The West Seattle Holy Rosary School Class of ’50 call themselves “Depression babies,” but when they gathered recently they celebrated happy times remembered. Thirteen alumni gathered for their 60th reunion at the Boulevard Park Place Retirement Community to reminisce of a younger West Seattle.

Dorothy (Reuter) Edgerton, attended Holy Rosary since third grade.

“It was free (to attend) if you lived in the parish and your mother gave a dollar every Sunday, which was expected,” she said. “If you lived outside the parish you paid a small tuition.

“West Seattle was its own little town,” she continued. “I came way over from Bellevue to attend. I remember an ice creamery next to the Admiral Theater. When I was a kid I saw Frank Sinatra come into the theater but I didn’t get to see the show. There were lots of girls screaming. He and Bing Crosby were like the Elvis of our time. He was scrawny. I don’t know what we saw in him but we all screamed and yelled. It was ridiculous.”

There were the dance halls the girls attended further afield, like the Aurora Palladium Dance Hall on North Aurora, the Spanish Castle Ballroom south of the airport, and the Aqua Follies Aqua Theater by Green Lake. Some of the ladies recalled listening to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong perform at these venues.

Joan (Kidd) Olson, Carol Lesser Swaggerty, and Carol Fischer Zietz went to first grade together at Rosary.

“There were 34 girls who graduated,” said Olson, 77, who was born and raised in West Seattle. “Five or six have died. Some we don’t know where they are.”

Many are still quite active, including professional musician Rose Marie (Baccetti) Barr, who, with hubby Bert, form the “Double Barrs,” a musical play on words. They are with the Uptown Lowdown Swing & Jazz Band, and Rose Marie had to swing out the door in the middle of lunch to get to her gig on time. She and others at the reunion recalled her carrying around “this big instrument” in 6th grade, referring to her full-sized guitar. Her music caught the ear of her future husband.

“Bert called me and said, ‘you don’t know me. I need a piano player.’ I was teaching classical music and didn’t know much about jazz,” recalled Barr. “I auditioned and he hired me because I could read music, but didn’t have a (jazz) style. He felt he could change my style for what he wanted, rather than hire someone who had their own style but would not change.”

Rose Marie graduated from a different high school. They now live in Bellevue but had lived in West Seattle.

“I remember when we were first married in 1950 they were building brick houses on Gatewood Hill selling for $18,000,” she said.

Annie (Reichert) Stark worked as a grocery clerk for 33 years, beginning after World War II.

“It was the first big Safeway store on California Avenue where Rite Aid is and near where the Granada Theater was,” she recalled. “There was a string of 22 checkers. People came in from all over the city. It was a madhouse in there. Trucks backed up with merchandise on rollers and everything went down into the basement.”

Shirley Schurman has lived in West Seattle since forth grade.

“It was a good place to grow up,” she recalled. “I remember the boat races on Lake Washington. We brought a washtub full of ice and beer and sat on the shore and it was great. I was older than 18, I think, but younger than 21.”

Schurman’s parents’ had a sewing machine business, Schurman Sales Company, with two locations, in White Center, and Burien.

“I had gone to a country school through forth grade in a little town called Duwamish, near where Boeing Plant 2 now is,” said Connie (Grzech) Wood, who then attended Holy Family School on Roxbury before entering Holy Rosary.

“Grandpa had a whole side hill and we used to walk down to the (Duwamish) river to go to school,” she said. “Coming to a religious school made quite a difference. We mostly wore old cotton dresses and brown socks. Then to come into the ‘city’ to Holy Family I was like a hick, and all the other girls were like, ‘who’s that?’ Then after the first few weeks every girl had uniforms and we all looked the same and that was nice.”

“I remember one of the class picnics and everybody started hollering and shouting when a little dog had gotten into this sack with wieners and got one in his teeth and was dragging about 10 of them behind him, a string of wieners,” laughed Mitzy (Jonientz) Cloyd, a retired realtor now living in Renton.

“My dad came from Germany and my mom was of German descent and he had a butcher shop at Pike Place Market,” Cloyd continued. “There is still a tile there with his name on it. He came home one day and told my mom they wouldn’t speak German anymore. There was prejudice, even though he had come to this country to get away from what was happening in Germany.”

Arlene (Lessard) Tracy became a facilitator during inspections atop the newly-forming Columbia Center.

“I was on the top with hard hat,” she said. “I worked for Seafirst Bank with the big developer, Martin Selig. I went on monthly inspections to make sure they didn’t put a bill in for something they didn’t build. I gave tours during construction with the exposed steel beams and elevator on the outside. I climbed a ladder that led to the mechanical work at the tiptop. It felt like you were in heaven.”