La Cañada History: Senior prank features Volkswagen Beetle

Ten Years Ago

Several Spartan seniors, advanced placement physics students, were basking in the glow of a prank well pulled in early June 2005. They successfully dragged a Volkswagen Beetle they’d purchased and beautified onto a bridge connecting the main classroom building at La Cañada High to the Student Center. Tom Michael, Kevin Twohy, Darron Fors, Colin McQuay, Ben Frandsen, Matt Motia and Tina Shiller were behind the joke.

Twenty Years Ago

His Royal Highness Don Felipe de Borbon, then the Prince of Asturias, Crown Prince of Spain, visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was briefed on the Galileo Project, the Mars Exploration Program, the Deep Space Network and the Cassini project. Today he is known as Felipe VI, King of Spain, having succeeded to the throne in June 2014.

Thirty Years Ago

La Cañada High School softball teammates Julie Kucera, Tina Lafferty, Andrea Gray and Lauren Reynolds were named to the All-Rio Hondo League first team in the spring of 1985. Coach Randy Boal’s team also had two other players receive all-league honorable mention, juniors Jodi Harrison and Michele Evans.

Forty Years Ago

The La Cañada Youth House (today known as the Community Center) announced it would offer a new program in the summer of 1975, “Horse-Nastics,” gymnastics on the back of a moving horse. The instructor was M. Jeanine Vore, well-known in La Cañada equestrian circles.

Fifty Years Ago

Following several months of negotiation, it was announced the membership of La Cañada Country Club would buy the 100-acre golf facility from the Angeles Crest Development Co. for $1.4 million.

Sixty Years Ago

Graduation season 1955 saw the Rose Bowl commencement exercises of 119 La Cañada seniors who had attended John Muir High School and 188 10th-graders from La Cañada Junior High School, both campuses under the umbrella of the Pasadena school district. To celebrate the end of their academic year, each of La Cañada’s public elementary schools held their own all-day picnics at Brookside Park in Pasadena.

Compiled from the Valley Sun archives by Carol Cormaci.