SoCal military academies rose, then vanished across LA

SoCal military – From boys in uniforms as young as 6 to campuses that later folded into real-estate sprawl, Southern California’s military academies rose with the country’s early confidence and gradually disappeared as the culture—and the geography of Los Angeles—changed. Alon

When he was 13. Jerome Silberman was sent to the Black-Foxe Military Institute—an academy in Hollywood that. by the war years. had already helped absorb another school’s site. Silberman would later be known as Gene Wilder. In his memoir. “Kiss Me Like A Stranger. ” he wrote that on his first night at the school he was sexually assaulted. and that he was bullied and beaten as the school’s only Jewish student. On a Christmastime visit home to Milwaukee, his mother saw the bruises and “never sent him back to the school.”.

That story is one of the sharpest edges in the long sweep of Southern California military academies—schools that once seemed to offer discipline, status, and a path to adulthood, then folded, moved, or disbanded as Los Angeles grew denser and parents’ preferences shifted.

The early selling point was character. The Page Military Academy for boys 6 to 14—advertised as “The Big School for Little Boys”—promised that it “does not enroll students with vicious tendencies or who have been under the juvenile court.” The language came wrapped in the era’s own code. where “vicious” could mean much more than behavior.

Other schools leaned on ideals of manliness and citizenship. The Miramar Military Academy. which began on the Venice waterfront and later operated in Redondo Beach. marketed itself as “an ideal school for manly boys.” Its curriculum featured “horsemanship” and “citizenship. ” and a 1925 ad for King’s Military Academy in Highland Park used the term “gentlemanship.”.

The classes were also sold as broad and improving, not only drill-and-kill. Advertisements and programs included mathematics, English composition, geography, history, and music—piano, violin, and choral work. A 1920 ad for the California Military Academy promised “special attention for backward pupils.”.

Aviation, too, found its way into the pitching. In the aviation-exuberant decade of the 1920s, some schools taught classroom courses in aviation and aeronautics. The Urban Military Academy opened in 1903. the year the Wright Brothers first flew. and into the 1930s it staged horseback fencing competitions.

On campus, the system looked organized, down to ranks and promotions. Students were sometimes assigned a military rank. and a 1930 ad for the Page Military Academy showed a 13-year-old cadet major carrying a swagger stick. Even the youngest boys at Page were expected to evaluate themselves “honorably and honestly. ” and to “realize ‘what it means to be ‘the captain of his soul.’” The line comes from the poem “Invictus. ” written 150 years ago. a text that has been credited with steadying men in many different settings.

But some academies did not last long enough for their ideals to outlive the shifting world around them. Like companies that merge and re-emerge, some schools combined forces or relocated. The Robert E. Lee Academy appeared briefly in 1928 in Redondo Beach, then news accounts reported it moving to La Crescenta. In 1929, it made the news when five checks it issued to two workmen briefly bounced.

Land and location were part of the pressure, too. Several academies sat on immense tracts in early Los Angeles. and the economics of real estate increasingly competed with the values the schools advertised. The California Military Academy offered a vivid example of that instability. It spent a few early years. circa 1906. on the water at Santa Monica. leasing a rambling Victorian pile that had once been the Arcadia Hotel. with cadets drilling on the sand. It moved inland in 1910. shifted again a few years later. and then in the mid-1930s moved into a purpose-built building in Baldwin Hills designed by architect Richard Neutra with prefab walls. The school disbanded in the 1960s, and the building was torn down in the 1990s.

There were other moves and transformations across the map. The Harvard Military Academy opened around 1901 on 10 acres at Western and Venice Boulevard. Its presiding genius was Grenville C. Emery. In an earlier job at Boston Latin school. Emery sent “scores of young men to Ivy League schools.” He got permission to use the Harvard name. and the school was taken over by the Episcopal Church in 1911. Over time. the school became secular. non-military. and co-ed. and it is now known as the Harvard-Westlake Schools. private middle school and college prep campuses.

The Page academy took up seven acres in the Wilshire-Pico neighborhood. It ran what one depiction described as a small village of classrooms. dormitories. a printing press. a woodworking shop. and even a miniature steam railroad for ferrying boys around the campus. Nearly 120 years after its founding, Page now operates private non-military schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Los Angeles Military Academy. founded around 1898 on 15 acres just west of Westlake—now MacArthur—Park. modeled its students’ uniforms somewhat after West Point. By 1908 it moved to Huntington Drive in El Sereno. When Gen. John Pershing—“Black Jack Pershing. ” a former West Point cadet—visited Los Angeles in January 1920. his motorcade traveled down Huntington Drive. with cadets standing on both sides to salute him.

Urban Military Academy’s story also shows how easily a school’s footprint could change. It opened its barracks on Melrose near Wilcox in Hollywood in 1905, then moved to the wilderness on the 11,000 block of Sunset Boulevard. The Black-Foxe Military Institute later took over Urban’s Hollywood site.

Culver City’s founder. Harry Culver. set up a military academy there on five acres in the 1920s; forty 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 comedy director Hal Roach made training films and pro-American morale-building movies with actors whose numbers included Ronald Reagan.

Tuition and status were part of the marketing calculus. Many schools were coy about tuition rates. but in September 1933. during the trough of the Depression. the Culver academy noted delicately that tuition was “in keeping with present economic conditions.” The students were described in a news story as “the sons of a number of wealthy and prominent citizens.” Roll calls included well-known names: the sons of Charlie Chaplin. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Buster Keaton. Bing Crosby. and Dean Martin.

Yet even with prestige on the rolls, postwar forces pushed these academies farther and farther away. By the late years of the decades following World War II. real estate pressures and density sent academies to places such as Glendora. Van Nuys. Monterey Park. and Burbank. Long Beach already had a couple of venerable military academies.

The national mood also shifted. After World War II, the American military was more professionalized. 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 survived—proof that the model could hold on, at least in certain places. The Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad was still flourishing at 116 years old. In Anaheim, St. Catherine’s Academy combines Catholic boys’ K-8 education and military traditions. It has 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.

One institution carried the weight of being older and ending later than many others. 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 it was renamed for its longtime head, Fred. C. Nelles, who made it his mission to “save the boy.” People know it by a third name—Juvie.

Between the earliest decades of the “American Century. ” when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill helped shape national imagination. and the later era when military schools fell out of favor. Southern California academies followed a common arc: they grew quickly as the country expanded its sense of purpose. then narrowed as parents changed their expectations. and as the geography of Los Angeles became more valuable than the land military schools once required. The transitions were not just educational. They were personal—sometimes life-affirming. sometimes devastating—and they played out in moves from Venice to Santa Monica. from Hollywood to Sunset Boulevard. from Baldwin Hills to demolition.

By the time the last of the oldest schools closed in 2004. the uniformed world that once seemed permanent had already been broken into fragments—some into other kinds of schools. some into new uses of land. and some into the memories of people like Wilder. whose experience at a military academy still lives in what he wrote. not in what the brochures promised.

Southern California Los Angeles military academies Page Military Academy Black-Foxe Military Institute Gene Wilder Juvie Whittier State School St. Catherine’s Academy Army and Navy Academy Carlsbad Southeast Academy Norwalk California Military Institute Perris