Trinity ‘49ers’ in spotlight
Finding the solution to this week’s Mystery Photo, especially for the Trinity High School Class of 1949, was not too much trouble. The photo, according to Virginia Bannister Santelli, was taken to promote the 1948 junior class play, “Junior Prom.”
“I played Queenie Smith in that play,” said Santelli, the one wearing the vest. “My grandmother made me that outfit, and we all bought our shoes at Sylvia Kauffman’s,” the shoe store on West Chestnut Street in Washington.
Santelli and a few of her classmates provided us with the identification of the others. Cramer Bacque is living in York. “We’ve been friends since the third grade” at Log Pile School, Santelli said. Mary Ellen Roberts Brock died in Winter Park, Fla., in 2008. At the time, her husband, John Brock, was deceased, and she was survived by two sons, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Another member of the “49ers,” Rodell Finch Lewis, thinks Bonnie Dossey did not attend Trinity High all four years, and neither Lewis nor Santelli know what became of her.
Bacque, according to information obtained online, served in the U.S. Navy from 1949 to 1958. He is retired from the former Bendix Field Engineering Corp., a defense contractor.
Santelli, a widow living in the Bellmead Apartments near the Presbyterian Home, worked for General Electric and General Motors in Ohio, where her two sons were born. One now lives in Florida, the other in Georgia, and she has three grandchildren. She said her need to work prevented a career as a singer.
“I was supposed to go to New York with Lena Horne. … I sang at the Basle Theater, and once the janitor told me backstage after I sang, ‘You done opened up the pearly gates and shook the rafters!'”
Santelli recalls the photo was taken for the yearbook and to promote the play, but only a picture of the entire cast appeared in the yearbook. She cannot remember who took the photo, so that part of the mystery remains unsolved. The image came to the O-R archives from Wheeling writer and photographer Jim Thornton, who found this negative and hundreds of others depicting the Washington area at a flea market.
We hope someday our readers can help us place that last piece of the puzzle.
Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.