In the fall of 1953 I started 5th grade at Trona Elementary School. The room we had was in the original part of the school near the auditorium. The auditorium was shared by the elementary school and the high school. It was boundary that separated the high school campus from the elementary.
This was Mrs. Mont-Eton’s third year as a teacher but her first year of teaching in Trona. It was also her children’s, first year at Trona High School. They had already become used desert life during the two years their mother taught school in Twentynine Palms and from spending time during the summer in the Panamint Range and Valley while their father was prospecting.
I’m sure we weren’t the easiest class to deal with but for the most part I think were pretty good. One student with the initials of H. S. seemed to be the center of attention but after a while she managed to get that under control.
There were many new teachers that came to Trona, stayed in houses the district subsidized for the first year or two and then they moved on. Winifred Mont-Eton was one of the teachers that grew roots.
Winifred retired from teaching in 1975 after 25 years of teaching. She spent 22 years of those years teaching 5th grade in Trona. After retiring she remained near Trona in Ridgecrest and Inyokern until her death in 2010.
There is much more to her story but I don’t want to tell it all. Winifred dictated her story into a tape recorder and her daughter, Lorry Wagner, transcribed it and published it as a book.
Winifred Mont-Eton’s autobiography on is available on Amazon.
To learn about Winifred becoming one of the first Ham radio operators click on the link below:
Benjamin Keith McCullar (1941-2021) was born to Thurman P. and Beatrice McCullar on December 4, 1941 in Oklahoma. He died July 2, 2021 at his home in Grass Valley, California.
Benny played varsity baseball and basketball in high school. The 1959 varsity basketball team won all of their leauge games to become the DIL champions. They played three CIF games before they were defeated by Santa Clara in the fourth game of the playoffs.
The McCullar family moved to Trona from Snyder, Oklahoma in 1955. Thurman worked for Stauffer Chemical in Westend. Thurman died in 1979 and was buried in the Searles Valley Cemetery. Beatrice died in 2008 in Bakersfield. Benny’s older sister, Beth, was a member of the class of 1957. She went to school in Trona for one year before getting married in 1956. Beth died in 2015 in Bakersfield.
Frances Jeanette Jones was born to Rupert and Edith Jones Nov 17, 1936 in Oregon and passed away Nov 23, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Her father, Rupert, died in 1974 and her mother, Edith, died in 2008. Frankie has a brother, Bruce who was a member of the class of 1958.
When in high school Frankie was a member of the Girls Athletic Association, Telescope staff and Komerce Klub.
We would like to express our sincere condolences to her family.
William “Bill” Wright Class of 1972 passed away November 13, 2021 with his wife Debra Seagle Wright by his side. Please join us on November 21, 2021 at 1pm at the Trona Elementary School Cafeteria for a celebration of life, with a burial following at the Searles Valley Cemetery. Reception following for family and friends at Trona Elementary School Cafeteria.
We just learned of the of Qwen Russell’s passing. She died in December of 2020.
Gwen was the daughter of Ruth Knolwes and step daughter of Howard Knowles.
Gwen went by her step father’s name, Knowles when she was growing up but her birth name was Holland. Gwen was the widow of Ira Russell who was in the class of 1951. I believe Gwen was living in Ridgecrest at the time of her death. Her brother, Bruce Knowles, was in the class of 1964 and her brother, Kenneth Knowles, was in the class of 1967.
Pete Teel (1940-2021) passed away Kern General Hospital in Bakersfield on October 10, 2021. He had a couple of episodes of Sepsis from a kidney infection. Pete was living in Trona at the time of his death. He was the father of six daughters, grandfather of seventeen grandchildren and great-grandfather of seven greatgrandchildren. His wife, Clora, and daughter, Celeste, are still living in Trona.
Pete was the son of Clayton and Lydia “Sue” Teel. Sue Teel drove the school bus from Argus to the school each day. The Teel family lived in Argus near the foot the mountains in a house that Clayton Sr. built. I used to visit Pete’s brother, Mike, quite a bit when I was in elementary school. The Teel family moved right after Pete graduated. Michael Teel passed away in April of 2021.
Richard Gonzalez (1939-2021) died on about October 14, 2021. He was the son of Al and Maria Gonzalaz and brother of Al Jr. (1936-1991) (class of 1955), Gilbert (class of 1956), Albert (class of 1960), Michael (class of 1963), Charles (class of 1964), Mavi (class of 1966) and perhaps other siblings that I never knew.
I remember Richard from algebra class, my envy of his photography skills and his marriage to one of the cutest girls in the class of 1961. Richard was the yearbook photographer when he was in high school and continued to perform that function as a paid professional photographer after he graduated. Hid father Al, was a photographer for AP&CC. Both Richard’s parents passed away in 2009.
I would like to express my deepest sympathies to his family.
As I learn more I will update this post.
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HOLLYWOOD — Sister Mary Pia, wearing a threadbare habit, spoke from behind the bars of her gated parlor about the boundless power of prayer.
“Hollywood is the Babylon of the U.S.A.,” she said. “For people who need prayers, we have to be here.”
Just two long blocks from her monastery, you are in the thick of the electric lights of Hollywood Boulevard: among the dopers, the runaways, the surgically augmented, the homeless, the sex salesmen.
Sister Mary Pia, as pale and innocent as an uncooked loaf, prays for all of them, while knowing virtually nothing about them. There is nothing ironic about this, she believes: “One doesn’t need to be of it to know of it.”
Indeed, in her 56 years at the Monastery of the Angels, she has ventured out no more than a few dozen times to attend religious retreats or make preparations for dying loved ones. Rarely has she set a shoe onto the stained sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.
Yet the signs of iniquity are everywhere. Police helicopters routinely hover over the cloister. There is the dull roar of the Hollywood Freeway. The head of the monastery’s statue of St. Martin de Porres has been stolen twice. Neighbors recently complained so loudly about the belfry’s morning chimes to prayer that the authorities forced the peals silent.
“I think we pricked their conscience,” she said of the neighbors. “Is 7 o’clock too early to get up?”
Two Worlds, Two Windows A Hollywood wig shop, and Sisters Mary St. Pius and Mary Pia in a visitors room at the Monastery of the Angels. “Hollywood is the Babylon of the U.S.A.,” Sister Mary Pia says.Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Sister Mary Pia is one of 21 Dominican nuns cloistered in this walled complex of stucco and steel. From a distance, the place looks more like a loading dock than a religious retreat.
They do no missionary work here, canvass no alleys, cook in no soup kitchen. Prayer is the occupation. Until recently there were 23 nuns, but Sister Mary the Pure Heart and Sister Mary Rose were sent to a convalescent home because there were not enough youthful and vigorous nuns to care for them.
The sisterhood is a dying way of life in America. Forty years ago, the United States had about 180,000 nuns. Today there are perhaps 70,000. Fewer than 6,000 are younger than 50. There are estimated to be about 5,000 cloistered, contemplative nuns, a piece of women’s history that may be on the way out.
Reasons for the collapse can be traced to the mid-1960’s: the flowering of the women’s movement, which broadened opportunities beyond secretary, housewife, nurse, teacher and nun. But the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally inflicted damage on itself when it ratified the Second Vatican Council.
“Basically it said that religious women were no more holy than lay women,” said Sister Patricia Wittberg, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. “It was devastating.”
Still, the sisters of the Angels, frail and birdlike, go on with a vocation to which they sacrificed their youth: perhaps never to have known a man, never to have rowed the banks of the Seine, never to have taken a moonlight drive. High heels and self-adornment were given up after high school graduation.
As a young woman, Sister Mary Pia might have become an opera singer. Sister Mary St. Peter, 78, the daughter of a Protestant, thought of becoming a nurse. Sister Mary St. Pius was good at photography. They gave away these things, without regret, for something they say is incalculable.
The average age at the Monastery of the Angels is about 70. From this generation also came feminists like Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug. Hugh Hefner, too, is of their era, as was the centerfold pinup Bettie Page. This generation helped create the cultural chasm that divides America today.
“It’s a materialistic age,” said Sister Mary Pia, gray now, her eyes milky with years. “For young women, religion is far down on the list.”
Sister Mary Pia grew up in the Wilshire District of Los Angeles and joined the monastery at 17, despite the tears of her parents. Prayer, she said, had delivered her brother home from the South Pacific battlefields, and so, seeing the power in it, she dedicated her life to God. She became a novitiate in 1950, years before the birth of rock ’n’ roll.
“I’ve heard of Alex Presley,” she offered. “But I wouldn’t know his music.”
Sister Mary St. Peter gave over her life in 1947, six years before the founding of Playboy magazine. “I never heard of Hugh Hefner,” she said with a shrug in the cloister’s front garden.
Sister Mary St. Pius, who arrived in 1953 from a small town in the Mojave Desert [Trona], does not know the work of the political satirist Jon Stewart. But after a brief moment, she squealed: “Martha Stewart? Oh, yes!”
Asked about Father John Geoghan, the Boston priest and serial molester who was the catalyst of the sex scandal that rocked the Catholic Church, the sisters went blank-eyed.
When told about him, Sister Mary Pia’s eyes became flinty, flashing defiance. She said she believed that one of the last respectable prejudices in America was that against the Catholics, and that the news coverage of abusive priests had been excessive, almost joyful.
“You get a little tired of all the bad news,” she said. “The media,” she wrinkled her nose, as if catching a whiff of a bad onion. “They never write about the good things.”
The important thing, then, is that there are still old women in America with the charity to care about something more than themselves, about strangers, even if they do not know those strangers’ manias and motivations. But take a walk down the boulevard any evening, and one wonders whether their prayers are reaching the intended destination.
“That’s the meaning of faith,” Sister Mary Pia said.
This article is from the archives of The New York Times. I can imagine most readers wondering why I reprinted here? The answer is simple. Sister Mary St. Pius mentioned in this article was born Barbara May. She graduated from Trona High School in 1950 and was the yearbook photographer. I’m trying to figure out how I can find out if she is still alive. She is on linkedin.com and lis listed as the monastery acrivest. That is a good sign.
