Jerry Samuelson:
I came to Cal State Fullerton in 1962, young professor, desperately needing a teaching position and mainly here because the head of the Arts at that time, Dr. John Olsen, I had met earlier, he had a vision of what this place was going to become and I wanted to be a part of that vision.
I had been teaching at UCLA, this very large prestigious built out campus and coming down here to an orange grove with a couple of temporary buildings and the first permanent building was just being started.
It took a lot of I guess, faith, to believe that something would happen out of this whole area. When that first building was completed, the Art department stayed in the temporaries, so the whole rest of the campus left and the visual artists were over there in that little wonderful world all by themselves and to be honest, when the art building was built a few years later, some of the faculty didn’t even want to move.
The happy events for me personally, of course, was the day the visual arts building first opened. Another, we added an addition to the visual arts building years ago and our president at the time had to go to Sacramento to fight for the funds to get the addition to the building and certainly when that came through that was a very happy time.
But I guess, it all pales in relation to a year and a half ago when we opened this performing arts building. I had been working on this building for twenty years and it was a long, long, time to get all the approvals and it was worth it, because after twenty years, we had built a really, really good performing arts building. Probably one of the reasons I haven’t retired is that once we got this building built I had to enjoy it for a little while before I retire.
I am still heavily energized in all the things we’re doing, I still teach a graphic design class each semester. My health is good and one of these days, one of these days; I’ll have to go on to something else.