100 YEARS AGO (1909) Three faculty members appointed after the 1906 earthquake to direct reconstruction of campus buildings issued their final report. Engineering professors Charles D. Marx, Class of 1896, William F. Durand and Charles B. Wing—the Commission of Engineers—worked more than two years and spent $700,000 on repairs and structural improvements.
In the wake of student drinking problems, the California legislature in March enacted a law forbidding the sale of alcohol within a mile and a half of Stanford and the University of California.
75 YEARS AGO (1934) Swiss physicist Felix Bloch joined the faculty. One of the first in a wave of European émigrés, he made discoveries that led to magnetic resonance imaging. When he won the 1952 Nobel Prize, he became the first such laureate on campus.
50 YEARS AGO (1959) President Dwight Eisenhower publicly threw his support behind Stanford’s proposal to build the world’s largest atom smasher. Initially dubbed Project M—for Monster —the 2-mile-long device became the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
25 YEARS AGO (1984) The Baroque-style Fisk-Nanney organ joined the 1901 Romantic-style Murray Harris organ in the choir loft of Memorial Church. Workmen completed the installation and tuning in April, four months after the death of the instrument’s designer and builder, Charles Fisk, ’52, MS ’66.The Center for Integrated Systems, a joint venture of Stanford and industry, was visited by French President François Mitterrand in its opening days. The center allowed faculty and graduate students from engineering, computer science and applied physics to work on projects of interest to the microelectronics and computer science industries.
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden had breakfast at Hanna House with the University’s 10 Nobel laureates and 20 students from Sweden.
Horses moved back into the newly renovated Red Barn. The last significant building remaining from Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, the century-old wooden stable had badly deteriorated before L. W. “Bill” Lane Jr., ’42, agreed to head a campaign to save it.
KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society (histsoc.stanford.edu).
