Archive - December 7, 2018

His 18th birthday arrived in 1944, in the middle of World War II, so David Boubion left Los Angeles, where he was born, by signing aboard the wartime Navy. He served aboard a destroyer in the campaigns at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Discharged in 1946, he went home to resume the social work that he had become involved in before the war as an off-shoot of his work as a camp counsellor and camps director. Enrolled in night classes at East Los Angeles Junior College, he organized a teenage group of Mexican-Americans in his neighborhood and got 60 to 80 members meeting once a week to participate in social and recreational activities. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a lot of nonsense—doing this kind of work on my own and for nothing. I might as well make a living at it.” He went to work for the Catholic Youth Organization . . .