New Life for an Old Auditorium : Restoration: Despite the recession, retired pastor Mel Laven managed to raise $50,000 to return a dilapidated school auditorium to its 1930s luster.

A mild look of contentment crosses Mel Laven’s face as he slouches, comfortably, in one of the old wooden chairs in the auditorium at La Verne Heights Elementary School.

It is as if he were right at home. And perhaps he is.

By most accounts, the 77-year-old retired pastor labored as hard as the carpenters did to restore the school’s auditorium to its original, 1930s luster.

While it was the carpenters who refinished the auditorium’s solid maple wood floor and electricians who rewired its Art Deco chandeliers, it was Laven who plied the community in search of funding for the project.

As he now admits, scraping together $50,000 from a small town in the middle of a recession proved to be anything but smooth sailing.

“It was a tough time to start a fund-raising project--right before Christmas in 1991, with the recession in full swing,” Laven said. “There was one point when we were $10,000 down and I was running out of sources. My wife tells me, ‘Don’t worry, we can mortgage the house--again.’ ”

Laven now chuckles over such financial close calls, because he did not have to go that far.

Although the project is still more than $1,000 short of being clear of debt, the auditorium--a 220-seat Works Progress Administration project built in 1937 on what is now Base Line Road--has been restored to its original condition.

“Every inch has been sanded, sealed and painted. Nothing has been left undone,” Laven said proudly.

The auditorium’s new lease on life began when Laven, visiting the school for a Rotary luncheon, noticed the dilapidated hall and was struck by its resemblance to the one at his old high school in Redondo Beach.

“I saw it was in such deplorable condition, it bothered me. And deplorable is an understatement,” said Laven, former pastor at Foothill Christian Church in La Crescenta.

After approaching La Verne Heights Principal Marcia Paetau with the idea of mounting a restoration project, Laven quickly found himself in charge of the effort--and on campus almost daily to oversee the project when he was not at Pomona Valley Medical Center, where he is a volunteer chaplain.

But by the time it was over, Laven estimates, several hundred residents chipped in to push the project through.

The difference has not gone unnoticed, or unappreciated, by the school’s students, who put the auditorium to use nearly every day, even while the facility was a shambles.

Paetau said that before restoration began, students often would have to test the seats to make sure they would not collapse when they sat down.

“The kids don’t have to wiggle each seat now to figure out which one is safe,” she said.

Diana Au, the only Board of Education member to live in La Verne, said restoration of the school itself was a top priority for the Bonita Unified School District, which of late has been besieged with calls for its dissolution amid allegations that schools in nearby San Dimas are favored financially.

But in 1991, the district pumped $1 million into a make-over of the campus buildings, most of which were constructed at the same time as the auditorium. When the financial well ran dry, the board gave the nod to Laven to try and finish the job through private fund-raising.

“I’ve known Mel a long time and I didn’t have any doubts he’d be able to raise the money,” Au said.

The school, the first in the area, started in 1875 as a one-room structure that is said to have served the children of three families.

Perhaps the feature that dates the auditorium the most is the school bell above the stage, rung now only on ceremonial occasions.

Although stage lights and curtains remain to be replaced--a separate venture that could cost as much as $10,000--Laven said he is pleased his mission has been accomplished and another generation gets to experience the auditorium.

Not a cafeteria, like the multipurpose rooms of many newer schools, he will remind you, but a real auditorium.