Old School: Lasting Tie That Binds Graduates

The further they travel in their lives, the more they return to the friendships they made near the beginning, finding commonality in a neighborhood all have left and a school none of their grandchildren attend.

On Wednesday afternoon, at a borrowed banquet hall in San Pedro, about 30 miles from where they first met, more than 80 people gathered for the ninth annual reunion of Depression-era graduates of Virgil Junior High School, Los Angeles’ oldest junior high.

All had lived in Hollywood in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, a quiet, stable community of small bungalows and growing dreams. For reasons even they find hard to explain, the campus on Vermont Avenue near Beverly Boulevard became their touchstone, the place where the values by which they would live their lives coalesced.

“You wonder why these people would want to get together after all these years,” said Al Forbes, a retired optometrist who came from Ventura for the event. “I think it was the era.

Knew Families

“The Depression did something to a lot of us. It brought a closeness. . . . We weren’t blase about anything. We were all Boy Scouts, and we all knew each others’ families. We are a lot the same.”

“People ask why a junior high school reunion,” said Bradley Kendis, a retired machine shop owner who now lives in Pacific Palisades. “I think it has something to do with the age you were, the time between 12 and 15. You never forget those years.”

“I think I came of age at Virgil,” said Mary Lee McClellan Greenblatt, who delivered the graduation speech for the Summer Class of 1933 and went on to become a teacher. “I made my first independent decisions there.”

Decisions, she said, that seemed all-important then, like choosing all on her own which clubs to join.

They speak too about nostalgia, about hunting boar with bows and arrows on Santa Catalina Island and getting haircuts for 35 cents. The bungalows they moved out of are crowded now with immigrant families, whose dollar does not go as far now as their dimes did then.

“We didn’t worry about money because we didn’t have any,” said alum Chief Judge Emeritus Albert Lee Stephens Jr. of the U.S. District Court.

Today, the school has maybe twice as many students as back then, mainly the children of immigrant families from Latin America. About the only building still standing from those days is the auditorium.

Academic Dean

“I don’t think the school is special to the students now the way it was to us then,” said Fred Yanari, a graduate who returned to Virgil to teach in 1952 and retired as an academic dean two years ago. “It’s not the kids. It’s the community. The community was stable then. The population is more transient now.”

At the reunion, there were the usual reminiscences: stories about the peephole someone drilled (but no one would own up to) in the wall of the girls’ locker room and tales of football and baseball victories.

Old classmates remembered scattered bits of data learned from classrooms. Mesopotamia is bordered by the Tigris and the Euphrates, recalled one. “Cellar door” is the most melodious phrase in the English language, another said.

There were also a few outbursts in the banquet room as former members of the Girls Glee Club and Boys’ League recognized each other’s faces through the years. But there were relatively few such surprises. What was unusual about this reunion was that many people in it had kept track of each others’ names and families and careers.

This was, on the whole, an accomplished crowd. Boys and girls who were proud to see “noon monitor” and “safety patrol” after their names in their yearbook, the Virgiliad, turned into college graduates and World War II heroes.

Members of Depression-spawned “thrift committees” that encouraged boys and girls to develop “the habit of saving during school days” went on to be prominent businessmen, teachers and lawyers.

At least three judges came out of the Virgil Junior High of those years: Stephens and his brother, Associate Justice Clarke E. Stephens of the state Court of Appeal and retired Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Wapner, now known for his role in the television show, “People’s Court.”

There was also actress Ann Rutherford, orchestra leader George Jenkins, Occidental Petroleum Co. director Arthur Groman and real estate developer Alexander Haagen, the builder of 62 shopping malls.

Old Times

The first reunions began in the mid-1950s, when men from the Winter Class of 1934 met casually. In the early 1970s, men from the Summer Class of 1934 began having lunch together annually to talk about old times, particularly sports.

Out of the lunches grew a newsletter, and out of the newsletter, a demand for formal reunions. The first reunion, held in 1980, was attended by 32 men. This year, there were more than 80, including, for the first time, women whose married names were researched through the growing Virgil network. Spouses were not invited.

“I couldn’t wait to see my old sweetheart, Barbara Finney,” said Paul Briles, a manufacturer of aerospace parts. “I put my tie tac on and everything. I used to go over to her house and talk to her mother. But she didn’t show.”