In the Beginning…

by Kieran Scott ’83 

It is 1957. Disneyland opened two years ago. Baseball’s Dodgers and Giants announced they are leaving the Big Apple and they plan to land somewhere on the West Coast. Interstate 5 Freeway is approved and is already slicing through neighborhoods from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Servite High School came along at a time of great change. Many cities in Orange County had become home to WWII and Korea vets. Their kids attended Anaheim High School or Fullerton High. The vast majority of the county was still agricultural, with orange, walnut, and lemon groves sprinkled among the Harbors, La Palmas, Euclids, and Katellas. Dairy farms were a short drive away from most in the 1950s, including the Yellis Dairy on Crescent and Brookhurst. Mooing cows could be heard as a car drove down La Palma from Knott’s Berry Farm toward the new La Palma Park site on Harbor Boulevard.

But Anaheim had no Catholic high school. Cardinal McIntyre, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, asked Fr. Louis Courtney, OSM to serve as principal at St. Paul in Santa Fe Springs. Fr. Courtney’s reply was a succinct, “No.” As Charles Motsko recalls, “Father Courtney stated that Servites do not teach at co-ed schools.” As a counter offer, the Cardinal promised the Servites their own school in Anaheim, on a plot of land near St. Philip Benizi Church in Fullerton.

That parcel at 1952 W. La Palma, Anaheim looked like an Old West movie set. It had been farmland that fell into disrepair. For every flat piece of ground, there were three potholes and ten tumbleweeds to fill them. Rocks and old farm equipment littered the lot. Knowing it would take real labor to open a school with so little time in a place so unready for learning, Fr. Courtney made a call to Chicago. Fr. Maurice Gillespie, OSM answered ‘Yes’ to the call to serve as principal of Servite High School. The only other Catholic high school in Orange County was Mater Dei in Santa Ana, which had opened in 1950. Mater Dei was co-ed and had already grown to over 1,000 students. Servite would be the kid brother, the ‘other school’ to Mater Dei. From day one, the Friars had work to do.

Classes began on September 15, 1958 with boys reporting to St. Philip Benizi’s Grammar School on the 200 Block of South Pine Street in Fullerton. The Servites had a residence at Valencia and Gilbert, which acted as the temporary priory for the order. Between Summer of 1957 and January of 1959, when the main building was ready for students to attend classes, Fathers Roger Manning, Maurice Gillsepie, Phil Brennan, Bernard Paul, and Alphonse Gallegos packed their habits at St. Philip High School in Chicago and came to Anaheim to teach those first students. Others would join them later, but all put in and made the dream come true.

That second wave of Friars arrived in late 1958 and early 1959, and included Fathers David Kondik, Eugene Walsh, Bernard Barnes, Charles Motsko, and Leonard Mazurk. These Friars took the school to the next level. The two-story building offered ample room for 150 freshmen and sophomore boys, with upstairs classrooms acting as temporary dorms for the religious until the priory could be built. One classroom on the ground floor served as a family room, while another was made into a chapel for daily Mass. A small cafeteria staff prepared lunches for students and priests, who all ate together every day.

As Charles Motsko recalls, the life of a Servite priest was simple but austere. “Breakfasts were not easy to come by, so by agreeing to celebrate Mass at nearby parishes, the Friars could get a free meal out of the arrangement. On weekends, it was catch-as-catch-can, with many a priest ending up in the home of a student for Sunday pot roast or lasagna.”

Aside from the main building and cafeteria, a locker room allowed students to shower and change for sports they participated in. Brookhurst Junior High School had a large quonset hut for a gym, donated by the US Army in 1956. Some basketball games were played there, or at St. Philip’s if that was available. But the Friars had to be resourceful, and it was an arduous task to ask again and again for the needs of a new campus.

But for these men in black, it was the life they had chosen.

The Summer of 1958 presented a challenge to the Friars. They were not construction workers, nor farmers, nor city planners. They were priests, brothers, and dedicated to the poor in service of Jesus and His Mother. It seemed that raising a school building out of a failed farm plot was too much to ask.

Looking around at what little materials were available, those first Friars did what had to be done. Fr. Gillespie saw that a construction site was discarding used chain link fence and asked if he could have it.  It was installed as the fence on the front of the campus until the fence was replaced with galvanized wrought iron in 1998.

For athletic fields and courts, the Friars were equally undaunted. The small parking lot doubled as the spot for two basketball courts. The boys played and practiced there that first winter. And “The Field” was a true test of will. The foxtails, burrs, stickers, and weeds which had been there for years before the school did not go gently into landfill. It all made for a better minefield than a football gridiron. But, it made that football team tougher. Coaches insisted that all the men get updated tetanus shots before they were pounded into that suspect surface. A kind man named Frank Del Graggio donated his time and tractor to till, thin, and clean out the field so the boys could have a proper football field. He never charged a dime. And it must have stuck with the JV team of Friars that year. They went 10-0.

As year one of Servite High School played out, the boys knew they would study four years of Religion, Latin, English, Math, and drill for four years of P.E. They knew that three years of science and history would fill out the rest of that rigorous curriculum, and that wherever they went, they would be Friars. They also knew that they were the first in line. They could not have known how long it would last, but with such a tiny group on such a hard-scrabble site, these first Men of Servite had to know that their comportment was essential to the success of later classes.

As new classes of freshmen entered the school, new courses were added. Science Seminar, student clubs and sports teams, CCD courses on weekends became part of the fabric of the Servite Way. Little did they realize that 60 years later, roughly 900 boys would await the start of a new school year, just as they did, albeit in a much larger, more technologically advanced, complex and updated campus than the simple one they called Servite in 1958-59.

In the end, it all comes back to that first year, that first class, and that phone call in 1957.