1940-49: SCHOOLS

Claudia Peschiutta

GLENDALE -- It was a time when sirens could split a quiet Glendale

night and have families running to lower the heavy blackout curtains on

their windows.

But for a young Ellen Perry, now 66, growing up in the city during the

1940s, the dangers of World War II seemed far away and the air raid

drills could leave her and her twin sisters giggling.

“We were little kids and we thought it was funny,” she said. “My

mother would hit us on the head like you don’t know and tell us this is

serious business.”

While many of Glendale’s young residents might not have understood the

conflict abroad, it permeated their lives and was a part of school life.

Perry remembers tending to the victory garden at John Marshall

Elementary School, competing with other classes to see who could collect

the most tin foil and adding coins to the fund for the U.S.S. Glendale.

She also recalls the disappearance of some of her Japanese classmates

and neighbors, who had been placed in internment camps.

“I remember two boys and all of a sudden they were gone,” she said.

“We never realized in our young minds what was going on.”

Though Perry called the decade as a “traumatic period of time,” she

also talked of playing with friends in her backyard, listening to

favorite radio shows and swooning for Alan Ladd at the movies.

Glendale High School hosted several famous guests, including Bob Hope

and Red Skelton, during those years in an effort to raise money for war

bonds, she said.

The war also came to influence curriculum in Glendale schools. The

prominence of defense industries led to a greater emphasis being placed

on technical fields. The war’s end led a balancing out of courses.

Long-needed facility repairs also had to wait until the late 1940s,

due to war-related materials and labor shortages.

Monte Vista Elementary was built in 1948 and Dunsmore Elementary soon

followed.