Comment: Free – forever. SoCal military schools thrived and pitched their tents

ten-a hutLA

That’s right, with ease. And listen.

Until recently, the US Army of volunteers had recruitment problems, and one way to combat them was to raise the age of enlistment last month, from 35 to 42. And the war in Iran has given the army a lot of new recruits.

Back at the end of the new “American Century”, the 20th, the nation had no problem mobilizing its military. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging San Juan Hill worked hard on the national imagination as the country began policing its new empire: Hawaii, and, since the Spanish-American War, control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the most powerful mercantilism in Central America.

It is no coincidence that military schools also arose at that time, and that they continued to expand beyond the first world war until the second.

A surprising number of them were opened here in Southern California, although you’d be hard-pressed to find many today. Back at the turn of the century, they advertised in newspapers from the Midwest to Hawaii, and put uniforms on 6-year-old boys.

The Page Military Academy for boys ages 6 to 14 — known as “The Great School for Little Boys” — has pledged to “not enroll students with bad habits or who have been in juvenile court.” [“Vicious” in Victorian code often meant homosexual.]

These schools were not a direct pipeline to the American armed services, but their clear promise was to cultivate men, if not actual officers.

Miramar Military Academy – which first operated on the Venice waterfront and then in Redondo Beach – advertised itself as “the ideal school for boys.” The words “horsemanship” and “patriotism” appeared in the school curriculum, as well as – from a 1925 advertisement for the King’s Military Academy in Highland Park – “gentleness.”

Their programs were not primarily drills and drills, but extended to mathematics, English composition, geography, history, and music — piano, violin, and choral programs. In a 1920 advertisement for the California Military Academy, the curriculum promised “special attention to backward students.”

Throughout the exciting decade of aviation in the 1920s, some schools, such as the Pasadena Military Academy on Avenue 64, offered classroom lessons in flying and flying, as did the Urban Military Academy, which opened the year the Wright Brothers first flew, in 1903.

Students were often given military rank and awards, such as the 13-year-old cadet holding a swagger baton in a 1930 advertisement for Page Military Academy in Los Angeles. Even the youngest Page boys were expected to examine their games with respect and honesty, and, according to one hot newspaper account, to see “what it means to be ‘captain of his soul.'”

(That’s a line from a poem called “Invictus,” which was written 150 years ago and is still very popular among some young men. Britain’s Prince Harry made his name in athletics he did for wounded soldiers. Nelson Mandela said it in prison to give himself heart. And finally the bad things, after he was killed by Timothy Army Veteran City in 2001, Timothy Veteran-Army Mc. released it to the public as his last words.)

Like today’s companies that meet and re-emerge or fold, some of these schools were quickly disrupted, or moved their bivouacs, or consolidated forces. The Robert E. Lee Academy appeared briefly in 1928, in Redondo Beach, and then newspaper accounts reported it moving to La Crescenta, where it made headlines in 1929 when five checks to two employees bounced.

That these schools sometimes occupied a large area in early Los Angeles was perhaps another reason why many of them merged or disappeared; real estate prices compared to gentrification standards were hardly a contest.

In fact, much of the story of LA’s military schools may sound like the real estate of “Where’s Cadet Waldo,” tracking institutions from one location to another. The California Military Academy spent its first few wonderful years, around 1906, on the Santa Monica waterfront, renting a Victorian building that had once been the Arcadia Hotel. The cadets dug into the sand.

It moved inland in 1910, moved again a few years later, and in the mid-1930s moved to a purpose-built building in Baldwin Hills, designed by famed architect Richard Neutra with prefabricated walls. The school was dismantled in the 1960s, and the building was demolished in the 1990s.

The Harvard Military Academy opened in about 1901 on 10 acres at Western and Venice Boulevard. Its presiding artist was Grenville C. Emery. In his previous job at Boston Latin School, Emery sent dozens of young men to Ivy League schools. He obtained permission to use the Harvard name for the school, which was taken over by the Episcopal Church in 1911. The school eventually became a global, non-military, and integrated, and you would know it now as Harvard-Westlake Schools, private middle school and college preparatory campuses.

The Page academy occupied seven acres in the Wilshire-Pico area, operating a small town with classrooms, dormitories, a printing press, a woodworking shop, and a miniature railroad that carried the boys around the campus. [Nearly 120 years after the academy’s founding, Page now operates private non-military schools in L.A. and Orange counties.]

One of the oldest sites was the Los Angeles Military Academy, established around 1898 on 15 acres just west of Westlake – now MacArthur – Park. The uniforms of its students have been modeled after West Point. In 1908 it had moved, to Huntington Drive, El Sereno, and when Gen. John Pershing – “Black Jack Pershing,” also a West Point cadet – visiting LA in January 1920, his motorcade took him down Huntington Drive, where cadets stood on both sides of the road to pray for him.

More musical camp chairs: The Urban Military Academy opened its camps on Melrose near Wilcox in Hollywood in 1905, and later moved to the wilderness that was the 11000 block of Sunset Boulevard, and the Black-Foxe Military Institute took over Urban’s Hollywood.

Battalion postcard, Whittier State School in Whittier.

(From the private collection of Patt Morrison)

The founder of Culver City, Harry Culver, established a military school on five acres there in the 1920s; 40 years later it was a tract of houses.

During the war, the center was written to be used by “Fort Hal Roach” as an annex to the studios where the famous comedy director made training films and films promoting the American character with actors whose numbers include Ronald Reagan.

In their advertising, these schools were often disaffected about tuition rates, although in September 1933, in the midst of the Depression, Culver Academy rightly noted that tuition was “in keeping with current economic conditions.”

Culver’s own son attended that school. “Sons of many rich and prominent citizens” one story called the school students, and certainly the names heard in other calls were celebrated: the sons of Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Buster Keaton, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin.

At the age of 13, in the fall of 1946, Jerome Silberman was enrolled in the Black-Foxe academy. You know him as actor Gene Wilder. She wrote in her book, “Kiss Me Like A Stranger,” that she was sexually assaulted on her first night at school, and was bullied and beaten as the only Jewish student at the school. During a Christmas visit home, in Milwaukee, his mother, who thought military school might turn him into a smart gentleman, noticed the bruises and did not send him back to school.

Meanwhile, the central forces of real estate and overcrowding were sending schools farther and farther out of town — to Glendora, Van Nuys, Monterey Park, Burbank. Long Beach already has several prestigious military schools [one of which required references].

The post-war zeitgeist also began to make them fall out of favor as the preferred educational choice of some American parents for their sons. After World War II, the American military was more active, and in the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War made military school less desirable. In California, between 1971 and 1973, eight military centers were closed.

However, some have survived. The Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad is still thriving at 116 years old. In Anaheim, St. Catherine’s Academy combines K-8 Catholic education for boys with military traditions, with its beginnings as a girls’ school, later an orphanage, and, in 1924, a military academy. Southeast Academy in Norwalk is a public charter school that provides a high school education with a military and law enforcement focus to a diverse and inclusive student body. The California Military Institute in Perris is also a middle and high school with military principles.

The oldest school of its kind in California, and possibly the first military-themed school in Los Angeles, it opened in 1891 and closed in 2004. Students were not sent there by parents, but by courts and judges. We were first called Whittier State School, and, in 1941, we were renamed after its longtime principal, Fred. C. Nelles, who made it his mission to “save the boy.”

You may know it by a third name, a common nickname:

Juvie.

Defining LA With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complicated place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison explains how it works, its history and its traditions.