Torrance

If you drove through Torrance, California today you could not imagine what it looked like in April 1955. There were open fields in most of the city. There were many old "stripper" oil wells in much of the town and only two residential subdivisions at that time. Hawthorne and Crenshaw Boulevards were the main north-south traffic arteries and Torrance and Sepulveda Boulevards ran east and west. "Down Town" was along Torrance Boulevard in the eastern part of the city. The industrial development consisted of the General Petroleum refinery, a U. S. Steel plant that made reinforcing bars, an American Standard Plumbing fixture plant and National Supply, an oil tool manufacturing plant. Standard Oil and Santa Fe Land Development Company owned large pieces of real estate but none of it was developed. There was a small commercial development along Pacific Coast Highway in Walteria.

I am not sure what the population of Torrance was in 1955 but there were about eleven thousand students in Kindergarten through Twelve. There were a half dozen large elementary schools and one high school with a second high school under construction.

The Superintendent of Schools at Torrance was a brilliant man who had been a full Commander in the Navy during World War II. He was convinced that students were best served by self-contained classrooms in Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Grades and then by four year high schools. That was the way the district was organized and during his tenure , there were no Junior High Schools. This was a very economical organization because it eliminated a whole layer of school service. We constantly monitored the success of our high school graduates and found they competed very successfully with those from districts that had Junior High Schools.

The Business Manager whom I replaced was a bright and able individual who had one weakness, he could not delegate responsibility. As a result he was obligated to do everything himself. Because of this weakness the district was unable to keep up with the increasing numbers of students at all grade levels. I found over five Million dollars in unobligated funds in the Building Fund. The Business Manager was just "too busy" to buy sites, hire architects and award construction contracts even though he worked eighteen hour days.

Now when I say "I did this and I did that", please remember that I had plenty of help but when you assign a job to an individual, you must hold him or her responsible and you must check up now and then to make sure the person is performing. Also it is necessary to retain the confidence and support of the Superintendent and the Board of Education who must approve everything that is done in the district. I was well-trained in bringing Boards along and always maintained a good working relationship with the Superintendent.

I found we had four thousand five hundred elementary pupils on double sessions and the City Building Department was swamped with thousands of building permits for new homes. It was imperative that we get some new schools under way immediately.

To this end, I began to interview Architects and I filled the position of Director of Construction. This individual would work with each architectural firm in developing plans for each school so that it would fit our particular organization and he would also be responsible for supervising building inspectors once construction was under way. In addition to new schools, we also needed an addition to our office building, a central library, a warehouse a bus garage and maintenance shops. After this review, I recommended employment of six additional architectural firms. Two were already "on board."

When I projected our financial needs, it was obvious that we could not finance the building projects that were going to be required. It would be necessary to have a bond election and at the same time, get authorization to accept a State Loan. This whole process was not new to me since I had gone through it at both Lawndale and Corona.

We worked out an enrollment projection that indicated we would have over thirty thousand pupils enrolled within a few years. In those days we could accurately predict pupil enrollment based on the number of "undeveloped" acres of land in the district and we had a lot of them. It was like estimating the yield per acre of corn.

The Superintendent had organized an Industrial Tax Committee representing all the major industrial tax payers in the district. We assembled this committee and got their agreement and that of the School Board for a Bond and State Loan proposition to be voted on at a special election. The Superintendent and I then held "Information Sessions" all over the City where we discussed the building propositions. When the election results were totaled the voters had approved $15,000,000 in bonds and $25,000,000 in State Loans for a total of $40,000,000.

Now we could go to work. I hired a structural engineer to "bird dog" the architectural firms who were doing State Loan Projects because the State requirements were very strict and there was a very structured system for all reports and records. During the first year, we completed and occupied seven elementary schools and one high school. When we began construction on those schools there were 4,500 pupils on double session. After the schools were occupied, there were 5,000 pupils on double session. That is how fast we were growing.

I am sure you realize that when a school is built it must be built on land that is owned by the School District. It was a part of my responsibility to buy the land needed for new schools. In this endeavor, we were competing with sub-dividers who wanted every lot they could get and would pay almost any price for it. The only advantage we had was that the School District had the power of "Eminent Domain" which means that we could actually take land that was required for the "Public Good" provided we paid the "fair market value." When we selected a school site we immediately filed a claim on it and hired professional appraisers to determine the "fair market value." We then negotiated with the owner or owners but they were aware that we could not exceed the price that was determined by the Appraisers and we always revealed the appraised amounts. The owner then had the option of selling at the highest appraised price or of going to Court to have the price set by the Court. Not one single case went to Court for settlement. I was able to buy hundreds of acres of land by negotiating a price with the owners.

Not all land acquisition was neat and clean. There were two very large developers in Torrance, Don Wilson and R.A. Watt. Both bought large chunks of land and built houses by the hundreds.. Here the similarities ended. When Don Wilson acquired a large parcel of land, he would call me and show me his development plans and I would pick out school sites needed to serve the area. I would then ask him to grade each site to our specifications and then quote us a price for the graded sites. We never paid Don Wilson a profit on a school site. We simply audited his books to determine his cost of acquisition and cost of grading and that is what we paid him.

Ray Watt was a different proposition. He never revealed his plans and never cooperated in any way with the School District. If there was any way he could push the price up he pushed it. Not once in my dealing with Ray Watt did he tell me the truth about plans, acquisition costs or anything else and as a result all his deals were scheduled for Court but he invariably settled just before the trial took place. To sum it up, Ray Watt was a very difficult person to do business with.

I want to relate one land acquisition incident that was quite involved and interesting. R.A. Watt was building a tract of homes near a parcel of land owned by Standard Oil. The School District needed a ten acre site in the tract but the best location for the site required that Watt completely redesign his street and underground utility plans. I studied the whole area and noted that if we took part of Watt's land and some from Standard Oil we could get an excellent site without doing harm to the Watt Tract. The problem was that Santa Fe had a right of way for a railroad over the parcel and it would cross the school site. We held a meeting in Ray Watt's office with Standard Oil and Santa Fe represented. I presented a plan that I thought would work if every one cooperated. We would move the railroad right of way enough to clear the school site, take some of Standard Oil's property and turn out with a straight railroad all in one stroke. After much discussion, we all agreed to that solution and that is what we did. It is not every day that one gets a chance to tell big developers, Standard Oil and Santa Fe what they should do.

The first increment at North High School was under construction when I arrived in April 1955. The contractor, Boesphlug (Base-plug) Construction, was slow and indecisive and at least sixty days behind schedule on the contract. I read the contract document and found that we had a right to occupy the buildings before they were completed so I held a meeting with the construction Superintendent and our resident Inspector. I cited the "right to occupy" section of the contract and told the Superintendent that we would utilize that section and that on "September 7 there will be 1200 students on this site and you better be ready for them." Actually the contractor refused to believe that we would really put students and teachers in unfinished buildings. They were not impressed with my threat even though they knew we had no other alternative. When over twelve hundred students showed up on September 7 the construction Superintendent almost fainted but then he began to push for the finish that could have been reached well in advance of Sept. 7. All that was needed was a little attention to scheduling of sub-contractors.

Just a word about school size. We felt we could put a thousand elementary pupils, in Kindergarten through Grade Eight, on a ten acre site. Our high schools were built with four thousand pupil stations and were on forty five acre sites. There was a small school for severely mentally handicapped pupils and a Child Care Center that was very popular with the industrial community.

The Superintendent had organized a Citizen's Advisory Committee composed of representatives from every organization in the district. This Committee met each month during the school year and school personnel presented programs that illustrated teaching techniques and procedures used in the schools. We might bring in a teacher and a whole classroom of students who would do a lesson on phonics or long division or art or just any phase of the school curriculum. The Committee members were supposed to report back to the members of their organizations. This process kept the community informed about what was going on in the schools. The whole effort was aimed at communication between schools and community. If a member had a particular interest, he could ask for a program in that field and the school staff was always available to help with questions. I always gave a School Building report to keep people updated on existing and planned projects. This system worked well as long as we were growing rapidly and citizen interest was at a high level. When their interest waned, it was almost impossible to keep the Citizen's Advisory Committee alive and active.

The Soviet Union had just put Sputnik in orbit around the earth and interest was very high in Modern Math. We organized classes for adults in New Math and it was very rewarding to see elementary teachers instructing auditors, computer specialists and engineers in the field of math. They were actually quite compatible and were most respectful of each other.

Once again I must mention the Board of Education. When I first arrived in Torrance, there was an excellent Board. We had a very bright house-wife, a medical doctor, a lawyer, a Superior Court Judge and a labor leader. Everyone of them served on the Board because of their interest in the schools. When this board began to break up we got members who had personal axes to grind or who "hated the Superintendent" or had some idea they wanted implemented through the schools. One of the very first new members was a strong-willed man who came on the Board to push for Junior High Schools and to reduce the influence of the Superintendent. He wanted to occupy a position of power so he challenged the top man in the organization, the Superintendent. This Board Member did not bother me very much but he caused me to do much extra work. For example, he asked me to pad the budget by a million dollars. He said," I do not want to hurt the schools but I want to cut a million dollars out of next year's budget. You just put in enough extra that the Board can make a million dollar cut." Of course I knew this cut would make headlines in the local paper and I was tempted to refuse him and call in the news reporters and expose the whole thing. I did not do it because I knew it would just start a fight that we could not win. I put in the extra amount and the Board cut it out and got their headlines. There was a great deal more of this sort of thing and relationships were very strained between Board Members and Administrators so that not many new programs were implemented in my last few years in Torrance. No employee is likely to suggest a new program if the whole atmosphere is negative around him and no opportunity is missed to demonstrate the inadequacy of school personnel.

Fortunately, I was able to go ahead with installation of automated equipment in the Business Office. During my first years in Torrance I had organized an Advisory Committee on Accounts, Reports and Records. We started out with IBM punch-cards and then moved to computers as we got the systems ironed out. It requires a lot of discipline for fifteen hundred employees to submit clean accurate data and the Unit Record System seemed to develop that discipline. When all the bugs had been ironed out, we shifted to the IBM 1440 computer and put grade reporting, pupil attendance, financial records and reports on it. One consistent aspect I noted in the computer area at that time is that no computer or system would do all the functions that the manufacturer said it would. It is best to begin with very modest applications which are paralleled by older proven systems until all the problems are ironed out. I knew of one large school district that did not have a reliable financial report for one whole year because they put everything on a Remington-Rand Univac system and it just would not produce the results. Today the small high-capacity computers would work just fine but we did not have those in the 1950s and 1960s. The large "hay balers" we were working with were very hard to keep accurate because data put into them seemed to remain there and then would show up at unexpected times and places. The watch word was," If you put garbage in, you get garbage out." That is a catchy saying but it does not help in those cases where legitimate data turns to "garbage" while it is in the system. In other words, it was valid when it went in but became outdated or been superseded but was impossible to clean out. This problem caused most of our headaches in using early computers.

I want to mention at least two professional organizations in which I was active during my years in School Business Management. First is CASBO, California Association of School Business Officials. This group covered the whole field of School Business and was a very helpful organization. The State was divided into Sections or geographical areas and there was a monthly meeting of members in each section. We had a state convention each May at which there were programs of interest to all members. We covered such areas as food services, pupil transportation, maintenance of buildings and grounds, vandalism control, budgeting and accounting, all kinds of insurance, purchasing, new construction, salary negotiations, wage determination, and many others. CASBO was also a part of ASBO, Association of School Business Officials, (Of U. S. and Canada.) This organization was more interesting than it was helpful and although there is not much in common between snow removal in Nova Scotia and Southern California, there are many areas that are common to all school business operations. We dealt mainly in those areas at our annual convention.

I served on numerous committees in both the State and National associations. I also served on the Board of Directors of the State Association and as President and Board Member of the Southern Section of CASBO. Our efforts really paid off in the field of insurance because we represented millions of dollars of insurance premium in both fire and liability coverage. We could be very persuasive as a group. We always had high level insurance executives from large companies at our conventions.

Another organization I found to be very helpful was School Business Executives. This was a group representing the twelve or so largest school districts in California. It was started by Sky Joyner, Business Manager of Los Angeles Unified who felt that there were some problems in large districts that were due to size alone and that we should get together from time to time and compare solutions. The early meetings were held at King's Road, a training center in the Los Angeles District where students learned to be butlers, housemaids, cooks, waiters, gardeners, chauffeurs and other domestic positions. King's Road was a large mansion which was donated to Los Angeles Schools by a very wealthy couple. The District turned it into a training center for all the trades listed above. The facility paid its way by serving wonderful meals prepared by its students and for which customers paid a good price. Later the School Business Executives branched out and met in school districts all over the state.

The format for our meetings was rather simple. We submitted a list of questions that we wanted the group to respond to. This list was sent to each member at least two weeks before the meeting and each member prepared written answers for distribution during the meeting. The questions and answers formed the basis for discussion at the meeting. I remember one question I had and it went somewhat as follows. " Since the State Milk Board sets the price of milk for the school food service needs and the price will be the same on all bids, on what basis do you award the contract?" One district's answer was, "We award the bid to the supplier whose cows won the most blue ribbons at the County Fair." The rest of us were not so imaginative.

I felt highly complemented when I was elected Chairman of School Business Executives during my first year of membership. I did not feel quite so smug when I discovered that it was customary for all new members to be "elected" Chairman. It was not really an honor but a chore. It might be of interest to mention most of the school districts represented on School Business Executives. There were Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Barbara, Fresno, San Diego, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Alhambra, Fullerton, Burbank, Glendale and Torrance. Not all districts were members each year and membership was strictly by invitation.

I want to mention some of the people who were on my staff at Torrance. One especially good employee was Jean Long, Director of Food Services. Jean was over six feet tall and was one of the most able people I ever worked with. During one year we opened twelve new cafeteria operations and she equipped and staffed all these student food centers. She left nothing to chance but managed to train all the employees who came on board while she kept all the other cafeterias operating smoothly. She opened more than a new cafeteria a month all that year and every operation was as smooth as could be. Jean left Torrance to become Director of the National School Food Services organization. She left quite a gap in our organization because we were still growing rapidly but I was able to hire John Blandy, an Ex-Marine who had been captured during the battle of Wake Island and who spent five years in prisoner of war camps in Japan. John was a real find and fit right in to our organization. He was trained by the Marine Corps in food services so knew the field inside and out.

When our Maintenance program began to become ineffective, I hired "Dutch" Aldershof as Supervisor. Dutch was one of the GIs who waded ashore in North Africa when the United States began its campaign there in World War II. He had been trained by Peter Kewitt Co. and had worked all over the world building air fields and roads. He was particularly effective in scheduling men and equipment. He brought a real shot in the arm for the Maintenance Department.

I now realize that I have waited too long to write down all this "stuff." It has taken me two days to remember the name of my first experienced well trained Accountant. This was Bill Sells and if I could I would apologize to Bill for my poor memory. However, Bill passed away some years ago and the best I can do is to remember him in gratitude. Bill was the first accountant in my experience who really organized a training program for Account Clerks who did the actual work in the Business Office. He produced an Accounting Manual to show the paper flow in the office and to serve as a guide for personnel working there. This Manual became a guide for many school districts in Southern California.

I could include many other outstanding people who were on my staff or with whom I worked but I do not think it would be productive to do so because there were simply too many to deal with in this paper. There were some who did not fit the jobs they were trying to fill and they had to find other employment. I can remember their names but I will not mention them here.

Now I want to turn back to the Board of Education-Superintendent relationship. I doubt that the tension in this area bothered the principals or the teachers. They are quite well insulated from the central administration and from many of the public. The tension certainly did bother the employees working close to the Superintendent because the Board controlled all salaries and they refused to give the Superintendent a raise. For two years all employees except the Superintendent received raises. This means that of about two thousand employees in the School District only one did not get a raise. The salaries of the Assistant Superintendents were bumped up against that of the Superintendent and we could not even get a cost of living raise. That was enough for me. I told the Superintendent that I was going to find another job, one that did not have a lid on the salary. He said, "Sam, you have been here eleven years and you wont leave now." I did not want to leave but I did just that. I was hired by Inglewood Unified School District at a salary twenty percent higher than I was receiving in Torrance and Inglewood was a smaller system. After my resignation, The Board of Education gave all the top administrators a nice raise and the administrators treated me to a great dinner. I had broken the log jam.