FOCUS : From Cows to College Campus

When Ventura Cornejo purchased a new home on Lime Avenue in Cypress in 1962, the area surrounding the development consisted mostly of farmland and cow pastures.

Cypress College, now the focal point of Cornejo’s neighborhood, would not be built for another four years. For a while then, the Cornejo family could enjoy the quiet rural life.

“Orange Avenue and Valley View Street were just little two-lane country roads back then,” he says. “We used to complain about the smell coming from the dairy farms. But when the area started to develop and all the traffic started coming in, we decided the cows weren’t so bad after all.”

The dairies and farmland are now long gone, of course. In their place is a bustling suburb of housing and commercial developments.

Still, despite the change, Cornejo and his wife, Lilly, have no immediate plans to leave the neighborhood that has been their home for so many years.

“We raised five children here,” said Cornejo, a real estate agent who serves on the local school board. “All my kids went to Christine Swain school just a few blocks away, and now two of my grandkids go there too.”

The school, at 5851 Newman St., was named for Christine Swain, who was head librarian at the Cypress Branch Library from 1959 to 1984. Swain, who is retired and still lives in Cypress, organized an after-school tutoring program for local children and served on the Cypress School District Board of Trustees for 30 years. This year, there are 407 pupils enrolled in grades kindergarten through six at Swain.

Newman is also the street where William C. Horan and a roommate rented a small two-bedroom home in 1966 for $55 a month while he was attending Cypress College. “My roommate and I split the rent, so each of us paid only $27.50. I was going to school on GI Bill funds, and that helped me stretch my money a little further. I was in pretty good shape,” he said.

Horan was one of the 1,966 students who enrolled for the first semester at a campus that existed only on blueprints just 74 days before it opened. Known as “The Instant Campus,” Cypress College originally consisted of 18 prefabricated temporary structures that took only a few months to put up. The gymnasium, classrooms and administrative offices were all in temporary buildings; the permanent structures were built over a period of about 15 years on the 112-acre site.

Horan, now a lawyer living in Huntington Beach, had transferred from another community college and needed only 12 units to complete an associate of arts degree. He completed them all in that semester, making him the school’s first graduate--the valedictorian in a graduating class of one.

Today, more than 13,257 students attend day and evening classes there.

The modern and elegantly landscaped campus, and a number of its individual buildings, has received awards from architectural and educational associations. Two of its more notable features are the colorful abstract wall sculpture by Orange County artist Sergio O’Cadiz that forms the facade of the library building, and the 115-foot campanile that can be seen for miles from almost any direction.

The design for the entire project is the work of William Blurock & Associates of Newport Beach and Caudill-Rowlett-Scott of Houston, Tex.--the same team that, in the mid-’80s, designed the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Population Total: (1989 est.) 5,316 1980-89 change: +9.0% Median Age: 30.7 Racial/ethnic mix:

White (non-Latino): 68%

Latino: 23%

Black: 1%

Other: 8% By sex and age: In hundreds

MALES

Median age: 30.4 years

FEMALES

Median age: 31.0 years

Income Per capita: $12,960 Median household: $36,289 Average household: $38,221 Income Distribution:

Less than $25,000: 29%

$25,000-49,000: 43%

$50,000-74,999: 20%

$75,000-$99,999: 5%

$100,000 and more: 3%