All Couped Up in Class--and Loving It
It’s fifth period at El Modena High School in Orange, and teacher Eric Hanberg’s students take their places with the precision of a NASCAR pit crew.
That’s only apt, since the classroom is a garage.
Soon the 21 sturdy seniors, all boys, plunge into their auto shop class with a gusto that would make any teacher envious.
“It’s my favorite class,” said Ryan Schroeder, 17, straining his voice over the bangs of hammers and whirs of electric saws. “Everybody, when they get here, they drop off their bags and work until the bell rings.”
At a time when vocational education is on the decline and auto shop classes are giving way to computer science courses, Hanberg’s class is a thriving anachronism that was even expanded this fall to include advanced auto shop.
The advanced class is building a classic hot rod from the remains of a 1937 Plymouth.
“It was the ugliest car they’ve ever made,” joked Hanberg, who picked up the rusting chunk of steel from a Placentia junkyard over the summer.
“It had a ‘hump back,’ ” he said with the easy proficiency of a hard-core car buff. “Most cars of the era had tail backs.”
Hanberg, 54, is an avuncular type with a broad mustache. The retired CHP officer earned his teaching credentials while still on the force and took a position at Buena Park High School teaching “history and all the boring stuff,” as he put it.
When El Modena needed a auto shop teacher in 1999, Hanberg jumped at the opportunity.
“He is pretty much the smartest guy about cars I’ve ever met,” senior Matthew Becker said.
Becker and the rest of the crew began the semester in a regular classroom adjacent to the garage where Hanberg gave them their task: to build a car from scratch. After going over the measurements and the layout, he turned them loose.
The hump in the Plymouth is now gone, cut off to give it a more compact shape. The students also removed about 31 inches from the middle of the four-door sedan. It will eventually be fitted with two “suicide doors,” which open toward the back rather than the front like most car doors.
It takes the imagination of a teenager to see the finished product as a group of students weld and polish the heap of rust sitting in the middle of the garage.
A few feet away from the Plymouth are two other prized projects of Hanberg’s students: an ’82 Camaro, which belongs to the teacher, and a decommissioned CHP patrol car, an ’89 Mustang 5.0.
Students in the introductory classes work on the engines, learning the basics of fuel injection, internal combustion, pistons, valves and horsepower.
The Camaro and the Mustang are painted in black and white and carry the insignia of the California Highway Patrol. The CHP has given the class permission to use the Mustang and the logo, Hanberg said, in an effort to promote safe drag-racing.
Hanberg and his class enter the cars in quarter-mile sprint competitions sponsored by local speedways. Weekend racers sign up at these events to test the mettle of their souped-up wheels. The idea is to get them off the streets and illegal drag-racing.
When Hanberg’s CHP cars show up, the challengers are eager for a fantasy chance to beat the law.
“They see CHP and just line up to race,” said Hanberg, who spent 26 years patrolling the highways. “It’s definitely a draw.”
The cars are driven by Hanberg and another employee of the school district, never by the students.
Their record is mixed, Hanberg said, in part because of the Mustang. “It’s not all that quick,” he said. “It’s a CHP car.”
Outside the garage, Schroeder used a circular saw to strip clean the frame of a 1980 Ford Courier truck, which will be used as the base for the hot rod.
“When I first started, I didn’t know anything about cars,” Schroeder said. “Now my parents come to me and say ‘I’ve got a problem with the car, can you take a look?’ ”
When the hot rod is finished, it will be raffled off and the proceeds will be used for graduation night.
Hanberg watched the frenetic pace of his students with pride. His four grown sons never shared his love for cars, he said.
Hanberg’s program exists in part because of the demise of other auto-shop courses in the district. Much of the equipment the class uses was taken from closed programs in other schools.
“It makes me just sick in my stomach,” he said. “There is a need for this. We are teaching these kids skills. But once a program closes, it is so hard to reopen and bring instructors in.”
Statewide, the number of high schools that offer auto shop or related classes has slowly dwindled from 485 three years ago to 452 last year. In Orange Unified, the number of students taking such classes has decreased from 218 to 187 in the same period, according to statistics from the Department of Education.
El Modena Principal Nancy Murray says it is becoming harder to hire vocational teachers. Interest in the classes also is falling because students have more choices, from computer science to laser technology.
“It’s a credit to him,” Murray said of Hanberg. “He runs a real good program with real appeal for the kids. But it takes that kind of creativity to expand in an era of decline.”
At 1:47 p.m. the bell rang, signaling the end of the period. A lone electric grinder continued to polish the nose of the Plymouth.
“You need to pack up now,” Hanberg shouted as an oblivious pair of eyes peered through clear goggles.
