From the Archives: Celebrating Easter

For this holiday, here is a photo gallery looking back at Easter celebrations

Following a 1947 sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl, above, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Standing beneath a rugged wooden cross on the north hillside, eight white-robed young women trumpeters hailed the rising sun with the inspiring "Gloria Patri."

The “Trumpeter,� by Paul Calvert, is my favorite L.A. Times Easter image. So of course, I made it the lead photo in this gallery.

Writer Alma Whitaker, covering the Hollywood Bowl Easter sunrise service in the above photo, wrote in the April 21, 1924, Los Angeles Times:

It was an extraordinary sensation rushing down wide boulevards surrounded on all sides and for miles in front and miles behind by multitudes of automobiles in that cold eerie two hours before the dawn. It was almost like driving furiously; almost silently through the Valley of Death; that queer silence relieved only by the whirr of the machines and an occasional uncanny screech from a motor horn.

By 4 a.m. the Hollywood Bowl seats were filled, but for an hour and a half after that the multitudes thronged in. The traffic jam had long since proved unmanageable, and most of us left our machines and trudged many long uphill blocks to the Bowl….

By 4:45 a.m. the sky was light, but no hint of sunshine had crept over the hills into the Bowl. But every mound, every hillside, was thronged with human beings of all sizes and ages, and still the crowd came on and climbed and climbed, upward toward the Cross — in a thrilling sort of silence with an undercurrent of whispered touchiness….

At precisely 5:35 a.m., the sun dawned over the hill and struck that Cross and the hilltops. The small boys climbed down in awe. And hushed awe and wonder filled that vast company….

Then upon another hilltop rang out the Easter sunrise trumpet call, sounded by the sisters Lorene and Alberta Lavis, in shimmering white angel gowns. And presently the Hollywood community orchestra was swelling into Humperdinck's "Vision of the Angels" and no other sound marred that ethereal strain.

Have a wonderful Easter!

Scott Harrison

This post originally was published on March 29, 2013.