International House Berkeley

69 Anyway, there were stories about Mr. Blaisdell. Once a number of Swedish economists came to visit the I-House. I think that was before the war. He was showing them around the I-House and pointed to the women's wing, and to the men's wing, and one Swede said, "Oh, they are separated?" And Mr. Blaisdell said, "Of course!" And the Swede said that it was not so in Sweden. And Mr. Blaisdell asked, "Don't you have problems?" And the person replied, "Yes, don't you?" Another story is how Mr. Blaisdell was showing them the newly-built bridge – I think it was the Golden Gate Bridge. Mr. Blaisdell was proud of this engineering feat. One visitor observed that a toll was charged to cross the bridge, and the other economist said, "Oh, this is a toll bridge?' And Mr. Blaisdell said, "Yes!" And the economist said: "We abolished those in Sweden in the twelfth century." These are all happy memories. I remember the kindness of President Sproul. Peggy Logee, a shy economist from Mt. Holyoke, and I were handing out name cards in the corridor of the House when in came President Sproul. Peggy asked him for his name, whereupon, he boomed in his all too inimitable voice: "Robert Gordon Sproul." Peggy's cheeks turned red, and she sputtered an apology. He replied, " I don't know your name either. What is it?" Were there a lot of discussions of politics? Yes, there were. The issue in 1948 was the creation of Israel. And these discussions were civil. We also had a number of Palestinians in the House. One of them, George Raad – I think he is still on the Board – became a civil engineer. Another was Bishara Lawrence, who later also served on the I-House Board. Oh, and we also had a good number of Turks. I can remember Ismail Ergonenc very well. He did very badly that first year because his English was not good. So a wonderful man in engineering told him to buy a round trip ticket on a Greyhound bus to the East Coast and back for $99 and sit next to anybody who did not have a companion; and he did. At the end of that summer, he arrived in San Pedro on the Greyhound bus with practically perfect English. A lot of people whom he met on the bus had invited him to stay with them. We called him Smiley – he looked like a Texan, and he had a sunburnt, outdoor look. He spent a couple of nights with my family. Daddy woke up in the middle of the night, heard something downstairs, came down, and there he saw Smiley taking apart the washing machine. He had never seen a washing machine before that. But then Smiley put it back together again. So one of the happy things in that first summer was that I had a number of visitors from I-House, i.e. Don Bailey, Bob Wijsman, Smiley, and then, later, Jeanne Moffitt – she was an American, but she was part of the European-English contingent. Bob Vaught, who was a mathematician, came for a day – he was visiting his parents in Southern California; he played the piano – Mother said he was concert quality – all those mathematicians were excellent musicians. Cal did not have anything but a music theory program at the time, so although there were lots of mathematicians at I-House, there were no music majors.

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