Often referred to as “a rich man’s school,” Stanford, to judge from my experience, was good to a poor boy.
By the summer of 1937, I had saved up enough to cover my first year’s tuition ($345). Enrolling in the fall quarter, I immediately visited the dean of men’s office to line up work to support myself. Dean George Culver’s secretary, a warm, delightful woman named Vivian Church, quickly lined me up for a hashing job at the Union Cellar, a campus restaurant—which solved my food problem. In addition, she set me up with a stenographic job with two economics professors who were writing a new textbook. My position was subsidized by a government program that paid me $30 a month—excellent pay for that era.
Added to that was a part-time job pumping gas at one of Walt Heinecke’s two Shell stations on campus. The going rate was 60 cents an hour and there were plenty of jobs, whereas the comparable jobs at Cal were scarce and paid about 35 cents an hour. Added to all this was a 50-foot wardrobe closet in the dean of men’s office containing some very high quality clothing, recycled by the University from the rooms of well-to-do students who didn’t bother to pack at the end of the school year. The upshot of this was that I was one of the best-dressed students on campus and never had to buy anything.
Job opportunities at Stanford were so plentiful and working one’s way through so easy, that I still recall the comment of my roommate, Monte Pfyl, in the spring of 1941. As we lay on our bunks, reviewing our parallel experiences as poor boys at Stanford, Monte suddenly waxed serious and said, “You know, Lodato, I can’t afford to graduate! I’m never going to make this kind of money on the outside.”
—JOHN LODATO, ’41, MA ’59
