‘Don Ameche served the first Mass and Fibber McGee, if you remember him.’

Even transcribed from the original tape recording, the typewritten words resonate with the personality of the aged and nearly blind priest.

“This is Father Enda, speaking to you from the Discalced Carmelite monastery at St. Teresa’s Clarendon St., Dublin,” he said. “At long last I have gotten around to beginning the narration of the history of the parish in Encino.”

On Dec. 15, 1945, Father Enda Somers said, he and a Father Patrick drove from their church in Alhambra to the orphanage of the Nazareth Sisters in Van Nuys. From there, the next morning, they drove to Encino to say the first Mass in a new parish.

Through the intervening years, Our Lady of Grace Church developed at an astounding pace. First came the school and auditorium where early Masses were held. Next, the Italianate arches of the monastery rose out of the grassy vista of Ventura Boulevard in the 1950s. Finally, the church itself was dedicated in the early 1960s. Today, amid the commercial vitality of Ventura Boulevard, it stands as a monument to foresight.

But 42 years after the parish began, one of its flock is now wondering why no one had the foresight to write down everything as it happened.

“I sometimes wonder why they didn’t keep running notes,” said Marie Brown, an Encino housewife. But she really knows why.

“I think of my life then,” she said. “I was going from pillar to post too.”

Since moving into a pleasant tract house in the hills south of the church in 1955, Brown, 62, has raised a family and dedicated herself to books and learning. She founded the Friends of the Encino-Tarzana Library and has been president of the Friends of California Libraries.

In 1984, about the time of the bicentennial of Father Junipero Serra’s death, the idea of a parish history caught her attention.

Several quick runs at it made little headway.

Then, anticipating the parish’s 40th anniversary, Father Gerald Wilkerson, who is now pastor, wrote to Ireland soliciting Father Enda’s recollections.

Father Enda, who left the parish in 1952, turned out to have a nice touch for detail.

“How did it all begin?” he asked on the tape he sent back. “There was a very rich lady living near Santa Anita race track, and she got interested in the Catholic religion.”

He related that she later converted and sought to show her gratitude. Father Patrick suggested buying land for a new seminary.

“She went out to the Valley and she espied the property where your church and school, etcetera, now stand,” Father Enda said. “And she purchased it.”

He described the first Mass, in the Encino Women’s clubhouse.

“Don Ameche served the first Mass and Fibber McGee, if you remember him,” Father Enda said, referring to radio actor Jim Jordan. “I remember Fibber saying, ‘Now, let’s do it the right way! Let’s walk down the middle aisle.’ There wasn’t any middle aisle. You could stand at one side of the building and almost shake hands with somebody standing at the other side.”

After that, Mass moved from parishioners’ homes to a garage. Meanwhile, the parish rented its 70 acres at Ventura Boulevard and White Oak Avenue, first to tomato and corn farmers, then to a Basque shepherd.

Father Enda recalled many peripheral events such as a shortage of bricks and an encounter one night with the FBI. The agents were watching a house across the street.

“There’s a gangster in there, and he’s trying to clear out,” Father Enda said they told him and another priest.

“We waited and waited and waited, and nothing happened,” Father Enda said. At last, they left. In the morning, gangsters and FBI were gone.

“What happened during the night, I know not,” he said.

There were sacred stories as well, such as his hearing the deathbed confession of a man who said he was a drummer boy in Italian Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army and hadn’t confessed in 85 years.

The warmth and vitality of the tape became part of Brown’s next idea--to tell the parish history on video.

“I think we should do it a different way because people don’t read books that much,” she said.

She put a notice in the parish bulletin. Photographs have poured in and now cover her dining-room table.

They show the monastery rising, priests and altar boys posing, even Cardinal James Francis McIntyre speaking to girls in Communion class.

Brown said she wants to talk to every person in them to get the stories on tape. But she doesn’t know who most of them are.

One is simply a family portrait, with Brown’s inscription on the back: “Who are these gentle people?”

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night worrying that some people are going to die before we get their stories.”

Brown’s next goal is to recruit half a dozen volunteer Studs Terkels to go out in the parish and do interviews.

She’d like Don Ameche to narrate. She’s even called his office.

“He found it very interesting, but he was too busy,” she said.

He’s still running from pillar to post.