This was Depression time. And both my mom and dad were Catholic and they wanted to raise the kids Catholic, and they felt the best way to do that and was to put us into a parochial school. So at that time Mary Star of the Sea didn’t have a kindergarten, so we went to public kindergarten, and then went to the first grade through the third grade in parochial school. The tuition was $1 a month and that dollar was sent with each pupil to school whenever it was due. At that rate it got pretty expensive on $75 a week that my dad was earning. So after we got our First Communion they put us into public school, from the 4th grade through the 6th grade; seventh grade back in parochial school for our Confirmation. In San Pedro, Bob just sort of got up and went to school and came home, walked to school and walked home and that was about it. It was really a very small-town existence. On weekends we’d go down to the movie house and see Laurel and Hardy or something. And then by that time we were getting pretty old, my mother and dad decided to move to Los Angeles, move the family.

I was always the one that was interested in athletics. Bob was always the reader. He would read constantly. Now granted, some of the books that we had weren’t that educational, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and so on, but it was reading, and my mother loved to see us read. But I would rather go out and play baseball and Bob would rather read a book. So with that we got along just fine. I wasn’t interested in what he did; he wasn’t interested in what I did. When we moved up to Los Angeles we both went to John Burroughs Junior High. He went in on the seventh grade and I went in eighth grade. When we graduated from John Burroughs we both went to L.A. High School. My mother would tell me, “Bob did well this year.” I got the impression that he did well in subjects that he was very interested in. He couldn’t get a passing grade in phys-ed. He wasn’t interested in it. It’s just exercise. He was self-admitted the world’s worst writer–well, penmanship. But he was good in the thing we used to call the majors, subjects that took a lot of thought.

John "Jake" Gaudino,
Robert Gaudino's brother