The young public schoolteacher had $500 and a dream. He was looking to open his own private school in the San Fernando Valley, and the five-acre parcel of land available on Sepulveda Boulevard near Roscoe Boulevard in the late '50s was perfect.
The soon-to-open 405 Freeway linking motorists traveling north to Highway 99 and on to Bakersfield had retail businesses along the stretch of Sepulveda bailing out fast.
In a few months, the new freeway would turn this main thoroughfare into a quiet, residential street, they worried. Better to get out now.
The owners of the old Montecello Motel saw the handwriting on the wall. They closed their doors an put up a for sale sign.
Maybe someone would come along who wasn't selling anything and didn't care that Sepulveda would have a tenth of the traffic it had now.
Vernon "Doc" Simpson was that someone. With $500 from his teachers pension fund, he put a down payment on the land and opened Montclair College Prep in an old motel.
"It was about the same time Russia was beating us into space with Sputnik, and we began reevaluating our educational system," Simpson said Monday from the headmaster's office at Montclair Prep.
Doc's 80 now and still running his prep school while also teaching psychology classes at Los Angeles Mission College. He has a doctorate in psychology and affectionately became just "Doc" to his students over the years.
"I had been teaching in public schools, and was getting tired of seeing kids fall through the cracks," he said. "Classes were overcrowded and I didn't see many teachers inspiring their students to go on to college."That's what I wanted to do here, and to be honest, I never thought it would be this successful," Doc said.
Montclair Prep has an incredible 98 percent of its graduates go on to four-year colleges and universities, many of them the most prestigious schools in the country. The other 2 percent attend community colleges or go into the military, then return to attend college, Doc says.
Not a bad track record for a school started on a shoestring 50 years ago in an old motel.
All remnants of the Montecello are long gone, replaced through the years by modern classrooms in two-story buildings. Doc built them as the school's student body grew from a few dozen students to more than 400, drawn by Montclair Prep's academic and athletic reputation.
Cher, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra Jr. and baseball star Reggie Smith went here, as did the children of Aaron Spelling, Cybill Shepherd, Marvin Davis and dozens of other personalities. Kids from all over the world and from local Valley neighborhoods have gone through grades six through 12 in Doc's prep school. Kids of the rich and famous who can easily afford the annual $15,500 tuition fee, and kids on financial aid whose parents could never afford a quality education like this.
It doesn't matter to Doc. Money was never part of his dream. The only thing that matters is that you're a good, hard-working, motivated kid who wants to learn. Doc and his staff will do the rest. They'll get you to college. "What Doc teaches here goes so far beyond education," says Sergio Roberio, one of six former students who returned to Montclair Prep as teachers.
For the last six years, he's been in charge of international studies, and teaches ESL classes to students from Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan and China, who live at the school in dorms. Sergio was one of those kids from Guatemala 15 years ago. "I know what Doc and this school meant to me and so many other students, that's why I wanted to come back. I owed him. "Doc opened doors of opportunity for thousands of kids like me." He did it on $500 and a dream.