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By Marily Shea-Stonum
Some of my best recollections are the food: at least once artichokes were on the menu, not your typical college cafeteria fare, although appropriate to a college so near to Castroville. Other somewhat dimmer recollections are the incorporation of produce from the original student garden overseen by Alan Chadwick.The backbone of college nights was the planning done by the individual dorms. When Rutherford House was responsible for planning the program, we chose to yank the thread of high school nostalgia with a homecoming theme. Somehow we chose a princess from each of the classes and crowned a homecoming queen, likely the only one ever to wear a HQ tiara at UCSC which took such pride in its general rejection of such bourgeois tropes. Still if my memory is at all accurate, folks enjoyed this throwback theme.
My favorite memory is from Spring of 1968 when two dorms held a “Roman Orgy Night” right around Easter. We hijacked it and crucified Christ. I think most spectators thought it was just part of the program, but in bad taste. We had a cardboard cross and Jim Crane in a sheet with a crown of thorns. Animal had “borrowed” a purple table cloth and was Pilate. I was a humble roman solider. Our preceptor, Harold McCann (also dressed in a sheet and sandals) was Barabbas. After marching Crane and McCann on to the platform–much to the amazement of the event planners–Pilate gave the crowd a choice of who to set free. The crowd chanted “Give us Barabbas”, McCann scampered off, and we nailed Crane up. After a minute or so Pilate announced the resurrection and we took Crane down. I still can’t quite believe it happened.
College Night! You were expected to ‘dress up’ (which for some meant just wearing more than a tee-shirt). Sometimes they were rather sparsely attended, or people left right after finishing their meal.
I can remember a few of them:
Arie Haagen-Smit: the “father of air pollution control” who had figured out the causes of smog while at Caltech. I think Dr Thimann knew him, which is how came to be invited.A brass band (not the Canadian Brass, I think, but something like them) which played so loud my ears were ringing for quite some time after.
Participating in a “Western Night” show with corny cowboy jokes and silly songs, when Gauss House had the job of putting on the show.
I think it was my freshman year when Merrill had Clark Kerr as its college night speaker, and I ‘snuck’ over there to hear him. It wasn’t long after Reagan had ousted him as the UC system President, and he had a lot to say about the founding of the Santa Cruz campus, in which he had had such an important role..
But, by far, the most memorable of them all was in my senior year, when, after a year of begging, Tom Lehrer consented to perform his songs “because they let him play the Bösendorfer piano”. The dining hall was packed beyond capacity, and the cheers were loud and long. Definitely one of the highlight days of my time at UCSC.
If anyone else has any recollections, I’m sure those will remind me of others which aren’t coming to mind, but those definitely stand out in my memory.
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