Gallery: South Pasadena High School 1940 Reunion And Birthday Party

PASADENA – Deadly school or workplace violence is nothing new. In 1940 it came to South Pasadena, when newspaper headlines screamed “Maniac Teacher Shoots 7, Kills 4.”

Just five weeks before graduation, South Pasadena Junior High School Principal Verlin H. Spencer, 38 – fearing he was going to be fired – shot and killed the school’s superintendent, the high school principal and the school district business manager, then drove to the junior high where he shot and killed two teachers and left another paralyzed for life before trying to kill himself.

“A lot of people don’t even know about it now,” said Frances McKown-Fisk, who celebrated her 90th birthday Saturday with four of her surviving classmates. “But those of us still alive do remember.”

They remember, and over the years they’ve been bound by their memories, she said.

“I was out in the gym field and they held us there,” McKown-Fisk said. “They couldn’t find (Spencer), and we were held until we were released by the police. It was terribly, terribly traumatic.”

Every time there’s a school shooting, it brings back the tragedy that left a “pall hanging over graduation,” she said.

“I think of Columbine, and of what we went through,” McKown-Fisk said. “It was just five weeks before graduation, and the whole community shut down for a week while we attended funerals.”

Classmate Barbara Martin, who turns 90 in December and who still lives in South Pasadena, said it changed life in the small tightknit town where everyone knew everyone else.

“I knew the daughter of the principal,” Martin said. “It was a terrible tragedy, and there was anger. … For all of us it was a shocking and terrible ending to what had been a perfect, idealized school experience.”

The students were “very attached” to the principal and superintendent, who were reputed to know the name of all the kids on campus, she said.

“They were so beloved, as was initially the principal of the junior high who did the shooting. It was a terrible insight into the mind and mental illness,” she said, referring to the results of a blood test after Spencer’s arrest that apparently showed huge quantities of bromide in his system.

Spencer was released from prison in 1970 and sent to Hawaii where, under a different name, he helped other paroled convicts and died at age 77, according to Fletcher H. Swan, class of ’41. Swan wrote about the case for the alumni paper – including his encounter with an apparently “very normal” Spencer just before the shootings. “He greeted me by name and asked about my parents and told me that my sister was doing well,” he wrote.

“We never knew any more about it, then we did hear he had died,” Martin said. “His wife was such a lovely person. One of our classmates went to see her the afternoon of the shooting. That’s remarkable for an 18-year-old. It was a class with a lot of understanding and certainly loyalty to each other and the school.”

After 72 years, and many class reunions, the shootings still resonate, McKown-Fisk said.

“Sleepy little South Pasadena, where nothing, no kind of tragedy, ever happened,” she said. “It’s not something that we ever have forgotten.”

janette.williams@sgvn.com

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