Sweet Memories : Class of ’35 Comes Home to Vast Change--and Surprise

It took Bill Martin more than 50 years to ask Cathy Bercu for a date.

Then one thing led to another, as Martin put it, and last weekend the two former Alhambra High School students surprised nearly 185 of their former classmates by announcing their engagement at the class’s 50th-year reunion.

It seemed fitting to Martin, who helped organize the reunion, that the announcement be made among classmates renewing old friendships.

They met in grammar school but were just friends, Bercu said. The two renewed their friendship only four years ago, after each had raised families and their spouses had died, Martin said.

Could That Be . . . ?

Last week when the class of 1935 held its first reunion, scores of other classmates, now in their late 60s, discovered the familiar faces of childhood friends hidden behind well-set smile lines and silvered hair. There were hesitant stares as classmates searched their memories for the name to match that oh-so-familiar face. Finally , a spark of recognition would bring laughter and hugs.

“He was a little skinny guy when I knew him, now look at him,” said a jovial Paul Prince of San Gabriel, a retired ironworker and former deep-sea diver, as he pointed out his old buddy Charles Fantuzzi. Fantuzzi, a retired Los Angeles policeman, is now stocky and no longer the 140-pound beanpole his friend remembers.

“The ladies have changed more than the fellows have,” said Thelma Hall Bescos, a former fashion model who now owns a butcher supply business in Alhambra. “But once you find a name and remember it, the features are still there. Everbody looks pretty great.”

The three-day reunion seemed too short for catching up on news about old friends. One of the most talked about surprises was the engagement of Martin and Bercu.

In Different Crowds Then

Martin, the reunion chairman, started organizing the extravaganza nearly five years ago, recruiting more than 50 classmates--including Bercu--to help track down the 580 members of the class.

At Alhambra High School, Martin and Bercu had mixed with different crowds, each never dreaming of dating the other.

“He was much too attractive for me,” said Bercu, whose beautiful and sophisticated face suggests that she was being modest. “He was blond and dressed very well, and I seemed to go more for the fellows that were good students. I didn’t have a chance with him.”

“She was just a nice girl,” Martin said. “There never was any attraction or dislike either way.”

The two went separate ways after graduating. He put himself through Whittier College, and she attended Pasadena Junior College. He worked as a salesman in Hawaii before moving to South Pasadena and she married and started a family in Alhambra. In the following years, preoccupied with work and family, they fell further out of touch.

Then a tragedy brought them together again. In 1981, Bercu and her husband Don, a Municipal Court judge in Alhambra, were in a car accident in which he was killed and she was severely injured. Martin, whose wife had died from cancer two years earlier, read about the accident and immediately went to her side.

“I kind of knew what it was like (to lose a loved one), so I just went to visit her because she was an old friend,” Martin said.

Through the long, painful months in intensive care, Bercu, who still must walk with a cane, appreciated her old classmate’s company and support. “I looked at my worst then, and I could hardly keep going, but he was regular about it,” Bercu said. They plan to be married early next year.

“It was the icing on the cake,” Vivian Pohl Le Font, a retired schoolteacher, said about the announcement at the reunion attended by classmates from as far as Massachusetts and Hawaii.

Those from out-of-state caught up on changes in the city from classmates who had stayed behind. Since their graduation, Alhambra has been transformed from a pastoral community of orange groves, chicken yards and a handful of local merchants to a rapidly expanding city with more than 200 businesses. The population has more than tripled, jumping from a little more than 20,000 in 1935 to 68,000 today.

While Alhambra High School was then the only high school in the area, serving students in Alhambra as well as those from surrounding San Gabriel and Monterey Park, the city now has four high schools.

The Alhambra High that class of 1935 remembers faced Main Street, with a patio where the “front porch” crowd, the pretty girls and the movers and shakers in clubs and student government, hung out. On the northwest corner of 3rd and Main streets, boys grabbed a quick smoke between classes, always on the alert for the vice principal.

Most Students Caucasian

Also vivid in class members’ memory was Alhambra’s rivalry with South Pasadena High. It got so bad that games between the schools were temporarily suspended, said Dick Johnson, a former Alhambra football player and UCLA engineering professor now living in Hawaii.

The student population then was almost all Caucasian, mostly the descendants of Western European immigrants. Many of their parents were first-generation immigrants who came to this country with nothing more than a craft learned in the Old Country, said Le Font, whose father, a painting contractor, came from Germany.

They were the children of German bricklayers, Scottish landscape gardeners and Italian marble craftsmen.

That picture is a sharp contrast to the Alhambra High School they found upon their return. According to statistics compiled by the Alhambra High School District, the school is 44.5% Asian and 34.6% Latino.

“When you get right down to it, unless a person wants to confess being an Indian, everybody is an immigrant,” said Alhambra attorney Talmage Burke, a descendant of Irish and Danish immigrants.

Old School Demolished

The classmates pored over a booklet containing photographs of the old school building, which withstood the 1933 earthquake but not the stringent earthquake codes that followed. The building was torn down in 1958.

When they were students at Alhambra, it was a gentler time, said Le Font. Those were the days when the senior class play was a highlight on the community and school calendars. It was the era when hundreds of Alhambra residents, young and old, would gather in the high school auditorium on Friday nights for the community sing. Following a bouncing ball that danced over the lyrics on a screen, they belted out old favorites such as “Beautiful Ohio.”

Others went to Pasadena Civic Auditorium and danced to the big-band music of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. For 25 cents, they could dance all night, recalled Don Morrison, a retired Alhambra optometrist who took his wife Ruthie there frequently.

Boys like Morrison could buy their dates a giant malt at Coast Ice Cream or a hamburger at Labrie’s for only 10 cents. If they really wanted to impress a date, they ordered her the steak sandwich for 20 cents.

Some teen-agers didn’t have to work, but most hustled for jobs, running errands or clerking at the Kress store for 25 cents an hour. And those with jobs felt lucky, because in those days of the Great Depression scores of other job seekers, including parents of some of their classmates, were only too eager to take their place.

The reunion was filled with other memories of a life style gone by. Even language has changed as old terms took on new meanings. When they were teen-agers, Le Font reminded her classmates, grass was still something you mowed and coke referred only to “something in a glass that you drank slowly.”

For many, Alhambra High was where they discovered their professions.

Actor in ‘Bonanza’

“That’s where I got the acting bug,” said Phil Chambers, a veteran actor who has had roles in many television series, playing the storekeeper in “Bonanza,” Jason on the “Andy Griffith Show” and the doctor on “Big Valley.”

Chambers remembers the exact moment when he decided to become an actor. It was just after he tried out for, and failed to make, the school drama club, Light and Shadow. Still sounding a bit hurt, he recalled telling himself, “I’m going to show these people. I’m going to be an actor.”

Former state Sen. Richard Richards first honed his public speaking skills as a star debater at Alhambra.

“I had felt I was an absolute nothing in grammar school,” said Richards. Thanks to the teachers at Alhambra High School, “things began to blossom for me for the first time,” said Richards, now a senior partner in his 40-member Los Angeles law firm.

Fujiko Sakiyama Ishizu credits the high caliber of teaching at Alhambra with preparing her for a teaching career. Ishizu, a Japanese-American who was one of the three top academic students in the class, had wanted to teach more than anything else.

But at the University of California, Berkeley, Ishizu was told that she couldn’t teach in California because the state did not hire Asians.

“Nobody thought I could become a teacher because I was Oriental. They laughed at me, especially the Japanese.”

Undeterred, she stuck to her dream. Ironically, it was the painful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II that gave Ishizu her first opportunity to teach. She taught sixth grade and high school science at an internment camp in Rivers, Ariz. Now Ishizu is in her 27th year of teaching at Mountain View Elementary School in El Monte.

Other classmates, like attorney Burke, followed family traditions. Burke, a councilman in Alhambra, is a third-generation politician. First elected in 1952, he may have served longer than any other councilmember in California.

2 Became Millionaires

Morrison, whose father prescribed eyeglasses for many of his classmates, also became an optometrist, later serving many of those same classmates and their children.

Then there were John McGill and Jack McKinney, who capitalized on their business acumen and became millionaires after selling their three-store Mayflower supermarket chain in Alhambra and developing a shopping center in Glendora. Eddie Hansen, always ready to try something new, enjoyed a colorful career, starting out in the film industry, then working as a CIA agent gathering intelligence in China and, at age 60, going back to school for degrees in holistic health and acupuncture.

As diverse as their lives have been, the classmates said they felt drawn to Alhambra once again.

As Sweeney’s Swingers filled a banquet room last Saturday night with the sounds of the ‘30s, couples swaying to the opening number, “You Came to Me out of Nowhere,” took a sweet trip down memory lane.