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determined by the Appraisers and we always revealed the appraised amounts. The owner then had the option of selling at the highest appraised price or of going to Court to have the price set by the Court. Not one single case went to Court for settlement. I was able to buy hundreds of acres of land by negotiating a price with the owners.
Not all land acquisition was neat and clean. There were two very large developers in Torrance, Don Wilson and R.A. Watt. Both bought large chunks of land and built houses by the hundreds.. Here the similarities ended. When Don Wilson acquired a large parcel of land, he would call me and show me his development plans and I would pick out school sites needed to serve the area. I would then ask him to grade each site to our specifications and then quote us a price for the graded sites. We never paid Don Wilson a profit on a school site. We simply audited his books to determine his cost of acquisition and cost of grading and that is what we paid him.
Ray Watt was a different proposition. He never revealed his plans and never cooperated in any way with the School District. If there was any way he could push the price up he pushed it. Not once in my dealing with Ray Watt did he tell me the truth about plans, acquisition costs or anything else and as a result all his deals were scheduled for Court but he invariably settled just before the trial took place. To sum it up, Ray Watt was a very difficult person to do business with.
I want to relate one land acquisition incident that was quite involved and interesting. R.A. Watt was building a tract of homes near a parcel of land owned by Standard Oil. The School District needed a ten acre site in the tract but the best location for the site required that Watt completely redesign his street and underground utility plans. I studied the whole area and noted that if we took part of Watt's land and some from Standard Oil we could get an excellent site without doing harm to the Watt Tract. The problem was that Santa Fe had a right of way for a railroad over the parcel and it would cross the school site. We held a meeting in Ray Watt's office with Standard Oil and Santa Fe represented. I presented a plan that I thought would work if every one cooperated. We would move the railroad right of way enough to clear the school site, take some of Standard Oil's property and turn out with a straight railroad all in one stroke. After much discussion, we all agreed to that solution and that is what we did. It is not every day that one gets a chance to tell big developers, Standard Oil and Santa Fe what they should do.
The first increment at North High School was under construction when I arrived in April 1955. The contractor, Boesphlug (Base-plug) Construction, was slow and indecisive and at least sixty days behind schedule on the contract. I read the contract document and found that we had a right to occupy the buildings before they were completed so I held a meeting with the construction Superintendent and our resident Inspector. I cited the "right to occupy" section of the contract and told the Superintendent that we would utilize that section and that on "September 7 there will be 1200 students on this site and you
