In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3. "Aterrible wop" he idea Miss McDaniel planted in Frank Capra's brain became an obsession. He still had no idea what he would become, but he now saw clearly that education was the one thing that would keep him from spending his life on the railroad tracks or in a brickyard. He overcame his parents' reluctance to his further schooling by promising to pay his own expenses if they would let him go on to high school. In 1909, when Frank was still in sixth grade, there were only twohigh schools in Los Angeles. The older and more prestigious was Los Angeles High School, situated downtown on Bunker Hill, about a mile's walk from where he lived. It was the school he would have expected to attend. There was also Polytechnic, or Poly, farther out on 19th Street and GrandAvenue . The dusty suburb called Hollywood, whose population still was under 4,000, had a high school, too, but it was only for those who lived there. With the phenomenal population growth of the early 1900s, Los Angeles had an urgent need for a new high school to relieve the overcrowding at the two existing schools and to serve a wider area. Crews working around the clock built a brand-new school in a barley field on the south side of the city at 42nd and Vermont near the Universityof Southern California, then a sparsely populated area of farms, orange groves, dirt roads, and small middle-class bungalows (today it is a densely populated Latino and black neighborhood). The new school opened in September 1910. It was called Manual Arts High School. By the second semester, when Capra enrolled there, Manualhad 1,054 students, 668 of them in his Winter '15 class of freshmen. The $500,000 school complex was an architectural showpiece, its three long and graceful main buildings connected with arched walkways and opening onto spacious grounds planted with gardens of roses and cacti. But physicalconditions otherwise were primitive in the early days. The streets surrounding T 5 0 F R A N K C A P R A the school had been laid out,but they were unpaved and lacking storm drains. The streetcars stopped several blocks away, and students had to walk through an open field to get to the school. The schoolyard was dusty in dry weather and a muddy morass in rain; by the time students entered class, their shoes and clothes were filthy. "We were styled the 'Country Cousin,' and the surroundings and our appearance sure did fit the title," student Langdon Smead wrote in 1914. When Capra was told by a teacher at Griffin Avenue Elementary that if he wanted to go to high school, he would have to go to the "Country Cousin" rather than to Los Angeles High, he experienced it as a slap in the face. Manual was seven miles and two streetcar rides from his home. He assumed that he was being exiled there because he was considered unfit to be part of the elite at the two established schools: "They were hoity-toity high schools, because only hoity-toity people went to high school. High school then was like Harvard or Yale. Only people who had money enough sent their kids to school. It was the moneyed class." Sixty years later, the hurt was still fresh when he told in his autobiography of being rejected from Los Angeles High because he was regarded as "riffraff" and being sent to Manual Arts to join the other "rejects." But he misunderstood. The day Capra entered high school, the Los Angeles Express reported that several hundred students had been waiting in line for hours—some all night—to be admitted to Los Angeles and Poly highs. But each school could accept only two hundred new students, so the overflow was sent to Manual Arts. That was the only reason they were turned away. The Manual student body was predominantly white and middle-class, even more so, in fact, than the student bodies at the other two schools, which were closer to the ethnic enclaves of downtown and the East Side. Manual Arts was a step up the social ladder for students from those areas. "If Frank had gone to Poly," said Rocky Washington, "I don't think he would have been treated any differently from the way he was treated around the neighborhood. But Manual Arts was a new school, out farther, in a more aristocratic neighborhood. There he...

Share