Dorsey devotee the picture of determination

It may not be a masterpiece, but for Janet Horwitz Colman, it's a treasure.

For more than 15 years, the Dorsey High School alumna, former teacher and founder of the school's alumni association searched for a valuable piece of Dorsey's history: a 1928 portrait of the school's namesake, Susan Miller Dorsey, the first female superintendent of the Los Angeles public school system.

"Most teachers and students don't even know who she was," Colman said in an interview. "Everyone who sees her painting thinks she's the little old lady on the lid of the candy box." (No; that's Mary See.)

Dorsey's portrait, by artist John Hubbard Rich, was commissioned by 3,000 Los Angeles teachers, who each chipped in a dollar to pay for it. It hung in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's first home in Exposition Park for eight years, beginning in 1929. When Dorsey High opened in 1937, the painting was transferred to the school library, where it remained until the late 1960s.

"I looked at her painting every day until I graduated in 1965," Colman said. "When I returned to teach at Dorsey High in 1970, her portrait was gone."

Colman, 59, who retired from teaching in 2002, is a historian by choice and profession. She volunteers as the school historian and is helping to organize an all-class reunion in June for Dorsey's 70th anniversary. She makes her living selling vintage Hollywood movie posters and photographs of movie scenes through her business, Hollywood Poster Exchange, which she founded in 1975 with her late husband, Bob.

The otherwise level-headed fourth-generation Angeleno became obsessed with Dorsey, whom she'd never met. She was haunted by the missing portrait -- rather like the detective played by Dana Andrews in the 1944 film "Laura," who becomes obsessed with a portrait of the woman he thinks is dead.

"My husband knew my only true love, beyond him, was Dorsey High" and the educator whose name it bears, Colman said. "I knew the original staff members who knew her personally, [I] collected oral interviews, saved some of her handwritten letters addressed to the school and spent more than 35 years teaching students all about her. She was quite a pioneer in her field."

Dorsey even inspired Colman's career choice. "In 10th grade, I took a guidance class, an orientation to the school," Colman said. "I knew then I wanted to be a teacher just like Dorsey. She was so dynamic, so well respected."