![]() His leadership would take the new college from temporary classrooms in area high schools to classes held in military surplus buildings to a first class permanent community college over the next 12 years. Murdock had been principal of a San Jose high school, and was the superintendent of the Centinela Valley high school district when he accepted the job. ![]() Murdock as the new college’s first president. ![]() The next month, the college trustees made a crucial decision to hire Forrest G. The military agreed to donate several surplus buildings from the Santa Ana Air Base in March 1947. With the land issue settled, there was the matter of the buildings needed to house classes. It remains in unincorporated territory to this day, though the it and the surrounding El Camino Village area often are mistakenly identified as being in Torrance, Gardena or Lawndale. The campus would be built on unincorporated county land. Plans for a possible freeway route through the southwest parcel (which was never built), and also for the 18-hole Alondra Park golf course, directly conflicted with the plan for the new college. Later that month, he changed his mind, calling for the college to be built on 81 acres in the southeast corner just north of the Torrance city limit instead. Postcard shows the El Camino College library reserve reading room circa early 1960s. The goal was to shift them to a permanent site as soon as possible, preferably in time for the start of the 1947 school year in September. 10, 1946, when its roughly 600 students started attending classes located in temporary quarters on high school campuses in Redondo, El Segundo and Inglewood. The local districts officially began the college on Sept. With the recent influx of veterans returning from service in World War II, time was of the essence. The district officially formed on the next day, July 1. The community overwhelmingly approved creation of the new community college district in a Jelection. After a couple of years building up support for the idea in the community, committee members convinced the State Board that the area had the students and the economic infrastructure to support the school. In 1943, they formed a committee to petition the State Department of Education to allow the formation of such an institution in the South Bay area. (Credit: El Camino College via Historic Torrance: A Pictorial History of Torrance, California) toward Crenshaw Blvd., top, and shows the surplus buildings that housed El Camino College’s students before permanent buildings were erected. (Torrance was not included initially because it was part of the Los Angeles Unified School District until forming its own district in 1947.) This 1947 aerial photo looks east along Redondo Beach Blvd. Education officials from the Redondo Beach, Inglewood, El Segundo and Centinela Valley school districts, unhappy with their students being shut out of admission to those increasingly popular out-of-area schools, decided that the need for a local community college had become critical. Ever since the first such school in California was established in Fresno in 1910, junior colleges bridging the gap between high schools and universities had been built in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Fullerton, Santa Ana and many other communities.īut the South Bay/Harbor Area didn’t have one. The need for a two-year junior college in the South Bay area had been discussed as early as the 1930s.
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