Lark Ellen Boys Graduate from Emerson Jr. High School - Page 1

Graduation from Emerson Jr. High in the ninth grade in a big new auditorium dressed in our best bib and tucker gave us a great feeling. for the start of the summer as we had been the big shots that night, But as the summer waned and we realized we would soon be the minnows in a big pond. My first day at University High School was very bewildering. The school was an older campus spread out over the side of a hill. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of older universities. The students seem to have so much more freedom and not under such tight discipline as we had experienced before. The buildings were mostly brick and the grounds green with grass and flowers. The student lunch and social area was on the side of a hill with fish ponds, trees, grass and gardens like a park.

In the middle of the park was the Wigwam (the students were Warriors) where you could get sandwiches and other foods with the gentle sounds of the popular music of the day played from 78 RPM records. The school had a large swimming pool under one of the buildings which was fed by springs on the campus as were the fish ponds. At the time it was the prettiest campus in the L. A. city school system and the one most of the movie studios used for graduation from their studio schools. There were only a couple kids from my Jr. High I knew attending University High School.

I had planned to go out for the football team but found I was too late to sign up as I was unaware that you had to do it well before the school year started. The only classes I remember were French, Geometry, and auto shop. The French class was only easier than the Spanish class I had taken in the ninth grade because of what I had learned about grammar in the Spanish class. Geometry was better than Algebra had been because it was not so repetitious.