Voices of the Past: Saint Mary’s College – Beginning and Milestones – told by Brother Mel Anderson to Ellen Beans in 2011
0:00:00 – Ellen Beans introduces Brother Mel Anderson
Welcome to this storytelling session here at St Mary’s College. I’m Ellen Beans and I have been a resident here in Moraga for a number of years. We came in 1981 and I have been involved in Moraga Citizens Network and Moraga Chamber of Commerce for the last 5 years. But my love of history has brought me here to spend some time with Brother Mel Anderson. And we’re going to talk about St Mary’s College and the Town of Moraga story. So I hope Brother Mel that you could tell us some about the beginnings of the college out here in these beautiful green hills of what we now call Moraga. And just how did the college view the development of the town developing right outside your boundary? And maybe you’d like to talk a little bit about what kind of relationship you’d like to see between the “town and the gown” in the next decade.
0:01:11 – Background on Brother Mel Anderson
Brother Mel Anderson was born right here in California, in Oakland. He attended school in Oakland and Berkeley and in Napa. And then when he went to college he came to the green hills of Moraga at St Mary’s College in 1948 where he was a philosophy major. After graduation Brother Mel spent nearly a decade and a half as a teacher, as a vice principal and as a principal in several high schools. And then in 1968 he was asked by his Alma Mater to serve on St Mary’s College board of trustees. Just 10 months later he was asked to assume the presidency of St Mary’s College. At that time the college had only 900 students, all of them male, and a faculty of about 85. One of the first tasks before President Mel Anderson was the question, should this college become co-educational. Well, within a year they had made a decision, so in 1970 this college began to accept women as students. During Brother Mel’s 28-year presidency he oversaw many, many things. This college developed and expanded in multiple ways. He oversaw the construction and renovation of 28 campus facilities. He saw a great expansion in the number of different academic programs. For example the baccalaureate programs were expanded to include programs in accounting, and program for older adults. Master’s programs were added in Business Administration, in education and health, in physical education and recreation, psychology, writing, communications and many more.He established a high potential program for minority students who so have the possibility of good academic success. And he revived a crumbling athletic program by hiring a full-time athletic director. While St Mary’s College was growing and expanding under Brother Mel’s leadership the town of Moraga was doing the same thing. Brother Mel, how about taking us back in history and telling us some of the origins of the college and its move out here to these green hills, and then what has developed here under your leadership and others in the last 80 years.
0:04:28 – Brother Mel starts off with the SMC groundbreaking ceremony in 1927
The date was May 15th, 1927. About 5,000 people came by automobile and the Sacramento Northern railway and assembled on farmland out in what was called Moraga Valley. The occasion was the groundbreaking ceremony for the new St Mary’s College of California. St Mary’s College was located in Oakland at the time in a building that was built in 1889 and really poorly designed, unfortunately. And the brothers who had moved from San Francisco prior to that sought a place where they could have a really first great collegiate institution with enough room to expand.
0:05:25 – Oakland based SMC a football power under Coach Slip Madigan
The property in Oakland on Broadway where Piedmont Avenue comes to an end, that property was growing too small for the college. We were right in front of Merritt Hospital. So that gives you an idea where it was. And the problem was that the building was inadequate and the property was also inadequate. Given the fact that St Mary’s had become a rather outstanding football power in the country under the guidance of Slip Madigan, who came in 1921 after a disastrous football season where St Mary’s College lost to the University of California by 121 to nothing. And so Slip Madigan, who was a protege of Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, came to the president Brother Gregory and said, or he came on December when he was off from school at Notre Dame, and he said, I think I’m your Christmas present and I can do something for St Mary’s College Football.
0:06:33 – SMC looked at new location in San Leandro before receiving sn offer from Moraga Company
Which he did. And so the brothers sought a new place for St Mary’s College. They had picked a site in San Leandro and had commissioned architect John Donovan to develop plans, and it was a gothic building that they planned to build in San Leandro. And the plans were almost finished when a gentleman by the name of James Irvine, now James Irvine was the head of the Moraga Land Company (Moraga Company), and he’s the same Irvine that Irvine, California is named after. So he was a rather prominent developer and he offered the brothers 100 acres of land in Moraga if they would agree to build the college in Moraga. And so the brothers thought about this, and came out and looked, and thought it was a beautiful place. And, of course, Mr Irvine had plans for the town of Moraga, homes, roads, parks, shopping centers and even an airstrip for small airplanes to land in Moraga. Because he wanted to make it an upscale kind of community and he thought that single engine planes could land in Moraga. And this would be a real boon to the area.
0:07:54 – SMC expands the 100 acre gift by purchasing an additional 300 acres
Well, anyway, the brothers accepted the offer and they sold the property in San Leandro, and bought 300 plus acres to add to the 100 that they were given so the total acreage of the college property at the beginning was a little over 400 acres, something like 420 or something like that. And they bought, I’ll have you know, about 20 feet or maybe it was a little more 10 yards or so, over the top of the hill surrounding the college, so that nobody could build on the top of the hills and look down upon the college. And they also were smart enough to build, to buy the property across the street from where the college entry is now. They bought a strip of property there so nobody could build a hot dog stand or something like that on the other side to get college students to buy their hot dogs. They bought that property so nobody could build on it. They really thought about this very carefully.
0:08:58 – Class of 1927 graduation ceremony doubles with groundbreaking in Moraga
The property in Oakland, they were happy to get out of. It had suffered two fires in a disastrous 1906 earthquake. They really wanted to move and this looked like paradise which Moraga tends to be. So we did accept the offer. We moved to here and there that’s why we had the ground breaking ceremonies in 1927. And I’ll have you know that after the groundbreaking ceremonies, the first first class of 1927 from St Mary’s College marched up to the grove which is in the southeast corner of the campus. They marched up to the grove, and the first graduates to graduate from St Mary’s College in Moraga graduated in 1927. So now 18 months later, the contractors built this college in 18 months. And they built the chapel, the buildings on either side of the chapel, two classroom buildings called Dante and Galileo Halls, three residence halls.
0:10:07 – Lake La Salle built because SMC needed to be water supply self-sufficient
They had to build a lake for water supply and they had to build a whole sewage disposal plant, on the other side of the dam from the lake that was put in, so that we could be totally self-sufficient. We had no East Bay Municipal Water, we didn’t have East Bay Municipal Utility District either, so that we had to do that all by ourselves. We had to, so we were really self-sufficient. And so at that time we also had to build some athletic fields because of the football program and so forth. So there was a new future for the college and optimism prevailed.
0:10:54 – New SMC facility opens in September a month ahead of the 1929 market crash
And so the first students came out here in 1928, enjoyed the year, and did a lot of work landscaping and so forth on their own. And as I say, when we opened up in September of 1929, everybody was really optimistic about what was going to happen next. We had plans to build a new gymnasium, and a swimming pool, which were not built when the college opened. And we had not built a library nor an auditorium. And they figured that, well that would come later. We would have fundraising and do that. Well, then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and that caused a lot of problems for the college.
Number one there was no town. The whole idea of having Mr Irvine’s Moraga Land Company city, that was the end of that. Those plans were shelved. The college was totally alone out here. And of course we were in terrible debt because the college was built on the pledges of people who generously offered their help. And in 1929 their wealth disappeared and so did the wealth of the college. And so the college went into terrible debt, or, had a terrible debt. And the football program was the one thing that sustained it, to some extent, because it was very popular. Traveled all over the country.
0:12:30 – Slip Madigan and Brother Leo Meehan are stars at SMC
And there was also another figure on the St Mary’s Campus that brought fame and some help to it, Brother Leo Meehan who is a great orator, an English professor who gave commencement addresses at the University of California Berkeley, University of Washington and Washington State of Washington. And I remember as a 10-year old child I was with my mother in San Francisco and I vividly remember the street cars on Market Street. Had big signs on the sides. It just happened the day that I was there the signs on the side of the street cars saying Brother Leo speaks Opera House tonight 7:30 or 8:00 or whatever it was.
0:13:12 – In 1937 SMC goes bankrupt and is secretly bought by the SF Archbishop
So we had a couple of famous football players and Brother Leo who was the academic. Well, this went on for a certain number of years, but they just couldn’t sustain it because everybody was in trouble. People had a hard time coming to college because they didn’t have any money. And so in 1937 St Mary’s College went bankrupt. And it was put up for auction on the steps of the Alameda County courthouse. And intermediaries bought it, and returned it to the person that was behind the intermediaries, namely the Archbishop of San Francisco, John J Mitty. And so that’s how the brothers got the college back and were saved for the time being.
0:14:03 – SMC stays in operation but a bankrupt Sacremnto Northern discontinues passenger service
But it was still a depression and the Sacramento Northern Railway, which of course delivered students to the college, went bankrupt, and they discontinued passenger service in 1941 before the war. Well on December 7th 1941, as you know, Pearl Harbor occurred. We were involved in World War II. The college was all male and it ended up with only a handful of students, just a handful of freshmen and a few people with disabilities or something that could not succumb to the draft. So as a result the college was put into a position of again being in just a terrible financial strait.
0:14:57 – Brother Austin convinces government to locate Navy Pre-Flight School at SMC
However, Brother Austin, who was a plucky Irishman who was president at the time, Brother Austin Crowley went back to Washington and said, St. Mary’s College would be a wonderful place for one of the services to take over. Because during the war you could train soldiers out there. And we have this beautiful climate, you could do it all year long. And he gave a real spiel. And the government bought it. The Navy took over St Mary’s College from 1942 to 1945. They built barracks and drill halls and swimming pools and so forth and they saved the college from extinction, is what they did. And so they really were. It was a wonderful boon for the college.
0:15:50 – Navy expands facilities but tears down most new buildings after 1945
I can remember going into the drill hall later on, I think in about 1945, when the Navy had, after the Navy had left the college, and I walked into that drill hall, and it was absolutely enormous. At that time I guess I was a sophomore in high school or so and I used to play baseball. And I stood down, went into that drill hall, and threw the ball with all my might. And I don’t think it got beyond the middle, and it bounced on the on the floor and rolled from there. It was just huge.
But all that was, of course, after the Navy pulled out, it was all destroyed, taken down and a few buildings still exist. One, Assumption Hall. which is on the east side of the campus, and there’s a building in the College Union that was built by the Navy. And they built it according to the design of the campus. And so we were able to keep that building. And now of course it’s kind of smothered in the whole College Union buildings that are there. But it’s still there. Those are the only two buildings that exist from those days of the Navy.
0:16:59 – SMC resumes as a college and attracts students through the GI Bill
However, after the war the GIs all had a GI Bill, and, of course, they flooded the college. In 1948 when I came as a freshman, I think I’d give you two observations. There were no homes across the street from the college, and on either side east or the west, those hadn’t even been developed yet. But the college was beginning to pick up by the number of students that came from the GI Bill. There were a lot of them here when I was a a freshman in 1948, and so the college began to pick up.
17:39 – Korean War in 1950 and enrollment at all male SMC drops 40%
However, a disaster came in 1950 with the Korean War and again we were an all male student body and we were reduced by about 40% or so immediately. And so there were some deferments, but it was really touch and go. And the Brothers had to think whether or not they would have to sell the college because we just couldn’t, it was unsustainable under those circumstances. We had to drop football, and that was for several reasons.
0:18:14 – New college football rules force many colleges such as SMC to drop football
Number one the expenses, but there was a new rule put in for college football called the free substitution rule which gave rise to the platoon system where you’ have an offensive team and a defensive team. Whereas before, the same team had to play offense and defense, and if you took a player out in one quarter, the player couldn’t go back to the next one. The rules were all changed and the free substitution rule, you had kickers and field goal kickers, and all that sort of thing. So you had specialties, and as I say, the platoon system. Very few of the smaller institutions could maintain a football team, and so not only did we, but also USF, Santa Clara, Loyola, and all those institutions around had to give up football.
0:19:01 – After Korean War enrollment rebounded and SMC expands with new buildings
So in 1954, after struggling through the Korean War, there was a return of GIs from the Korean War and we had to build more residence halls. And so there were two built in 1961, two in 1968, and a library, which we hadn’t had since the beginning of the college in Moraga. That was built in 1968 and so the college at that time, and now we’ll get into Moraga, At that time the college had a rather distant relationship with the Board of Supervisors in the county Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors. And so if we needed a building we went out there and their planning committee and so it was kind of a casual relationship. And if we wanted to cut down trees or put in a road or build a fence or build something we went ahead and did it and nobody seemed to care a little or anything about that.
Well, then we still only had about 850 to 900 men and about a faculty of 80. I think you already mentioned, and so I thought this this isn’t going to work.First thing I did was I became president in 1969. The first thing I did was look at the books. We were in debt, still in debt over a couple hundred thousand dollars. Now that doesn’t sound like much money now, but in 1969 that was a lot of money. So I said, we’ve got to do something about increasing the student body. We did a lot of study and we said we’ve got to go co-education. We were the last all male college in California. The major male colleges like USF, Santa Clara, Layola, they had all gone co-education prior to us. And I said it was silly to hold out any longer. So we studied very carefully and said this would be a good thing to do. Which we did. And so the first women, as you mentioned, came in 1970 and so we were very pleased to see how it, it was a little rough getting adjusted, but it worked. And as I told people, many of the men found the woman of their dreams, and likewise many of the women found the man of their, I wouldn’t say nightmares, but certainly their dreams.
0:21:22 – The 1974 incorporation of the Town of Moraga creates need for a master plan
Anyway, in 1974 something highly significant, however, happened in the Moraga area. The people of Moraga decided that they wanted to incorporate and so they went through, and the votes came out in favor of incorporation through a lot of work by a lot of people to make sure that it happened. And the charter was granted to the city of the Town of Moraga. And so what happened was everybody had to have a little change in attitude, because soon as you had a council, and you had a design review board, and your own police department, and your own fire department, there were new procedures, new laws, new demands. And we had to come up with our own master plan.
0:22:12 – SMC forges a new relationship with Moraga with regard to development
The town asked, look we’ve got to have a master plan, what is the college going to do? What kind of buildings you going to build? You can’t just do it piece-meal, what’s your overall plan. So we had to develop that and had that approved by the town. And there were some touchy moments here and there and I don’t necessarily want to go into all those but there were some touchy moments where there were some disagreements. But most of those were ironed out quite well and, of course, we realized that we really had to have a liaison between ourselves and the college and the city which we established. And they were very happy to have that so that they knew what was going on at our place, and we knew what they were doing with the Town of Moraga, so that we could actually have a good cooperative relationship between town and gown rather than have any kind of conflict.
0:23:01 – SMC ends up with a security force almost as big as the Moraga Police Department
So I think it worked out quite well, and, let’s bring us up to date. In 1969 as I said, we had about 800 to 900 students and 80 faculty, today (2011) we have about 2,500 men and women undergraduates of which 1,650 live on campus. And of course this changes the campus considerably. We have to have a security force, for example, which is almost the same size as the Moraga Police Department because we have to protect these students and make sure that everything runs properly. We also have a graduate program now. None of those people live on campus, there very few, maybe couple, one or two, but we have over a thousand graduate students in the education department, creative writing, MBA programs and so forth.
0:23:54 – The origin of the Soda Center name for the student center
And so there was building activity taking place. As you said, we were building, we were growing, the same time that Moraga was growing. Now by the time of 1969 we began to see houses spring up across the street from us, and on either side so that we have the Moraga Estates, I mean the St Mary’s Estates, and a group up on the hill over. So they were all there. That was all beginning to grow. We had neighbors, very close neighbors, and so in the meantime we were building too. So we built 13 residences, we’ve built 13 residenc halls up to now, two classroom buildings, one science facility, beautiful science facility, one art center, three Administration facilities, one student center which is called the Soda Center. Has nothing to do with Coca-Cola or Seven Up or anything like that it. It so happens that the name of the donor, the main donor was Charles Soda and he was Italian and I suspect that probably the folks, his ancestors that came from Italy were probably Sodini or something like that and it was shortened to Soda because it was simple and sounded very American. But he was an Italian and that’s the Soda Center, how it got its name.
0:25:15 – Old Lucky store site in Rheem becomes office space for SMC
We had one gymnasium, McKeon Pavilion (University Credit Union Pavilion today), and then tennis courts, and a football field, a beautiful education building, performing arts and so forth. And we also have had, because of expansion, need of office space. We bought the old Lucky store in Rheem and that has become what is called our Moraga Campus or Rheem Campus over there. So that’s the reason that’s over there, because we just had expanded so much so we put development. And I have to say that all this building, you have to have a very good fundraising program, and that requires a very good director and a lot of leadership. And a lot of people to go out and talk to donors, not only alumni, but friends of the college, their parents and then people that are just interested in St Mary’s College. And so we are able to do that.
Now the other thing I want to mention too, and I think this is something very important. St Mary’s College, of course, is a, I should before I say this mention one other thing. The recent basketball notoriety kind of reminded me of the heyday of football, which I say ended in 1951. But I can remember as a student the first game was St Mary’s College versus the University of California. That was always over… and we would get 80,000 people to go to those games and UC, USC and UCLA. And of course there was when we played under Slip Madigan in the famous game with Portland University in New York. We had what were called a whole lot of the “street car” alumni and they were not necessarily students. But they all were fans of St Mary’s College football, and they had a train that went from St Mary’s College, from Oakland all the way to New York, to take this crowd of people to watch St Mary’s play Portland University in New York. And of course it was called the longest traveling bar in the world, which was probably true given the name of the kind of people that were on that train.
0:27:35 – Liberal arts education mandatory for all SMC undergraduates
Anyway, let me get back to what I was going to say about St Mary’s College. All of our undergraduates take courses in the liberal arts. When I say all of our undergraduates we have three undergraduate schools, the school of liberal arts, the school of science and the school of business administration and economics. But all of those students are given a smattering, some more, some less, but they all have a liberal arts education because we believe that it’s because of the education of people and their insight and their understanding of human nature and the history of the world, those are the kind of people that are going to be the leaders of our American democracy.
0:28:23 – Emphasis on reading original texts from the Greeks to modernity
And so what we have these people do, every student takes what we call the collegiate semina,r and those are four courses over the period of either four years or four semesters. And they read, they start with reading the Greeks, and they read those in their original, not in the Greek language, but in their original, they don’t read about somebody says abouf them Greeks. We read Aristotle as Aristotle said it, or Plato as Plato said as Socrates was written about. Or we read the plays of Sophocles or Aristophanes. We read those directly and discuss them in the class. And we try to get by the jargon and the half baked notions and the film clips of today, the kinds of things we get our students, try to get our students to speak articulately about these books and concentrate on these things, what they mean, what these ideas were.
And of course then we go from Aristotle to the Christian Roman traditions. We read Augustine and Lucretius, the nature of things and so forth. And then we move into the medieval times, the 16th-17th centuries, and then we move to the moderns and we read people like Marx, Darwin, Freud, Shaw, Kafka, Weber, Newman. We read all those people and talk about them. So our students come out of St Mary’s College with a good understanding of the whole historical tradition of philosophy and literature, poetry whatever. At least they have, so whether a person ends up being a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a businessman, they have this background. And we think it’s very important and we aim to have these students discuss articulately and defend their views as they go through these courses. And as I say, if each student could master even the thinking of Aristotle or Plato, we’d be in pretty good hands.
0:30:34 – Religious studies are not just about Catholicism
And also we have two courses in religious studies. We should mention that because no one is compelled to be a Catholic and about half of our students are not necessarily Catholic and some that claim to be Catholic maybe don’t practice their Catholicism. But that’s the way we, that’s the way things are. We have in our theology faculty, we have a rabbi, we have several Protestant instructors, and we have, of course, Catholics in the religious studies department also. And our aim is to inspire students to take religion seriously, but to come to their own conclusions. And that’s then, that would be the liberal arts approach. We also have an active campus ministry but no one is compelled to attend chapel services. That’s voluntary. We find that if students are compelled to do things like that sometimes you get a negative reaction and it’s much better that people do things of their own free will and be encouraged by the way we act and way we deal with students and so forth. And that is more important than compelling people to attend chapel services. We just don’t think that’s the way to go. And, as I say, the philosophy behind America’s success is that we have well-educated, thoughtful people and that’s what we try to produce. As Churchill once said, Americans usually get it right after they’ve tried just about everything else, so that’s what we like our students to do. They read all these books, they read all these ideas and they think about them. But they come up with their own conclusions for themselves and that’s what we’re aiming for. And we hope that we are successful.
0:32:20 – Basketball has become the new sports phenomenon at SMC
I would like to say one other point about Moraga and with this latest basketball notoriety. On our website we received about a million hits when we got as far as the Sweet 16 last year. And the two questions, the two most frequent questions that we heard on the website were, where is Moraga and where is St Mary’s College. And now I noticed that the Moraga website has on it the home of St Mary’s College, which, of course ,we’re very pleased to see. And we hope, of course, that our relationship with St Mary’s College (Town of Moraga?), and, as I said, we have somebody that is very closely aligned as an intermediary between the city council and the college.
0:33:15 – SMC hosts debates between Members of Congress
And last year, as you know, we had Barbara Boxer, the two Congress people had their debate on the St Mary’s College campus. And, of course, again we gave ourselves and Moraga quite a little bit of notoriety. And we’re now trying to get a presidential debate for next year and we’re working on that. And that would be wonderful if we could do that. And it would bring great fame to Moraga as well as to St Mary’s College just to do something like that.
0:33:49 – On our wish list is a parkade so less of the campus needs to be a parking lot
So those are the kinds of things we’re thinking of. And, of course, we have more ideas about expanding. We hope to put it in a large new gymnasium, the library and we probably build some more residence halls because we’re getting hard pressed for our residence hall. And all this has to deal with the town of Moraga. I think we can work out and we also like to build a parking structure one of these days because we’re kind of tired of seeing too much asphalt on the campus. It’s much better to build a structure and then have cars stacked up rather than because to if you have to park them on the campus you lose the beauty of the campus. And also it causes a great deal of problem with the creeks and the rivers, the creek especially, because of the runoff. That’s what we’d like to do, is build some parking structures for the needs of the students as well as for events that we have. And we need the parking. So those are some of the things we’re thinking about for the future. But anyway St Mary’s College is very proud to be part of Moraga and we hope that the Moraga Town Council and all the citizens are proud to have St Mary’s in their midst.
YouTube generated transcript edited by John Kaiser
