Manual Arts: A Diamond Jubilee : Alumni Celebrate and Recall Their Years at L.A. School

Fate had tossed them together, 350 “rejects” for whom there was no space in 1909 in the city’s only other high schools--Polytechnic and Los Angeles. After a makeshift year in an abandoned Olive Street grammar school, they had moved to a permanent home, built among the bean fields on the southern outskirts of the city. It was called Manual Arts High School.

Those pioneers had lofty goals, and more than a slight flair for the dramatic. So, with a nod to Longfellow, they decided to call themselves the Toilers, as in:

The heights of great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight.

But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night.

It was to be the start of a proud tradition. At “the Arts,” names of alumni such as (former California governor) Goodwin Knight; Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, USAF, ret.; Metropolitan Opera’s Lawrence Tibbett; football’s Tom Fears; actor Paul Winfield; actress Kathryn Grayson; director Frank Capra; and writers Irving Stone, Erle Stanley Gardner and Eugene Burdick are still spoken in reverent tones.

The Glory Days

And, if her salmon pink walls are chipped and crumbling, her rose arbor long since furrowed under, her vast green lawns covered with cement, the faithful are able to close their eyes and summon memories of what have come to be known as Manual Arts’ glory days.

Today Manual Arts is an inner-city school; white middle-class kids who grew up in the Exposition Park neighborhood and graduated from “the Arts” have raised their families in the suburbs. The new generation of Toilers is 54% Latino, predominantly from Central America, and 46% black.

The once-bucolic neighborhood is plagued by crime. Reports in recent years of killings on the campus, drug busts and gang activity are in ghastly contrast to the innocent prankery of the students of 1918 who, a school history notes, were taken to task for having a banana peel-apple core war during assembly.

But the weekend’s get-together was a celebration, the school’s diamond jubilee, and looking back with fondness, and looking forward with optimism, the people who love Manual Arts said “happy birthday” during a two-day party complete with band music, purple and silver balloons and a telegram of “warm congratulations” from President Reagan.

It was Friday night in the Pacific Sierra Ballroom of the Los Angeles Hilton and school principal Karleen Marienthal was welcoming the 700 or so alumni and friends who had turned up for the after-dinner dance. “Tonight,” Marienthal said, “everyone is a Toiler.”

Karl Turnquist, 83, who from 1925 to 1960 was a math teacher at Manual Arts, beamed; Marienthal is his daughter. Above the din of the band, which played everything from “Mack the Knife” to “Your Cheatin’ Heart” as though all Manual Arts alumni were deaf, Turnquist was remembering when:

“In those days, you were there by the grace of God and the department head (not by computer selection). Forty weeks of teaching for $1,800--of course, that was tax-free. In 35 years I never missed a day of school” save to take a Board of Education exam and to respond to a subpoena.

Evelyn Turner Loftin, 91, was making her way onto the stage to accept a T-shirt, and the applause of the crowd, as the earliest graduate in the house. After graduation, Loftin went on to State Normal School (now L.A. City College) for teacher training, graduating in 1917 as one of two women in a class of 500.

She recalled, “When I graduated, Negroes couldn’t teach in Los Angeles (except in one school in Watts), so the dean found a place for me in El Centro,” where she taught for two years before returning home to marry. Loftin went on to become a concert singer (she did backup to Ethel Waters in the film “Stormy Weather”), a real estate broker and notary public.

Recalling With Clarity

Apologizing that a stroke in 1979 had slowed her down a bit, Loftin then proceeded to recall with perfect clarity her growing up as one of 13 children--”My father brought me out here (to be placed in the care of an older sister) and went back to Texas”--and, of course, life at dear old Manual Arts.

“Goodwin Knight and I used to sit together in the auditorium. There were just three of us little black girls. Everything was lovely. But when school was out at three o’ clock, of course, everybody went their way and we didn’t know where they went, if you know what I mean. We didn’t go to the dances. We didn’t have anybody to marry. (She would marry twice).”

Sharing a table with Loftin were two other Manual Arts graduates, her daughter, Marilyn Ward Dixon, class of ‘40, and her son, Edward, class of ’37.

The dance, which attracted mostly a middle-aged and older crowd, was a time to bring out the old yearbooks (the Artisans) and to focus instant cameras on classmates from long ago. Strangers assessed strangers from across the room before approaching and asking, “What year were you?”

Donald Mroscak, a former Manual Arts teacher now on the faculty of Garfield High, looked around the room and said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our schools had the racial mix that’s here tonight. . . .”

“Back to the Arts” was the theme for Saturday’s events, beginning with a morning assembly on campus that attracted about 300 of the loyal. Speakers included School Board President Rita Walters, who noted, “Manual was born amidst a crisis of crowding in the school district . . . it seems the more things change the more they stay the same.”

Highlighting the early years at “the Arts,” 1910-1939, was Nancy Holmes Manella, a 1935 graduate who went on to USC, married Arthur Manella, also a Manual Arts alum, had a career in communications and became the mother of a daughter and a son, both attorneys.

There was World War I, in which 600 Manual Arts students, alumni and faculty served their country (casualties included Hazel Morton, who lost her life in Red Cross service). There was the flu epidemic of 1918 that closed the school for seven weeks. And there was the Great Depression. “Not many of our modest families had fortunes to be lost in the Wall Street crash,” Manella said, but they did have jobs to lose and one result was “a generation of students who had to give up all ideas of college.”

There was the big earthquake of 1933, which toppled some of Manual’s buildings and necessitated the shifting of students to Foshay and Audubon schools temporarily. Recalled Manella, “I had broken half my laboratory equipment. Then the earthquake came, and no one ever knew.”

Finally, she spoke with fondness of Manual Art’s sometimes eccentric, but always caring, faculty who “thought their job as teachers was the most important job in the whole world.”

The years from 1940-1959 were recalled by Richard Cooper, who is now an area superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). “It took me a little bit longer to get out of Manual Arts than most,” said Cooper. “I did a three-year stint and then, 20 years later, another three-year stint (the last time as principal in the early ‘60s).”

Cooper recalled the days of World War II paper drives and war bond drives with Manual Arts money “earmarked to purchase a bomber for Jimmy Doolittle.” As a volunteer, Doolittle would lead the first raid of B-25 bombers over Tokyo, winning the Medal of Honor.

James Taylor, another alumnus now with LAUSD, described the tumultuous ‘60s, which brought Manual Arts unrest, disruption and her 15th city football championship. And former U.S. Rep. Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who was student body vice president at Manual Arts in the ‘50s, told of the school’s transition in the mid-’70s to a predominantly black school and the “black pride” poems and paintings that sprang up on walls and in halls.

“Manual Arts made that transition,” Burke said, “and made it as an example for other institutions.”

Finally, Lori Gregg, a young black woman who will graduate in June as a top scholar and hopes to go to Harvard and become a corporate lawyer, told of the cultural shock when she transferred in 1983 from “a preppy school in the Valley,” to which she had been bused for four years. She came, she said, filled “with fear and paranoia,” but what she found was pride, school spirit and great dedication on the part of the teachers.

“Yes,” Gregg said, “I could have gone to a better school, but I could never have had a better experience.” Manual Arts “is still moving forward,” said principal Marienthal, who had chosen for the occasion to wear a purple (as in the purple and gray, Manual Arts’ colors) dress. “We hope today is just the beginning of a re-association with Manual. . . . We need your help and support.”

Then came Frank Naley, 83, yell leader, class of 1920, doffing a long white wig to reveal a bald pate and putting down his walking stick to lead the audience in a rousing M-A-H-S locomotive cheer. As he did, the red and green lights blinked on his Christmas bow tie.

En route to the cafeteria for lunch, Evelyn Loftin was greeted by a middle-age woman who wanted to remind her that her mother, “one of the Anderson girls,” had been Loftin’s classmate in 1915. Told that her onetime classmate is now dead, Loftin shrugged and said, “I’m just a tough old biddy, I guess.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t remember where the bathrooms are,” a young woman said, making her way past three former yell leaders, all wearing their purple and gray sweaters. They were Denice Todd Tyus, ‘71, a former track star who is now a Superior Court clerk; Darryl Mitchell, ‘71, a dancer in “Cats,” and Richard Hodge, ‘73, now a computer operator.

As a band of purple-clad musicians played “Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” the crowd gathered outside the purple building dubbed “Mac Manual” for dedication of the business building as James H. Doolittle Hall. It is satisfying in this era of “questionable role models,” said speaker Dan Isaacs of LAUSD, to be able to pay tribute to a man who “had the right stuff before the term became popular.”

Doolittle, class of ‘14, was at home in Carmel, marking his 89th birthday. But a Doolittle was there--Peter Doolittle, 31, the general’s grandson, accompanied by his wife, Penny. The younger Doolittle, who lives in Lakewood, is with Hughes Aircraft in radar systems.

Later, in the crowd, a woman in a tattered sweat shirt identifying her as a member of the Girls’ Athletic Assn. introduced herself as Pat Prior Kessen, class of ‘44, “one of the first female cheerleaders.” She had been somewhat dismayed to learn that “they don’t know our old fight song anymore.” And there were sad recollections about the boys killed in World War II and the tragedy of their senior class president Larry Robson, who died when he was thrown from his horse.

This was not a reunion for these friends, for their little ‘40s group has kept in touch. McFarland said Vic Levy at his floral shop in Lakewood has always kept the group in touch--”Vic would always know who was doing what and where they were.”

Kessen’s sister, Sylvia Prior, class of ‘40, had taken on responsibility for feeding 3,000 names into a computer in the effort to locate alumni for this anniversary celebration. Prior, mother of two daughters, one a doctor and one an attorney, said she did it partly for her father, who “should have graduated in 1914. But his father died the year before and he went to work. He made lots of money in the music business and never went back to school. He would have wanted somebody to help out today.”

Peggy Rabe, class of ‘44, lives in the San Fernando Valley today and, she acknowledged, “When I first came over here to campus (for a planning committee meeting), I was in shock.” She hadn’t been back in years. But Rabe, who once was student off-grounds chairman, responsible for seeing that students didn’t leave campus without permits, was philosophical: “This is a different era.”

Wearing a red T-shirt that proclaimed, “Age is not important unless you’re a cheese,” Larry Houston, vice president, class of ‘24, was thumbing through the memorabilia display in the Manual Arts library. His association with the school is a long one--his 40 years with the LAUSD included a teaching post at Manual Arts from 1939-1942.

Houston, who served both as director of athletics and director of educational services for the school district, was remembering his student days at Manual Arts--the day he was chewed out by the principal for wearing fashionable dirty cords (“I wouldn’t let my mother wash them”), the bad rap he got when he was accused of being in a group drinking bootleg liquor. “I was at a DeMolay dance with my girlfriend (now his wife),” he swears.

Houston had come to the celebration with his sister, Bonnie Houston McLaren, class of ‘16, an 86-year-old dynamo from Seal Beach Leisure World who will tell the world, “I still dance and ride a two-wheel bike and drive my own car.”

She was remembering Goodwin Knight--”I knew he was going to be somebody then”--and Lawrence Tibbett (then Tibbet), who “sat behind me in drama.”

She was remembering the boys who went off to fight in World War I, writing home to ask her to save a dance for them when they got back. And she was remembering her first job out of Manual Arts, working for a seed company for $8 a week. She laughed and said, “And I paid $32 for a pair of shoes. I loved high heels and I had pretty good-looking legs.”

But on Saturday she was remembering, most of all, dear old Manual Arts. “It was wonderful,” she said, “wonderful.”