Unlike the bored, dispirited ladies in Stephen Sondheim’s song ‘Here’s To the Ladies Who Lunch,’ a group of former parents at Palisades Elementary and their beloved principal have been happily meeting for lunch every month for the past 20 years. Once their children graduated from the school, Cheryel Kanan, Pat Culley, Kaye Wawerchak, Jean Pearson, Darla Jones, Janet Valadez, Sigrid Hofer, Sharon Kanan, Kit Festa and former principal Marjorie Hansen initially met annually at the school’s Founder’s Day.   ’We were invited every year, but then stopped getting an invitation’they probably lost the list,’ said Valadez, who had a son at the school. ‘So we decided to meet on our own.’   Until recently, Hansen, 95, who was principal from 1957 to 1974, invited the group to her home for holiday meals. She would have stayed at Pali Elementary until her retirement in 1981, but the LAUSD began moving principals to different schools.   ’We were upset and protested it,’ said Cheryel Kanan, who had three children go through the school, ‘but parents meant nothing to LAUSD.’   Kanan (now the Palisadian-Post business manager) remembers how she got involved at Pali Elementary.   ’I went to the new moms coffee [1966] and signed up for ‘Ways and Means,” she said, admitting she had no idea what that volunteer job involved. Later she received a call from the PTA president asking her to sell ice cream that Tuesday. ‘I told her I had a toddler, but she told me to bring her along.’   When Kanan was asked to chair the Ways and Means committee, she agreed, thinking she would be organizing ice cream sales. Instead, she found herself in charge of the school’s major fundraiser, the Fiesta.    ‘I remember the pocket lady at the Fiesta,’ said Kit Festa, who has three sons and a daughter. ‘She wore an apron that had numerous pockets. Children would reach in and pull out a prize.’   ’We created a lot of games,’ said Darla Jones, whose three children attended the school. Other moms dubbed Jones their ‘artist in residence’ because she painted all of the flyers and posters.   Fundraising proceeds were given to Principal Hansen, who decided how it would be spent. The group used S&H Green Stamps to buy classroom rugs, and ice cream money helped purchase books for the library.   ’We ran the library,’ said Pat Culley, whose two sons and a daughter attended the school.   Sigrid Hofer was in charge of library volunteers. ‘When we started I had 32 volunteers; I had so many people,’ said Hofer, whose two sons, Manfred and Tom, are now graphic artists at the Post. ‘Then times changed and more people went off to work.’ Culley remembered the PTA also paid for aides in the classroom for three hours a day and organized teacher breakfasts and teas. Hansen, ever appreciative of her parents’ efforts, bought a sterling-silver tea set for school celebrations, which stayed when she left, and is still used for special occasions.   When mandatory busing was introduced in LAUSD in 1974, the nature of the PTA changed.   ’Parents who lived so far away couldn’t join PTA,’ said Valadez, ‘and if your kids weren’t at the school [but bused out of the Palisades], why would you join?’   Culley, who was PTA president then and whose daughter was bused to Baldwin Hills, recalled how ‘We had more parents involved before busing. Now there are fewer, but we have more forceful parents who took over the fundraising [by creating a booster club] so they could have more say with the money.’   ’When we were in the PTA, it was social,’ said Festa, who served as PTA president. ‘The best thing to come out of working at the school was all the wonderful friends we made.’   At one point during lunch, the talk turned to sewing. ‘My mother sewed all of my clothes,’ said Pearson, whose husband Ben was a Hollywood agent to Cesar Romero, Don Ameche, Dorothy Lamour, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Betty Grable. ‘She made me an evening gown for the Academy Awards and not one person knew it was homemade. My husband wore a 24-year-old tux, but no one noticed because they were so caught up in themselves.’ Sharon Kanan (Cheryel’s sister-in-law, who had two sons at Pali Elementary) also joined the lunch, but Kaye Wawerchak (three daughters) was unable to attend. Three of the ‘founders”Mary Pitts, Pat Rumph and Alyce Raymond’are deceased. The women will hold a 96th birthday celebration for Hansen in April.
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