Former One-Room School Erased : Swift Demise of Paularino

The demolition took place without fanfare. No spectators, protesters or former students to mourn the death of the one-room schoolhouse where they had spent a good part of their youth.

The Paularino schoolhouse, built around 1909 in an area of Costa Mesa that was once known as Paularino, was demolished Tuesday to make way for a two-story office building.

The dilapidated, one-story wooden building, once a landmark in the area and a place where hundreds of Orange County children learned their ABCs, was razed by a bulldozer in about an hour to make way for the 11,000-square-foot building on the half-acre site near Bear Street and Paularino Avenue.

“We kids had a real good time out there,” said Nora Deininger, 90, who graduated from the school in 1913.

Contacted at her home in Orange, she recalled that only half of her graduating class passed the eighth grade. “There were only two people in the eighth grade,” she said. “I passed and graduated and the other one didn’t.”

She recalled that the average daily attendance for the eighth-grade class held in the building was about 20 students, fewer than previous schools she had attended out of state.

“We had gone to a bigger school in Wisconsin before we came here, so this little country school was quite different,” she said. “It was country rural life.”

The Paularino School was originally on the corner of Bristol and Baker streets. In 1910, the school board bought 2 acres from the Irvine Co. and moved the school to Newport Boulevard and Paularino Avenue.

In 1923, a new, two-room Paularino schoolhouse was built and John A. Shiffer bought the old schoolhouse and moved it to its most recent site, on Bear Street just north of Paularino. He turned the school into a two-bedroom home with a living room, dining room and kitchen.

John Shiffer’s grandson, Guy Shiffer, is 75 now and lives in Santa Ana. He recalled that he began attending the old Paularino School when he was 7, and then graduated from the new schoolhouse that opened in 1923.

“That was the only schooling that I got,” Shiffer said. “I had to go to work. We bailed hay and farmed a little grain and this and that.”

Ownership of the site changed hands several times before being sold to its current owner, Dr. Steven S. Grant.

Bale Rarick, 29, whose parents had rented the house since 1981, said the only things left from the original school building were the chalkboard trays, which were mounted on two of the walls in the dining room.

Not long after the Raricks moved out, scavengers and transients moved in, looting and vandalizing the building.

And the Paularino School that was built in 1923 was torn down in 1966 to make way for the Costa Mesa Freeway.

Ruby Best, 79, who with five other students formed the Paularino graduating class of 1922, was pragmatic about the demise of her former alma mater.

“It’s fond memories,” said the Costa Mesa resident. “But as they say, progress is progress.”