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I have many fond memories of my years at Cal State Fullerton. I started attending Orange County State College, as it was then known, in Fall 1962. I was the mother of three school-aged children and dearly wanted a college degree. The classes were held in Quonset huts surrounded by orange groves. I watched the elephant races, cheered for the basketball team and worked part-time for Dr. Seth Fessenden.
I rode my bicycle each day from my home in Placentia through the orange groves. Some of the days I had to walk my bike home as the Santa Ana winds were so strong from the east in the afternoons.
I attended classes only two or three days a week many of the semesters, and chose classes scheduled so that I would be home when my children got out of school. I studied during the alternate days.
One of my favorite memories is of a group of young college students who “adopted” me and always saved a place for me at lunchtime on the deck of the new administration building in the later years of my attendance. One day one of those young men came into a classroom to return a book to me and said, “here’s your book, Mom. Thanks so much.” The students nearby looked at him, and one of them said, “Is that your son?” I laughed, as he was about 20 and I was in my 30s.
My first semester was in Fall 1966. I had signed up for beginning swimming. Unfortunately the new swimming pool was not yet completed; the P.E. building was new that year. So for the first few weeks we held the swimming classes at the pool in the dorms across Nutwood Avenue.
The photo I’ve sent is of the Humanities building as it looked during construction about spring semester 1968; it was completed the following year. Today the Quad is nice with mature trees that seem so foreign (to me).
Other photos I’ve sent show campus marches against the war in Vietnam. Orange County, conservative Republican stronghold, was turning radical on campus because of the draft, the war itself, and with help from organizations like the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) agitating and inciting students to “become a cog in someone else’s revolution,” as a campus counter-revolutionary conservative pamphlet read.
