In 1930, Alfred J. Cleary (SI 1900 & grandfather of Board of Regents President Mark Cleary ’64) was appointed San Francisco’s first chief administrative officer by Mayor Angelo Rossi. Cleary, who had trained at UC Berkeley as a civil engineer, was chief assistant in charge of work on the Hetch Hetchy Dam and the supervisor…

One of the most famous students to attend SI graduated in 1939. Richard Egan starred in Love Me Tender (1956), in which Elvis Presley made his debut, Disney’s Pollyanna (1960), and A Summer Place (1959), playing Sandra Dee’s father. At SI he performed in The Dragon’s Breath and The Bat and won the Freshman Elocution…

In 1936 and 1937, San Francisco introduced two engineering triumphs to the world with the Bay Bridge (the world’s longest bridge at the time) and the Golden Gate Bridge (the longest single-span suspension bridge). The Red and Blue of November 6, 1936, ran an editorial drawing a parallel to the Bay Bridge, which would link…

SI students witnessed the historic events of the city in the 1930s, including the General Strike of 1934, when longshoremen began a strike for better wages. That July, street violence broke out and police shot and killed two longshoremen and wounded 109 people. A four-day general strike followed that shut down the city. Even though…

CSF In 1930, SI applied for membership in the California Scholarship Federation and formed its first Honor Society, Chapter 211 of the CSF. According to The Heightsof that year, the group was “a junior part of the International Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and any high school member enjoys the help of that body upon…

Football The football team, which left the AAA after the 1931 season for lack of success against the powerful city teams, went undefeated under Coach George Malley from September 1933 to December 1935, finally losing 12–7 to Loyola High School of Los Angeles in the state Catholic prep grid championship. Coach Malley was so popular…

What did high school students read in their English classes in the 1930s? What electives could they take? According to the Catalogue of 1930–31, students read such classics as The Iliad & The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Everyman, Morte d’Arthur, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Last Days of Pompeii, Ivanhoe,…

If you ask people who graduated from SI in the 1930s what they recall of the Great Depression, they will not say very much. Most recall times of little hardship for themselves. “That was all we knew. We didn’t know we were poor,” was the echo of nearly every Ignatian interviewed for this history. Still…

In 1932, SI hired Eneas “Red” Kane, a nationally-ranked track athlete who had coached and taught there for several years, as the school’s first athletic director. He served in that position until 1936 when he left for a job at City Hall. He was replaced by Richard “Red” Vaccaro, a former star athlete at the…

In the 1930–31 school year, SI had three principals. First, Fr. Dennis Sullivan, SJ, who had taught as a regent at SI in the early 1920s, took over in the summer of 1930 but left for Seattle on November 3, possibly for reasons of health, and he died there six years later. Following in his…