A Belated Graduation for Two Lives Interrupted by War

War kept Mabel Tsumori Abe and Gilbert Cefaratt from their high school graduations.

Three months before finishing Verdugo Hills High School in 1942, Abe was forced into an internment camp for Japanese Americans. A year before his own 1946 Verdugo graduation, Cefaratt bolted for the Navy and service in the Pacific.

Today, the overlapping threads of two divergent lives will be woven together when the septuagenarians are given honorary status as the oldest members of the Verdugo Hills Class of 1998.

Wearing powder blue caps and gowns, Abe and Cefaratt will stride across a stage on the school’s football field to receive the honor that eluded each for half a century.

They will reflect on those tranquil times before World War II intruded on their lives, when he was a lanky track star and she was the peppy secretary of the student body.

They will revel in having reclaimed uprooted lives and in how, five decades later, they forged a friendship--sitting side by side on a school bench, paging through worn yearbooks, chatting about classmates long gone.

And before day’s end, they will offer the crowd of fresh-faced graduates frank words about history and circumstance.

“I’m going to tell them that when they go out in the world, they should not persecute their fellow citizens,” said Abe, 74. “I’m going to say, ‘We are the victims of war.’ ”

Cefaratt, 70, will add other hearty America values to the mix.

“Patriotism,” he said. “Love and respect for family.”

Cefaratt and Abe would seem an unlikely pair to share the spotlight on any occasion, let alone a decorous ceremony before an anticipated crowd of 5,000.

Cefaratt’s father was born in Italy. Abe’s grandfather came to the United States from Japan. Her father was born in San Francisco and ran a produce store in Tujunga.

Abe’s family may have been in the United States before Cefaratt’s, but the distinction meant little in the angry days after Pearl Harbor.

Like tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans, Abe and her family were herded into internment camps after the surprise Japanese attack on Hawaii.

The family spent three months at a camp in Merced before being transferred to another camp in southeastern Colorado.

Abe’s parents and two siblings shared a barracks with four other families. They had no running water and were surrounded by barbed wire and armed military police.

“Every day, I’d look up at the MP with the gun pointed at us and say, ‘Why you have to point that God-blessed gun at me?’ ” Abe recalled. “He said, ‘Just so you behave.’ ”

Abe, then 17, and her friends used to taunt their keepers.

“Barbed wire doesn’t change anything,” she recalled telling one. “We’re still U.S. citizens.”

Abe finished high school at the camp and graduated in a makeshift ceremony in a stable. She wrote to Verdugo Hills High to get her diploma.

Three years later, in 1945, the family returned to Tujunga. Abe found clerical work and eventually began raising three sons, one of whom is now a Marine major.

As Abe and her family resumed their lives, Cefaratt was embarking on his journey into World War II.

At 17, a year before graduation, he enlisted in the Navy. He served as a radar operator on a cargo ship, on destroyer escorts and patrol planes.

“I would have gone sooner if my folks would have signed,” Cefaratt said. “That was the feeling in those days.”

Cefaratt joined just two months before the Japanese surrender, but he remained in the Navy until the age of 21, earning the rest of his high school credits along the way.

After he was discharged, Cefaratt returned to Sun Valley. He went to work as a technician at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. and spent the next 38 years with the company until retiring in 1990.

The stories of Cefaratt and Abe might have remain untold had it not been for Verdugo Hills Principal Gary Turner and the school’s alumni reunions, where Turner learned that Abe, a longtime Sunland-Tujunga activist, had never formally graduated from Verdugo Hills High.

Aware of Abe’s story and her many local activities--she has served as president of the Sunland-Tujunga Art Assn. and as a docent at Bolton Hall, a local historical museum--Turner decided to honor her.

At a 60th anniversary celebration for the high school last October, Turner announced that Abe would be graduating in the spring with 300 teenagers. Cefaratt, seated next to Abe, said that he, too, wanted to take part.

Today’s ceremony promises plenty of patriotism and tears. The “Star-Spangled Banner” will be sung; the Pledge of Allegiance recited. And in the midst of it all, Abe and Cefaratt will step to the podium one at a time and live a moment that was a lifetime in coming.