Santa Monica College Honors a First-Class Graduate

Seventy years later, officials at Santa Monica College still spout the same line that they used to lure their first student there.

Raymond Davis knows. Because he was there in 1929 when the place opened.

“They said I could get everything I wanted at this new college and not have to go so far to get it,” recalled Davis. “It sounded good to me.”

Davis, who at 90 is the last known member of the college’s first graduating class, was back on campus Tuesday evening as the school capped a yearlong 70th-anniversary celebration with commencement ceremonies for its current crop of graduates.

He had been one of 153 students who signed up opening day for college courses at the fledgling Santa Monica City College in borrowed classrooms at Santa Monica High. He was among four dozen or so who graduated two years later.

Born and raised in Venice next to the Grand Canal, Davis had graduated from Venice High School and was headed for USC when the Santa Monica college recruiter rumbled past the canal in a Model A.

Life was bucolic in those days in Venice. A swamp covered what is now Marina del Rey. Until houses began popping up along the canals, marijuana--known to neighborhood boys as “locoweed,” grew wild.

Davis, an eighth-generation descendant of the Mayflower settlers, helped tend his family’s five cows. “We’d stake them in on a chain in a vacant lot when we went to school and then pick them up when we came home,” he said.

Ralph Bush had a tough sell: His new employers in the Santa Monica school system expected him to fill the college classrooms being set up on the second floor of their old brick high school building.

Bush himself was sold on the two-year-college concept. Years before, he had helped establish the nation’s first junior college in Joliet, Ill. He convinced Davis to give it a try.

“Our classes were up on what we called the mezzanine,” Davis recalled. “Being at the high school, it seemed more like high school than college.”

Davis was on the college basketball and track teams, playing center and throwing discus. When he graduated in 1931, he went on to USC, just as Bush had promised.

There, Davis graduated with a degree in dentistry and, as a fall-back, a teaching certificate.

“My mother wanted that. She said, ‘What if you get your hands broken or something and can’t work as a dentist?’ She was paying the bills, so I listened to her,” he said.

Davis opened a dental office at Wilshire Boulevard and 4th Street in Santa Monica in 1935 and practiced dentistry for 40 years. After raising their three children, he and his late wife, Kay, moved to the Northern California coastal community of Trinidad, 20 miles north of Eureka, in 1975.

He returns to Santa Monica yearly to visit friends such as Roy Naylor, a 84-year-old paint store owner who himself graduated from Santa Monica College in 1935, and William McNally, a history buff who is writing a book called “Venice West--The Last Resort.”

McNally calls Davis “a classic Venice original,” who still reflects the stubborn independence that was typical of that community’s early residents--and many current ones.

Davis said he is always amazed at what he sees on his return visits. But he is not nostalgic for the good old days of low-rise Los Angeles.

“There are always new buildings going on, with 20 stories in height being the minimum, except in Santa Monica,” he said. “Santa Monica has a funny political system. They should put high-rises there. It’s a better use of space.”

At Tuesday’s commencement for 650 graduates, Davis doffed his blue cap as he was introduced to the crowd. On the platform with him was 28-year-old Internet entrepreneur Jason Weisberger from Marina del Rey, who officials said was the college’s youngest commencement speaker in history.

In the 1931 yearbook, Davis was surprised to see college recruiter Bush’s picture prominently displayed several pages before that of the school’s president. To this day, recruitment remains a high priority.

Officials at the college--which moved to its Pico Boulevard location in 1952 and now boasts an enrollment of 29,000--claim the highest university transfer rate of any community college in California.