A Sentimental Journey 26 Miles Across the Sea : ‘The Boys’ of High School Social Fraternity Travel On to Avalon for 50th Anniversary

For “the boys” of Delta Tau Sigma fraternity, the weekend’s outing to Catalina was a voyage of 26 miles (across the sea) and 50 years back in time to school days at dear old Manual Arts High.

Senior citizen discount tickets in hand, the group--20 of “the boys,” 16 wives, one fiancee and two widows--boarded the Catalina Express at San Pedro for the 90-minute journey to their own special island.

This was a golden anniversary, a time of “remember when,” of laughter and love and a few tears. There were youthful escapades to be relived, and savored, and where better than on Catalina Island?

First ‘Convention’

It was here, in 1935, that the fledgling fraternity had held its first “convention” (by all accounts, an event notable mostly for the quantity of sloe gin and the availability of girls to take dancing at the big ballroom).

And, if Catalina isn’t quite the same--if the big bands no longer play the ballroom, and Mother Gray’s cafe is gone along with the big white steamer and the “villas,” canvas-and-frame tent-cottages that four could squeeze into for $2.50 a night--well, they can’t take away the memories.

It was just before 9 o’clock Friday morning when the Express backed out of her berth at San Pedro and, from its sun deck, the group waved to Ida Lloyd as the helicopter carrying her whirred overhead. Lloyd, who declined the boat trip because of vertigo, would be on hand to meet the boat when it landed at Avalon.

Soon, the Bloody Marys were being passed and the reminiscing was beginning as the ship glided over the smooth sea.

Hunting, Fishing and Girls

“We used to come over here hunting and fishing, hunting for girls,” Bob Skibel, 66, was saying. Al Arugeti, 67, remembered, “We’d meet a girl on the boat, buy her a drink, dance with her and then she’d say adieu. “

Labor Days and Memorial Days were excuses to take off for Catalina, where the boys were and where the girls were. For the undergraduate set, it was the Balboa Island of its day.

For Armando Sanchez, 67, it wasn’t just a fling. It was on Catalina that he met a girl named Ruth Roll, who, it turned out, lived only two houses from his on 54th Street in Los Angeles. They’ve been married for 46 years and have seven children and 12 grandchildren.

The Art Deco casino ballroom where, more recently, the princes of rock have performed, was where young lovers danced and wooed. Ruth Sanchez recalled, “The first dance I ever had with Armando, Perry Como was singing with the Ted Weems orchestra.”

David White, 69, was a demon of a dancer who earned the nickname “Jigger.” But they all danced, the Balboa and the other steps, to the music of Harry James, Benny Goodman, Jan Garber, to the songs of Liltin’ Martha Tilton. Howard Lloyd remembered that “you could dance all evening for 50 cents and every night the ballroom was full. The streets would be empty until Bob Crosby stopped playing.”

The brothers of Delta Tau Sigma would be wearing their Depression-era best--$25 suits, pink shirts, white bucks. And, if they subsisted for the weekend mainly on sandwiches and oranges carried over by suitcase, supplemented by milk and cheese and crackers bought at an island grocery, there always was money enough for a few beers.

Sanchez was recalling the ritual of the “pot roast,” wherein each of the brothers would empty his pockets into a big roasting pan and the coins would be pooled for a bottle of sloe gin and a couple of dozen straws.

Joe A. Lewis, 69, by consensus the brother who has changed the most, was the fraternity cutup, by one brother’s description “a radical and a rebel.” The way they tell it today, the police were always waiting for Lewis, handcuffs in hand, when he set foot on Avalon and he’d be tossed in jail for public drunkenness. The brothers would let him sweat it out overnight before pooling their money to raise the $10 bail.

(Bill Leffert, 69, who masterminded this reunion, had asked the sheriffs to handcuff Lewis and take him away, just for laughs. But, this being 1985 and an era of lawsuits, they declined).

A funny thing happened to Joe Lewis in the service. As Frank Bruce, 67, explained it, “He came out a flag-waving Republican conservative.” He retired as an Air Force colonel and married Nancy, who until recently was an aide to retired Army Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters, now U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

But they remember something else about Joe Lewis, that when he left for the Army during World War II he left his car for any of the brothers who needed it with instructions that, “All you have to do is ring my mother’s doorbell and ask for the keys.” That’s the way it’s always been in the fraternity.

It all began on Feb. 26, 1935, when seven boys signed their names to the charter. The document stipulated an initiation fee of $12 and dues of 10 cents a week. During World War II, more than one member received good-natured “greetings” overseas reminding him of dues owed.

Bruce, the “big daddy” of the fraternity, was recalling how it began: “We were seniors. They didn’t allow fraternities in high school but most of us weren’t able to go on to college because those were depression days. We wanted to stay together--and most of us were frustrated athletes” looking to form a team on which to play.

At its peak, the membership was 45. Through the years, a few dropped out and others were voted in. The nucleus was from Manual Arts High on South Vermont Avenue--alma mater of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle and former Gov. Goodwin Knight, among others--but, being democratic, the fraternity later welcomed brothers from Washington High and Los Angeles High. Although the last member was accepted in the mid-’40s, there still are 25 on the active roll.

The outing to Catalina was no once-in-a-lifetime reunion. “For a long time,” Bob Skibel, 66, said, “we met once a week, then once a month. There’s a group that plays golf every Wednesday morning in South Pasadena. Then they have a little lunch and lie to each other and talk about the good old days.”

A Social Fraternity

Most still live in Southern California, but one couple came from Virginia, two others from Arizona.

Delta Tau Sigma is a social fraternity, and much more. Skibel recalled how, in high school, one of the fellows got a job with the railroad and soon managed to get four others jobs there. Through the years, if one brother was out of a job, the others made it their business to find him one.

“They’re closer than family,” Dorothy Skibel, said. She and Bob have been married for only 20 years but, she said, “It’s like I’ve known them forever.” They were there with financial aid when a member suffered an industrial accident and had a leg amputation. They were there with a new television set for Armando and Ruth Sanchez because they figured a couple with seven kids and a modest income could use a gift like that.

And they were there at the end for a member who, having fallen on bad times and not wanting the others to know it, was in an indigents’ ward, terminally ill with cancer. Learning of this, the gang paid a visit to the ward, but could not find him. Then, Bill Leffert remembered, a gaunt figure, unrecognizable, raised himself up, smiled and said, “Hey, you guys must be looking for me . . . “

Their fortunes have been varied. A few are wealthy men;, some owned small businesses, others had jobs. Their occupations included banker, insurance agent, city employee, policeman.

Through the years, they have stuck. During World War II, Ruth Sanchez said, “There was a party every Saturday night for the boys who were home on leave. We had three bottles of Canadian Club that lasted all the war because we kept filling the bottles with Three Feathers.”

One Didn’t Come Back

Only one of the brothers never came home, Howard Peck, a B-25 pilot who was shot down by the Japanese over the Philippine Islands. But Kenneth Lloyd, 68, gave everybody a good scare. An Air Force lieutenant, he was pilot of a B-17 that was shot down over Albania. It was weeks before his wife Ida, pregnant with their son, knew that he was alive. Lloyd spent a year as a POW.

Leo Sinclair, of the paint family, died of leukemia at the age of 39. And Mike Julio Trens, who’d served with distinction in the Navy during the war, was lost at sea years later. He was aboard a University of Hawaii oceanographic research vessel, the Holo Holo, that disappeared west of the islands on Dec. 9, 1978. The case remains a mystery.

Others are gone, but remembered whenever “the boys” gather. “Our ranks are dwindling,” said Howard Lloyd, at 66 one of the youngsters.

“There are no old people in this group,” Ray Thomas, 67, said. Indeed, they seem determined to laugh off the little infirmities of age, to savor, but not wish for, “the good old days.” As Addie Leffert put it, “Each year we’re just happy we’re here.”

There was, for example, Saturday’s mixed golf tournament at the country club--”very mixed,” as Ida Lloyd observed. There were shared jokes about the futility of players trying to spot the ball for one another. And Leffert, watching from the sidelines when someone in frustration threw his club in the air at a distant tee, said, “That can’t be one of our group. They’re not strong enough.”

The winner was Hank Hillis, 60, Colonel, USAF, ret., who shot a 69 for 18 holes on the par-64 course. Ken Lloyd walked off with the “world’s worst golfer” award with an impressive 71 over nine holes, leading John O’Mara to observe, “There was a 6-year-old girl on the course who shot an 89.”

Armando Sanchez, who’s had some health problems lately, noted that the fraternity’s second “Man of the Year” award had been bestowed on him in 1980 only because “they didn’t think I was going to last long enough for another one.”

Fraternity’s Football Hero

Sanchez, who is always pointed out as the fraternity’s football hero, insisted “I wasn’t as good as these guys thought I was. (Doyle) Nave was the star.” (Nave, who went from Manual Arts to USC as a quarterback, was a hero of USC’s last-minute 7-3 triumph over Duke’s Blue Devils in the 1939 Rose Bowl.) As for himself, Sanchez said, “I tried to get into the University of Boyle Heights and couldn’t.”

Ah, but who among them could forget Delta Tau Sigma’s victories over the San Pedro Longshoremen and the San Diego Bombers in the L.A. Municipal League semi-pro football season of ‘39? (With the help, admittedly, of a few ringers like Earl (The Eel) Elsey from Loyola University.)

Who could forget the 1945 dance at Riviera Country Club to welcome the boys home from the war? Bob Skibel recalled, “The club sent us a bill for $700 for repairs,” including replacement of glasses that had been tossed into the fireplace in a burst of conviviality.

And there was the fraternity house on Gramercy Place, bought in 1939 for $2,400. Some of the boys living there when they came out of the service were working night shifts, Frank Schillinger, 72, said, and “the bed would still be hot when the next guy got into it.”

It was at Hermosa Beach, where Delta Tau Sigmas, having pooled their quarters all winter, were able to rent a summer house, that Al Arugeti’s memorable initiation rite took place--a dip in molasses followed by a roll in Limburger cheese.

But Avalon was the special place. Ken Lloyd, 68, and Mervyn McDonald, 67, used to go spearfishing in the bay in a homemade diving bell fashioned from an old water heater. Their lifeline to the boat was a 60-foot garden hose through which the man above pumped air with a hand pump. The divers would later sneak into the exclusive Tuna Club to shower.

When the big white steamer came into Avalon, some of the

Delta Tau Sigmas would dive for coins thrown by passengers into the clear green water. Howard Lloyd recalled, “Everyone would meet those boats. There would be a band playing ‘Avalon.’ And the islanders, those who’d been here two days, would rag the newcomers. Then they’d yell, ‘Hi, neighbor!’ ”

High School Sweethearts

Robert Ingold, 69, a yachtsman, would years later be commodore of the Catalina Yacht Club. He and Arlyne, high school sweethearts at Manual Arts, who now live in Fallbrook, were first in the group to marry, in June of 1937, starting their life together, she remembered, in a $25-a-month apartment in Inglewood. She loved him, she likes to say, because “he was the only boy who had a car,” a powder blue Model A roadster.

Bill Leffert married an “outsider,” an L.A. High girl, 44 years ago. They met when he was working at a service station at Crenshaw and Adams and she at a coffee shop next door. Addie Leffert said, “He came in every day for three months and ordered coffee. He doesn’t even like coffee, but coffee was five cents and tea was 10 cents.”

Some of the wives were schoolgirls together. “What’s nice about this group,” Armando Sanchez said, “is that you can see your old girlfriend with your best friend” and it’s just fine.

There have been some divorces, and remarriages. The group is quick to accept newcomers who fit in. Frank Bruce and his fiancee, Gloria Peri, 54, who’ll marry Oct. 27, were showered with gag gifts (a supply of No-Doz, literature on family planning) at a party. Peri already is one of the group.

Alicia Lloyd, who is in her 40s and was an airline stewardess before marrying Howard Lloyd 18 years ago, was expressing her mock horror that no one had challenged her senior citizen ticket on the Catalina Express. She suggested to Nancy Lewis, a contemporary, “We’ve been hanging out with these guys too long.”

At the banquet Saturday night at the Palms, Mervyn McDonald offered thanks: “Dear Lord, we thank you for this youthful association that has lasted half a century.”

Joe Lewis’s presentation was a trip down memory lane to 1935--when a Plymouth car cost $565, movie matinees cost a quarter, a stamp was three cents and drive-ins and rumble seats were the vogue.

Priscilla Schillinger, ignoring the three-minute limit on reminiscences, evoked thoughts of Flash Gordon movies on Saturdays, Astaire and Rogers, and Ray Noble playing “The Very Thought of You.”

“We were before panty hose and drip-dry clothes,” she said, “and before men wore long hair and earrings and women wore pants and tuxedoes.” It was a time, too, before premarital sex, she noted, “or so we said.” She smiled and said, “The man I’ve lived with is my husband and after 47 years he’s the same one. It’s kind of embarrassing, but also it’s wonderful.”

Hank Hillis proposed a toast “to those who’ve gone before us.”

‘Man of the Century’

The party was a roast, of sorts, for Frank Bruce, the fraternity’s “Man of the Century.” He was duly introduced as “the only member of the fraternity to stay behind while his mother went off to war.” (Bruce acknowledged earlier having fought only “The Battle of Tulsa,” exempted because he was in war work with Douglas Aircraft. His mother, then in her early 40s, joined the WACS as a private, went on to become a captain.) Bruce later left Douglas and founded Bruce Industries (aircraft parts).

Jim Teevan, 68, said that watching his own children grow up, he “often felt so sorry for them, that they didn’t have something like this to be a part of their lives . . . I just wish we were looking forward to 50 years from now.”

William Hack, 66, visibly touched, said, “I never will know any better people than are in this room tonight.” Jack O’Mara, his voice almost drowned out by the cacophony of ‘80s music from the adjacent patio, said he hoped the group would “keep going until we all drop dead, OK?” David White, 69, said simply, “I love everybody here.”

Frank Bruce, accepting his award, insisted, “You guys honor me beyond what I really deserve.” As a chorus, the voices shot back, “We sure do.”

Squinting to try to make out the text of some prepared remarks, one of the speakers was heard to ask a tablemate, “What the hell does this say?”

Bruce mopped at his tears as Hank Hillis led a hearty “Hip-hip-hooray!” By acclamation, Bill Leffert was chosen the 1986 Man of the Year. Only Leffert opposed the choice.

Finally, Bob Skibel said, “I hope all of you here live to be 100 years old--and the very last voice you hear will be mine.”