Centennial Planning Committee

The Fairfax High School Alumni Association (FHSAA) is a group of people who graduated from Fairfax and who love their alma mater. They are committed to preserving the history, traditions and opportunities that all Fairfax alumni share.

Unlike many other high schools in Los Angeles that have had active alumni organizations for decades, Fairfax doesn’t appear to have had a formal alumni association until 1995, some 71 years after its founding.  The group that formed then, called Alumni and Friends of Fairfax, was spearheaded and supported by a group of alumni from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, headed by Jim O’Donnell, Class of 1944, & Milton “Sparky” Adams, Class of 1928.  [Mr. Adams was an entering freshman at Fairfax on the day its doors opened in 1924.  He donated his personal copies of the 1926, 1927, and 1928 Colonials, the first yearbooks published, to Alumni and Friends of Fairfax.]

One of the main reasons for organizing at that time was that Fairfax was just four years away from a landmark birthday: Its Diamond Jubilee (75th anniversary) would be celebrated in 1999, and Alumni and Friends of Fairfax was a key to planning and promoting that event.  Among the initial steps they took in the planning was to publish an Alumni Directory in 1997, the first time a listing of alumni addresses had been compiled and made available to former students.

In 2021, history repeated itself: With Fairfax’s 100th birthday looming in just 3 years, the Fairfax High School Alumni Association (FHSAA) reactivated itself in order to plan for that momentous event in 2024.  And again, one of the first steps the reborn Alumni Association took in preparation for the occasion was to revise the Alumni Directory, supplementing and correcting address information last collected in 2016.

Between 1999 and 2021 the Alumni Association went through several iterations.  When the Class of 1944, which had led the organization since its inception, bid farewell in 2004, the alumni organization remained relatively inactive until 2010, when Fairfax’s principal, Ed Zubiate, recognizing the value of re-connecting the school with its thousands of former students, opened a Development and Alumni Office (DAO).  Staffed by Joyce Kleifield as Director of Development, Bev Meyer (W’65) as Alumni Coordinator, and Jeanne Weldon-Travis (’73) in Alumni Outreach & Fund-raising Support, the DAO actively invited alumni back to campus, founded a 501(c)(3) Fairfax High School Alumni Association, helped to organize and sometimes host on-campus Class Reunions, sponsored an Alumni Poker Tournament, sponsored a series of alumni speakers on campus, put on a Lieber-Stoller tribute concert, mounted an alumni-student musical revue called The Fabulous Fairfax Follies, and spearheaded the move to name the Fairfax High School stage in honor of Marilyn Moody.  In addition, the DAO created a display for the Fairfax Alumni Hall of Fame, added a Faculty Hall of Fame in 2011 with the induction of its first three members – Marty Biegel, Marilyn Moody, and Jim Tunney – and hosted a Legacy Hall of Fame Gala in 2012.  Finally, the DAO introduced countless Fairfax students to their heritage as Future Fairfax Alumni by organizing an Oral History Project that brought together students and alumni for informal video conversations on the red sofa in the former Room 117 [which, incidentally, had been Marty Biegel’s history and government classroom].

The Development and Alumni Office was closed in 2012 due to Greenway Arts Alliance ending their funding of the program.  Once again the Alumni Association experienced a period of inactivity until 2021, when Bev Meyer and Jeanne Weldon-Travis revived their dream of a 100th birthday party by establishing a Centennial Planning Committee, reinstating the Alumni Association, and contracting with PCI to produce an updated Alumni Directory and facilitate an Oral History Project.