Judy Harvey-Sahak interview

              TI: So could you please state your name and your relationship to Scripps?

JS: Okay. My name is Judy Harvey-Sahak and I am currently the librarian here at Denison
Library, and I am also an alumna, class of 1964.

TI: Where did you grow up?

JS: All over. People used to ask me “Where are you from?” and I’d have to take a deep
breath and I’d…(gesticulates). I was born in the East. In the South, actually. I also lived in
New Jersey, and finished high school in California.

TI: Where in California?

JS: Woodside. It’s up on the San Francisco Peninsula.

TI: Oh, I’m from around there.

JS: Oh are you? It’s beautiful. I loved it up there.

TI: So how did you hear about Scripps?

JS: Um…a couple of ways. I wanted to go to a women’s college (I had gone to a girls’ school
in New Jersey) and we moved to California. And I thought I might even want to go back
East. This was in a time when, you know, your mother said “I don’t think so” and you said
“Okay.” (laughs) So there were two women’s colleges on the west coast, Scripps and Mills.
And the sister of a good friend in high school was going to Scripps and my older sister
applied to Pomona, so I had heard about Scripps through those two ways. And I thought
“Why not?” so I applied. And that’s just sort of word of mouth. I had an interview and I
loved the woman who interviewed me. And I never visited the campus before I came,
which is very unusual I think, for today. Anyway, that’s how I decided to come to Scripps.

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TI: Did your mother go to college?

JS: Uh, she did not. My father did, he has a master’s degree. My mother grew up during
the Depression and her family was not wealthy and she did not go to college. He was from
Florida, he went to the University of Florida and then the University of Chicago.

TI: Did your mother encourage you to go?

JS: She did. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was something that from the very time I was little…it
was assumed that I would. Just because she didn’t go didn’t mean that she didn’t
encourage my sister and me to go.

TI: And your sister went to Pomona…?

JS: No. Well…It’s kind of complicated. It was a blended family. It was my stepsister, who
was right in between…my sister sister is two years older than I am and my stepsister was in
between. It was the stepsister who applied to Pomona. My older sister actually started out
at Converse College (?) in South Carolina, which I finally found out that (?) taught at
Converse College. No one’s ever heard of him, but anyway. And she ended up at the
University of the Pacific and she has a degree in music therapy and a master of social work
from UOB (?).

TI: Did your sisters also go to girls’ schools?

JS: High school. Or, my stepsister went to middle school (she started actually in fourth
grade at that school) and my sister and I, when my mother married her father, we started
going. I was a freshman in the high school and my sister was a junior, so I went to that
school for two and a half years. It was the Kimberly School in New Jersey, and my sister
graduated from it. Actually, a couple of years ago she went back to her fiftieth high school
reunion and had a fabulous time, so it was fun. I loved going to a girls’ school and the
education was wonderful. Very fine.

TI: So why do you think that you wanted to go a women’s college…?

JS: Because I had gone to a girls’ school. It was not…I don’t think it was expected, but there
was a lot of talk, you know, amongst the teachers and amongst the students that they
would be interested in going to a women’s college. The headmistress, of course, wanted to
encourage us all to go to a women’s college. So it wasn’t assumed that you would go just
because you were at a girls’ school, but there was a lot of talk about it and I think a lot of
brochures from women’s colleges (in the library, I remember that). So I think there was just
a lot of, not assumptions, but I think a lot of activity about women’s colleges. And at that
time, I really didn’t think too much, or none of us thought a whole lot (this was in the late
fifties)…thought a lot about feminism or the benefit of going to a women’s college. It was
just, there were men’s colleges and women’s colleges. I mean, Vassar was still a women’s
college, Radcliffe was still…a college (laughs), and there were men’s colleges. Amherst was
men’s, Williams was men’s, I think Yale was still all men. There were men’s colleges and
women’s colleges with some coed colleges, but for the most part the ones that I knew about

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and my friends knew about were single-sex. When I moved to Woodside, of course
Stanford was nearby, but none of us really aspired to go to Stanford.

TI: Why is that?

5:27

JS: I think it had a reputation for being very difficult to get into. And one of our…not a
classmate, she was a year younger than I…ended up going to Stanford. She was the most
brilliant girl in school, so…(laughs). And living close by, I think, it was more difficult to get
into. If I had applied from the East Coast I might have gotten in! But I didn’t even think
about going to Stanford. I didn’t want to be that close to home (laughs).

TI: I understand that (laughs). So as a first-year, what were your first impressions?

JS: I loved Scripps. I, at that time, came in the fall of 1960 and we arrived on a Saturday.
And orientation wasn’t very long. I think I was homesick Saturday night and part of
Sunday morning and after that it was just fine. When I was a first-year, I was scheduled to
live in Kimberly, but Kimberly was still under construction and had not been finished yet.
So there were nine freshmen in the Toll rec room, which I think was up on the third floor.
I think that now has been turned into several rooms. But there was one large rec room on
the third floor of Toll, and there were nine girls there, and then three of us were assigned
to the Grace Scripps Clark browsing room. And so I was one of the ones in the browsing
room. And we were there all semester. And the girls living in Toll were only there for about
six weeks until they moved into Kimberly. I had never been just with…well, except for
Kimberly, for the girls’ school (that’s funny, two Kimberlys!)…in a girls’ school, of course,
we were all girls. So I was accustomed to being in classes just with girls but the humanities
class particularly was very different (we can talk about that). It was a large class, it was like
every single freshman. There were like ninety of us. That was a pretty large class—I don’t
think I’d ever had that large a class before. And academically, I had never really worked as
hard as I did. There was a lot of reading, a lot of work. I think I was sort of thrown off a
little by the amount of independence that the faculty expected of us in our academic work.
I really enjoyed the classes. The humanities class was a double course for three years, you
may have heard this before. The freshman year was “The Beginning of Time” through the
Roman period, and then the sophomore year was the Renaissance and then junior year was
the modern era. And I loved the course because it was very integrated. We might have had
a history lecture one day, an architecture lecture the next day, philosophy or religion the
next day. And there was an attempt to integrate everything. Actually, it was left up to us to
integrate everything, but that was the humanities program. And it was very exciting, I really
enjoyed it. I loved living in a residence hall with a lot of other women. It’s quite different
now, I think, than then. Most of our activity was in the residence hall. Our eating was in
the residence hall, studying (although we of course went to the library)…but there was a lot
of activity centered in the residence hall, particularly in the fall semester. One of the first
things I remember is that there was a fall party, which I guess was in late September. And
then in mid-October, every residence hall put on a party. And guys from Harvey Mudd and
I guess Pomona too and CMC (and CMC was a men’s college then) came up and sort of

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went around from residence hall to residence hall. There was a performance…and so we all
sort of bonded together as a group in the residence hall. First there was the little party and
then at the end of the fall semester there was a holiday party, which at Grace Scripps Clark
was a medieval dinner, which was just fabulous. I think just working together and getting to
know that group of girls really well…I was very intimidated by seniors when I was a
freshman (laughs). I don’t know if your first-years are but I was very intimidated and
thought they were very old and very mature-looking. But nowadays I’m not sure that
happens. But I enjoyed Scripps and I never (I think I said before) I had never been to visit
the school before, and I thought it was just beautiful…utterly beautiful. I had never been
anyplace like this. So I was a very happy person. I became a student guide for the
admissions office (I loved that) and got involved in governance. I loved Scripps. It was fun.
The first impressions were great.

11:30

TI: You mentioned you were originally assigned to Kimberly but it wasn’t finished yet. Did
you eventually move there?

JS: I did, after one semester. The three of us moved to Kimberly. I think the way…there
were originally four residence halls, starting in 1927, ’28, ’29 and ’30, so for the next
twenty-five years there were just four residence halls, and then…it’s sort of complicated.
There was a big land switch. Harvey Mudd decided—the trustees and donors to what is now
Harvey Mudd College—decided to establish a college emphasizing science. And it was coed
from the beginning. There were not very many women, but it was coed from the
beginning. And, at the time, Scripps ran from…actually owned the land…that the western
part of Harvey Mudd is on now. Scripps property ran from Foothill Boulevard, from
Dartmouth, over to Amherst. Amherst is the street that runs in front of the president’s
house. So the eastern edge of (except for the president’s house), the eastern edge of Scripps
College was that street that runs past the president’s house and it would run up behind
Browning and Dorsey and would run between them and Frankel-Routt. So that’s Amherst.
It was decided that instead of having Scripps fronting that way and having Harvey Mudd
being sort of landlocked that there would be this land switch and so Harvey Mudd got a
long east-west section and Scripps retained its then-property and then added a little to the
east. So part of that was the athletic field, which is essentially where the athletic field is
now, and Kimberly, and the swimming pool, because all the athletic fields and the
swimming pool had been up at Harvey Mudd. So they had thought that Kimberly would be
finished by the fall and it was not (never is). So all the people…the students…that had been
assigned to Kimberly…when Kimberly was built, all the students who lived in the other
four halls had to apply live in Kimberly. And some were accepted and it was thought that
they would make a nice, cohesive dorm. They were assigned to Kimberly and then some of
the freshmen were chosen to go to Kimberly. Well, since it wasn’t finished we all had to be
farmed out to the other residence halls. But by spring semester it was completely finished
and my friends Cindy and Sharon and I moved into Kimberley and everyone else was
already there. Let’s see, there was something else I wanted to say…Oh. Part of the deal with
Harvey Mudd was that Harvey Mudd, when there was this land switch, Harvey Mudd

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actually helped build Kimberly (financially), on the understanding that all the Harvey
Mudd students would be housed at Scripps—all the Harvey Mudd female students, sorry!
(laughs) Not in that day and age, no! So we always had a couple of Harvey Mudd students
and it was always fun to have them around because they had completely different schedules
and different friends and they sort of thought differently than we did.

15:27

TI: Why did Harvey Mudd house its female students at Kimberly?

JS: Because there were so few of them that that they didn’t want to build a residence hall
for women at Harvey Mudd because there’d only be about, you know, ten people in it at
most. But now of course I think Harvey Mudd has at least half and half women and men.
Well at Harvey Mudd, I think their first year of operation was 1958 and there were
probably three women in that class. Well, that wasn’t a huge class to begin with, but I
think there were about three women, and they were housed at Scripps. So the decision was
made, “Well, we’ll just house all of our women at Scripps, it would make sense to do that.”
But then as the college grew and as times changed…you know, I’m not sure…I don’t know
when Harvey Mudd women first went to live at Harvey Mudd, but I’m sure it was after all
the halls were coed. That’s an interesting question but I don’t know the answer to it. But
there were so few women at Harvey Mudd.

TI: Did you stay at Kimberly for the rest of your time at Scripps?

I did! It was very traditional to live in the same residence hall. That’s why when alums
come on campus, one of the first questions they will ask you is “And what hall are you in?”
because they remember a time when they spent their entire four years in a residence hall
and really got to know a portion of the Scripps community because they would have
known…let’s see…I would have known the class of 1961 to 1967. So that’s six years of
women I would have known pretty well living in a residence hall with them for all four
years. And it was very traditional, it was just what one did. And that was from the very
beginning. After the first year, of course only freshmen were in Toll the first year, and then
the second year the second residence hall, Grace Scripps Clark, was to be a freshman
residence hall and Toll was to be a sophomore residence hall. And they were going to have
a class in each hall. But they very early on decided that that was not a good idea and that
they wanted to mix the classes. So that was a tradition from the very earliest period, to have
everyone stay in the same residence hall. And that extended up until the early ‘80s. I think
one of the problems was women who lived in the four older residence halls and Kimberly
were perfectly happy with it. In fact, in Kimberly we thought we were pretty special because
there was a bathroom in between every two rooms and there was just a very good
camaraderie and we really enjoyed just being in the same residence hall. But then Frankel
and Routt were built in the late ‘60s and the same tradition continued there. And I think
everything was alright until there was a larger student body by the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and
what really determined the switch…well, was in the early ‘80s, the four older residence halls
were renovated and they had gotten fairly rundown (they had been around for fifty years).
And so there was all new furniture and carpet…I mean, it was a huge project. The only

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thing that wasn’t done was air conditioning, and I couldn’t understand why during that
renovation air conditioning wasn’t installed in the four older residence halls. Have either
of you lived in a residence hall…in one of the old ones?

TI: Well, I live in Clark now and we were actually both roommates in GJW last year, which
was air-conditioned. That was great (laughs).

JS: Well, you don’t really need it. Anyway, that’s a side point (laughs). But, so there was
this residence hall renovation in ’81-’82, and Frankel-Routt had not been renovated at that
point. And I think Kimberly…the women there sort of didn’t care one way or the other.
But there was a lot of unhappiness about how wonderful the older residence halls were and
no one ever had a chance to move in. So that’s when the room draw was instituted, and so
now everyone has an opportunity…I guess you could stay in the same residence hall for all
four years if you really wanted to. I’ve sort of witnessed that students go with their friends
and move to a residence hall. And if no one has a high number then they just sort of draw
what they can and everyone sort of goes together to a residence hall. And also, by that
point the so-called freshmen wings in Clark and Toll—what do you call it now? Do you call
it Clark?

TI: (nods)

21:07

JS: Yes, I think there was effort to call it Grace Scripps Clark. We called it Grace Scripps
when I was a student and then sometime in the ‘70s it became Clark Hall, and then the
college tried to re-call it Grace Scripps Clark, and I never know what people call it. But you
know what I’m talking about. Okay, so in Clark and Toll the freshmen wings were built,
and it was very difficult to integrate that many freshmen into the existing hall, and still
have that many freshmen the next year. So everything was dispersed.

TI: Did you have a dorm mother?

JS: We did. She was called a Head Resident and…well, she was a “dorm mother.” I don’t
remember…isn’t that funny…I can’t remember who it was in my first semester in Grace
Scripps Clark, but our hall mother—or Head Resident or “dorm mother”—in Kimberly
when I first moved—we had I think three different ones in four years—the first year and a
half was really very cool. We thought she was a quite nifty woman, who you could sort of
call sort of a Bohemian (at that point, Hippies hadn’t been invented). She was sort of
Bohemian and very well educated and very warm and very personable. And she went on
somewhere else. And the one that I worked with (I eventually became president of the hall
in my junior and senior year) and the woman I worked with then I remained friends with
and communicated with until she died. Most of the Head Residents were educated women
who were widowed and maybe didn’t have…it might have been a financial advantage for
them to live on campus somewhere, and there was a little bit of income for them, but they
had a place to live, they had their room and board. And you know, I don’t know whether
they got together as a group. They may have, that’s something that I never thought about as
a student, whether the five Head Residents ever got together. But they really did provide

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leadership in the residence hall. They didn’t make regulations; the students did that. They
didn’t enforce regulations, because we had a proctor and that happened. But she was a
presence in the residence hall. She would go into the rose garden and pick roses and
camellias and other flowers and just made sure that public rooms, particularly, looked nice.
And she provided a lot of counseling, which I think was a very, very useful role. And she
wasn’t a scary person, but we really respected her. And I’m trying to remember how old
they were. They seemed really elderly, but they were probably before retirement age, which
then was sixty-five. So they probably were in their late fifties or early sixties. There was also
an assistant head resident who was sort of in charge of…I think she only worked in the
daytime…she was in charge of the front desk. I think in Grace Scripps Clark there’s still an
area where there’s a desk with little cubbies that were mailboxes? Well, there used to be a
centralized telephone system, and the assistant head resident would sit at the telephone
and answer the telephone and call you in your room and say “You have a phone call on
Line 3459, and then you’d leave your room and go down to the end of the hall where the
telephones were. It’s probably very hard to imagine now, as an eighteen- or nineteen- or
twenty-year-old, how really antiquated that system was, because you have cell phones…well,
I have a cell phone too! But just to think that you know, someone had to call in, have the
phone answered, then you had to get the message, and then go down to the end of the
hall…it was just very old-fashioned. But the Head Resident…well, we had a limited number
of “two o’clocks,” (senior year you could just stay out every single night if you wanted to,
that was such freedom, I mean that was so liberal!) but before, you had to sign out and you
had to sign out a key. Each room didn’t have a key, we didn’t keep our doors locked. But
you had to sign out a key. And if you weren’t in by two o’clock, the Head Resident would
be alerted. Well, I don’t think it was at two, it may have been, you know, twenty minutes
after or 2:30, and she would be alerted. Because there were such things as accidents, and so
the Head Resident was aware of what was going on in the residence hall. She probably,
although I don’t know this for sure, interacted with the maintenance staff and the
housekeeping to make sure everything was kept up properly. But she really didn’t make the
rules, the students made the rules. Then there were established rules. I mean, there was a
handbook (well, now it’s called the Guide to Student Life), but we lived by an honor code,
and we were on our honor to come in by two o’clock and not, you know, come in through
a window (laughs), or have somebody else sign in for us or whatever. I think the Head
Residents started being phased out in, it was about 1967. But when Frankel and Routt
were built, I don’t think they had Head Residents, I think they had assistant residents, and
at first the resident assistants were graduate students. And I don’t know for sure when
Scripps students started being resident advisors. But the whole transition took place in the
late 1960’s from the Head Residents to the assistant residents.

28:02

TI: What did you do for fun?

JS: Oh, my. What did we do for fun? Well, we went down into downtown Claremont and
shopped. We might even take the bus into Pasadena. That was a nice outing. At the time
were juniors, people who had cars would go and shop. There wasn’t much going into Los

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Angeles, we didn’t do that a lot. For fun, there were always concerts and we went out on
dates. I mean, that was a very different…from my understanding, it was very different than
it is now. I mean, back then it was, one girl and one boy, maybe going on a double date!
But then some of us would go in a group to a movie or something like that. We went out
on dates on the weekends and if you were pinned to someone or even engaged it was
always the same person. But there was dating, couple dating, and some group dating. There
were lots of dances, lots of on-campus parties. I was speaking with one of my students at
noon today about alcohol on campus. And not to really go into that much, but it
absolutely was not allowed when I was here and a lot of on-campus parties were alcoholfree.
Of course, there were parties off-campus where there was alcohol. For the most part,
there were a lot of on-campus parties that we went to. As I say, there were plays, there were
parties. When I was a senior for the first time I participated in (? What is the name of this
theater program?), which was the theatrical group on campus. Now the theater program is
at Pomona, and I’m trying to remember…I think theater was not an academic program
until probably the late ‘70s, early ‘80s and then it was a joint program that’s based at
Pomona. But before that there was something at Scripps called (?) and they produced plays.
It was an extracurricular kind of activity. And for the first time I was in a play in my senior
year, “The Pajama Game,” which opened Garrison Theater, and I spent a lot of my
weekends practicing. I think a lot of musicians and people who are in the theater now
spend a lot of their time on weekends practicing. Oh, what did we do? We went to the
beach, we occasionally went out to the desert. When my roommate brought her car, I think
that was when she was a senior—I mean a junior—I think our weekends became much more
(laughs), much more active. Now but you have to remember, on weekends freshmen could
be out until one o’clock twice a week. I mean, that was the extent. So if they did a lot or
had a boyfriend and wanted to be out past 10:30 at night, which was when we had to be in,
they took their “one o’clock’s” on the weekends. You know, we studied, we…it’s funny, I
don’t remember a lot about this, isn’t that funny? I remember doing a lot around
Claremont. Oh, well one thing…oh, I probably shouldn’t even admit this (but it’s not
going to shock anyone), on Friday afternoons there were things called “TGIFs.” And the
entire area, with a couple exceptions of enclaves of houses, but north of Foothill there was
nothing but orange groves. And so we on Friday afternoons…and that was not a date thing,
you know friends that were guys and girlfriends, just groups of us, somebody would buy a
keg and we would go up to the orange groves off of Mills Avenue and we would drink beer
on Friday afternoons for “TGIF.” That was always fun. And as I said earlier, there were a
lot of dorm parties and organized events and those would take place on weekends. What
else did we do? Of course, Harvey Mudd was here and CMC was here, and Pomona was
here, (but we didn’t do a whole lot with Pomona). Most people stayed on campus on
weekends, even the girls who lived in Los Angeles or closer. I’m trying to think, one of my
dormmates and a classmate was from La Verne, but as far as I knew she was always in the
dorm on weekends. So we stayed on campus. There were on-campus things to do. We
would go swimming if it was fall warm enough we would swim on weekends. Probably the
same sorts of things people do now! (laughs) Study, go out. There were different kinds of
partying, but parties. That’s about it. I can’t even remember very well, I must apologize for
that! (laughs)

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34:21

TI: No, that was great! In a return to the dating scene, did you have friends who were
engaged?

No. Well, when I was here you could not be married and live on campus. There was one
exception made when I was, I guess, a junior. One girl had gotten married and she was a
senior. Her husband actually was in the army and was stationed…I’m trying to say Hawaii,
maybe? So she was allowed to live on campus because her husband wasn’t even around, but
you know, I’ve often wondered why that was a regulation and whether that was a thought
that a married woman might be a bad influence if she lived in the dorm. I really don’t
know why that rule existed, but it did, so married women didn’t live in the dorm. My
friends…some of my friends eventually got pinned, which I later figured out one got
pinned because that was sort of made it official that you could sleep with your boyfriend
(laughs), which I never thought of at that time, when I was…I sort of thought it was like
going steady. I was very naïve. Of course, a lot of us were very naïve in the early ‘60s. But
some of my friends were pinned, and one of my friends…I’m trying to think of my closest
circle of friends…one of those actually had started dating someone, an older man, when
she was still in high school (or I guess it was the summer after high school) and he would
come out on weekends and they would go out. And they were engaged I guess by the time
we were juniors, but they didn’t get married until after she had graduated. And they’re still
married, which is sort of unusual. Another of my good friends…oh, my roommate was a
very idealistic, very unrealistic, but a lovely…she was a poet and everything was beautiful and
she fell in love at the drop of a hat, and had many, many boyfriends. And then there was
another couple who started dating. She was a sophomore and he was a freshman at CMC
and they dated for three years in college. And they’re still married, which is really unusual,
and they were pinned and then engaged. But a lot of…but it was unusual to have that
strong and long-lasting of a relationship in college. There were some students who were
pinned and then they got unpinned and started dating someone else. But you must
remember that one of the…it was sort of thought and assumed that you would get married
right after college, it was sort of a holdover from the ‘50s. My class was really the first to
start breaking away from that and not all of my friends were married right out of college.
Many were married within two or three years, but that’s not right after college. So there
wasn’t the same sort of ambition to get engaged or to be engaged before you graduated. A
couple of my friends were. And I’m trying to remember…one was married—two were
married in August after we graduated. Let me say it this way: half of my friends who got
married early are still married and half have gotten divorced and remarried and divorced.
Maybe it’s an individual thing rather than a societal thing. But there was also sort of
informal dating…I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but in Grace Scripps Clark (there’s
nothing in GJW), but in Grace Scripps Clark when you come in the front room and turn
to your left, there are two rooms on the south side of that hallway which used to be date
rooms. Each of the residence halls had at least two of these rooms, called date rooms, and
they would be used for…if you had a date, the young man would come, and generally I
wouldn’t be ready and we wouldn’t ready, so he would wait there. That was generally on
the weekends and maybe in the evenings. But that was one place. And there were a lot of

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us who…a lot of my friends who were dating guys from CMC or Harvey Mudd, guys would
be in and out all week, and that’s where we would see them, in the date rooms or maybe in
the living room. So the date rooms were used. Men were not allowed in your room, so that
is where a lot of interaction took place. And there were lots of blind dates. I met guys on
blind dates. And there was a lot of dating. My friends who became engaged or were serious
about someone…I’m thinking of my seven or eight close friends…by the time we were
seniors, though, I noticed the regulations and rules were loosened up. But it was
considered, well not important to have a regular boyfriend, but a lot of girls did.

40:57

TI: How would you define “getting pinned”?

Well, being pinned…I think it’s sort of a holdover from days when there were fraternities.
There were a couple of social clubs at CMC and there were fraternities at Pomona which
were also social clubs, but I think in coed institutions where fraternities and sororities were
really quite prevalent, the fraternity guys would have a pin that would have…I can’t even
think of a fraternity (Phi Beta Kappa, but that’s not really a fraternity), but they would have
these pins that would identify them and I think they wore them on their lapels or
something, and they would identify them as being a member of that fraternity. Well, when
they had a steady girlfriend, she would…you would wear the pin right above your heart, if
you were a girl, and someone had given you the pin. And you should wear it everyday. And
it was sort of a signal to everyone that you were not available, that you were pinned to
someone, and no other guy would ask you for a date. I was never pinned so I don’t really
know how it worked, but friends were. And pinning was sort of a…in some cases sort of a
pre-engagement, and in other cases it was sort of a “going steady in high school” sign that
you had a regular boyfriend. And as I say now, looking back it was sort of an okay to sleep
together. Although at the time that certainly didn’t enter my mind as the reason people got
pinned. And when a guy got pinned, particularly if he was at Harvey Mudd or CMC, his
friends would throw him into the pond here at Scripps, either the one between Toll and
Grace Scripps Clark (the Olive Court Pond), but the general one was Seal Court. And I
think a lot depended on the residence hall the girl lived in. Because if you lived in Toll or
Clark they usually wanted to embarrass him in front of everybody else that he knew. And
there was a lot of…the guys were in and out and around a lot. The girls in the residence
hall were familiar with girls’ boyfriends and would recognize them. They were a known
quantity in the dorm because they spent a lot of time there, either waiting or coming by
between class or coming at lunch, before lunch. But for the most part, being pinned was
like going steady and you actually wore the pin. And I know you could buy pins in the
CMC student store, so CMC guys had pins that they must have bought to give to
girlfriends. And I’m trying to remember the ceremony. The ceremony for getting engaged
may have been the same for being pinned. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard me talk about
this at a candlelight dinner, but a pinning candle or an engagement candle was a candle
that was in probably a small candleholder that was decorated with flowers and ribbons and
I guess if you got pinned the pin would be pinned to one of the ribbons, and if you were
engaged the ring would be tied onto one of the ribbons. And this ceremony would occur

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 11 -

on a Monday night. (All of our dinners except for Friday and Saturday night were served.)
And so at Monday night dinner, the head waitress (the head waitress was always a student,
all the waitresses were students), the head waitress would bring in this candle all lit and the
residents of the hall would be seated around tables. And the Head Resident would start the
candle and it would go around the entire table and then she’d take it to another table and
everyone would pass it around, and then she’d take it to another table and then when it
got to the woman who was to be engaged or pinned, she would blow it out and everybody
would get all excited. Of course, engagement was a lot more exciting than pinning. But
there was this ceremony involved, so it was a very public sort of affirmation of your
romantic attachment to someone. You’re asking…I haven’t thought about some of this
stuff for a long, long time.

46:04

TI: Would you say being pinned was the only appropriate circumstance in which to have
premarital sex at Scripps?

JS: Oh, no.

TI: “Oh no”? (laughs)

JS: Oh, no (laughs). As I said, I was so naïve. No, people were having sex a lot (nods). I
later…you know…put together and discovered [that]. I don’t think a lot of girls slept
around because this was in the days before abortion, and also in the days when having a
child out of wedlock was a real negative…carried a lot of negative connotations with it. It
just wasn’t…it didn’t happen! I mean, of course it happened. One of my classmates left
college in her senior year when she was…probably in February or March…and we really
didn’t know what had happened to her. But she had had a baby, and did come back and
finish in the fall after the rest of us graduated. So it did happen, but there was…I think the
stigma of becoming pregnant and not being married was there. And also there were no
alternatives. So I think the so-called “sexual revolution” happened later. Also—(this
sentence of the recording was lost)

48:00

TI: So what happened to your friend’s baby after she came back?

JS: You know, I’m not quite sure. I think she put it up for adoption. She was married a
year or two later to someone else, and fairly quickly had children. And I wasn’t really very
close to her, but I believe she gave that child up for adoption. Which is what most young
women did (nods). Other couples, if they were really committed to one another, did get
married. But then the woman could not live in the dorm. And that was very difficult,
particularly if both were still students. And they would need to be supported in some way. I
understand…I mean, I remember that one student did get married, the couple was
married, and both sets of parents supported them until they graduated. But nowadays that
just doesn’t happen. You don’t have to marry someone that you may or may not be
completely devoted to if you got pregnant.

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 12 -

TI: Did those kinds of pregnancies happen a fair amount of Scripps, like where they [the
pregnant students] would just vanish?

JS: No (shakes head). In the four years I was here, I knew about two. There might have
been others. Students did leave at the end of a year. Students would transfer. There was a
large transfer rate. Particularly between the freshman and sophomore year there were a lot
of students who didn’t come back. And some of them may not have come back because
they were pregnant, but I think most of them didn’t come back because they transferred
somewhere else. Going to a small women’s college was not the thing for everyone. And I
know of at least two girls in Kimberly in my freshman year who transferred to larger, coed
colleges. University of Arizona and I believe UCLA. So it just wasn’t the right college for
everyone. I was not involved in any sort of peer counseling or anything like that, so I wasn’t
aware of a lot of issues. And you know, it was kept quiet. It wasn’t necessarily something
that was widely known. I do know that a girl a year older than I am was dating someone
when she was a senior. He taught at a local private school. And they were married like the
day after she graduated. It turned out that they had a little girl five months later. I mean,
she was pregnant, but they had planned…you know, I think would have gotten married
anyway, but they got married. So I do know about that one. A lot of early births, but
respectable (nods) because you know, everything turned out all right.

51:41

TI: We talked earlier about how there was less a pressure to get engaged right after
graduation than there had been a few years earlier.

JS: Uh-huh.

TI: So would you say there was a greater interest in pursuing a career?

JS: Absolutely. I think my class…and I look at some of the women a year older than I, and I
look at my class, and I think we really were the first. And to go back just a little, to birth
control; the birth control pill became widely available when I was about a sophomore. So
there were fewer accidents than there had been earlier. But there were so many changes.
The pill, the President had been assassinated…there were just a lot of changes beginning in
society…the student movement at Berkley had started. Women were becoming much
more…wanting to have careers. And in my class, one of the girls that I lived with in the
Grace Scripps Clark browsing room went to law school, she went to Boalt Hall at Berkeley.
Several of my friends became teachers, but in some cases that was to have something to
“fall back on” in case I need to work at some point in the future. But a number of my
classmates went on. A couple are doctors. So I like to look back and thinkß that my class
was one of the first to start to distance ourselves from that traditional role that women had
been in since after the World War. The whole drive to wean women away from the roles
they had during the war, of working in factories and being teachers and being
psychologists… a lot of those jobs were taken back by men when they came back from the
war. And there was a lot of not just subtle, but a lot of (my understanding is) a lot of laws
were passed to encourage women to stay at home, to raise children, and so this sort of
domesticity…women, particularly intelligent women, started thinking “This is not for me.”

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 13 -

Some of my classmates did have mothers who worked. My mother did not. But a number
of my classmates did have mothers who had careers who worked. So they had a good
example in front of them. I’d say fewer women in my class got married right away. Many
within the first five years, but not right away. Becoming married was not one’s goal and
then you did that the rest of your life; there was an awareness of life beyond Scripps at that
point.

55:01

TI: So as someone whose mother didn’t work, how did you envision your future after
Scripps?

JS: I knew that one thing that I wanted to do after to college was to have a career. My
mother did not work, but my stepfather and my father and my sisters all had career plans.
My stepsister, the one in between, became an audiologist working with hearing disabilities.
My older sister was a music therapist, and she worked in the state college…you don’t know
a state hospital system, but there used to be a state hospital system that took care of the
mentally ill. And my aunt, my mother’s sister, was a nurse. So there was this tradition of
working in my family, so I really did know I was going to work. Now, I was a European
Studies major so I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. At one point, I thought,
“Well, maybe I’ll go work for the UN.” Well, that’s a wonderful dream (laughs), but how
do you get there? Or, “Maybe I’ll work for an international agency.” Now, I didn’t know
what that was. So I was very unrealistic about what I would do, but I knew I would do
something. And in the spring of my senior year, I thought, “You know, I don’t have any
real, concrete plans beyond this summer.” I mean, my parents gave me a trip to Europe for
graduation, but after August I didn’t know what I was going to do! So I had always
admired…this is not a question you asked me, but I’ll tell you anyway…always admired the
woman who was librarian here, Dorothy Drake, after whom the Dorothy Drake wing is
named. And I had used the library, studied in the library quite a lot, and I came to see her
to talk to her about going to library school. One or two other classmates, not close friends,
but classmates, were also going to graduate school in library science. And so I came and
talked to Dorothy Drake, and she encouraged me. So that’s how I decided to go to
graduate school and become a librarian. But at least three of my good friends did the
masters in teaching at the graduate school here and did get a teaching credential and a
couple of them did teach. But my three best friends were married after they…when we
come to reunions now, I look around our group of women. And many did retire as
teachers, but a good number are still working. One of my friends is Director of Pediatric
Endocrinology or something like that at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
And my friend who’s the attorney, she retired from her job at IBM but she is now a…what
are they called, not an advocate judge…some sort of judge. So my classmates are still being
very productive, and love it. I mean, I don’t think we’d stick with it if we didn’t really love
it. And a number of my classmates are women who have worked in the community as
volunteers; they’ve been chair of this and chair of that, and you know, president of one
community group after another, and for some reason did not have a career outside of the
house, but are very accomplished, intelligent, inquiring, curious women nonetheless.

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 14 -

59:21

TI: In a return to the humanities requirements that you had, would you say that having
that number of humanities that were required of you kind of made you major in
humanities more than you might have otherwise?

Yes, and no. I think I majored in European history because there was an emphasis on…the
humanities program was Eurocentric, I must tell you that. But I loved the history that we
got. And I also enjoyed the political philosophy and the comparative government that was
a part of it. So that might be one reason I majored in History and European Studies. A
couple of good friends were English majors, and they were…sure, a lot of literary texts were
covered in Humanities, but I think they would have been English majors anyway. My
friend who became the lawyer majored in government at CMC. There was a math major in
my class. Another good friend majored in biology at Pomona, because for all intents and
purposes there was no science at Scripps. The Joint Science program, I think, was
established in the late ‘60s. But one could major at another institution, and did. But I
think the humanities program was instrumental in determining the majors of many of my
classmates. There is a new brochure out to send to prospective students, and there’s a little
graph chart on what the most popular majors are, and I was a little surprised; I mean,
biology is there and neuropsychology, and mathematics. But fine arts, and English, and
history, and some of the traditional…humanities majors are still very popular. I think, yes,
things have changed. There are more women majoring in psychology, sociology,
politics…there were a fair number of international relations majors when I was a student,
and I think that was because the guy who taught IR was a very personable, appealing
person. And I don’t think you can discount personality when you’re talking about majors,
and the person you’re going to be working with when you’re doing your thesis. I thought
what you were going to ask me is whether I felt that it was restrictive…

TI: Oh yes, that was my next question (laughs)

JS: (laughs)…because I wasn’t able to take a number of courses. But because it counted as a
double course, we didn’t have breadth of field requirements. We didn’t have to have
courses in gender and women’s studies, and in fine arts, and in…what is it called, it’s not
literature, it’s…

TI: Letters?

JS: Letters. And science…I mean, we didn’t have to have a distribution across the
curriculum. The humanities provided that. And so we had two required courses, but we
could take three other courses a semester. And I took literature courses, I took government
at CMC, I took comparative literature at CMC, intellectual history at CMC (we didn’t
have that here)…I didn’t take any language courses because I’m not a very good linguist,
and no more science courses, but I did take religion courses and some fun things too. I’m
trying to remember what the fun things (laughs)…obviously not too much fun! I think the
literature courses were probably the furthest from my major, but of great interest. So you
did have a variety. You could take those extra courses. You did have to fulfill a major. And

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 15 -

I don’t know that there were any double or dual majors; I don’t even know if that was a
possibility. There were a lot of self-designed majors when I was here, just as I think there
are now. But that was one of the benefits of going to the Claremont colleges, is that you
could major at CMC or at Pomona and still graduate from Scripps, and have that
humanities [background]. And my class communicates by email frequently, and there’s a
lot of traffic at some points and there’s a month or two without anything, and then a lot
about a certain issue. And one of the latest controversial issues was humanities and how
some of my classmates think…you know, a lot of older alums think Scripps should revise to
the “old humanities.” And I must say, because of the requirement, I think now Core starts
with the Enlightenment, the end of the seventeenth century. Well, we started, you know,
in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and did a lot of Greece and Rome. So I feel that the
historical richness of that program was really important to me. Now, I know that
contemporary students have so much more to choose from. I mean, we were talking earlier
about telephones. In so many ways, and in so many areas of our lives, and in things that we
get involved in and what we can read and what we can look at and what we can listen
to…students just have so much more now to choose from than we did. And so to confine a
student in 2012 to the curriculum that we had I think would be a disservice. I think my
classmates probably won’t want to hear me say that (laughs), but I loved the program. It
was good for me; it has provided a wonderful background for my career, but I think that
students today would not stand to be restricted to that many courses. Because now, I mean,
to fulfill a letters course, you can take a good many different courses. So it’s…times have
changed, and that’s good. That’s good (laughs).

66:30

TI: As oral historians, technically, we’re also interested in history kind of manifests itself at
Scripps. So your year, 1964, is really interesting in terms of civil rights and those kinds of
things. So what did you notice about civil rights and agitation and demonstrations?

JS: Well, I think I mentioned earlier the…I’m forgetting the name of the student
movement that began at Berkeley, but it had a name…and when I was a junior, there were
inquiries to the student council (and I’ll get on to the basis of your question later), asking if
Scripps wanted to become a member of this student group. Well, we decided not to
become a formal member. But we were aware that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the
status quo beginning to be manifested. You’re right, civil rights…1964 was an election year,
and it was, I think…that was Barry Goldwater’s year, and he was running against Lyndon
Johnson. And Johnson had been president for a year and a half, oh, for just a year, and he
was reelected. I think I told you, I went to Europe when I graduated, and I remember
arriving in England, in London, and looking at TV in my room (it was a black and white
TV). And what was on there…I was appalled because…I hadn’t watched much TV at
Scripps, but I was appalled to see the race riots in the South, and I thought, “This is really
horrible. What is going on here?” And it was…I had to leave the country to actually be
completely aware of it. Or, I had to leave Scripps to become more aware of it. And when I
did return, of course, the time I was in graduate school the following year, I became much
more aware of the dissatisfaction and the various marches and the killings and the

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 16 -

bombings and all the really unpleasant things that were going on. It was a real, as I say, I
think my year really saw the start of significant changes of society. With civil rights, racial
rights, women’s rights…by three years later, the women’s movement had started. But it had
already started. So much of this was propelled, you’re probably aware, by the Vietnam War,
which had some of my year at CMC. A lot of them joined the army. I don’t know when
the draft started, it might not have been until ’65, but it was pretty soon. And a fellow that
I had been dating pretty seriously my senior year at Scripps was a year behind me at CMC,
and he actually joined the navy when he was a senior so he wouldn’t be drafted into the
army. He later finished. So there was a lot of awareness. And as I say, the most…now, I’m
sort of an amateur, wannabe historian, but I think a lot of the changes that occurred at the
end of the ‘70s, or that came to a head at the end of the ‘70s, really were propelled by the
war, and the antiwar sentiments. I was in Washington from ’65 until ’70, and by 1968,
there were marches against the war, and in favor of civil rights. And I’m trying to
remember the year that Martin Luther King did his “I Have a Dream” speech. Was that

’66?

70:56

TI: That sounds right, but I could be wrong.

JS: Yes. So society had started to change, and that was reflected at Scripps very much so. So
I guess I have to admit that I was aware that there had been riots and a lot of racial unrest,
but since I didn’t watch TV…I’m trying to remember if there even were TVs at Scripps…I
remember after Kennedy was assassinated, there were at least a couple around campus,
because I remember seeing coverage of his funeral and what have you. But it was just
something that reading in the paper and hearing about was not as forceful as seeing
actually the visuals on TV. Well, I think everyone would agree that TV revolutionized our
way of thinking and paved the way for the way we think about the world now. I mean,
there was no Internet. There was no YouTube. There was no instant news. There were
newspapers, there was radio. There was TV news, by 1964 of course, there was TV news
before that, but I do have to admit…I don’t agree wholeheartedly that Scripps was an ivory
tower (do you all know that term?), but we were aware of what was going on in the world
though we were somewhat buffered from it, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I think a lot of my
more activist classmates thought it was a very bad thing. But in retrospect, I think you have
to have a certain amount of buffering between what you’re doing intellectually…well, at
that time. I must say…I don’t know what’s good for you, but I think that being able to lose
oneself in the life of the mind and a community of women, which was not real life at all. I
mean, living with seventy-five other women in a dorm, that’s not real life. But it was right
for the time, it was right for that period, particularly of my life. Having those friendships,
having that community, being nurtured and buffered and encouraged. In a way, it might
have been important for women to have that so we could become independent and become
mature in that kind of environment, but I do think that being slightly apart from the rest
of the world was not an unhealthy thing, particularly for me. But it was, after I left Scripps,
went into the world, did have more access to TV (more time to watch TV), and to become
aware of what was going on in the world, it was a time of great upheaval, I think is what

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 17 -

you would have to call it. Very interesting time to live, I must say. I mean, I was never a
hippie (laughs). Although I was a young adult, I was never a hippie. I just missed that
period. And my personality is not much of a free spirit anyway. Oh, that’s the term I was
trying to think of with my roommate. She was very other-worldly and very much a free
spirit. But…that’s it.

75:05

TI: Were there students of color at Scripps while you were there?

JS: Not many. The very first African American came in 1958. There were Asian Americans.
There were two Asian Americans in my freshman year, but they did not graduate. There
were very few Hispanics. There were women with Hispanic last names from Mexico City
and from Spain…there was a fair international student body. But I don’t think that even
they would consider themselves women of color. It was a very sort of homogenous student
body, it really was. There was a young woman, an African American woman, in my
freshman class, and she left after her freshman year. Without a…I mean, no matter
whether she had gone to a predominantly white high school or not, I don’t really
remember…but that would have been even a different situation because she would have
been with her family in the evenings and with African Americans on weekends, and
cousins…as I say, larger extended family and community of color, and at Claremont there
just was not that group to feel a cohesiveness with. There were…between 1964 and 1968, I
believe the colleges made quite an effort to attract students of color because there was a
move for Afro-American Studies, as it was called, and Chicano Studies, at the end of the
‘60s. So there was a sizable cohort at the colleges at that point. And there was probably
more effort…I think Scripps probably did make efforts, I know they did. But at
Pitzer…Pitzer, for example, had been established in 1964, and one of their goals and
missions from the very beginning was to be more socially aware and active. And of course,
as the ‘60s wore on, the mission and the program at Pitzer I think was more attractive to
people of color than, say, the humanities program at Scripps. And the humanities program
as I knew it ended in 1970, so there were a lot of changes. But there were not many women
of color at Scripps while I was here (shakes head). There probably were more…because
Pomona had a larger student body…more students of color there and at Pitzer. I cannot tell
you about Harvey Mudd and CMC. My sort of recollection and my memory of impressions
is that all of the colleges were fairly Caucasian.

TI: I know that the 5Cs (or I guess at the time the 4Cs) are private, but was there formal
segregation at the schools?

JS: No. Oh no. I think it was a sort of self-selecting thing. When was Little Rock and
integration? Brown v. the School Board?

TI: Brown was ’54.

79:25

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 18 -

JS: ’54. So this was ten years before I graduated. Six years before I entered college. So the
whole notion of integration was fairly new in American society. It isn’t that it didn’t exist
in the schools. And I think…I’m trying to remember…Claremont at the time seemed to me
to be a fairly segregated…there was no legal segregation, and not in practice, but I think
that students sort of self-selected not to come to the Claremonts. I might be very wrong,
but that’s my recollection.

TI: We’re asking you, so your recollections are great!

JS: You know, and oral histories are wonderful and you do fill in a lot of blanks, but you
also must use oral histories in conjunction with documented sources because memories do
fail. And particularly after this many years, you lose some of the details. But my impression
is that…well, with Asian Americans, for example, the large immigration from Asia didn’t
start until what, the ‘70s? So there were not a lot of Asian Americans of college age until
like the mid ‘80s. So that’s another factor. There just was not a community that would be
attracted to the colleges.

TI: Well, in a return to feminism, which we brought up a little bit, did you learn about
feminism or women’s lib in your classes at all?

JS: No. Not really, no. There were good role models. I remember the French teacher…she
was a tough…she was great. She had a backbone of steel and she was tough. Some of my
history professors…I’m trying to pull up some names here…but the librarian, Dorothy
Drake, was a great role model. The president was not a woman, was a man, but many of
the language teachers and literature teachers…well, a lot of the faculty at Scripps were
women, married women who had families and who nonetheless were teaching. The
psychology professor, Molly Mason Jones, was a great role model. She established a nursery
school on campus and was quite an influence on campus. Betty Friedan’s book, The
Feminine Mystique, came out in the spring of my senior year. Some people say that’s what
started it all. And it may have. There was a lot of, as I said earlier, a lot my classmates
decided they did want careers. I’m not sure we recognized it or put a name to it. But
toward the end of the decade, women’s lib, as it was known at first, became quite…not
popular, but quite a movement, on campus. Feminism was a word that I didn’t hear a lot,
but I think in action it existed, but just not under a term. This was an age when…I’m trying
to remember, women did have property rights. I’m not a legal historian; I’m really not very
clear about the legal aspects of women’s rights. But I have to say, in 1964, a lot of societal
attitudes were still very old-fashioned. We didn’t have…it has come very gradually, I think.
There were trailblazers; there was a greater awareness by the end of the ‘60s, but I think to
label oneself a feminist at that period would have been quiet unusual. There were, there
were women who were quite aware. But I’m not sure it had a lot of depth at Scripps in the
mid ‘60s when I was here.

85:09

TI: Did you read The Feminine Mystique when it came out?

- Iker and Harvey-Sahak 19 -

JS: No, I didn’t. I received it as a graduation present, but I didn’t read it until a couple of
years later. And it did make a lot of sense. But by that time I had my master’s, I was already
working…and it seemed, you know, “She’s right about this.” I was, what’s the word…I
appreciated what she had to say. Well, with me, I was never an activist, but I always felt it
fit, I always felt it was the right thing. I felt that I deserved to do what I need to do, and I
could do anything. (Laughs) But I have to admit that I grew up thinking boys were a lot
dumber than girls, I mean…(laughs). Even when I was in grade school, I thought, “Oh,
those boys are dumb!” (laughs). So I guess I always felt that I was as good as, if not better
than, the average young man.

TI: I think we’ve covered just about everything.

JS: Everything?

TI: Yeah, this is a big sheet of questions…

JS: Yeah, that is a lot!

TI: But you kind of covered them all in answering other questions. But do you have
anything you want to say that we didn’t cover, or just to end?

JS: Oh, golly. Not really. I mean, if you’d ask me a direct question…The four years I spent
at Scripps were really…I think for everyone, those four years are an extremely transitional
period. But it definitely was for me. I think it’s a time of great maturing, of becoming aware
of other people. And we had a lot of fun at Scripps and enjoyed a lot of the traditions that
are no longer here. And in many ways, sometimes it was a relief to have to be back in the
dorm by two o’clock in the morning (laughs). I mean, I endured and lived with those rules
and regulations and didn’t think to revolt against them. But in retrospect, I think that
women can very well do without them, and should, particularly. So, that’s all I have to say.

87:52