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This history of the University Students Cooperative Association (U.S.C.A.) was funded through a grant by the Berkeley Consumers Cooperative to the U.S.C.A. aimed at financing a student project for the summer of 1971. Mark Gary, then President of the U.S.C.A. Board of the Directors, suggested to the Board that a history of the organization would be suitable, and the job was assigned to me on the first of June. Composition was completed today, December 19th, 1971.
My idea for this book was to write a biography of the U.S.C.A. rather than a history, concentrating on individual members' stories and recollections, and avoiding as best as possible a strictly organizational perspective. A series of interviews with co-op pioneers and veterans in the Bay Area was initiated with this aim in mind. To a man, I found those co-opers I talked to--usually with the aid of Marcella Murphy, co-op vice-president--generous with information and impressive in their enthusiasm for the organization and its precepts. I want to thank each of them--Doug Cruikshank, Bill Davis, Dan Eisenstien, Harry Kingman, Dick Palmer, Dave Bortin, Larry Collins and Hal Norton--for their assistance and the glimpse each gave me into the nature of the co-op. I only wish that time and money had permitted me to contact more co-op alumni, several of whom I spoke with but did not formally interview. My apologies to them, and to the book--they could only have added richness. Too often I found the ``organizational perspective'' the only available viewpoint.
I want to express special gratitude to Harry Kingman, for lending me much valuable material from his files. Without them the background for the co-op's birth would have been whole cloth. Also to be thanked are the present Board and staff of the U.S.C.A. for the aid they returned for persistent annoyance from me. Thanks of personal sorts to Marcella Murphy, Gwen Lindgren, and Gail Schatzberg for their impetus and assistance. And a most extraordinary thank you to Carolyn Callahan, who has never even been in Berkeley, let alone been a co-op member, for typing so much of the manuscript without promise of compensation.
I hope that this book will help the co-op as it enters its fifth decade. No living group has been around as long, done as much, or had a more interesting effect on the Berkeley campus and the idea of co-operatives in the United States. I hope new members manage to read it, and become involved in the organization they now own and control. The title of this tome to the contrary: the U.S.C.A. is far, far more than a cheap place to live. It is a life-experience.
Nothing more to write, except to say that I have enjoyed this project, and regard it as valuable to my life, and my career, however either may go.
And to thank the people I lived with for most of my college life, and dedicate this work.
To my brothers and sisters of Barrington Hall. Fall 1969 to Spring 1971.
[Editor: Many parts were edited to improve readability. Careful attention was paid to preserve the author's original style and tone.]
It began where a lot begins, in Berkeley, California. But its beginning came when much was ending, in the 1930's. It always was a different sort of thing. The collegiate generation of the early 1930's was faced with unique problems. As with practically every other group of Americans, the Depression of those times had severely cramped the economic viability of its members. The college students of that time could be divided, therefore, into two extremely general groups: first, the well-to-do, whose fathers had economic positions in the society unthreatened by the Depression; second, the far more extensive group, poor students who lived in enforced frugality and survived by superhuman determination.
This latter, larger group imposed a great responsibility on the schools that they attended. Programs of student aid were begun on every major college or university campus but they were handicapped for the same economic reasons that their students were handicapped. The University of California at Berkeley was, in 1930, the major educational institution of the state. The 16,000 students attending Berkeley fit, of course, into the two general categories mentioned above. But, as a large state institution, the University had more resources to draw on than many private institutions. It had its own Y.M.C.A., for example, which itself had a resource no other institution could claim: its director, Harry Kingman. Kingman was an unduplicatable man of many accomplishments, by no means the major of which is discussed here.
Kingman, in 1933, was in his second year as general secretary of Stiles Hall, the University of California Young Men's Christian Association, as well as coach of the Cal Freshmen Baseball Team. He had come to the Y.M.C.A. in 1916 from a stint with the New York Yankees and New York College. In 1931 the death of the then-general secretary had elevated Kingman to the directorship of campus organization. He brought the position an activism that dealth with many problems of his constituency. In recognition of that activism, Robert Gordon Sproul, the President of the University, appointed Kingman to a committee, with three other faculty members, designed to ``assist and befriend'' incoming freshmen in 1932. Kingman's membership brought him into direct contact with the incredible economic straits that the student body had to navigate.
The Y.M.C.A. itself kept a supply of used clothing on hand for destitute students. Other community organizations--Hillel, Newman Hall (the university Catholic chapel)--provided similar services. Mostly the efforts of these organizations were directed towards finding jobs for the students--insufficient funds were not only keeping potential students away from Berkeley, they also caused many to drop out. In September of 1932 Kingman went on the local radio with a speech called ``Students Without Money,'' which detailed the types of aid available to the destitute. One case he mentioned was of a student who was, relatively, extremely fortunate; he lived with an uncle who paid his tuition and books. Presumably the room with the relative carried board privileges too, and the student had only to worry about extracurricular expenses. According to Kingman, he was asked about his financial status approximately four months into the semester. The student counted his change and said, ``I started the semester with three dollars, but I have only about one dollar left.'' He was fortunate. A case existed at that time of one student who collapsed on College Avenue from malnutrition. Others spent as little as five dollars a month on food. In his radio broadcast Kingman defended the various efforts to support students: ``The fact is that relief needs on the California campus have been fairly well met.'' In addition to private aid there were also University loans--about 70 different funds available at that time--which suffered from the inability of most students to repay them and from being solely available to undergraduates. There were also some emergency loans available, as well as 200 University scholarships which averaged at about $225. These scholarships reached less than a third of the qualified students. Kingman listed more scholarships as the most urgent need of student aid.
Among Kingman's targets as a member of Sproul's freshman advisory committee were the men of the class of '34. Kingman met with these students often in late 1932, seeking a long-range solution to the financial problems then faced.
Most Cal students didn't have uncles living in town who were willing to pay for tuition and supply room and board. Most lived in cubbyholes at rooming houses and, as said before, scrounged for meals. Loans and scholarships and jobs were all very well, but they could only aid individual students, one at a time, and did nothing to alleviate the general conditions. Life, for the U.C. student, was still one of extreme deprivation. With his freshmens, Kingman began to seek out something different. He gathered students together into meetings with Professor Ben Mallory, of the Vocational Education Department, an authority on co-operatives. Kingman had had an idea, which he passed onto the students. Fourteen students gathered one evening in the house owned by Harry and Ruth Kingman in February of 1933.
This gathering was dramaticed in 1938 as an episode in K.F.R.C.'s ``Pageant of Life'' radio series. As-reconstructed by a scriptwriter, Kingman's pitch to the students went thusly: ``Now: you must represent...what shall I say...the underfinanced portion of the student body... Why can't conditions be improved, for hundreds of students like yourselves...by throwing your resources together. Living together! Eating together! Working together! Buying on a mass basis.''1.1
A co-operative endeavor, in other words, was suggested, and the fourteen freshmen agreed that it was worth trying. Among them were Bill Spangle, Willis Hershey, and Addison James, each of whom assumed leadership in what rapidly became a major project--not only for them but for the University Y.M.C.A. Kingman appointed one of his staff, Francis A. Smart, to half-time activity aiding Spangle and the others in setting up their co-operative.
No one is sure how the word ``co-operative'' was first involved, but it is a system with roots in Rochdale, England, where the movement began in 1844. A rather cringeable pamphlet entitled ``The Story of Toad Hall'' tells in saccharine detail the story of the earliest co-ops; only the philosophy of the co-operative movement has bearing on the Berkeley students' story. That philosophy was started by Peter Warbasse, a philosopher of ``co-operativism,'' in a book called ``Cooperative Democracy.'' Basically the system is based on several postulates commonly known as ``The Rochdale Principles.'' These declared that a cooperative would be based on democratic control, common purchase of the cheapest available produce, open membership, market prices charged, political neutrality, limited interest on any invested capital, and return of savings to members in return for their investment. Warbasse called it ``a radical movement of pale pink,'' for its object was the antithesis of capitalism--service instead of profit. A housing co-op--untried in Berkeley and virtually unique anywhere--would adapt these principles to housing needs. Basically, it meant that students living in the house would control house policy and expenditures. They would be both independent and responsible.
The Berkeleyans sought, at first, limited goals; the first co-op unit was a rooming house on the south side of the campus. According to ``Early History of the University Students' Cooperative Association,'' a reminiscence written by Fran Smart in 1940, Adaison James merits credit for persuading Mrs. Annie Dickson, contacted through one of the local churches, to take on the responsibility of running a cooperative boarding house. Mrs. Dickson's husband had-suffered severe economic hardships in the Depression, yet she was interested in the project and willing to assume some risks to join it. Those risks took the form of renting a larger house than the one her family presently lived in. Mrs. Dickson did the buying and cooking for twenty male students in exchange for meals for her family. The rent for these first coop members was ten dollars a month, which Mrs. Dickson allocated as $9 per student per month for food and the other $20 a month going for the utilities. Workshifts of four hours each week were required for the student residents. These workshifts were all typical duties--cleaning house and kitchen and aiding Mrs. Dickson in fixing the meals. When the co-op boarding house opened in March, 1933 ten students joined as charter members. Twelve more men joined before spring semester ended.
At the end of that semester the cooperative effort branched in two. The number of students involved had grown, and the emphasis grown away from day-to-day survival to preparations for the future. Students sought to stock up provisions during that summer of '33 to keep their co-op alive for the year that followed, by working at manual labor outside of Berkeley, in two groups, one chopping wood in Dixon, California and the other at various jobs at Clarksburg, a city on the Sacramento River. The Clarksburg camp opened in May, at which time the men involved moved into the bunkhouse which had been provided by the various farmers in the area and began cleaning it up. These farmers had been contacted by the Stiles Hall associate general secretary, Ralph Scott, who had explained the aim of the camp. The bunkhouse was centrally located among the various farms in the area, and was furnished with equipment loaned by Pacific Gas & Electric. Bill Spangle, whose home was in Sacramento and was therefore familiar with the area, managed the Clarksburg camp. As each new man arrived at the camp he paid Spangle a $2 deposit for operating expenses. Each man provided all linen and personal items.
Spangle's duties were several. Not only was he sole cook, he also aided the students in finding jobs. He was successful in this task, as some members earned over $100 during that summer with which to continue their schooling.
The Dixon woodcutters were involved in a task which had an ongoing aim--the benefit of the whole group of co-opers instead of just individual members. Their project was connected with the local office of the Unemployment Exchange Association, or U.X.A., which the students had visited often while planning the organization of the first co-op. The students who cut wood at Dixon for the U.X.A. worked not for money but for points to be applied toward room and board expenses in the following year. They were so adept at swinging their axes that their productivity became a danger to the organization later.
The co-op boarding house had been an avatar. The group's aim all along had been to establish a student-run house that would service more than 20 members, and the summer of '33 was devoted to this end as well. A large effort, sponsored by Stiles Hall, to popularize the new idea of a student cooperative house was begun, with correspondence to high schools and junior colleges telling of the idea. Radio time was also secured. It pays to advertise. A ``gratifying'' response came in to the propaganda, and the fledgling organization suddenly found itself with no room for all its accepted members. A search for an available house was begun and consumed much time and hassle. The students finally found an appropriate establishment at 2714 Ridge Road--a block from the Founder's Rock at the northeast corner of the campus.
The Sigma Nu fraternity house was part of what was then thriving northside Greek community, but the fraternity was moving and the building was available for lease, and ideally suited for a cooperative house. The students instantly grabbed it--a matter of some relief. Fran Smart recalls one incident demonstrable of how close a call was the rental of the Sigma Nu house. A Los Angeles applicant named Dickson Myers had sent in his five dollar deposit and had been notified of his acceptance. Myers immediately set forth from L.A. and negotiated a night-long journey up the coast. He got to Stiles Hall at eight in the morning, and asked the staff there where he could find the co-op house, as he required slumber. Smart and the others told him that ``it wasn't ready yet''--and sent him into downtown Berkeley and the Y.M.C.A. there for some sleep. In the afternoon when Myers arose, he returned to Stiles Hall. Smart and the co-op people were still out, concluding the lease deal for the fraternity house. They came back with joyous exclamations of ``We got it.'' Myers asked what they had gotten, and when he was told ``the co-op house,'' he was naturally aghast. ``Do you mean to tell me,'' he screamed, ``that you let me drive all the way up here before you even had a place for me to live in?''
The co-operative spirit was even then at work.
That spirit was forced to further limits. A house is not a house is not a cooperative. Furniture was needed. For that, money was needed and leasing and renovating 2714 Ridge Road had depleted the precious collection Clarksburg and deposits had built up. It was here that the University, beginning on a high note its somewhat erratic support of the Berkeley cooperative movement, stepped in through the Faculty Advisory Committee. This committee had rendered valuable advice and aid in the advertising campaign. Now it helped the co-op movement to gain a $650 loan from the U.C. Club House Loan Fund with which to furnish the renovated Sigma Nu house. This amount had to do in order to furnich a 48-person residence. As the K.F.R.C. script has Bill Spangle saying to the other co-opers:
Spangle: Well, six-hundred-and-fifty-dollars is practically all the money there is in the world...but as Janes says, it won't equip this big...building...completely... fifty beds and mattresses...
Janes: And tables and chairs...
Voice: And chesterfields...
Voice: And a kitchen stove...
Voice: And don't forget silverware and towels...
Voice:And how about a washing machine. We've got to keep clean!
Spangle: You promote it Rowley...and you can be in charge of the laundry department. But seriously...let's appoint committees for two, and each committee'll be in charge of buying or promoting certain items...like cots and mattresses...floor lamps...dishes and so forth. They can make the rounds of all the second-hand shops...
Smart's article details some of the purchases made at those secondhand stores, mostly located in Oakland. The kitchen range cost $71.61, a library table $1.50, two blinds went for ninety cents, a single chair $3, a Faultless washer and mangle $83.72, and silverware $14.87. They also found 52 old Army cots for $98.43...but which caused much more than a hundred dollars' worth of trouble.
These cots were link-spring arrangements better than six feet long, which while in storage had been coated with a protective petroleum jelly. The 52 cots were brought to 2714 Ridge Road--the old co-op name of Barrington had by then been applied to the building--late one afternoon and dumped on the steep sidewalk in front of the building. They lay there in the gutter. Each new member as he arrived at the new co-op was escorted to the Ridge Road gutter and invited to chose--and clean--his own cot. Fran Smart describes the experience of scraping, wiping and generally persuading the oily stuff off of the beds as a ``fortunate thing, for it gave each of the members who had to do this work a feeling that he really was a part of the house and belonged there.'' The cooperative spirit again raised its elbowaching head.
The only new items bought by the students were mattress pads, which became quite lumpy in time and extremely uncomfortable, at least according to Bill Davis, a young Y.M.C.A. staff member who lived in Barrington Hall from the outset and would become one of the most important figures in the history of Berkeley's student co-op.
Davis' quasi-official position with the nearly-founded student co-op was that of advisor, or ``House Papa,'' but he was actually not very much older than his charges. Bill had been to the University in 1924 from two years in junior college. Graduating in 1931, Davis spent a year at the Boalt Hall Law School before joining Stiles Hall in '32. Put into freshman orientation and relations work by Kingman, he was involved in other aspects of Y work until the opening of Barrington Hall. ``My home was in Long Beach, of course,'' he says, ``and I was single, so it was a natural thing for me to move into Barrington.'' In addition to Davis' own financial considerations, Stiles Hall felt that it would be a good idea to have an on-the-scene liaison with the new co-op which could still need help. Davis aided the co-op in a potentially uncomfortable situation. Rochdale principle and common liberal thought required that the co-op practice racial desegregation in the house - and of course nobody objected when a black man applied for residence. Some concern was voiced about how well he would ``fit in'', so Davis arranged a meeting on a Long Beach corner with the black to talk the organization over. The anxieties proved foundless, of course, and there was no hassle involved. Another black member of the early Barrington was Thomas Berkeley, who later opened the finest interracial law practice in the city. Davis moved in with the first members when the co-op opened in August 1933.
Also moving in with the first batch was a young couple, Willis and Anne Hershey. Fran Smart spoke of the problem which made Anne Hershey's presence a practical boon. The house obviously needed a cook. There was some debate about whether or not to hire a man or woman for the post--and whether or not a competent pot-and-panner could be found for the salary Barrington Hall could afford to pay. Some discussion revolved around the question of a housemother; the University Mother's Club had been contacted early in the organizational phase of the co-op to make curtains, but the ``mother's touch'' was a questionable virtue beyond that contribution. Hershey, a business major who would eventually become head of the San Francisco Volunteers for America' solved the problem by telling the co-op of Anne's situation. She was at that time employed as cook by a family in nearby Burlingame, and Willis secured those culinary services for the co-op by moving up their wedding date. This solution not only brought Barrington a cook, it brought Anne Hershey a rent-free room. She became the house cook, and her husband Willis took the equally vital post as house buyer.
Hershey's major tool in that position was also the major acquisition (after Barrington Hall, of course) of the student co-op. Twelve and a half dollars was spent on an old Model T truck, which he drove to the markets in Oakland before dawn every day, to return with fresh produce. The truck broke down on numerous occasions, necessitating seven a.m. rescue-Hershey missions by other co-op members, but it lasted two years, at which time a more reliable truck could be afforded.
The Hersheys and Davis weren't the only ``officials'' in the co-ops. Bill Spangle had returned from Clarksburg to be named the manager of the house. He was in charge of a houseful of independent men--he also had a serious problem on his hands related to the U.X.A. wood cutting project. As stated before, the students working for the U.X.A. had done so in exchange for points, which could be ``cashed in'' for produce during the school year. That produce turned out to be too low in quality for even the co-op to use, and the students were stuck with all the firewood chopped during the summer at Dixon. This was a serious problem; the Barrington membership had counted on the U.X.A. produce to help them through this first year.
Again it was the co-op's friend and mentor organization, Stiles Hall, that came to their aid, along with the Faculty Advisory Committee. Again advertising was brought into play to liquidate the surplus wood. Members of the U.C. faculty and other Berkeleyans were notified that the firewood was on sale at retail prices, and their response was enough to get all the wood, and all the U.X.A. points, converted into needed cash. The U.X.A. did provide lots of carrots, however.
Barrington Hall was not, though, simply a business enterprise. College students lived there and the building was unique for the fact that they controlled its operations as well. Bill Davis, the Stiles Hall ``liaison'' with the house, also served as house advisor, dealing with the standard curricular and extracurricular problems as they were brought to him. He also did quite a bit of talking to University officials, particularly Dean of Students Ed Voorhis, who was, according to Davis, largely responsible for the organizations success with the University Clubhouse Loan Fund. Faculty members would also come over and talk with the membership after being contacted by Davis or another member. Einerson of the Astronomy Department and a paleobotanist who showed slides of his discoveries in that field while in the. Gobi Desert were only two.
Pressures on the student body at that time were, of course, mostly financial, but the campus was Berkeley and Berkeley has never been far from controversy. Douglas Cruikshank was, in 1933 and '34, a student engineer transferred up from U.C.L.A. He became very active in the co-ops and in the Berkeley campus, and recalls one incident of a political nature which occurred while he was there. A student group wanted Eugene Debs, the main Socialist of the time, to speak on campus. Predictably, the first reaction from the lower echelons of the U.C. administration was a groan of Negation. Fortunately, the U.C. system was then blessed with Robert Gordon Sproul in its presidency. Sproul understood the political desires of students and recognized the necessity for dealing with them honestly. He allowed Debs to speak with the promise that he himself chair the discussion and that opposing views be given equal time to speak. ``As I recall','' Cruikshank said, ``it was no great thing when the event came off.''
Aside from politics, and far more common, as well as far better suited to the climate of the decade, the student body as a whole found recreation and relief from its academic and financial burden in campus activities (one of which, the Big C Circus, would later fall because of the student co-ops) such as dances, football games and so forth. Expense was kept far down, of course--as money still dominated the cares of the students, second in importance only to their studies, which promised future independent solvency.
The first year for the student co-op ended with solvency and independence becoming more of a possibility. The applications for both room and board and board only spaces in Barrington Hall had grown beyond the capacity of the Ridge Road house to handle. It was decided during the summer of '34 to lease a second house, at 2498 Piedmont Avenue to the east of the campus. This house was Sheridan Hall, again an old fraternity house whose Greeks had sought less expensive corridors. Fifty-seven roomers plus many boarders could be accommodated at this new location, which was considerably more ``luxurious'' by 1934 student standards than Barrington had been.
Sheridan's first members had another advantage besides the house. The Hersheys, Willis and Anne, who had been responsible for much of the success of Barrington's first year, moved to the new house in order to get it ready for its opening. They did such an extraordinarily fine job that it caused divisions of a sort to arise in the still new organization. Anne and Willis had arranged for beds to be put in prior to the entrance of any students--so there was an immediate ``luxury'' the cot-scouring pioneers on Ridge Road had done without. The beds were even made when the first Sheridan members--a young man by the name of Hal Norton among them--walked through the doors. Veterans of the opening pains of Barrington felt a bit slighted. They hid their no-doubt good natured resentment behind a righteous sheen of ``co-operativeness''--the Sheridan men had had ``too much'' done for them and this was bad for their cooperative spirit. Fran Smart expresses this dandified feeling aptly and revealingly: ''it seemed to take a little longer for these new members to acquire the feeling of 'belonging' to the cooperative group...the hardships which the early members of Barrington experienced proved beneficial in making the boys feel themselves an integral part of the unit.''
Actually the location of Sheridan Hall had as much to do with the membership's alleged ``snooty'' attitude as the condition of the hall when they moved in. Sheridan sat on the corner of Dwight Way and Piedmont Avenue, at the southern end of what was then a thriving fraternity row. These co-op members lived in another atmosphere than did the Barringtonians, whose house was flanked by Newman Hall, the University Catholic Chapel, and the immense Cloyne Court Hotel, which catered to a professorial clientele, And their attitudes were correspondingly different. In the early 40's Sheridan would become a political power base much as were the frats before that. Its members, according to David Bortin, whose life in Sheridan began a long history of involvement in the Berkeley co-op movement, were very active in student government. A President of the Associated Students of U.C. was elected from Sheridan, and another aspirant moved there in order to consolidate a political base prior to his own election. In Borton's phrase, ``Little Gentlemen'' thought of themselves as members of a co-op movement first. The reason for this sense of identity was not altogether ideological; as leaders who preached ``cooperativism'' to the membership always found, the theory never held much fascination for the great mass of students. Rather, the sense of involvement with a new and different system of living--a sort of socialism, a kind of quasi-communism--brought the two co-op houses and their memberships together far more than circumstantial advantage enjoyed by Sheridan split them apart.
The co-op now consisted of two houses, over 100 live-in members, and as many boarders. Bill Spangle managed Barrington and was, in effect, general manager of loose organization already known as the University of California Student's Co-operative Association. A Barrington veteran named Ken Eastman was manager of Sheridan. Money was being spent--the organization was growing. Complexity was on the geometric increase with every new member. The leaders of the U.C.S.C.A. turned in the organization's second year, to the legal questions of membership liabilities In the group's debts. Obviously a legal set-up was needed besides the loose ``general partnership'' that existed de facto. Under this system one house could be held responsible for the debts of the other; the group's liabilities could be charged to every member, an untenable situation. The liability of the individual member had to be limited; even the green young businessmen managing the U.C.S.C.A. saw that. A document was drawn up to be presented to the governing board, which was then composed of Spangle, Eastman, and the two house presidents, listing some alternative types of organization along with advantages of each. The general advantages of organizing were also given; they included not only the limitations of individual liability but also the central ``coordination of the houses in setting rates or placing members'', ``a common buyer so as to reduce food costs'', and ``to keep the houses from drifting apart'', an ambiguous statement.
Four different methods of organization were given, but only one was given more 'than one line of treatment: ``the inter-house organization which would be a corporation''. Barrington and Sheridan would continue to operate independently in their ``internal set-ups'' and member relations, but neither house would be financially responsible for the other's debts and the membership would be protected from unlimited liability. The Board of Directors would assume titular liability for all or the organization's debts.
The incorporation idea was approved in November of '34. Doug Cruikshank, who had been elected as Barrington's council president, was now elected to the presidency of the U.C.S.C.A. Board. Spangle was general manager. The legal work for the incorporation required the help of a senior law student at Boalt Hall, the U.C. law school; Cruikshank visited him often in getting the papers drawn up. When, they were signed by the Board of Directors the U.C.S.C.A. became a non-profit organization under the laws of California. The seven signers included Cruikshank, Spangle, and a young accountant/economist named Dudley Dillard from Barrington, Eastman and two other Sheridan members, Smith and Thomas Blakeley, and Fran Smart of Stiles Hall, the only non-resident member of the Board. Later a faculty representative was appointed, on request, by the President of the University.
The U.C.S.C.A.'s second year passed, and a change occurred in the management of the student co-ops, one that would have a sensational, almost fatal, but ultimately highly beneficial effect on the co-op. A non-student named R.O. Brown was hired as general buyer/manager of the organization. A one-time Cal football player, Brown was married and had been a building contractor before taking on the U.C.S.C.A. duties. An independent and ``hidden'' man, he had a gift of foresight and an eye for expansion of the system. It was primarily through his efforts that the organization gained its first real estate, and financial permanence.
The Lafayette apartment house, largest in the city of Berkeley, was located at 2315 Dwight Way, two block on the west side of Telegraph Avenue., Berkeley's major by-way. A trolley ran on tracks up and down Dwight; it was truly in the center of town. These apartments, located in a huge wood frame building spanning the block-width between Dwight and Haste, were owned by the Cerone family, whose sugar interests were very extensive in the area. Cerone was anxious to get rid of the Lafayette Apartments. Built in 1906 to harbor earthquake refugees from San Francisco, the wood frame itself shipped over from the stricken city (charred beams are still--in 1971--found there occasionally) was in sad condition. The owners were very willing to lease it to the U.C.S.C.A.
The building, despite its worn condition, was nonetheless a windfall. It could handle 200 live-in residents and any number of boarders. Like Sheridan, it had its own cook and kitchen. The large number of residents would double the capacity of the U.C.S.C.A.--or better, since the first hall, Barrington, was felt to be superfluous in the light of the new acquisition. The lease with the Sigma Nu owners was allowed to lapse and one--with very liberal terms--was arranged with the Cerone family. The new Barrington (it was decided that the name was worth the transfer) would require a great deal of alteration and maintenance--it was in violation of several articles in the city codes in its present state. The U.C.S.C.A. would earn its low rent by taking care of the rejuvenation of the building. Spangle and the other Ridge Road co-opers--excepting people like Doug Cruikshank who left--either graduated or in order to work--moved the co-op the two miles across campus and city to the hall's present site.
It is time for the story of the U.C.S.C.A. to focus inward onto a personal story, for anything that involved the co-op involved Larry Collins during the next few years of co-op history. Collins, like Cruikshank, had come to U.C. Berkeley from U.C.L.A. to finish his education, and like almost every other Cal student in July 1935 was immediately socked in by the ubiquitous financial disaster. There were no jobs, in other words. Collins got around this problem with a busboy's job at Ingram's Chow Parlor on Telegraph Avenue; hauling and washing pots and dishes brought him two daily meals. He did not toil alone. Another student, by the name of John Merchant, sloshed and schlepped alongside him. Merchant, who later went on to become a dentist, told Collins about Sheridan Hall, where he then lived, and Collins' interest was excited. The reputation of ``those communist houses up in Berkeley'' had reached him in L.A., and meeting a member of this strange organization intrigued him. Collins looked up Bill Spangle, the manager of Barrington Hall, and got a rundown on the group and the idea from him. ``Well,'' he remembers saying, ``sounds like you guys have a good idea.'' He asked Spangle about the possibility of acquiring a room-and-board job at the new house. Spangle conferred with Bill Davis, who had also moved, and finally offered Larry the job of running the night clean-up crews for his room and board. That a minor job like this was considered worth a full compensation is an indication of the amount of work the new Barrington was turning out to be.
The conversion job--Lafayette Apartments to Barrington Hall--was just underway when Collins joined the group. In 45 apartments the kitchens were removed and on the ground floor these apartments were knocked away altogether to prepare a lobby area. The building was, as said before, pretty rundown. Its exterior, though, featured all the ``classic gingerbread'': frescoes, columns. The interior was much the same way, with turned spokes on the stairway banisters, clear redwood paneling on the walls (which suffered from a cheap varnishing job), handsome and intricate cornish work. Each apartment door was inlaid with translucent glass along which inebriated or simply high-spirited members would from high time to high time rake their keys on a dead run back to their suites. Once back to those suites--which contained for the most part three rooms, two doubles and a single--these members may well have risked death to find sleep. The beds in new Barrington were not designed for the fidgetty.
Basically the beds were or two types. In what had been the living room of the old apartment, in what was now a room for two men, a wallbed, fronted by mirrors, could be folded down at bed time. The upstairs rooms featured a more unique sort of arrangement. There the beds were built into the wall itself, and covered with a rotatable drum. Spun towards the outside the bed was accessible from the room. Turned inwards, presumably by an occupant, the drum hid the mattress from the rest of the suite--but exposed the bedded to the elements, and a respectable drop to the pavement below if a toss or turn became to violent. Barrington never recorded any fatalities from this amazing sleeping arrangement--which is fairly amazing in itself. Apparently those early co-operators were as skilled as they were daring.
The most significant physical aspect of the New Barrington, as it was known for some years, was a rotunda near the center of the building running from the kitchen/dining room/lobby level straight up to the roof where it was capped by a skylight. According to David Bortin, ``a waterbag could be dropped from the third floor down to the bottom, and it was very dangerous to walk on that first floor.'' Despite this quality the rotunda, which was flanked by closed stairways, was a serious danger to the house--it was a veritable chimney--and one of the primary reasons it was later leased to the Navy.
But the house did not burn down in the 1930's and the rotunda was indeed invaluable for the recreational purposes Bortin described. Collins mentions that the waterbagging practice soon spread its soggy tentacles outward onto Dwight Way. ``One of the things that guys used to enjoy doing,'' he says, ``was waterbagging the dinky (streetcar) as it would go by. We developed all sorts of devices for doing this, and then we began to take in the general public: any pedestrian on either side of the street would get it if they didn't watch out. Finally the police would come along. In those days the guys didn't get uptight about it, they just quit.'' Rapport with the Berkeley Police Department has not, of course, remained on so congenial a level. Thirty years after Collins entered the co-op Berkeley initiated a statute against the throwing of waterballoons (bags having given way to progress): a waterballoon thrown from the Barrington roof through a policecar window is said to have been the clincher.
Barrington began in those early years certain weird traditions--unique to the house but common in kind to those developed by any living group anywhere. Unique to the times though, was a house rule that a phone call from the Bureau of Occupations--presumably a job possibility for a house member--took priority at the switchboard over a long distance call from one's mother across country. Any man with a new haircut had to go around the hall saying ``Vincie Rinctums'' to anyone he met; otherwise he got ticked on the head with a forefinger. Again the times were responsible--the idea was that any man who could afford a haircut didn't belong in the U.C.S.C.A. The office of the House Fink, an institution which remained an honor worthy of much campaigning every co-op year for the next twenty, was initiated. The Fink had the job of jester, or clown, among printable duties; he could violate the otherwise sacred serving order, for instance.
House traditions and recreations were not restricted to 2315 Dwight Way and environs, of course. It is claimed that members of the hall in the late '30's were responsible for destroying a vaunted Cal tradition, the Big C Circus. Held every four years, the Big C Circus featured a parade down Telegraph Avenue full of floats built by various living groups, classes, and other subcategories of the student community The parade preceded a carnival/sideshow in Edwards Field. For one of these circuses Barrington decided to enter a float. One must understand two facts about Cal student life and current events to appreciate the Barrington contribution. First, Berkeley and Stanford University were then, as always, involved in a sports rivalry. Second, Stanford's Hoover Tower had just been raised in honor of Stanford's most famous graduate. The Barringtonians, full of Cal spirit, gathered together all the trash--tin cans and the like--that they could find, stapled it all together into a vaguely phallic shape, balanced their sculpture on a flatbed truck, labeled it Hoover's Last Erection and rode this creation past the unamused gaze of Robert Gordon Sproul and the Berkeley administration. A member of that administration subsequently cancelled the Big C Circus.
Collins himself took little or no part in the construction of the famous float. But he saw the parade. In fact, he stood on the curb of Telegraph Avenue with his girl friend-whom he would later marry-and her mother. This latter lady was ``slow on the uptake'' and read the label/title slowly to herself before realizing just what it said.
Bill Spangle's position in the co-op was, socially, much more than just the house manager. He was the resident authority on ``cooperativism'' and the major voice raised for ``house spirit''--which involved attending football games, en masse, and included such extra activities as stopping and dismantling the Dwight Way streetcar at rally times. Spangle did not necessarily approve of such actions. He was head of the largest single social group in the house--men from the Sacramento area and American River Junior College, the same area whence came Spangle. But this group was no clique; others rose to co-op prominence as they gained experience. One of these who felt his fascination with ``cooperativism'' grow was Larry Collins. He rapidly became entranced with the co-op philosophy. The fascination, prevalent among many at that time, stemmed from the pragmatic qualities offered by the U.C.S.C.A. and from the uncertain era in which it grew. ``You get a lot of guys,'' Collins says, ``who are looking around, searching for some kind of an ideal to identify with; I happened to be in that situation during the time I was there so I got hung on the co-op idea.'' Co-op members were not generally so entranced. Collins has rueful memories of some of his and other enthusiasts' attempts to educate the masses. Like others attracted to the philosophy Larry spent hours researching texts by Warbasse and other ``cooperativists'' in the U.C. and Berkeley libraries. Barrington's management initiated, in 1936, a series of mandatory seminars or ``caucuses'' which all house members were forced to attend. At each of these Collins or Dudley Dillard or someone else would rise and read an essay about co-operativism--sometimes in a pretty preachy fashion. As a result these lectures did not go over too well. As they never have.
Inculcation of co-op virtues proceeded on all Barrington fronts. In February of 1936 was published the first issue of the house newsletter/egosheet. Edwin Dolder, the editor, made no attempt in his first ``Barrington Bull'' to pass on the co-op philosophy, but with its second ``volume,'' edited by Jesse Hess, a Warbasse quotation or some other aspect of the Rochdale principles was printed on the front page of every issue. The Bull, always a part of Barrington life, would lose its ideological tone (as well as its name--in 1938 the title was changed to The Barbarrington, and would undergo many such changes till the first name came back into style to stay) as would the Barrington managers. They found that the members were far more interested in liberal causes such as the trade union movement than in the ideological basis of their own organization. Sheridan members were part of a U.C. board which began a fair employment program, Fair Bear; Barrington supported this program, by hiring chefs from the union, after an intra-house debate that aroused far more interest than the cooperativism caucuses ever did. The co-op organization moved beyond itself for the first time--but simultaneously enlarged itself. A woman's hall, Stebbins, opened on Ridge Road in the early months of 1936.
The genesis of Stebbins Hall had its source in the activities of a man who would later become one of the U.C.S.C.A.'s most valuable benefactors, as well as one of the greatest educators in the history of the University of California, Clark Kerr. In 1935 Kerr was a graduate student directing a Works Progress Administration survey of the existing cooperatives in California. Another graduate, Jacqueline Watkins, handled the northern division of the project, and gathered information about the U.C.S.C.A. in the course of this duty. At that time, of course, there were two all-male houses. Watkins suggested to the Mortar Board Alumni, graduates of the senior honor society, of which she was a member, that they sponsor a women's co-op--a worthwhile project to draw the membership of that group together. The M.B.A. were enthusiastic and appointed Watkins as chairman of the committee of eight to househunt, a task they began in the fall of 1935. When the Ridge Road Inn, located near Euclid on Ridge Road, was offered for sale in the midst of an otherwise hapless search, the M.B.A. had its building. A thousand dollar rental deposit was secured from the University Loan Fund with the help of the U.C. Dean of Women, Mrs. Lucy Ward Stebbins. The University Y.W.C.A., sister organization to Stiles Hall, was utilized to collect applications and keep in touch with applicants after the need for a women's co-op was known; it was as intense as that for a men's unit had been three years earlier. Better than 130 applications were received for an 82-roomer capacity--which suddenly ceased to be a certainty. With a most uncooperative attitude the owners of the Ridge Road Inn suddenly demanded an immediate two thousand down payment towards the furniture in the building. Watkins heard about this during the Thanksgiving recess, when the other members of her committee were out of town. Dean Stebbins, contacted in cooperation, assured Watkins that the additional two thousand could be gotten out of the Loan Fund Committee, but the owners of the Inn would have to move their deadline back a ways. The owners did so, the Loan Fund Committee approved the additional money, the crisis was passed. Ridge Road Inn, renamed in honor of Dean Stebbins, opened as a co-op in January of 1936. The opening was a special event--a hundred-person tea party was held on the 26th of the month. The U.C.S.C.A. gained its third house--R.O. Brown, the co-op general buyer-manager, had given invaluable aid to Watkins and the Mortar Board Committee. In 1936, after three years of operation, the co-op organization had grown from 14 members to over 400, counting the many boarders eating at the three halls.
The opening of Stebbins provided not just another house or more members or sexual integration. It also provided the groundwork for economies and controls in the organization as a whole which would eventually lead to the central kitchen apparatus. The houses still retained their individual cooks. Jacqueline Watkins, in a 1935 article called ``Cooperation Goes to College'', listed the amount of food one house alone, Barrington, consumed in one semester: ten tons of meat, 30 tons of potatoes, 18,000 loaves of bread, 225 gallons of ketchup, 44,000 eggs, 160 pounds of bacon, 30,000 quarts of milk, 1350 quarts of ice cream...and so forth. Co-ordination and purchasing for all this produce was the responsibility of the Corporation Manager, Robb 0. Brown. In the two years that he had been in his position, Brown had done a splendid job. The organization had obtained New Barrington and Stebbins. The embryo of a true central organization had been conceived. Its growth, however, into a truly viable entity is Browns responsibility by less glorious though more critical events.
Barrington was in the midst of a financial crisis even as Stebbins was just entering the organization. In the center of the Barrington troubles was Larry Collins, who had ascended to the managers job in Barrington that January, after a climb up the responsibility ladder from the workshift and assistant house manager's posts. The spring semester of '36 was a milk run--but at the end of that semester, in the middle of May, the house officials discovered that they hadn't enough cash to meet the various financial commitments during the summer. Summertime has always been an economic crisis period for the student co-op, as can be expected for a college living group. Since that summer of '36 the organization has laid away money during the year to offset the lack of incoming funds during this dry period. But prior to then the rents had not continued for two years running--or at least expenses had not been so high. Also, the house was behind on its accounts payable for things already consumed. Barrington was in trouble.
The U.C.S.C.A. manager, Brown, decided to take a vacation just as this crisis was realized He had withdrawn money beforehand from the co-op account--his right as manager--to take this vacation, and the membership was none too pleased. The managers of the halls concurred with the other student leaders. ``There are certain responsibilities a manager's supposed to exercise,'' says Collins, recalling the students' objections, ``and if you don't have enough money to pay your bills you don't take money in advance and go off on a vacation. You stick around and try to solve the problem.'' The decision was made by the co-op board to fire Brown. Hal Norton, since February, the manager of Sheridan, delivered the message to Brown on behalf of the board.
This crisis was bad enough. The students had to come through with the necessary money to tide the U.C.S.C.A. over the summer, and the organization was not materially richer for being rid of Brown. The ex-manager did not help matters. Bitterly, he organized a meeting of the creditors of the U.C.S.C.A. at an Oakland hotel. To these men he proposed that they foreclose on the co-op by demanding their payment while the organization had no funds. Then they should appoint him as caretaker over the group and he would get their money back for them. It was, by the time the students knew of Brown's plans, the middle of the summer. School would be in session and students would be arriving in less than a month. It was the most critical moment in the life of the organization.
The students ran for help. The manager of the local Bank of America branch at that time was named Mohlenschardt, who knew of the Brown story and of the co-op problems, and he gave Collins, Norton and the others a sympathetic ear. He went to one of the creditors' meetings called by Brown--the U.C.S.C.A. has always owed the B. of A. money--listened to the arguments, and finally spoke out in a distinctive German drawl. He pointed out that no money could possibly come from the organization until students returned in the falls at that time the money would be forthcoming no matter if Brown was named caretaker/custodian of the U.C.S.C.A. or if the students were left in charge. Mohlenschardt assured his fellow creditors that the students were not out to ``bilk'' anyone--they were simply desperate. ``I for one,'' he said, ``want to support the students' position on this.'' He convinced the other businessmen who, once they knew the full story, decided to allow the organization time to pay off its summertime debts.
Collins and the other co-op leaders had learned their lesson from the troubles with Brown. Previously they had known nothing about accounting and they provided no reserve funds for depreciation or against the empty summer period. They set out to learn before another near-disaster could come upon them. Along with Lee Poole, the U.C.S.C.A. office accountant, Collins and Norton sought advice from professionals--an auditor was brought in to organize their books on the advice of Dudley Dillard, a Barrington economics major who had run a preliminary audit for the organization. (Dillard later became chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Maryland.) The professional auditors hired returned once a month for a year or so while the co-op leaders learned about the problems--taxes, deterioration and so forth--which any organization would encounter and must learn to command.
Successor to R.O. Brown as buyer/manager of the co-op was a once and future medical student named Ed Beebe. Beebe was known, liked and recommended by Stiles Hall liaison Bill Davis; he worked full-time as co-op buyer-manager for a year, during which time he also raised a family and attended pre-med at U.C. He graduated and, with enough money saved to attend med school, left. Larry Collins applied for the job and was appointed. He also married, in September of that year, 1937.
1937 was a quiet year for the student co-op. Collins was involved in the co-ops latest acquisition, an ``annex'' of Barrington Hall on Atherton. The food for this 24-man house, which ran for five years, was shuttled from the nearby larger house. In early 1938 an experimental central kitchen was begun there which lasted till summer. A truly organized central organization revolved about the axis of common purchase and distribution of food--and the young group needed that central planning. Collins as buyer/manager, took steps during that period to cement the U.C.S.C.A. to other cooperative endeavors--with the burgeoning Berkeley co-op. He spoke at a three-day camp held in Hayward during one summer on ``Youth Facing Life Under Capitalism''. In 1938 the idea of a central kitchen had occurred to him after visiting a co-op canneries in Washington and meeting a man at one of these, ``an old socialist from 'way back'', who was willing to supply the U.C.S.C.A. with cheap produce. This agreement was the first knotting of the student co-ops' ties with other cooperative movements in the United States, some of which Collins went on to work with and lead. After leaving Cal Larry worked for the government, the Berkeley Co-op and finally the Mutual Service Life Insurance Corporation, of which he is now west coast director.
Expansion had been the key word in the first five years of the co-op's life, and finding new houses to take the still growing number of applicants remained a high priority. The Atherton experiment convinced the board that a central kitchen was advisable in the organization by making possible a central control. Therefore, when the huge Oxford Arms apartment house at the west face of the campus came up for lease, a C.K. to feed every house but Sheridan, which still employed its own cook, was part of the plan the co-op had for the site. Oxford was leased before summer of 1938, and Hal Norton, then Sheridan's manager, was asked to get the building in shape to house 112 roomers and feed 600 co-opers. That summer Hal organized a crew to renovate the ``pretty well run-down'' building and add the central kitchen facilities. (Barrington already had a bake shop). The building had been around since the turn of the century and was in poor shape. Norton and his men did all they could--but never was Oxford Hall in its long and gore-filled history to receive University accreditation as approved housing. Approval by the university required things that Oxford's physical plant was just not capable of handling. Oxford's reputation as a house of another-sort-of-ill-fame did not follow its opening by much.
In the Fall in which Oxford began operations, under Norton's management, the U.C.S.C.A. took steps aimed at solidifying the various co-ops under a single aegis. The depression, while its presence was still felt, was no longer a desperate problem for U.C. students (after all, there was a co-op now); ``co-operativism'', the ideology, simply wouldn't do to keep the members united. Among other ideas to draw the organization together Collins and the others began an all-co-op newspaper modeled after Barrington's Barbarrington. Volume I Number I of The U.C.S.C.A. News appeared on October 24th, 1938, ``a publication,'' claimed the lead article, ``designed to create greater unity of purpose and action among the five houses of the co-operative association.'' Ed Wright, the editor, also handled the Barbarrington. That first issue featured a pretty standard newsish fare. Stebbins had a new housemother, Mrs. Eloise Dyer. Atherton chose its name insisting that no ``House, Hall, Lodge, etc'' follow its single-word title. The Women's Home Companion asked for photos from Stebbins to be used in an article on co-ops. Barrington defeated Bowles Hall, the University's castle-like dorm on Piedmont Avenue, in football, and also bought a set of new curtains. ``That the council was contemplating napkins embroidered with little birds and flowers was stoutly denied by the members of that august body.'' Most important of the stories in that issue, obviously, were reports on interactivities of the U.C.S.C.A. with other cooperatives: Barrington invited East Bay Co-operatives to hold meetings in the Dwight Way house, and an arrangement had been made with the newly founded U.C.L.A. co-op for Barringtonians to sleep there the weekend of a Cal-U.S.C. football game. Future issues dealt strongly with the relationship of the student organization with other co-ops; Collins was doing his job, a task which would find frustration later.
Norton found that his job was more difficult that he had expected. Financially, Oxford showed a definite deficit throughout the final months of 1938. In January of 1939 he reported that ``The first four months of operation a net liability of $503.67 had built up, but that another four thousand dollars was due to the organization from the opening of the hall.'' The Oxford Accent, the new hall's house newspaper, reported on January 24th that new boarders were the answer to Oxford's problems. By March 20th, the Accent reported, a profit of $5 had been built up. Oxford's financial doldrums were past.
That same issue of the Accent, however, found it necessary to editorially point out that the economic problems of America as a whole were far from solved. The author of the piece indicated the ``forces of reaction'' which had taken over Germany and Italy, and spoke of the fears of a second world conflict. That a reminder of the outside conditions had to be made is indicative of the change in student mentality that had come about in the five and a half years of co-op existence. No longer was the economic shambles of the western world an immediate part of student lives.
Oxford's first year was capped with the U.C.S.C.A.'s annual senior dinner on April 24th, an event which was supposed to be the first annual such affair. Robert Gordon Sproul, the President of the University, made the principal speech; Collins and Harry Kingman, who was soon to retire from Stiles Hall, also spoke. It had been a successful year, not only for Oxford, but for the U.C.S.C.A. as a whole.
From June 13th through the 15th Barrington hosted its first large-scale conference for other cooperatives. At first called a Western College Co-operative conference, the meeting was designed as an idea-exchange with members of other west coast co-ops. J. Stitt Wilson, who had been the first socialist mayor of Berkeley, spoke, along with a cooperativist named Robert Brady. The actual conference exceeded the hopes of the hosts; at the Pacific Coast Conference, as it was finally called, The Pacific Coast Student Cooperative League was founded by the 70 attendees from six universities and colleges. A temporary board of directors was chosen; Louanne Bartlett of Stebbins was named to chair it. Hal Norton assumed the secretary's post. The group decided to establish its headquarters in Berkeley, ask a dime per year dues of each member, and meet yearly-in Oregon in 1940. The P.C.L. also decided to apply for membership in the Co-op League of America.
The influence of the U.C.S.C.A. had thus spread. It had attained some business maturity. That summer of '39 the owners of Barrington Hall, the Cerone family, approached the U.C.S.C.A. Board with an offer. The building itself had become a liability to the Cerones and they were anxious to be rid of it. The offer was unique. From a total price of $45,000, the family wanted five thousand dollars down, with the remainder to be paid in exactly the same way as Barrington's rent had previously been paid. There was no argument that it was an invaluable deal for the co-op, as even then the building and land was assessed at being worth $78,000. But the board was reluctant to take such a vital step without general membership approval. They arranged for a postcard poll to be taken of the members, putting to them the question of whether or not the, group should buy Barrington. The response was affirmative; the deal was made. As the organization did not have the full five thousand dollars on hand to make the down payment, a two thousand dollar option was paid, and the rest sent in by the first of September.
According to Hal Norton the purchase of Barrington Hall was the true beginning of the viability of the University of California Student Co-operative Association:
That was the real beginning, because with that behind us...that meant we had had laid the foundation, economically and financially„ on which to support future expansion. With the appreciation of real estate it was possible for us always to refinance Barrington to secure funds to buy another unit.
The business aspects of the co-op, despite the Barrington real estate, were still dangerous by any conventional standard. The ratio of assets to liabilities in a solid business, according to those standards, is two to one. In the co-op's case that ratio was exactly the reverse. This situation wouldn't change for decades.
Certainly it did not change in 1940, a transition year for America as well as for the student co-op, a year marked by no special events save general growth away from the Depression towards something else. Assistant manager of Barrington Hall that year was Ted Johnston, a transfer to Berkeley from Santa Ana Junior College, who had in 1939 been the Barrington workshift manager. The next year, 1941, he was manager, and forced to deal with serious problems in the wood frame building then ending its 35th year of existence and its fifth year as a co-op.
The building had gone over to the U.C.S.C.A. in almost as poor repair as it had been in 1935. even though co-op members had put in much effort: adding a student store, a lobby, and a concrete floor for the building's smaller dining room. The wood frame was unchanged, of course--and the waterbaggers' paradise, the central open rotunda, also remained. A haven for practical jokers, the hall was a fireman's terror, and the possibility of a catastrophic fire was the house manager's greatest fear. ``I used to walk in the alley on the east side of the building,'' Johnston recalls, ``sometimes at night, really concerned because sometimes there'd be a fire in somebody's wastebasket--somebody's mattress would catch on fire. I think that was the thing that concerned me more than anything, was that the old building frame could just go up, burst in flame, and have a lot people lose their lives and all their possessions.'' Bill Davis recalled that some house members kept coils of rope under their beds as emergency escape measures.
Another problem that beset Barrington was four-legged. Rats attacked the Barrington and U.C.S.C.A. warehouses--both located on the ground floor of the building.
Such troubles were not new--but a University-and-U.C.S.C.A.-wide problem had appeared which heralded the start of a new era for University life and the student co-op. The war in Europe had already affected the American economy, and began to affect the enrollment at colleges. The ratio of women students to men steadily increased--as was the demand for housing for these women. The co-op met the increase by re-opening its first hall, 2714 Ridge Road, this time as a woman's house. The 36 woman membership decided to name the old Barrington Kingman Hall, and held a party at the opening. Harry and Ruth Kingman were special guests. The co-op would operate Kingman Hall until June of 1946.
The early years of the 1940's brought a considerable turnover in the co-ops, both in the membership and the management. Larry Collins left the U.C.S.C.A. in 1940 to be replaced for a relatively short period by Lee Poole, the co-op accountant. Hal Norton and Gordon Miner, the Barrington manager, applied to the Board for the buyer/manager's position. Norton's experience as manager of two houses, Sheridan and Oxford, and as a long-time member of the ``triumvirate'' of co-op leaders (Collins and Poole were the others) gave him in high enough esteem to win him the job. Miner went on to operate his own aluminum foundry in Long Beach.
When Norton became manager it was late '41. The coming war already had taken its effect on the U.C.S.C.A.: the turnover of the membership referred to above. Fewer men were going to school. Norton wasn't worried about this decline; ``it was apparent,'' he says, ``that we would be able to keep the organization going with women but not necessarily would be able to fill all of our units.''
The unit the organization would have the most trouble filling was Barrington, of course. The decline in male applications was felt most desperately there. However, the U.C.S.C.A. had opportunity to rid itself of a potential white elephant, while simultaneously gaining improvements, on the house for future co-op use. The United States Navy expressed an interest in leasing the house for the organization for a number of years to house workers from the Richmond shipyards. Bureaucratic red-tapery with local Naval representatives and Washington approvals became involved, as well as membership resistance, and the deal didn't come to a head until 1943. In the meantime the organization turned its attention to handling the positive aspect of the 1940's membership fluctuation--the increase in women applicants.
Purchasing houses had been begun with Barrington. It continued with the next addition to the roster of co-op houses, Sherman.
Located on Prospect Street near the California Memorial Stadium, in the midst of the fading Berkeley Greek colony, Sherman Hall was a sorority house whose owners were selling out. The house was an incredible bargain for the co-ops. The full purchase price was $21,000--for a good house in one of the best locations available--plus some six thousand dollars the U.C.S.C.A. paid for an addition to the building and renovations. The real estate acquisition of the business had a valuable property in Sherman Hall. The increase in women's applications had a solution, too. The new house could room 47 and board 80. The co-op increased its women's houses substantially during this time, leasing in 1943 a small, 16-woman house the Board named Rochdale, after the foundation place for the world co-op movement. The house lasted but two years the lease was dropped in 1945.
In 1942 the state of California, in the grip of war hysteria--recalling the erroneous report of Japanese bombers buzzing San Diego on December 7th, 1941--began the Japanese Relocation Program, the low mark in America's relations with its minorities. Under the program west coast citizens of Japanese ancestry, forced to leave their homes, were placed in quasi-concentration camps east of the state. Berkeley had a large Nisei community, U.C. students many of them. The primary Japanese organization on campus was the Japanese Students Club located in a two-story building on Euclid Street around the corner from Stebbins. The students were stuck with a building they could not use--a financial liability compounded over the relocation troubles. The student co-op had ties with the Japanese Students, mutual members and dealings with the administration. George Yasa-koshi, who would become assistant manager of the U.C.S.C.A. in the late '40's and later head of the Berkeley Consumer's Co-ops was among these common members. The co-op heard the J.S.C. problem and agreed to take over the rent. David Bortin remembered the feelings of the Board members:
The student co-op felt pretty noble about it; maybe they were pretty noble, to undertake to relieve them of that house and that obligation at a time when nobody else was willing or able to do it. The whole university population was going down drastically, yet the student co-op agreed to take over that house and operate it. I think they felt pretty good about it. They felt they-were rising above prejudice even in the middle of wartime.
A renewable lease was taken on the Clubhouse, which the U.C.S.C.A. dubbed Lexington Hall and filled with 31 men at first. After 1943, until the building was returned to the Japanese in 1948, Lexington became a women's hall. Hal Norton's future wife became its manager.
The crunch on men's housing made itself fully felt in 1943. The owners of Sheridan Hall, from whom the co-op had rented the house for nine years, decided to close the hall. David Bortin lived there at the time, and described the residents' reaction as one of resignation:
It was clear that it just wasn't economically feasible to keep it open, and I think that the only choice available was to put it on central kitchen. Most of the people who were loyal to the house felt that something in violation of Sheridan's traditions would be worse than having it close.
The U.C.S.C.A. let the Sheridan lease lapse and the Piedmont house passed from the co-op fold.
Bortin, a rare new Cal student, moved down to Barrington in the summer of '43, the last summer in the 1940's the house was to host co-op members. Officials from the city, the national government and the U.C.S.C.A.'s own central level were conspiring to get this potential financial white elephant--the building even looked like a white elephant to the lyrically minded--out of the U.C.S.C.A. for the duration of the male student dearth. The central co-op board was of course anxious to accept the offer of the Navy, working through the Home Owner's Loan Association, to lease Barrington for seven years. According to Bill Davis, then in his fifth year as Stiles Hall representative on the co-op board, several loyal members of Barrington were dead set against leaving the hall. ``The fellows...figured that they could figure out some way to keep the place afloat, without going down the tubes financially. They also resented the collusion between the co-op officers and the city officials.'' The Board had, at that time, but four applications for the house in the coming year--and, of course, the house was in desperate need of repair. The Navy's proposed yearly rent was, according to Norton, minimal at $640--but they promised to completely renovate the hall, and save the house from condemnation by the city.
City authorities were in fact the best friends the co-op central level and the Navy had in their campaigns to get the hall rented. The building inspector of the city of Berkeley was a man named Harry Cobden, who had the heat on the co-ops over the condition of Barrington Hall. As said before, the building was a tremendous fire hazard. The inner rotunda would act as a veritable chimney in case of any fire; wind would suck through the building and control would be impossible. There were no fire walls. Cobden's pressure on the board to do something about the house was welcomed by Norton, Davis and the others, and Davis believes that the leaders exaggerated Cobden's objections to the Barrington loyalists: ``but it was perfectly evident,'' he says, ``that if we didn't get those guys out of there, get this thing leased to the government we were going to lose Barrington Hall.''
The argument convinced the faithful. Reluctantly those who wished to remain in the co-op moved to Oxford, the only remaining men's house except for Lexington, which would soon convert to female residence. A decade of student-owned and controlled housing closed with Barrington Hall. The organization had, to say the least, come a long way. It had begun with fourteen students in a loose group. It had grown to 60, to 120, to almost 400, doubled that, lost almost all of its men, came down to 325. It had learned the basics of administration and accounting. It had purchased property to secure its future.
At the beginning of its second decade the U.C.S.C.A. entered a stasis in expansion, as it waited for World War II to end and for the new situation in student life, still unknown, to come.
The co-op, in the last two years of World War II, waited for the G.I.'s to return home and again fill their houses with students, but they didn't simply mark time. Although the male population of the University--and, therefore, the U.C.S.C.A.--was at its lowest in history, the co-op still found opportunity and reason to expand its facilities. It is interesting to note that the only non-Berkeley house ever operated by the U.C.S.C.A. was done under wartime conditions, and by a Board of Directors chaired and mostly composed of women. (Not only were several Board Presidents women, one was a freshman.) Whether the Buena Vista unit opened on Baker Street in San Francisco is merely a reaction to the needs of the time or a reflection of the organization's consistent desire to gain more houses, expand itself is a matter of pure conjecture. The question itself is reasonable: the U.C.S.C.A., then strapped for funds, opened a house thirty miles from its central office, with its own kitchen and chef, of course, servicing an entirely different clientele--medical students from the U.C. Med Center and some Hastings Law School attendees. The house lasted as a co-op unit for thirteen years, resold in 1957 as a financial burden to the organization, inadequately maintained.
The co-op's central office had been located in Barrington Hall on Dwight Way, but with the arrival of the Navy Hal Norton had to move his office. A small building near Telegraph Avenue on Bancroft Way, the southern boundary of the University campus, was appropriated for central office use. With the organization of the co-op bureaucracy a paid staff had become necessary, but it consisted mostly of part-time workers, secretaries and a warehouse manager, in support of Norton, who kept the co-op books and assembled the whole apparatus.
The board of the U.C.S.C.A. had also undergone change. Prior to the start of the war, the manager and president of each member house had served on the governing body. Just as the war began Joe Bort, the President of Barrington Hall, suggested a plan where each house elected a number of representatives according to the house population. The Board members increased in number as the Board, presumably, sustained its democratic auspices.
The single event which stands out in the U.C.S.C.A. in '44 was a fire that began one night in the living room at Stebbins Hall. Nobody was hurt seriously, but the entire facade of the building was damaged. Renovation improved the public facilities at Stebbins--a whole new living room had to be constructed.
Preparing for the inevitable influx of ex-G.I.'s in early 1945 turned out to be more difficult than Norton and the others figured; no houses seemed to be for rent in Berkeley at that time. A house did come on the buyer's market that provided not only a good co-op unit but territory for expansion. Located atop a site above Euclid on Ridge Road, this large handsome house was the property of a millionaire builder's widow named Ellis who allowed her son, a teacher of biology and botany at the University of Kansas, to use the building when he wanted. She handled the family business and it was from her that the house was bought.
The house itself was a good find at a time when the influx of men was on a steady rise, but the land that went along with it gave the purchase the status of a godsend for the co-op organization. Containing 13000 square feet overlooking the U.C. campus and San Francisco Bay, the property was, except for the relatively small Ellis building and a small carriage house behind it, undeveloped. In such a great location development--in terms of new housing--was inevitable.
The U.C.S.C.A. was obviously in no position financially to construct a building of its own in 1945. Accountants brought in by Hal Norton to ascertain the economic viability of the organization still made the same report to the co-op board as they had for years: ``You're bankrupt. You just don't know it.'' What the accountants meant was that the co-op's ratio of assets to liabilities was still less than two-to-one--in fact, it was the obverse. By any sane standard of finance, the organization was doomed; bankrupt. But the U.C.S.C.A. was not a capitalist organization. It survived despite itself, and by planning on a future where construction could occur.
One of the qualities in its favor was luck--or so it seemed from the price Mrs. Ellis asked for the Ridge Road property. She wanted $37,500. The co-op leaped to the purchase. They had to expend an additional $16,000 on renovations--part of which went to converting the old carriage house in back into a central office facility. When the renovations were done 51 men could be accommodated in its rooms, and of course many more as boarders.
Among the early roomers at Ridge House, as the new buy was called, was David Bortin, returned from a stint in khaki to try life in the co-ops again. The number of old friends met astounded him. ``I was amazed,'' he said, ``at how many people I knew in Berkeley...and so I did decide to come back to Cal.'' Bortin did not remain in Ridge House more than one semester. After that he lived in Oxford again, for a little while, before moving to the 1946 addition to the co-op houses, Cloyne Court.
The Cloyne Court Hotel had stood on Ridge Road between La Loma and Leroy for several decades, servicing an older, professorial clientele. As with many of the co-ops, Cloyne came to the U.C.S.C.A.'s attention because the building's maintenance had deteriorated beyond the owners' capacity to take care of it. Sale was the only way out for them, and cheap sale at that. The co-op always had plenty of cheap labor available to renovate the houses and was usually anxious to buy. Cloyne Court was another good purchase, anyway. A large building, it could house 150 men and board many more--its suites were clustered around several small stairwells--which would alleviate noise problems and aid privacy. It had an expansive courtyard, a fairly large kitchen, a lobby with a switchboard, and beautiful landscaping. Best of all it had an incredibly cheap price tag for a four-storied hotel: $115,000 plus $10,000 for the furnishings--which, although minimal, was a challenge to the co-op. Cash reserves were low thanks to the purchase of Ridge House. For the first time a major appeal to the U.C.S.C.A. alumni was made, to help the co-op pay the $435,000 down payment. A month's effort produced $30,000 in personal loans--an indication of the financial vitality of the U.C.S.C.A. Most perplexing of all, Cloyne Court had already established residents--professors and professors emeritus who had lived there, with their families, for years, and whom the U.C.S.C.A. was not anxious to summarily evict. Not many of these people had an immediate place to move. Secondly, their rent helped the organization over the financial hump represented by the $125,000 cost of the building. None of the old residents were evicted therefore, and when fifteen co-op men moved into Cloyne Court in August of 1946 they moved into the finest accommodations ever enjoyed by co-op members.
David Bortin was one of that privileged vanguard, who moved in among the private tenants. The students that first semester were served the same fare in the same manner as the rest of the denizens--on tables covered with white tablecloths, and so forth. Bortin remembers his fellow Cloynefolk well. ``I waited tables on these people and I found many of them fascinating. One of them was Professor Stratton. He was the man who ruined his eyesight in an experiment by putting on glasses which inverted everything in his eyes, and after a couple of weeks got so he perceived things as being right side up that way, then took off the inverting glasses, and everything looked upside down to him. This was a landmark psychological experiment in his day: Stratton was then in his 90's; according to Hal Norton, he and his wife were the last of the early Cloyne residents to leave. He was not the only noted faculty member at Cloyne Court. A Professor Ballantine, ``the father of California corporation law'' was there, and gave the new management, led by an ex-sailor named Myron Haas, no end of trouble with his complaints. Said Borton:
You can just imagine a bunch of college kids moving into a place that had been quiet resident apartments for older professors and their families...the kind of noise level changes that occurred, the amount of complaints there were, threats to call the police...and here they were complaining to the landlord about people who were themselves the landlord.
It was a very delicate diplomatic thing for Hal. On the one hand he did not want to lose the tenants. On the other hand these kids who were moving into the house were cleaning it up and building up, because the place needed constant maintenance and Cloyne had not had any in years. There was a lot of hammering going on in addition to the beer busts and the 24-hour bridge game--and so it was a delicate thing at that point, making the transitions that needed to be made.
Haas, the first Cloyne manager, had been chosen by Bortin and other members of the co-op personnel committee. Shortly after co-op people began to move in, replacing the previous residents, a council was elected in the age-old living group manner, and Cloyne Court was underway as a co-op. There was some discussion about renaming the building ``Poole Hall'' after Lee Poole, was one suggestion. The name ``Collins Hall'' was put onto a house constitution, but Cloyne Court remained the official title.
``Everything in 1946,'' Bortin recalls, ``was veterans.'' Indeed the U.C. campus had grown a wartime low of about 20% men to a postwar total of almost three-quarters male. Bortin estimates that 80% of these men were attending school on the G.I. Bill. ``It was really a veteran's campus. A very heterogeneous campus in other respects. But that was the great golden age of the Ordinary Great Building American Middle Class. That was the great time when college education became the norm. Before World War II it wasn't. Before then it was the privilege of either a financial elite or an intellectual elite where the motivation for college was so strong that they overcame all kinds of obstacles in order to get it. This was where the co-ops had their inception in the 30's, to enable that kind of person, who otherwise couldn't possibly manage it, to go to college. With the G.I. Bill college became the norm.''
Another thing besides G.I. experience the '46 students shared was a general earnestness about school--that much remained unchanged since 1933. Politics was, as always, a common Berkeley activity, with the dominant mood divided between a ``Back-to-Normalcy'' conservatism and radical ideas on the shape of the postwar world. There was no political activism of the overt, physical sort--the only violence of any significant sort occurred at football games, when Cal students reacted to their team's usually disgusting performances by ripping up seats and hurling them onto the field.
The housing shortage caused by the veteran's return was not solved by Cloyne Court and Ridge House alone. Board members of the U.C.S.C.A. sought other means to put up all the applicants. Bill Davis, by then eight years married and still Stiles Hall representative to the Board of Directors, was involved in one abortive project dealing with surplus Navy barges then in mothballs at nearby Port Chicago. These barges had stainless steel kitchens and facilities ideal for a floating co-op. The first deck had a huge mass hall, the second quarters for the men, with officers' or managers' rooms at one end. ``We got awfully excited about this.'' Davis said, ``We learned that we could get these things for nothing... We went up and inspected them two or three times with the head of the U.C. Naval department, Captain Bruce Canaga, who was very much interested... Our idea was to bring them down and board them at the Berkeley Yacht Harbor somehow. We would hook-up facilities, water and so on, and run these things as long as we needed them in order to get over this critical housing shortage.'' Norton and Davis figured out that the co-op could run the barge-co-ops for $35 per month per person, room and board. It was also figured that disposal of the barges after the crisis was over would be no trouble. They could be sailed out to sea and scuttled, if need be.
The deal itself was scuttled because of an uncooperative, indeed competitive, attitude on the part of the University. U.C. had just built a veteran's center in Richmond and officials feared that the co-op barges would siphon applicants from it, and put pressure on city officials. They in turn pressured the co-op with such city type weapons as fire protection and drummed-up sanitation objections, all of which could have been solved. The barge idea never came off.
The 1946 run-in with U.C. was a low incident in the history of encounters between U.C.S.C.A. and the University whose students they served. The University itself was just beginning to move in to the student housing/field with the Richmond center and the ``temporary'' Smyth-Fernwald dormitory complex to supplement Bowles Hall. But throughout the thirteen years of co-op existence the organization and the University had kept a wary eye on one another. While administrators such as U.C. President Sproul and Deans like Ed Voorhis and Lucy Ward Stebbins had given great aid to the group in its fledgling period, other, more visible members of the U.C. bureaucracy looked at the co-op askance. As the University system had no chancellors at that time, these men held great influence, and owing to their own pre-Depression background were inclined, at the start of the U.C.S.C.A., to withhold their trust of what must have seemed to be a most radical and socialistic organization. Norton and the others ``couldn't get in any doors''; only because of the large amount of faculty support, Hal says, was the U.C.S.C.A. of the '30's--and even the '40's--able to pass the bureaucratic gauntlets relatively unscathed.
Members of the agricultural economics department and the law school were, in Norton's words, ``responsible in part for the growth of the U.C.S.C.A.'' Many famous members of these and other departments served on the co-op Board by presidential appointment--on the request of the co-op members. Among them were Alexander Kidd, who never missed a Board meeting in his time on it, and William Lloyd Prosser, a law professor recognized as the international authority on tort law. These men are examples of the outstanding talent that sat in the faculty seat on the U.C.S.C.A. Board--and helped the organization through its bureaucratic hassles. Later Monroe Deutsch, Provost of the entire University system would sit on the Board, and later still Clark Kerr would change the bureaucratic view of the co-op through his influence. But in 1946 the University's attitude towards the U.C.S.C.A., while not hostile, was one of tolerance. As Ted Johnstone, now a University official pointed out from his both-sides perspective, the officials could have applied enough pressure on the city to shut down the organization had they wished.
Dissention of a sort erupted in the co-op two years after the barges incident, when Lexington Hall ceased to be a viable co-op and the Board decided to return it to the liberated Japanese. There was some controversy about whether the Euclid building should reopen as an ethnic clubhouse. Among those in opposition to this was Bill Davis, who felt that segregation from the community as a whole would be detrimental to the Japanese, as well as to the whole student body.
Some of us took the view that since the relocation had opened the local ghettoes up and gotten the Japanese out of their traditional occupational limitations that we shouldn't rebuild these things back into society--take advantage of the relocation. But there were interests in the Japanese community that took another point of view. They felt that the Japanese kids needed a place to meet other Japanese kids. They also said that they would make an effort to see that the clubhouse was not a segregated place, that people who weren't Japanese could go there. But as it turned out it became at the end a segregated unit.
The return of the house, however was a gesture of good will which would help the U.C.S.C.A. over one of its most aggravating situations a score of years later. The 1948 hassles were settled with its return and quickly forgotten as troubles with a more direct effect on the co-ops appeared in the closing years of the '40's.
In 1948 the hysteria of the McCarthy era was just building up steam, and though rightwing paranoia made itself felt on the U.C.S.C.A. in a small way, it permanently changed the organization. Years later a loyalty oath controversy would split the co-op as it split the campus and country, but in 1948 a conservative California legislature passed a law prohibiting the use of the title ``University of California'' in the name of any private organization. Reactionary Berkeley administrators pushed the co-op to drop the title, just as Stiles Hall, which called itself the University of California Y.M.C.A., came under pressure, Norton and the co-op Board resisted these demands. They felt that they were idiotic and that submission to these forces would compromise the co-op principle. However, the issue was recognized as little more than a ``damned annoyance'' and, like Stiles Hall, the U.C.S.C.A. made the change, through amendment of the Articles of Incorporation. Now the organization was simply the University Student's Cooperative Association...which, since students from local schools such as Laney and Merritt Colleges sometimes lived at the co-op, was probably a more apt title anyway.
May of '48 produced a financial bargain for the U.S.C.G., in the form of an offer from the Cerone family. They offered the residuum of the co-op's lease on Barrington Hall, which still had some years to run, for $16,000. The purchase meant no end of good things for the co-op and was quickly made. Though the house was still in the hands of the Navy, complete ownership meant that the hall could be regained and reconverted back to co-op use a full two years sooner than expected. The fully renovated house was again changed from apartments to a co-op and residents moved into the house in September of 1950.
The Barrington renovation was handled by a San Francisco architect named Timothy Krueger. Highly respected in his profession, he had been engaged by the Navy to redesign the building, yet had worked with Norton as much as with his official employers. The result was a hall that seemed built for the co-op when it came back into its hands. The woodpanel exterior had been replaced by fireproof white stucco. The chimneylike rotunda in the center of the building, bane of fire inspectors and joy of waterbaggers, was gone; two curved walls in two warehouse closets and many soggy memories were all that remained. The three residential floors now had firedoors in the middle of their block-width long hallways, The roll-drum and foldout beds were gone--to the relief of Norton, Davis, and others who wondered how fatalities had ever been averted while the roll-drum beds were in use. 148 roomers and thirty boarders came into the physically improved facility--which, to the dismay of its old alumni, never renewed the pre-war traditions. It was a different generation, however: veterans being joined by students who, like them, had been children during the depression and shared their desire for security. It was at this point in the history of American campuses that engineer domination came into being. Seriousness about studies was again the keynote of a student's life, though finances were generally in better shape.
One further purchase, one further change in the U.S.C.A. houselist was to occur before the beginning of the organization's third decade. In the spring of 1953 the Campus Inn, a building with space for 63 women, came onto the market. Located only one lot down from Stebbins Hall, the U.S.C.A. paid $50,000 for the land and furniture as well as the building. It was eventually named Alice G. Hoyt Hall in honor of that lady's massive aid to the co-op. Hoyt Hall would be the last physical addition to the U.S.C.A. for six years, and the last permanent one until 1960. But with Hoyt's purchase the U.S.C.A.'s financial assets reached close to $600,000 as opposed to $250,000 liabilities--booming health for an organization like the co-op. An experimental coeducational house was set up at Hoyt that summer.
That same year, 1953, the Backstrand-Levering bill was passed into state law after a vote in its favor by the California people. It stated that any non-profit organization claiming local or state tax exemption had to file a statement saying that it did not advocate the violent overthrow of the state or federal government, or advocate support of a foreign government against the United States in event of hostilities.
It was a loyalty oath, in other words, and it split Berkeley like a dry stick.
A state campus such as Berkeley considers whatever scholarly independence it can goose away from the governing administration invaluable; it was a seat for every political opinion known, and a loyalty oath was repugnant to many of its faculty and administrators, and most of its students. McCarthyism's poisons had not avoided the campus as they seeped down through the levels of American life, and many members of the U.C. bureaucracy and faculty believed that such a measure was a rightful weapon for the state in its fight against sedition: U.C. was then split, and it was not a friendly schism. Accusations were leveled of communist or fascist sympathies, reputations were slandered, and it was feared that damage to the University's academic reputation would be inevitable.
The U.S.C.A. felt the wrench of division, as well, as its members debated the oath issue for months on end in 1954. As a non-profit organization it was liable to lose a year tax exemption if it failed to sign the loyalty oath. The first two weeks of March howled with the issue in the organization. A ``fact finding'' committee was appointed by the U.S.C.A. Board to ascertain the sentiments of the membership at large. The findings of this committee were discussed at a hearing held on March 3rd, which recommended that as little publicity be given the issue as possible by the U.S.C.A., and that all statements from the Board on the issue go through the co-op's public relations committee or a special committee set up by the Board for this purpose. Most importantly, the fact-finders recommended that a plebiscite be held of the entire membership as soon as possible.
Bob Shephard, a co-editor of theU.S.C.A. News, spelled out in the March 10th issue the ``dire implications and consequences'' waiting for U.S.C.A. members if the oath went unsigned: ``We count among the majority of our members science majors--students of chemistry, physics and engineering who hope in the next four years to be working for the government. Quite a few are already working in the government radiation, atomic energy, and microwave labs here on campus. A goodly number are criminology majors who look forward to steady positions with state or federal offices such as the F.B.I....few, if any of us, could afford to be labeled as members of a subversive organization.'' Shephard did not advocate signing the oath, but diagrammed the alternatives a membership plebiscite would be offered: ``whether or not to sign, and if the decision is not to sign, whether or not to fight the case in the courts.''
A special Board meeting to discuss the issue was called at Ridge House on March 11th. At that time the deadline for signing the pledge was believed to be March 15th, but at the meeting Professors Prosser, Kidd and Kragen of the Boalt Hall Law School advised the Board that a decision could be put off until November 1st, four and a half months after the U.S.C.A.'s fiscal year closed. The directors agreed in enormous relief that the issue could wait until fall for a decision; in the meantime, the legal brains of the organization, including Manager Norton, who was then in his third year of law school, were to continue to look into the law's procedures and demands. Not until the following October did the oath again command the attention of the U.S.C.A. Board.
Its return to the public eye, however, was marred by even stormier controversy than the previous March. The Board met on October 14th, and although it was still agreed that the membership as a whole should decide the question, the directors felt an obligation to the organization and themselves to make a recommendation. They argued the issue until 2:15 the morning of the 15th, the longest Board meeting to date, and recommended by a seven to five majority that the organization stand up for its principles and not sign the oath. In actuality, the co-op principles per se had little bearing on the question of the pledge. Neutrality in political matters is one of the basic Rochdale doctrines, but nothing of a specific political nature was involved. The co-op had a choice between obeying its members' sense of outraged ethics or the retention of a tax exemption and status as a non-seditious institution. On November 1st ballots were distributed to the eight co-op houses--Oxford, Ridge House, Cloyne, Barrington, Sherman, Stebbins, Hoyt and Buena Vista, which was still in use. Not surprisingly the membership did not share the defiant spirit of the Board. Each house but Sherman gave a better than 60% yes vote to signing the loyalty oath, and at that Prospect House the majority--52.9% or 27 out of 52 girls--voted to sign. Better than 70 of that 86.4% voting of the U.S.C.A. membership was in favor of the action. Accordingly, the then-President of the U.S.C.A. Board, Manley Horowitz of Barrington, was formally instructed to sign the oath for the organization.
Despite this, the U.S.C.A., and Cal students generally, remained opposed to any sort of loyalty oath. Sentiment to officially act against California's Assembly Bill 1215, an anti-sedition property tax measure that came up the next March, therefore must have been strong, but as the aforementioned Rochdale Principle stated, and the U.S.C.A.'s twelfth bylaw reinforced, the organization forbade itself from taking part in any political question to which it was not definitely related. As the co-op did not enjoy a property tax exemption, Bill 1215 could not be officially opposed. Part of the reason the U.S.C.A. didn't forget its statutes--and very rarely did so--was Bill Davis, Y.M.C.A. Board Rep:
I always did take the position on the Board that I think that the U.S.C.A. as an organization has no business getting involved in a partisan way on issues that are not directly related to its life as a cooperative organization. There are always people who want to breach that principle, who felt there was some mitigating reason, always some great pressure, some tremendous need for us to abandon that principle in a given situation...I have on occasion on the Board argued against the U.S.C.A. taking a position on an issue that my own organization, Stiles Hall, would take a position on...I think that when you have a consumer's organization with a certain job, and it gets involved in partisan issues not related to its job in a pretty direct way, then you run the risk of dividing your constituency--of alienating somebody, losing somebody, and making your job difficult...and under certain circumstances you could wreck the organization.
It was 1954. The co-op had two decades of age; with little fanfare, the organization slipped into its third...a time of maturation for the U.S.C.A. and the student body it served.
The ``Silent Generation'' was in college in 1954. They were post-war students--teenagers at the time of World War II ineligible for the benefits of the G.I. Bill. McCarthy-ism had come, was there, would pass. Eisenhower was president. The peculiar status quo of the conflict sans bloodshed was on the world and people pulled into themselves out of sheer boredom with the outside world.
Dan Eisenstein came to Cloyne Court in 1954, a ``red-hot'' escaping from a claustrophobic secondary existence. On his first day in Berkeley, Eisenstein visited every building on campus to acquaint himself on the locations of bathrooms and so forth. ``This is my home,'' he said. Not every new Cal student had such lyrical feelings, but it was generally true that they were another new generation in the university's history. Great events like World War II and red scares had grazed but not punctured their consciousness. The Depression, the state of life which had given birth to the USCA and to the college generation of Hal Norton and Bill Davis, was, for some, a childhood memory. For many more it was a fact of pre-birth history.
The co-op was twenty years old and had several houses, each with a life of its own. Eisenstein recalls them:
Oxford was the haven of the communist part of the co-op. Oxford was the anarchists. Oxford was the home of the Tibetan Brigade. When Tibet was invaded by China, and it army wiped out, some guys started raising money to go to Tibet to fight the Chinese. Sherman was the Queen of the co-ops. Pretty girls at Sherman. Stebbins and Hoyt, a brand new place when I got there, were sort of not much anything. They were just around. They weren't exciting places to live... people went into them not out of choice. Cloyne was exceptional. Cloyne was not like Oxford, Cloyne was not like Barrington, Cloyne was not like Ridge.
Unlike many of the other houses, the brown mammoth near the crest of Ridge Road had an older, more experienced population. It was most of the Korean War veterans in the organization.
By and large these guys...got into things like engineering, instead of history or political science. When I came to Cloyne, the average age was around 23 and about 25% of the house was graduate students. We had the highest grade point average on campus almost every year for the first four years I was there. We won the University intramural sports championship three out of the first five years... There was an awful lot of house spirit. There was a lot of real feeling that this was our place and we were all very involved in it and very proud of it.
The membership had developed a distance from the leaders of the U.S.C.A.
The co-op as a whole had exactly the same problems as the co-op does now: nobody trusted the central organization, nobody knew much about the central organization. The whole operation rotated around Hal Norton. Hal Norton and Bill Davis were simply the central mass around which the flags waved. They'd been there all along and a lot of kids tended to defer to them. It was obvious that Hal was devoting his entire life to the organization, with a hell of a lot less compensation than he could've gotten elsewhere.
Hal, who had recently gained his law degree, had guided the U.S.C.A. through some difficult times in his twenty years with it. He had built its property holdings in a continuous attempt to insure future co-op growth. In 1995 Hal began negotiations with the University on possible development of the organization's most important piece of real estate: the property adjunct to Ridge House on which the carriage-house central office was then located. The University's involvement was almost a prerequisite for any construction on the site.
First of all, U.C. owned the property next to the U.S.C.A. lot, a block long slice across Hearst Avenue from the campus. Plans were underway to build a five hundred car garage there. The U.S.C.A. had, since it obtained its property in 1946, sought to convince the University of the efficacy of low-cost student housing on the Hearst site which would take in not only the University and U.S.C.A. properties but that of the Wilson family on Scenic Road which adjoined both.
According to a Spring 1956 Prospectus published by the U.S.C.A., the University had discouraged the organization from its idea, saying that the property was ``ear-marked'' for future University dorms. U.C. later changed its mind and decided to invest in high-rise block units on the south side of the campus. ``Because of the immensity of the University development,'' said the Prospectus, ``the decision was no doubt a wise one, but this does not imply that the north side property is undesirable for housing.'' With some bitterness, the study mentioned the lack of encouragement given the co-op by the University. However, ``while no change has been made in the University plans, the U.S.C.A. has been invited (a) to assist the University in its attempt to solve the parking problems, if possible, and (b) to make specific counter proposals for the use of the Hearst Scenic property.''
The Prospectus was such a counter-proposal, and after delineating the increased need for student housing, the study gave three proposals for the U.S.C.A. use of the three Hearst-Scenic-Ridge properties of the U.C., the co-op and the Wilson family. ``Our thought,'' it said, ``is that the land...could be developed in three stages, ultimately accommodating 1070 students.'' In the first phase out of the University property adjoining the Ridge land would be made available to the co-op for construction of several large buildings: a 500 student dining hall, a 310-student double-roomed dorm, a central office, warehouses and, most importantly, a central kitchen. Nobody had ever been satisfied with the cramped, unsanitary hole-in-the-wall at Oxford.
``In fact,'' said the report, ``University and City officials have constantly been exhorting, even admonishing us, to implement our frequently affirmed promises to erect a new kitchen.'' The second stage of development would involve the demolition of Ridge House to clear the way for another dorm unit for 230 students, and would take place totally on the present U.S.C.A. property. Stage III of the plan was the most uncertain part of the plan. Requiring purchase of the Ridge-Scenic Wilson land, it called for dormitory units for another 530 students and another 500-man dining room.
Funds for this project would come from three sources: mortgages on the constructed buildings, loans from alumni and funds borrowed on the present U.S.C.A. property. The reason Hal Norton had always sought to purchase buildings was now evident.
Needless to say this specific plan fell through, or rather splattered against the iron will of the University bureaucracy. U.C. went ahead and built its multi-storied parking structure. The Wilson property was still untouched and the expansion-minded Norton kept it constantly in mind. He figured it into many of his ideas on what to do about the housing shortage and the critical central kitchen situation.
While Oxford's kitchen had been fairly adequate for co-op purposes in the early 1940's, when membership had been lower and some houses still had their own cooks during the student-starved years of World War II, it became obvious in the early and middle `50's, as students began to swell the U.S.C.A., that some new facility was needed. Summer semesters at the University were a special pain. During the middle 1950's, the U.S.C.A. kept Stebbins and Cloyne Court open and brought the C.K. operation to Cloyne, a bad necessity at best, since the cooks and dietician were moved against their will and several of the larger kitchen machines could not be moved at all. In the late `50's the every-summer-move practice was abandoned and work-shifts were sent down to Oxford to help prepare the meals.
In the meantime, Norton kept exploring possibilities for Ridge Road development. Possibilities would keep on coming. However, they would not assume a tangible, architectural form for some years until the latter part of the 1950's. During those years, student life at Berkeley changed almost unperceptively. By and large the Silent Generation label was an apt one.
Dan Eisenstein, self described ``red-hot,'' rose quickly in the Cloyne hierarchy and in his personal involvement in the U.C. campus. In the middle `50's the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at Berkeley was Alex B. Sherriffs, a man who would later become Governor Ronald Reagan's educational policy director for the entire state. Sherriffs would often pay visits to student living groups and extol the virtues of student involvement in a type of campus life. He deplored apathy.
``Of course,'' says Eisenstein, ``he didn't mean to get involved in politics. He didn't mean challenge the power structure. He meant go to football games.'' Twice a month Eisenstein, a Cloyne manager, would visit Sherriffs and try to get across a student view, usually without success. ``When the place blew up...Sherriffs was very surprised.'' As silent the U.C. students may have generally been, the lack of understanding, and of the capacity to understand, on the part of the administration was demonstrative of the most un-silent schism that was to come.
Student life in the `50's was still dominated by the Greek system, by fraternities and sororities and the beer-and-parties approach to education they represented. Plunked in the middle of the largest Greek colonies in Berkeley were several co-op houses. Sherman, up on Prospect, did not have it too bad--it was a fine house. The ``queen of the co-ops'' had no specific rivalries or feuds. Cloyne, however...
Cloyne Court had three neighbors in the 1950's. Higher on Ridge Road, above La Loma, was Newman Hall, the University Catholic Chapel. Considered an ``architectural gem'', it was a beautiful brown shingled building filled with exquisite woodwork. The University recognized its excellence so it subsequently purchased and immediately demolished Newman to make way for a vacant lot full of concrete chunks, broken glass and weeds, as it remains even today. Across the street from Cloyne was the fraternity house of Cal's Phi Kapa Psi chapter. Eisenstein described the Cloyne-Phi Kapa Psi relationship as relatively friendly. Across Cloyne's backyard, over-looking the co-op's asphalt volleyball court, was the house of the group that made the relationship with the Phi Kapa Psi's that way: Beta Theta Phi, or the Betas, as they were simply and affectionately known.
The source of the hatred that enjoyed a fifteen-year bloom between Cloyne Court and Beta Theta Phi is a matter of supposition. The Betas were by and large an athletically oriented frat--much of Cal's football team lived there. Though Cloyne excelled in certain intramural sports through individual members, the diminutive stature of most of the co-op denizens won the disgust of the more gargantuan Betas. The lack of racial or ethnic considerations in the choice of co-op residents was also a matter of some rancor. In their terms, as quoted by Dan Eisenstein, ``the Betas had two things going for them: these were a lot of jocks in the house, and they couldn't stand kikes, wops, niggers or chinks. They were thoroughly insulted by the fact that right next to them was a house full of kikes, wops, niggers, chinks, and Japs too.''
Eisenstein describes Cloyne's encounters with their muscle-bound neighbors graphically:
Periodically the Betas would have parties, and would get very drunk and would litter our volleyball court with broken glass. It wasn't broken till it got into our volleyball court--it'd break when it hit. Beer bottles in those days, the returnable kind, were big strong beer bottles that made nice glass chips. We'd spend the next morning sweeping glass off our volleyball court. Nice fellas, the Betas.
We'd have lots of fights, physical ones, with the Betas. We had a bigger waterhose then they did. One advantage: firehoses. We could stand in the volleyball courts and fill their rooms with water. One point I remember well. A jock of some sort lived in an upstairs room. He left his window open. He went away and we had a water-fight. Nobody went up to shut that window. When he came home there was a foot of water on his floor. He got very upset and he and some of his friends came over to try to do something about this.
Cloyne had a fellow in the house named Sammy Moreno, a little Mexican guy, a Spanish major who had just come back from the Army while I was there, had been in Cloyne before the Army, in '53. He weighed about 122 pounds...but he was the boxing coach at Cal while he was still a student. He'd been champion of his division, or something, in the Army--but didn't look it, a little skinny guy.
This Beta jock came over with about twenty of his fellows. He was met by about twenty of our fellows in the middle of the volleyball court, and he was making a huge ruckus about this. Sammy stepped in front of him and said, ``really, you should just go home and quiet down since you're really not getting anything done here.'' The guy took a swing at him and Sammy hit him. And they carried him home and he woke up, I guess, at home. He was asleep before he hit the ground. One of the few times that anybody ever hit anybody from the Betas.
Tales of such classic David-Goliath confrontations, of course, are legend. Another more clandestine skirmish between the contrary living groups is somewhat more original. Again, Eisenstein articulates and begins with background:
Cloyne Court had stoves which have grease traps in them, which we took out in back and emptied into grease buckets. These would be picked up by the tallow company periodically and taken off to be rendered into something. One night in summer of `56 or `57 a few people took this can of grease and spread it on the Betas' driveway. They then had only one driveway, very steep, which was next to Cloyne. And the grease slowly oozed down onto the sidewalk. The vandals retired to a Cloyne room overlooking this mess to observe what would then occur. It was after midnight.
One of the things that they saw happen was a car trying to pull into the driveway and just spinning its wheels. This guy finally looked out of his car, saw that there was grease on the sidewalk, let out a howl, and turned around and went off to park somewhere. First event.
Second event: walking down the sidewalk from the direction of campus comes a guy who is totally nude. It is now one in the morning. Totally naked. This is pledge week.4.1 This guy, totally naked, walks along the sidewalk, holding his hands over his vital place, and he suddenly sees this huge flood of grease on the sidewalk. And he looks at it, and he looks around, there's nobody visible and he goes back about ten feet and he runs and leaps and misses. And he falls naked into this pool of grease. And he rolls around and gets up and staggers off down the street. The street is quiet again.
The next morning the Betas spent three hours burning off the grease.
The Cloyne war with the Betas went on for years, continuing after the University bought the house next to Cloyne and the frat moved into a more modern structure across the street. On one famous night in the mid-60's, some inebriated Betas fired a pistol at Cloyne's roof where the flares set an empty sleeping bag on fire and threatened a fatal conflagration. Complaints to the Dean of Men got nowhere, just as did reports of gunshots aimed at Cloyne and the horrible murder of several pet chickens by drunken Betas. ``Boys will be boys,'' the Dean, it is claimed, would intone. ``Back when I was in a frat....''
Far from regarding the Betas as a joke, Cloyne-men were anxious to end the Greek menace across Ridge Road and, indeed on more than one occasion, they suggested to the Board that the U.S.C.A. buy the Beta house and evict the tenants. This act of justice never came to be, but nevertheless the Betas were moved in the late '60's and the feud ended when Berkeley's immensely wealthy Graduate Theological Union purchased the building from the national Beta Theta Phi organization. Cloyne's arch-enemies moved across campus to south-side and were never heard from again.
The middle `50's also contained the definitive event of the decade for the college generation: The Great Panty Raid of 1956. But the story of that sweltering day in May must wait, to cap the 1950's psychologically even as it seared its halves chronologically. The story of the U.S.C.A., only peripherally involved in the Panty Raid, found its next pinnacle at its silver anniversary mark in 1958. Not only did the most important and long-lasting student-owned organization reach its 25th birthday, it also sought to cap that event with a true solvency: further advancement towards hypothetical financial stability.
It was planned that the 25th anniversary of the U.S.C.A. be given a celebration. Hal Norton shrewdly saw it as an opportunity to better relations with the University. Those relations had never been particularly cozy until the 1950's when Clark Kerr, whose graduate project in state cooperatives had helped instigate the opening of Stebbins Hall, became Chancellor of the Berkeley campus.
``He was much more friendly than previous administrators,'' Norton said. ``His door was always open to us...he invited our board to meet with him and some of his administrators.'' Kerr's friendliness was a major boon to the U.S.C.A. in 1958. ``Kerr was responsible,'' according to Norton, ``for our being able to have a commemoration of our 25th anniversary.'' Harmon Gymnasium, on the south side of the campus, was then the largest indoor meeting place available at the University. Kerr made it available to the co-op.
The speaker for the occasion was chosen especially for the purpose of enhancing the U.S.C.A.'s image in the Berkeley campus community. Eleonor Roosevelt was an audience and publicity magnet almost without par for liberal students. Norton reached Mrs. Roosevelt ``through rather direct contact.'' The great lady assented and a full day of activities were planned for her at the co-op and the university.
A reception for co-op members at Ridge House was followed by a reception handled by Clark Kerr at U.C.'s Alumni House. At the Harmon Gym celebration, Kerr joined Mrs. Roosevelt, Norton, U.S.C.A. president T.Z. Chu and the entire U.S.C.A. Board on the speaker's platform. Seven thousand people sat before them in the Gymnasium, a packed-house crowd. Such a demonstration was bound to cause dubious minds on certain pertinent strata of the U.C. administration to take notice. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
Changes came in their attitude, but slowly. Those involved in Berkeley's burgeoning high-rise dormitory complexes looked naturally askance at the U.S.C.A.'s continuous efforts in competition. Usually there was no ill feeling. Relations were open, honest and friendly even if unproductive on the Hearst-Scenic land issue.
The University was not directly involved in the most crucial endeavors of the U.S.C.A. in 1958 which sent representatives of the co-op organization all the way to the United States Congress and signaled a pitch in organizational activity in the external sphere never before reached. Coupled with the continued acquisition of funds for a Ridge-Scenic-Hearst residence complex, the co-op moved in 1958 to amend the National Housing Act of 1950 in order to qualify student co-operatives for low-cost federal loans.
Work on this project was primarily divided between U.S.C.A. Manager Hal Norton and the organization's ``founding father,'' Harry Kingman, now a prominent liberal lobbyist in Washington. Discussions had gone on in U.S.C.A. circles for several months in late 1957 and early 1958 on the conceivability of amending the Act, but ``the first concrete step,'' according to a September Manager's Report to the U.S.C.A. Board, ``was taken in March.''
At that time Norton attended a Co-operative Housing Conference in Washington, and discussed the co-op's problem with federal officials from the Housing and Home Finance Agency and the Federal Housing Administration. Basically that problem was associated with the newly competitive university dorm program. The 1950 Housing Act required that any non-profit corporation seeking federal funds for a student housing project gain a co-signature on the loan from the University. U.C. wasn't anxious to help finance its competitors. Amending the Act would eliminate the need for a U.C. co-signature.
Norton also let the Co-operative League of the U.S.A. know of the U.S.C.A. 's plan while in Washington. ``Although it was never determined that the co-operative sections of the Federal Housing Act completely bar a student cooperative from [a loan],'' Norton wrote in his report, ``it was the consensus of all that the College Housing Program of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, because of the direct loan provisions and the low interest rate, was more desirable, provided [the U.S.C.A.] could qualify.'' Drawing on his legal background, Norton then drafted the amendment. Basically his amendment stated that the university was not responsible for the co-op's debt.
Conferences with the Washington representative of the Co-operative League and a former Federal Trade Commissioner began Norton's drive. They decided to ask Senator William Fulbright to introduce the amendment. Fulbright was then Chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee under which the Subcommittee on Housing functioned. If Fulbright didn't go along with the idea, the sub-committee's chairman, John Sparkman of Alabama, would be approached. Nothing ever came of these two pathways, but the bill amending the act was eventually introduced by Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, who had been both a Federal Trade Commissioner and the Co-operative League's Washington representative at different times before retiring.
The reaction from Congress at first was favorable, but soon a problem appeared in the form of the director of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. His opposition to the amendment was based on his belief that student co-ops were ``questionable financial risks'' and the contention that federal funds should go only to the universities in such situations. His objections were echoed by the advisory committee to the College Housing Director.
Norton tried to counter these objections with an argument appealing to basic fairness:
We expected the imposition of a financial standard prior to loaning to the eligible co-ope