It must have been Reunion Homecoming in the fall of 1967, when I saw the new Buick circling slowly in the small pedestrian plaza at Galvez Street and Escondido Road. As I walked out of the new Meyer Memorial Library, then less than a year old, a gray-haired motorist rolled down his window and asked for directions.
"First," I said, trying not to sound condescending, "let's get you off the sidewalk and back into the street."
That alum had found a fancy building where he didn't expect one and, even as an 18-year old freshman, I knew there would come a day when I, too, would return to a Stanford that I didn't recognize.
Now I read that the occupants of Meyer Library, my home away from home for most of my undergraduate life between 1967 and 1971, are on notice for relocation. Deemed seismically unsuitable, the building will be demolished sometime in the next decade to make way for, well, something else. I don't need to return to realize that, at long last, I am a stranger.
The undergraduate library, called UGLI for short because that's how it was listed in the quarterly class schedules, was the first major building I saw when a family friend drove me to campus down Escondido Road. Its soaring pillars and facades perforated with tiny windows made the structure look far taller than its four stories.
Just a short walk from my dorm, UGLI offered newspapers, magazines and easy chairs, making it the ideal place to mix study with pleasure-reading. Some of my fellow Wilburites wouldn't consider any class before 10 a.m., but my first-year Spanish class met only at 8 a.m., five days a week, for three quarters in UGLI seminar rooms on the ground floor. The library housed the language lab, where I spent futile hours listening to tapes through headphones and honed a lifelong bias against people, like the language lab director, who insisted they be called "Doctor." He later was convicted of embezzling from the University.
The dating ratio did not favor men in that era, so UGLI became my evening entertainment on most Friday and Saturday nights as well. During Big Game week, the Band would come in and play briefly, its brassy tones echoing throughout the building. Students put on impromptu skits and flew paper airplanes from the air-well balconies during dead week, once drawing a vocal objection from a hardy intellectual.
"They wouldn't do this at Harvard," he yelled out in disgust.
"Then go to Harvard!" someone replied, drawing a cheer.
In my junior year, I had the good fortune of landing a girlfriend. We studied together and played footsie under UGLI's tables. We exchanged notes about when we could spend the night together when my dormmate was gone. The notes survived; the relationship did not.
There were times, in my final year, when I needed fewer distractions than availed at UGLI. I felt almost guilty sneaking off to the older Green Library, where small tables at the end of rows of metal stacks allowed greater privacy. I always came back for the newspapers and magazines at UGLI, however, and hoped the building would not feel jilted.
Soon the building that I remember as so new and so interesting will, to my great surprise, have come to the end of its road before I come to the end of mine. I feel the loss.
Someday I will visit Stanford to see what took UGLI's place. On that occasion you may see a white-haired man who looks bewildered and struggles to get his bearings at a place he once knew so well. He will do his best, however, not to drive on the sidewalk.
Fred Leeson, '71, writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon.
