100 YEARS AGO (1906)
Nearly 60 graduates of the 1906 “Calamity Class” attended their delayed commencement ceremony in Assembly Hall on September 15. As freshmen, they faced a typhoid epidemic, with several fatalities. Diphtheria in their second year claimed more victims. Jane Stanford died under mysterious circumstances during their junior year, and the April 18 earthquake “shook the class of 1906 out of college,” noted the student newspaper, the Daily Palo Alto. In his farewell to the graduates, President David Starr Jordan said, “The wrecking of buildings does not wreck a university. The University exists in the minds, the wills, the souls of men.” For the first time, all participants wore caps and gowns.
Student Ben S. Allen read the last will and testament of the Class of 1906, challenging the next class to “invent a more effective method for avoiding final examinations than an earthquake.” Daily Palo Alto editor Allen had been suspended from the University in January 1906 for writing an editorial that criticized the administration’s handling of hazing and other problems at the men’s dormitory, Encina Hall. His dismissal rocked the campus; the alumni magazine devoted 11 pages to the controversy. Readmitted in fall 1906, he graduated a year late.
Stanford officials replaced football with rugby as the major fall sport, citing concern about increased violence in football, commercialization of collegiate sports, and financial mismanagement by student athletic committees. The University of California also made the change. Although the decision was initially unpopular—students and alumni had not been consulted—by 1915 Stanford fans favored keeping rugby when UC reverted to football. Santa Clara University served as the Big Game rugby opponent through 1917. Stanford officially restored football in 1919, spurred by student preference for Cal as the Big Game opponent.
75 YEARS AGO (1931)
Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, 80, died of heart disease on September 19 at his campus home. Jordan’s enthusiasm and optimism attracted students and faculty who treasured independent thinking and freedom from the constraints of academic tradition. Just after the 1906 earthquake he turned down his dream job—head of the Smithsonian Institution—saying he needed to rebuild Stanford. Despite his retirement from the presidency in 1913, Jordan’s promotion of the world peace movement before America entered the Great War earned him—and Stanford—considerable enmity.
50 YEARS AGO (1956)
Construction was under way in the hills behind campus on a radio telescope designed by Professor Ronald Bracewell. Its 32 parabolic antennas—aluminum dishes 10 feet in diameter—were used for an
11-year project starting in 1959 to study the sun’s surface and map its temperatures.
25 YEARS AGO (1981)
Professor Arthur Schawlow was named co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy, the examination of substances by how they reflect or absorb light.
