Jack Rosston | Interview 2 | July 25, 2011

REDMAN: My name is Sam Redman, and today is July 25, 2011. Today I’m in San Francisco, sitting down again with Jack Rosston for a second oral history interview, focusing primarily on Jack’s many ties and contributions to the University of California. Before we really turn to campus, so to speak, I’d like to return to a couple of themes that we discussed in your last oral history session that I wanted to get just a little more material on, if that’s all right. We talked about how you were working for one of these New Deal alphabet soup agencies, the NYA, the National Youth Administration, and how, as a sixteen-year-old young man, you were taking the ferry over each day to campus to work. Could you tell me a little bit more about what jobs you were doing as an 00:01:00NYA employee?

ROSSTON: I guess it was in the early days of getting ready for the atom bomb, really, in the Physics Department in San Francisco. One of the things that they needed to have was a complete vacuum. They used mercury to get the complete vacuum. A little bit would spill. One of the professors got poisoned, and so they hired me to take a vacuum, which was just a tube and a flask connected to a vacuum, to go around on the floor and pick up the globules. I didn’t realize what I was doing, which was probably prevent him from getting mercury poisoning, but I was right in the middle of it. Nothing happened. They did get to the atom bomb.

REDMAN: We talked a little bit about that you had gone to an employment office. Bureau of Occupation was it?

ROSSTON: Yes.

REDMAN: To sign up for this type of work. If you were intending to be a student, say, at the University of California at that time, could you say, “I would like a job at the University of California”?

ROSSTON: I was a student at the University of California. I was a freshman. They had the NYA jobs for students who needed to have extra money. It was like the YPA was for people who had families.

REDMAN: If you would summarize for me what your thoughts are on the effect of the NYA program on students like you at the University of California. It seems to me that it was a pretty important work program that allowed you to keep going 00:03:00to school at Cal, since you were able to pay for your transportation using your NYA checks, your checks from that job. Is that too much of a stretch to argue that?

ROSSTON: That’s about what I had. I had a scholarship, which paid for my fees and my lab fees and my books, and then I had to pay for my transportation. The NYA, which was ten dollars a month, I did. That was my first year. My second year, they let me get fifteen dollars a month, and I lived in Berkeley then.

REDMAN: Thinking about those scholarships, then, taken together, the scholarships and the NYA job, it seems like that helped you further your education and that that was a pretty important program.

ROSSTON: It was the only way I could do it, because my family had no money. My 00:04:00brother was also working his way through college.

REDMAN: That was just a simple fact of the Depression in some sense, that these families had no money to give to their kids to go to college, even if they wanted to. It seems like the NYA was a pretty important aspect of that. The other topic that I’d like to talk about -- we talked about both of the bridges, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, as going up about the time when you were starting college. Is that correct?

ROSSTON: No, it went up when I was in high school.

REDMAN: They were being built while you were in --

ROSSTON: They were finished when I was in high school.

REDMAN: Do you recall what the Golden Gate, for instance, would have looked like before the Golden Gate Bridge was there, from your teenage years or from your younger days?

ROSSTON: I knew what it was. I watched the bridge built, because I went to George Washington High School, which had a fantastic view of the Golden Gate. I 00:05:00was there for two and a half years. We watched the bridge being built.

REDMAN: At that time, I would imagine that it would be immediately clear that this was a major engineering project. Was it clear right away that this was going to become such an important symbol of the Bay Area?

ROSSTON: I don’t know that, but it was pretty damn exciting. There was a great festival in San Francisco when the bridges were opened.

REDMAN: Some of that excitement and enthusiasm, I imagine, continued on in terms of the 1939 Treasure Island Fair. The mid-to-late 1930s must have been a pretty exciting time in the Bay Area for a number of reasons.

ROSSTON: For a number of reasons, a real number of reasons. It was still the 00:06:00Depression, but the building of Treasure Island and the World’s Fair -- it was going to be an airfield afterwards, but planes got too big. It was a big move for the Bay Area, and it attracted people here at the World’s Fair. I think San Francisco really came into leadership.

REDMAN: The bridges really facilitated the movement of people from one place to another, but do you think it also changed the mood in San Francisco? Was that festival atmosphere about the bridges, do you think that was fairly short-lived?

ROSSTON: We were just beginning to come out of the Depression and go into World War II, but after World War II that’s when San Francisco started building 00:07:00very heavily. Los Angeles then, too, even faster.

REDMAN: Let me ask the final question, then, about the bridges. Can you compare for me, when you look today, as someone who’s lived in San Francisco for much of your life, or the Bay Area for much of your life, when you look today at the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, what are the things that you think about? What comes to mind when you see those bridges?

ROSSTON: I think the Golden Gate Bridge is a monument in itself. It’s a beautiful bridge. The bridge to the East Bay is more utilitarian. But they both are utilitarian.

REDMAN: Having seen the Bay Bridge constructed, and the Golden Gate Bridge, very memorably, constructed, seeing the new east span of the Bay Bridge, which is being constructed now, this massive structure, do you have any thoughts on that 00:08:00as far as the future of those bridges?

ROSSTON: I think the romance of the thirties was exciting. These are much more utilitarian. We have a subway under the water. We had ferry boats in those days, going both to Marin and the East Bay. That was kind of fun.

REDMAN: So there’s a little bit of a different mood there.

ROSSTON: Yes. The ferry boats were romantic.

REDMAN: For a couple of years, in the 1950s, you attended MBA classes, or maybe it was immediately following World War II that you took classes towards an MBA at Stanford.

ROSSTON: That was during World War II. I was there for two quarters in 1942, 00:09:00’43. Then, after the war, I got a job at SRI, which was just starting. I took a couple of courses for one or two quarters.

REDMAN: SRI?

ROSSTON: Stanford Research Institute.

REDMAN: Can you tell me about what that experience was like? I know we’re jumping now in topics, but we’ll get a little bit more into a narrative theme here. Tell me about the experience, during the midst of the war, taking classes at Stanford.

ROSSTON: I did at the beginning of the war, and then I was in a ROTC program. After two quarters, we were called to active duty.

REDMAN: That’s when you did your language training.

ROSSTON: Language training then, yes. I came back to Stanford Business School for about six weeks, and then I was called to active duty.

REDMAN: So you were thinking at that time that you would potentially be able to extend your education there before being called into active duty?

ROSSTON: I was on active duty when I went there the second time. I was a full-time soldier.

REDMAN: What was that like, maybe being in a uniform in the classroom during that time? Were people just kind of used to that at that time?

ROSSTON: After being in an Army post, it was like going to heaven.

REDMAN: Because the environment was a little nicer and it wasn’t as strict? So there was a lot to --

ROSSTON: The level of what was going on was at a much higher level than just being a dirty solider.

REDMAN: So you felt like you were using your intellect in a way that maybe hadn’t had the opportunity for some time. Let me ask about your earliest 00:11:00activities with the University of California Alumni Association. Did you join the Alumni Association right after you initially left Berkeley?

ROSSTON: No. I think after I got out of the Army. I guess when I was working; I joined in the late forties.

REDMAN: Do you remember what the Alumni Association would have been like in the late 1940s? If someone were to ask you to paint a picture of what the state of the Alumni Association was in the 1940s --

ROSSTON: There was a local Alumni Association in San Mateo County, so I became active in that and active in scholarships. I think I still have a membership. I 00:12:00was on the scholarship committee, then I became president of the Alumni Association, and then I was called into the Alumni Association.

REDMAN: Let me jump back to your earliest work with scholarships. That’s one of the main efforts of an alumni association, is raising funds and then also selecting students for scholarships. What attracted you to that activity?

ROSSTON: Of course, I owed a lot to it, because I was a beneficiary of it. That’s how I got started in it. I enjoyed meeting people who were interested in the same thing in the peninsula, and then I got involved in that. Then I 00:13:00became president of the chapter. Then I was invited to join the Alumni Association. They call it board of directors, but it was just a member. Then I worked on the scholarship committee, and then I became president.

REDMAN: When you work on a scholarship committee for the Alumni Association in that era, what was the work like as far as the various duties?

ROSSTON: When I started in San Mateo County, part of it was interviewing students, and part of it was calling people up on the phone and asking for money. It goes that way. The Alumni Association itself was doing things, and I got involved in several of the programs and was working with scholarships. How 00:14:00to get students, how to treat them, what the alumni magazine is, and how communications to alumni come. Very gratifying being able to help the role of the University in the state of California.

REDMAN: I’ll ask you this question numerous times today, but I’d like you to tell me about students in the 1950s that you may have been interviewing. Imagine yourself, then, as a younger man, working with the Alumni Association on scholarship committees and interviewing these young students. What do you recall about the students from that era?

ROSSTON: The main students I interviewed were from the peninsula at the 00:15:00beginning. When I did student interviewing, I was fundraising. San Mateo County was a fairly well-heeled community. It was much before computers. We used the telephone to call people up. Sometimes I’d get good answers, sometimes I wouldn’t.

REDMAN: As far as asking for contributions?

ROSSTON: Asking for money.

REDMAN: Was that hard for you or was that something that you took to fairly easily? For a lot of people, it’s a challenging thing to ask for money.

ROSSTON: Once I started doing it, it was much easier.

REDMAN: It took a little getting into, but once you --

ROSSTON: Yes, and then I would get other people to tell them what I was doing and getting them. I did make some money by just sitting on the telephone. Maybe 00:16:00it would be five or ten dollars, but that was a good amount of money. I think we probably, with the chapter of the Alumni Association, we did have some fundraisers.

REDMAN: Do you recall what types of fundraisers those might be in that era?

ROSSTON: We would have one event a year. One of them was somebody had a place where they had bows and arrows. We had a party down there and got one of the faculty members to come down, and ran it as a benefit. I think we did have other things. That’s in the history someplace. It’s not in my head.

REDMAN: Jack, will you remind me what year you graduated from Cal?

ROSSTON: 1942.

REDMAN: Can you help me interpret the significance of the Great Depression and 00:17:00the New Deal for people in your generation in thinking about higher education? Do you think those experiences contributed to how alumni of your generation thought about the University after the war?

ROSSTON: I think it went in two directions. I think there were a lot of people who worked their way through, and some of them became very, very successful. Then there were people who had money. They were able to do things that we weren’t able to do. Some of them became philanthropists and some didn’t at all.

REDMAN: It’s a very interesting question for me when you see some people who are very wealthy and some of them are very willing to give back, and others are more reticent. They hold onto their money. Were you starting to learn a little bit about that in that era?

ROSSTON: I was. I, of course, was attracted to those who wanted to do good. Some 00:18:00of our big money comes from people who, A, have it, but B, have a great loyalty to Berkeley. The Haas family has given tremendously to it. The Goldman family has given.

REDMAN: This is a multigenerational thing, often, for these families.

ROSSTON: Oh, yes.

REDMAN: That’s something I’d like to get into, again, in a little while. One of the biggest stories emerging out of the University of California campuses in the late forties and early fifties was the loyalty oath controversy. Do you have any specific recollections about that?

ROSSTON: Yes.

REDMAN: I’d like to hear what your impressions were of that.

ROSSTON: There were some wonderful faculty members who were just kicked out because they wouldn’t sign the loyalty.

REDMAN: Because they wouldn’t sign the loyalty oath?

ROSSTON: Yes. It was what we had been fighting for in World War II and what our 00:19:00country stands for. It just went so far from one side to the other, as happens in this country. You’ve got two different sides in this country that are just so far apart, I wonder if they’re ever going to get together a little bit.

REDMAN: That was a moment of political swing in the state of California. Far to the right, with --

ROSSTON: Some. California now is pretty leftist, and I think it was then, but there were both sides, as there are now.

REDMAN: In particular, it seems that, in the forties, fifties, and then definitely sixties and seventies, Berkeley starts to get this particular reputation as being farther to the left, of course. Sometimes on the extreme left. But then, obviously, there are examples of faculty members and alumni that 00:20:00are much further on the right. Do you think Berkeley starts to get a little bit more of a cutting-edge reputation politically around this time?

ROSSTON: I think it does. It’s like a country that’s got all kinds there. I think it has become more liberal than it was in the twenties.

REDMAN: What were your impressions of the loyalty oath controversy from the perspective of someone in the Alumni Association? Were there problems in terms of then continuing fundraising, or was that sort of a blip on the radar?

ROSSTON: I was not that active at that time. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t really get active until the 1950s.

REDMAN: Were you reading about the loyalty oath controversy?

ROSSTON: Yes.

REDMAN: You presumably took a special interest in it because of --

ROSSTON: I did, yeah. I remember my father, who died, I guess, in the late forties, had opinions about that, too. We agreed.

REDMAN: So he felt like it was over the top to ask faculty --

ROSSTON: Yes, and the way the Japanese were taken out of California was bad.

REDMAN: Your father had agreed with you on that?

ROSSTON: Yes, or I agreed with him. I was younger.

REDMAN: To what extent do you think the alumni differentiated between a red scare, sort of this falsely created red scare, versus an actual threat of Communism? Do you think the alumni also represented a full spectrum of the political -- ?

ROSSTON: I don’t think that the red scare was there. It was there when I was in college. When World War II started, the Russians and the Germans were on one side. The Young Communist League was not allowed on the campus, but they were at 00:22:00the campus gates, with big banners, “The Yanks are not coming.” When Germany and Russia decided they weren’t getting together, the signs were changed to, “The Yanks are not coming too late.” It was unbelievable! Overnight, they took their signs and changed them.

REDMAN: That’s pretty amazing. Eventually, you rose to the San Francisco chapter Alumni Association president.

ROSSTON: No, San Mateo.

REDMAN: The San Mateo Chapter. How did your association deepen at that point?

ROSSTON: I guess I’d been active in scholarships, but it was all local. Then I got a call from the Alumni Association, asking me if I wanted to be on the council. I think they went out and they reached.

REDMAN: They were trying to find people to be on the council. Were the meetings for that in San Francisco or in Oakland or Berkeley?

ROSSTON: They were in Berkeley, on campus.

REDMAN: What were your first impressions of the council?

ROSSTON: I was very impressed.

REDMAN: What impressed you? What were your first thoughts on -- ?

ROSSTON: I loved the University, and I was very comfortable being with people who loved the University.

REDMAN: You had taken a special interest in the Bancroft Library. You had mentioned to me before starting this interview today that your first donation to the Bancroft Library was a very modest donation in honor of your father. Can you 00:24:00tell me a little bit about that?

ROSSTON: I wanted to do something, and my father and I had a love of books. I guess I had a love of California, and I saw something that came in, and I said, that would be a way to do something in his honor. That’s why I gave up ten dollars.

REDMAN: Had you known about the Bancroft Library?

ROSSTON: I knew a little bit about it, but I didn’t know much about it.

REDMAN: It was some sort of a piece of alumni literature, maybe, that mentioned the Bancroft Library?

ROSSTON: I don’t know what it was, but I did know the Bancroft Library, and I did know it was California history. All that impressed me.

REDMAN: That was the start of a relationship, in some sense.

ROSSTON: The Bancroft Library -- Ellie Heller is the one who got me really interested, but I had already been interested.

REDMAN: Can you tell me about Ellie, and then spell the last name for me?

ROSSTON: H-E-L-L-E-R. Eleanor Heller.

REDMAN: Eleanor Heller. Can you tell me about who she was?

ROSSTON: She graduated from Mills College. I think she may have been in a wealthy family, but she married into a very wealthy family. They were millionaires over and over.

REDMAN: Was she on the council?

ROSSTON: I don’t think she was on the council, but she was on the Board of Regents, and her husband had been on the Board of Regents.

REDMAN: She sort of reintroduced you, in some sense, to the Bancroft Library later on?

ROSSTON: Yes. I had not been to the Bancroft Library before Ellie called me up 00:26:00and said, “Jack, I want you to serve the University in something that’s non-controversial.”

REDMAN: Was she making that in terms of a pitch, like in terms of, “I promise this won’t be controversial”?

ROSSTON: She had a good sense of humor, and I knew her enough to talk to her, so I was very pleased. I guess she’d been off the Board of Regents at that time.

REDMAN: Once you became part of the council, eventually you moved up to being the president of the national University of California Alumni Association. Tell me how that took place. Was there a major turning point in your involvement, or was it just sort of gradual?

ROSSTON: I was very involved in the mission of the University of California. I got involved in a lot of different things on the council, and I became part of 00:27:00the council’s board of directors; I don’t know what it was called. Then the time came for election. It was scary, but I got it.

REDMAN: You had decided to run for the position, or did someone --

ROSSTON: I was asked to, and I said yes.

REDMAN: It seems like this obviously became a great fit. It’s something that was a good thing, both for the University of California and for yourself, but were you aware that this was a role that you wanted to take on?

ROSSTON: I was so thrilled with it. I was president of the local chapter. We got involved in things, and I guess I got involved in things, so they put me on the council. They called me from Berkeley to put me on the council because I had 00:28:00done things.

REDMAN: So it was maybe your success in raising funds or scholarships? Do you know what stood out?

ROSSTON: I don’t know exactly what their thinking was. They knew I was an active person, I guess.

REDMAN: I understand your first year as president, you became a non-voting member of the Board of Regents. Is that correct?

ROSSTON: That’s right. With a voice. I could speak up, and I did.

REDMAN: Was that sort of just a matter of course, that your second year you become a voting member, or was that a change that -- ?

ROSSTON: In those days -- I don’t know what it is now -- the president of the UCLA Alumni Association and the Berkeley Alumni Association took turns. Now I think the other campuses are getting involved. I don’t know whether it’s 00:29:00changed. I would be a non-voting member the first year, and a voting member the second year.

REDMAN: Did you work in fairly close collaboration with the Alumni Regent from UCLA that first year? Do you recall that?

ROSSTON: We were friendly, but I don’t think we worked together. I worked more with University people, including the President.

REDMAN: Who was the President at that time?

ROSSTON: I can’t even remember your last name.

REDMAN: I can sometimes remember my name. We’ll get into that in a bit.

ROSSTON: That’s history. Bill Coblentz was on the Board of Regents at that time, and he was a good friend. We would walk together and everything.

REDMAN: What was his last name?

ROSSTON: Coblentz, C-O-B-L-E-N-T-Z. He just died this year.

REDMAN: Tell me about what direction he had come to the Board of Regents. Was he a faculty member, or was he a -- ?

ROSSTON: He was a lawyer. A very politically oriented lawyer. Very high in the state Democratic Party.

REDMAN: You had mentioned to me that you noticed a difference between various Regents that essentially cut across the lines of gubernatorial administrations that had appointed them. You had served with Regents appointed by Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, and Jerry Brown. Is that correct? I’d like to hear your recollections on the make-ups of the Regents.

ROSSTON: I think one thing that Brown Regents and the Reagan Regents had in common was love of the University, which was incredible because they were so politically different. The Jerry Brown Regents, in my opinion -- maybe it shouldn’t be for the record -- Jerry was kind of a wild one. He’s calmed 00:31:00down a lot. It took a lot of calming. Every time he came to a Regents meeting, and he didn’t come to all of them, he would come with a host of protestors. That was very upsetting for me.

REDMAN: What about that bothered you? Was it that people were protesting against the University, or that they were protesting on a particular political issue while University -- ?

ROSSTON: I think they were just protesting. The other two-thirds of the Board, because it was about two-thirds, were really interested in the University, and I was surprised that some of the conservative Republicans, which were not my style, agreed with me. I went down to one of the places where they did the 00:32:00atomic research.

REDMAN: Oh, sure, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, or the National --

ROSSTON: The one down in New Mexico.

REDMAN: Los Alamos.

ROSSTON: I went down to Los Alamos. I was new on the Board. They invited us down. I didn’t realize you could bring your wife. She actually knew some of the scientists down there.

REDMAN: Your wife did? Barbara?

ROSSTON: Barbara. Barbara did cancer research, and they used nuclear things in that.

REDMAN: Is that right? So she knew some of the scientists there.

ROSSTON: Some of them came over and said, “I know your wife.” That was a thrilling thing to go down there.

REDMAN: Tell me about that experience. I suppose probably fairly early on, but later on, it becomes this visible point of contention that UC Berkeley had been 00:33:00involved in nuclear research, but not only atomic weapons development. They’d become involved in cancer research and all sorts of --

ROSSTON: Yes, and Barbara was in cancer research. Some of her cohorts she worked with. At any rate --

REDMAN: Was that a controversial trip to -- ?

ROSSTON: No, it wasn’t. All the Regents went down, and it was very, very well done. It was just an absolutely thrilling thing to do. Barbara would have loved it if I brought her with me, but I was a new kid on the block and didn’t think you brought your wife to those things. Be careful.

REDMAN: What are some of the major things you remember from your time on the Board of Regents? Were there particular political events, or were there particular points of contention or debate at that time? You’d mentioned that 00:34:00both the Regents on the right and the left of the political spectrum were tied together by their love of the University.

ROSSTON: They were. They didn’t always agree, but they really had strong love for the University. All of them had great respect for them. That worked out very well. A couple of Jerry Brown’s Regents were yo-yos as far as I was concerned, but don’t quote me on that one.

REDMAN: Were there particular things where you may be surprised that people on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, agreed with you about?

ROSSTON: I think it was an era where you could really work to have the University of California remain as one of the top universities in the world. I think that the science there was wonderful and the intellectual level was wonderful. The University of California, I think, probably due to lack of funds 00:35:00or whatever, has not been able to attract some of the people. One of the problems I saw then was, if you got a great, promising chemist or physicist, and he had a wife and two small children, and he got an offer from a job at UC or Harvard, he couldn’t afford to come to UC. Or he could go to -- I hate to call it that -- but a secondary, good university, and still support his family well. I really campaigned to have the professors get something that was nearly comparable to Harvard and Stanford and Princeton.

REDMAN: You were on the Board of Regents in 1981, 1982. I’m curious if you 00:36:00could sort of paint me a bit of a portrait about what the academy was like. Was it pretty similar, do you think, as far as the time that you were a student? It seems a lot of things had probably changed in terms of science and the humanities and the types of research that was going on on campus by the 1980s.

ROSSTON: Yes. I think my knowledge of what was going on went way up, too. The University really emerged during World War II, and the scientific research they did to help the war effort, which was the atom bomb.

REDMAN: That really helped, in some sense, the reputation of the University academically, but it vaulted it into a new political position, that it was in some sense more of a complex political world.

ROSSTON: While I was a Regent, I went back to Washington with the President of the University to meet the senators. He said, “I want to bring you back 00:37:00because I want them to see what a Regent looks like.” I guess he didn’t add, “But nobody else had the time.” Anyway, it was an incredibly exciting time for me.

REDMAN: We’ll summarize on this and then get into the Bancroft for a bit. I’m just curious if you could sort of summarize what your major experiences were on the Board of Regents. Was the thing that stood out the other Regents or the activities for the University? It seems like a love of the University was a common thread there.

ROSSTON: It was a pretty common thread. The skin color was changing, and the 00:38:00Latin Americans were coming in. There was a very brilliant woman who I think was Mexican, and she and I became very good friends. We always voted together. She was very vocal, and I would say, “Sshh, quiet.” Then she’d say, “Jack, get up!” We always sat next to each other. It was really fun to be with people that I admired so much. I was very privileged.

REDMAN: Did you get opportunities to meet faculty as a regent in ways that you wouldn’t have?

ROSSTON: Probably, yes. Just by saying “Regent,” it was prestigious. All I have left is parking privileges.

REDMAN: Perhaps about the time when your time on the Board of Regents came to a 00:39:00conclusion, you became especially active in the library. Can you tell me why you chose to get involved with the library in particular as an aspect of campus?

ROSSTON: I was looking for things to do. That’s when Ellie Heller called me up and told me to get involved in the Bancroft. I was involved in it from the time I started, but then when I became president, I was president for three years, I think, because of the vacancies. Then when I was through with that, my son, Greg, had just graduated from Berkeley, and his fifth anniversary class was the first fifth anniversary to give a gift to the University. They gave a desk for 00:40:00the undergraduate library. They raised $5,000. I thought, my god, that’s a wonderful kid. I don’t know how I got involved, but I did get involved. I was in the Bancroft, and then my time at the Bancroft expired. I guess the librarian had retired, so I went in to see the new librarian and said, “I’d like to work with you.” That’s how we started the library advisory board.

REDMAN: That comes along in the early 1990s. Is that correct? The library advisory board. I understand that you had a strong personal connection to the UC President, David Gardner. Gardner had studied the loyalty oaths for his own doctoral dissertation, so I’m wondering if you two in particular had talked 00:41:00about that, or --

ROSSTON: I don’t think we talked about that. We talked about the University. We talked a lot about the library. I asked him to be on the library advisory board as one of the first people on it. I think he was President of the University at the time or had just been finished with that.

REDMAN: How had you first been introduced to him? Do you recall that?

ROSSTON: I don’t really recall. Oh, I do. I think he was working for the Alumni Association. I met him and I was very, very impressed with him and we became friends. Then I think he went down to UC Santa Barbara. Then he was called up. We kept in contact, close contact. He came up from Santa Barbara to Berkeley again.

REDMAN: Tell me, what was he like, personality-wise, David Gardner?

ROSSTON: They’re all outgoing guys.

REDMAN: All of the presidents, they tend to be --

ROSSTON: Differently, but he was enthusiastic. He was brilliant. He had a great 00:42:00idea about what should be done. The stacks in the University library are named the Gardner Stacks.

REDMAN: That’s a fitting tribute to him, intellectually and then also in terms of his ability to build the University.

ROSSTON: Yes. He did a lot to help raising money. He was on the original library advisory board.

REDMAN: Let’s jump into that. There are two major committees, then, at the library that you’re very involved with. Of course, the first is the Friends of the Bancroft Library, and the second is the library advisory board that was established in the 1990s. Let’s begin, though, by talking about the Friends of the Bancroft Library, because that seems to come first, correct? There seems to have been an old version of the Friends committee, and then, today, there’s a new model of the group established during your tenure. I’ve heard some critique of the Friends of the Bancroft Library prior to, say, the 1980s, and 00:43:00even during much of the 1980s. It was primarily an outlet for bibliophiles or individuals who were very interested in volunteering on behalf of the library, but there was little or no fundraising going on. Can you maybe respond, if you would, to that sort of critique?

ROSSTON: Jim Hart [James D. Hart] had a lot of fingers he could point to people and come back with money. Jim Hart was a great fundraiser for the Bancroft. I guess that was all that was needed.

REDMAN: Jim Hart was the longtime director of the Bancroft Library.

ROSSTON: Director of the Bancroft for a long time.

REDMAN: James Hart was a literary scholar. He becomes the Director of the Bancroft Library around 1969, and holds the position until the time of his death in 1990. There’s no doubt a lot to talk about during those years. Do you 00:44:00recall your first meeting with James Hart?

ROSSTON: I don’t know. I knew his daughter maybe earlier.

REDMAN: What do you remember about James Hart? What was he like?

ROSSTON: He was like a king. He really could run that place. When he left, there was a big vacancy.

REDMAN: Thinking about Jim Hart, what does it take to be director of the Bancroft Library at the University of California?

ROSSTON: To be an intellectual, obviously. To have a love of California history, and have contacts to be able to work with people in providing library. I don’t know how the Mark Twain collection got in there, but it did for some reason, and that was an important part of the Bancroft, and it still is.

REDMAN: Let’s talk about the Mark Twain collection, because my understanding is that it came to Berkeley but it was unclear whether or not it would stay permanently at the University of California. There was some question that potentially it could be purchased by an East Coast university like Yale, who could come up with the money. That’s apparently where you came in, in some sense.

ROSSTON: Jim Hart was doing very well. When he died --

REDMAN: Do you remember about what decade? This was in the nineties, or about early nineties?

ROSSTON: Early nineties. When Jim Hart died, he had had people who funded it. Maybe they died, too. The communications were broken and we had to come up with $40,000 for the Bancroft Library or we couldn’t have it. I was then president 00:46:00of the [Friends of the] Bancroft. That’s when I called on the Bancroft Friends committee to do something about it. I think I told you this. I said, “You either got to give or get $10,000 each.”

REDMAN: So you turned to each of the Friends of the Bancroft Library, saying --

ROSSTON: Horrified them.

REDMAN: That horrified them. Was that hard for you to do as well, to ask --

ROSSTON: No, because I was so damn opinionated.

REDMAN: Were you frustrated with the lack of fundraising that was going on, or did you just see it -- ?

ROSSTON: We’d all depended on Jim Hart. When he was no longer there, I had to find it, and I was chairman of the Bancroft at the time. I thought, “I’ve got to find some way. I got $40,000.”

REDMAN: You had mentioned to me before we turned on the tape that three of these 00:47:00individuals came back to you with money that they were personally giving, and one person raised the $10,000.

ROSSTON: That was enough money just to pay for the Bancroft that year.

REDMAN: Really? Wow. Did that surprise you?

ROSSTON: I asked for $10,000. There were about ten or eleven who didn’t do anything over $200 or something. I had expected we would get more in an emergency. At any rate, we sailed through it. We had to do something. That was very important.

REDMAN: That establishes a tradition for the Friends of the Bancroft as a fundraising arm in some sense. It’s not exclusively a fundraising arm, but it 00:48:00establishes a tradition of fundraising.

ROSSTON: Now the Director of the Bancroft is a fundraiser.

REDMAN: Tell me about, then, after this initial decision to raise funds through the Friends of the Bancroft Library, did that subsequently come up again as needs arose --

ROSSTON: I think it did gradually, and I think we’ve got some terrific fundraisers in the Friends of the Library now, and they have contacts and they are very conscientious about it. When I joined, it was just a pleasant place to be.

REDMAN: Can you maybe describe, then, for me what the personalities were like of the initial? You had mentioned --

ROSSTON: They were intellectuals. Some of them had money, some of them didn’t. 00:49:00Most of them, as intellectuals, had contacts. They were not in the business of raising money. I can understand that, but when you get down to practicalities, in order to keep something going, and it’s not supported by state funds, you’ve got to get volunteers. I had worked on the foundation, so I had some idea about how to do it. The Berkeley Foundation.

REDMAN: Were there different experiences or attitudes in maybe the seventies, the eighties, and nineties about fundraising for the long term? It seems to me that the real endowment, the movement for universities to create these massive endowments, is more of a modern phenomenon.

ROSSTON: I think it is, but also, I don’t think it was necessary at Berkeley. 00:50:00There were some endowments, but endowments come in later at Berkeley. Now they have an office of planned giving, which they’ve had for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s [recent].As the state dries up, you’ve got to do something. The state is really drying up much more than it should.

REDMAN: Were there changes in the nature of the alumni? You mentioned your son’s involvement with the Alumni Association in helping raise $5,000 for the Moffitt undergraduate library. I’m curious if you can tell me about how alumni were maybe changing. Was the face of the Alumni Association changing?

ROSSTON: I think it had to. I know Greg, whenever his class has a reunion, he’s out putting his hand in people’s pockets. I think that that’s 00:51:00happened in a lot of the classes. A lot of loyalty.

REDMAN: Do you think the efforts to fundraise are more straightforward nowadays, or more open, or more obvious in some sense?

ROSSTON: I think it’s more necessary. Some people realize it.

REDMAN: I’m curious, then, about some of the friends initially being horrified at being asked for this. Some people, of course, rose to the occasion. Were others extremely upset by this in any way?

ROSSTON: Nothing came in.

REDMAN: So they just would maybe make their regular $200 --

ROSSTON: I had about three or four people who worked with me very closely, and that’s how we got the money. That’s dirty linen. That doesn’t make much sense to publicize that.

REDMAN: Some people were jumping right onboard, and others may have had feelings that they kept to themselves.

ROSSTON: Yes. A lot of them were wealthy, and a lot of them weren’t.

REDMAN: Some people were just purely interested in the literary aspect of it, or the California history aspect of it.

ROSSTON: Yes.

REDMAN: This is our second tape today. Today is July 25, 2011. One of the topics that we were talking about earlier is that some University of California families have very strong philanthropic traditions, very strong traditions of giving, and many of these families in San Francisco have a Jewish cultural heritage, Jewish religious heritage. Not only have these families raised money, 00:53:00they’ve sent their kids to Cal, and some have even gone on to be faculty members at Berkeley. I’m curious if you have a perspective on the connections between these families of Jewish ancestries in San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

ROSSTON: I think that there was discrimination fifty years ago, or sixty to seventy years ago. There are two primary universities in the Bay Area, and a lot of Jews have gone to both of them. There’s a lot of loyalty to each of them, and some with cross-loyalties.

REDMAN: So you think that you would find a similar series of connections at Stanford as well?

ROSSTON: Oh, yes.

REDMAN: Thinking about the Haas family in particular as being one, and then you’d named -- were there any big -- ?

ROSSTON: The Koshland family.

REDMAN: What were some of the major families that you had worked with? Did you have an impression of particular families, well-known alumni families, that you connected with?

ROSSTON: I didn’t connect that way. No, I did not.

REDMAN: I suppose that you were more working with individual donors at any given time?

ROSSTON: People I got in contact with, I worked with. I spent some time with the foundation over there, after I was president. I automatically got transferred over there, and I was vice chairman. I worked with him, and I worked on ideas.

REDMAN: The library advisory board. It’s amazing that this board has only been around since the 1990s; since you look at it, you look at the mission of what it 00:55:00does, of helping the university librarian and providing a fundraising body for them. It’s surprising that this wasn’t already around.

ROSSTON: There was state money coming. The building of the library itself was philanthropy.

REDMAN: The changes in funding necessitated the need for a library advisory board.

ROSSTON: Yes, and there were a lot of families in the years after World War II who were rich and became much richer, and they wanted to do something.

REDMAN: Do you think people connect with the library in a way that they might not connect with other places on campus because of the nature of books and studying and reading?

ROSSTON: There’s all kinds of connections. There’s a lot of money going into athletics, which upsets me.

REDMAN: Tell me about that. Tell me about your thoughts on --

ROSSTON: I hate to be quoted on that, because I could get into trouble. A lot of people give a lot of money to athletics, give all sorts of money, and some of them don’t. When there’s millions of dollars going into the stadium, and the library -- it’s doing all right now. The University is getting fitter.

REDMAN: So that concerns you. That disparity.

ROSSTON: I would just like to get more money to come in. They’ve got quite an outfit for planned giving now. I remember when it was two people. I think we get a Christmas card with eight signatures on it now.

REDMAN: The library advisory board, it’s the President of the University, 00:57:00chancellors, vice chancellors, and then a selection of faculty members and alumni. Did you originally construct that board, and did you choose people from different places?

ROSSTON: What I did was I found some benefactors, but I got all the former chancellors and a couple of former presidents, and that gave it a hell of a prestige. From that, we moved on. We didn’t have anybody in the library except the librarian.

REDMAN: It was particularly important, do you think, to have people from outside the library, but then specifically the presidents and chancellors?

ROSSTON: Yes. Then we made the Chancellor the president. I was president. I said, “I’ll be something else.” Or I was chairman. I said, “But you’ve got to have the Chancellor as chairman.”

REDMAN: The Chancellor and Vice Chancellor, they have a lot of additional responsibilities. Was it hard to get time and attention? The library being so 00:58:00central to --

ROSSTON: The chancellors always attended the meetings, and they hosted them in their office. The annual meetings were in the Chancellor’s Office. I don’t know whether they are anymore, but that’s how it started out.

REDMAN: That’s a really impressive commitment to that, to a new board.

ROSSTON: I think Heyman was Chancellor at the time. He may be the first one. I don’t know who was the first one.

REDMAN: What were your impressions of Heyman? You worked with Chancellor Tien as well. What were your impressions of Heyman as Chancellor?

ROSSTON: I thought he was wonderful.

REDMAN: What in particular impressed you about his time?

ROSSTON: His time, his fairness, his intelligence, obviously, and his love of the University. You have to have all of that put together, and getting out and doing things. He knew how to meet people, to talk to people. His wife was 00:59:00wonderful. It becomes a family thing, like it does with the library.

REDMAN: Let me ask about the role of wives and faculty wives. In the fifties and sixties, you think that there was this idea of the faculty wife who was an intelligent woman who might be able to cook for her professor husband, but then also was able to converse on Shakespeare or physics.

ROSSTON: We had some pretty damn good wives.

REDMAN: That played a role, it seems, in a lot of these activities in terms of fundraising or get-togethers.

ROSSTON: The Sprouls.

REDMAN: Tell me about the Sprouls.

ROSSTON: His daughter became a very good friend of ours, and she was one of the original members of the board.

REDMAN: Did it help to have that family namesake on the board?

ROSSTON: I don’t know, because she was such an individual, too. She was great. 01:00:00She had friends. She knew how to do things. She was somebody good to talk to about planning. All that worked.

REDMAN: You had mentioned that the Regents were becoming more diverse in terms of the backgrounds, the ethnic backgrounds, of a lot of people. That must have been a change, but it sounds that there were more women playing a role as --

ROSSTON: Strong women.

REDMAN: Can you tell me about how that may have changed the dynamic from your perspective?

ROSSTON: I really don’t know. I was never sitting in the Board of Regents until I did, and a lot had happened since then. It was all set up for me.

REDMAN: I’d like to then jump to a recent series of events. One that’s in my 01:01:00mind, of course, recently, with the retirement of Charles Faulhaber as Director of the Bancroft Library, I know there were a pair of failed searches for the Director, where Charles was a finalist. Peter Hanff, who is, again, many years later, serving as Acting Director, spoke about the process of going through these two failed searches before finally bringing on Charles. From the way stories pass down within the building, it sounds as though nobody could have anticipated that Charles, the scholar of Medieval Spanish literature, would be so successful at running the Bancroft Library, and that he’d be such a successful fundraiser in particular. Can you tell me what your role was in those searches?

ROSSTON: I guess I was chairman of the Bancroft Library Friends. I sat in. There 01:02:00were I think three or four of us, and faculty members, on the committee. It was sort of half divided. Charles was on one side, and I forget the name of the guy, who was wonderful, on the other side. The vote came, just from the rolls they had, and it was even. It was maybe thirty-five, forty people, and it was even. It was too close to call, so they didn’t want to disturb anything. I think it was right. That’s when they postponed it for five years. The only thing that I was worried about was absolutely wrong, was that he couldn’t raise money. He’d never raised money before.

REDMAN: He was a scholar.

ROSSTON: He was a scholar, and he’d never raised money. I remember when he got appointed, he called me up and said, “Can I have lunch with you today?” That 01:03:00was just charming.

REDMAN: As soon as he was appointed, he called you, and you two had lunch. It started your relationship pretty early.

ROSSTON: I’d been a friend of his, but not close, because we didn’t come across. He was a professor and I was an alumnus. I wasn’t in his field.

REDMAN: You were familiar with him.

ROSSTON: I had been through the search. I was on the search committee.

REDMAN: What were your impressions of him when he first started as Director?

ROSSTON: I was already for him. I wanted him to be director for five years. I think I could have done with either one of them, but I sort of leaned toward -- but I had no idea what his potential was for fundraising. His wife has been a big help, too.

REDMAN: It sounds like that was a pretty hard task of finding a director and 01:04:00vetting them and going through those searches. Was that a challenging -- ?

ROSSTON: It was, because we came out with two prize-winners. That was the only problem there was. It wasn’t that there wasn’t enough talent, but they were different talents.

REDMAN: Would you describe for me the sort of impressions of the realization that the Bancroft Library really needed a new building, a new facility? My understanding is that when Charles was appointed the Director, some engineers and administrators on the campus described the Doe Annex as the building most in need of attention but least likely to get it. Can you sort of talk about that?

ROSSTON: When Jim Hart took me through the stacks, I was just shocked at the conditions. With all of the valuable collections they had, it was like a fire trap. Things were falling apart, really, in my mind. The scholars were there. 01:05:00The Mark Twain collection. I remember going through with Jim. They pulled out a drawer and they gave me a piece of paper. Mark Twain had been out for a walk one day and made notes to do something, and they had a whole bunch of his notes that he made, which are still in there, I’m sure. The rooms up there were just like cells, and they’re overloaded with books. I think that went on for a lot of the University, because scholars also put things away and pile them up. It needed a lot of money. Jim Hart was getting it, but not a revolution to happen later like --

REDMAN: What, then, was the difference? The story goes that Charles receives a 01:06:00call from the campus administration, explaining that the plan to build another university building had fallen through and that the Bancroft Library, if they were able to raise funds, they would be next in line for a new facility. The University was willing to commit to retrofitting the building. Can you add to that story for me a little bit?

ROSSTON: I think I was out of it. I was no longer involved.

REDMAN: Okay, but you were aware of --

ROSSTON: I was aware, but not involved at all.

REDMAN: Tell me a little bit about your surprise, then, at what happens next. The Friends and Charles kick into high gear, and the University kicks into high gear, and they’re able to raise a massive amount of money for a gorgeous new building. What were your impressions of that, then?

ROSSTON: Delight.

REDMAN: Did you see this as part of an extension of a tradition that you had set 01:07:00up, or did that only really occur to you a little later?

ROSSTON: I was there. I didn’t set it up. I do remember all the drawings and going all through the whole process of what was going on as an observer, because they were doing it.

REDMAN: Were you excited by that prospect?

ROSSTON: Oh, very. I got so excited when it all happened.

REDMAN: Was your primary excitement -- were you thinking about the preservation of that California history or its role in the scholarship or University? What in particular do you think -- ?

ROSSTON: I think all of that, all three things. It is a scholarly place. A university should be a scholarly place. It’s a history place, because that’s where it is. It’s going into new things. It’s pioneering in oral history, 01:08:00which is a complete new way to do history. It got its start under Hart.

REDMAN: I’d like to ask about Willa Baum, if I may, and the Regional Oral History Office. Can you tell me a little bit about your impressions of who she was as a scholar and the director for the Regional Oral History Office?

ROSSTON: And a person. Oh, I was very fond of her.

REDMAN: So you were fond of her personally and also intellectually. Tell me about what she was like.

ROSSTON: She was all business, but very warm personally. She set that up, and she knew what she was doing. I don’t think she had any ego at all. She was just ready to do her mission. She had a bunch of very intelligent women working 01:09:00with her. Each one of them could have done something else, but they wanted to do that, and they did a very good job.

REDMAN: Within the Bancroft Library, there are these research arms of the Mark Twain Papers and the Regional Oral History Office, but then there’s also a mission of preserving and archiving documents, primary sources. Do you think those two things go together quite well? It seems like, on occasion, one of the projects will have an unusual fit within the Bancroft Library, or a more strenuous fit within the Bancroft Library.

ROSSTON: I think it’s a combination of things that work pretty well together. I don’t think that there’s that much competition between them. I think they appreciate each other. I feel good about that.

REDMAN: Maybe it’s different personalities occasionally that come and go.

ROSSTON: You’ve had some wonderful people there who are absolutely selfless.

REDMAN: As we wrap up this session, I’d like to ask a couple of questions. Between your arrival at Berkeley and the construction of the new Bancroft Library, a lot has changed, especially in terms of the academic creation of new knowledge or scholarly research. The web has added a new component to scholarly life. Can you tell me, from your perspective, how academic departments at Berkeley have shifted their relationship with the library?

ROSSTON: I don’t really know, but I would judge that, because of the way libraries are treated now, it’s easier to move in and out when you have a computer. It meshes. I think Berkeley is a very good place for that, because I think they’re so advanced in those sciences as well.

REDMAN: As we wrap up, I’d like to ask about the place of the University in 01:11:00your life since the time you graduated. Obviously, this is a big question, but I’d like you to maybe take a moment and pause and reflect on the development of the campus and the library since your time. It seems to have meant a lot for you.

ROSSTON: Oh, it has.

REDMAN: Can you maybe reflect on the place of the University in your life since the time you graduated?

ROSSTON: Even before I got there to school, I loved the University of California. I remember when I was in the second or third grade, we’d have teams on math problems, and I was always on the Cal team.

REDMAN: So you’d always aspired to go there and be part of it. It seems to have been a very good relationship for you.

ROSSTON: I think I mentioned that I had a cousin who went there who died in 1927, on her seventeenth birthday, of polio. The year before they discovered the iron lung. That’s a first. I didn’t even know what was going on then, I was 01:12:00so young. I remember them saying that she went over to Berkeley, and that was about all.

REDMAN: So you gradually became more and more familiar with the University and wanted to stay.

ROSSTON: It was my only possibility of going to college, too.

REDMAN: So it represented that for you to a certain extent.

ROSSTON: Yes, but it was obviously one that I wanted to go to. I was glad I had one son who went.

REDMAN: Your other son went to Harvard.

ROSSTON: I refer to them as my smart son and my dumb son.

REDMAN: The one who went to Cal as the --

ROSSTON: Smart son. I don’t worry about egos.

REDMAN: You don’t worry about egos. That’s funny. I would like to jump back. I know this is a bit of a tangent backwards, but I think we did talk about where you were on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. I understand that 01:13:00they were in the midst of finals at Cal. Can you tell me what campus was like on that day?

ROSSTON: I guess finals were just beginning, and I had to get a paper in before finals. I stayed up all night the day before, on December 6 to December 7, because I was getting my paper in. I woke up to people screaming, and that was the day we got the news, December 7.

REDMAN: This would have been in the co-op?

ROSSTON: I was in a co-op, yeah.

REDMAN: And people were frightened?

ROSSTON: They were different things. Even in a place like a co-op, they’re not all conservatives. A couple of guys bombed the Japanese student club. That kind of pressure going on. It horrified me at that time, and most of the kids were 01:14:00horrified at that.

REDMAN: We did talk last time, too, about the internment of Japanese and some of your friends leaving, and your reaction to that. Can you talk about what the reaction on campus was like? Do you remember what other students were saying?

ROSSTON: Not too much. Not really.

REDMAN: There was so much else going on in the world. Do you think that the internment of the Japanese sort of got lost in some sense?

ROSSTON: I think that, particularly people living in San Francisco, where there was some mixture, were very upset. It was hysteria going on. I think that that was what it was. I had friends who went to visit. We had a future congressman go. At least one.

REDMAN: The war was a pretty powerful moment in your life, and then obviously in 01:15:00the history of California. I asked if you would reflect on the Great Depression and the New Deal as far as how that affected people’s thoughts and opinions on higher education. Can we just finish up with World War II, and I’ll ask, do you think the war influenced your generation in terms of alumni and their relationship to the University at all?

ROSSTON: I don’t know. I really don’t know. My kids are postwar, and they have allegiance to their universities. It’s parental influence, too, that gets into the blood. They’re both loyal. Greg is loyal to both Cal and Stanford now, and Steve went to Harvard and he’s loyal to Harvard, but he also did 01:16:00graduate work at Stanford, and he married a Stanford professor. Stanford is a part of their life, but he still does things for his dad.

REDMAN: I think that’s a great place to wrap up. Is there anything else that you’d like to share about your involvement with the University since the Second World War?

ROSSTON: It’s been very gratifying for me to be part of it. I love going over there when I can do things. It’s getting to be more and more difficult for me to get around. I don’t drive anymore and I get tired easily. If there’s a library or a Bancroft event, I do want to get over to it, and I do get over to a lot of them.

REDMAN: Very good. I think that’s a good place to end, and I thank you very much.

ROSSTON: You make me feel good when you do this. I love to get involved with the University. I miss it a lot.

[End of Interview]