Weekdays, in the late afternoons, I remember racing up and down the hockey field, our breath frosted by the evening chill, our cheeks flaming with exertion. Little did we care that we had to wear middies and bloomers and dark stockings.
Many Saturdays, I walked over to the Children's Hospital and played with or read to the patients. In the hospital garden, I pruned the shrubs, weeded and planted small annuals.
On Sundays, I would often join a couple of dozen students at Dr. Jordan's cottage for 4 o'clock tea. Wolfing down gingersnaps and graham crackers,we listened to him reminisce or he listened to us--mostly talking all at once. David Starr Jordan was a gentle, darling man.
By the end of my sophomore year, I started dating my future husband, who worked In San Francisco at an investment firm and lived in the lower bachelor apartments of the Fairmont Hotel. We "barged" into many of the Fairmont's Saturday dances. (He had relatives in the city, so I always had a place to stay.) On weekends, he drove down to Stanford for golf and to attend our parties. He became a sort of big brother to our sorority house, Chi Omega, and even hit it off so well with our housemother that we would occasionally include her on our movie dates. We did not include her on our visits to the cactus garden, however.
My worst memory at Stanford: my roommate being carried away on a stretcher to an iron lung. That was in 1930, a very bad year for polio.
My most thrilling moment: in November 1928, when the news came by telegraph that Herbert Hoover, Class of 1895, had been elected president of the United States. Sousa's band had been playing in San Francisco, and they caught the next train to Palo Alto to march and play all the way to the president's house. They gathered practically every campus student along the route; there were quite a few Stanford Republicans in those days.
Elizabeth "Westy" West Wright, '31
