STORIES FROM THE PAST

40 years ago

Education always entails a certain degree of sacrifice, but an early Imperial Valley education must not have been any fun at all.

In the Valley, local schools were known as “rag knowledge boxes,” a term indicative of the kind of structure school sessions were held in.

The first Imperial Valley schools were located in the Chocolate Mountains near the Colorado River in 1891 and 1896 for children of miners in the area, but they were soon shut down.

The first school in Imperial Valley proper was established in 1901 by J.E. Carr near Calexico.

The school held its first session on Sept. 8 under a ramada roofed with arrow weeds and supported by eight poles. About 50 boys and girls attended the school, some walking as far as five miles across the hot sand for the sake of education.

The second school was established in 1903 in a tent north of Calexico. The instructor, John Shenk, later became a Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles.

“The pupils came on burros, on horseback and on foot from habitations not as a rule visible from the school house,” said Shenk.

The view from the schoolhouse only afforded the sight of several ranch tents, the California Development Company building and a water tank at the international boundary.

“The pupils were earnest and eager, but with an occasional infraction of the arbitrary rules prescribed by the schoolmaster,” said Shenk. The description of the punishment he meted was indicative, no doubt, of the sort of judge he probably was.

“Corporal punishment was seldom resorted to and when used it was, of course, with the full approval of the parents — obtained after the incident was closed.”

That same year, another school was established by L.E. Cooley in a now-defunct community named Van Horn, located several miles west of Heber.

After 1903, however, the population of Imperial Valley increased so rapidly that schools were popping up as fast as post-war babies in the 1940s.

When the Imperial Valley seceded from San Diego to form its own county, the superintendent of the county school district was Carr, the first “official” school teacher in the Valley.

Actually, the first school in the Valley was the Fort Yuma Indian School and Agency, at the time located across the river from Yuma.

The second was a fort abandoned in 1879. In 1880, some Catholic nuns came to teach the local Indian children. In 1895, the U.S. government took over and turned it into a boarding school.

30 years ago

YUMA — A police officer shot and killed an armed man following an hour-long standoff that began after a television anchorwoman was beaten and robbed of her car and a handgun, a police spokesman said.

Jan Schmidt, a spokesman for the Yuma Police Department, identified the dead man as Charles Santa Cruz, 23, of Yuma.

He said Santa Cruz is alleged to have assaulted Teri Paulia, an anchorwoman at Yuma television station KYEL, at her home at about 6:20 a.m. Wednesday. The man took Paulia’s car and a handgun, Schmidt said.

“That was after he had physically beaten her — not too bad, but bad enough,” he said. Paulia did not require hospitalization, Schmidt said.

He said Paulia’s car was spotted by a state Department of Public Safety officer east of Yuma about an hour later. The DPS officer attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver rammed the DPS car, causing minor damage to both vehicles, and sped off, Schmidt said.

A Yuma County sheriff’s deputy spotted the car a short time later and chased it into Yuma, where Yuma police joined the pursuit, Schmidt said.

He said the car finally was stopped after it ran into a brick wall, and the driver walked into a nearby alfalfa field.

“At that point, he was not a threat to anyone but himself,” Schmidt said. “We had the area pretty well cardoned off, with help from the Sheriff’s Office, DPS and the Border Patrol. We had plenty of manpower,” Schmidt said officers negotiated with Santa Cruz for about an hour before he left the alfalfa field and started walking toward a more heavily populated area.

“He was headed toward a busy street, 16th Street, which is one of our through streets and carries quite a bit of traffic, especially at 9:45 in the morning,” Schmidt said.

He said police warned Santa Cruz several times that he would be allowed to go no further and that he should lay down his gun.

“But he just kept on coming and one of our officers shot him with a shotgun,” Schmidt said, later adding by telephone the victim was shot in the torso from about 15 to 20 feet away.