Early Days in Berkeley 1951-53
Because I needed to complete two courses in American history, two years of foreign languages, ROTC credit classes, and an academic major for which I lacked most prerequisites, I needed to enroll for 21 or 22 credits each semester. The class load simply meant that I had to study hard and not participate in many non academic activities. More difficult was finding a stimulating major that I could complete in two years.
I thought of the ideas and courses that had most interested me. I focused on my childhood interest in maps and the interesting geography and geology textbooks that I had read at Oregon State. After an intensive study of the University of California Catalog, I discovered that I could major in geography, a university academic field that I had not known existed. My first meeting with a faculty member in the fall of 1951 was with the undergraduate advisor of the Department of Geography, John Kesseli. Professor Kesseli was a tall, lean man with a full head of wavy, silver hair. His gruff, heavily accented German-Swiss voice was accompanied by piercing blue eyes.
I arrived at his office several days before the fall semester began. Professor Kesseli asked me where I had attended college my first two years. When I replied, Oregon State, he said in his particular accent, “Corwallis? Why didn’t you stay? We don’t want you here!” I was greatly taken aback because my decision to come to the University of California and to major in geography had been the most important decision I had ever made. I became upset, somewhat angry, and replied “I left Oregon State because I didn’t think it very stimulating and that I thought that the University of California would be. I am going to stay, whatever you think.” Professor Kesseli broke into a big smile and said, “Well, OK! Let me put you through your paces.” It was obvious that he wanted students with spunk and who would question the teacher’s authority. Professor Kesseli did “put me through my paces” in his classes in map reading and geomorphology. He practiced the Socratic method of teaching and one had to be prepared to answer his penetrating questions without hesitation. I responded well to his methods; they truly involved me directly in the learning process. Through a growing mutual respect, he and I became good friends until his death.
I did not realize when I chose my major that the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, was the most distinguished geography department in the country. Its chairman, Carl Sauer, was honored throughout the world. As I mentioned in Part I, his classes The Conservation of Natural Resources and The Domestication of Plants and Animals as well as The Geography of Latin America were truly inspirational. They offered me the intellectual stimulation that I had not found at Oregon State. Each course was a carefully thought out story that was founded on a consistent philosophical background. Professor Sauer had gathered the evidence that underpinned his ideas from broad readings in geology, history, anthropology, and archeology. He synthesized the evidence with sound speculation and great verbal skill. He was not highly theoretical as was the fashion in most social sciences. Instead he wove stories about the ways objects and ideas were geographically distributed and ordered historically. His stories were the most thought-provoking of any I had ever heard. I even tried to record his classes in writing as close to word for word as possible so that I could reflect on his ideas, sometimes much later.
Erhard Rostlund, who taught courses in introductory cultural geography and the geography of the United States and Canada, was a large, white haired Swede who had a heavily accented voice. He had been a seaman who came to an academic life in middle age. From him, I learned that teachers, even in very large classes, could take individual care of students. I still remember the detailed comments he made on written assignments. Sometimes his comments were longer than the student’s original paper. He introduced me to studies in soil erosion, deforestation, fisheries depletion, and regional variations within the United States and Canada. From Professor Rotund I first learned of Aldo Leopold’s book, The Sand County Almanac, which may be thought of as the first popular account of ecology. It was the first book, other than textbooks or atlases that I felt compelled to buy with my limited finances.[1]
John Leighly taught climatology, meteorology, cartography, and the history of American geography. Professor Leighly was the most traditionally scientific member of the department. From him I learned about the processes that create weather and climate and the ways in which map projections are derived. A brilliant man but an extremely dull lecturer, John Leighly was precise in his speech and writing. The careless use of punctuation or of which and that did not slip by his scrutiny. He loved to talk about current events and was a gracious host to the students from his classes, which he often held at his home. He led me to respect the care for accuracy that a good teacher must have.
The fifth professor in the Department of Geography, James Parsons, taught a field class that took its students all over the San Francisco Bay region, some place new every Saturday. “Parsons” or “Jim” as we called him had started as a journalist. He carried with him throughout his life the curiosity about everything he saw or read. Field trips with him were constant discovery. Professor Parsons stopped frequently, often precipitously, whenever he saw something that struck his interest. He asked class members questions about what they saw; and he asked strangers who were part of the local scene what they could tell us about the place. I learned from him that every place is interesting and that curiosity and lack of inhibition in asking questions will contribute greatly to understanding the world.
As an undergraduate student who took classes with many advanced graduate students, I was surrounded by intelligent intermediaries with whom classroom ideas could be discussed. And on a spring break field trip to Sonora, Mexico, with five graduate students I was stimulated by their enthusiasm to explore new places with the knowledge that they had gained as nascent professional geographers.
Truly my choice to study geography at the University of California transformed my life. I found intellectual stimulation beyond my wildest expectations. I found extraordinary teachers. And I found fellow students who were as interested as I in learning about the world, especially from the perspectives of geography.[2]
My life in Berkeley outside geography
Not only was I stimulated academically at the University of California but I was also exposed to the wide array of theater, music, and political activity of the region. For me, who had only known neighborhood, small town and small city, the abundance of cultural activities of the San Francisco Bay region was more than I could take in, especially because my work and academic schedule was demanding. Nevertheless I was introduced to the possibilities that were to be found in one of America’s great metropolitan areas.
With the exception of 1953-1955 when I was in the US Army, Berkeley was my home and geographic focus until 1960. Gradually Portland became the past, and Berkeley became my present and future. When I was an undergraduate student no freeways or large shopping malls existed in the Bay Area. San Pablo Boulevard was the main artery through the area connecting Sacramento and the north to San Francisco. Berkeley was linked to San Francisco and Oakland by the ‘F’ Train. And San Francisco, ‘The City’, was accessible by bus, car, and the interurban train over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and by the Southern Pacific ferry between the Oakland Mole and the Ferry Building in the City.
The natural environment of the Bay region was marvelously interesting to me. Dominated by the San Francisco Bay itself and surrounded by high hills, the region as a whole could be viewed from many vantage points throughout the area. I remember staring out of classrooms at the grand scene. As I walked home from classes, I caught glimpses of the Bay and felt part of the larger scene. My senses were activated by the smells and pleasant aromas of the diverse trees and flowers that scented so many of the walks through campus or the residential neighborhoods (and from the roasting coffee as one approached San Francisco on the Bay Bridge.) On campus the eucalyptus trees emitted their distinctive and pervasive smell. The way in which the hills behind the campus changed from the yellow/brown of dry grasses in late summer and fall to the brilliant greens of newly sprouting grasses after late fall/early winter rains was the key to understanding the seasonal changes of California’s Mediterranean climate. In the late summer, the unique coastal fog that often rolled in to smother the region offered a clue to the cold offshore ocean current and the temperature inversions associated with it. And to me, a western Oregonian, the short period of grey, winter rain storms reminded me of home.
My impressions of Berkeley were mainly confined to the streets within a half mile of the campus of the University of California. This area was largely built up between 1900 and 1930. I lived and walked through most of the streets northwest, south, and west of the campus. In addition to the residential neighborhoods, commercial activities were found along the major streets that led to or were adjacent to the campus: Telegraph, College, Shattuck, and University Avenues. Usually I preferred to walk along residential streets because they were tree-lined and the homes often had pleasant, flower filled front yards. I also enjoyed walking along Telegraph Avenue with its groceries, restaurants, cleaners, bakeries, and other businesses that catered to both neighbors and students. Especially attractive to me, in large part because I had never seen such before, were the many book stores, in particular those selling used books. When I and my Oregon buddies moved northwest of campus, I often walked along Shattuck Avenue, the main commercial street of downtown Berkeley. Usually, however, I preferred the residential streets east of Shattuck because, like the area south of campus, they had many older homes, often of distinctive redwood style. And west of Shattuck Ave. the houses were interesting to me because many of them were of a distinctive ‘Mediterranean stucco’ style common to the 1920s.
During my second year in Berkeley I first lived in an older apartment building on University Avenue. My walk to school was on University Avenue, which was lined with commercial activities that were marginal to the central business district and included an auto dealership, an older movie theater, a large grocery store, and many small shops. I often took a less direct route to see what was playing at the several movie theaters in central Berkeley. And finally I lived in one of the large, older redwood homes the once lined College Avenue a few blocks south of campus.[3] Apartment buildings and fraternal organizations’ buildings were the norm on College Avenue as it approached the campus.
The University of California campus stretched down hill from the crest of the Berkeley Hills to the central business district of Berkeley. The upper slopes were not part of the main teaching campus, which was bounded on the east by the football stadium, astride the Hayward geologic fault, the International House, the Greek Theatre, and a large dormitory. The campus proper lay on the foot slope at the base of the hills. Strawberry Creek, which flowed in a steep canyon through the hills, was confined to landscaped channels through the campus. The campus was originally laid out, mid foot slope and had good views of the city and bay below. The center of the campus was the broad formal quadrangle with its tall campanile, which can be seen even from San Francisco.
The classroom buildings, the offices, the library and other major buildings were widely spaced and formally placed along winding roads and carefully maintained open spaces. Many of the buildings were built of white stone or covered with light-colored stucco. Some of the buildings were monumental with an eye to beauty as expressed in the style of ‘beaux arts’. A few were of the Bay Area redwood style. And the large new labs, classroom and office buildings were recently constructed in a less ornamental post war style. Large glens with shady spots and groves of redwood and eucalyptus trees provided many places to sit, relax, and be by oneself. Temporary buildings to house the increased demands of an expanding student population after the Second World War still occupied several of the open spaces.
I was focused on Giannini Hall, the home of the Department of Geography. Giannini Hall was part of a complex of three buildings mostly associated with the School of Agriculture. These buildings were sited on a knoll above the north branch of Strawberry Creek. Giannini Hall contained the office of the Dean of Agriculture and had a spacious foyer and wide halls, although the Department of Geography was tucked into a small suite of offices at the back of the building on the second floor and was most commonly reached by a back stairway. In particular I remember the lacey Olive trees near the entrances and an extraordinarily beautiful gingko tree, which, each fall, precipitously dropped its brilliant yellow leaves in a perfect golden circle on the deep green lawn that sloped away from the building.
I also spent many hours in the Doe Library, the stunningly beautiful main university library with its magnificent formal reading room and beautiful smaller room filled with comfortable chairs and a great collection of books to be read simply for pleasure. On hot days the library was cool and on rainy days it was good to curl up in a comfortable chair with a good book. Large lecture halls in Wheeler Hall were the location of a couple of my required classes. Wheeler Hall was located near Sather Gate, then the main entrance to campus, which had only recently spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue with the construction of a new administration building.
The spaces I traversed or used in Berkeley and the larger San Francisco Bay Region made me aware, for the first time, of the ways in which extremely great wealth could be concentrated in public buildings and spaces, in large homes in well landscaped neighborhoods, and in huge commercial structures in dynamic business districts. I had known the concentration of local banks, commercial and public buildings, and a few areas of expensive houses in Portland, but I was unprepared to realize that wealth could be expressed in the urban landscape as strongly as it was in the San Francisco Bay area. In my daily life, I became aware of the value placed on and expended by the State of California on the monumental buildings and extraordinary library of the University of California. And when I occasionally visited the City of San Francisco, I was amazed by the extent of the neighborhoods of expensive homes, in the large numbers of big stores, offices and public buildings in the downtown, and of the museums and Golden Gate Park. Of course, the expenditure of wealth on the Golden Gate and Bay bridges was impressive and visible from many places throughout the region.
And it made me feel good to participate in this concentration of wealth which could build beautiful buildings, create pleasant neighborhoods of large homes, and maintain magnificent parks and tree-lined streets. Yet the natural setting was not overwhelmed. The overriding character of the Bay Region dominated the landscape. The combination of natural and cultural features provided me with a great sensual experience that supported the stimulating intellectual journey I had started at the University of California.
- ↑
- Four other fellow students in my undergraduate geography classes went on to become chairmen of departments of geography in American universities: William Denevan, Donald Vermeer, Richard Nuysten ↑
- It and its neighbors have long been torn down as the University residential dorms moved into the neighborhood.
Life as a graduate student
Academic Life. I was discharged earlier than planned because the Army was being rapidly reduced in size following the end of the Korean War. I returned to New York in style on the USS United States, then the fastest ocean liner that crossed the Atlantic. I bought a new car from a Chevrolet dealer on Broadway and drove across the United States to the West Coast. Not having made plans for my life after the Army, I returned to Berkeley and inquired about getting a Masters degree in Geography. I was eligible for the GI Bill, which could pay for most of my education. I found an apartment in a private home on Summer Street in which I lived by myself for most of the next three years. It was within walking distance of the campus and had good views of San Francisco Bay. The classes that I needed for my program did not start until fall; thus I had a summer to do as I pleased.
My advisor and friend, Professor John Kesseli suggested that I enroll in an eight-week, field course offered by the Department of Soil Science. The class consisted of six or eight students, who majored in soil sciences, and Professor Frank Harradine, who had experience both as a teacher and as part of the massive field study that surveyed the soils of California. We traveled hundreds of miles throughout California, from the Klamath Mountains in the north to the deserts east of San Diego, from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada. Everyday we stopped many times, dug 4-5 foot deep holes with a soil auger, and recorded detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the soil, the specific geomorphic and geologic conditions of the surface and surroundings, the climate, natural vegetation, and the land use of the site. We recorded additional information from road cuts, made cross sections from the mountains to the coast, and systematically categorized each recording from the nearly 500 stops we made.
On weekends or during brief respites from the field we organized our notes and records into reports that reflected our understanding of how the diverse soils of California could be grouped into meaningful geographical suites. The soils field course was the most important class I have ever taken. It let me see how I could combine systematic visual observations of the natural (physical) world with a series of categories from many different disciplines. And it demanded intense focus of the body/mind in its execution. It required an understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that were impressed through land uses by agricultural, forestry, and urban institutions. The experience taught me that every spot in the world, from an area with a diameter of a few inches and only a few feet deep can be interesting and is related to an expanding network of material and ethereal worlds beyond.
I remember little of the remainder of the summer of 1955 except for a couple of camping trips that I took. For the first time I went by myself into areas that might be called wild or natural. The experience was notable for the feelings of awe and wonder that I did not have words to express, even to myself. I realized how little I knew of plants, animals, stars, insects, rocks, and water and how they came together in beautiful combinations. At the end of the summer, I met several English graduate students, who, like me, were just starting their graduate education. They became close friends. The summer of 1955 was the base on which rested the next several years of my life.
The three years from the fall of 1955 through June 1958 were the most stimulating years of my life. With the background of my undergraduate years as a foundation, I was poised to discover the richness of ideas that the faculty of the University of California had to offer. Graduate seminars, classes, and interactions with other students stimulated me more than I had ever before experienced.
Courses. With more time to experiment with courses outside my major, I took classes in several different departments. The study of nomadic societies of Asia was given by Wolfram Eberhard, who was later to become a member of my dissertation committee. Professor Eberhard was German by birth and education but had taught in both Turkey and China before coming to the University of California. He studied and did research on the social characteristics and history of nomadic societies throughout Asia. My research paper for his class was a study of the origins and spread of equestrian nomadism in Central Asia. It was the first time I had had to use sources written primarily in German.
From Professor George Forster, I took a class that compared cultural practices that had originated in Spain with those that had been transformed in Latin America. The course was a great introduction to understanding ways in which cultures can be modified by powerful, new political and religious forces, especially as seen by the receiving culture. The class stimulated my interests in Latin America, which remained dormant until my retirement some forty years later.
A course by Professor John Rowe, at the time the leading archeologist of Andean culture, introduced me to the ways an archeologist may look at the world. Although he gave some emphasis to the beginnings of civilizations in the Old World, I remember more about his reconstruction of former Andean civilizations from intimate knowledge of found artifacts. Unlike several of my other teachers, Professor Rowe was little prone to speculate about possible links between found objects; instead he introduced me to a way of looking at physical evidence, strictly in and of itself, without speculating how it might be connected with other objects that were not directly linked to it physically.
Courses in other departments of the University introduced me to the natural world. Probably the most stimulating to me at the time was Professor Hans Jenny’s course in the factors of soil formation. Hans Jenny was native to Switzerland. Having taken the summer soils field course, I was eager to learn more about how the great diversity of soils was created. The course fixed in my mind the fundamental importance of soils as major ways of focusing interests in mineral, organic, climatic, geomorphologic, and human worlds. As a focus soils link the cultural and physical worlds directly. Professor Jenny was stimulating not only in his theoretical genius but also in his field studies of the soils of the north California coast.
Less stimulating, but highly informative, was Professor Norman Hinds’ seminar in geomorphology. His approach used current, basic geologic literature, which helped me fill in ideas I had been first exposed to as and undergraduate. In the 1950s, geology was very conservative and had not yet exploded with newer geophysical and technological understandings.
My graduate class in plant ecology given by Professor Herbert Baker was exciting in the ways in which it explored the emerging concepts of the interrelationships among plants, animals, soils, water, and climate. And in a practical sense, my plant taxonomy class given by Lincoln Constance made me collect, identify, and then classify plants that grew in the nearby California countryside. In the process I became aware not only of plant identification methods, but also of ways in which plant species, genera, and families were connected through the processes of evolution and local plant ecology.
Within the Geography Department, I was excited by the research seminars in which I participated. The first seminar that I took was offered by Professor James Parsons. It explored the many ways in which early ‘native’ farmers cultivated crops through the use of the periodic shifting of fields (milpa agriculture) which could maintain long-term productive farming communities. Many of the seminar’s participants investigated a particular cultural group or region to try to understand the local farming processes and their effect on the land. I researched the great variety of terms that were used to describe this form of agriculture. Because shifting field agriculture has been widely used, many techniques have become associated with it, often with unique names to describe its sophisticated methods in different parts of the world. I learned to explore the stacks of the library of the University of California in my search of ethnographic and agricultural literature. Because every search led to a discovery, I came to love this form of library research. The love remains today.
One of Carl Sauer’s seminars explored the processes of plant and animal domestication. The American Geographical Society had recently published a series of lectures about the origins and dispersals of domesticated plants and animals given by him. These lectures, based on the limited archeological and ethnographic evidence then available, were highly speculative. They outlined the possible geographic centers of domestication and the geographic routes by which domesticated plants and animals were diffused to new areas. They provided a geographic perspective to the topic which students of the seminar might expand.
Each member of the seminar chose a particular plant or animal to follow from its possible site of domestication to its current distribution. I chose to investigate the domestication and keeping of honey bees. I followed the record of beekeeping through ethnographic literature that depicted or described beehives and the uses of honey and beeswax. Although I had largely limited my research to apis mellifera, which is an Old World bee only later introduced to the Americas by Europeans, I also searched the literature on New World, stingless bees, which were also a source of honey.
The second seminar that I took from Professor Sauer dealt with pre-Columbian transfer of plants, animals, and other objects between the Old and New Worlds. Because I was doing research on West Africa in preparation for field work, I was allowed to look at the links from both South Asia and the Americas to West Africa. The seminar was important for me to explore the ideas about the long distance spread of objects, ideas, and peoples. It introduced me to the evidence of possible theoretical connections between places and of the limitations of fitting evidence to theory. Carl Sauer’s fascination with geographical interpretations of cultural origins and diffusions has also become a fundamental approach to my understanding of cultural geography. To map the geographic location of objects or ideas at various historical moments and to subsequently interpret their distributions is for me one of the fundamental ideas of geography
Another of my graduate seminars focused on the interpretation of major geographic patterns of distribution and the natural processes that created them. John Leighly’s seminar explored some of the emerging ideas that connected oceanography and climatology. Although I was unable to follow some of the geophysical processes, I became aware of the processes of short term climate changes and their relation to ocean currents, temperatures, and salinity. The ideas informed other ideas from Sauer’s classes about longer term climate changes, especially Pleistocene changes in sea levels and shore lines.
In some ways Professor Kesseli’s geomorphology seminar on the processes of hill slope and valley formations was one of the most important to my academic career. This focus on geomorphology and later, my master’s thesis on a geomorphologic topic were major reasons that I received my first two university teaching positions. John Kesseli had translated excerpts from a German geologist’s newer approaches to understanding how land surfaces and landforms were modified. Walther Penck’s entire book had recently been translated just prior to the seminar. The members of the seminar studied Penck’s ideas on the ways in which the forms of hill slopes are related to base levels; i.e. the level to which streams were eroding adjacent lands. These ideas were in large part revolutionary at the time. They did not support the dominant ideas of the ‘aging’ of landscapes from ‘youthful valleys’ through to ‘old age’ plains. I had never seen how these earlier ideas could be anything more than descriptive and a part of a not very adventurous geology. Thus when a possible way of explaining (not simply describing) most landforms surface features was made available to me, I “ate it up.”
A seminar on the beginnings of American environmental thought given by Clarence Glacken was fundamental in introducing me to the roots of the environmental movement that only later emerged. I was fascinated by the wealth of environmental ideas that were to be found in the early Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the subject of my seminar research. The ferment in the early days of the United States extended to thought about humans’ relations with nature. Professor Glacken’s monumental work, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, had followed the earliest environmental thought in the Western world up to the beginning of the 19th Century. During the 19th Century environmental ideas began to explode, going in many directions. It was the beginnings of this explosion in America that the seminar addressed. I returned to these ideas many years later when I developed a course that explored late 19th and early 20th Century environmental thought.
The years 1955-1958 formed the intellectual base for most of the years that followed. I became part of the traditions focused on 1) ecology and evolution; 2) cultural and natural history; 3) the making of both cultural and natural landscapes, and 4) the cartographic representation of geographic distributions from the scale of a house or building with its surrounding fields or neighborhoods to worldwide patterns of distribution of both cultural and natural phenomena
Teaching. The graduate seminars and courses provided many of the ideas and approaches that I used throughout my academic life. They introduced me to unending pathways to follow with enthusiasm and pleasure. The other major part of my early graduate student days was as a teaching assistant in introductory courses in physical and cultural geography. These basic classes brought home to me the fundamental factual bases of academic geography. They stood me in good stead as a teacher. Throughout my years of teaching, I especially enjoyed teaching introductory cultural geography, although the nature of my teaching steadily evolved.
Cartography, as practiced in the 1950s was largely a pen and ink, hands on method of making maps. Although I have always had a love of reading maps, I had little interest in making cartographically beautiful maps because they demanded patient, meticulous use of liquid ink and clean paper, which I seemed to find many ways of smudging. Nevertheless, I was a teaching assistant for both John Leighly and John Kesseli, when they taught the upper division class at Berkeley. I learned a great deal from them about how to make maps but have become enthusiastic about producing good maps only with techniques developed through the use of computers.
Field work—Jamaica. A major part of the graduate program in geography at the University of California was to do field work in a foreign country. The idea behind this was that a cultural geographer, in particular, had to broaden his perspectives beyond those of America. Fortunately for me, grants to study abroad were relatively easy to get. Carl Sauer was in charge of grants to Caribbean countries that were supported by the US Office of Naval Research. The grants did not need to relate to the Navy’s operations. I was offered a summer field grants to study karst (limestone) landforms in central Jamaica. I knew little about limestone formations but studied the literature intensively. Little had been written about Jamaican limestone topography, so I approached the study naively. Before leaving for a two month’s study I had obtained good aerial photos of the area from Kaiser Aluminum Corporation, whose interest was in the aluminum ore that overlay some of the limestone.
In Jamaica I found accommodation in a boarding house in Mandeville, which was the largest town near the Cockpit Country, a very rugged, nearly impassable limestone topography in central Jamaica. In the early 19th Century, the Cockpit Country was a place in which runaway slaves hid. Its name derives from the very high, steep walled limestone hills that surround hundreds of deep depressions. The soluble limestone is undermined by underground caves and stream channels. No water flows on the surface. Because I was imbued with ideas about slope formation as related to base levels, I tried to apply the ideas I had learned in Professor Kesseli’s seminar. The base levels were the underground streams. Solution of the limestone hill slopes in this tropical area was rapid. The resulting hill slopes were straight or slightly convex. The initial points of erosion, where solution occurred most rapidly, were located in the nearly thick, level beds of limestone where minor faulting or fracturing had occurred. Solution was most active at the juncture of the fractures which were arranged in two series that were aligned nearly at right angles. The Cockpits usually drained to underground streams, the base level of the hill slopes. Although I was only partially successful in understanding tropical karst topography I was able to organize the results of my observations into a master’s thesis. I also learned a great deal about how to work with aerial photos in the field and to convert my results into maps. Possibly more importantly, I learned how to work by myself in a foreign country.
Social Life as a Graduate Student—1955-58. Several of my colleagues and I met almost daily for dinner at the university cafeteria. David Harris, Elinore Magee, John Beattie, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Fox formed the regular core of the group although not everyone attended every day. David Harris, Elinore Magee and I started the Geography graduate program at the same time. Yi-Fu Tuan had started the program a year earlier, David Fox a year later. John Beatty was a beginning graduate student in English History.
David Harris is English and had received an undergraduate degree from Oxford University. Yi-Fu Tuan, from a nationalist Chinese family had also received an undergraduate degree from Oxford. His initial emphasis at Berkeley was geomorphology, writing a dissertation on pediments in Arizona. Elinore Magee had an undergraduate degree in Economics from Berkeley. More recently she had been working for the Bank of America in San Francisco. Later she wrote a dissertation based on field work in the Balsas river basin in Mexico. John Beattie and David Harris roomed at the same house and became friends through that connection. We were all within a year or two of the same age and were united by our interests in the ferment of ideas at Berkeley in the late 1950s and by the congeniality we found over dinner and many Friday night sherry parties and weekend meals at a couple of local bars. Although we went our separate ways as we individually met other people, for me, this group and other friends at the University were the primary ways in which I initially connected to a rich academic social life.
In 1957, Elinore Magee introduced me to her roommate, Elizabeth (Beth) McGehan, who had worked with her at the Bank of America. Beth had graduated from Mills College, in Oakland with a degree in English Literature. She had worked at Sather Gate Bookstore in Berkeley and at The Bank of America in San Francisco. Beth had just been accepted to enter the Boalt School of Law of the University of California. She often joined us for weekend activities.
Besides this closely linked group, University of California geographers were bonded by the generous gatherings of Professor Jim Parsons and his wife Betty. They opened their home at the top of the Berkeley Hills to numerous parties on holidays and on the occasion of visits by eminent scholars. Clarence and Mildred Glacken also held yearly social gatherings for all graduate students in geography. Occasionally Erhard Rotund and his wife Esther also entertained local geographers. And a sumptuous yearly party, given by Anna Marie and Adjunct Professor Edwin Loeb was always anticipated. The secretary of the department, Westher Hess and her physicist husband Bill regularly had small groups of geographers to their home. These social bonds strongly reinforced the intellectual strengths of the Department of Geography.
In yet another way my social life connected with other geographers. Although I knew that I had homosexual feelings, I had largely suppressed them. In the 1950s homosexuality was still classified by psychiatrists as a disease and might be criminally prosecuted if expressed publicly and the military services banned homosexuals for serving. Therefore, I knew no community of people who felt the same as I. As an undergraduate I had found identity with a geography graduate student. Ward Barrett had left a teaching position in New York to come to Berkeley to study as well as to discover the underground homosexual community of San Francisco. He knew of my feelings toward him even as he kept me at arms’ length until I had returned to Berkeley from my army duty and he from field work in Samoa and New Zealand. In the meantime I had been approached by another graduate student, Tom Pagenhart, who was then working in Sacramento. Ward and Tom let me express my sexuality more openly as well as being interested in the same sorts of academic ideas as I.
From 1955 to 1958, my social life focused on my friends on campus and on the eating and drinking places of Berkeley and nearby Oakland. I lived nearly three years in a room in a private home on Summer Street, below the Berkeley Rose Gardens and tennis courts. My usual route to the University was down Arch Street, which was lined with pleasant homes, including those of Professors Sauer, Kroeber, and Leighly. Because I had a car, I and friends explored nearby parts of California—The Delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, the Gold Country along Hi-way 49, the wine country of Sonoma and Napa Valleys, Highway 1, north and south of San Francisco, and Yosemite and Lassen National Parks.
Fieldwork in Angola and Dissertation Research. In June 1958, Beth McGehan and I married. In June, I had also received my MA degree, passed my doctoral examinations, and had been given a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study in Angola.
If you want to know more, I can send you the book from which these excerpts came. ↑