100 YEARS AGO
President David Starr Jordan turned down an offer to become director of the Smithsonian's National Museum, considered one of the most distinguished positions in American science. He said he would not leave the University during the lifetime of Jane Stanford, who had given him total support during the previous three years when financial problems threatened the school's existence.
Student Will Irwin produced the cheer, "Give 'em the axe," that became the battle cry of rooting sections at athletic contests.
75 YEARS AGO
On Registration Day, 170 freshmen passed the English matriculation exam, while 185 failed and were required to enroll in "bonehead" English. This represented an improvement over previous years.
In the premier Big Game in the new 60,000-seat stadium, constructed between June and October 1921, the University of California's "Wonder Team" defeated Stanford, 42-7. Three engineering professors designed the structure, based on a plan used 2,000 years earlier for the amphitheater at Pompeii: a sloping embankment built with dirt excavated from the playing field, with spectator seating built on the embankment. A 23-foot hole was dug near El Camino Real using three graders drawn by tractors. Dirt was loaded into dump wagons pulled by mules. Four-horse teams pulled "Fresno scrapers" to trim the 37-foot-high slope, topped by a 15-foot-wide esplanade. Nearly 4,000 cubic yards of earth were moved each day. A portable sawmill helped carpenters who constructed tiers of seats. The new stadium, second largest in the country after Yale's, was financed largely by student and alumni subscriptions at a cost of $211,000, and was paid off in three years.
50 YEARS AGO
A year after the war ended, Stanford's student population increased an incredible 94 percent. Some 7,244 students registered in the 1946 autumn quarter, compared to 3,727 in fall 1945. The record-breaking enrollment included 3,836 veterans. University officials scrambled to maintain the traditional ratio of 15 students to each professorial-rank faculty member.
To cope with the huge housing shortage, officials leased buildings at the Army's Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park and converted them into apartments for single men, married couples and couples with children. The complex was renamed Stanford Village. President Donald B. Tresidder promised that fraternities would not be restricted or eliminated as sororities had been during the war. All 24 fraternity houses, used by the University in wartime, reverted to Greek societies.
25 YEARS AGO
Hearings on the proposed dismissal of Associate Professor of English H. Bruce Franklin dominated headlines. The elected seven-member faculty Advisory Board listened to testimony from 110 witnesses during proceedings that went six hours a day, six days a week, for more than five weeks. Student radio station KZSU carried the action live. Franklin, an avowed Maoist, had been suspended with pay in February 1971 by President Richard W. Lyman, who charged Franklin with disrupting a talk by U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, initiating the shutdown of the Computation Center, urging defiance of a police order to disperse and encouraging violence at a nighttime rally. Franklin and the student demonstrators said they were protesting the U.S. military incursion into Laos.
With support from the Dollies, the Stanford Band voted against admitting female musicians.
Catherine Peck, '35, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society.
