Remember When? Part 3

by Larry Downing

SLO Adventist church leaders, through a process I know nothing about, made a decision to purchase a piece of property on Orcutt Road and sell the in-town church. The next major decision came about as a result of the Government decision to decommission Camp Cook, now Vandenberg AFB, and dispose of certain material assets. These assets included buildings that had served as troop barracks. The church purchased one of these buildings with the understanding that church members would take down the building, load the lumber on a truck and transport it to SLO where the building was reconstructed on the Orcutt Road property. The address is now 1130 Orcutt Road where it is the home of the SLO Unity Church.
I do not know the financial arrangements that were involved in purchasing the building. The barracks may have been classified Army Surplus and sold to a charitable organization for $1.00, like was the case when Monterey Bay Academy obtained what was then Camp McQuaid. What lodges firm in my memory bank includes walking through the empty building; the wood floor; the open beams and watching the men pull nails. I still have the two nail-pullers Dad bought and used to good effect to unloosen the nails from the roof beams, flooring, siding and all the other components that went into a long-standing building that housed hundreds of soldiers.
One event stands out. A section of a wall had been loosened from a sidewall. Someone pulled the final nails that held the two sections together and the wall began a perilous journey. Roger Lutz, my Uncle, had been pulling nails from the flooring next to the wall when, without a cry of “Timber” the wall began to collapse on top of him. He looked up, looked doom in the face, gave a leap and sailed through the opening that had once been a window. The floor fell round him. Had he not been near an open space? One squashed uncle. There was talk afterward among the demo crew that they had witnessed a miracle.
I do not know who turned the piles of lumber distributed about the property into a building that housed a church on one end; a school on the other. What I do know is that when I started the fourth grade, we met in a new school located on the East end of a newly constructed building. I think Mrs. Kurtz was the new teacher. (The order of schoolmarms may well be out of whack.)
Mrs. Kurtz, the mother of a boy about my age and a girl a couple years younger, had been round the block a time a two. The shenanigans practiced under the former regime came to an abrupt end. No more taking off from school on bikes, Larry Richards riding his bike with me seated on the handlebars, feet planted firm on the extended wheel bolts. Darell Richards riding his bike. A stop by the SLO County Courthouse to ride the elevator, the only one in town. A quick run by the candy store—LOOK bars were our favorite. No more climbing up on the flat roof of the church, far from Mrs. Smith’s sight.
The general lack of classroom control may have been what caused Mrs. Smith a certain amount of mental upheaval and may have been the catalyst that brought her term to an abrupt, premature end. We students transferred to the Arroyo Grande Adventist School to complete the last two or three weeks of what had been a memorable year.