{"id":152235,"date":"2026-05-22T12:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T12:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/comment-comfortably-permanently-the-socal-military-academies-that-thrived-and-then-folded-up-their-tents\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T12:03:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T12:03:20","slug":"comment-comfortably-permanently-the-socal-military-academies-that-thrived-and-then-folded-up-their-tents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/05\/22\/comment-comfortably-permanently-the-socal-military-academies-that-thrived-and-then-folded-up-their-tents\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment: comfortably – permanently. The SoCal military academies that thrived and then folded up their tents"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ten-cottage<\/i>LA<\/p>\n

All right, take it easy. and listen.<\/p>\n

Until recently, all-volunteer There were problems related to recruitment in the US Army.<\/a>And one way it chose to combat them was to raise the recruitment age from 35 to 42 last month. It is now willing to overlook one conviction \u2013 just one, mind you \u2013 for marijuana possession. And the Iran war has brought a flood of new recruits to the army.<\/p>\n

At the end of the new “American century” of the 20th century, the nation had no problem strengthening its military. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders attacking San Juan Hill powerfully captured the national imagination as the country assumed policing of its new empire: Hawaii, and, from the Spanish\u2013American War, control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, as well as a strong hegemonic mercantilism in Central America.<\/p>\n

There is no coincidence in the fact that military schools also came into existence at the same time and their numbers continued to grow from World War I to World War II.<\/p>\n

A surprising number of them opened here in Southern California, although you’d be hard-pressed to find many of them these days. At the turn of the century, they advertised in newspapers from the Midwest to Hawaii and outfitted boys as young as 6 in uniform.<\/p>\n

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Get the latest from Pat Morrison<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Los Angeles is a complicated place. Luckily, there is someone who can provide context, history, and culture.<\/p>\n

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Page Military Academy for boys ages 6 to 14 \u2013 known as “The Big School for Little Boys” \u2013 pledged that it “does not enroll students with vicious tendencies or who have been subject to juvenile court.” (“Vicious” in Victorian codes often meant homosexual.)<\/p>\n

These schools were not exactly a direct pipeline into the US armed services, but their underlying promise was to develop gentlemen, if not always literal officers.<\/p>\n

Miramar Military Academy \u2013 operating first on Venice Beach and then on Redondo Beach \u2013 advertised itself as “a model school for manly boys.” The terms “horsemanship” and “citizenship” appeared in schools’ curricula, as well as \u2013 in a 1925 advertisement for the King’s Military Academy at Highland Park \u2013 “gentlemanly”.<\/p>\n

Their programs were not primarily drill-and-kill exercises, but extended to mathematics, English composition, geography, history, and music \u2013 piano, violin, and choral programs. In a 1920 advertisement for the California Military Academy, the curriculum promised “special attention to backward pupils.”<\/p>\n

Throughout the aviation-enthusiast decade of the 1920s, some schools, such as the Pasadena Military Academy on Avenue 64, taught classroom courses in aviation and aeronautics, as did the Urban Military Academy, which had opened in 1903, the year of the Wright brothers’ first flight. In the 1930s, it hosted equestrian fencing competitions.<\/p>\n

Students were often given a military rank and awarded promotions, such as the 13-year-old cadet major carrying a swagger stick in a 1930 advertisement for Page Military Academy in Los Angeles. Even the youngest of Page’s boys were expected to evaluate their performance respectfully and honestly, and, according to one vivid newspaper article, to feel “what it means to be captain of your own soul.”<\/p>\n

(It’s a line from a poem called “Invictus,” written 150 years ago and still extremely popular among some young people. Britain’s Prince Harry named it after the athletic games he created for wounded soldiers. Nelson Mandela read it in prison to give himself heart-pounding. And at the inglorious end of things, after his execution in 2001, Army veteran and Oklahoma City mass-murder bomber Timothy McVeigh It was distributed to the public as his last words.)<\/p>\n

Like modern-day companies that merge and re-emerge or close down, some of these schools quickly disbanded, or moved their bivouacs, or combined forces. The Robert E. Lee Academy appeared in Redondo Beach for a short time in 1928, and then newspapers reported its move to La Crescenta, where in 1929 it made news when five checks issued to two workers briefly bounced.<\/p>\n

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A postcard of the California Military Academy in Santa Monica. <\/p>\n

(From the personal collection of Pat Morrison)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

These schools sometimes occupied vast tracts of land in early Los Angeles, perhaps another reason why many of them merged or disappeared; There was no competition between the values \u200b\u200bof real estate versus the values \u200b\u200bof gentrification.<\/p>\n

In fact, much of the story of LAS military academies may seem like a real estate “Where’s Cadet Waldo”, tracking institutions from one location to another. The California Military Academy spent its formative years, circa 1906, leasing the magnificent Victorian pile on the Santa Monica water that had once been the Arcadia Hotel. Cadets practiced on sand.<\/p>\n

It moved inland in 1910, moved again a few years later, and then in the mid-1930s to a purpose-built building in Baldwin Hills, designed with prefab walls by renowned architect Richard Neutra. The school disbanded in the 1960s and the building was torn down in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Harvard Military Academy opened around 1901 on 10 acres at Western and Venice Boulevard. Its president was the genius Grenville C. Emery. In his previous job at Boston Latin School, Emery sent many young men to Ivy League schools. He got permission to use the Harvard name for the school, which was taken over by the Episcopal Church in 1911. The school eventually became secular, non-military, and co-educational, and you will now know it as the Harvard-Westlake School, a private middle school and college preparatory campus.<\/p>\n

Page Academy took up seven acres of land in the Wilshire-Pico neighborhood, operating a small village of classrooms, dormitories, a printing press, a woodshop, and a miniature steam railroad to transport boys around the campus. (Nearly 120 years after founding the academy, Page now operates private non-military schools in L.A. and Orange counties.)<\/p>\n

One of the oldest locations was the Los Angeles Military Academy, established in 1898 on 15 acres just west of Westlake \u2013 now MacArthur \u2013 Park. The uniforms of its students were modeled somewhat like those of West Point. By 1908 it had moved to Huntington Drive in El Sereno, and when General John Pershing \u2013 “Black Jack Pershing”, himself a former West Point cadet \u2013 visited L.A. in January 1920, his motorcade took him to Huntington Drive, where cadets lined up on both sides of the street to salute him.<\/p>\n

More Music Camp Stools: The Urban Military Academy opened its barracks on Melrose near Wilcox in Hollywood in 1905, and over time moved into the woods that was the 11000 block of Sunset Boulevard, and the Black-Fox Military Institute took over Urban’s Hollywood site.<\/p>\n

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A postcard of the battalion, Whittier State School, in Whittier.<\/p>\n

(From the personal collection of Pat Morrison)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Culver City’s founder, Harry Culver, established a military academy on five acres there in the 1920s; After 40 years it was a housing tract.<\/p>\n

During the war, the academy was outfitted for use as an appendage of the studio called “Fort Hal Roach”, where the famed comedy director made training films and pro-American morale-building films with actors, including Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n

In their advertising, these schools were generally quite coy about tuition rates, although in September 1933, at the height of the Depression, Culver Academy delicately noted that tuition was “in keeping with present economic conditions.”<\/p>\n

Culver’s own son attended that academy. “The sons of many wealthy and prominent citizens” was how one news story called the schools’ students, and certainly some of the names heard in roll calls were celebrated: the sons of Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Buster Keaton, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin.<\/p>\n

At the age of 13, in late 1946, Jerome Silberman was enrolled in the Black-Fox Academy. You know him as actor Gene Wilder. She wrote in her memoir, “Kiss Me Like a Stranger”, that she was sexually assaulted on her first night at school, and as the school’s only Jewish student, she was bullied and beaten. Upon visiting his home in Milwaukee at Christmas time, his mother, who had thought military school would turn him into a courageous accomplished gentleman, noticed the injuries and never sent him back to school.<\/p>\n

By then, the centrifugal forces of real estate and density were sending academies farther and farther away from the city \u2013 to Glendora, Van Nuys, Monterey Park, Burbank. There were already a few respected military academies in Long Beach (one of which needed a reference).<\/p>\n

The post-war zeitgeist also began to disprove them even more as the preferred educational choice of some American parents for their sons. After World War II, the US military had become more professional, and by the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War made military school less attractive. In California, between 1971 and 1973, eight military academies closed.<\/p>\n

Still, some have survived. The Army and Naval Academy in Carlsbad is 116 years old and still thriving. In Anaheim, St. Catharine Academy combines Catholic boys’ K-8 education and military traditions, beginning as a girls’ school, later an orphanage, and in 1924, a military school. Southeast Academy in Norwalk is a public charter school that provides high school education with a military and law enforcement focus to a diverse and coeducational student body. The coeducational California Military Institute in Paris is also a public middle and high school with military principles.<\/p>\n

The oldest school of its kind in California, and possibly the first military-themed school in Los Angeles, it opened in 1891 and closed in 2004. Students were sent there not by parents, but by courts and judges. It was formerly called Whittier State School and was renamed in 1941 after its longtime principal, Fred. C. Nels, who made it his mission to “save the boy”.<\/p>\n

You may know it by a third name, a common nickname:<\/p>\n

Juvi.<\/p>\n

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\"Pat <\/picture> <\/div>\n

Explaining LA with Pat Morrison<\/p>\n

Los Angeles is a complicated place. In this weekly feature, Pat Morrison explains how it works, its history and its culture.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten-cottageLA All right, take it easy. and listen. Until recently, all-volunteer There were problems related to recruitment in the US Army.And one way it chose to combat them was to raise the recruitment age from 35 to 42 last month. It is now willing to overlook one conviction \u2013 just one, mind you \u2013 for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[11817,27870,1225,32778,544,16917,1020,7381,32777],"class_list":["post-152235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bible-verse","tag-academies","tag-comfortably","tag-comment","tag-folded","tag-military","tag-permanently","tag-socal","tag-tents","tag-thrived"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152240,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152235\/revisions\/152240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}