Claremont McKenna College - Ayer Yearbook (Claremont, CA)

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Formulating and Founding. the Enterprise, 1926-1946 RE G I STRATI O N for the newly established Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men talso known as the Claremont Undergraduate School for Men, or, even more simply, the Claremont Menhs SchooD commenced on the morning of Mon- day, 23 September 1946, in the foyer 0f Bridges Auditorium on the campus of the Asso- ciated Colleges of Claremont thirty-Hve miles east of Los Angeles. Throughout the morning and afternoon, Dr. Gerald I. Jordan, assistant professor ofpohtical economy, recently released from the Navy, and Mrs. Bertha Ward, lecturer in Spanish, lately serving as a language instructor for the Army, enrolled eighty-six young men tmany of them in Eisenhower jackets or other examples of surplus military attiret in a hand- ful of courses being offered by a hastily assembled faculty of seven. Tuition, room, and board for the fall semester came to slightly more than $500. The majority of regis- trants, like millions of other young men similarly enrolling across the nation, were on the GI Bill. Morris Slack, for example, had flown 13-173 and 13-245 in the South Pacific, then taken charge of air intelligence in Kunming, China, before being discharged with the rank of lieutenant colonel, the same grade held by School Director Dr. George C. S. Benson, who had served in Africa, Italy, and Austria in civil affairs and military gov- ernment. Robert Eachus, also registering that morning, had won his commission in a tank destroyer battalion. Donald Phillips had won a spot promotion from the ranks to ensig11.James Wilcox had served in the South Pacific as a sergeant in airborne infantry and artillery units. William Cronin had spent part of the war in Brazil as an enlisted

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Ever since the 18803, men and women of higher education had been dreaming 0ftransf0rming C laremont into a new Oxford, a new Cambridge, basking in the sunshine of Southern California.

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2 technician in the Army Airways Communication Service. Even closer to home,Wa1- ter Wiley had spent two years as a member of the Navyis V-12 unit at UCLA. A month before he was scheduled to be commissioned in the Army Air Force, John Noll was hospitalized. Rather candidly, another new student, Robert Emett, later admitted to having first heard of the new school while serving a short stint in a naval brig. It was from the brig that Emett applied and received his letter of acceptance. Whether veterans of combat or stateside service, whether officers, NCOs, or en- listed men, the returning servicemen filling out their forms with the help of Dr. Jordan and Mrs. Ward were equally eager to make up for the war years that had taken a por tion of their youth, endangered their lives, and put their dreams on hold. That meant higher education: college, an impossible dream for so many before the war but now, thanks to the GI Bill, an imminent reality. True, they had come to a school not yet a college, a school hastily organized over the previous spring and summer, its director on the other side of the continent teaching at the Harvard Summer School. These young men in various assortments of civilian and military clothing were not waiting in line to start a college, although the college could not be founded without them. They were waiting in line to redeem dreams nurtured in Quonset huts in the South Pacific, in midnight watches on the Atlantic, on submarine patrol, or amidst the boredom of stateside duty in remote places: dreams of getting an education, of becoming some- one, something, somebody, a self not even glimpsed before the war. Now that they had survived the cataclysm, had become sergeants and ensigns and lieutenant colonels and privates First class with the Combat Infantrymanis Badge, it was all so very pos- sible. It was right in front of them, here in this improvised school whose campus remained as of yet an empty, rock-strewn desert wash spotted with sagebrush and scrub oak. Two weeks after registration, on 6 October 1946, the eighty-six students assembled with their director, professors, and staff in the Mabel Shaw Bridges Auditorium tthe larger of two Bridges auditoriums on the Associated Colleges campusi for the opening convocation of the Claremont College Undergraduate School for Men. Onstage were Harvey Mudd, Chairman of the Board of Fellows of Claremont College, who presided over the ceremony; Dr. James Blaisdell, president emeritus of Claremont College; Dr. Frederick Hard, president of Scripps College; Dr. E. Wilson Lyon, president of P0- Inona College and provost of Claremont College; Robert Bernard, managing director of Claremont College; and Dr. George C. S. Benson, director of the Claremont Col- lege Undergraduate School for Men. Also onstage with the other fellows ttrusteesi of Claremont College was Donald McKenna, a Pomona- and Harvard-educated busi- nessman with an abiding interest in higher education. It was a symbolic gathering. Each of these individuals represented in the most di- rect and compelling way the past, present, and future of the enterprise. Twenty years Claremont McKenna College