EMERSON JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
Adress 1650 Selby Avenue, West Los Angeles (between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard).
It was a huge one-floor building , North Santa Monica Boulevard.
The classrooms of Norma Jeane's level had 500 pupils, coming from West Los Angeles.
Some came, driven by a chauffeur, from their home in the enclave of Bel Air, above Sunset Boulevard.
Others came from the Los Angeles middle-class buildings, and some others, like Norma Jeane walked from one of the poor area of the west front of the town, Sawtelle.
Sawtelle was bounded by 4 big boulevards : Sepulveda on East, Bundy on West, Wilshire on North and Pico on South.
It was a mix of people. Japanese immigrants,
pioneers of the first times of California, peasants from the Dust Bowl,
came during the Crisis to find work and shelter under the California
sun, Spanish, Mexican Indians and old residents of Los Angeles, as Ana Lower.
In other words, for the Los Angeles residents, Sawtelle above all evoked many beers bars where the workers used to meet each other. The area was synonymous of poverty and illiteracy.
Norma Jeane attended this school from September 1939 to June 1941 (aged 13 to 15).
She graduated (9th grade) on June 27, 1941 ().
She repeated a part of her first year to catch up the time lost by her frequent changing of school.
In 1941, when she left the school, her grades weren't great. She almost failed in rhetoric and diction, which is not surprising if her shyness and stutter are considered. But on the other hand she was brilliant in journalism, taught by Miss Crane. She wrote some articles for the school newspaper, The Emersonian.