St. Monica Church and Santa Monica, California is rich with wonderful photographs taken through the years.

We present some of these photographs for your viewing pleasure. Wherever possible we will give an approximate date when these pictures were taken, their locations and any other information that we have gathered.

Who is Jack Penn?

I was born John Herman Penn at home, 1723 4th Street, Santa Monica on 26 Nov 1925 (the home place is long gone as the City condemned the property for use by Board of Education - right across from the present City Hall).

I was baptized at the St. Monica new church in December, 1925.

I attended St. Clement's School 1932 - 1940, and attended 9th grade at John Adams, and finished at St. Monica High School- 1942, CLASS OF 1944 but left Feb 1944 as I had enlisted as an Aviation Cadet in USAAF. All the teachers were Sisters of the Holy Names and priests; I cannot feel badly enough that today's high schoolers cannot experience their presence and know how wonderful they were as teachers and moral leaders!

I received my Masters Degree at USC in 1952 and was a Psychiatric Social Worker at Norwalk State Hospital for 5 years, then served another 20 years as a State Adult Parole Officer, retiring in 1976 as a Supervising Parole Agent III.

I wrote the SMHS Alumni Newsletter for 8 years (covered alumni from 1923 Academy of the Holy Names through SMHS Class of 1946) and ran out of gas,  so I quit. I wrote articles for the Orange County Register, but primary interest has been in genealogy of my families (Penn-DeLeon and Heinauer-Deblier) and I have written 3 or 4 unpublished books; two of which were requested by the Library of Congress and the L.D.S. headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. Families (all Roman Catholics for centuries in France and Fulda Germany) still keep in touch with families, friends and alumni via e-mail.

Many of the photographs that you will see were taken or collected by my mother, Laura Rose Heinauer (Penn) and her parents in Santa Monica between 1911 and 1968.

Here's the California Avenue Incline (looking both North and South) which many of us used to go to the beach below where the St. Monica's High crowd used to go. Note the railroad tracks and dirt roads and that there were TWO inclines there until erosion wrecked the North one. About 1910.

Monsignor Conneally and Bishop John J. Cantwell (after whom the St. Monica auditorium is named) standing just outside the main, front door of the church in the 1930s. It COULD have been when the church was consecrated in 1925, or maybe at the time of some Confirmations; maybe one of our old timers can remember!