http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-schools22dec22,0,7593238.story
COLUMN ONE
Real Estate Hunters Go Old School
For a new
home or new venture, urbanites are snapping up entire campuses in the
By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer
GAYLORD,
But thanks to an impulse buy on EBay, this is home.
Not just this gym — the entire Gaylord Rural Elementary and High School. Gwen
and her husband, Oliver, own 30,000 square feet of leaky classrooms, dented
lockers and rust-streaked urinals. And they are ecstatic.
They stride the gloomy halls, under burned-out bulbs, and remind themselves
they own it all: The sixth-grade classroom, which they've filled with firewood.
The first-grade cubbies Gwen uses as a closet. The blackboards Oliver scribbles
full of business calculations. The girls' locker room, painted
lilac, where they wash in the communal shower.
Never, ever did they dream of buying so much space for $25,000.
Their entire house back in
True, they're out on the prairie now, an hour from the nearest McDonald's, in a
town of 97. Gaylord's streets are rutted dirt. There's not much to do on an
autumn night beyond hunting skunks. But the Archuts
find life fuller here.
"There's a difference between living and existing," says Oliver, 35,
who builds recording equipment. "In
That same calculation is drawing others to fading towns across the heartland.
In the past year, at least a dozen communities have turned to EBay to sell
schools shuttered for lack of kids. They've attracted tremendous interest from
entrepreneurs seeking a bargain and an escape.
The schools are cheap, generally priced at $1 to $3 a square foot. They're big,
too, and some are beautiful — solid brick with hardwood floors and quaint
cupolas. In most small towns, there are no zoning ordinances to limit
commercial or industrial activity. And the communities offer a refuge from the
anxious anonymity of urban life.
"Not only do you know your neighbors, but everybody really does drop by
for a cup of sugar," said Suzanne Azzarella, 33.
She and her business partner moved their engine sales business from
They bought both buildings on EBay for $49,500, astounding the local school
district, which had tried for more than a year to give the buildings to charity
but found no takers.
Civic leaders in
In
And in
The Michaelses, who gave up a condo in
Such small-scale enterprise will not save Upham or
McCracken or Gaylord.
Like so many of the farm towns that once anchored the Great Plains, these
communities have long since lost their young families — their futures — to big
cities.
It gets harder and harder for Gaylord to round up enough children to put on the
Angel Choir concert come Christmas. There are just six kids left in town, a few
more on surrounding farms. Erin Abbott, a high-school senior, sums up her
dreams in five words: "Someplace bigger. With paved
streets."
"I sincerely doubt there will be any town left here in 10 or 15
years," said Jean Gedney, 84, who has lived in
town for six decades.
"All you have to do is look around," said Kaid
Dannenberg, 45, whose family runs the local fertilizer plant. "There's
nobody here. There's nothing to bring anyone here."
Or, rather, there wasn't — until EBay.
Now, Gwen Archut strides around town in her
high-heeled boots, blond hair swinging, so full of energy that locals smile at
the mention of her name. Burly, 6-foot-8 Oliver, with his rough German accent
and rollicking laugh, has thrown himself into rural life so completely that he
butchered his own hog this fall and pickled 95 pounds of sauerkraut.
Katherine Lehmann, the town clerk, admits she can't
quite understand their passion. "We're amazed Gwen and Oliver are even
happy here."
But they are. And that's given Gaylord cautious hope.
Before the EBay sale, retired teacher Jim Muck, 64, never dared expect a future
for Gaylord. Now he finds himself dreaming. If this couple from
"We're not expecting to be a town of 1,000 people," said Muck, who
serves on the town council. "All we're looking for is some small
progress."
Muck wasn't expecting even that much when he and a friend came up with the idea
of listing the school on EBay in the summer of 2003.
Vacant for more than a decade, the building had become a liability and an
eyesore. The trouble was, the town couldn't afford to
tear it down. Demolition would cost more than $100,000 — almost as much as
Gaylord's operating budget for an entire year.
Then Muck got to talking with Dave Rose, a friend who sold farm equipment on
EBay. On a whim, they decided to list the school through Rose's firm,
To their astonishment, the phone began ringing.
"I was absolutely shocked, to be honest with you," Rose said.
He soon realized the concept had potential. As word spread about Gaylord's EBay
posting, towns in
Rose knew he had to sell more than the school; he had to sell the concept of
the prairie to a distant, big-city buyer. So he wrote glowing profiles of each
community, touting the good hunting, the scenic vistas, the
friendly neighbors.
"Every place has its positives," he said. "You just have to look
a little harder for them sometimes."
The Archuts needed little convincing.
Oliver was desperate to get out of
He asked Gwen to find him a
"I called three times to make sure that $25,000 wasn't just the down
payment," she says. "I thought I was being bamboozled." When
Muck finally convinced her that was the total price, she flew out to take a
look.
Up against the
The school was a wreck as well; it had shut down in 1990, and no one had
maintained it since. The front door was boarded. The blue paint had long ago
flaked off. Even the bricks looked dilapidated.
Inside was worse: The roof leaked. The boiler pipes had ruptured. Little glow-in-the-dark eyes glowered from the lockers, remnants of
a long-ago haunted house. Icy air blew in through broken windows.
To Gwen, it looked wonderful.
For years, she and Oliver had been making sound equipment for top-40 rock and
country bands from their 1,600-square-foot house. Their machinery took up every
inch of floor space, the whole backyard and a neighbor's garage. Here at last,
they would have space to spread out: the whole school plus nearly four acres of
land.
The Gaylord council received several offers for the school. A businessman from
"A young couple," he said, "wanting to come to town and build a
business."
He would have given them the school free.
The Archuts, though, thought they were getting a
steal at $25,000. They closed on the property in October 2003 and moved in a
few months later. The town used the cash to fix its dilapidated sewer system.
When he walks through the school these days, Muck nods approvingly. The science
lab looks much as it always did, with its scuffed linoleum floor,
avocado-and-mustard paint, silver clock forever stuck at
The seventh-grade classroom next door gleams with fresh, white paint. It's now
the main production room for the Archuts' company,
TAB-Funkenwerk.
Oliver has moved a bed into the old fourth-grade classroom. Gwen has turned the
first-grade room into a den, with a big-screen TV, easy chairs and sticky
flypaper dangling from the fluorescent lights to catch the mosquitoes that
bedevil them in summer. They cook in the cafeteria, on the industrial-size
griddle.
"It's perfect," Oliver says. "Like
camping."
At first, the luxury of so much space was all that mattered to him. But it
didn't take many days in Gaylord before he and Gwen fell in love with the town
as well.
For starters, they suddenly could afford to have fun. The closest movie theater
is 14 miles away, but you can buy a ticket and a tub of popcorn for $5.50.
Fresh salmon rarely graces a menu out here, but a steak-and-potatoes dinner
costs maybe $8. If they ever decide to buy a real house — and Gwen's pushing
for it — they can get a nice one for $17,000.
Also, doing business is easier here. When Oliver wanted to hook up his machines
in
In
He can't go a week without someone asking when he and Gwen, who is 32, are
going to start a family. Oliver says they're not ready yet.
The next week, he's asked again: "Any progress?"
He prefers to think of this as cozy, not nosy.
"It's a different world," Oliver says. "People genuinely
care."
The Archuts have had some hardships in Gaylord.
Shortly after moving in last winter, Oliver had emergency open-heart surgery to
replace faulty valves. An electrical fire destroyed one of the classrooms. The
leaky roof will be expensive to repair, and they've already spent about $30,000
to make the school habitable.
And there are small, unexpected inconveniences. Oliver never seems to be able
to get all 900 light bulbs working at once. Every week or two it seems one of
the school's 250 windows breaks. Just sweeping all the hallways takes hours.
Still, the Archuts burst with optimism. They have
hired three neighbors for part-time work; their custodian refurbishes
floorboards in a classroom where he once whipped his buddies at checkers. The Archuts are looking to fill three more jobs. Gwen expects
to have a payroll of 15 within a year or two.
Oliver dreams his biggest dreams in the brick-walled auditorium, with the
cracked stage floor that creaks alarmingly under his weight. As soon as he
renovates the auditorium, he says, he'll invite his musician friends down to
Gaylord. He imagines the school as the perfect spot to record an album or
prepare for a tour, away from the frenzy of the coasts.
For now, though, Gwen and Oliver have done Gaylord proud just by calling it
home.