4,000 Return to Celebrate as Glendale High Turns 100

Margaret Harbour didn’t find many former classmates at Saturday’s 100th Anniversary Reunion at Glendale High School.

But the 91-year-old Glendale resident wasn’t surprised--she graduated in 1926.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s many my age here,” she said, grinning as she flipped through pages of a 75-year-old yearbook. “I’m an old lady.”

Harbour was one of nearly 4,000 people who attended the reunion. Graduates from 1924 to 2000 gathered with family, students and teachers on the school’s football field. The event featured marching bands, antique cars, class photos and school tours.

Tucked inside Harbour’s yearbook were two 1979 newspaper clippings about the death of Glendale High graduate and film star John Wayne. Harbour remembered going to school with Wayne, whose 1973 dark-green Pontiac was displayed at the car show. He graduated a year before she did.

“He was a big shot, president of the senior class,” she said. “People were really impressed that he went to my school.”

Glendale High School has grown from 29 students, when it opened in 1901, to 3,494 students today.

The makeup of the school also has changed, said Mark Bloodgood, 75, of La Crescenta, who graduated in 1943.

“We didn’t have a lot of different races,” he said. There were a few, including some Japanese American students who were interned during World War II. “They were our friends and classmates, but during the war they just hauled them up and took them away.”

Today, the school is 14% Asian and Pacific Islander, 24% Latino, 49% Caucasian Middle Eastern, 1% African American and 11% white.

Sophomore Carrie Hounsell, 15, said the school has “changed completely--but in a good way.” Hounsell, whose father also attended the school, wore her mother’s blue poodle skirt and a pair of black-and-white saddle shoes to the event. She said she was inspired to dress for the occasion after looking through her father’s yearbook.