A century ago, on May 14, 1924, 2,155 students graduated from UC Berkeley in a ceremony held in California Memorial Stadium. It was the first use of the stadium for graduation, a service it has performed many times in subsequent decades, most recently this past Saturday.
The Berkeley Daily Gazette observed that “this is the first commencement exercise of the university to be held outside of the Greek Theatre. A new tradition was established … .” That was an incorrect claim, since the Greek Theatre wasn’t completed until 1903. Before that, graduations were elsewhere on campus, usually indoors.
Close to 30,000 people were estimated to have attended the 1924 commencement. A huge wooden shell painted gray and “covered with a blue-and-gold canopy” stood on the field, and the graduating students were apparently seated in chairs on the field while spectators filled the stands on both sides.
Large amplifiers were on the platform, and “the amplification worked to perfection, from a microphone on the speakers’ table so that even visitors seated in the shade of the football scoreboards were able to hear.”
Student housing: At a post-graduation banquet of the California Alumni Association on the same day, prospects for student dormitories were discussed.
Robert Sibley, the association’s secretary, told those assembled that “President Campbell has surveyed living conditions in Berkeley and believes that the only solution of the congestion and profiteering on students is dormitories.
“A dormitory for freshman women is the first thing to be considered, and then gradually there should be built class dormitories to completely fill the demand. Many students are now forced to spend their evenings in the library in order to keep warm and to escape the noise about their own dwellings.”
Sibley’s announcement proved to be prematurely optimistic. UC wouldn’t build a dormitory until 1929, when Bowles Hall was completed with private funds, and no UC women’s housing would be built until Stern Hall in the early 1940s.
A full plan for dormitories wasn’t enacted until the chancellorship of Clark Kerr in the 1950s, and the first large residence halls weren’t completed until late that decade, more than 30 years after Sibley gave his speech about the high-priority need.
Street work: Berkeley officials were talking about street repairs and improvements a century ago in mid-May 1924.
“Extensive street repairs are now well underway, and between now and July 1 … close to $10,000 will be expended, according to the announcement today of City Manager John N. Edy,” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported May 15, 1924. Another 29,700 was expected to be spent by November.
“All the macadam (paved) streets in the district of approximately 19 miles of streets bounded by Shattuck Avenue, Adeline Street, Allston Way, Piedmont Avenue, Dwight Way, Warring Street, Derby Street, Claremont Avenue and Woolsey Street already have been repaired … ,” the story continued.
Agricultural land: Some big news on May 16, 1924, was the announcement by the University of California that enough money had been raised to buy a 23-acre piece of land, the “Schmidt Tract,” in northwest Berkeley to provide research facilities for the College of Agriculture.
The land was needed for outdoor research, university officials said, so the College of Agriculture could remain at the Berkeley campus, rather than being dispersed elsewhere in the state.
The property bordered by Cedar, Rose and Sacramento streets would indeed be used for agriculture but for less than two decades. At the end of the 1930s it was sold for private development, and houses built just before U.S. entry into World War II stand there today.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.
