6 Decades and a Few Quakes Later, It’s Back to School

Edythe Espree saw her elementary school Monday for the first time since it was rebuilt after the earthquake.

Not the 1994 earthquake. The one in 1933.

“That one was the big one,” she said as she returned to 49th Street School south of downtown Los Angeles. “That’s the one that tore this place apart. It just knocked this school completely down.”

Espree was back after six decades Monday to help teach first-graders how to read.

It didn’t take her long to discover that both her old school and the neighborhood around it have gone through several incarnations since the days she studied and lived there.

But one thing hasn’t changed: children still enjoy curling up with a book.

You can see it in their faces, said Espree, now a 74-year-old grandmother. You can read it in their eyes.

Espree was recruited to be a volunteer tutor by Rolling Readers, a teaching program that seeks to have children reading by the end of the third grade. Launched three years ago in San Diego, it has about 30 tutors in Los Angeles and is spreading across the country.

At 49th Street School, Espree will spend an hour a week helping first-graders recognize the look, the sound and the meaning of words.

Espree could scarcely recognize the look of her alma mater when she returned to 49th Street School, however.

“It was a beautiful school, magnificent. Two-story brick,” she said Monday. “That’s why the school crumbled. The houses around here survived. They were all built of wood.”

The school, built in 1913, was one of the reasons her mother had relocated her and her three brothers and three sisters to the neighborhood from Dallas, according to Espree.

Espree recalled that the neighborhood, now home to blacks and Latinos, used to be populated mostly by Jews and Germans--as well as Japanese and Chinese.

Espree was a fourth-grader when the 1933 Long Beach earthquake struck. Fortunately, school was out for the day.

“We just stood there and cried when we saw our school was demolished,” she said.

The disaster prompted a tough new state law governing school construction. Temporary bungalows were used as classrooms as Espree went on to the fifth and sixth grades. She later attended McKinley Junior High and Jefferson High School.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, and the United States entered World War II, her Japanese American classmates were rounded up and detained at Santa Anita racetrack before being sent to relocation camps. Espree collected her friends’ 1942 high school diplomas and delivered them to the racetrack.

Espree planned to go to college but ended up working instead as a wartime riveter, attaching bomb bay doors to planes at a Santa Monica defense plant.

Later, as a wife and mother of one, she worked for 27 years in UCLA’s administration office. After retiring, Espree logged more than 3,000 hours as a volunteer City Hall tour guide during the administration of Mayor Tom Bradley. The West Adams district resident was steered into Rolling Readers by another organization, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program.

Before settling in Monday at a tiny corner table in teacher Sarah Harlow’s first-grade class, Espree toured her old school’s new campus.

She laughed as she pointed across the street, where a tiny candy store run by two women had dispensed bubble gum to her and her friends nearly 70 years ago. She described how a dirt playground crowned by an old-fashioned maypole existed where a two-story classroom building now stands. Chain-link fencing and locked gates surround 49th Street School--which has nearly tripled in enrollment since 1930.

The classroom activities had a familiar feel to Espree, though, as 6-year-old LaToya Jones selected “Little Rabbit’s Loose Tooth.” Espree did most of the reading.

“I wish I could get a tutor like this for all of my kids,” whispered Harlow.

Principal Lemuel Chavis nodded. One of Espree’s friends has agreed to tutor and he intends to recruit Espree’s husband, Elmo, as well, Chavis said.

“I’m very impressed with the school,” Edythe Espree said as she ended her first day back.

“The kids are obedient, the teachers are doing good work. I was worried when I came back. But I’m not worried now. If I’d seen something wrong, I’d be crying.”