Students Patch Together Impressive Fund-Raising Effort for Red Cross

Can a quilt autographed by celebrities be used to raise money for war victims in the Balkans?

It worked more than 80 years ago for one group of Hollywood schoolkids who stitched together a quilt signed by hundreds of turn-of-the-century luminaries as a fund-raiser for the American Red Cross.

So now a new generation of students from the same school is trying to do the same thing.

Pupils at Santa Monica Boulevard Elementary School who collected signatures of contemporary dignitaries ranging from movie stars to political leaders and business tycoons are selling posters of their finished blanket to raise cash for victims of the Kosovo conflict.

Their creation is based on a 1918 quilt that students at the school sewed together to help pay for relief efforts during World War I.

Seventh- and eighth-graders at the school back then charged dignitaries and others 10 cents to sign the quilt. The 63 Red Cross-marked panels were in turn sold for $1 apiece. The more than 900 names on the 1918 quilt represent a who’s who of America at that time.

Signers included Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller, Gen. John Pershing, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, and the first man to fly--Orville Wright.

As we reach another turn of the century, signers of the new quilt include Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Winslet, Richard Dreyfuss, Gen. Colin Powell, Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and the first American to orbit the Earth--John Glenn.

No record was found to explain how teacher Eva Jones and her pupils managed to gather their celebrity autographs back in 1918.

But current Assistant Principal Jacqueline Kurkjian and her students begged and cajoled every big shot they could think of as the new quilt was assembled last year.

They got the idea for the project when UCLA engineering professor Kenji Ono and his wife, quilting author Fumie Ono, spied the 1918 quilt hanging at Red Cross headquarters during a visit to Washington. When they got home, the pair phoned the school to relate what they had seen.

Over the next year the Hollywood students went to work on the project (the idea of turning it into a fund-raiser was to come later). They got a boost when City Council President John Ferraro loaned them a book listing the mailing addresses of celebrities. Kurkjian and the students mailed hundreds of letters urging each dignitary to sign and return an enclosed swatch of cloth.

A talent agent carried a piece of cloth to the 1998 Academy Awards and got the signatures of “Titanic” director James Cameron, Winslet and others from the movie.

First-grade teacher Larry Abbott snagged the autographs of musicians Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips at a folk festival. Kindergarten teacher Sean Duffy, who once worked as a Washington aide to Rep. Dick Armey, wrote his old boss and got his autograph, along with those of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Reps. Tom DeLay and John Boehner.

Principal Hasty Arnold has friends who work at Boeing’s Rocketdyne plant in Canoga Park, and they got space shuttle crewmen from the Hubble telescope project to sign a patch.

Sherry Lansing, Earl Lestz and other executives of Paramount Pictures, which is down the street from the school, autographed swatches. So did Esa-Pekka Salonen and others from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles City Council and the county Board of Supervisors.

At the end, fifth-graders at the school signed their own names to their creation in red ink, just as their 1918 counterparts had done to theirs. Then Kurkjian recruited a North Hollywood neighbor, quilt hobbyist Marie Parsekyan, to stitch the panels together. The finished piece includes about 1,000 names.

Last May, the new quilt traveled to Washington, where it now hangs next to the original in Red Cross headquarters.

People look for similarities between those who helped shape the first part of this century and those who have helped mold the final part.

The signature of inventor Thomas Edison is on the earlier quilt, and that of computer software mogul Bill Gates is on the other.

John Phillip Sousa signed the first quilt next to the handwritten first notes of his “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Composer John Williams signed the new one, next to his handwritten opening notes of the theme from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

After the new quilt arrived in Washington, the idea of making a fund-raiser out of it for Red Cross relief work arose. Students are selling the posters for $10 apiece.

They are also hawking candy and baked goods to raise enough money to send a delegation of fifth-graders to Washington on May 24 to see the two quilts hanging together, said Ingrid Villanueva, 10.

There are 150 youngsters in the fifth grade, but only 30 can go. So the names of pupils with good scholarship, attendance and citizenship will go into a hat and winners will be drawn, Kurkjian said.