Classmates Remember Discipline, Pranks at St. Philip’s School : Reunion: The Class of 1940 was poised between the Depression and World War II but preoccupied with adolescent concerns.

Some former students at St. Philip’s School in Pasadena were poking through the school building the other day, peering into empty classrooms and breathing in the familiar smell of chalk and paste.

Things have changed in the past 50 years, they noted. The inkwells are gone from the desks, the basement cafeteria has been turned into a day-care center, and the furniture in the old eighth-grade classroom, up on the second floor across the hall from the library, has been scrambled.

“All the desks were facing north when we were here,” said Malcolm Brown, surveying the present loose arrangement of movable desks, turned roughly toward the east.

But the old place on Hill Avenue was still recognizable, said Father Damian McHale, looking pensively at the long, narrow coatroom next to the classroom entrance.

“Many’s the time I remember standing right here,” he said.

“Probably for doing things you weren’t supposed to be doing,” said James Link, merrily disrupting the mood. “You were such a bully.”

Talk for half an hour to members of the St. Philip’s graduating class of 1940 and you start thinking you’re in an old Mickey Rooney movie. Gray-haired and close to retirement, most of them, they transport you back to a time when the big troublemakers in school were the youngsters who talked in class or played on the roof.

A dozen of the 16 graduating eighth-graders got together Sunday for a 50th reunion of the class of 1940. They ate a potluck dinner, looked at slides of past reunions, gathered at a reception and attended Mass, with the class’ two priests joining St. Philip’s pastor, Msgr. Gary Bauler, as co-celebrants.

A pair of former teachers even put in appearances. Sister Mary Joan Patrice, a fresh-faced novice teacher in 1940, was to fly in from Denver. “We all grew up together,” she said in a letter to one of the classmates.

And the energetic seventh-grade teacher Sister Mary Victory, who was known on occasion to slide into class like a baserunner stealing second, was to travel from Chicago.

“She was strict,” recalled Ray Somerlott, a retired Pacific Bell marketing specialist.

“You needed that, Ray,” McHale snapped good-naturedly. “You really needed it.”

It seems like yesterday.

They were a wholesome bunch, poised precariously between the Great Depression and World War II, but overwhelmingly preoccupied with adolescent concerns.

Margaret Marso, now a nun with the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the same order that staffs the school’s faculty, has dug up some old letters she had written to a friend. There were detailed descriptions of her classmates and blow-by-blow accounts of how the teachers kept all of that youthful energy directed at math and history.

“But in all the letters, I didn’t mention the war once,” she marveled. “I don’t think we felt threatened by it.”

They weren’t above some mischief now and then. Somerlott in particular seemed always to be in hot water with the nuns. “I was the class cutup,” he confessed.

A bruiser of a youngster who could throw a football practically the length of the school’s playing field, Somerlott was as frisky as a bear cub. “You’d be standing innocently in the schoolyard and suddenly you’d be flying through the air,” recalled Brown, an executive with an Arcadia aerospace firm. “Ray was learning judo.”

Richard Wozniak, now a priest at the San Gabriel Mission, was another cutup. “Jitterbug,” as some of the girls referred to him, got nabbed by the nuns once for playing on the roof when he should have been washing windows.

Schoolwork was demanding enough. “The girls had all the brains,” said McHale, chaplain at the Long Beach Naval Hospital.

Marso shrugged. “I just worked hard,” she said. “I thought everybody was smarter than me, so I had to catch up.”

Some of the most vivid memories were associated with being forced to step out from the group.

Sister Franciscus, the music teacher, thought that she perceived some singing talent in David Fritz. First she gave him private lessons, then recruited him to sing “Ave Maria” for a school assembly.

“It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced,” said Fritz, a retired sheriff’s deputy and private investigator.

Pearl Riedel, asked to write down some of her memories of St. Philip’s, recalled one particularly painful experience. “I remember in the eighth grade,” she wrote, “when I had to dance the minuet with Malcolm Brown. So embarrassing!”

Somerlott was called upon once to render “Mother McCree” on the piano. Mid-performance, he forgot how the song ended. “I must have played the tune 12 or 14 times,” he recalled, “until I finally just hit the keys real hard and got up.”

The approaching war, in which most of the boys eventually saw active duty, may have seemed like a distant thunderstorm, its rumble barely audible in their busy lives. But the classmates did feel the lingering effects of hard times.

“Money was hard to come by,” said James Link, a medical supplies salesman from Altadena. Most of the classmates held after-school jobs. Marso worked as a baby-sitter, McHale washed glasses and silverware at a local restaurant, and Link worked at two plant nurseries. “I moved plants around for about 50 cents a week,” Link said. “Remember, in those days, you could buy five pieces of candy for a nickel.”

But the envy of the class was Brown, who worked as a stand-in for child movie actor Freddie Bartholomew. Brown didn’t exactly rate as a movie star. “Next to it,” Somerlott said.

He was also the owner, in the days when driver’s licenses were issued to 14-year-olds, of a rattletrap of a Model A Ford. “I couldn’t afford real paint, so I used this green stuff that they used on tree stumps,” Brown said. “I painted it with that terrible goop, then put polka dots all over it. I eventually traded the car for a bicycle.”

The classmates went on to high schools--many of them to Woodrow Wilson High in Pasadena--colleges and careers. But most of them have kept in touch, getting together for weddings, ordinations, graduations, reunions and funerals. Two of them--James Pfeiler and Robert Woodward--have died.

The survivors have watched the world change around them. “At Woodrow Wilson High School, there were 500 or 600 in the graduating class,” Somerlott said. “There were two kids who smoked cigarettes and one who owned a car. Look at today’s ninth- and 10th-graders.”

Maybe that was the big difference, said Marso, a friendly woman with the ingenuous smile she displayed 50 years ago. “We learned to be content with fewer things,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot that we hankered for.”