Their loyalty hasn’t changed

They sat through an African folk tale, a poem about Black History Month and a student choir’s rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Negro national anthem.

Yet the middle-aged white visitors -- seated in front of portraits of Rosa Parks and Malcolm X in the cramped school auditorium -- kept marveling Friday that “nothing” had changed in the 48 years since they graduated from Baldwin Hills Elementary.

I suppose the campus hasn’t changed much, if you just look at the bricks-and-mortar stuff:

The faded, striped linoleum floor of an auditorium built more than 50 years ago. The yellow safety stripes edging the front steps, where the Class of 1960 took its graduation picture. The bungalow classrooms out back, where they once huddled with classmates around transistor radios, cheering for the city’s new baseball team, the former Brooklyn Dodgers.

They found touchstones from their past. But I looked from their graduation photo -- 39 white kids and one Japanese American girl -- and then to a stage mostly of black children, and I was struck by how much their neighborhood has changed.

The 13 former Baldwin Hills students gathered at the school Friday to present new books and a gift of $1,960 at a ceremony inaugurating the new library.

“We wanted to do something special, because we’re all turning 60,” said Carol Ross Edmonston, who now lives in Orange County. “And we wanted to give something back to a school that gave us such wonderful memories.”

For most, it was their first time on the campus since they graduated in January 1960.

They attended Baldwin Hills before magnet schools and busing programs, a time when you went to the neighborhood school with the kids on your block. Your siblings and parents knew one another.

They walked to school together, rode bikes to Cub Scout and Camp Fire Girls meetings, and played spin-the-bottle at their first boy-girl parties. On weekends, they’d gather at the Rodeo Bowl -- now the Bah’ai temple -- or the Baldwin Hills Theater, where movie tickets cost a quarter.

Theirs was a middle-class community, where the dads were salesmen, accountants, aircraft factory workers, and the moms made after-school snacks of jello and chocolate chip cookies.

“There was something magical about the school and that whole area,” Edmonston said. “It was like everybody was your family.”

Soon, blacks began moving in, and real estate agents played on the fear of white residents, convincing them to sell and leave. By the time the class got to Dorsey High, whites were in the minority.

“You knew if you tried out for cheerleaders, they’d select two whites, two Asians and two blacks,” Edmonston recalled, “because the school had about one-third of each.”

When they graduated from Dorsey in 1966, more than two-thirds of her classmates were black.

“We got used to it, I guess,” she said. “You realize people are people. You drop what you perceive as the barrier of skin color.”

They scattered after graduation, but their 30th Dorsey High reunion brought them back together and launched a string of celebrations. They realized their closest ties were to their elementary school classmates and neighborhood.

Four years ago, they gathered at a classmate’s house, piled into four cars and cruised along Cloverdale Avenue, Dunsmuir Avenue, Ridgeley Drive . . . past their childhood homes. Two years ago, they hired two limos to take them on a scavenger hunt for mementos from their youth.

They know it’s more than the school they pine for. Those were “Ozzie and Harriet times,” Don Lipkis wrote in their memory book. “Free from worry about drugs, school shootings, abductions, sexually transmitted diseases. . . . We can be kids again, be silly and relive the more secure times of our childhood.”

But even through the mist of memories, they couldn’t help but notice one change. “We never had gates,” said Lipkis. Now the school is ringed by a tall chain-link fence, padlocked shut -- and even that’s not enough to keep crime away.

Last weekend, vandals broke into the campus, trashed six classrooms and the parent center, smashing computers and televisions and spraying the rooms with fire extinguishers. Hazmat teams had to be called in, and kids were locked out of their classrooms for three days.

There was no sign of the vandalism Friday, and I didn’t tell the alumni about it.

I understand why they loved the school.

It still feels orderly and peaceful. The kids were polite; parents were helping out; the campus was well tended and in bloom. The school’s test scores are among the highest in the district and going up every year.

Ozzie and Harriet? No. But closer than you would expect in urban Los Angeles.

I didn’t want to spoil the alumni homecoming with bad news. Instead I watched them joke and jostle for places on the front steps, mugging for a photographer, arguing about who should go in front, making rabbit ears behind one another.

“One more picture,” the photographer told them. “Do you want me to get a close-up?”

“No!” a trio of women shouted.

Sometimes things look better with a little more distance.

sandy.banks@latimes.com