❒ Seventy-five years after graduating, Mary Johnson Savoie, 92, looks for old friends

A FORMER RESIDENT KNOWN AT BENICIA HIGH SCHOOL as Mary Anna Johnson is having trouble locating her classmates.

It’s not easy tracking down old friends from 75 years ago.

Johnson left Benicia after graduating in 1936, and went on to live a life of highlights. She met Orville Wright. At her first full-time job at the agency that later would become NASA, she would see the actor Jimmy Stewart, who was then in the Army Air Corps.

She nearly drowned as a child here, has been threatened by an armed Chicago robber, and could have been aboard the plane that crashed and killed a legendary actress.

Johnson eventually married a college classmate, Lee Savoie, and the two moved to Louisiana, where she’s still having adventures.

Now, what Mary Johnson Savoie would like to know is whether any of her fellow members of the Benicia High School Class of 1936 are still alive.

Earlier this year, she mailed the high school office a note that said, “Congratulations!!! To the Class of 1936 on the 75th Anniversary, From one of the Members, Mary Anna Johnson Savoie.”

At the bottom of the note, she asked, “Is anybody there???”

The search begins

Kim Feiglstok, an administrative assistant at the high school, sent the letter to Marie Earp, who for years organized class reunions for the high school and whose son, Bill, teaches history and other subjects there.

That launched Earp, a member of the Benicia High Class of 1952, on two hunts.

First she made contact with Savoie and helped her piece together where in Benicia she lived — near West Fourth and West I streets, in a house now owned by the Passalacqua family.

Earp also began tracking down Savoie’s classmates.

Sadly, she discovered, most are now deceased.

Among those gone are Charles Byerrum, father of Bonnie Silveria, who is active with Benicia Main Street and the Benicia Historical Society; Peter Alameda, who was related to the Nunes family, longtime Benicia residents; Catherine Lavezzo, who married into the Bordoni family and had a well-known ranch outside the city limits; Patsy Gieffels, whose relatives still live in Benicia; Elinor Barkley, whose mother taught at Benicia High; Gwendolyn Rose, who was buried in Benicia; Dorothy Drummond, who married into the Lemings family that owned the Pastime Club; and Barbara Wetmore.

Earp hasn’t found any news on Dorothy Jane Wilson, Jack Bruner, Edgar Brewer, Ruby Holland or Helen Adams, the other names supplied by Savoie. But she’s not giving up.

For Earp, the contact also has been a chance to connect with more of Benicia’s history.

She said Savoie’s father, Gus, was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who later built homes on West I and West Fourth streets. He earned the nickname “One-Nail” for his efficiency.

“This is an adventure,” Earp said. “I’m fascinated by her. At 92, she line dances each week!”

That she does, though Savoie said she no longer credits her line dancing class as the sole reason she is thriving after more than nine decades.

“Maybe that’s not how I ended up — maybe it’s because I walked to and from school every day,” she said Thursday from her home in Lake Charles, La.

A window to early Benicia

Mary’s home was closer to the elementary schools; the high school was farther away. In fact, at one time, the building that currently serves as City Hall was the city’s high school.

“I remember life without television. We didn’t even have a radio early on,” Savoie said. “I remember our first radio. It wasn’t called a radio then; it was a crystal set. It was in our living room, and that room was only for company.

“We children were not allowed to touch it. If we wanted to listen to it, we had to get our father to turn it on.”

Benicia was a smaller town, with smaller schools,. “I remember playing outside with the neighbors’ children,” she said. Hopscotch was popular among the children. “It’s an easy game — you don’t even have to keep score. But if you think it wasn’t athletic? I tried it the other day!”

After playtime, she said, “we’d come in for supper and do our homework. We lived a kind of free life without television.”

Savoie came to love swimming, and learned to swim in the Carquinez Strait. But as a toddler, she and a friend nearly lost their lives as they tumbled into the water off Benicia’s rocky coastline.

Another resident spotted the children, raced down and pulled them out of the water, she recalled. “We were where we weren’t supposed to be,” she said.

She joined the local Campfire Girls, and remembers going to the beach — this time with permission — for camping activities.

During Savoie’s childhood, Benicia still had a ferry. “I remember the ferry,” she said. Her family would get on the boat on Memorial Day and ride it into the Strait. “We’d go to the middle of the water and put wreaths out, in memory of the veterans lost at sea.”

She didn’t date in high school, but few of her classmates did in that era. “Not dating didn’t keep us from going to the events,” she said. She went to the school’s two proms and senior dances. The girls would line up, and the boys would ask them to dance.

“The bands would come in, and we’d walk from home and go dancing,” she said.

She was in the high school band herself, playing saxophone.

Growing up, moving on

Someone who wrote for The Blotter, the high school’s newspaper at the time, predicted Savoie would work in a laboratory. Eventually, the prediction proved accurate. But secretarial work was her first vocation.

Shortly after her graduation from Benicia High School, she landed her first job, in the Arsenal. It was government work, though it was temporary.

She and her sister would ride the Arsenal bus to the place where they would type serial numbers of guns. Three copies were needed, and in those days, the typing was done on manual typewriters and used two sheets of carbon paper to make multiple copies.

“If you made a mistake, you had to roll the paper back really carefully and erase the numbers on all three copies,” Savoie said. “I could see the secretaries who worked there were glad we were there.”

Her next job may have been temporary, too, but it was tasty. She went to the University of California-Davis campus to analyze brandy samples. “They had a still on campus,” she said, though she isn’t sure the university had a proper oenology department. “People in town didn’t realize they had a still on campus.”

She lived in a residential hotel, and few who would catch the scent of brandy on her as she arrived home disbelieved her claim that she worked on campus.

Savoie’s first permanent job took her to Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, which was still under construction when she arrived. This was before NASA was established in 1958; she worked for its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

The tie to NASA has made her sentimental as the American space program wraps up its latest phase as soon as Atlantis returns home. “I hate for it to be the last shuttle flight,” she said.

When she started with NACA, its administration building wasn’t complete. She and her colleagues worked in one of the hangars.

But they didn’t mind, she said. “It was nice to get in at the beginning,” she said.

Savoie’s job title was “Computer.” “We used calculating machines,” she said. “We used a Friden, and another model that was even faster.”

That’s where she met Jimmy Stewart, who had been inducted into the Army for World War II.

Brushes with greatness

Mary Johnson Savoie was to have many other adventures in the coming decades. An attendee at the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony in 1941 shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, she saw President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the White House balcony.

NACA would send her to Washington for more training as a technical librarian, and while there she met Orville Wright, who with his late brother Wilbur had developed the first successful fixed-wing airplane. Orville at the time was a member of the aeronautics advisory committee.

“He was getting on,” she remembered. “I shook hands with him. And why somebody didn’t take a picture!”

On a return trip to California, she and others seated near her — including noted violinist Joseph Segretti — realized that actress Carole Lombard and her mother were on the plane, returning to California after attending a war bond rally in Lombard’s home state of Indiana.

The flight made a stop in Albuquerque, N.M. To accommodate four servicemen who were being sent to California, Savoie and three others, including Segretti, were asked to give up their seats.

“I thought I was going to see Clark Gable!” she said. Gable had married Lombard during a break in the filming of “Gone With The Wind,” in which Gable played Rhett Butler. The other passengers, too, had expected he would be waiting for Lombard at the airport.

The four were disappointed at remaining in Albuquerque when the TWA DC-3 took off for Las Vegas, where it stopped for more fuel.

But 23 minutes after leaving Las Vegas, the plane crashed into Nevada’s Double Up Peak, killing all 22 aboard, including 15 servicemen.

Segretti later wrote of the experience in his biography, “but he didn’t mention any names,” Savoie said.

California to Chicago to Lake Charles

She chose not to stay with NACA; after spending a summer with a friend in Denver, where she worked in a motion picture theater, she returned to the Bay Area and was hired as a lab technician — fulfilling that high school newspaper prediction — at the University of California-Berkeley.

She met a Cal student, a Louisiana man named Lee Savoie. It was the man she would marry.

His decision to get his optometrist degree in Chicago moved the couple there, where Savoie landed a job with Abbott Labs.

“I used a Geiger counter,” she said. That’s because the laboratory made radio pharmaceuticals, and she would test supplies for radioactivity.

“My badge never ‘flashed red,’” she said, using a metaphor for the badge’s warning that she had received too much radiation.

She recalled a snow-driven Chicago night when they went to see a traveling production of “South Pacific,” despite her husband failing to produce the tickets. The sympathetic theater owner gave them provisional admission, allowing them to stay unless someone else produced tickets to those seats. After the show, her husband found his tickets in an inner coat pocket.

Another encounter was scary, and had echoed a warning from a friend that moving to Chicago meant she was heading to “gangster land.”

She and some co-workers at the lab had gone to a restaurant across the street for lunch and were waiting for a table when a hooded man came into the restaurant and ordered the customers to kneel down and face the wall.

“I thought, ‘Gulp! This is it!’” she said. “But it all went smoothly.”

The bartender thought he recognized the gunman’s voice and presumed the man was joking. The robber pointed his handgun at the bartender’s face to show he was serious, and made a clean getaway with the restaurant’s money box, used by patrons to cash their paychecks. No one was hurt.

Once her husband got his degree, Savoie joined him in moving to Lake Charles, La., where she quickly discovered he and his family would drop English and start speaking French.

“I said I will learn French,” she said, and enrolled in a “conversational French” class. But she was taught Parisian French, not the dialect used by Louisiana’s Cajuns, and it didn’t help.

She even learned that Louisiana English didn’t match what she spoke in California. Asked to make “creamed potatoes,” she boiled chopped potatoes and added cream. She didn’t realize the Louisianans used that term for mashed potatoes.

The couple’s marriage ended after 13 years, but Savoie would keep her last name and would stay in Lake Charles. The two are still friends, she said.

Dancing circles

“After I got out of Benicia High School, I didn’t come back home to live,” Savoie said, although she visited a few times before moving to Louisiana.

In Lake Charles, she worked in doctor’s offices, a chemical plant and in hospitals until retiring. That’s when she took up line dancing. Her fellow dancers have given her a shirt that proclaims, “I’m 92, and I can dance circles around you!”

She’s danced with the Krewe of Illusion at Mardi Gras. “They’re kind of on the crazy side,” she said, telling how they’ve portrayed unusual takes on fairy tales to introduce the lineup of dancers. After an evening show on her most recent birthday in January, they encouraged her to make an encore performance at midnight.

Now what Mary Johnson Savoie hopes most for is to hear from classmates from her time in Benicia schools. They have a lot of catching up to do.

Those who want to contact her may reach her at savoietowers@suddenlink.net.

“I love email!” she said.