars had things called “running boards.” When nothing at Woolworth’s cost more than 10 cents. When double features at the movies--where you could sit through as many showings as you wanted--sometimes included a “talent night” live show.

And the music, always so important to teen-agers, was “Blue Moon,” “It’s June in January,” “Lookie Lookie Lookie Here Comes Cookie,” “The Carioca.”

Golden Reunion Gala

Ah, yes, those were the days--and the ones remembered Saturday evening as the classes of 1934, ’35 and ’36 of Roosevelt High School gathered at the Airport Marriott for their Golden Reunion Gala.

It was indeed a festive occasion. Half a century had passed, but old friends--nearly 700, including spouses--found each other, recognized each other and hugged each other.

“Hermie!” said Lily Rubin Kompaniez, winter class of ’36. “It’s Lily!”

A few minutes later Gert Daniloff Kanter, having greeted a classmate, turned and explained, “We both have the same first cousin.”

Rose Rubin Gilbert, Lily’s twin, had flown back from Italy for the event. Mary Momose Wake, winter ‘34, one of the school’s many alumni of Japanese descent, was happy to find “some very dear Jewish friends” of years gone by.

State Sen. Herschel Rosenthal, winter ‘36, proclaimed the event “wonderful” and said that the men were easier to recognize than the women classmates: “The men have lost a little hair and added to the waistline, but they look pretty much the same.” He also spoke of the community and times in which the Roosevelt High School of 50 years ago existed.

“Everybody knew everybody, and everybody was poor so nobody moved,” Rosenthal said. “It was a community that was stable. We had such a great feeling in school, a feeling of friendship.”

That feeling of friendship was a recurring theme earlier in the week as alumni involved with planning the reunion returned to one point: the community that nurtured Roosevelt High in those days was an example of the great American melting pot.

“We were almost all children of immigrants,” Lily Kompaniez said. “There were a few WASPs--Herbie Klein (former press secretary to President Richard Nixon). A lot of Japanese, no Chinese, a few Italians. . . . Most of them (students) spoke a foreign language in the home.”

Her husband, Eugene Kompaniez, a thoracic surgeon, and Milton Rubin, chairman of the Roosevelt High 50th reunion, remember the ethnic mix also.

“In the ‘flats’ off of Fourth and Boyle it was entirely Russian,” Rubin said, “and there were a number of Armenian families around the Bridge Street School.”

A Melting Pot

Ruben Almanzan, who remained in the Boyle Heights area until moving to Hacienda Heights five years ago, also recalled it as a melting pot. Latinos, he said, were in the minority--a far cry from Los Angeles Unified School District statistics that indicate Roosevelt’s present enrollment of 3,500 as 96.9% Latino.

(Congressman Ed Roybal, one of Roosevelt’s notable Latino alumni, was scheduled to attend the reunion but was prevented from coming by matters in Washington.)

Grace Terada Ito, winter ‘36, also recalled “so many different ethnic groups. We got along so well, we enjoyed so many friendships. I only remember the good times. We must have been young and happy.”

Julio Gonzales, winter ‘35, now U.S. marshal in Los Angeles after retiring from 21 years on the Los Angeles Police Department, recalled a spirit of friendship, a home economics course, going to class in makeshift tents after the 1933 earthquake and playing basketball at the YMCA on Euclid Avenue. He and Erwin Baker, a retired Times reporter, both remember the prestige of belonging to the ROTC.

Baker remembered a history teacher who recruited football players for USC, enabling many to go on to college on scholarships, and Gonzales spoke of the inspiration he found in an athletic coach, Tony Galindo, “the first Hispanic coach in any sport. . . . He really made an impression on me.”

Time to Rejoice

Toyoka Kataoka Kanegai, winter ‘36, rejoiced at Saturday’s reunion to find so many long-lost friends.

“When the war came and the Japanese were relocated,” she said, “we lost our home, and when we came back we couldn’t find our friends. Then my husband was with military intelligence for 22 years, and I could not find my Japanese friends when we returned. But when we were in school, we didn’t even know what nationality we were. It just didn’t matter.”

Many of Roosevelt High’s mid-1930s students did not graduate, Milt Rubin admitted, largely because they had to go to work to help support their families in the Great Depression. His own entry into Los Angeles City College (and later UCLA) was delayed because of financial necessity.

“I graduated in June and my father died in August,” he said. “There was my mother and sister and the burden of the family fell on me. I went to work in Max Grad’s Richfield station at the corner of Evergreen and Malabar. All my friends had gone on to City College. I couldn’t go and I was really heartbroken.

“A friend of mine came by the gas station on New Year’s Eve of 1935 and said, ‘How about parking cars for me tonight? I’ll pay you a dollar an hour.’ I was making $14 a week for 70 hours of work, so a dollar an hour was a fortune.

“At the end of the evening he offered me a permanent job. The hours were 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and I took it so I could go to school during the day.”

Went Into Service

He registered at City College and later was graduated from UCLA. Then, as with most of his classmates, he went into the service during World War II, married and reared a family.

Erwin Baker, a reporter for the Examiner for years before joining The Times, was editor of the Rough Rider, Roosevelt High’s student newspaper. His successor as sports editor was Herb Klein, the future Presidential adviser. Even in high school Baker had a flair for investigative reporting.

“I found a way to spend more money for pictures, but the principal, G. Millage Montgomery, didn’t agree and suspended me from the Rough Rider for six weeks,” Baker said. “I finished my senior year as editor, but one of the traditional honors for the paper’s editor, membership in the Ephebians, was denied me.”

So Roosevelt High’s mid-’30s graduates celebrated. They turned out in tuxedos and long gowns, in cocktail dresses and polyester pantsuits; they peered at their graduation pictures on their name tags and ogled photos taken that evening on monitors in the room where they dined.

They talked of the “Good Old Days”--the rivalry with Garfield High, the football games lost to Manual Arts (“I used to go home and cry,” said Lily Kompaniez), of going to the movies at the Meralta theater, of the 16 pairs of twins at Roosevelt in those days.

One man, like the others in his late 60s, proclaimed the event “a beautiful party, but they run out of herring.”

Another woman, scrutinizing a guest’s name tag, ascertained a non-Rooseveltian.

“No,” she said, “I don’t have to hug you. “