Celebration recognizes the impact the school has had on community
MID-CITY Call it a celebration for the ages.
The McKinley Elementary School community capped off its centennial year on Friday with a 100th birthday bash for the neighborhood institution. Hundreds of people whose lives have been intertwined with McKinley history — whether they were students, parents of students, teachers or former administrators — came out to celebrate the school’s rich history, an event held in conjunction with the school’s annual International Day celebration.
Removed from the outdoor celebration of the school’s diversity and multicultural-ism, a “Centennial Hall” was created inside the auditorium, showcasing old report cards, photos and classroom pictures. Memorabilia spanning the past 100 years was split into decades, each 10-year period represented on a separate display board, from the 1900s all the way to the 2000s.
The elderly and the young and everyone in between stared at the photos, reflecting on the past — both the school’s and their own. One man found his face in a classroom photo from the 1960s, posing next to it as his mother snapped a picture.
Standing before the 1980s board, Simona Elkin, a PTA president in the 1970s, and her good friend, Marie Kincannon, a former teacher at McKinley, chatted away, throwing out names and asking one another if they remember what had happened to them.
On the 1980s board was a picture of Kincannon’s second grade class in the 1985-86 school year. Kincannon smiles brightly in the picture, sporting a curly hairstyle popular during the decade.
“I look at the different people and wonder what happened to them,” he said.
The photos made Elkin reflect back on her time as a volunteer at McKinley, where Christine Chang HISTORY COMES ALIVE: Students, teachers and administrators, both past and present, marked the 100th anniversary of McKinley Elementary School on Friday, attending an event that featured murals in the Mid-City school’s auditorium of historic photographs and information. her son attended school in the 1970s. She credited the school with jump-starting her volunteering career, eventually moving her way up to the Gene Autry Museum.
“We had some good times here,”Elkin said.
Named after the 25th president of the United States — William McKinley Jr. — the elementary school opened its doors in 1906 on 20th Street, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Arizona Avenue.The school was constructed in response to an influx of families in the eastern section of the city following the opening of two major employers — a brick manufacturing plant and a bean storage warehouse.
The school community slowly grew throughout the next two decades, reaching 143 students and three teachers by 1912. In 1921, enrollment had reached 276 students and eight teachers. With a growing community, the original school site was no longer meeting the needs of the students and the teachers. In 1923, the second McKinley Elementary School was constructed at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Chelsea Street, the school’s current location.The Kennedy Child Study Center currently occupies the original school site.
The centennial year helped spark a flood of fond memories for many of those who attended the celebration, reflecting on their time at McKinley Elementary and what the school meant for them.
It was 1931 when Tom Lubisich, an 81-year-old retired chemist from Malibu, enrolled in kindergarten at McKinley Elementary School.
Santa Monica was a much different city back then, a time before traffic filled the streets of Santa Monica Boulevard and incidents of criminal activity were rare.
It was so safe to walk around the neighborhood as a child when Lubisich was a pupil at McKinley that students were allowed to go home for lunch.
“Many times, I walked across Santa Monica Boulevard and there were no crossing guards or anything,” Lubisich said on Thursday. “The playground was always open and we played there after school and on the weekends.”
Lubisich recalled a rare snowstorm in 1932. The principal at the time had called a recess for the entire school, asking all the students to meet on the front lawn. It was there where the students were met with a snowman that the principal had just created.
Upon a recent visit to McKinley for an interview with Nancy Greystone, the chair of the centennial planning committee, Lubisich was surprised to see the changes made in the school. A fence has been erected since Lubisich’s days as a student. There are newly added facilities, including a parking lot. The students are now playing on a spongy asphalt rather than the hard surface of the playgrounds back in the 1930s.
Gone is the local grocery store and ice cream parlor at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and 23rd Street, where the students used to buy ice cream for a nickel. Also gone is the abandoned nursery, now the site of Saint John’s Health Center.
For some former McKinley students and teachers, the changes are less dramatic.
Kincannon was a part of the McKinley community from 1957, when she started as a kindergarten teacher,to 2005,when she retired as a special programs consultant for the school.
The 71-year-old from the Pacific Palisades was only 21 years old, fresh out of UCLA, when she began a long fruitful teaching career at McKinley, gradually working her way through the grades by the time of her retirement from teaching in 1995. She continued on as a consultant for the following 10 years.
“It brings back a lot of memories to me,” Kincannon said on Thursday.“Realizing that a great amount of my life was spent there, I look back over it and I am just very grateful I had a chance to do what I wanted to do and make some kind of change in children’s life.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 16, 2007. Read the original PDF.