Since it's also National Zucchini Bread Day, I thought I'd start today's post off with some vintage cheesecake. Now, that may be what Hannibal Lector would call a ham-handed segue, but they're both made from eggs and sugar. So they're sort of vaguely related. Anyway, this is the youngest of the Seoul Sisters, Lena—the one who later became a model. Here she is on vacation in Beautiful Downtown Burbank.
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Lowell is one of the two public schools in the San Francisco Unified School District (along with Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts) that only enrolls students who meet special admission requirements. The admission process is based on test scores, GPA, extracurricular activities, and a writing sample. In other words, these were some smart-ass kids.
The rest appear to have been taken at the old campus of Lowell High School in San Francisco, California. Before it was re-established on the "outer dunes" of Lake Merced in 1962, Lowell High was located at 1860 Hayes Street in the Panhandle. The move was ostensibly prompted by the building being seismically unsafe, yet it somehow survived—and is now known as the John Adams Center, part of the extended City College of San Francisco campus.
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Although the precise year is never mentioned in the musical and film Grease, its polarizing sequel Grease 2 retcons events to about 1959. That seems about right. These girls don't look like Pink Ladies or paper shakers, though. More like studious background dancers. I suppose, at a school like Lowell, you'd have to be.
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Lowell is one of the two public schools in the San Francisco Unified School District (along with Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts) that only enrolls students who meet special admission requirements. The admission process is based on test scores, GPA, extracurricular activities, and a writing sample. In other words, these were some smart-ass kids.
As Dana Carvey's classic "Grumpy Old Man" character on SNL might say: "In my day, we didn't have fancy camera phones! We didn't have Instagram, and the Facebook! When we wanted to take pictures, we saved our allowance, and bought Brownie Hawkeyes! Then we had to buy film! And we didn't get to see how we looked right away, oh no! We took that film to get developed, and we waited and waited! And when the pictures came back, it was a month later—and we didn't even remember who we posed with! We didn't get to 'tag' and 'share' our photos! You know what we did? We took one look, and then put them away in an album for 57 years! And we only got to see them again half a century later, if some blogger put them on the internet! That's the way it was, and we liked it!"
I remember the old Lowell High. I went to Dudley Stone in the Haight Ashbury in the early 1950's and my Aptos Junior High friend, Bob Lee, attended Lowell. Lee later became an NFL quarterback and punter and holds the distinction of playing on five Super Bowl losers (four Minnesota and one Los Angeles). Bob's father later hired me to work for the Associated Press in 1968 as his father was the AP Bureau Chief in San Francisco. I attended Lincoln High and was a classmate and friend of Jeffrey Tambor.
ReplyDeleteWhat a walk down memory lane!
ReplyDeleteI too attended Dudley Stone and graduated from the old Lowell in January 1959. In those days classes were divided into "low" and "high" grades: L-4 & H-4, L-freshman & H- freshman etc.
When i started Lowell it was a college prep school and therefore there were no neighborhood boundaries Also, there were no specific academic requirements that I can recall, none of us were any brainier than others.
Yes, Lowell was supposed to be a city-wide college prep high school, but at that time it was open enrollment.
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