When I was growing up in South Los Angeles in the forties and fifties, my best friend lived down the street. He was going to go to USC, and so I wanted to go to there, too. My mother would not hear of it — she said, “Why would you want to go to USC when you can go to UCLA?”
I was excited to be admitted. My mother wanted me to stay on campus, because she’d never had that experience herself. And I did work during the summers, but not during the school year; I’m an only child, and my parents made sacrifices in order for me to be able to live on campus.
Only six people out of my high school graduating class went to UCLA, so I joined a small fraternity when I got there, and I relied on my fraternity brothers to help me decide which professors to take. We made some great memories — we even stole Tommy Trojan’s sword; it was made of wood, and we took it, we got it. I had a lot of fun and went to all the football games.
UCLA yearbook photo, 1960.
I was a pretty naïve kid, and as an undergrad I worked really hard at being cool. Powell Library at the time had the Undergraduate Reading Room, and that’s where everybody hung out. There, or on the wall near the co-op at Kerckhoff Hall — in the mornings, the guys would sit on that wall and just do what guys do. I’d spend my time in the reading room or near the co-op, smoking a pipe and chasing co-eds, thinking I was cool.
I come from a family of intellectuals — they liked opera, they liked reading, they went to plays — and so I loved learning. I started out as an accounting major, because the girl who I was dating, who today is my wife of 63 years, was studying accounting. But I didn’t like it, so I changed majors several times.
I finally switched to economics. My mother told me about an economics professor she’d had when she was at UCLA in the 1920s — she said he was quite young and handsome. Well, I’ll be darned if this guy wasn’t still teaching at UCLA in 1958 — so you’re talking 30 years later, right? I ended up taking a class with him, but the “young and handsome” professor was now 70-plus years of age. We laughed about it for years.
In economics at UCLA, I was exposed to some of the brightest minds in the field. I didn’t realize this until I went on to graduate school at another university, and found that the stuff that they were teaching me I’d already had as a junior at UCLA. And they never spoon-fed you — they professed knowledge to you, and it was your job to absorb it.
I learned a lot, but by senior year, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do; I felt lost. And two of my economics professors, Charles Tiebout and Thayne Robson, basically took me under their wing, and spent a lot of time just talking to me — not about the theory of economics, but about life. That influenced my whole career; it’s why I decided to go to graduate school, and eventually became a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and a lifelong educator myself. And I’ve tried as best I could to pay forward what they gave to me.
While I was at UCLA, it was the golden age of education. Beyond my major, I took what they called “breadth courses,” just for learning’s sake; my favorites were music appreciation with Paul Des Marais and Geology 101 — geology for non-majors — with William Putnam. They both really made the material come alive, and those courses broadened me as a human being. I’m 84 now, and I was 21 then, and I still feel the impact they had on me.
I hope UCLA continues to offer that kind of well-rounded education to its students, and not only courses intended to further careers. I hope, too, that UCLA will hold on to many of its traditions, as I don’t like when these are abandoned — for example, USC still has the same fight song it always had, while UCLA has changed theirs. I don’t see why it had to change. I’m really opinionated when it comes to that stuff!
I still get great vibes thinking about my time at UCLA. My wife and I both lived on campus, did all the football things together and made some great friends. It really was the golden age of education, and it was a wonderful time.
