LAPD Class of ’46 Finally Has Its (Graduation) Day

Among the police were 60 “rookies,” all of a new class that had just been graduated from the police academy. . . .

--From an Oct. 12, 1946, Los Angeles Times account of a demonstration by striking film industry workers and sympathizers outside Technicolor Motion Picture Corp. in Hollywood.

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Actually, there were 66 rookies and they never made it to their graduation that Oct. 11. As their families gathered at the parade ground for the ceremony, they were hustled off to quell what The Times described as an “incipient riot.”

The 36 surviving Class of ’46 members are now men in their 70s, long retired from the LAPD and from second careers. Now, they’ll finally get their diplomas, together with members of the current rookie class, in ceremonies at 10 a.m. Friday at the academy. And that prospect has brought on the reminiscences.

Fifty years have passed, but their memories of that October day are vivid. The taunts and jeers of the angry mob as, undeniably wet behind the ears, the fledgling police faced off with the picketers and agitators. Bill Tomanovich, 75, of Alhambra recalls one woman in the crowd yelling, “Don’t fool with those rookies. They don’t know what they shouldn’t do yet.”

“You’ve heard of Custer’s Last Stand?” he asks. “Well, we were the thin blue line.” By the newspaper account, there were 2,000 confronting 150 police. One woman threw a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, and another, noted The Times, “smacked an officer on the head with her handbag.”

“They spit at us and yelled at us,” says Bill Johnson, 72, of Burbank. “They had a lot of females in the front row to buffer the males from the police.”

It was the verbal taunts that Emmett Drennen, 73, of West Hills, recalls. His was a class of World War II veterans, but as the officers drew their batons, “The crowd started calling us ‘black shirts,’ ‘Gestapo.’ ”

It was a precursor of things to come in that long and violent strike, which would escalate into vandalism and bombings at nonstrikers’ homes, more than 1,300 arrests and a series of angry demonstrations at various studios.

The catalyst: a dispute between organized labor factions in the film industry, which employed 30,000 people, about jurisdiction over studio carpenters. Among those from the neutral Screen Actors Guild who tried to settle things were Ronald Reagan and George Murphy.

Over the weeks, the class of ’46 frequently drew strike duty. One day at Columbia, Boris Meneghelli, now 73 and living in Sherman Oaks, waved through a window to a woman employee. Her name was Bette, and “We got married within the month.”

The way they like to tell the story, the rookie cops were lucky just to survive the trip to Technicolor that graduation morning. Two aged buses used to transport jail inmates were pressed into service to take them there. Driving one was rookie Bill Phares. “You’ve seen movies of the Keystone Cops?” Tomanovich asks. “Well, he passed a streetcar on the right side with another streetcar coming toward us.”

Knock it off, Phares, now 74 and living in Glendale, replies good-naturedly. “You’re still alive.” There’s an easy camaraderie among these men, who meet bimonthly for brunch and hold a reunion dinner each Sept. 23, the day they started at the academy in 1946.

They share a bond unique to those who fought “the good war.” Home from the service, they weren’t content with life as usual. The LAPD held the promise of excitement and about $220 a month to start. What did they have to lose?

Says Johnson: “The application fee was a dollar, and you could apply all at once for Sheriff’s Department, LAPD or Burbank police.”

It cost Larry Shesgreen a bit more. Shesgreen, 71, of Whittier, has never forgotten: “I got stopped for speeding on the way to take the test.”

In those days they had to buy their uniforms and their guns--war surplus Colt revolvers costing $35. “I’ve been in debt to the Police Credit Union ever since,” Tomanovich says.

After the war, Drennen returned to his job at Douglas Aircraft, but it wasn’t the same. For one thing, “I’d learned to smoke in the Army, and I couldn’t smoke in there.” And women he had trained were now his superiors.

Most of the men would serve 25 years or more as police officers before tackling second careers, among which were security guard, truck driver, real estate salesman, insurance fraud investigator and teacher. In retirement, Ken Vils, 78, of Los Feliz, has a fairly steady gig as actor Leslie Nielsen’s movie stand-in.

Theirs was a different LAPD, they’ll tell you. Says Vils: “We ran the street then and the kids run it now.” And, those streets weren’t so mean. “I drew my gun twice in 20 years,” Phares says. Adds John Ernst, 76, of Glendale: “We had more confidence in the courts.”

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Most of the all-male class was assigned to Metro Division. While working crowd control at a plating plant explosion, Phares recalls grabbing a bystander and demanding, “Where do you think you’re going?” To which the man replied, “Son, I’m your chief of police [C.B. Horrall] and this is your mayor [Fletcher Bowron].”

The story makes Boris Meneghelli, 73, laugh. “I did that to the governor, kicked [Earl] Warren off the street” one time.

There were blips of excitement, such as the murder, never solved, of Elizabeth Short, 22, the “Black Dahlia,” whose nude body, cut in half, was found in a vacant lot near Crenshaw and Exposition boulevards in January 1947. Many of these men knocked on doors, seeking witnesses.

Johnson helped track down two derelicts who’d stolen the Christ child from the nativity scene at the Plaza near Olvera Street. His case later became an episode on “Dragnet,” but in the TV version a boy had taken the statue for a ride in his red wagon.

On Friday, Chief Willie Williams will give diplomas to 18 of the Class of ’46 before presenting them to the 90 new recruits.

And, this being a milestone year, table talk at tonight’s annual dinner, at Primavera, will be about the upcoming cruise to Mexico with spouses. “Who knows,” asks Ernst, “who’s going to be around on the 60th?”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.