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at Claremont College some twenty miles from Corona. I went to class each Saturday and sometimes at night during the week. It was necessary to get teaching credentials first and then get the administration credentials. I got all of those while going part time and working full time.

Business management in public school districts was a new and unique field in the nineteen forties. Only large districts hired Business Managers at the time but with the increase in school age children and the increasing complexity of school finance most districts began to hire administrators to handle the areas of budgets, accounting, building maintenance and operation, pupil transportation, purchasing, food service, insurance and salary negotiations. When I became Assistant Superintendent in Corona, we had two districts, the elementary and the high school. There were two budgets to be administered and there were two school boards to work with. The high school board had five members and three of them were the elementary board. Part of my salary and that of all central office employees was paid by each district. All accounts and records were kept separate. That sounds complicated and it was because both boards met on the same evening and only three of them could legally transact elementary district business. We constantly had to remind board members that only three specific people were the elementary board. Later I simplified the whole process by getting the district "unified."

When I became Business Manager I became faced with a number of specific problems that I thought needed immediate attention. First, the attendance boundaries between the elementary schools were so "gerry mandered" as to create a segregated Mexican school. This had been done deliberately. Second, the district was being ripped off by a pupil transportation contractor whose family was a political power in the community. Third, all books and records were kept by hand and it was almost impossible to tell what was going on and where we were financially.

I decided to tackle the records problem first and I happened to be talking to a local banker at a Lions Club meeting about our situation. He informed me that the bank had recently purchased a National Cash Register bookkeeping machine and that now they were able to total the day's business one hour after closing rather than at nine o'clock in the evening. I called National Cash Register and they came immediately and showed me the systems being used by a few other school districts. I knew these systems would solve our problem but I had more bases to touch. The County Superintendent of Schools did not travel by horse and buggy but it would have been most appropriate for him to do so. He audited every expenditure of every school district in Riverside County. He wrote and signed each check for every district except Riverside City Schools and he did not consider Corona capable of keeping its own records. In other words he turned down the idea of the bookkeeping machine. I was some what frustrated and decided to talk with the County Auditor, Ray Hicks who did the final check on all expenditures made from the County Treasury. As I had suspected, Hicks was very critical of the County Superintendent's record keeping and immediately endorsed