For years, high school students ridiculed the old Brainerd campus, a Libertyville landmark with wood floors and huge windows that has creaked, leaked and housed bats during its 91 years.
After Community High School District 128 stopped holding classes at the deteriorating freshman campus in 1999, officials considered demolishing the building, but nostalgia and preservationists prevailed.
Now civic leaders are trying to raise $13 million to bring the red-brick three-story building up to code and convert it to a community center for weddings, reunions and cultural affairs. Besides its profile as the original Libertyville Township High School — the third high school in Lake County after Waukegan and Deerfield-Shields — it boasts of at least one legendary student.
Marlon Brando, known as “Bud” to his friends, allegedly rode his motorcycle up and down an indoor staircase at Brainerd and was turned down for a part in a school play there.
“He liked to make an entrance. That’s the way he was,” said Harvey Gossell, 82, of Libertyville, who graduated in 1942 and knew Brando.
“I don’t think he was a very good student, but he was a lot of fun,” said Gossell’s wife, Betty, 83. Known for his truancy and poor grades, Brando was transferred to a military academy after attending Libertyville Township High from 1938 to 1940.
But it was the building, not Brando, that drew one architect to fight doggedly to save the school at 416 W. Park Ave., where it meets Brainerd Avenue.
Robert Peron, a Libertyville trustee, has been spending weekends trying to clean up the vandalized building before June 15, so it’s ready for open house during the annual Libertyville Days festival.
“We’re looking for volunteers. We’re looking for donors. We’re looking for moral support,” said Peron, who never attended the school but said he couldn’t stand it being replaced with a parking lot.
Peron worked with school officials, who at one point threatened to raze the building, before helping negotiate a deal in December in which the school district agreed to lease the facility to the village for 50 years for $1.25 million.
The district wants to keep the property for its athletic fields but will wait five years before collecting its first lease payment of $250,000 — giving fundraisers time to find private donations, Peron said.
Supporters have formed a fundraising organization, the Brainerd Community Center Foundation, which has applied for non-profit status. The group also hopes to have the building recognized as a national landmark.
“This building is not going to use any tax money,” Peron said. “It’s got to be a win-win. Whatever village money is spent, we will reimburse [the village] for it. They are our safety net.”
That decision came as a relief to some alumni and teachers, who fondly remember the school’s historic features, such as built-in bookcases, old-fashioned blackboards and original windows. Officials added a gymnasium in 1929, which sports an upper-level jogging track. In 1953 the district opened the nearby Butler campus for upperclassmen, keeping Brainerd open for freshmen only.
Mike Starovich, 44, a 1980 graduate and Libertyville resident, remembers hustling between buildings to make it to class on time because freshmen attended some classes at Butler.
“I remember the classrooms with super high ceilings, all that kind of stately cool old stuff,” Starovich said of the freshman campus. “The building was always warm because everything was steam-heated.”
Teachers who worked in the building described an intimate setting, where staff got to know each other well and called themselves “The Brainerd Bunch.”
Carolyn Kasel, 45, who taught at Brainerd from 1987 to 1999, recalled the big wood-framed windows “that would open up, higher than I am tall.”
Because the building lacks air conditioning, every spring, bees flew into the classrooms, prompting the district to invest in portable screens, she said.
“We did have at least one occasion where a student jumped out the window,” Kasel said. “I don’t know if it was a prank or an escape.”
Jean Aucutt, 47, of Mundelein remembers creatures of a different sort in the building. At night, she recalls arriving for parent meetings and “the janitor is chasing a bat down the hallway,” said Aucutt, who today is assistant principal at Vernon Hills High School.
Aucutt and others describe the building’s flaws as part of its charm. In 2000, filmmakers used Brainerd as the setting for a movie, “New Port South,” which featured hundreds of Libertyville students as extras.
For the older generation, the building symbolizes defining moments in history.
The Monday after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, “Mr. Underbrink, our principal, called a special assembly and he had the whole school sitting in the old gym telling us that World War II would be starting and that ‘all of you boys’ — most of us — would be serving,” said Harvey Gossell, who served in the Navy.
He finds it amazing that the Brainerd school has changed little ever since.
“The darn building is still standing,” he said.
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lblack@tribune.com
