SAN JOSE -- San Jose High School was born haphazardly in 1863, and it's something of a miracle that it has survived the century and a half since. The second-oldest public high school in California is throwing itself a yearlong birthday party, and one proud alumna is joining in the festivities with a photo essay marking the sesquicentennial.

Josie Lepe, class of 1990 and a photographer for this newspaper, returned to campus to photograph some of the school's most successful seniors in their favorite spots on campus, the places where they found inspiration and strength, the ones they would remember for the rest of their lives. Lepe then tracked down some prominent and very busy alumni for the photo essay, including a congressman, champion fighter and 102-year-old doctor.

It would take an enormous coffee-table picture book to tell the story of a school whose students collectively witnessed the Civil War, the destructive earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, two World Wars separated by the Great Depression, the turmoil of the 1960s, the attacks of 9/11 and more. Lepe's trick was to take these individual memories and stitch them together into an inspirational, if abbreviated, history of San Jose High. What is education if not inspiration?

Distinguished alumni

According to San Jose's late historian, Clyde Arbuckle, San Jose High was commissioned soon after John Joseph Bowen, a civil engineer and principal of a grade

Several campus changes and four decades later, a gifted 12-year-old, Jewish boy enrolled.

"I was declared a child prodigy," Dr. Ephraim Engleman, class of 1927, said recently in his office at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. "I was the greatest nonathlete in the class."

At age 102, and after winning numerous awards and honors, he still runs the Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center for Arthritis he founded in 1979. After so many years, he hardly thinks about San Jose High, but one spot on campus springs to mind quickly.

"The auditorium," he said. "I played jazz on the piano in the auditorium."

Dozens of students spent their lunch hours listening to this skinny kid play this crazy-fast, revolutionary and controversial brand of music. Back then, the student body was nearly all white, the result of racial segregation and the preference of many immigrant Catholic families for parochial schools.

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San Jose High's 150th birthday celebrated in photos