The Mount's WWII Veterans

Undated list (ca. mid-1940s) of Mount alumnae in military
or civilian service during World War II.

WE CAME ACROSS AN INTERESTING DOCUMENT in the Alumnae Association archives the other day that, in spite of its age, is remarkably timely.

It is a list of 18 Mount alumnae who served in World War II. Although (typically) there is no date on the yellowed typescript, the sheet is titled "In the Service of Our Country: World War II." One of the women graduated in 1944, so perhaps the list was drawn up not long afterwards, that is, before any of the Class of '45 enlisted.

These 20- and 30-something Mounties served in the medical field (Army and Navy corps and Red Cross) and women's branches of the Army Air Corps (WACs) and Navy (WAVES.)

As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II (May 8 for the war in Europe and September 2 for the war with Japan) we can honor our {Unstoppable} Mount veterans for stepping up to serve their country -- both our current veterans and those who served in a bygone era. We bless you for your service.

The Mount's World War II heroes:

• Gertrude Boland '36, WAVES
• Mary Olive Bunce '36, WAC
• Helen Coogan '41, WAVES
• Gertrude Feenan '39, WAVES
• Beatrice Genevra '41, WAVES
• Irene Groehler '37, WAVES
• Christine Huse '44, Army Medical Corps
• Margaret Donovan Kelly '37, WAVES
• Ethel Kristofek '39, WAVES
• Mary McDevett '33, American Red Cross
• Margaret McGuirk '44, Navy Nursing Corps
• Jacqueline Moffatt '39, WAVES
• Mary Shannon '43, WAVES
• Elizabeth Sheridan '39, Army Nursing Corps
• Helen Shubert '32, American Red Cross
• Shirley Timewell '34, Army Nursing Corps
• Frances Williams '40, Army Medical Corps

Goodbye to a Man of the Mount

Brother Kevin Donohue, OSJD '49

THE ARCHDIOCESE and all of Los Angeles are mourning the passing Dec. 3 of Sir Daniel Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation and with his late wife, Bernardine, among the great philanthropists in the city.

According to the obituary in The Tidings, Sir Daniel passed away at the age of 95. In his long career at the foundation, millions of dollars were granted to hospitals, social programs, schools and building the L.A. cathedral.

The obituary also mentions that Sir Daniel studied at Catholic University, but omits his undergraduate alma mater: Mount St. Mary's College. He was an alumnus of the Class of 1949.

He was Brother Kevin in those days, a member of the Hospitallers of St. John of God, and with another brother, Oliver McGivern, was training for a vocation in social work. They commuted each day from Rancho San Antonio, the orphanage in Chatsworth where they lived and worked.

They're mentioned in the 1949 yearbook as one of the notable sights around campus. They have their own page in the yearbook, which carries the editors' impressions of the pair:

Mount St. Mary’s turns "co-ed" … two Hospitaller Brothers of St. John of God … Social Welfare majors, social science and philosophy minors … active in work with boys … at Rancho San Antonio … members of SWES … dynamic on field trips … noticeable on campus … friendly smiles … flowing black habits … "Call us 'Brother,' please!" … enliven class discussions with varied experiences… familiar station wagon jogging on and off the hill… always cheerful … '49ers. 

Brother Kevin eventually left religious life, and in 1954 married Bernardine Murphy, daughter of Daniel Murphy, another great philanthropist with a recognizable name.

The names Donohue and Murphy grace many a building in Los Angeles, including Donohue Center at Doheny, thanks to the generosity of this family. We're proud to call Sir Daniel one of our own.

Sidebar: Were Bros. Kevin and Oliver the first male Mount grads? Read the history here.

Remembering Joella

According to the 1950 yearbook, Joella played so many different
instruments, she amounted to a "one-girl orchestra."

NEWS OF THE DEATH of Joella Hardemann Gipson-Simpson '50 on January 31, 2012, in Windsor, Ontario, somehow bypassed the Mount Community. The Mount's first African-American graduate was such a remarkable woman that her passing warrants a mention even a year and a half later. Joella's career in education and service is way too extensive to cover in a little blog, but there is a complete obituary in the Windsor Star, and it reveals a woman who put enough into life for three or four people. Here are a few highlights.

Joella Hardeman '50

Nicknamed "Joey," Joella graduated from the Mount in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in instrumental music and minors in philosophy and English. Like many of her fellow Mounties she was active in campus clubs and service organizations. She earned a full scholarship to pursue a master's degree in music at the University of Iowa, which he completed in 1951.

At some point, though, her attention turned to math, and she went on to earn a PhD in Mathematics Education, becoming one of the first African-American women in the country to earn a math doctorate.

Her distinguished career in higher education took her to universities from Mississippi to Africa to Nicaragua, and even included a stint as a math teacher in L.A. Unified School District. 

She attained a full professorship at Wayne State, which she joined in the early 1970s, going on to educate generations of math teachers. Her studies in numerous STEM education issues were funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Education grants, and she was twice a Fulbright scholar.  

A lifelong, devout Catholic, she lived the social justice values she learned at the Mount and in her family, throughout her life supporting innumerable charities, service organizations and schools -- including the Mount. In August, 1995, on the 45th anniversary of her graduation, the Mount held a daylong gala in her honor,  and the California Assembly and Los Angeles City Council both honored her life of work and service. 

In 1990, the Mount named her Alumna of the Year. (A sketch of her incredible career is in our online repository.) What a privilege to call Joella Hardeman Gipson-Simpson one of our own.

Joella and members of the Mount Orchestra in 1949-50, her senior year.

Crafty!

Each "Chick" of 1946 is represented in the colorful brood.

HERE's A FUN FIND -- party decorations with photos of alumnae from nearly 70 years ago. They turned up in a long-forgotten box of "stuff" (official archival term) stored away for the last 15 years and unearthed yesterday.

The Mount Archives holds all kinds of interesting memorabilia from the late Mary Irene Vujovich Ohlfs '46, from her scrapbooks to her extensive collection of news clippings about the College. (Thanks go to Mary Irene herself for the donations, and to her family, who continued to send us stuff after she passed away in 1994.)

Mary Irene Vujovich
Ohlfs '46.

Mary Irene was truly a devoted alumna of the Mount in general and of the Chicks of '46 in particular. The Class of 1946 was a close-knit group who had weathered the World War II years together at Chalon and got together regularly for the rest of their lives.

According to the envelope, these party decorations were used for the reunions of the Class of '46 in 1981 (35 years) and again in 1991 (45).  Each is a 2-inch, brightly colored baby chick with a small photo of the graduate pasted over the face and alumna's name on the back. It was a labor of love -- probably Mary Irene's -- to create each tiny cut-out and add a bit of purple curling ribbon.

Well into their 90s, the remaining Chicks of 46 are gradually dwindling in number. But thanks to Mary Irene, their well-documented memories live on in the Archives.

Portrait from a wedding

IT IS FILED UNDER 'STUDENT LIFE, 1940s,' this beautiful little image of a young Japanese couple on their wedding day. The simplicity of their dress and austerity of the chapel speak to its wartime setting. It's signed "Sincerely, Henry & Joan Umeda."

We never thoroughly studied the photo, though, until the other day. More than a wedding portrait, it speaks of a deeply poignant situation. Above the signature, in different ink, is written "Joan Nagao," presumably the bride's maiden name. Beneath that is written what looks like "Margaret." 

But when you really look at it, you see it reads "Manzanar." 

Manzanar: that shameful episode of American history when tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were imprisoned by the U.S. government after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Uprooted from their everyday lives, many lost everything during their years in the camp.

Yet life went on, including love and marriage. 

A faintly visible inscription in the upper left reads "To the dear Sisters of Mt. Saint Mary's College." From that we might discern that Joan Nagao was a Mount student who wanted to share her happy news with her teachers. 

We haven't been able to find any evidence yet of a Joan Nagao or Joan Umeda graduating from the Mount before or after 1941. But we hope she and her husband, Henry, had a long and happy life together after this photo was taken, and after they were able finally to leave Manzanar. 

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.

Scrapbooks and Facebook

THE COLLEGE ARCHIVES ACQUIRED (the official term is accessioned) four scrapbooks today from the estate of Mary Irene Vujovich Ohlfs '46. Mary Irene, who passed away a decade ago, was a dedicated picture-taker and scrapbooker, and her son, Jeff, has been gradually handing off her Mount mementos.

The daughter of a Ventura County rancher, Mary Irene faithfully documented 50 years of the Chicks of '46, photographing every reunion, captioning the photos and including invitations and programs from each event. (She's on the right in this photo, with classmate Helen Crane.)

Scrapbook No. 1 of today's acquisition also has an unexpected trove of photos of Mary Irene as a Mount student in 1942 or -43, posing and clowning with her sorority sisters in Tau Alpha Zeta (TAZ).

Having seen innumerable pictures of my daughter and her CSUN sorority friends on Facebook, I'm struck by how some things don't change. Mary Irene was certainly the social networker of her day, in the media of handwritten notes, mimeographed invitations and a Kodak Instamatic. She would have loved Facebook.

But you have to wonder what will become of the Class of 2012's digital "scrapbooks" on their Facebook pages. For example, the Mount's oldest sorority, Kappa Delta Chi (est. 1929), has a Facebook page with lots of photos not unlike Mary Irene's (although I'm sure the TAZ and KDX girls wouldn't be caught dead in each other's fashions).

In the archives there is stuff about KDX going back 86 years -- even further back than the Chicks of '46. Where are the Mary Irenes of the Class of 2012, and how do you keep a Facebook page anyway? The Library of Congress is wondering the same thing...

The men of the Mount

One of the questions I get all the time is some form of "who were the first men at Mount St. Mary's College"?

This came up in the article on the Archives in the current Mount Magazine. It notes that the first male nursing student I've been able to find graduated in 1993, although men were allowed to apply to the program 20 years before that.

Sometimes we Lone Arrangers have to throw a "factoid" out there and see what happens. I'm delighted to report that I have now heard from the official First Male Nursing Graduate, complete with a fax of his diploma and the article above.

He's Michael Clannin, Class of '75. He had served in Vietnam as a Navy corpsman with a unit of Marines in a field hospital. (Think M*A*S*H.) After that heroic work he had plenty of experience but lacked the degree for an RN, and the Mount was a perfect fit.

Around that time the College started accepting what were called "capitation" grants, part of an effort by the U.S. government to cope with a shortage of nurses. As recipients of federal funds, institutions can't discriminate on the basis of gender, so single-sex schools like the Mount had to adjust admissions policy. Mike was one of the beneficiaries and can't say enough about the support he received, especially from the renowned Sister Callista Roy.

The Mount article mentions music students going way back to the 1930s. I had a phone message today from another male alum (as in alumnus), Hank Alviani, a music graduate in the Class of '74. I sent him an email with the following brief history: The earliest male students would have been Roman Catholic seminarians and priests studying Gregorian chant at the Bishop Cantwell School of Liturgical Music. The director of the school, Dom Ermin Vitry, OSB, also directed the College music program. Master's degrees in music were conferred as early as 1932 and expanded with the opening of the Graduate School in 1955. One of the most celebrated music programs in the city, the Mount's Department of Music began admitting male undergraduates around 1961. By the time Hank graduated, many men had received Mount degrees.

There seemed to be not much more than a handful in any given year, however. The article above, an undated story from the Los Angeles Times, mentions just three (ca. 1974): Hank, Mike Clannin, and Paul Gibson. The story says there were a dozen male undergraduates on campus at the time.

Our president, Jacqueline Powers Doud, likes to say we're a women's college "with a few good men." That has been the case for a surprisingly long time, and three cheers to our alumni for reminding us.

Rosie and the wet cement

Our John Deeb is relentless as a good bloodhound. Checking my webmail, I see this:

So here’s my latest find…. It appears to be a metal can encrusted in cement. So far the cement that I have removed definitely shows a can that was not produced recently. It’s fun to think that maybe it was used by our friend Rosie to carry the wet cement from a wheelbarrow outside of the newly completed Mary Chapel to Brady basement where she slathered it on the wall before writing her name in it……..

Mary Chapel and what became Rossiter Hall were just finished and nearing completion, respectively, in 1940. With the poured-cement construction of the college there would be plenty of wet cement to go around.

John said he found the can about 15 feet from the memento blob. He goes on:

I've already identified the can and dated it to the late 30's, early 40's. It's a Golden Glow Ale can produced by Golden West Brewery out of Oakland... Rosie could have tossed it across the space on her way out.

I'm liking this girl. More questions. What brought her up to the Mount in 1940? Did she bring a six-pack of Golden Glow? Was the basement crawlspace a familiar hideout from when she was a student? Was she the one who tossed the milk bottle? What the heck else is down there??

I'm going to try to find a picture of Rosie from our very limited collection of pictures of the class of 1931. I want to see what she looks like. This is all conjecture, of course, but can you spot a beer can-tossing, cement-smearing, high-spirited alumna?

As I wrote back to John, "Doesn't it seem a little strange that 8 years after graduating she'd come back just to smear cement on the wall? And that decades later she was still telling people about it?"

What the heck else is down there?