Dorsey devotee the picture of determination

It may not be a masterpiece, but for Janet Horwitz Colman, it’s a treasure.

For more than 15 years, the Dorsey High School alumna, former teacher and founder of the school’s alumni association searched for a valuable piece of Dorsey’s history: a 1928 portrait of the school’s namesake, Susan Miller Dorsey, the first female superintendent of the Los Angeles public school system.

“Most teachers and students don’t even know who she was,” Colman said in an interview. “Everyone who sees her painting thinks she’s the little old lady on the lid of the candy box.” (No; that’s Mary See.)

Dorsey’s portrait, by artist John Hubbard Rich, was commissioned by 3,000 Los Angeles teachers, who each chipped in a dollar to pay for it. It hung in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s first home in Exposition Park for eight years, beginning in 1929. When Dorsey High opened in 1937, the painting was transferred to the school library, where it remained until the late 1960s.

“I looked at her painting every day until I graduated in 1965,” Colman said. “When I returned to teach at Dorsey High in 1970, her portrait was gone.”

Colman, 59, who retired from teaching in 2002, is a historian by choice and profession. She volunteers as the school historian and is helping to organize an all-class reunion in June for Dorsey’s 70th anniversary. She makes her living selling vintage Hollywood movie posters and photographs of movie scenes through her business, Hollywood Poster Exchange, which she founded in 1975 with her late husband, Bob.

The otherwise level-headed fourth-generation Angeleno became obsessed with Dorsey, whom she’d never met. She was haunted by the missing portrait -- rather like the detective played by Dana Andrews in the 1944 film “Laura,” who becomes obsessed with a portrait of the woman he thinks is dead.

“My husband knew my only true love, beyond him, was Dorsey High” and the educator whose name it bears, Colman said. “I knew the original staff members who knew her personally, [I] collected oral interviews, saved some of her handwritten letters addressed to the school and spent more than 35 years teaching students all about her. She was quite a pioneer in her field.”

Dorsey even inspired Colman’s career choice. “In 10th grade, I took a guidance class, an orientation to the school,” Colman said. “I knew then I wanted to be a teacher just like Dorsey. She was so dynamic, so well respected.”

Colman knows Dorsey High history by heart too. She can tell you that architect and aviation enthusiast Henry Gogerty designed the school to look like an airport, and that it was called Western High while under construction. She knows that some of the school’s graduates helped to form a jazz fusion band called Hiroshima in the 1970s.

She can tick off famous alumni, including Academy Award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith; baseball Hall of Famer George “Sparky” Anderson; attorney Howard Weitzman; Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles); the late Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles); and film actress Brenda Sykes, who appeared in the 1971 Rock Hudson film “Pretty Maids All in a Row.”

But Colman reserves her deepest affection for Susan Miller Dorsey, who was born in Penn Yan, N.Y., in 1857. As a child, Susan watched congressman and future President James A. Garfield jump on the steps of the New York Tribune to calm a mob after news broke of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, she told The Times in a 1938 interview. Dorsey said Garfield shouted, “God reigns, and the republic still lives!”

She graduated from Vassar College in 1877 and spent a year teaching at Wilson College in Pennsylvania, returning to Vassar to teach Greek and Latin.

In 1881, she married Baptist minister Patrick William Dorsey. The same year, the couple came to Los Angeles, where he became pastor of First Baptist Church at 6th Street and Broadway (then known as Fort Street).

In the early 1890s, her husband abandoned her, taking their son with him. Dorsey returned to teaching in 1896 at Los Angeles High School, where she rose to vice principal.

By 1913, she was assistant superintendent of schools. In 1920, she became superintendent. Her aim, she said, was to “solve vocational problems and train character,” The Times reported.

During Dorsey’s nine years at the helm, enrollment increased 275%, The Times reported in 1938. She was responsible for a $30-million budget and 400 schools.

In her spare time, she volunteered in the city’s social welfare programs, including in the Chinese community, tending to those with tuberculosis. A temperance advocate, she was a speaker, writer and recipient of numerous honors, degrees and tributes.

Colman’s uncle, the late Albert Glasser, knew Dorsey when he was a student at Roosevelt High School in the late 1920s. He “wrote, played and conducted the original music composition for his high school graduation,” Colman said. “But a few weeks before the ceremony, his music teacher told him that he was going to play Glasser’s music himself.

“My uncle was heartbroken, but tenacious. He took the bus across town to see Mrs. Dorsey.

“She said, ‘Not only will you conduct your composition, Mr. Glasser, but I will be in the front row to hear it.’ ”

Glasser went on to become a prolific composer of B-movie scores from the 1940s through the 1960s; among the productions he worked on were the Cisco Kid films and television programs.

Dorsey sat for her portrait in 1928 and resigned as superintendent a year later. Rich unveiled his painting at a ceremony attended by Gov. Clement C. Young and other local notables. Young said the growth and improvement of Los Angeles’ schools was thanks to “the splendid leadership of the woman we have gathered here today to honor.”

Dorsey died in 1946, a few days before her 89th birthday.

Because the painting had hung in the museum until Dorsey High opened, the museum had stamped “property of LACMA” on the back. When the Dorsey library got a new paint job in the late 1960s, the portrait was returned to LACMA.

During a LACMA “deaccessioning” sale in the early 1980s, someone bought Dorsey’s portrait for $65 because he was familiar with the work of Rich, a renowned 20th century portrait painter. But the buyer had no idea who the subject was, nor did the museum.

Colman learned this much later. Meantime, her search for the painting proved futile -- until a fund-raising luncheon in 1985. A 1946 graduate asked if she remembered a painting of Dorsey that had hung in the library.

“Not only do I remember it,” Colman said she told him, “I’ve been looking for it since 1970.”

“He told me it was at his next-door neighbor’s house,” Colman said. He’d recognized the portrait from his days at Dorsey.

Colman knocked on the door, and there in the living room hung Dorsey’s painting.

“I almost fainted,” she said.

She asked if she could buy it. He said he would get back to her. Days later, he said she could have it -- for $25,000. She cringed.

Her husband, knowing how much she wanted the painting, worked out a trade: $25,000 worth of movie posters for the portrait. The painting’s former owner -- whose name Colman cannot recall -- sold them, recouping his investment.

Since 1986, the portrait has graced Colman’s living room. As the school’s longtime volunteer historian, she said, “it seems only fitting that she found her way back to me.”

Colman plans to leave it to the school. And to ensure that the portrait doesn’t vanish again, she wrote Dorsey’s name on the back.

cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com

Dorsey High’s 70th anniversary celebration, an all-class 1937-2007 reunion picnic, will be held at the school from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 2.