Restoring Hopes : Volunteers Repair Seats in Effort to Put New Spring into School’s Pride

Walter Bitely and the boys grew heartsick when they saw the worn-out mohair chairs, some knifed down the middle by impudent students, others scarred by graffiti or crippled by the weight of people bouncing on the seats.

Back in 1958, the auditorium seats were as plump and pretty as any chair in the big movie theaters of the time. Rosemead’s working-class families were in awe of the plush new auditorium at Garvey Intermediate School.

But times change, and so did the students, who eventually turned on the seats, leaving them beaten down by vandalism and old age, with some of the maple armrests dangling in disgrace.

Enter Bitely and friends, men in their 70s and 80s now, all with emotional memories of the auditorium: Some knew it as the historic site of Rosemead’s tiny first school, built before the turn of the century to serve what was then a ranching community. Others played roles in establishing the showpiece auditorium decades later when the push of suburbia called for something more.

So they volunteered to bring back the glory days. Last month, they began fixing the 844 auditorium seats.

Twice a week, four hours a day, they gather. There’s no pay, you pour your own coffee and bring your own tools.

One of the regulars was a former principal at Garvey. Two served on the school board. Another was a member of Garvey’s first graduating class.

They work with little chitchat in the cluttered, steamy lobby of the stucco and brick auditorium, swinging mallets, wielding bolt cutters and hauling the 20-pound seats back and forth. Inside, eighth-grade flute players keep practicing, only a few stopping to talk to the old-timers.

The men say they are not just fixing places to sit. They yearn for the days when students took pride in their school. Maybe that will happen again, they say, if youngsters see that a bunch of geezers care enough to sweat over the long-ignored seats, which school administrators had no money to fix.

“We’re just hoping it’ll arouse something in the kids to respect,” said Bitely, whose daughter graduated from Garvey in 1957.

But how does he know the students will not go right back to mutilating the chairs once the volunteer project is completed?

“I don’t, dear,” he says, patiently returning to his work replacing seat cushions.

It all began when the Garvey School District’s Centennial Committee was looking for a project. Bitely, a retired auto parts store owner, suggested the chairs. Everyone agreed. Of course, the chairs.

“The seats are so raunchy,” Bitely said with disgust. “They’ve been torn up so badly I couldn’t stand it any more.”

“They’re gross,” said Jaime Lopez, 12, a seventh-grader. “They have all this graffiti on it. They’re all lumpy and everything.”

A strapped district maintenance staff had made sporadic attempts to fix the chairs over the years but vandalism always outpaced them and their attention was diverted to more pressing needs.

The centennial committee raised $11,500 through community donations for the materials required: new seat covers and springs, so the cushions would bounce like they’re supposed to. But a contractor said it would take $80,000 to complete the job because of labor costs.

Never mind, Bitely said. We’ll do it ourselves.

Then he rounded up the guys. Charles Froehle, 79, was elected to the school board in 1958, the year the auditorium opened, and served for 23 years. Carl Van Winkle, 75, another former board member, had three daughters graduate from Garvey. Gus Hillman, 80, came to Garvey as a shop teacher in 1950 and was soon the principal, serving until 1962.

All recall how the auditorium became a center of community life, hosting not just school graduations, but church plays, band concerts and Christmas pageants, in which voices rose from all 844 seats in unison to sing “Silent Night.”

They got to work in early September. They send the seat covers to a shop for reupholstering, but do the rest themselves.

The chair frames are turquoise, a popular 1950s color that became very dated but is coming back in vogue.

The men remove the seats and work on them in the lobby on makeshift plywood tables. They pry open the cushioned bottoms, sending up puffs of terra-cotta dust from rotting foam.

Then they work on the guts, replacing wobbly springs and frayed spring pads, adjusting the tension for the proper release.

The work will take another three weeks or so, and--if they raise more money--the men plan to redo the mohair backs.

On a recent day, Hillman’s fingers were black from tightening oily nuts and bolts. His white hair was covered by a cap that said, “Hi. I’m Gus. Uh huh!”

When he picked up one broken armrest, he got a reminder that his own era had a form of graffiti, too: a message was carved faintly in the wood, appearing to evoke his name. The writer had scrawled “Hill . . . ,” but the rest was missing.

A sly grin came over Hillman’s face as he wedged a screwdriver under a stubborn piece of pink gum stuck to the side of a seat. “I’m beginning to think I’d like to be principal again,” he said.

Froehle, after holding one too many worn-out chairs in his hand, said: “It’s just a sign of the times. No discipline. . . . Kids just don’t have any respect for people’s property.”

In its heyday, the auditorium was so stately that it kept the students in their place. And just in case, each was assigned a numbered seat. If you messed with it, the teacher would know. There were few problems.

The auditorium was built with $80,000 left to the school in the will of Richard Garvey Jr., whose father, a big rancher in town, had opened the first school on the site.

That was in 1894, when Rosemead was full of orange groves and avocado fields. Richard Garvey Sr. built the two-room school for his son and the children of his ranch workers. It was expanded in 1916 and 1937--seven years after the elder Garvey’s death--when it became a full-fledged middle school.

The rusted bell from his original school, which called students to class, was set in front of the auditorium at the grand opening in 1958, the year Rosemead was incorporated.

The walls were decorated with oil portraits of a solemn, tuxedo-wearing Richard Garvey Sr. and his wife, Theresa, in a lacy evening gown with dainty white gloves.

Their watchful eyes have peered down on many generations since as Rosemead has evolved into a densely packed 5.5 square miles, a diverse blue-collar community dotted with mini-malls and fast-food restaurants.

The school, with 1,200 students in grades six through eight, is one of 13 in the Garvey School District, which serves San Gabriel and Monterey Park, as well as Rosemead. The district’s students include about an even mix of Latinos and Asian-Americans.

Garvey’s principal, Ted Huling, is planning a special assembly to honor Bitely and his friends when their work is complete, in part so they can talk about what the school means to them.

Also likely to attend is Emily P. Lambert, 82, who went to kindergarten at the original two-room school and who donated money to the chair repair. She remembers how the elder Garvey would invite the local children to swim in the lake on his ranch and slide down his buttercup-filled hills.

“If people knew him, they’d understand that we want to keep everything like he had it,” she said. “We’re going to keep up that school as long as we can.”

But whether the students will understand is still to be determined.

Jaime, the seventh-grader attending the music class in the auditorium, was surprised to see the volunteers working so hard, “ ‘cause they’re old, and they should be at home resting.” The 12-year-old predicted that his fellow middle-schoolers may make the men’s efforts for naught.

“They’ll get mad ‘cause they took the graffiti off,” Jaime said. “They’ll do it again.”