100 YEARS AGO (1907)
Tired of answering calls from parents, prospective students and others, the Stanford Business Office, which had the only nonresidential phone on campus, installed a telephone in the Registrar’s Office, too. President David Starr Jordan had to wait another year to get a phone. Other administrative offices got connected in 1909.
75 YEARS AGO (1932)
Tall, bespectacled track star Ben Eastman, ’33, set a world record of 46.4 seconds in the 440-yard run at a meet against the Los Angeles Athletic Club, shaving a full second off the record set in 1916. Two weeks later, Blazin’ Ben set the 880-yard world record at 1:51.3. At the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Eastman was edged out of the 440 gold medal by Bill Carr of Pennsylvania, who set a new record of 46.2.
Romance among the cacti was under assault by “heartless” police officers, who told sweethearts enjoying moonlit seclusion in the Arizona Garden to “move along.” The alumni magazine—the Stanford Illustrated Review—decried “this ruthless destruction of old custom,” while the Stanford Daily’s story was titled “Is Nothing Sacred?”
50 YEARS AGO (1957)
The West Coast premiere of Douglas Moore’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe, marked the opening of the 720-seat Florence Hellman Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The facility was named for the late wife of Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel, ’20, president of the Board of Trustees. Associate professor Sandor Salgo served as musical director; Harold Schmidt (see Class Notes) trained the chorus.
25 YEARS AGO (1982)
Chung-Kuei Chang, a Chinese scholar who lived out his life in the Varian Physics Building, died in April at age 87. Leaving a wife, three daughters and a blind son in China, he had come to Stanford in 1937 to study electrical engineering, then physics. The second world war and China’s Communist revolution stymied his return. Chang lost his home at the Chinese Club when it was torn down in 1971 to make room for the Law School. He moved into the Varian building as night watchman.
Karen Bartholomew, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society.
