The Old and the New : Fullerton’s Home Hasn’t Changed With the Times

When it was built in 1922, the Fullerton High gymnasium was an island in a sea of orange groves, and although 72 years have passed, the gym remains largely unchanged.

The gym, believed to be the oldest in Orange County, and the school, which opened in 1893, is a source of pride for students and teachers.

“The district has done an excellent job of taking care of the gym and the school throughout the years,” said Bob Van Voorhis, a math teacher at Fullerton who coached boys’ basketball from 1965-85. “It’s like the entire campus, very tradition-oriented. The district has really tried to keep that old-time feeling.”

Actually, maintaining that feeling didn’t require much effort. The Fullerton Joint Union High School District has done little to the gym. Only two years ago a new floor was installed for the first time. This year, the locker rooms were refurbished for the second time.

Before the new floor was installed, players were at the mercy of various dead spots and other quirks in the original surface.

George Van Velte, who has been at the school since 1962 and its athletic director since 1976, remembers having to make repairs in the middle of a game.

“We used to have nails come up on the floor in the middle of basketball games,” Van Velte said. “I’d have to walk around at halftime with a hammer and pound them back.”

Ray Lawyer, who coached boys’ basketball at Fullerton from 1952-64, said when it rained, water would leak through the roof, causing the floor to warp.

The gym is actually two small gyms. The main one consists of everything a gym normally contains, while a smaller, adjacent gym has only a court and a scoreboard.

The bleachers, believed to be the original seats, are inches from the sidelines, and at full capacity can accommodate 1,000 people.

However, during the 1974 season, the gym’s seams were tested when about 1,300 showed up for a Fullerton-Troy game.

Troy, Fullerton’s biggest rival, has always drawn well at Fullerton, but this game featured Mark Wulfemeyer, who was a two-time All-Southern Section selection and the county’s career-scoring leader.

“We only had one official for some reason,” Van Voorhis said. “They started the game with people hanging from the rafters, on the floor and in the windows. They were there to see Wulfemeyer.

“They got through the first quarter, but then the principal and athletic director decided the game was too crowded and too tight for one official, so they postponed it.”

Van Velte said when the district put in the new floor and refurbished the locker rooms (at a cost of almost $250,000), workers also checked much of the plumbing and infrastructure, and found everything to be sound.

“It serves its purpose for high school basketball,” Van Voorhis said. “If you get 600 people in there, you’ll have a good crowd and it’ll be nice and loud.”