‘The Ya-Ya’s’ of Costa Mesa High School’s first graduating class K.I.T. for 60+ years
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Costa Mesa High School has seen legions of youth walk through its hallowed halls since the institution first opened its doors in 1958.
But for one group of local women, who were among the first students to ever step foot on the campus as it was still being built, there will only ever be one inaugural graduating senior class.
Costa Mesa resident Rita Wolverton-Madigan recalls having the distinction of being an upperclassman from the time she was a freshman, since the school opened only to a single cohort, adding the upper grades as its first class went on to become sophomores, juniors and seniors.
“It was so crowded at Newport Harbor High, so all the freshmen at Harbor came over to Costa Mesa,” the 81-year-old recalled in a recent interview. “Then the next year, the Newport kids went back to Harbor and we were always the upper class. It made for a close-knit group.”
During their first year, some 600 freshmen hailing from intermediate schools in Costa Mesa, Santa Ana Heights and Newport Beach got to select the school’s colors — green, black and white — and voted for Mustangs to be its mascot.
Wolverton-Madigan’s schoolmate, Jill McBride, said while the campus was “bare bones” in the beginning, with no formal cafeteria and just a small gym, everyone was beyond happy to be there.
“We had each other and the thrill of watching something being done to our school each year,” the 82-year-old Mission Viejo resident remembered. “We set every record, because there was no record to break, so we were stars.”
Although the members of Mesa’s Class of 1962 went on to college courses, careers — or, in some cases, into the waiting arms of marriages and motherhood — their time at the Costa Mesa campus and the friendships they formed there have never left them.
Bound by time and memory, Wolverton-Madigan and McBride are part of an unofficial sisterhood of girls who remained friends well after graduation, meeting up at class reunions to relive their most cherished memories.
Their personalities are unique but complement one another. Wolverton-Madigan describes herself as the introvert in the group, while McBride remembers herself being more experimental and a bit of a wild child. A third, Huntington Beach resident Nancy Lewis, says she was a “good girl” with a level head who could always be counted on to be the group’s designated driver.
During their many reunions together, the girls reminisced about their shared childhoods spent frolicking along Orange County’s rugged, undeveloped coastlines, attending beach parties or hearing live music performed by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones and untold hours spent surfing or riding horses bareback in Balboa.
“It was a special, special time,” Wolverton-Madigan recalled of her youth. “We used to take horses to the beach and ride them on the beach. It was wild. That’s where my little 10-year-old heart will always be.”
It was sometime around the group’s 40th reunion in 2002 that the circle of gal pals decided to adopt a name for their tribe. A popular film at the time about four lifelong female friends — ”Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”— may have provided some inspiration; the exact origin story is hard to pin down.
And so Costa Mesa High School’s very own Ya-Ya’s were born, a kinship of a half dozen women now in their 80s whose ranks have thinned slightly after one member passed away and another moved out of California to be closer to her children.
But they’ve also opened their arms to welcome in others. Joined these days by a few younger girl graduates of Costa Mesa High, the original Ya-Ya’s keep in touch through regular phone calls and get-togethers. Talk of raising kids and the exploits of husbands, some of them now exes, has shifted to other, more age-appropriate topics but the joy is still there, according to McBride.
“We’ve slowed down. I’ve had a hip replacement and things like that. We’ve got arthritis or sun spots from too much sun,” she said. “We’re tired, and we’ve gone through a lot and we can’t do a lot of the things we used to do, but we talk and laugh and laugh so hard and share stories. It’s like we’re still in the 1960s, mentally and emotionally, just not physically.”
Lewis, who married right out of high school and lived in a coastal home in Newport Beach for 57 years before moving to Huntington Beach, says she’s grateful to still have such dear friends close by.
Long ago, she said, the Ya-Ya’s had heart-shaped pendants made with their names etched into the silver. Despite looking high and low, she cannot find the keepsake, but it hardly matters.
“We’ve been friends since third or fourth grade, most of us, and most of us are still here,” she said. “It’s just a treasure that we’re all still very close.”
