James Laird - Lark Ellen Boys Graduate from Emerson Jr. High School - Page 3

One Dec. weekend in 194O Jackie's family lived next door and I was invited to a barbeque with them to a relative's home, Bill and Ester Graham in San Fernando Valley that Sunday. The Grahams had just moved to Cal. as Bill, an engineer, had been recruited to work at one of the new defense factories springing up in So. Cal. We had only been at their home a short while when it came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. It was Dec.7, and I don't remember much about the rest of that day. Up until then war was on all our minds but it was the war in Europe, not Japan. The next thing I remember is my father tell us boys that we were leaving the boy's home before Christmas. I don't know what prompted the sudden move whether it was the war or the Boy's Home moving. The superintendent, Mom Cassidy was retiring at the end of the year also.

In Jan. 1942 we started school in Bell and even though it was part of the L. A. City school system the classes were not quite the same. The big difference for me was the geometry class. The instructor had written his own version of a text book which had been approved for him to use. We had mimeographed copies to use and he was in an entirely different place in the course than my last class so it was a bit hard to follow. At the end of the semester in February we moved to Imperial Valley to live with our mother in the town of Calipatria where my brother Gene and I were born and thus we started attending yet other schools. One advantage we had in these new schools was we had lots of cousins to help us feel at home. This is where most of my mother's relatives lived. The grade school was next the high school. Our mother ran the school cafeteria at the grade school which served both schools. My mother was a member of the first class to graduate from the high school.

Jim Laird