Mahony Was Among 1st Graduates in ’54

It was an entry typical of high school yearbooks, the meaning of inside jokes lost over time but the youthful humor in evidence:

“Roger Mahony, local salesman for Mother Fletcher’s Nose Slings, recently purchased twin barracudas from Charlie’s Fish Hatchery. He plans to raise them in the swimming pool.”

Mahony is now a cardinal in the Catholic Church, but in the spring of 1954 he was 18 and graduating from the newly built Our Lady Queen of Angels High School Seminary next to the San Fernando Mission.

The new building, with a Spanish mission-style tower, even had a swimming pool.

Mahony had moved during the Easter holiday with classmates from the Los Angeles archdiocese’s junior seminary on Detroit Street, then known as Los Angeles College. The school, founded in 1926, is now the site of Daniel Murphy Catholic High School.

Because the Mission Hills campus included junior college-level studies in its early years, Mahony spent two more years there before continuing seminary training at St. John’s College in Camarillo.

Co-editor in 1955 of a yearbook produced by the college-level students, Mahony is seen posing for a photograph with another puzzled seminarian, studying first aid handbooks in the school’s infirmary.

But Mahony wasn’t the only seminarian there destined for bigger things.

Other cassock-wearing seminarians in the same yearbook include William Levada, now the archbishop of Portland, Ore., and Justin Rigali, now archbishop of St. Louis.