Gertrude Huffman has special memories of the San Pedro school she entered in 1906.

As usual, Gertrude Huffman of Lomita awakened early Tuesday morning. She spent three hours weeding in her yard--preparing her garden for corn--and then rested a bit. Shortly before noon, she got into her 1979 Volkswagen and drove over to the 15th Street Elementary School in San Pedro to go to a luncheon.

The luncheon, an annual affair given by the school’s Parent Teachers Assn., honors the founders of the PTA’s national organization. When Mrs. Huffman walks in, PTA ladies are bustling about Room 35, setting their homemade salads, chicken wings, lasagna and fruit molds on a table for their several dozen guests. Later, the fifth- and sixth-grade chorus will perform, and the first-graders will recite poems about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

It is a special time for the 15th Street School PTA, which, at 80, is the oldest continually operating PTA in California and the second oldest in the nation.

But Gertrude Huffman, a 15th Street alumna, can top that.

She’s 90.

She is witty, energetic and opinionated.

She is well-traveled, having been to such far-flung places as Siberia, India, the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica, which she said was kind of barren, except for the penguins. On her next major trip, she’s headed for the Greek Islands, although more immediately, she plans to drive this month to San Diego to visit her son.

“I think your mind rules your body,” she is fond of saying, and indeed, her health is excellent. Her vision is good--with her glasses she can read the fine print on a business card with ease. She had cataracts removed several years ago and says anyone who’s got them and doesn’t get rid of them is a fool.

Her memory, too, is extraordinarily clear. It stretches, in fact, back to her days as a student at the 15th Street school.

She entered the first grade there in 1906, when she was 6 years old and the school was 5. It wasn’t even named after 15th Street then--it was called the 16th Street School, because that’s where its front entrance was. Later on, when San Pedro was annexed by Los Angeles and the school systems were merged, the name was changed to 15th Street because Los Angeles already had a 16th Street School.

“We never had anything like this,” says Mrs. Huffman, referring to the sprawling complex that now houses the school’s 750 students. “It was an old wooden building with four rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs.”

Boys and girls never mixed on the playground. Mrs. Huffman--then Gertrude Kirchner--played the triangle to lead her classmates on their march into class. “When we went into class, we lined up, and you’d better not move around! It was disciplined. Now, they don’t have enough discipline, I don’t think.”

In her outspoken way, reflecting a disregard for changing norms, Mrs. Huffman blames that lack of discipline on women entering the work force.

“I’m from the old school,” she declares. “I believe in the mother taking care of the family.” Women today “want too much, they want it all. . . . I was married seven years before I had a washing machine. I washed on a washboard, and it didn’t hurt me any.”

Not surprisingly, she also has opinions about her longevity. She said she lives modestly, saves her money so she can travel, drinks only in moderation and has never touched tobacco. “If I want to spend my money,” she says, “I’d rather spend it on something that will do me some good and not some harm.”

And there is one other thing she will not do. Never, says Gertrude Huffman, will she resort to what some others do in their old age and “take the rocking chair.”