Pair's Senior Year Lasts Half a Century

By DUKE HELFAND

June 18, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TUJUNGA —

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

Three months before finishing Verdugo Hills High 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 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.

The pair 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 student body secretary.

They will revel in having reclaimed uprooted lives and 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 assembled 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 American 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 estimated 5,000 onlookers.

Cefaratt is first-generation Italian. His father was born in Naples. Abe is second-generation Japanese. 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 following the surprise Japanese attack in Hawaii.

The family spent three months at a camp in Merced about 200 miles north of Los Angeles before being transferred to another in the arid reaches of southeastern Colorado.

The Abes--mother, father and three children--shared a barracks with four other families. They had no running water and were surrounded by barbed wire and armed military police.

“Ever 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 inside a stable. She wrote to Verdugo Hills High to get her diploma.

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

Just as Abe and her family were released to resume 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. One of his assignments took him to the USS LeJeune, a converted cruise liner that returned servicemen from Okinawa, Guam and other Pacific islands and delivered replacements.

“I would have gone sooner if my folks would have signed,” Cefaratt recalled of his fervor to get into the war. “That was the feeling in those days.”

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

After his discharge, Cefaratt returned to Sun Valley, then known as Roscoe, the community of his childhood. He went to work as a technician for Lockheed Aircraft Corp. and spent the next 38 years with the company until retiring in 1990. Since then, he has turned back to history, co-writing two books on the World War II pilots and ground crews of the P-38 Lightning fighter plane.

The stories of Cefaratt and Abe might have remain untold had it not been for Verdugo Hills Principal Gary Turner and the school’s annual alumni reunions.

At those meetings, Turner learned that Abe, a longtime Tujunga-Sunland 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 to a group of alumni 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. The perfect-attendance award will be handed out. Turner will send his graduates off with words of encouragement.

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.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Graduation Schedule

TODAY

* Birmingham in Van Nuys, 6:30 p.m., football field.

* Burroughs in Burbank, 6 p.m., Memorial Field.

* Canoga Park, 6 p.m., athletic stadium.

* Cleveland in Reseda, 6:30 p.m., football field.

* El Camino Real in Woodland Hills, 5 p.m., football field.

* Granada Hills, 7 p.m., football stadium.

* Grant in Van Nuys, 5 p.m., Valley College Monarch Stadium.

* Kennedy in Granada Hills, 6:30 p.m., football field.