The Mount's hidden saint

ONCE UPON A TIME, the name John Henry Newman was a familiar one on the campus of a Catholic college or university – a building, a club, a center. For much of its history, this was true at the Mount, too. The Newman Seminar Room was part of the original architecture of the Charles Willard Coe Memorial library in 1947 until it disappeared in the renovations of 1994-1996. The legacy continues to this day as the Newman Collection of rare books, papers and letters, which occupy an entire wall in Special Collections on the library’s first floor.

Caricature of Newman in
Spy Magazine in 1877 (MSMU
Special Collections)

Today, October 9, we celebrate the memorial of Newman as Saint John Henry Newman, canonized October 13, 2019, by Pope Francis. That his feast day is observed in the early fall of the academic semester is key to knowing who St. John Henry was. Among other things, he was a gifted essayist, novelist, and poet and a prolific one as well. But the work we care about is here is his 1852 The Idea of a University, which influenced the course of Catholic higher education and the liberal arts for the 20th Century and after.

Newman was a gigantic and hugely contentious political figure in 19th Century England. He was a renowned scholar, philosopher and cleric in the Church of England and popular professor at Oxford University. But while still a young man he began to harbor doubts about Anglican theology and starting publishing his questions in a series of pamphlets, or "tracts," sparking an uproar that lasted the rest of the century.

His eventual and very public conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 cost him and his followers their families, friends, homes and livelihoods. England was deeply anti-Catholic at the time, with a shocking bigotry that almost mirrors the racial ferment of 21st Century America, so it was no minor thing for Newman to change churches. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1846 and resettled in Ireland to preach and teach in comparative poverty, and continued to write, often focusing on the problems of moral relativism, which he saw writ large in the Church of England. Not unlike Rev. Martin Luther King, his efforts and sacrifices over decades improved the lot of Catholics in England and he was able to return after 32 years, settling in the industrial city of Birmingham. He was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 and died in Birmingham in 1890.

The careful reasoning and logic that led him to the Catholic Church made him a hero of Catholics in the United States, who were very much second-class citizens in the early 20th Century (and, believe it or not, regular targets of the Ku Klux Klan). Shut out of other elite schools, Catholics redoubled efforts to build their own colleges on Newman’s model, and further did him homage by forming Newman Clubs on almost every college campus in the country, religious or secular.
 

Newman was a big deal at Mount Saint Mary’s College. The 100th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood fell on October 27, 1946, and was celebrated with an all-day symposium that included a dramatization of his long poem Dream of Gerontius, lectures by notable Hollywood Catholics and writers, a panel discussion, and choral performances of original compositions by the music faculty setting Newman’s prayers and poems to music.

Members of the Newman Club gather in Brady Hall in 1953.

Newman’s biggest fan at the Mount was Sister Catherine Anita Fitzgerald, CSJ, ’44,  the leader who built Coe Memorial Library in 1947. It was she who insisted on the inclusion of the Newman Seminar Room in the blueprints and the one who filled it with books, art and antiques during her many years as head librarian and faculty member. In the 1950s she formed the Friends of the Library, whose first major fundraising effort was the purchase, at a Sotheby’s auction in 1960, of a large collection of Newman’s books, among them many rare first editions. To the Mount’s Newman Collection, over the ensuing decades, were added newer books as scholarship in Newman’s thought and influence grew and flourished. (Sister Catherine Anita herself wrote articles for scholarly journals and contributed an  article about Newman for the Mount journal Inter-Nos.)  

Other Newman scholars in Los Angeles have occasionally made the pilgrimage to Chalon to use the collection, and it is still mentioned in the Mount catalog as an important library asset. St. John Henry, however, hasn’t been part of Mount life since the 1960s – either in the classroom or at shared events with the Newman groups at USC, UCLA, Loyola and Marymount. In some places, including MSMU, his teachings on liberal arts and Catholic orthodoxy gradually fell out of fashion after the Second Vatican Council in favor of more feminist or social justice-oriented theologies. Sister Catherine Anita, Newman’s on-campus champion, died in 1996 not long after the Newman Seminar Room ceased to exist.

But we hold the collection in trust for the future, because truth never goes out of style – a favorite principle of Newman himself. If you want to commune with a genuine saint – after the Covid-19 pandemic, of course – come to the first floor of the library at Chalon where you will be welcome to browse his books.  In the meantime, we have digitized some of his handwritten letters from our collection (by the way, these are officially second class relics since he became a saint). The PDF will download to your computer. NB: You’ll need to be able to read tiny 19th Century cursive.

Our Lady of the Mount, pray for us. St. John Henry Newman, pray for us! Happy feast day!

A second-class relic with Newman's cursive, from 1831 letter to James Bliss.
(MSMU Special Collections)

The Mount, the CSJs, and epidemics

Crowded corridors at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Pasco, Wash.
The photo is undated, probably from around 1950.

WITH THE MOUNT CLOSED due to the COVID-19 pandemic and all of us hunkering down at home, we have been thinking about past epidemics that raced through the United States, all of which impacted the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet -- and later Mount Saint Mary's -- in different ways. Here are some historic highlights from our sources in the University Archives & Special Collections.

Having an epidemic? Build a hospital

The CSJs' hospital in Tucson,
Ariz., in the 1920s.

One of the scourges of the 19th Century was cholera, a water-borne disease spread by human waste and primitive sanitation. It was extremely contagious and often fatal. Those stricken would be healthy one day and dead the next. Germ theory hadn't yet been proposed, so diseases were thought to be transmitted by forms of "bad air" called miasmas, which the steamy Mississippi River next to the CSJs' early settlements seemed to produce. Creeping up the river from New Orleans, cholera struck St. Paul, Minn., in the summer of 1854, less than three years after the the nuns had arrived and before they'd been able to build the town's first hospital. With funding from local citizens and doctors, they started taking cholera victims into an old log cabin. Patients who could afford it paid a dollar a day. At the same time the sisters sped up their plans for a permanent hospital, which became St. Joseph's.

A similar story was repeated by the CSJs in Eureka, Calif., who had barely unpacked their trunks when they were faced with patients suffering from the devastating Spanish Influenza in 1918, a virus that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. In Pasco, Wash., CSJs took in flu patients at their tiny Our Lady of Lourdes hospital, just two years old. The sisters in Indianapolis couldn't offer a hospital, but they responded to the pandemic by opening the campus of Sacred Heart High School for outdoor "field" masses on Sundays. Parishioners could practice some "social distancing" and still receive the sacraments.

In the end, the Spanish Flu took a terrible toll on the CSJ community, claiming at least eight mostly young and healthy Carondelet sisters between 1918 and 1921.

Measles at the Mount 

High on a hill in Brentwood, Mount students were isolated in a unique way, but they weren't immune from virus outbreaks. The "Mountain Ear," a weekly gossip column in the The View newspaper (mountaineer -- get it?) reported humorously on March 20, 1957, that a local epidemic of measles had infected four students and possibly six in Brady Hall, including the editor. If a gossip column sounds unserious, it's because in the decades before the measles vaccine it was a very common childhood disease, and most Americans, including Mount students, had developed the immunity. There's no evidence the measles spread. Over the decades, The View reported an occasional student with an embarrassing case, and no one gave it a second thought. It wouldn't be until 2015 when parents' failure to vaccinate their kids led to a dangerous global outbreak, that everyone started paying attention. The warnings show up in recent student newsletters.

The polio scourge

A childhood case of measles is one thing, but another childhood disease caused absolute terror in mid-20th Century. Although there were many polio outbreaks in the 20th century, the epidemic after World War II was the most terrifying. Starting around 1947 in California, it wasn't stopped until 1955 and the release of the the Salk vaccine. The worst year was 1952, one of the largest outbreaks in U.S. history. Cases that year of poliomyelitis, also known by its starker name infantile paralysis, numbered almost 60,000 in the U.S. Three-thousand children and young adults died, and more than 20,000 were left with permanent mild to severe muscle and nerve damage, including paralysis.

Up on the Brentwood hilltop Mount student were relatively safe. Science and nursing majors studied the disease intently, receiving advice in the columns of The View about what scientific articles to read.  Recruited by ads in the paper, many students responded with regular blood donations for the Red Cross after it was discovered that gamma globulin, a blood component, boosted the immune system and was effective in reducing the symptoms of polio and and other serious diseases.

Adelaide Spuhler Mealey '49

Students at a a Family Day event in 1954 heard a talk from an alumna about day-to-day living after surviving polio. Adelaide Spuhler Mealey, '49 contracted polio after her marriage but was able to care for her two toddlers from her wheelchair.

Virus research

No blog on viruses and MSMU can fail to mention our famous CSJ biologist, Sister Mary Gerald Leahy, whose pioneering research in the 1960s on mosquito reproduction was surfaced anew during the Zika virus epidemic in 2016. Rampant in South America, the Zika virus is spread by aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- which Sister Gerald actually raised in St. Joseph Hall -- and can cause serious birth defects if the mother contracts it during her pregnancy. The epidemic struck at the time of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, foreshadowing the current debate over canceling the 2020 Summer Olympics. The Rio Games went on as planned, but because of Covid-19 the Toyko Olympics have been postponed.  

Coronavirus

Wildfire, epidemics -- never has the Mount been entirely closed in its history until now. The wonderful benefits of transportation and travel mean that the safety and isolation of the mid-century Mount and earlier is almost a dream. But the students of the early 1950s, sweating out the polio epidemic, didn't have smartphones, online classes, Zoom or digital article databases. The common thread is that we live with uncertainty and sometimes fear, but life always manages to go on.

And while all of Los Angeles is on lockdown, maybe we will have a little more time for this blog! Stay safe, stay healthy.    

Sources

We have access to so much wonderful stuff. Check out Sister Mary Agnes Rossiter, CSJ, A Sketch of Her Life by Sister Lucinda Savage, CSJ (1947), which mentions the Spanish Flu. The CSJs' early hospitals and cholera epidemics are mentioned in The Century's Harvest 1836-1936, also by Sister Lucinda. Digital copies of The View and all our digital collections can be viewed at http://stmary2.sdlhost.com.

An advertisement from The View on February 16, 1957, urges students
to donate blood to create gamma globulin to fight polio and other diseases.

Mary Chapel's Stations of the Cross

Ecclesial permission to have the Stations of the Cross
in the original Mount Chapel in 1932

WE BLOGGED THE OTHER DAY about some of the treasures that have surfaced this summer in storage in the Mary Chapel Sacristy, and now we're going to dig into a little more history about one of them.

A framed document in Latin is dated 1932, which would be within a year or two of when the Mount community finally moved up the hill to the new Brentwood campus (the future Chalon) from temporary quarters at St. Mary's Academy in Inglewood.

Brady Hall was the one and only structure until 1939 when Mary Chapel was built. It was a beautiful, multipurpose building into which were crammed the CSJs' convent, student dorms, dining facilities, classrooms, science labs, library, infirmary and of course a chapel. Mass was mandatory and celebrated daily in two converted dorm rooms with the dividing wall removed.

Every Catholic church is entitled to a Stations of the Cross, or Way of the Cross, an ancient devotion that relives Jesus' passion and death in 14 "stations," usually around the walls of the nave. The Latin is Via Crucis, and this document kept in the Sacristy is formal, written permission to stage them in the chapel at the new Mount campus.

These days, the Stations in Mary Chapel are barely noticeable, owing to their small size and decades of grime. In the tiny Brady Hall chapel, there was room for only 14 small pictures, but when the new Mary Chapel was consecrated in 1940, the old Stations were incorporated into the new architecture. The originals were photographed and enlarged, and then hand tinted by one of the Art Department faculty, Sister Ignatia Cordis, CSJ. The covering varnish has darkened and muted the original colors, but when you looks at them now, you are seeing part of the Mount's first chapel in 1932. (What became of the originals is unknown.)

Out of curiosity, we looked into why the Catholic Church had to give formal permission for the Stations.  If a devoted Catholic reverently "walks" the Stations using the appropriate prayers, he or she is entitled to have sins wiped away, called an indulgence. From medieval times, pilgrims following  Jesus' final footsteps in Jerusalem -- the real Stations of the Cross -- were granted a variety of indulgences, good for clearing one or two or a lifetime of sins. The popularity of the pilgrimage led it eventually to be extended to local parishes. A penitent praying the Via Crucis in her home church is essentially making a little pilgrimage and can discharge her sins without having to go all the way to the Holy Land. This approach was popularized in the 1600s by the Franciscans, who since 1217 have been the custodians of the original Way of the Cross through the ancient streets of Jerusalem.

It is the opportunity to receive an indulgence that explains why any installation of the Stations of the Cross has to be blessed by the local prelate; they have to be done in the proper form according to Church norms. (We have an artist's concept of the Stations in the J. Thomas McCarthy Library on the Doheny Campus, but they're not "licensed," so no indulgences.)

The Mount's Documenta Pro Erectione S. Viae Crucis -- "evidence for the building of the holy Way of the Cross" -- is signed in Latin by Sister Margaret Brady, CSJ (Soror Margarita Maria), the Mount's founding president; Father Ermin Vitry, OSB, a Benedictine monk who was Mount chaplain and a music professor; and Most Rev. John (Joannes) J. Cantwell, archbishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles (Angelorum) and San Diego (Sti. Didaci).

The Franciscans' 800-year-old custodianship of the Holy Land explains why it is also signed by two Franciscans. Head (guardian) of the Franciscan province at Mission Santa Barbara, Father Dominic (Dominicus) Gallardo, OFM, authorized as his local delegate Father John (Joannes) Otterstedt, OFM, to make sure everything was on the up and up.

Since the old Stations were incorporated into the new chapel, there was no need of a new  Documentum in 1939.  Those Stations and their Documentum are all that remains of the original  chapel except a couple of fuzzy photographs. 

The first Mount Chapel right before its final liturgy in mid-December 1939.
After that, Mass was celebrated in Mary Chapel. The room is opposite
the elevators on the second floor of Brady Hall, now a lounge.

Signs of the times

No. 5. Masons build the foundation for the permanent sign that
will announce Mount Saint Mary's University.

COMING AND GOING FROM CHALON this last week of summer vacation, we've watched a new entrance sign gradually take shape By our count, the new one will be sign No. 5 since 1932. Here's a pictorial look back on how we welcomed visitors to the Mount from Chalon Road.

No. 1. The rustic 1932 edition that became a beehive.

The first sign was erected in 1932 over the entrance road (still technically known on maps as the Mount Saint Mary's Fire Road). Made of redwood, it stood for almost 25 years until a colony of honeybees took up residence in one of the hollow uprights.

Incidentally, the entrance road was unpaved in the early 1930s and subject to frequent washouts in torrential rains that occasionally hit the mountains, like the tropical storm that landed in early October of 1932. The road was eventually paved with funds donated by Countess Estelle Doheny.

No. 2. Added in 1956, this is fork in the road that marks the routes
to the Mount and the newly finished CSJ House of Studies.

In 1955, amid an explosion in religious vocations, the Los Angeles Province of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet built what is now known as Carondelet Center. The House of Studies was essentially a junior college for hundreds of young sisters, who received some coursework and all of their religious formation to complement what they were getting as Mount students up the hill. The new sign went up at what was now a fork in the entrance road.

The single sign became two at some later time, possibly in the 1980s when the Mount and CSJ Los Angeles Province subdivided ownership the Chalon property into two separate parcels, the College and Carondelet Center.

That sign was covered over with a new temporary plastic edition in January of this year when the Mount announced formal university status.

Nos. 3 and 4. A temporary sign covers the 1980s MSMC
sign and heralds university status as of January 1, 2015.

The entering Class of 2019 will be welcomed with the new, official university sign, But more to the point, it will remain a sign for everyone who climbs our mountain in Brentwood of our 90 years of {Unstoppable} history.

Encyclopedia of religious habits

Who were these nuns? Summer school students in the 1950s
at MSMC. (Mount Archives photo.)

MANY OF OUR OLD PICTURES carry no information on the back. The photo above shows up in a folder titled "Sisters in Traditional Habits" but doesn't identify the women. All we know is that they're not Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

Luckily, the University of Dayton has an important, wonderful (and not to mention cute) resource online that identifies the traditional habits of more than 100 religious orders of women. Instead of photographs like the one above, they're pictures of miniature, hand-sewn costumes on porcelain dolls measuring about seven inches tall.  The landing page at UD has information about how the collection was developed.

We're able to identify the habit above as that of the Daughters of Mary and Joseph in their distinctive embroidered teal-blue scapulars.

Starting back in the 1920s, many teaching orders sent their nuns to the Mount for summer school classes toward a degree or credential. Thanks, U. Dayton! Now we can at least figure out where they came from.

A familiar face

The original St. Joseph's shrine was on the western
edge of the Chalon Campus where the library is now.

THE COLLEGE IS NAMED for St. Mary, the Mother of God, but we have a second beloved patron in her husband and the Lord's foster father, St. Joseph. And while we usually refer to our founding Sisters in shorthand as "the CSJs," we shouldn't overlook the patronage of this great saint of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

Here are two small snapshots from the College Archives. The first shows the original shrine at Chalon, taken around the time it was christened St. Joseph's Park in the spring of 1937.

According to Sister Germaine's history 1925-1975, St. Joseph Park,

with its attractive wayside shrine, became the new devotional corner. This shrine. one of Mother Margaret Mary [Brady's] long-desired projects, was planted with a selection of rare trees and flowers, to make it valuable as a botanical garden also.

Funding for the shrine came from the Alumnae Association and other sources. The shelter was designed by Mother Margaret Mary, then president, with help from the Mount gardeners, and constructed of wood and locally quarried stone. It occupied an open space south of the College Building (now known as Brady Hall), where it stood for nearly a decade until it had to be moved to make way for the new library in 1946-1947.

Since then, St. Joseph's statue has occupied its honored spot in the Colonnade along the eastern edge of the Circle, a reminder that our patron still keeps his silent, loving vigil over the Mount community.

A student in bobby socks and saddle shoes pauses at St. Joseph's
shrine for a quick prayer between classes. Picture is dated 1961.

Department of Security, 1931

Tige, the Mount's first dog, keeping an eye on the tennis courts.

WE'RE PROUD OF OUR SECURITY OFFICERS at the Mount, who keep their watchful eyes on us and our beautiful campuses. We thought for today's blog (it being #ThrowbackThursday) we'd look back at MSMC guards in history. Today's folks, after all, are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Well, giant dogs, anyway.

When the College moved from St. Mary's Academy to the new Chalon site -- a lonely outpost on a mountaintop -- the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet decided they needed a watchdog. Thus began a long and faithful tradition that continued for more than 50 years.

The story of the first dog is too good to miss, so we are reproducing Sister M. Germaine McNeil's rendition from her History of Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, 1925-1975 (New York: Vantage Press, 1985, 425).

The first and most intelligent in the long succession of Mount canines was Tige, a huge blue currier, given as a watchdog by a friend of Sister Winifred Riecker and Sister Celestine Quinn  [Music faculty -- Ed. note] soon after the college moved to its Chalon Campus in the spring of 1931.

Tige was a gentle and obedient dog, trained by his former mistress to obey commands in French and German. Sister Winifred fed him on a diet of toast and pancakes, which he quickly learned to supplement by catching quail. Sister prepared a bed for Tige in the passageway leading to the engine room [Brady basement -- Ed. note] and tucked him in nightly with an old blanket. The dog would remain until Sister left, then lope across campus trailing his blanket caught in his collar. If he thought something was being concealed from him he would open a drawer or a door-latch with his nose to satisfy his curiosity.

Tige with a friend, possibly Buzzy, who arrived
a few years after Tige and left in a hurry.

Tige was hostile to strangers but did not bite. Instead, he would firmly grasp their upper arm in his teeth and conduct them out to the road off the campus. 

The students were Tige's special friends. He chaperoned them on their hikes in the hills and accompanied them on their walks into Westwood. In this latter instance, he became an embarrassment because he would chase every motorcycle he saw. When the girls wanted to leave campus without Tige, they would lock him in the elevator [in Brady Hall -- Ed. note]. Then, of course, the dog would bark until he was released. 

Tige's coat was so thick and heavy that it was usually clipped in summer to make him more comfortable. He was so ashamed, however, of being deprived of his coat that he would hide for several days in the thick brush of the hillsides.

He faithfully attended Father Vaughan's classes in the Lecture Hall [now Brady lounge -- Ed. note], where he slept in the rear on the flat of his back with his legs up against the wall.

Sister Germaine's dog tales warrant a couple more blogs if we can locate more photos. When she finished her history in 1985, the Mount still had a four-legged security team -- although the two-legged variety had supplemented the department for decades. We'll tell you about the last two, Zac & Zelda, in a future post.

Thanks to all our Security team members for their hard work and keeping up a venerable tradition.

The rattlesnake, 'our dear neighbor'

A "modern-day St. Patrick" : Sister Mary Gerald Leahy, CSJ,
with facilities engineer Martin Bullinger in the early 1960s,
helps a visiting rattlesnake to find a safer location.

WE INTRODUCED SISTER MARY GERALD LEAHY the other day and described her impressive career as a biologist. Although insects were her specialty, disease-bearing mosquitoes in particular, she loved biology where she found it, and there was plenty at Chalon.

Take rattlesnakes, for instance. The Mount is planted right in the middle of snake country, surrounded on three sides by dense chaparral. And it's not as though the founders didn't know what they were getting into. Here is an excerpt from a history by one of them, Mother Dolorosa Mannix:

When the real estate agent took us to see the site, there was no road, and the climb had to be made through brush -- sage, mostly, chaparral and sumac. The guide sent his dog on ahead of us, saying, "If there is a rattlesnake in the brush, the dog will bark." We were grateful that the dog did not bark, though we did see rattlers coiled around the branches of the black walnut on the summit.*

That summit, of course, was where the College was built. In spite of 85 years of development in the area, there are still plenty of snakes roaming the hills.

As a biologist, Sister Mary Gerald knew that snakes play an important role in nature's cycles. Fewer snakes would mean more troublesome critters like rabbits nibbling on the landscaping and field mice in Brady Hall. Threatening as they seem, rattlers are good neighbors. When a snake paid a visit, Sr. Mary Gerald was summoned to greet him.

The picture above, found in her papers, shows Sister's technique for handling her reptilian visitor.  As she supervises, chief engineer Martin Bullinger has managed to get the rattlesnake -- which looks to be about 4 feet long -- to clamp his fangs into the end of a long stick. A big, empty glass jar stands ready.  Drop the snake into the jar, quickly pop on the lid, and carefully escort him off campus.

According to unwritten College lore, the only person ever bitten by a rattlesnake at Chalon was one of the Sisters, who was treated at a hospital and released with no ill effects. If it was Sister Mary Gerald, it's a good bet that she didn't mind. She certainly had enough exposure: The View from October 25, 1955, has a front-page picture of Sister handling a somewhat smaller snake by herself. In the caption, she is referred to as "a Modern-Day St. Patrick." 

We think the creature-loving St. Francis of Assisi may be a better comparison. No one will ever rid the Mount of snakes as St. Patrick did in Ireland, but Sister's legacy is at least to remember that they are God's creatures, or as a scientifically minded CSJ might say, our "dear neighbor." Next time you see our neighbor Mr. Snake, be nice -- and think of Sister Mary Gerald.

* Sister M. Dolorosa Mannix, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles Provincialate Archives, 1927. Quoted in The History of Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, California, 1925-1975 by Sister Mary Germaine McNeil, CSJ. New York: Vantage Press, 1985. Page 6.

Sisters in school

THE STORY IS OFTEN TOLD how in June 1925 Archbishop Cantwell asked Mother Margaret Mary Brady to start a college, and the Mount's doors opened for business just a few months later.

His concern was good Catholic higher education for all the young ladies graduating from St. Mary's Academy. Mentioned less often was the number of nuns who needed schooling. The Sisters of St. Joseph were a large and growing order, and they had plenty of company in the sisterhood ranks, so almost immediately the new Mount St. Mary's College started classes on Saturdays and during the summer for Sisters of all orders in L.A.

The photo at the top shows an early Mount summer session held at St. Mary's Academy (the College moved to Chalon in 1930). Most of the nuns would be heading into the archdiocese's parish schools so teacher training was the main curriculum.

The smaller photo is the summer of 1947 or '48 at Chalon with more students and more different kinds of habits -- some years there were as many as 30 orders represented. State education requirements mandated that religious teachers have a bachelor's degree, so even Sisters with years of classroom experience found themselves on the other side of a desk. It was not uncommon for a high school teacher to spend six or seven years earning a B.A. part-time.

These sister-oriented programs also laid the foundation for the Mount's own development and growth. In the mid-1950s, Countess Estelle Doheny loaned No. 2 Chester Place to the Mount for weekend and evening classes for teachers. No. 2 became Medaille Hall, and the CSJs' established presence on the property led a few years later to the opening of the Downtown Campus, now known as Doheny.

My thanks go to Sister Mary Therese Sweeney, CSJ, of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange for the excuse to dip into the Summer School photos. She's writing a book on the history of her community, and in helping her the last couple years I've learned a lot about the "parallel universe" of Mount graduates who were Sisters.

Timeless

RESEARCHING THE DEDICATION DATE of St. Joseph Hall, I came across this picture of the Circle and building from the mid- to late 1940s. So little has changed in the Circle that this could have been taken last year. The flagpole, of course, was moved to make room for the new fountain, and some of the view of the South Bay disappeared decades ago behind the Humanities or Drudis-Biada buildings.

The dedication date is March 25, 1945. The picture is on matte card stock with fluted edges and was produced by the long-gone Flaim Studio on Greenleaf Avenue in Whittier.

White wonderland

IT WAS NEARLY 80 DEGREES at Chalon last Friday, and amid the beach weather and warm blue skies it's hard to believe that on the same date back in 1949 -- January 13, a Thursday -- the city and the College enjoyed a record snowfall.

It wasn't just a light dusting -- probably more like 4 inches -- and it stuck. I just came across this photo of Mary Chapel, taken from the second floor of Rossiter Hall. What I like about it are the "Christmas trees" on either side of the entrance.

The students (and maybe even a Sister or two) enjoyed some snowball fights before it all melted in the late morning.

The beach weather last week was pretty nice, but day after perfect day in Brentwood can be a little, well, boring. It would be fun indeed to see this place decked in white again.

Uniforms aloft!

FOUND SOME OLD BINDERS in the back of a drawer -- about which more in a minute -- and among the contents of #2 were a couple of clippings from the Los Angeles Times and Santa Monica Evening Outlook. There are no dates to be seen, but it was easy enough to figure out that it's shortly before graduation in 1954.

The Times photo shows four ASB officers, left, hoisting their discarded uniform skirts up the flagpole in the center of the Circle. The Outlook picture, taken from further away, shows more skirts pinned to a "halyard" running the length of the flagpole. A big crowd is gathered around. The captions explain that the College was observing the annual "hoisting" of the skirts to celebrate the seniors' freedom from their navy-blue uniforms.

Uniforms, part of life at the Mount from the beginning, finally went away in the mid-1950s, not long after these photos would have been taken.

It's always fun to discover a long-lost tradition (did they want "hoisting the skirts" to sound a little naughty?) that I can pass along to Betty Jiminez for next year's "Did You Know?" posters for Homecoming.

These binders are fascinating. They're a mishmash of documents spanning five decades starting in the 1930s. There's everything from handwritten notes to old mimeographed questionnaires. They document some pretty significant histories, though, like a rundown of college costs in the 1930s to a typed draft seeking permanent accreditation for the secondary teaching credential in 1946. There are handwritten highlights of 1953 or 1954, as if for a speech or report.

Some of the papers may have originated with a Sister pretty high up in administration, because there is CSJ memorabilia in #3. They accumulated in folders and at some point, probably about 1975, they ended up in the binders, where they've lain forgotten for almost another 40 years. It's my turn to take the next step -- acid-free folders and Mylar sleeves -- and hope to give them another 40.

Postscript: the Vujovich family

MARY IRENE'S SON, JEFF OHLFS, helped me out by writing a short bio of his mother for the collection finding aid. His notes connect a couple dots in Mount history.

According to legend, the Sisters enlisted a friend to help them look for a permanent site for the College in 1928. The friend is never named in the written or oral histories, and the story of Mother Margaret Mary Brady slogging up the steep chaparral in full habit sounds a bit embellished. But Jeff's narrative identifies this friend as Michael Vujovich, Mary Irene's father.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Mr. Vujovich was a rancher in Ventura County, and would have known a thing or two about California real estate. The CSJs would have needed a smart guide if they were going to get involved in land deals with oilmen.

In archives, it's always gratifying to put a name with an event, to find a real person taking part in real history. Somehow the old story seems less myth and more genuine. There is also the remarkable continuity of one family, the Vujovich-Ohlfs clan, staying involved with this college for more than 80 years.

Splendid solitude

AMID ALL THE NEWS COVERAGE of this weekend's "Carmageddon" shutdown of the 405 have been historic pictures of the Sepulveda Pass. This impossibly busy thoroughfare didn't get a paved road until the 1920s, so the photos are fun to look at. If you know where to look, you can see Mount St. Mary's College.

The small picture at right from 1961 (before the Bel Air Fire) was reproduced in the Los Angeles Times, and I've marked the College in yellow. It really shows what a visible landmark the College was in the 70 years before the Getty Center was built.

The picture at top is taken from the west in 1956 or -57. Alone on its hill, the College could see -- and be seen from -- much of Los Angeles. It's astonishing to see how bare the canyon was in those days before the 405 pushed through.

Our oldest alumnae still long for the days when you could see the Mount from Santa Monica, the only light source in the otherwise black mountain front. The shrine to Our Lady of the Mount on the western slope was lit up all night and served as a beacon to boats out on the Bay.

As the college grew, so did its nighttime signature. One night early in World War II, a panicky neighbor called the college to demand that the spotlights illuminating Mary Chapel be doused immediately lest the Japanese home in on them and bomb the Westside. The College complied.

A few people express quiet regret about the loss of the Mount's landmark prominence in the shadow of the Getty. One of the CSJs told me last year that the community had always been told that their 180-degree view from Carondelet Center was to be "preserved in perpetuity," and that the entire canyon was part of some kind of "trust" that would prevent construction. The sisters were as surprised as anyone when the Getty Trust proved otherwise.

The college is closing for Carmageddon (as is the Getty). It's hard enough to get here on a normal day! For one weekend, though, the Sepulveda Pass will revert to impassable and the Mount will enjoy a bit of its old solitude.

Found! The Brady Hall Chapel

BRADY HALL, BUILT IN 1930-31, was supposed to be the first of several College buildings constructed one after another in the early 1930s. Thanks to the Great Depression, it ended up the only building for quite awhile. From 1931 until Christmas Eve, 1939, Brady was everything to everybody, students and sisters alike, from dorms to dining hall, labs to library, classrooms to convent to chapel.

John Deeb of Chalon Facilities and I have spent a little time here and there looking around for the former chapel in Brady. The old blueprints showed a couple of small dorm rooms on the 2nd floor with the partition removed. A purple pebbled-glass window in the Student Lounge opposite the elevator was a hint that this was the place. Finally, a passing mention in an old article confirmed it. The room, it said, was too small for pews so they used a dozen or so padded kneelers. The altar was made of painted white wood, and overflow attendance left people out in the hallway on folding chairs. Everybody turned out for the daily 7 a.m. Mass in those days.

We even know about the tiny Stations of the Cross, because they were later photographed and enlarged, hand-tinted and placed in Mary Chapel, where they remain to this day. But what did the Brady Hall chapel actually look like?

I stumbled today on two tiny snapshots. I've posted them here. The handwriting on the back says that they were taken the day before the very last liturgy celebrated in the little temporary chapel. That must have been a few days before Christmas Eve in 1939, which is considered the inaugural Mass of the new Mary Chapel. (It was formally dedicated by Bishop Cantwell on the Feast of the Ascension in May, 1940.)

I'm sure that both students and faculty had mixed emotions about the move. They were undoubtedly delighted with the beautiful new Mary Chapel, but the memories of crowding the entire Mount family into a tiny space for worship must have lingered for a long time. If you've ever wondered why Mary Chapel has such small Stations of the Cross in such a soaring space, that's why -- a little memento went with the community to the new church.

Together again for the first time

I'M WRITING UP A LITTLE TOUR-GUIDE NARRATIVE for our Doheny Docents, who are going to be giving Chalon Campus tours during the Women & Spirit Exhibit at the Mount this summer. Chalon, truly one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in Los Angeles, has an interesting architectural history tied up with oil interests, developers, activist neighbors, booms and busts. (Some things never change.)

As I've noted before, the Mount's architect was Mark Daniels, a century ago one of the most prominent in California. Trained as a landscape engineer and something of a naturalist (he was superintendent of Yosemite National Park) he is credited with the 17-Mile Drive at Pebble Beach, Thousand Oaks area in Berkeley, and other ritzy Bay Area neighborhoods.

In the early 20th Century, L.A.'s oilmen were developing the former Spanish ranchos into new neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades. In the mid-1920s Daniels came on as the signature architect for a new development called Miramar Estates, envisioned as a rich spread of European-style villas where Sunset Boulevard meets Pacific Coast Highway. (Contemporary photos of the land can be found at SMPL's Imagine Santa Monica.)

Daniels designed the model home for the subdivision. It was heavily publicized as the "Los Angeles Times Demonstration Home," meant to embody the classic Southern California lifestyle but featuring state of the art techniques -- "the last word in construction" -- and even ultramodern amenities like a dishwasher. Times readers were given weekly updates in breathless language as construction progressed.

What's interesting is that this happened to be the same time Daniels was enlisted to design a master plan for Mount St. Mary's College. There was a built-in connection: the Sisters of St. Joseph purchased the College property from the same oilmen who had sold the land for Miramar Estates and a big parcel down the hill from the Mount in a neighborhood called "Riviera."

From rooflines and archways to chimney tops, vents and wrought iron, the Demonstration Home and Brady Hall reveal a detailed and exquisite architectural vision. In fact, Daniels had traveled to Madrid in 1928 to design a palace for a Spanish nobleman, the Marquis de Portago, a tribute to an architect who could out-Spanish the Spaniards on their own turf.

Looking at the Miramar Estates area now, with its expensive homes and expansive views, it's almost impossible to believe that the development went bust. But it did, the victim of stock markets, gasoline prices and real estate bubbles. (Some things never change.) Daniels' vast plans for the Mount were only realized on a much smaller scale in the 1940s after a hiatus in building of nearly 10 years. Plans by some of the oilmen to build a cement plant between Miramar and the Mount were defeated by neighbors like Mary Pickford.

As for the Times Demonstration Home, it was abandoned and falling into ruin by the early 1940s when it was finally rescued and restored by a pair of German emigres. (Their interesting story and that of the current Villa Aurora are told here.)

Though few people know it, the Chalon Campus has an architectural pedigree that is rooted deeply in Los Angeles history. The Doheny Docents are in for a nice surprise -- another beautiful campus to introduce to history buffs.

Blossoms

SEEING THE MOUNT'S lush azaleas and camellias in springtime bloom reminds me of a story told by the late L.A. Times columnist and alumna Zan Thompson '40 about the grounds in the late 1930s when she was a student.

The campus was a bare hilltop when the Sisters took occupancy of the new college building in the spring of 1930. Landscaping got under way immediately, with redwoods and fruit trees and shrubs to stabilize the hillsides.

And flowers, of course. But the flowers had a particular purpose. Mother Marie de Lourdes Le May, head of the English Department and later president and Provincial superior, planted camellias, gardenias and roses near the front steps, blooms that would make a pretty corsage.

No Mount student, Zan wrote, would be without a corsage when her clueless blind date (usually a Loyola man) showed up without one. Mother Marie de Lourdes would take flowers and ribbon in hand and send her student off for an evening on the town with a classy corsage of home-grown posies. (P.S. -- The young lady had to be back in her dorm by 1 a.m.)

I don't know whether the flowering shrubs near Brady hall are the ones planted by Mother Marie de Lourdes, but it's nice to imagine that they are. Let the feminists take umbrage, but it's also fun to imagine a time when a young man on a date was expected to arrive with flowers.

Water features

STUDENT SURVEYS indicate that the Circle -- the open area at the center of the Chalon Campus -- could be more user friendly. It's a lovely spot and the umbrella tables are often occupied, but on a sunny day the glare is pretty harsh, and it's often more of a pedestrian corridor than a spot to sit and enjoy.

Starting today, the Circle is being transformed into a more inviting space of trees and a central fountain. It's an exciting project. Not only will it add beauty to this already marvelous campus, it will at last fulfill what turns out to be an 80-year-old vision.

Mark Daniels, the original architect of the Chalon Campus, sketched his ideas in 1929, a partial set of which is held by the College Archives. But in some old newspaper clippings and the St. Mary's Academy 1930 annual, I came across a drawing I hadn't seen. This scanned image (click to enlarge) shows the expanse below a much more ornate Mary Chapel, with two fountains splashing away on either side.

Daniels, who was also a landscape architect, knew that the timeless combination of water, gardens and dappled light was essential to inviting the College into the glorious climate he sought to showcase in his vision for the Mount.

Postcards from Chalon - Part II

THE VIEW FROM CHALON is one of the most spectacular in Los Angeles, but in the early days when there were just a couple of buildings, the 270-degree the vista from this remote hilltop must have been absolutely breathtaking.

The addition of St. Joseph Hall (science and administration, 1944), Coe Library (1947), the Carondelet House of Studies (1954), Carondelet Hall (1959), Humanities Building (1964), and Drudis-Biada (1974) each took a piece out of the expanse, although there are still plenty of view sites from balconies, patios, roads and between buildings.

This undated postcard predates the Coe Library and shows the surrounding ridges and coastal plain looking southwest, interrupted only by a straggly redwood. The postcard is titled "Facing the Pacific." There was nothing between the Mount and Santa Monica but bare hills.

I admired the view yesterday as I drove downhill toward Chalon Road. The view across Santa Monica Bay toward Catalina Island was crystal clear thanks to the gusty winds. I slowed the car and wondered for the umpteenth time what prompted Mother Margaret Mary Brady to build the campus a thousand feet in the air. The view reminded me yet again of what a special place the Mount is.

I just wish the students would look up once in awhile from thumbing text into their smart phones to take it all in. I guess it's a student thing: One of the alums on my architecture tour in October, who graduated in the 1990s, was blown away by the view. "I just didn't pay attention to it when I was here," she said.

From log hut to Brady Hall

FOR THE ARCHITECTURE TOUR I'm leading next month, I've been poking around records, photographs, blueprints and beautiful Brady Hall itself, a remarkable structure that served as the entire College between 1931 and 1939.

I must have had architecture on the brain when I came across this illustration of the Sisters of St. Joseph's first building in America in 1836, a log hut in Carondelet, Mo., from whence the congregation takes its name. The tiny new St. Joseph's Convent, perched on a bluff between the Mississippi River and miles of virgin woods, consisted of a stool, two mattress covers, a table and three chairs. A nearby hut (similarly underfurnished) served as a school room for the local village kids.

From small starts do mighty things grow. You can trace the lineage of that log cabin down to Brady Hall, which in its early days was equally utilitarian, providing dorms, dining hall, classrooms, science labs, student lounges, library, chapel and convent under its pantiled roof.

On April 20, 1836, one Sister Philomene wrote back to the motherhouse in France describing their new foundation in cautiously optimistic tones. She concluded, "We are doing our best and trusting in God." It's that same mindset, charism, or whatever you want to call it, that built Brady Hall, and everything else the Carondelets have accomplished in the 175 years since they first occupied the log cabin.

(The illustration and quote come from The Living Fountain: The story of Mother St. John Fontbonne, by Sister Mary Dolorosa Mannix, CSJ, with illustrations by Sister Francis Louise Russell, CSJ. Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1951.)