1932
Norma Jeane ended in June her school year at the Ballona Elementary and Kindergarten
During summer, she took part in a show given during a religious celebration at the Hollywood Bowl.
With 50 other children, she made her first public apperance. The girls were dressed with a black dress and had been positionned so that they formed a living cross.
The show was pompous and very boring. Marilyn later told about her memory :
"We wore white tunics under our dresses and, at the signal, we had to remove our dresses to change the black cross into a
In September, she attended the Vine Street School (1st grade); she remained there until June1933.
The school was located at the corner of El Secundo Boulevard and Washington Street, at the south of the area now occupied by the Los Angeles International Airport.
Often, her dog Tippy (,
) followed her to the school and waited for her, until she got out of school.
At school, discipline was just a variant of the one used by the Bolenders,
but during the recess, things were different : "I lived to play. It
had to pretend things. Like all the kids, we played real dramas,
excessive adventures. To me, I loved to invent - I think more
than the others - because at my foster parent's home, everything
was so predictable".
One
of the "pretending" games had been inspired by the only radio program
the Bolenders allowed to listen to. It was a detective story and
several times, Norma Jeane paced the road up and down, handling Albert
Bolender's flash lamp, and without caring about the
daylight, lighted the cars license plates so that she wrote down the
numbers. That's how, at the end of this year 1932 - beginning of 1933,
Norma Jeane learned to write the numbers.
BACK TO ALPHABETICAL INDEX
NEXT FILE