If Leland Stanford is still watching from some ethereal vantage point, he probably enjoyed January 20. I know I did.
It was a day to mark time, to reflect upon the people and events that make a place the way it is, that imbue it with character and life and meaning.
It was a Saturday, chilly, overcast, unremarkable. I drove to campus, parked in a lot near Tresidder, walked to Memorial Church, entered through a side door and huddled against a whistling breeze that followed me up the stairs to the balcony. The place was filling up. Down below, in the main sanctuary, friends, colleagues and family members of William R. Hewlett, '34, Engr. '39, sat silently as organist Robert Huw Morgan filled the cavernous cupola with a mournful sound.
While all around us the MemChu icons brooded and watched, we heard stories about a gentle and generous man who for three generations showered Stanford with gifts both personal and financial. A giant was gone, and his footprint was indeed giant-sized.
But the memorials that accompanied Hewlett's passing were more than tributes to an extraordinary person. They also were an opportunity for a grown-up university to remember its adolescence.
Stanford was still a kid when Bill Hewlett walked under the arches of the Quad in 1930. The campus buildings weren't much older than he was. Having survived a difficult infancy, the Stanford he entered had no particular claim to greatness and barely mattered to anybody outside California.
The stories from those years illustrate just how far the University has come, and in how short a time. My favorite is an anecdote related many years ago by engineering dean, and later provost, Fred Terman--Hewlett's mentor and the man most respon-sible for building Stanford into a technological powerhouse. When Hewlett was a student, the Depression was in full swing and Stanford had no money to repair its buildings. The electronics laboratory was in an attic, the roof leaked and tar-papered catch basins were strategically placed throughout. So Hewlett one day carried in some goldfish and dumped them into the water--"a homey touch," Terman said.
Hewlett and his predeceased business partner, David Packard, '34, Engr. '39, spent the rest of their lives adding goldfish to the water, as it were. Although such things are hard to quantify, one could make a good argument that their combined "goldfish" were as transformative for Stanford as any other factor in its history. There's not much doubt that, without them, the University would not have traveled so far so fast, maturing at a rate that, in retrospect, seems breathtaking.
So I sat in Memorial Church and thought about where Stanford was and where it is. The length of line from there to here had a hundred knots, untangled by the Hewletts and Packards and Termans and Sterlings and others who came and went and left the place better than they found it. It made me feel closer to Stanford, and just a bit prouder to be playing a small role in keeping it going.
Mostly, I thought about the importance of knowing where you come from. Hewlett and Packard never forgot--as billionaires they were as unaffected as they had been when they were scrappy inventors working for food money. I hope Stanford never loses touch with that history and the wisdom that comes with it.
By the end of the service, I knew Bill Hewlett a little better and understood more fully what his and Packard's legacy involved. I left the church and wandered through the campus, imagining how they must have felt watching the University grow up around them. In the end, what can we say that does justice to their progeny?
I think it might be this: that when historians 100 years from now try to capture the essence of Stanford in the 20th century, they can do so with one simple, evocative image--two young guys stooped over a table in a leaky, run-down laboratory, preparing to change the world.
You can reach Kevin at jkcool@stanford.edu.
