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By Susan McCarthy Here’s how ancient Cal’s Faculty Club is: it originated at a time when it was difficult to find something decent to eat in Berkeley. Established to meet a practical need “for warm lunches at reasonable price,” and subsequently becoming a social outlet for scholars, the Club celebrates its hundredth birthday this year. Like other ancient institutions, it has changed with time, becoming more inclusive than it once was, admitting faculty, staff, and alumni as members--whether they are men, women, or, in one case, a dead moose. In the 1870s, the University put up two cottages to serve as women’s dormitories where the Faculty Club now stands. For some reason, women students did not take advantage of the opportunity, and faculty moved into the buildings instead. When one dormitory burned down, the other was converted into a cookhouse for a co-operative restaurant--a dining association for campus denizens. Students paid about 20 cents for lunch (although eating at the football team’s training table cost a dollar for three). A room was also set aside for professors. Over time, as the University and local restaurateurs rose to the challenge of feeding the hungry, fewer students came to the dining association, and eventually the faculty took the whole place over. Around the turn of the century, they decided they needed a bigger place, one with “the amenities of a proper gentlemen’s club,” according to a history written by James Gilbert Paltridge ‘35. Those hungry professors formed an organization, contributed money, got permission from the regents to occupy the land, and hired architect Bernard Maybeck to build them a dining hall. No sooner had Maybeck begun construction than the faculty began thinking of other things they needed--a wing with bedrooms for bachelor faculty members, a billiard room, an office. When these were finished, they hired architect John Galen Howard to add yet more dining rooms, bedrooms, offices, lounges, and decks, which he did in a style that harmonizes well with the original Maybeck structure. The building, renowned for its beauty, is the subject of a solemn little volume by architect James Steele, now a professor at USC, which extols it as “an important masterpiece.” Maybeck’s Great Hall, the heart of the Faculty Club, was born ancient. Its vaulted timber ceiling, with beam ends roughly carved into snarling visages, its enormous stone hearth, and its row of windows with stained-glass shields almost invariably cause people to mutter something vague about Beowulf. The inaugural fire was lit in the hall’s huge fireplace in 1902. (Steele comments that Maybeck had a legendary ability to design fireplaces that did not belch smoke into interiors, sending it up the chimney instead.) Around 1914, a giant moose head was put up, adding to the medieval feel, and caretakers since then have carefully maintained the ambiance. Many compare the Faculty Club’s architecture to that of a monastery. Emeritus law professor Jack Coons calls it “a sort of Vatican nesting in the Rome that is this campus,” alluding to its institutional independence from the University. The Club even has its own choir, the Monks’ Chorus, which is composed--oddly enough--of faculty clad as Franciscan monks. One thing that the halls of Beowulf, the Vatican, and your average monastery have in common is a paucity of women. When it first opened, the Faculty Club, too, kept women out. In case anyone was in doubt about this rule, a sign reading “Men Only” was put up at the door to the Great Hall. Although notable Cal benefactor Phoebe Apperson Hearst was elected a life member in 1902, women could visit only under escort of a member in good standing, and even then there were restrictions on which rooms they could enter; members who ignored the rules were apt to be fined. (The presence of women was tolerated, however, at the dances that were frequently held at the Club.) The University at that time was not uniformly unwelcome to women--the first female to have a full-time professorship at an American law school was Boalt Hall’s Barbara Armstrong, appointed in 1919, who later became an architect of Social Security. On one occasion, Armstrong entered the Club. According to Coons, “Barbara had taken the expansive title of the Faculty Club to include that then rarest of birds, the female professor.” She was “carefully lifted and carried from the sacred premises.” Not long thereafter, a Women’s Faculty Club came into being, opening its doors in 1923. Designed entirely by John Galen Howard, the Women’s Faculty Club stands as a welcoming “country house,” in contrast to its medieval counterpart. “The Faculty Club reminds me of a hunting lodge, very masculine and rambling,” says Mary Remy, manager of the Women’s Faculty Club. “Our building has a very gracious feel to it.” As late as 1966, when former UC Press editor Harold Small wrote about the Club for California Monthly, women still could not join and, even when they appeared in the dining rooms with a proper escort, they were not received kindly by all. Small observed that “even now, when a woman, lovely woman, glides serenely into the Gothic dining room...there are members who look on the Vision of Delight as if she were Grendel’s Mother.” However, that business of no girls in the clubhouse couldn’t go on forever. The most obvious solution seemed to be for the Faculty Club to join with the Women’s Faculty Club. The merger almost took place, but in the end the Women’s Faculty Club demurred. (It has been suggested that the decision may have had something to do with finances--the Women’s Faculty Club habitually running in the black and the Men’s Faculty Club running in the red.) Instead, in 1972, the Faculty Club formally determined to end all discrimination against women. The Faculty Club certainly fulfilled the promise of having “all the amenities of a proper gentlemen’s club.” Professors from all campus departments not only ate warm lunches, they discussed scholarly matters, played cards and billiards, held dinners, and relaxed in the Club’s well-appointed bar. At times, the Faculty Club could also have the atmosphere of a fraternal lodge--especially during its annual Christmas parties, which to this day involve a procession with a boar’s head, performances by the Monks’ Chorus, and comic musicals written by members. These last are quite an old and sacred (or, some might say, sacreligious) tradition. In 1985, Pulitzer Prize-winning music professor Andrew Imbrie composed an original score to accompany journalism professor David Littlejohn’s script, which skewered Berkeley icons such as then-Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman, People’s Park, animal research protesters, Mario Savio, the Daily Cal, and the vagaries of faculty parking. Felix Solomon, the Club’s general manager, has even fitted the moose head with a moveable lower jaw so that it can take part in the singing. But such tales of revelry should not overshadow one of the main functions of a faculty club--that of serving as a forum for the life of the mind. When the Faculty Club threw itself a hundredth birthday party in March, there was singing, dancing, and a palindrome contest; but there were also talks by professors Walter Alvarez, Anne Kilmer, Richard Muller, and Martin Trow exploring “The Idea of a Community of Scholars” and the Club’s role in encouraging the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas. “Where [else] on campus can a classicist get together with a physicist?” asks Faculty Club board member Phyllis Brooks. “It is a place where faculty can meet beyond the confines of their departments and their disciplines.” In 1948, an anthropologist and a business school professor did just that. After an interesting lunchtime conversation one Friday at the Club, they decided to make it a regular thing, and formed a small discussion group that became known as the “Little Thinkers.” With no more than a dozen or so members at any given time, the group has attracted such respected scholars as anthropologist Sherwood Washburn, law professor Philip Johnson, philosopher Joseph Tussman, and eminent faculty from physics, psychology, and other departments. Still going strong today, the Little Thinkers gather to discuss anything from the politics of the day to Darwinism to the plays of Tom Stoppard. Anthropologist George Foster, who has been a member of the Little Thinkers since 1955, says: “It is much the most interesting group of people that I belong to, or have ever known. So many different ideas and talents, and the conversations are always lively. I’m overwhelmed at the collective amount of knowledge in the heads of those people; it makes my mind swirl when I think of how much information they have at hand, in various fields.” (The group’s name is said to come from Hilda Krech, the wife of one of its members, who remarked: “My father always said he belonged to a little group of distinguished thinkers. My husband belongs to a distinguished group of little thinkers!”) But perhaps the least distinguished and most controversial member of the Club gained admittance in 1986, as a result of the legendary Moose Head Affair. A member had written to the Academic Senate complaining about the Club’s display of the moose head. The Academic Senate then requested that the Faculty Club remove the moose--and other heads and antlers--in light of a “pervasive new sensitivity to animals.” (It was also alleged that dust and dead bugs were apt to tumble off the moose onto the plates of diners below.) A hundred members responded, almost all insisting that the moose must stay. Some facetiously suggested that the moose had sought refuge in the Club or that, if he had to go, the heads of certain Academic Senate members might make good substitutes. Ultimately, the board invoked the Faculty Club’s independent status, made the moose an honorary life member (and had it cleaned), and the whole business died down. In the 1980s, when Milton Chernin became president of the Faculty Club, the board used its independent status once more to finally put the Club on a sound financial footing by making a regular business of renting out the facilities for weddings, receptions, and meetings. By 1986, the Club had paid off its debts, claiming to be the only independent faculty club in the nation running in the black. Revenues from these events have also helped the Faculty Club renovate in a style appropriate to the building. “We made it our principle that we were going back to 1902,” says Brooks. They took down 1960s-era light fixtures in the Great Hall, for example, replaced them with fixtures modeled on the elegant lantern in front of the Club, and have recently added tapestry-covered chairs and furniture in the Arts and Crafts style. Members of the general public are welcome to eat at the Faculty Club, which serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Although they don’t get the advantage of reduced rates for members, all may eat a meal in the Great Hall, where they may sit at one of the long tables and gaze into the eyes of the moose. |
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