Monday, Sept. 20, 2004 | 10:57 a.m.
At age 17, Philip "Bud" Kennedy, a senior at Las Vegas High School, got frustrated as he walked the downtown streets and people stopped him to ask why such an able-bodied young man was not off fighting in the war.
It was the late fall of 1943 and World War II was foremost on his mind and the minds of his classmates. His senior year was destined to be cut short.
"On Christmas Eve, (Class of '44 classmate) Sebastian Mikulich and I were sitting in a $3-a-night hotel room in Salt Lake City waiting for the bus to take us to boot camp in Idaho," Kennedy, 78, said. "That was the experience that stands out most in my memory of my senior year of high school."
Fourteen surviving members of the Las Vegas High School Class of '44 joined Kennedy for their 60th reunion that Kennedy hosted at his northwest Las Vegas home on Sept. 17.
He joined classmates Gail Andress, Jerry Snider and Natalie Stevenson Rittenhouse, and Las Vegas High historian Donna Andress, to recall the days of their youth and what has become of the world since then.
Nowhere is the influence of World War II on the youth of that era more apparent than in the shrinking numbers of the LVHS Class of '44. They were to have entered their senior year with 118 members, but just 72 appear in the Boulder Echo yearbook and just 49 were around to pose for the graduation photo.
Their country had been attacked three years earlier by an unprovoked enemy forcing them into a war and an uncertain future. Today's teens also are high school students whose country was attacked three years ago by an unprovoked enemy, forcing their country into a war and an uncertain future.
But Class of '44 survivors are quick to point out the world of differences between then and now that far outweigh any similarities between the eras.
The Class of '44 grew up during the Great Depression. TV was in its infancy. The Las Vegas Strip did not yet exist.
After the attack at Pearl Harbor, Americans had an undying patriotic spirit.
To that end, the class's members quickly dwindled as many of the boys headed off to military service and a number of the girls married their war-bound boyfriends and went to work.
"There was no way we could have known the war was going to end the next year," said Donna Andress, 79, wife of Gail Andress, 78.
A member of the Las Vegas High Class of '43, she became a longtime Las Vegas Sun reporter who in 1980 and 1981 co-wrote the multi-part series "Las Vegas High School: Its People, Its Impact."
In the Sun editions of July 20, 1980, Andress wrote for that series: "The homefront activities filled many hours -- paper and metal drives, bond rallies, conservation and V-mail letters from overseas ..."
"It was difficult being a teenager at that time because there was a shortage of everything -- camera film and rubber tires -- and gasoline was rationed," Donna Andress said.
"The war crossed social lines. The military bussed us girls from the high school to dance with the soldiers at chaperoned events at the base (the Army gunnery school that now is Nellis Air Force Base)."
Gail Andress stuck around his senior year just long enough to have his picture taken for the yearbook, leaving in September for military duty.
"I missed my whole senior year," Andress said, noting that Donna also had left Las Vegas for the University of Nevada, Reno, so there was little to keep him in town. "I have to admit though that the real reason I joined the Navy then was because I did not want to get drafted into the Army later."
Snider did not complain about being one of the few boys in a class dominated by girls, noting that he was a few months younger than most of his classmates. Three days after graduation, however, he was on a bus to the Navy's boot camp.
Despite the departure of many of the senior boys, old Las Vegas High -- now the site of the Las Vegas Arts Academy -- had a football team that went 6-2-1 and a boys' basketball team that defeated Panaca 34-29 to win the Southern Zone title.
The next fall, with the war winding down, the Wildcat football team was back at full strength, going undefeated and not being scored upon -- a legendary squad that was featured in "Ripley's Believe It or Not" and produced 10 Las Vegas attorneys, including the late Bill "Wildcat" Morris and Myron Leavitt.
But sports and many other social activities during the 1943-44 school year took a backseat to the homefront war effort. Looking back, classmates say it was spare time that was well spent.
"We weren't concerned so much back then with having stuff like today's teenagers," Rittenhouse said. "There were no computers or cell phones. Some of us didn't even have telephones.
"Mostly we were all poor. That's why we could give an all-out effort for things like metal drives. As a result, we had lots of stuff to do our senior year. Today's kids can go about their business and not have to think much about their war because many of them have had to sacrifice nothing."
For fun in the mid-1940s, students at Las Vegas High -- the only high school in town at the time -- borrowed their parents' cars to cruise Fremont Street if their gasoline rations held up. They crowded into Dougan's soda shop, a hangout at 7th Street and Carson Avenue across the street from the campus.
There, they gossiped over sodas and played the jukebox. Many also engaged in the taboo of the time: smoking cigarettes.
The Las Vegas of 1944 was a far cry from the sprawling city of today.
"You traveled two miles in any direction from the heart of downtown and you were in the desert," Kennedy said. "Except for the El Rancho and the Frontier hotels, the town pretty much ended at San Francisco Street, which is now Sahara Avenue."
Kennedy recalled people telling his father, Fred, he was crazy for opening his L & K Market at Second Street and Bridger Avenue, "because it was too far out of town and no one would travel that far to shop there."
Amid that small-town atmosphere, simple and unassuming people tried to adjust to those turbulent times. The love story of teenagers Gail and Donna Andress was typical of that period.
In the spring of 1944, after receiving orders to ship out as a Navy gunner, Gail called his high school sweetheart and the couple decided, like many others back then, to tie the knot before he went overseas.
They met in Mount Vernon, Wash., where the couple was married in a ceremony attended by, among others, Gail's grandfather, C.C. McDaniel, mayor of North Las Vegas and the valley's first Chrysler/Plymouth dealer.
Donna's mother, Clarabelle Hanley, a longtime Las Vegas High teacher, was unable to attend because she could not get time off from her wartime summer job with the Union Pacific Railroad.
The Andresses traveled the country, from several bases in California to Florida, where Gail served aboard a ship that patrolled the southern Atlantic coast. The war ended before he could be sent overseas.
Strangely enough, Class of '44 members recall that, while dozens of classmates left school to join the military, only one was believed to have been killed in combat during World War II. And they say they are not even sure about that.
However, Donna Andress said, many military men at the time were training for the invasion of Japan where a heavy loss of life was expected. The dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki negated the need for such a risk.
Those who returned to Las Vegas, though, would see the birth of the Nevada Test Site, which starting in 1951 became the nation's nuclear testing ground.
The Andresses settled in Las Vegas after the war, where he long worked for his grandfather's auto dealership at First Street and Ogden Avenue and she worked on and off for the Sun from the 1950s through the early 1980s.
The parents of two, grandparents of two and great-grandparents of seven celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary earlier this year.
Kennedy also returned to Las Vegas after the war, married underclassman Jeannie, and became the longtime owner of Turf Equipment Supply Co., which today is operated by his son. The Kennedys have five children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Snider, 77, born and raised in Las Vegas, was a longtime credit union manager who in the last decade has waged a courageous battle against limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.
The disease killed his brother Butch, a Las Vegas firefighter who co-founded the national Muscular Dystrophy Association firefighter boot drive.
Jerry and his wife, Pat, have four children and four grandchildren.
Rittenhouse, 77, never forgetting her humble roots, has devoted her life to volunteer work for numerous local charities. She is the widow of longtime local attorney Pete Rittenhouse. She has one child and two grandchildren.
The Class of '44 produced some notable individuals, among them, James Cashman Jr. of the Cashman auto dealerships; Sebastian Mikulich of the family that long operated Las Vegas-Reno-Tonopah Stage Lines; and NASA scientist Phil Payne.
The Class of '44 was honored in 1994 when members attended commencement ceremonies for the first graduating class at the new Las Vegas High School at Hollywood Boulevard and Sahara Avenue. They wore gold caps and gowns and diplomas were given to the students who left school early to go to war.
Although they are grayer and wiser, don't call members of the Class of '44 "old." They are quick to point out that one of the people in attendance at their recent gathering and at past reunions was one of their teachers, Joe Thiriot, 98, who taught English and drama at Las Vegas High from 1940 to 1966. He attended again Friday night.
Members of the Class of '44 also say they are not envious of what the children of today have that they did not have.
"Everything about today's world is so electronically controlled," Snider said. "I thank God I'm not 60 years younger because I do not know if I could make it as a teenager in this world of technology and computers."
Rittenhouse said that when she was young she " had only two pairs of shoes, but those indeed were the best of times.
"But don't misunderstand us. The modern age is wonderful too, with its medicine and technology that is keeping some of us alive.
"The attitudes today are off kilter, but this is still an amazing time to be alive."
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