Wrong College, but Thanks for Memories

While eating my breakfast last Friday morning, I turned to your article on Balboa and Easter Week (March 30). I was astonished when I realized that your picture of students on the beach at the Balboa Peninsula was, in fact, as picture of me with a group of my friends! Even more incredibly, the picture is a shot of a young man taking a picture of us, and that young man is now, and has been for the last 36 years, my husband. Obviously, we were completely unaware that someone was taking a picture of him taking a picture of us.

The caption on the picture, “Glendale and Pasadena junior college students hit Bal’s beach in April, 1948,” is completely inaccurate. First and foremost, most of the people in the picture, including me and my husband, were students at UCLA. The boy with the sailor hat is the Rev.Joseph Nunziato, a Methodist minister who at that time was attending Occidental College. The boy with the beach towel draped around him is Dr. Al Kuhl, who at that time was attending Cal Berkeley. My husband is wearing what then was the current thing in UCLA rooters’ caps. The date is also wrong as he and I didn’t know each other in 1948, although I certainly was at Balboa that year, as I was every year, during my years at L.A. High School and UCLA. This picture was probably taken in 1950.

The group of students were all members of the youth fellowship group at Wilshire Methodist Church which we attended in those years. None of us had any connections in Glendale or Pasadena, but as I said previously were mostly L.A. High School graduates and, at the time of the photo, students at UCLA.

Inaccurate as to who we were or not, we got a big kick out of spotting this picture in the paper, and it certainly brought back memories of the many good times we had on the Balboa Peninsula and on Balboa Island those many years ago. Marilyn Carver Luethke Anaheim