In this week’s column I’ll mention events of not just 100 years ago but of 150 years ago as well as the present. A century ago, Berkeley received the startling news Jan. 8, 1926, that football coach Andy Smith had died of the flu on a visit to the East Coast. Smith, who was only 42, had built the Cal football program into a national powerhouse. Arriving as head coach in 1916, he quickly developed a dominating program.
From 1920 to 1925 his “Wonder Teams” won 44 games, tied four and lost none. They were judged national champions during three of those years. On Jan. 15, 1926, with his body returned to Berkeley and cremated a week after his death, Smith’s ashes would be scattered from an airplane flying low over California Memorial Stadium, which was regarded as “the House that Andy Built.” Thousands watched from outside the stadium.
Smith, a bachelor, had lived at the Elks Club in downtown Berkeley and left his estate to the University of California, part of it to create scholarships for football players.
Jack London: Adventurer, writer and social and political activist Jack London was born 150 years ago next week on Monday. Although he’s most closely associated with Oakland, where he grew up and lived much of his life, he did spend time in Berkeley and had some important connections to the town.
London spent a semester as a UC Berkeley student before heading off for the Yukon Gold Rush, and his second wife, Charmian Kittridge, was connected with a number of Berkeley homes, including one where she grew up near the corner of Parker and Fulton streets. London visited there several times, including during their courtship. He also included Berkeley in some of his fiction writing.
The title character in London’s book “Martin Eden” is a rough young Oakland sailor who goes to Berkeley as a student and falls in love with a fellow student. In “The Iron Heel,” one of the leading characters is a professor at the university who lives with his daughter in a pleasant upscale Berkeley neighborhood.
Lastly, London’s novella “The Scarlet Plague” about a pandemic that destroys human civilization features protagonist who is also a Berkeley professor, and much of the action takes place in Berkeley when the disease is first spreading.
Film screening: A documentary film, “Inside the Free Speech Movement,” based on oral history interviews compiled years ago for the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement has been completed and will have a screening on the afternoon of Jan. 17.
The free event from 2 to 4 p.m. will be held at the Berkeley Central Library’s Community Meeting Room on the building’s third floor. The documentary was directed by local historian Linda Rosen, who will participate in a question-and-answer discussion at the screening.
Professors in crash: Two professors in UC Berkeley’s College of Commerce (today’s Business School) were injured Jan. 9, 1926, in a Marin County car accident.
Professor Ira Cross was driving the car toward the San Rafael ferry when a tire blew out. He lost control, and the car went down a 60-foot embankment, rolled over several times and was stopped, ironically, by the wreckage of another car that had rolled down the same slope hours earlier.
Professor Webster R. Robinson was pinned in the car when it came to rest in a tidal marsh. His back was injured, and Cross and his son, who had been “thrown clear of the wreckage,” were cut and bruised. The group had been on a fishing trip.
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.
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