CSDR Founder Perry Seely never heard of the city name of Riverside until his housemate, Elsie Paxton, suggested the city for his next town to explore for the new school. Seely took his wife, Olive, with him to drive one hour east to Riverside to inspect possible sites. They fell in love with the friendly town. We at CSDR owe tons of thanks to Elsie Paxton for pushing Seely to try Riverside with an open mind for her sake. The rest is history.
Did you know that CSDR was once a farmland? My dear friend, Burton “Burt” Schmidt, confirmed the school lot was an agricultural field. He saw the undeveloped lot with his eyes in front of Arlington Ave.
After Burt graduated from Gallaudet University in 1947, he followed his wife, Ailene, back to Riverside, where she grew up. During her youth, there was only one state school for the deaf at Berkeley since 1860 for the whole state. She and her younger deaf sister boarded a train for a long ride from Riverside to Berkeley in the 1930s and the 1940s. They spent most of the year at the residential school and returned to Riverside for major holidays and summer breaks.
Burt taught printing at CSDR for 20 years from 1969 to 1989 and coached football. Burt looked back in 1948 with a fond memory of how he and Ailene helped themselves gather as many oranges as they wanted from the future school for the deaf. With bags of oranges in their car, they got stuck in the ditch and could not get out on unpaved Lincoln Ave. They had a towing truck come to their rescue. He spun this story to me 50 years later.
Above is the CODA daughter, Sandra, of Burt and Ailene Schmidt. She and her siblings grew up in Riverside. They heard from their parents how much they enjoyed working at CSDR. Ailene worked in the kitchen. I remember seeing her bring home food from the kitchen at the end of the workday. That was a nice job perk. Prior to the teaching job offer for CSDR in 1969, Burt worked at the Riverside newspaper plant as a linotypist, a popular line of work with good money for deaf men from the early part of the 20th century until the 1980s.
Once the escrow closed on the new school site in 1948, Perry Seely moved to Riverside to stay on top of the progress of the new school. He landed a job as a linotypist in the same print shop with Burt.
Seely earned two medals for his volunteer CSDR campaign. After many fruitless attempts to find a willing legislator in the 1930 and 1940s, he finally found a legislator with a soft spot in his heart for deaf youth. His name is Elwyn Bennett from the East Los Angeles District. Dr Ken Randall, Bummy Burstein and I visited him at his Los Angeles home in 1996 for a three-hour oral history interview
Seely managed to gather the names of 400 deaf school-age kids who stayed home due to a lack of education services specifically for them at the time. This was a powerful argument for opening the second state special school. The Berkeley School had a long waitlist of students from the entire state for admission. This was another strong reason for a new sister school.
Bennett led the legislative effort to see the bill passed in both chambers of the state legislature unanimously (a rare occurrence).
Governor Earl Warren signed the bill on March 26, 1946. The new law authorized a second school for the deaf somewhere in Southern California.
The second medal was awarded to Seely for two years of his volunteer time to select a suitable school site. He traveled at his expense to numerous cities, mainly in Los Angeles County, for site inspection.
In October 1948, Seely’s goal was finally attained with cheap land purchase with first-class construction in Riverside. Had he settled on a site in East Los Angeles instead (probably in Pomona), the State would have put up more money on the property with much less for building construction with many corners cut. He hardly wanted that scenario. We look at what happened in Fremont with the shoddy construction on the high-priced land.
By contrast, the 74.2 acre site on Horace Street cost $68,500. What a deal! The whole school construction cost a cool $7 million, the highest construction cost in the history of Riverside. Seely focused on a fancy school on an affordable site. His vision continues to prevail to this day.
Reading the primary sources in the 1990s for the school history book taught me that the State didn't buy one parcel of land but two. Each parcel had different owners. The land borders Arlington Ave, Lincoln Ave, Horace Street and Maude Street. The total acreage was 74.2 acres in the combined parcels.
When I saw this aerial photo for the first time recently, I finally saw two separate parcels with a dirt path in between. Now I know why Marguerita Avenue is on the Maude side, the dirt path bisecting the 74.2-acre school property. I am pumped with excitement that we will continue to learn about our past little by little. I have been doing this for 30 years now.
Further, the aerial photo shows the line of palm trees on Arlington Ave. The palms were tall and mature when the bird's-eye picture was taken. Wow. The towering palms add the feeling of a resort.
The Eucalyptus trees on Horace Street were already tall and mighty. It is estimated that such trees were planted in the 1920s to prevent winds from harming the orange groves, thereby thinning citrus revenue. Those trees are approximately 100 years old now and look majestic
The northern parcel bordering Arlington Ave raised only barley needed for grain bread, cereal, pasta and beer. The southern parcel alongside Lincoln Ave raised both barley and oranges.
As can be seen in the picture, the pole was posted to pinpoint where Arlington Ave meet Maude Street. You can see orange groves and palm trees in the back on campus.
Old-timers remember the old Circle K store on Maude Street. The quick-stop store was in business from 1968 to 2002. It is now JK Market under different ownership.
Adjacent to the store is the veterinarian’s office. The old farmhouse was torn down in the 1960s on the same site. You can barely see the white farmhouse at the bottom of the photo.
Light manufacturing activity was near the old farmhouse on the other side of Arlington Ave. You can see a cluster of white buildings on the bottom left. A lady from the 1950s told me that she lived in the dorm and walked to part-time work at the white warehouse during the week and on weekends. She placed a protective cover on each tomato and earned 50 cents an hour.
Across from CSDR on Arlington Ave was an undeveloped lot where Target is now. To the right of Target was also a dirt lot. A new apartment building, Quail Creek, opened for occupancy in 1978. In 1994 for my first year of teaching at CSDR, I paid $450 monthly for a studio unit there. Now we have families with deaf children and school employees living there. A retired high school teacher with over 35 years of service lives there. Walking a short distance to work or school at CSDR is very nice.
Seymour Bernstein shared a story with me in which he and Brian Malzkuhn (my old basketball coach) once discussed their dream of opening their franchise business on the apartment site. The franchise in question was McDonald’s. That was 1972.
The east side of the school grounds on Horace Street also had orange groves. That is why we see Eucalyptus trees that line the street up to Lincoln Ave.
In a nutshell, here are the following reasons for Perry Seely’s selection of Riverside and then the Horace Street farmland for a new school.
1. The friendly tone of the Chamber of Commerce in Riverside was noticeable. In the 1940s, the CC was the place to stop for property information. Seely noticed the CC officials were not eager to show the property lots for a school for the deaf. They placed such a special school in the same category as prisons, mental hospitals and other undesirable entities. That was the old line of thinking in the 1940s. Seely was pleased with the Riverside people for their open arms for deaf children
2. Very affordable land prices in Riverside compared to what he saw in East Los Angeles. He had been to Santa Barbara, Escondido in San Diego, Ojai, Santa Ana, Orange County and mostly East Los Angeles. To put the stubborn rumor swirling among the old timers to burial, Seely never went to any beach town, including Laguna Beach. The beach property was already sky-high in price in the 1940s. Remember, Seely wanted low land prices.
3. Seely kept in mind that gentrification will always occur due to the growing population moving east from Los Angeles. He decided that Riverside would be a good midpoint between LA and desert communities like Indio and Palm Desert in the far future.
4. Seely insisted that the new school would not be built in the middle of nowhere or in tiny towns like he saw in other states. Good examples are Gooding for the Idaho School for the Deaf and Cave Spring for the Georgia School for the Deaf. GSD is the largest employer in town.
5. Seely wanted rich cultural amenities available for education and entertainment. Examples include libraries, museums, churches, civic organizations and parks. The sudden wealth from the sale of Washington navel oranges in the 1880s sparked the construction of many fine buildings in downtown.
6. Seely saw that there were other small schools around in town for CSDR to play with in league sports.
7. Seely loved interesting landscape effects around town. Riverside is in the valley, surrounded entirely by mountain ranges. Mt Rubidox and Pachappa hills are nearby. The new school was between two large orange groves in the Horace and Maude areas providing attractive scenery. As can be seen in the picture below, there were no houses built on Horace Street in February 1953 when the new school opened. Only the houses were built north of Marguerita Ave on Maude Street. No houses are seen on the south side of Maude Street.
8. Seely wanted a town where the school staff with state earnings could afford to rent or buy a home. This has been true since 1948. However, rent and mortgages are now going up faster in recent years. We are still better off in Riverside than in Fremont. We feel sorry for our brothers and sisters up north for having to drive farther for what they can afford.
Before I close, I invite you to wave our hands at Perry Seely for his vision and for standing on his principles for a suitable school site and a wonderful town where we still enjoy a balanced life between work and play. Below is a framed picture of Perry Seely with a plaque now hung in the Seely Center, formerly the P building. I donated $400 in 1997 for the photograph portrait.
The City of Riverside has been a good neighbor to the deaf community for the past 75 years. We have a commission of the deaf to represent all seven wards where deaf people reside so that the City Hall can listen to us for our issues.
We must thank Kevin Struxness for preserving the precious history of CSDR, allowing us to understand the roots of our success.