There’s no record that Frank Zappa was a student at Claremont High School, but in an interview he once listed Claremont as the first of four high schools he attended.

Many from the Claremont High Class of 1958 remember him.

“Yep, he was there,” said Karl Hertz, who sat three rows ahead of Zappa in Eleanor Galloway’s English class.

“We all knew Frank,” concurred Jerry Peairs. “He may not have stayed a year or ended a year, but he was there.”

When we think of Zappa, which we do now and then (we can’t help ourselves), we tend to think of Cucamonga, where he owned a recording studio for a spell, or Pomona, where he formed the Mothers of Invention before departing in 1965 for L.A. and fame.

The peripatetic Zappa family moved frequently, and while over the years I’ve heard the lore that Zappa attended Claremont High briefly, the school district checked for me years ago and couldn’t turn up anything. Besides, it’s well-documented that Zappa graduated from Antelope Valley High in 1958.

But then along came Murray Gilkeson. A retired Baldwin Park High teacher, the La Verne man, 65, has spent an impressive, if unsettling, amount of time investigating the link.

Gilkeson told me his work began in 2013 when he found the Claremont High alumni website and was surprised that Zappa wasn’t listed. He was told Zappa was never a student.

This shocked him, because he’d heard otherwise way back in 1970. In a conversation at a Claremont record shop about the then-famous Zappa, the clerk, Doug Galloway, said his mother had taught Zappa. The English teacher remembered him, Galloway told Gilkeson, because his vocabulary was so large, she had to look up some of the words he used in essays.

All these years, Gilkeson assumed Zappa’s status as a Claremont High student was a given. Now it wasn’t?

He made a personal crusade of proving Zappa was there, attending a Class of ’58 reunion and following up with phone calls and emails to alumni to plumb their memories. He also goes to monthly breakfasts at the Village Grille with students from that era, now in their 70s.

I went to the one last Saturday, where Claremont stories bounced back and forth across the table among a half-dozen alumni.

The Claremont they describe is unrecognizable to us latecomers: small, isolated, made up of orange and lemon groves, populated by farmers and professors, where volunteers fought fires and downtown emptied out by 6 p.m. even on a Saturday.

“Everybody was in bed by 8,” added Roger Bonzer.

Claremont was so small, seventh through 12th grades met on the same campus, the one at Indian Hill and Foothill boulevards that’s now a mixed-use complex.

Gilkeson has found about 20 students who remember Zappa from eighth and ninth grade. At the breakfast, Hertz, Peairs and Stu Holmes said Zappa drummed in the marching band, produced a wall-sized mural of outer space for a science project and cut up in English class.

Gilkeson has collected more anecdotes, of Zappa reciting a poem in front of one class and participating in a skit in another, absorbing information without taking notes, ad-libbing a science talk in a German accent.

“Everybody knew Frank. He was just a little off-center,” Diann Irvine told Gilkeson.

Case in point: Classmates John Peek and Nelson Scherer told Gilkeson that they and Zappa did a puppet act on a talent show on KHJ, placing second.

Puppetry is an unusual hobby for a teenager, I remarked at the breakfast.

“Some of us were car guys, and Frank was into puppets and music,” Peairs observed.

One student could place Zappa firmly in the ninth grade. Steve Thorne told Gilkeson that his family moved to Claremont in 1954, when he started ninth grade, and that he ate lunch with Zappa, who was in his class.

Still, Zappa proved elusive at yearbook time, wherever he went. “The family moved 11 times,” Gilkeson said.

A photo from an eighth grade talent show, which appears in Claremont’s El Espiritu yearbook of 1954, is said by classmate Barbara Norton to depict Zappa, whom she knew well — although, frustratingly, the boy in the photo isn’t named.

The most definitive proof of Zappa’s attendance is from Zappa himself.

In a 1970 interview in Evergreen Review, he said: “During the ’50s, I went to four separate high schools…in chronological order, to Claremont High School in Claremont, Grossmont High School in El Cajon near San Diego, Mission Bay High School in San Diego, and Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, where I graduated.”

No records exist from Claremont because, Gilkeson learned from the school district, records weren’t kept then for students like Zappa who didn’t graduate.

His theory is that the Zappas first came to Claremont in the summer of 1953, and that Zappa attended all of eighth grade and part of ninth grade before the family moved to San Diego in late 1954, later returning for a longer stretch once Frank was out of high school.

Why did Gilkeson devote such energy to an obscure historical point?

“I felt that CHS should be proud that Frank claimed us as one of his alma maters, and we should return the compliment,” Gilkeson explained in an email. “I feel that it should be documented as much as possible before all those witnesses are no longer with us.”

Peairs is grateful. He said he angrily confronted the webmaster who refused to acknowledge Zappa by saying, “What do you want from us, affidavits? He went to school with us!”

“He did a lot of work,” Peairs said of Gilkeson. “He’s talked to a lot of people. He’s driven a few of them nuts.”

David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, driving a few of you nuts. Contact david.allen@langnews.com or 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.