Cue the swarming insects

Actor Theodore Bikel plays a devious dictator in the 1968 "Mission:
Impossible" episode "The Cardinal." He's standing on the proscenium
in front of "Zolnar Monastery," aka Mary Chapel. 

FANS OF 'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE' notice the Mount in reruns all the time. One of our personal favorites is "The Cardinal," which first aired November 18, 1968, and was filmed at the College. Along with the Circle, Mary Chapel and other Chalon backdrops are some other campus props -- straight from the Biology Lab.

As we've noted before, Sister Gerald Leahy, CSJ, of the Biology faculty was an internationally renowned entomologist whose work with malaria-spreading mosquitoes took her all over the world. Since much of her research was performed at Mount St. Mary's, there were plenty of aedes aegypti caged in the science building.

The plot of "The Cardinal" involves infecting a bad guy with a high fever while smuggling a  cardinal out of the monastery where he is being held prisoner. To infect the bad guy, who is preparing to pose as the cardinal, the IM Force sends disease-carrying mosquitoes through a thin tube into his room.

According to Patrick J. White's The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier prop manager Bill Bates had everything he needed to create "Zolnar Monastery" but couldn't come up with the insects. One of Sister Gerald's CSJ colleagues came to the rescue, as White tells it:

 "One of the nuns told me, 'Oh, the Biology Department has lots of mosquitoes; they're doing some experiments.' She gave me a jarful," [said Bates]. On the set and about to shoot the scene requiring the mosquitoes, Bates got a frantic call from the college, urging him not to use the mosquitoes. "They'd given us the wrong bunch," Bates says, "and we had a jarful of malarial mosquitoes! She caught us just before we released them."

 That would have infected the bad guy, all right, and heaven knows who else.

We'd like to give a hat-tip to Gaile Krause of Campus Ministry and her husband, Chris, for tracking down the background on "The Cardinal" episode.  Oh, and if you'd like to read one of Sister Gerald's many published articles on mosquito breeding, click here for a copy of "Barriers to Hybridization between aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus (diptera: culicidae)" published in 1965.

For Sister Gerald's mosquitoes, that was more than 15 minutes of fame as a film extra.

Sister Gerald Leahy, CSJ, and her pet malarial mosquitoes in 1981.
(Mount St. Mary's College Archives.)

Postscript: We wonder if Bates recycled the nun's habit from "The Fugitive" episode filmed at Doheny: see the pictures on Facebook.

Capturing Doheny's calm beauty

Cool blues with a sunset sky bring the quiet and peace of
Chester Place to life. St. Vincent's looms in the background.

LOS ANGELES ARTIST AND AUTHOR Leo Politi is known for the special way he rendered our city in vibrant colors and bursting with activity, celebrating its ethnic diversity years before anyone started paying attention.

He could also paint stillness and quiet. Should anyone be surprised that he found them at Mount St. Mary's College?

The image above is from Tales of the Parks of Los Angeles, Politi's 1966 tribute to the most inviting cityscapes (Palm Desert, CA: Best-West Books). The Mount's copy was found earlier this week in Coe Library storage and will be cataloged and join several other Politi books in Special Collections.

Politi  numbered among his friends many Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and visited them at Chester Place, which in the mid-1960s had recently become the Mount's bustling Downtown Campus. But he came to paint after the students had departed and the grounds were returned to the resident nuns.

With the flowers in the Wishing Well providing the only bright splash, Politi captures the cool calm of the campus. The nuns are preparing for evening prayer at the end of what had surely been a very busy day for them.

Please see our Facebook page for additional pictures of Chester Place by Leo Politi, and you're invited to visit the Spearman Room in the Chalon Campus library if you'd like to see the originals.

Pixelizing the past

OUR WEB SERVICES FOLKS are working with Admissions to come up with a new promotional video for the Mount. Romesh Fernando noticed on an online archives inventory that we have old film, video and audio stored here and was curious to see if there were any historic images that could be used.

The reels are a bit mysterious because they're not adequately labeled, and of course we can't look at them without the "antique" playback equipment. Anyone seen a home movie projector lately?

Romesh borrowed a couple of reels and had them digitized by the friendly people at Digital Pickle in Pasadena.

The still photo above is a frame captured from some footage of nursing students and faculty doing their clinicals at a local hospital. Other results revealed color home movies from a swim meet, a volleyball match and graduation that fell sometime between 1949 and 1956. There is no sound with any of this stuff, but it's quite exciting -- and a bit eerie -- to see these 50- or 60-year-old moving images reanimated on a computer screen. It'll be fun to see what else turns up and how it gets used in a new online video.

Back in the days of those Super 8 movie cameras, who would have imagined YouTube? Here's a more recent version of what we've got in those mysterious film cans.

Welcome back, uh... students?

Gee, it's been kind of lonely up at the Mount without our undergraduates -- especially for this Lone Arranger, toiling in monastic solitude in the Spearman Room. What do you know, a veritable high school showed up this week, complete with cheerleaders, cool cars and teenage 'tude. It was the cast, crew and marquee (pictured, waiting to be rolled onto a truck) of West Beverly Hills High School, that renowned institution of secondary education featured in "Beverly Hills 90210: The Next Generation."

We've also got a raft of young musicians enjoying the hilltop views -- iPalpiti, or heartbeat in Italian. The group comprises an internationally renowned pool of young talent and is here in Los Angeles for a two-week music festival.

This weekend is Orientation and the signs are up reading "Welcome Class of 2014." Seems impossible, doesn't it?

All of these are a gentle reminder of how quickly time flies when you're having fun (Lone Arrangers always have fun) -- and how the fall semester and the return of our own talented students is just a month away.