100 YEARS AGO (1908)
The Board of Trustees adopted a seal for its exclusive use on contracts and other legal documents. It featured a young redwood with the words “Semper Virens” inscribed above; in the outer ring were the words “Seal of the Leland Stanford Junior University” and the year of the founding, 1885.
In the first major addition to the academic program, the University acquired Cooper Medical College of San Francisco as the core of the department of medicine. With the University still recovering from substantial earthquake damage and an economic slump reducing the endowment, the acquisition was controversial. Seven faculty members from Cooper, which dated back to 1859, and seven from Stanford formed the new department. It would remain in San Francisco until 1959.
A year after easing Jane Stanford's prohibition on automobiles by allowing limited access, trustees in the fall opened all campus roads except University Avenue (Palm Drive) to the “devil wagons.”
75 YEARS AGO (1933)
The “Vow Boys” began their march into Stanford sports history, breaking a 27-game winning streak by USC. As freshmen the year before, after watching the upperclassmen post a fifth straight loss to USC, they vowed never to be defeated by the Trojans. They almost missed the game when their train was delayed five hours in Salinas because of a track washout. Arriving sleepless only an hour before kickoff, they handed the Trojans the first of three defeats, winning 13-7.
With the enrollment limitation of 500 women rescinded by trustees, 300 additional women arrived in the fall, creating an instant housing shortage. Dormitory floors of the Stanford Union were remodeled, more women were crammed into Roble, and three houses on Salvatierra Street—Mariposa, Madroño and Elm Cottage—were reassigned. Two faculty homes and two Palo Alto boarding schools took in additional women. Construction of Lagunita Court eased the pressure in fall 1934. By the end of the decade, women's enrollment had more than tripled, to 1,722.
50 YEARS AGO (1958)
Three men with Stanford connections shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. George Beadle and Edward Tatum were cited for their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events. Their work was carried out in 1941 while they were at Stanford, using the common bread mold Neurospora. Joshua Lederberg was cited for discoveries concerning genetic recombination and organization of the genetic material of bacteria. Within months, he joined Stanford's Medical School to launch the department of genetics.
University administrators banned student radio station KZSU from the airways for two years. The station's offenses? Illegal radio power levels, interference with other stations and the questionable taste of broadcasts such as the “Stanford Sadie Show,” featuring the seductive voice of a mystery Stanford woman. The Federal Communications Commission had issued numerous warnings to the University, which owns the station.
A liberalized student loan program went into effect, providing as much as $670 per year in loans for each upperclassman who maintained at least a C average.
25 YEARS AGO (1983)
A computerized catalog of nearly 20 percent of the library's holdings became available online. Named Socrates for its method of questioning the user, the database included more than 920,000 catalog entries. It was available from any terminal linked to the University's IBM 3081 mainframe.
Professor Henry Taube won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering basic mechanisms in chemical reactions, ranging from how enzymes and batteries work to the critical energy processes that maintain life.
KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society.
