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Many Cal graduates over the years have had high hopes of seeing their children attend Berkeley. Our case was no different. Both my husband and I are Cal graduates, as are my mother (Class of ’38) and my great aunt (Class of ’16). Our situation differs from many, however, in that our home for the past 27 years has been Chile, where our boys were born and raised. On several visits to California we took the boys to Berkeley and the campus; we even took in a Cal basketball game. When we showed them photos of our college years, we couldn’t help but transmit to them our love and enthusiasm for Cal. When the time came for our oldest son, Daniel, to enter a university, he decided to study in Chile. Once in the university’s engineering school, Daniel learned of the Education Abroad Program, which offers opportunities for study in universities around the world—including Cal. He applied and, after several months, received a letter offering him placement at Irvine. Because he had his heart set on Berkeley, he declined and reapplied the next year. After months of waiting, another letter arrived: This time he was accepted at Berkeley. We were all thrilled! Having a son studying at Cal was, for me, like reliving those wonderful, exciting years all over again. Daniel obtained housing in a dorm just like the one I had lived in for three years. Over the months, Daniel’s letters arrived with animated and often humorous descriptions of dorm life, his new friends, intramural soccer games, poetry readings, concerts in People’s Park, hikes in the Berkeley hills, trips to San Francisco, and, of course, his classes. We were in for some surprises. I knew that the dorms were now coed. I had expected that certain floors would be for men and others for women, but – no! – the floors were mixed. I nostalgically thought back to Friday and Saturday nights in the dorm, bustling with the voices of us girls, in curlers and underwear, visiting, talking on the phone, getting ready for dates, while Ray Charles sang in the background. It seems that it’s not that different now, though. One Friday evening when I called my son, the dorm sounds that carried over the miles were quite familiar. In the ’60s, “lock-out” time was at 2:30 a.m. on the weekends; what a rush to get back to the dorm on time! There was laughter and gaiety (and good-night kisses) in the crowded lobby of the dorm before the doors were locked. The ethnic make-up of Daniel’s floor mates was quite different than when I was in the dorms. Many students, like him, came from other countries; this was not surprising because Cal has always had a lot of foreign students (I married one!). Of particular interest were the number of students who were U.S. citizens but whose parents were from such places as India, Iceland, China, Indonesia, Israel, El Salvador, Iran, Malaysia, and Peru. Daniel found this variety a new and broadening experience. Daniel said that living at the University (rather than at home, as he does in Chile) gave him more time both for studying and exploring the many activities that Berkeley has to offer. He was somewhat surprised that many of his engineering professors were foreigners. While the workload was similar to his Chilean university, he was able to achieve much better grades at Berkeley. One of his goals while at Cal was to improve his ability to write in English. He heard about an American poetry class taught by Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, and decided to sign up. This class opened up a whole new area of interest for Daniel. After returning to Chile, he came to me one day and said, “Mom, this is what I consider my greatest accomplishment while at Berkeley,” and he handed me a small, bound book of the poems he had written while there, some in Spanish, some in English. He continues to read and write poetry. My mother and I, both life-long Cal football fans, insisted that Daniel attend football games. On the phone, I eagerly asked him what he thought of the games. Did he sit in the rooting section? (Only once, because they all stood most of the time and he didn’t know the songs and chants.) Did he participate in the card stunts? (“What are card stunts?”) Shortly before the Big Game, he told me how some Cal students had stolen the Stanford mascot, a tree. “Tree?” I asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t an axe? They would always steal the Axe from each other. You know, the Stanford Indians, their axe.” “Indians? I’ve never heard any mention of Indians.” “Well, what is the team called?” I asked. “The Stanford Trees?” He didn’t know what they were called. I have to admit that I felt disappointed at some of these changes, but I think I can understand the reasons behind them. And I was happy to hear that the wonderful Cal Band was as spectacular as ever. Someday I hope to be able to attend a Cal football game again. A year after Daniel’s return to Chile, he continues to hear from his Berkeley friends. When he or his brother Nicolas wear a Cal sweatshirt here in Santiago, they sometimes get stopped by a Cal alum or a visiting exchange student. Now Nicolas has applied for the Education Abroad Program and also wants to go to Berkeley. We are anxiously waiting to hear… by Judy Kirk ’64 My husband John and I are enjoying a parent’s-eye view of Cal today via our daughter Kate, a member of the Class of 2002. Before she made her decision to attend Berkeley, the three of us walked up Telegraph Avenue to visit the campus. As we stood on the deck in the Campanile, music floated up from the Greek Theatre, with the steep hills rising beyond. To the west was the Bay, silvery that day. I had a lump in my throat; it was all so glorious and so familiar. Kate said, “It’s beautiful! This is it. This is where I want to be.” Our orientation forty years ago consisted of a short meeting at which we were told, “Look around you. By your junior year, half of you will be gone.” Kate’s orientation was approximately twenty-four hours of information-packed gatherings, spread over days. After one evening session, John and Kate, along with some other dads and students, walked down to Telegraph for coffee. One dad matter-of-factly reported the sighting of a naked man strolling along the street. No doubt about it, they were finally in Berkeley. In 1960, John and I each drove our belongings across the Bay to move in, he to a boarding house on Durant, I to the Unit 1 dormitories across the street. I remember the maid service: beds changed, linens and towels provided, and rooms cleaned. I had a view out my window of the Campanile, whose light would go out at midnight as the radio played quietly, my studying over for the night. The time after ten o’clock was designated “quiet hours,” and the dorm fell silent. If we missed “lockout” then, we were “campused,” a cause for mild notoriety. (The inference was that a boy was probably involved—certainly not the library, which had already closed.) If we needed a dad or a boyfriend to help carry something heavy above the ground floor in our women-only building, we yelled, “Man on floor!” as we stepped from the elevator. Kate was assigned a room in the Unit 1 dorms, in Deutsch Hall; in my day, Deutsch was an all-male dorm. Her floor was coed, even the bathrooms. Students in the dorms now brought their own bedding and did their own cleaning—or didn’t, as the case may be. When we first met Kate at Deutsch, I silently marveled that our daughter was walking where I walked, eating meals where I ate them. Suddenly, Kate said: “Mom, I walk here and I think: You were here where I am now at exactly the same time of your life.” I recall my closet containing skirts and dresses for classes and the morning routine, including makeup and hair dryers. Kate usually wears jeans; she rolls out of bed, pulls her hair back, and goes off to class. The dorms now are never quiet, but the middle of the night is quietest, and that is when Kate studies, wrapped in a blanket in the hall. Earlier in the evening everyone’s door is open, with TVs and stereos blasting. A couple of weeks after moving our daughter in, we dropped something off to her, and there were nine or ten students packed in her room, having a great time celebrating the various “piercings” they had just gotten. We weren’t surprised to see Kate’s eyebrow pierce, and we appreciated the irony of her explanation: “I like the little bar instead of a ring; it’s more subdued.” Cafeteria food, or, as it is called now, DC (for dining commons) food: Kate speaks of it with disgust and loathing, while I remember liking everything—and escaping the food poisoning that once hit many in the unit. And if there is food, there must be drink; while we had schooners of beer at Larry Blake’s Rathskeller, Kate and friends have sake bombs at a Japanese restaurant, counting one-two-three in Japanese, then chugging some strange mixture of beer and sake. In our day we wore white shirts and blouses to the Big Game so we could sit in the rooting section and do card tricks. When we met Kate after the game in 1998, she was wearing the one Cal shirt that had made me wince. It proclaimed, in blue letters on gold, “F— Stanford.” The crowd that day was not violent, despite later media reports, but when we heard “We are armed. We will fire,” over the p.a. system, we marched right down onto the field with the rest of the crowd. After all that, Kate’s shirt didn’t seem so far out of line. My activities in my first years at Cal consisted of two years of Spring Sing at the Greek Theatre—Deutsch and Cheney teamed up to win the Sweepstakes Award both years—and other Cheney activities. John and I graduated in June 1964, just months before the Free Speech Movement began. Kate is involved with CalPIRG to stop the renewal of oil leases off the California coast, in a small University art gallery, with Citizens for a Free Tibet, and Cal alumni night during KQED’s pledge week. She also refs intramural volleyball. She has “slept out” twice: once during the Ethnic Studies protest, and once to buy tickets to the opening night of Star Wars: Episode One. Her major is PEIS (Political Economy of Industrial Societies), a major that didn’t exist when we were at Cal. We were political science and economics majors. The contrasts of then and now for us are significant, but so are the similarities: the same beautiful campus, the rigor of study, the hills for hiking, the parties and friends. Had I more time and space, I might be tempted to write about what it was like at Cal when three of Kate’s grandparents were there. For a start, I would mention commuting by ferry boat…. |
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