Ten-hut, L.A.
All right, at ease. And listen up.
Until lately, the all-volunteer U.S. Army had been having recruiting problems, and one way it chose to combat them was to raise the enlistment age last month, from 35 to 42. It also is now willing to overlook one conviction — just one, mind you — for possessing marijuana. And the Iran war has given the military’s ranks a burst of new recruits.
Back near the cusp of the new “American Century,” the 20th, the nation had no problem muscling up its military. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill worked powerfully on the national imagination as the country undertook the policing of its new empire: Hawaii, and, from the Spanish-American War, control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, along with a robust overlord mercantilism in Central America.
There’s nothing coincidental in the fact that military schools also rose up around then, and that they kept multiplying past the first world war and up to the second one.
An astonishing number of them opened here, in Southern California, although you would be hard pressed to find many nowadays. Back in the start of the century, they advertised in newspapers from the Midwest to Hawaii, and they put uniforms on boys as young as 6.
The Page Military Academy for boys 6 to 14 — known as “The Big School for Little Boys” — offered the pledge that it “does not enroll students with vicious tendencies or who have been under the juvenile court.” [“Vicious” in Victorian code often meant homosexual.]
These schools weren’t quite a direct pipeline into the American armed services, but their implicit promise was to cultivate gentlemen, if not always literal officers.
The Miramar Military Academy — first operating on the Venice waterfront and then in Redondo Beach — advertised itself as “an ideal school for manly boys.” The words “horsemanship” and “citizenship” appeared in schools’ curricula, along with — from a 1925 ad for King’s Military Academy in Highland Park — “gentlemanship.”
Their programs were not principally drill-and-kill exercises, but extended to mathematics, English composition, geography, history, and music — piano, violin, and choral programs. In a 1920 ad for the California Military Academy, the curriculum promised “special attention for backward pupils.”
Throughout the aviation-exuberant decade of the 1920s, some schools, like the Pasadena Military Academy on Avenue 64, taught classroom courses in aviation and aeronautics, as did the Urban Military Academy, which opened the year the Wright Brothers first flew, in 1903. Into the 1930s, it staged horseback fencing competitions.
Students were often assigned a military rank and awarded promotions, like the 13-year-old cadet major carrying a swagger stick in a 1930 ad for the Page Military Academy in Los Angeles. Even the youngest boys at Page were expected to evaluate their own performances honorably and honestly, and, according to one burnishing newspaper account, to realize “what it means to be ‘the captain of his soul.’”
(That’s a line from a poem called “Invictus,” written 150 years ago and still immensely popular among some young men. Britain’s Prince Harry bestowed its name on the athletic games he created for wounded soldiers. Nelson Mandela recited it in prison to give himself heart. And at the ignoble end of things, after his execution in 2001, Army veteran and Oklahoma City mass-murder bomber Timothy McVeigh had it distributed to the public as his last words.)
Like modern-day companies that merge and re-emerge or fold, some of these schools went under quickly, or moved their bivouacs, or combined 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 the news in 1929 when five checks it issued to two workmen briefly bounced.
That these schools sometimes took up immense tracts of land in early Los Angeles was probably another reason that many of them merged or disappeared; the values of real estate versus the values of gentlemanship was hardly a contest.
In fact, much of the story of L.A.s military academies might sound like a real estate “Where’s Cadet Waldo,” tracking the institutions from one place to another. The California Military Academy spent a spectacular few of its early years, circa 1906, on the water at Santa Monica, leasing out the rambling Victorian pile that had once been the Arcadia Hotel. Cadets drilled on the sand.
It moved inland in 1910, moved again a few years later, and then in the mid-1930s moved into a purpose-built building in Baldwin Hills, one designed by the renowned architect Richard Neutra with prefab walls. The school disbanded in the 1960s, and the building was torn down in the 1990s.
Harvard Military Academy opened around 1901 on 10 acres at Western and Venice Boulevard. Its presiding genius was Grenville C. Emery. In his earlier job at Boston Latin school, Emery sent along scores of young men to Ivy League schools. He got permission to use the Harvard name for the school, which was taken over by the Episcopal Church in 1911. The school eventually became secular, non-military, and co-ed, and you’d know it now as the Harvard-Westlake Schools, private middle school and college prep campuses.
The Page academy took up seven acres in the Wilshire-Pico neighborhood, operating a small village of classrooms, dormitories, a printing press, a woodworking shop, and a miniature steam railroad for ferrying 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 locales was Los Angeles Military Academy, founded in about 1898 on 15 acres just west of Westlake — now MacArthur — Park. Its students’ uniforms were somewhat modeled like West Point’s. By 1908 it had moved, to Huntington Drive, in El Sereno, and when Gen. John Pershing — “Black Jack Pershing,” himself a former West Point cadet — visited L.A. in January 1920, his motorcade took him down Huntington Drive, where cadets stood on both sides of the street to salute him.
More musical camp stools: the Urban Military Academy opened its barracks on Melrose near Wilcox in Hollywood in 1905, and in time moved out to the wilderness that was the 11000 block of Sunset Boulevard, and the Black-Foxe Military Institute took over Urban’s Hollywood site.
Culver City’s founder, Harry Culver, set up a military academy on five acres there in the 1920s; 40 years later it was housing tracts.
During the war, the academy was drafted for use by “Fort Hal Roach” as an appendage to the studios where the renowned comedy director made training films and pro-American morale-building movies with actors whose numbers included Ronald Reagan.
In their advertising, these schools were usually quite coy about tuition rates, although in September 1933, in the trough of the Depression, the Culver academy noted delicately that tuition was “in keeping with present economic conditions.”
Culver’s own son attended that academy. “The sons of a number of wealthy and prominent citizens” one news story called the schools’ students, and certainly the names heard at some roll calls were celebrated: the sons of Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Buster Keaton, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin.
At age 13, in the fall of 1946, Jerome Silberman was enrolled at the Black-Foxe academy. You know him as the actor Gene Wilder. He wrote in his memoir, “Kiss Me Like A Stranger,” that he was sexually assaulted on his first night at the school, and was bullied and beaten as the school’s only Jewish student. On his Christmastime visit home, in Milwaukee, his mother, who thought military school might turn him into a dashing accomplished gentleman, saw the bruises and never sent him back to the school.
By then, the centrifugal forces of real estate and density were sending academies farther and farther out of town — to Glendora, Van Nuys, Monterey Park, Burbank. Long Beach already had a couple of venerable military academies [one of which required references].
The post-war zeitgeist also began putting them further and further out of favor as a preferred educational choice of some American parents for their sons. After World War II, the American military was more professionalized, and by the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War made military school less appealing. In California, between 1971 and 1973, eight military academies closed.
Still, some have survived. The Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad is still flourishing at 116 years old. In Anaheim, St. Catherine’s Academy combines Catholic boys’ K-8 education and military traditions, having its beginnings in a girls school, later an orphanage, and, in 1924, a military school. Southeast Academy in Norwalk is a public charter school offering a high school education with a military and law enforcement focus to a diverse and coeducational student body. The coeducational California Military Institute in Perris is also a public 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, opened in 1891 and closed in 2004. Students were sent there not by parents, but by courts and judges. It was first called the Whittier State School, and, in 1941, renamed for its longtime head, Fred. C. Nelles, who made it his mission to “save the boy.”
You may know it by a third name, a common nickname:
Juvie.
The post At ease — permanently. The SoCal military academies that thrived and then folded their tents appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
