One Room, Many Memories : Anniversary: Alumni of El Toro Grammar School, at a re-enactment of the school’s dedication in 1890, remember the old days.

EL TORO —  Alumni, gathering to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the original El Toro Grammar School, the oldest public school in Orange County, recalled a time when things were not so gentle.

“I remember when the teacher swatted a boy over a piano bench, it upset me so bad, I can’t even tell you,” recalled Ida Ashbeck, 75, who graduated in 1929.

Another student, 1912 graduate George Osterman, also remembered the discipline dished out by a series of young schoolmarms--but said it was nothing compared to how strict parents were.

“If you got into trouble at school, chances were you would be in a lot more trouble when you got home,” said Osterman, who at 90 is the school’s oldest living graduate.

Alumni and relatives of the oldest families in the Saddleback Valley gathered Sunday for the schoolhouse anniversary and a re-enactment of the school’s dedication.

Built in 1890, the one-room schoolhouse was used by the original Saddleback Valley School District until 1914, when overcrowding forced district officials to build a two-room brick school about a mile away. The schoolhouse was turned into a Catholic church and then left to deteriorate in the 1970s. But by the early 1980s, the Friends of Heritage Hill volunteer group refurbished the house and moved it to the Heritage Hill Historical Park, where it now sits next to several other historic monuments.

The grammar school has been restored to look exactly as it did in the early 1900s, but some graduates recalled features missing from the Heritage Hill exhibit.

“There was a bottle of water in the middle, it was brought in, like today’s bottled water, because you couldn’t drink the water in El Toro back then,” said Cedric Serrano, who attended the school in 1937.

And according to Osterman, the school also had its own stable, so students who rode donkeys and horses would have a place for their animals while they sat in school for seven hours.

Other graduates remembered how enrollment at the school would shrink during harvest season. Graduating classes became progressively smaller as boys left to work on family farms or girls departed to get married.

“One year we only had two students in our graduating class,” said George Osterman Jr., 70. “One (student) moved away and the other one got married so they canceled graduation.”

Teachers also would quit each year, discouraged by the district’s strict rules that prohibited female teachers from smoking, drinking, marrying or “joining any feminist movement, such as the Suffragettes,” according to a copy of the rules posted in the schoolhouse.