The Graduate : A Diploma, a Report Card, a Yellowed Newspaper Column . . . Clues to Whatever Became of Beulah Jeannette Brode, Class of ’15

About the time that Southern California colleges and high schools were holding their graduation exercises last month, Mike Welds of Fullerton came out of an Anaheim restaurant to find a strange object resting on the trunk of his car.

It was a badly tattered brown leather case, 6 1/2 by 9 inches. Engraved on it in gold letters was the legend: Manual Arts High School, Los Angeles, California .

Mystified, Welds picked it up and opened it. Inside he found a parchment diploma that read:

Manual Arts High School

Los Angeles High School District

This certifies that Beulah Jeannette Brode has completed a course of study prescribed for this school and is awarded this diploma.

Given at Los Angeles, California, this 23rd day of June, nineteen hundred and fifteen.

It was signed by A. E. Wilson, principal; by the president of the Board of Education, and by the superintendent of schools.

In addition to the diploma Welds found two other items. One was a report card showing that Beulah Jeannette Brode had been an almost straight-A student, completing courses in dramatics, physiology and journalism, and two in English. Her lowest grade was a B in journalism.

The other item was a column of mine, clipped from The Times. It was an old one, probably circa 1960.

Welds couldn’t imagine why the diploma had been left on the trunk of his car. He sensed that it was a treasure to someone--perhaps to a son or daughter, perhaps to Beulah Jeannette Brode herself.

After all, she would be only 90 or thereabouts.

Welds thought that perhaps someone laid it on his trunk momentarily while opening a car door, then forgotten it and driven off.

He waited around half an hour, thinking that the owner might realize that he or she had left it behind and come back. No one came.

After pondering it for some time, Welds mailed the case and its contents to me, thinking that the column might offer a clue. It was an undistinguished column, and one that suggested nothing of Beulah Jeannette Brode’s interests or identity.

Despite the deterioration of the leather case, the diploma itself was in good condition. The lettering, in the old English style, was still bold.

I wondered what kind of a world Miss Brode found on her graduation from Manual Arts. In some ways it must have been forbidding. Europe was engaged in a tumultuous war from which the United States had abstained; but only 38 days before her graduation, a German submarine had sunk the British liner Lusitania, and we were soon to join the Allies.

But the world was full of excitement for a bright student: 1915 was the year in which W. Somerset Maugham published “Of Human Bondage,” Edgar Lee Masters published his “Spoon River Anthology,” and Albert Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity.

Los Angeles was just coming of age as a metropolis. Two years before Brode’s graduation, William Mulholland finished his aqueduct, bringing in water from the Owens Valley and making his famous speech as it cascaded down the mountain: “There it is! Take it!”

The Big Red Cars linked Los Angeles with such sunny suburbs as Santa Ana, Whittier, Riverside, Redlands, Newport Beach and Glendale. Oil gushed up from thousands of wells. The beaches were clean. The air bore the scent of orange blossoms. In Hollywood that year D. W. Griffith filmed his celebrated classic, “The Birth of a Nation.” In the Tournament of Roses, Mrs. Anita Baldwin McClaughry, Lucky Baldwin’s daughter, entered a float that featured a giant bird composed of thousands of hothouse Killarney roses and maidenhair ferns. In a few years Angelenos would be enjoying music under the stars at Hollywood Bowl.

It was certainly a world to delight the heart of a bright young woman.

I wonder what became of Beulah Jeannette Brode.

With her facility for English, perhaps she became a writer; perhaps she found a place in the booming movie industry; perhaps she went on to one of the many colleges that accepted women in her day; perhaps she went into the employ of some mercantile office or downtown law firm. Perhaps she married her employer and became a housewife and vanished into Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique.”

Perhaps she was swept up into war work as a volunteer and married a doughboy before he went away; perhaps she became one of those militant suffragettes who marched in the streets to obtain the vote in 1920. Perhaps she had seven children.

She may very well still be living, in which case she has survived four major wars and seen every day of this cataclysmic century. If not, there must be someone who thinks enough of her to preserve her diploma, and, for some strange reason, to have left it on the trunk of Welds’ car.

For all I know she may have been a colleague of mine. I don’t believe I got more than a B in journalism.

Beulah Jeannette Brode, if you’re still among us, and if you want your diploma back, please let me know.

It’s in safe keeping.