Interview of Blanche & Robert Campbell

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1974

JACKSON: Bob, I think we might start from the beginning — where you were born, when, your parents, your father's work, up through the time when you entered college.

R. CAMPBELL: Fine. I was born in Osceola, Nebraska. That's a small town. It was the fifth of February, 1898. The town has about as many people now as it had then, but they're mostly retired farmers who've moved in. The young people all get out of there as fast as they can. I was educated there; and when I got up into high school, I went out and worked on the farms during the summer . I plowed corn the first part of it, and then we threshed. About the time that was over, school began. We had a lot of fun in school. I played a little football--I wasn't big enough, but I did play some the last year. I played baseball three years. I decided I didn't want to go to college the next year. I talked to my dad about it, and he said, "Well, you can stay out this year, but I want you to remember you're going back a year from now, so you've got that to look forward to." I went out and threshed again that summer. First we'd thresh from the shock, and then, when that was over, we would go into stack threshing. That was always a very dirty job, because it had been rained on. It was kind of a tough job, but we all survived it. Then I came back, and I thought I would take a little rest, but Dad said, "Well, you are going to work now." So he got me a job in a bowling alley setting pins there. You didn't have it like you do now where it's automatic; you'd set one on each little spot on the floor, and you got them right or they'd yell at you from up front there: "Hey, you've got number ten out of place!" And then you'd get down and move it and get it right for them. I quit that and went down to Lincoln, and got a job with The Farm there, as they called it — the University of Nebraska College of Agriculture. They were doing a lot of repair work. The first job I did was help take out a floor in a dairy barn and put in a new one — and believe me, that was really rough. You had the big cement blocks to break up; then we mixed cement. And in those days, it didn't come in a machine that was turning all the time, [with the cement] ready to just swish into place. You mixed it up; you put in a layer of sand and then a layer of cement and then another layer of sand; you got in there with your shovel and turned it over, I think three times; and then you poured water on it and turned it over again. So we had quite a job. We'd put it in the wheelbarrow by the shovelful and wheel it to wherever we were working. We finished that, and then we harvested the crop of corn for the silos. It was my first work at that, and I didn't realize what a bundle of corn can weigh--it's about seventy to eighty pounds. You threw those on your wagon and went in, and then you threw them off again into the elevator that put them up in the silo. Now, that was really tough, too. When we got that done, I went back home again. I was taking another little rest, and Dad says, "Well, Carl called from their ranch down there and says the Nelson brothers want you to come down and work for them awhile." So I went down there. Now, they were milking forty-seven cows which were thoroughbred Holsteins. Most of them gave at least a bucketful, and some of them gave two. Some of them they ran tests on, and they would milk them six times a day. They would have a man from the College of Agriculture at Lincoln out there to supervise it and see that everything was straight. You had to be able to get up and do that six times a day, and then do the rest of your work besides. But I started in, and I milked seven cows while the one other man that was there milked the forty. I gradually worked up to where in about two months I was milking about fifteen or sixteen cows, depending on which ones I got; so I did improve some. But by that time I was ready to start the summer work again. I went through the corn and the threshing, and then it was time to go to school. I went to the University of Nebraska.

JACKSON: Well, now, Blanche, let's move over to you and hear your story from the beginning up to college.

B. CAMPBELL: All right. I was born June 11, 1902, on a farm about a mile and a half south of Papillion, Nebraska. Papillion is a small town about ten miles southwest of Omaha. I used to call it a suburb of Omaha. I went to a country school. I think it's still there; it was the last time we were back there. They had eight classes in one room — starting at one side, they had grade one, and then grade two in the next row of seats, and then grade three in the next row, and so forth. I had to walk a mile and a half to school — that was quite an experience. Kids nowadays just don't do anything like that at all. I really look back on it with a great deal of nostalgia. I graduated from there in the eighth grade. . . .

JACKSON: Before you go on, what about your parents? What did your father do?

B. CAMPBELL: Oh. My father was a farmer. He not only farmed his land, but he also had two threshing machines. He would go from one farm to another threshing their grain. I remember how we used to cook for the threshers. There 'd be about, oh, I suppose twenty or twenty-five of them in the crew, I'm not sure. But, we'd have big meals for them; we'd have to take lunch out to them in the middle of the morning and the middle of the afternoon, and then they'd all come in at noon. We had washstands outside that they washed their hands in before they came inside to eat.

R. CAMPBELL: And their faces.

B. CAMPBELL: And their faces, [laughter] yes, because they got dirty--the chaff from the threshing was very dirty. I remember how we used to cook all morning and all afternoon for their lunch and their dinner. We made pies and cakes. That was another experience that youngsters nowadays never have. Our house was not a modern house, in that it did not have indoor plumbing, so we didn't have a bathtub. We had one of those galvanized tubs that's about thirty-five inches in diameter and about a foot high, and that was our bathtub. I remember taking a bath in our great big kitchen on Saturday nights. [laughter] That's what they did in those days — they didn't have a bath every day. We had to heat water on the wood stove. It took an hour to have enough hot water for a bath. I remember our house was about a quarter of a mile from the railroad that ran through our farm. Tramps walked on the railroad, and they'd often come up and sleep in our barn, and then they'd come up to our house and ask for food. When Dad was on these threshing jobs, where he would be threshing at a neighbor's maybe two or three miles away, that was too far away for him to come home at night. He'd stay all night with all the rest of the threshing crew. Mother and I would be alone. To this day, I have a fear of staying alone at night because I was so frightened when those tramps came up to the house many times after dark, asking for food. My one and only sister was born when I was eleven years old, and she was also born on the farm. Oh, and I forgot to mention about the trains. I remember so well how those trains at night would come up the grade. Every time that I would sell a copy of The Little Engine That Could or read The Little Engine That Could, I'd think of those trains as they came up the grade. I can hear them yet: "I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can . " Sometimes they would stop, and it would be quiet for a while; and then very soon again they'd start up: "I-think-I-can." They'd keep on going until they got up to the top of the grade, and then it sounded just like the little engine that could: "I-knew-I-could, I-knew-I-could, I-knew-I could, I- knew-I-could. " [laughter] I remember that so well. Well, as I said, my sister was born there when I was eleven years old. . . .

JACKSON: And her name?

B. CAMPBELL: Her name is Hazel Marguerite Boyd. Her husband [Dr. Don Boyd] is a Methodist minister. They are living here in Los Angeles now, on South Hudson; he is the minister at the First United Methodist Church downtown at Eighth and Hope, right across from the new Broadway Plaza. They’ve been down there now eight or nine years. When they were first married, they lived back East; they were back there until about fifteen years ago, I guess. We were so glad when they moved out here because she's my only sister and it was so nice to have her closer. When I was in high school, we moved into town--that is, just outside of the city limits of Papillion. My folks built a very lovely home, and it's still there. The last time we were back in Nebraska — in fact, last summer when we were back, a year ago--we stopped there and saw my cousin's wife, who is living there in the house, and we went in and walked around and saw the living room where we were married in front of the fireplace. It was a very nostalgic thing. I like to go and see that home every time we go back. I graduated from Papillion High School in 1919. I was valedictorian of my class; however, I regret to say it had only nine members. [laughter]

JACKSON: Well, nine's a good percent.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, anyway, it never occurred to me that I should go to college. In a small town like that, I just never thought about it. [Having been] raised on a farm, I never learned to ride a bicycle — I was just a farm girl, a country girl. But I had a teacher in high school who said I should go to the university. That put the idea in my head, and my mother and father approved; so in the fall of 1919, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska.

JACKSON: Wonderful. Well, now. Bob, let's go back over to you. You're both now at college. I think we might have missed about your brothers and sisters.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. I missed about my mother and father and my brothers and sisters.

JACKSON: Now, take that up first.

R. CAMPBELL: All right. My dad was the postmaster, but he read in the law office there and became an attorney and started practicing that. But very soon [he] ran for county judge and was county judge for a number of years there. I had two brothers and one sister--Harold Ray, Phillip Brooks, and Esther (Mrs. C.R. Beck). All three of those are dead. There's only one besides me with the name Campbell left, and that's a nephew (Henry Crawford Campbell) up in Montana. He's in Bozeman, teaches in the music department, second in command there .

JACKSON: At the University of Montana?

R. CAMPBELL: It is Montana State University. My mother was a schoolteacher in Osceola and [my father and mother] fell in love and got married. Now, I can't think of anything else I left out. I liked my brothers and sisters, and we had a good time growing up.

JACKSON: Where were you in the group, age wise?

R. CAMPBELL: I was the last one in the group, age wise. I am the only one still alive now.

JACKSON: Well, now you are starting at Lincoln, at the University of Nebraska. Tell us about your first day there and what happened.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, the first day, I got a job at the bookstore, where my older brother had worked. I worked there all of the first year, until I went into the army. I found it was a great deal more difficult to go to a university than it was to [go to] high school. I had a very tough time--I remember French particularly. There was a man named Maynard who was born in France, but he spoke perfect English. He called me, had me stay one day after class, and he said, "Now, exams are coming up, and you're very bad--I think you're over the line. You're going to flunk. So I'm going to have a review this next Saturday. Several other boys and girls are coming, and I would like to have you come." So I went. He had a list of questions there that might be asked on the examination. We went over all of those, and we hoped we had them down pat. The examination came, and all of those questions were on it, so I got a passing grade. And he said, "I'd advise you never to take any more French."

JACKSON: What was your course or major?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I was just taking the regular . . .

JACKSON: General?

R. CAMPBELL: . . . general course, yes. The second semester, the war came along, and I enlisted right away. We had to go around and see the professors to get our grades. So I went around to the man who was teaching math, and he said, "Now, what are you going to do when you come back?" I said, "Well, I'm going to go to law school." He said, "Well, if you'll promise me that you'll go to law school, or, if you change your mind, that you will never take any more math, I'll give you a passing grade. I don't want anybody to think that Dr. Canby taught you analytic geometry." [laughter] So that was all worked out, and I never did take any more math. I was in the army for two and a half years. We enlisted in coast artillery because they said they would send us to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, for quick training, and we'd be in France very quickly. So we went out to Fort Littleton, Colorado, and got inducted and got all our clothes and what we had to have. Then we got on the train. There you're in front of the mountains, and so you're running north and south. We went down south to Pueblo, and instead of turning east we turned west. We went through the Rockies and out to California, to Fort Miley. We trained there. They had sixteen-inch guns. We would wind them up. There was a fort across the neck of the bay called Fort Baker, and there would be some little boat out in the center that would give both Fort Baker and Fort Miley some data as to where the ships were coming in. We would wind up our guns to a certain place, and then they would say, "Ready, aim, fire"--and one man would pull the string. Of course, nothing happened, but we always got direct hits, according to the record book. [laughter] Very soon they put up a notice that anybody that wanted to transfer to infantry could do so. So Skete Silverstrand and I talked it over and decided. Well, let's do it-- we'll get to France quicker in the infantry than we will in this place, because we're never going to get out of here. So we transferred to infantry and went back to the Presidio of San Francisco, where we'd been the first day. In about ninety days, [the boys who had stayed at Fort Miley were taken] as a unit and made the first antiaircraft unit in the armed forces, and were sent to France. They were in France about 120 days after we left them. They did quite a lot of work there — antiaircraft work. They were actually not in very much danger because they were shooting at aircraft a long distance from them. But some of them were ill--one boy came home and died with tuberculosis, and two or three others had it but got over it. In a few years, I was glad I didn't go, but at the time I was very, very disappointed . We had been at the Presidio of San Francisco several months when we marched down to Camp Fremont in Palo Alto. They took all the men out of our company there that we had trained to go overseas after we had gone to infantry, and they gave us a new bunch to break in. We got them all trained. I was first sergeant at the time the other men left, so that's the reason I didn't get to go. They left the first sergeants and two company officers, and all the rest of the men went. It was kind of disappointing to have to wait longer, but we said, "Well, we'll get there anyway." We got on the train there at Camp Fremont, right in the midst of the flu epidemic; we left several people behind with the flu, including our company commander. Second Lieutenant Aylsworth was in command then. He'd been a regular army man and had gone to officers' training school right at the start of the war. We had a rather uneventful trip across the country. We went to Camp Mills, Long Island, got all our equipment for overseas, and made out the passenger lists. That seemed to be very difficult because we made ours over about four or five times . I had a very good secretary--that wasn't what they called him; I forgot what he was. But he was a corporal. He'd never marched a day, hadn't drilled any. [tape recorder turned off] This man had been a secretary in the legislature at Oregon, and he could type as fast as anyone I 'd ever seen then.

JACKSON: That was in Oregon?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, in Oregon. He came in with the last batch of recruits. He got the lists out, and we sent them over to headquarters. They sent them back--this was wrong, that was wrong, that was wrong. The same with all the companies. He typed it over I don't know how many times, but he finally got them all right. The whole regiment went down to the boats at Hoboken, New Jersey. We went over to the boat and stood there all day long, and then we got on our own smaller boats and went back to Camp Mills. This happened three times. We did get on the boat the second time, but we got off again and went back; the third time we just got on the dock, and they said we'll go back. They signed the armistice the next day, so the war was over. [laughter] I was terribly disappointed — so were a lot of the people--but later on we were glad that we didn't go. We came back, and they gave us a pass so we could go over to New York City. We went over, and everyone was having a great time. We were walking along the street, and a man said, "You want to go to a show?" And we said, "Yes"; so he said, "How many of you are there?" We said, "Well, just two," and he said, "Well, I've got four tickets here. You take these." So we got a couple of other guys and went and sat in the second row of the best show in town. It was a variety show--it was really something. Right in front of us were colonels, and all that brass of the army was there. Then we went home, and the next day we got another pass; we came over, and we stayed over in the city that night. We went to another show. We went to a theater there that had the largest stage ever made in the world. They’ve torn it down since then; it was the Hippodrome, a very famous theater. We had a fine time there on the Island, but eventually we went down to Camp Lee in Virginia. We went down on a troop ship. When we got there, they said that our company had left a dirty ship, so we had to do all the work there, getting everything straightened up. But of course we didn't leave any dirty ship, you know--we were clean people. [laughter] We stayed down there, and they used that for a discharge depot. I didn't get out till June of that year. I came back to Osceola and went to work again in the Osceola implement store where I'd worked part of my year of vacation when I didn't go to the university. Later in the summer I worked on a farm where I'd worked before the war helping harvest the crops. When that was over, I went back to the University of Nebraska; that was when I met Blanche, the first or second month. We had a fellow from our hometown named Tedo Carson who was hashing at the place where Blanche lived. He said they had room for two or three more at the dinner table at night, and did we want to go down and eat? So Tubby Clark--who worked at the bookstore with me and was from my hometown--and I went over there for dinner. And that's when the trouble started. [laughter]

JACKSON: Well, Blanche, you take over now and tell your side of the thing. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: Well, let's see. I graduated from Papillion High School in May 1919, and I enrolled at the University of Nebraska that fall. As Bob said, he came to eat dinner at the place where I was living. He sat right across the table from me. It wasn't very long after he had been there that they rolled up the carpet one night in the room right next to the dining room, and we danced. We had a Victrola, and we had records on that; and while we were dancing he asked me for a date. We went to a show and had such a good time — I really thought he was great. So every time that we could after that, I would suggest that we dance after dinner, because every time that we danced, he'd ask me for a date. And I remember he used to take me to the Cornhusker Hotel to dinner. Oh, I thought that was the biggest treat ever, because that was really something--to eat out. Being a country girl, you see, I had never done this. I don't suppose I'd ever eaten in a hotel before I went to the university; I doubt very much if I had. We really had some wonderful times. Bob didn't mention that about that time, he was working part time at the College Book Store, where he had worked the first year that he was in college, before he was in the service. He was enrolled in law school. Mr. [Ernest] Long, the owner of the store, offered him a full-time job if he would quit school and work for him. He would pay him $200 a month, which in those days was a very good salary. I think it would be equal to maybe $1,000 now, because that was way back in 1919. Bob didn't like school too much, anyway. He said he couldn't take any more math. [laughter] So he quit school, and he has never been back. He's been in the book business ever since.

JACKSON: Well, that's an education in itself.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, I should say so. He used to travel a lot, buying books for Mr. Long, the owner of the store. They bought books back from the students and then sold them as used books, you see. Bob would travel around to other schools where they did not have stores that bought books back from the students. In those days, many of the student stores just sold new books--no used books at all. He would send a poster ahead to the bookstore there and say that on a certain date he would be there to pay cash for their books. So the students would bring their books in and he'd line them all up. He had a fantastic memory of what books were used at the University of Nebraska and what books were used at other colleges as well, because the books that Mr. Long couldn't sell to the students at the University of Nebraska he sold wholesale to stores all around the country. So Bob could buy all of their books, whether they were going to be used at the University of Nebraska or not; he'd just line them all up and look over them and see what they were worth, and then he'd give the student cash. Of course, that was what they liked. I didn't get to the part where we got married, did I? [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: I was traveling before we were married.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, he was traveling much of the time. Oh, yes, I remember. The first trip that he went on, I asked him if he was going to write to me, and he said, "Oh, yes." And he asked if I would write to him, and I said, "Sure." And he said, "How often are you going to write?" And I said, "Well, I'll write just as often as you'll write to me." And he said, "Well, I'm planning to write to you every day." So he did. And I did. Sometimes his letters would pile up as he was getting farther away from Lincoln. It took longer for the letters to get back, and I'd get as many as four or five letters a day. His writing was terrible — just atrocious, as it still is. [laughter] The girls at the rooming house would see the envelopes, you know, with his writing, and they'd say they didn't see how I could read what he had written. But I never had any trouble reading what he wrote. Well, this went on for four years. He had a chance, as I recall, to buy a store in Madison, Wisconsin — a used- book store, similar to the one that he was working in at the University of Nebraska. He wanted to get married and go there and have his own store. Well, in those days, we never once thought of getting married before we graduated. So I said, "No, I want to graduate first. But you go ahead, and then after I graduate we can be married and live there." But he didn't want to do that, so he passed that up. I'm so glad he did, because if we had gone there at that time, we'd probably still be there, back there in that cold country. I much prefer California. Anyway, we were married then in June, right after I graduated.

JACKSON: What year was this?

B. CAMPBELL: As a matter of fact, I graduated the fifth of June, 1923. I was twenty-one years old on the eleventh of June, and we were married the twentieth of June, twenty-five and a half years after my parents were married, December 20, 1898. So that was quite a month. We were married in my home in front of the fireplace. [It was] a very small wedding--just Bob's mother and father and one of his brothers and his wife [Phillip and Dorothy Campbell] , and my mother and father and my sister and my grandfather [Jacob Lutz] and an aunt [Anna Sweeney] and two of my girl friends. That was our wedding party. We left by train. Oh, I remember some of our friends asked Mother if they could get in and put rice and stuff in our suitcases, and Mother wouldn't tell them where our suitcases were. We had taken them up to the station in Omaha about ten miles from my home and [had] put them in lockers up there the day before, so they weren't at home. [laughter] We went on our honeymoon and were gone almost a month. We went to Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, and Niagara Falls. They used to say that if you went to one of those places on your honeymoon, you were really married for good. We went to all three--we weren't taking any chances. [laughter ] We just had a wonderful time on our honeymoon, seeing everything; we have pictures that we took. I have one picture of us in the Atlantic Ocean at Atlantic City. We were having a great time there and were so excited to think there we were in the Atlantic Ocean, just these country kids from Nebraska.

JACKSON: Bob, weren't you doing some book work on this trip also? Some buying?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. We went to a lot of places besides the ones she's mentioned. Ernie Long, my boss, said that he would pay all of my expenses, including the room, and I could go on the tours, like I'd gone on the summer before, and go to these schools and buy books. So we stopped in Ames, Iowa City, and Des Moines, and in all the college towns. We were gone for a little over a month. We went as far north as Massachusetts. We went to Providence, Rhode Island, and many places, and bought books in practically every town. Sometimes we wouldn't get anything; sometimes we'd get a wonderful buy from a store if we hit there just at the right time--when they'd finished getting their dead stock out — and [if] nobody else had been there doing the same thing we were. We had a very fine trip. I remember that it was raining very hard the day we were married, and lots of the trains were running behind. We got out of the car at Omaha and went in the station and learned that our train, instead of leaving at three o'clock, was scheduled to leave at midnight. We checked about any others, and they said, "Well, they're all uncertain." We decided we'd stay in Omaha that night at the Fontenelle Hotel, and none of our friends knew that we were there. Then we went on to Ames and then [to] Iowa City and around. We really had a wonderful time. Blanche could understand how I liked to take these trips. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: I remember, too, [that] we visited the Princeton campus and Yale. Oh, that was a fascinating campus — just beautiful. And we were at Harvard, too, weren't we?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, we were at Harvard.

B. CAMPBELL: And we went to the University of Ohio campus. We visited so many college campuses on this trip, which was so exciting. It really was.

R. CAMPBELL: I had an aunt--where was she? Was she at Harvard?

B. CAMPBELL: No, Yale.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, she was at Yale.

B. CAMPBELL: You had some relatives just outside of Washington, D.C., too.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, yes. This one aunt [Julia Teele] was at Yale, and we visited her and her friend. She was a doctor at a settlement house in the Italian district there. The Italians--this was in the days of Prohibition — made a lot of booze and sold it. My aunt and her friend wouldn't think of doing anything like that. They knew what was going on and they just overlooked it. Down in Washington, as Blanche says, I have a cousin [Ray Teele]. He entertained us, and we saw his place out in the country. As a matter of fact, his father was still alive then, and he was there to welcome us.

JACKSON: Did you and Blanche settle down then in Lincoln? Is that the next step?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, we settled down in Lincoln.

JACKSON: And you were working for the store off the campus?

R. CAMPBELL: Working for the store, yes; and I was going to go on a book-buying trip the next spring.

B. CAMPBELL: That fall.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it was fall, I went on the book-buying trip in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado en route to Los Angeles. I made arrangements for Blanche to meet me in Colorado Springs at my sister's. We came on to Los Angeles together. We went over to the Busch Gardens in Pasadena [where] Blanche lost her purse. That night we called Dotty Rouse, a sorority sister who had been at the University of Nebraska with Blanche, and she said, "I knew you were here. A lady called me. [She] found your purse." Dotty said this is the lady's number, and so Blanche called her. She said that she had to read the letters to find out . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Read the letters that were in the purse.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, the letters that were in there, to find out who to call . . .

JACKSON: . . . and where you were.

R. CAMPBELL: And where we were. She didn't see where we were, but she saw Dotty Rouse's name in the address book, and she took a chance that maybe she'd find us.

JACKSON: This girl knew where you were?

R. CAMPBELL: No, but she said, "I'm sure they'll call me while they're here in L.A." We did call her that night. This lady who found it said, "Well, you know, I've had some letters from some lovers, but they never told me three times in one letter they loved me." [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: In the same letter. [laughter]

JACKSON: Well, now, I think you get the idea of coming out here. Is this about the time you [decided to move]?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. When we got back from our honeymoon, we lived in a very small apartment. I remember the landlady — she was huge. And her husband was very small. But, oh, they were so good to us. Many nights they'd invite us to come in and have dinner with them, and that was always a treat for us, of course. Mr. Long asked me if I would come and work at the bookstore, too. As a matter of fact, I had worked some while I was in school. I was a business major; I got my Bachelor of Science degree in business administration. I worked in the office at the bookstore. When we got back from our honeymoon, he wanted me to come and work, which I did. That fall, Bob made arrangements for me to get off work and meet him on his trip of buying because he wanted to come to California to live. I didn't want to leave my folks, because I'd never been very far away from home before. So he had to sell me on moving to California, and [as] he mentioned a little bit ago, that was when we came here. We were here five days; he took me to all the nice places so that I would like California. We only knew a few people in Los Angeles at that time. I remember we visited some friends who were living in a little bungalow court on Burns Avenue. Remember those little bungalow courts?

JACKSON: Near Vermont Avenue.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. Well, Burns Avenue is only three blocks long. It runs from Vermont Avenue to Hoover. I just thought those bungalow courts were the cutest things I'd ever seen. A living room and a bedroom and a kitchen — and they were so cute. I said, "If I can live in a place like this, I will come to California.'' We went from here up to Seattle, stopping several places on the way. Yes, I remember the Stanford campus was so beautiful. We stopped at Berkeley; I saw some of my sorority sisters there. Oh, whenever we went to a college town where my sorority, Phi Omega Pi, had a chapter, I always went and got acquainted with some of the girls. That was fun. When we got back to Lincoln, we told Mr. Long that we were quitting at the end of the year.

JACKSON: The school year?

B. CAMPBELL: No, the calendar year — through the end of the current year — 1923. So we both quit our jobs and decided we'd come to California. We didn't have anything lined up to do here, but we figured we'd find something. We spent one week with Bob's folks at Osceola and one week with my folks at Papillion. I remember when they took us to the train. They had had a very hard snow, and it was cold — oh, it was as cold as it could be. So we were kind of glad to get away from that cold weather. On the way out on the train, we read an article about Harry Culver — how he was selling real estate in Culver City and how fast it was moving. So we thought, "Well, maybe we could do that." In those days, you didn't have to have a license to sell real estate. We just went up and said that we'd like to go out with them on trips where they took people to sell real estate. Well, we were not very good salesmen--we sold one lot, to ourselves. We went on this way. Finally we realized that we weren't getting anywhere, because we had no income and our money was running out. We had bought a Ford for approximately $650 and we had bought furniture for [the] little three-room apartment that we rented in Culver City. Incidentally, this apartment was owned by a very nice couple who were members of Temple Baptist Church. The church is still in the Philharmonic Auditorium Building at Fifth and Olive in downtown Los Angeles, and I believe the church still owns a controlling stock in the Philharmonic Auditorium. We had gone around to various churches to find a church home, because we felt that was a good way to get acquainted with the kind of people that we would like to know. Our landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Judy, invited us to go down to Temple Baptist Church, and of course they introduced us to many of their friends down there, and that was it. We joined Temple Baptist Church, and we were baptized, submerged. We had been going to a Methodist church back in Lincoln. We were baptized by Dr. J. Whitcomb Brougher, who became a very dear friend of ours. He was a wonderful, wonderful person. We had many friends at Temple Church. And we met a man--what was his name?

R. CAMPBELL: Van Vranken?

B. CAMPBELL: Mr. Van Vranken, who was the manager of a bus station on Santa Monica Boulevard just east of Vermont Avenue. Bob said, "Maybe I could get a job driving a bus." He decided that he'd go up and see Mr. Van Vranken. I stayed home because I had applied at the telephone company for work. In my hometown, in Papillion, I had worked at the switchboard on vacations, and I had worked in all of the offices of the courthouse there. I worked while the secretaries went on vacation. So I had had quite a bit of experience in office work. That was when I was in high school — going back a bit. I thought I might be able to get a job as a telephone operator — anything, just to have some income, because we had to have something to live on. When Bob came home that night, I said, "Well, did you get a job?" He said, "I think we'll start a bookstore." And I said, "A bookstore! What with?" Then he told me that when he was driving north on Vermont Avenue up to Santa Monica [Boulevard], right across from the old UCLA campus, which was called Southern Branch at that time, [he saw] a store building under construction and a sign, "Store for Rent." He had stopped to see the owner of the building, Mr. Hawley [and had] talked to him about the possibility of starting a bookstore there. Well, Mr. Hawley was going to have a drugstore in the corner of the building, at the corner of Monroe and Vermont. A man had been talking to him about opening a barbershop in this storeroom. And Mr. Hawley knew that a bookstore would attract many more people to that side of Vermont Avenue from the campus than a barbershop would, and [that] consequently his business in the drugstore would be better. And he said, "Well, the man who is thinking of opening a barbershop told me he'd be back tomorrow morning at nine o'clock to give me his answer. So if you're back here by 8:30 tomorrow morning, and if you'll sign a five-year lease and pay the first and last months' rent, you can have it." We thought that was such a great idea, to start a bookstore, because Bob had loved it so when he was at the University of Nebraska working for Mr. Long. But where to get the $250 to pay the first and last months' rent? That night we went up to see some friends of Bob's folks, Mr. and Mrs. William Welch, a retired couple who lived on North New Hampshire almost to Los Feliz. We told them our predicament, and because they knew his father to be an honest man, they figured that Bob would pay the money back — so [they] loaned us $1,000. We went back the next morning and signed a five-year lease and paid the first and last months' rent, and we were in business. We moved into the back of the store so that we would save that much rent, and we curtained it off a little more than halfway back — just enough space to put [the] furniture that we had purchased. And of course there's always a gas connection, you know, for the stove, and there's always a toilet and a washbowl, but [there was] no bathtub or shower. So we bought one of those galvanized tubs like we used to use on the farm, and that was our bathtub while we lived in the back of the store. We lived there for about six months, I believe, Mr. Judy, our landlord who was a carpenter, came in and put up shelves, because we had just an empty storeroom, and we purchased a few showcases to display supplies such as fountain pens, etc, Bob went across Vermont Avenue and talked to all of the professors over there. He got so he knew all of them very well; they told him what books they were using, and he found out what kind of supplies they needed. So we made many trips down to the wholesale supply houses, Stationers' Corporation and Los Angeles News Company as I recall, getting supplies to put on the shelves. We opened for business on May 10, 1924. We bought books back from the students at the end of the semester and these helped to fill our shelves.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO AUGUST 12, 1974

B. CAMPBELL: The bottles of ink came in small cartons, and about a dozen of those [came] in a larger carton. We would take those small cartons out and put them on the shelf, and then we'd put the empty box that the cartons had come in on the shelf to make it look like we had more stock. [laughter] That's the way we filled up our shelves, because there are a lot of things that come that way. So, as I say, we opened on the tenth of May, 1924, and that was an astonishing occasion. I was under the impression that we took in a dollar and a half the first day, but Bob thinks it was $6.95.

JACKSON: Now, you tell that part.

R. CAMPBELL: I tell it better. [laughter] It doesn't make any difference whether you take in six dollars or one dollar now. I figured that if we took in twenty-five dollars we would break even. We took in six dollars — or one dollar — but we also bought in a lot of books from the kids. It was just before the final examinations, and a lot of the kids from the fraternity houses had a lot of books stuck away that they weren't using. They started bringing those in, and I think we paid out over a hundred dollars the first day. We had borrowed more capital from Blanche's folks and from my folks, so we had enough money to buy quite a few books. We issued "due bills" allowing 50 percent of the price of their books, whereas those taking cash received only 40 percent. About half of [the students] took the due bills that they used later to buy books and supplies. A few weeks before we were ready to open, I went to see a cousin-in-law of Blanche's who was on the Southern Branch faculty, the University Elementary School.

JACKSON: What was her name?

R. CAMPBELL: Helen Christianson. She's now retired and lives out in Pomona. She was very glad to see me. She said, "We'd be happy to have some secondhand books because the Co-op here doesn't handle any secondhand books at all-- and most of the classes can just as well use secondhand ones because they don't need them afterwards." That encouraged us, so we went to all the rest of [the faculty members] to get information about books that would be used in their courses. There was only one person who wouldn't give me this, Dr. [Frederick] Leonard, head of the astronomy department. "No," he said, "we must be loyal to the store on the campus." He was a young man, and he looked like a student rather than a professor until he grew his beard. Remember Dr. Leonard?

JACKSON: Yes, I remember him well. [tape recorder turned off]

R. CAMPBELL: That fall, we had a very, very fine business, It was bigger than we [had] expected; it wasn't like the day we opened. We had bought secondhand books from the kids, and a lot of those were being used over again. We'd also bought them from stores around the country. There were 1,000 more students enrolled that year, so the Co-op didn't notice [that] they'd lost any business. It was that way for three years--we'd do more and more business each year. Then in the fourth year, there was very little increase in enrollment, and [the Co-op] had a big loss because we had about a 20 percent increase in business. In some instances, we had enough used books to supply the whole class. They started to use a book in freshman English that we called a "clinker." I knew there were a lot of them around the country. We had enough of those to supply the whole class, and we almost did.

B. CAMPBELL: Used copies.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, used copies. We had a few new ones, too. There was always somebody [who had to have a] new book [and wouldn't] take a secondhand one. They heard about somebody that died from this, that, or the other — from a lock of hair that was in a book or something. [laughter] Anyway, we sold almost all of those, and in four or five weeks the Macmillan salesman came in--it was a Macmillan book — and he said, "How many of those books did you sell? We gave thirty reading copies to the school, and they didn't even sell that many at the Co-op." I said, "Well, I just happened to get a few hundred of them from stores around the country." I really upset their apple cart, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. The same thing happened in psychology the third year. The Houghton Mifflin publisher's representative, Spud Loomis , had become a very good friend of mine, because in my days in the store at Lincoln I visited Pullman, Washington, and he went to school there and worked in the bookstore. He was on the football squad at Washington State when they played the University of Nebraska in Lincoln the last year we lived there. We saw him then. For several years Spud worked for Houghton Mifflin, who published the psychology text. He really was upset at not selling very many of his books — he had worked hard to get an adoption there. But that happens all the time. It's kind of a sad thing that it happens [to the publisher], but it does. It's good for the dealer and good for the kids. They can sell their books, and somebody else can have them the next year, so it's a very fine thing in some ways.

B. CAMPBELL: Don't they revise [the texts] more now?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, thirty or thirty-five years ago, they started revising them as often as ethically possible, so as to change the books a little bit. [Sometimes] they can just change the order of the chapters, which changes the book completely. That way they do not have to write anything [new]. The secondhand business has grown tremendously; it's the big thing now. Let's see. We were talking about the fourth year, when Co-op sales were down. Well, then they started looking around and trying to figure out what was wrong. A girl who we knew--she was in Blanche's sorority--came in and told us about a meeting she had attended of the student council where they were complaining about Campbell's Book Store. One girl said, "They've done everything unethical to throw things their way. Dr. Ernest Carroll Moore has told them not to do certain things on the campus, and they've gone ahead and done them." Well, Dr. Moore never told me to not do anything on the campus — except that fall he told me that we couldn't print the football programs, which we had printed and given out free. All [they] said was "Compliments of Campbell's Book Store." There were no [official] programs then, so we gave them these--one sheet of paper with the lineups on one side. But we stopped that. Actually, we had them at the store and we tried giving them out to people, but there weren't enough of them to worry about. But that was the only thing he ever complained to me about. I saw him the second year and said that I wanted to give a hundred-dollar scholarship. He said, "Well, why don't you make it four twenty-five-dollar ones? For twenty-five dollars, a student can pay his registration fee and buy his books. A lot of these kids can go to school, but they haven't enough money to buy things with; if they could just get started, it would be all right." He said that we could start four of them with these twenty- five-dollar scholarships. So I did that, and then the next year I raised it another hundred [dollars] so that we had eight. We did that for a number of years. Now a student pays something like $290 a quarter for his fees, so things have gone up . It was on the old campus that Ralph Bunche worked for us. About two and a half months before the end of the spring semester in 1927, the athletic department called and said they had this fine young man there that just had to have a job, that the university funds had run out and they had to release eleven people who were working, and that he had almost a straight-A average and was a fine, fine young man. So I said, "Well, send him over, and we'll find something for him to do." Just a few moments after that, one of the boys who worked in the stationery department told me that he was going to have to stop and study more because he was behind and he just couldn't work anymore. So I said, "Well, that's fine. We'll put Joe over there selling where you are, and Ralph will be the janitor." Ralph came over, and we talked about how much he had to have — a certain amount of money--and I said, "Well, now, this takes two hours, and that will be twelve hours a week. We had to pay him thirty-five cents an hour instead of twenty-five, which was the going rate for the good ones then. [laughter] He was a very fine worker. I gave him a letter to give to Mr. Phillips of Phillips Bookstore at Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he went to graduate school at Harvard. Mr. Phillips was an albino and he couldn't see very well; and as you know, Ralph was a black, but he was not terribly black. He said yes, he could come in and sell books to Harvard students --it would be fine. So when he left, Mr. Phillips's wife said, "You know you hired a black there." And he said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes." [laughter] Ralph came in and nobody objected to him, and he worked through the rest of the year and then became a teaching fellow the next year, which paid him a great deal more than selling books did. But he was very happy to have the job. We kept in touch with Ralph off and on all through the years. I talked to him the Sunday before he died, and he asked about basketball. That was his first question — he said, "How did the Bruins do in basketball this weekend?" So I could give him the news of that, tell him we'd been at the game, as we were at all of them. The thing was, we used a lot of students and sometimes kept them on when we didn't really need them. We were making a lot of money then--it seemed like a lot-- and it grew every year. The students started trying to get the faculty to be loyal to "their store," as they called it, and called on most all of the faculty and asked them not to give us any information. There were one or two more [faculty members] besides Dr. [Frederick C.] Leonard that were a little affected--so we had to send students over to ask what books they were going to use next fall. We moved in 1929; that was a sad year for us because I borrowed some money and we built our own building on LeConte Avenue a few doors west of Westwood Boulevard.

JACKSON: So you borrowed some money to build that building.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, like you always do.

JACKSON: And weren't you the first to open, of all the businesses in Westwood Village?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, ours was the first store to be really open. Marlowe Janss had the Janss drugstore down there, but it wasn't open — you could go in the back door for Tom Photopopulos ' s food concession. He was trying out all of his new equipment and was glad to have some of us come and eat lunch and dinner. He had a very nice place there. He later changed his name to Tom Photos.

JACKSON: I think you mentioned one time that there was a problem getting your store ready in time for the opening of the fall semester.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, there was.

JACKSON: Describe that — about the construction.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I told them, to begin with, that it had to be ready to get in by the first of September at the very latest, [but that] I'd rather have it the middle of August so we could get the shelves in there and get moved properly. It was getting along towards that time, and they were not making the progress they were supposed to make. I talked with them, and they said that one of the things they could do [was] not sand the floor before they put the linoleum on. They were going to put battleship linoleum on; it was heavy enough that it didn't really have to be [sanded]. They didn't tell me that after a few years you could see the ridge wherever a board was, but that's the way it is now. I said, well, that would be all right. So they cut that out, and that gave us just enough time to put the shelves in, and get the books and supplies on them, and be ready for business on the tenth of September . I was reading something the other day in my scrapbook--incidentally it was by Rowe Baldwin, who was working for Janss then. She said there was a continual quarrel about who was first: Bob Campbell, Marlowe Janss, or somebody else--I can't think who it was. I know that the third one didn't start for three or four weeks. But Marlowe thought that because he was down there and the food concession was open before we were, he thought he was first. He didn't get his front door in and really have an opening until after school started. We thought we were the first one all the time, but maybe we weren't. When classes started, we didn't have anywhere near the students in that we should have had. We were very discouraged. We got a big balloon filled with helium and put it up above our building; it said, "Campbell's Book Store — SAVE." At the Friends of the UCLA Library [meeting] the other night, we asked how many remembered that, and there were three people there that remembered seeing that sign .

B. CAMPBELL: Page Ackerman was one of them. She was in school then. That balloon was way up above the store with a great big arrow pointing down to the sign, "Campbell's Book Store--SAVE. " It was high enough so that it could be seen from the campus buildings, which were clear up at the other end of the campus.

JACKSON: But nothing in between.

B. CAMPBELL: Nothing in between.

R. CAMPBELL: No trees and no sidewalk. It really was discouraging. Then the Depression came along — that was October — and that really put a crimp in things. They opened the west room of our building. (We had left a space there for someone else.) A restaurant opened up there, but [it] didn't last long. We soon found that we were not going to do the business there that we had done on the old campus, and so we started putting in merchandise for the general public, both in stationery and in books. We didn't do it on a big scale, but we just started gradually, and we worked that up to where we dropped the textbooks entirely during the war.

JACKSON: Textbooks?

R. CAMPBELL: Textbooks, yes. We had a lot of trade books then, and we built that up until it became a great department. We sold the store to Brentano ' s about six years ago, so it's their store now, and they're responsible for the shape it's in.

B. CAMPBELL: It'll be six years next month that we sold to Brentano' s.

JACKSON: Now, you two agreed to continue to manage it for Brentano 's up until. . . . You'd better explain that. Bob — the timing.

R. CAMPBELL: They wanted to know if we would stay on. We talked it over and said yes, we would. And so they gave us a one-year contract to manage it. Before the year was up, they said that they wanted us to just forget about that and to stay and work there because they wanted the people there to maintain the same relationship. The man who said this was Mr. Elliott Lang, who had just taken over as president of Brentano's. He'd been the manager of the New York Saks Fifth Avenue, and he was a very fine person. We liked him, and so we said, "All right, we'll do it providing that you send out somebody who knows the Brentano business and this chain-store stuff. It's all Greek to us — we don't know it, and it takes too much of our time to learn it. We'll work here, but we won't do that." He said, "That's just fine." So they worked that out and sent a man (Allen Chabin) from Washington, D.C., who we thought was very good. Mr. Lang didn't like the way Brentano's operated, so he resigned in six months. Allen Chabin is running Brentano's new store in Beverly Hills now. The last four or five years, they cut down on our stock and cut down on the help so much that the store is just a skeleton of what it used to be. So this year we decided to retire, and we talked about doing it on the tenth of May, which is the anniversary of opening our store. Then we decided [we'd] stay on and just see what would happen. And then one day Mr. Cowen, who is managing the stores now from their New York headquarters, came in and said, "We'd kind of like to know when you're going to get out." [laughter] So I said, "Well, we had decided on the tenth of May, which is our fiftieth anniversary, but then we decided we'd go on. But if you want us to quit, why, we'll quit then," "That's fine," he says. "That'll be great." And so we set that as the date, and we retired on the tenth of May, 1974.

JACKSON: And it was the tenth of May, '24, when you opened the doors on Vermont Avenue. Well, let's switch over to Blanche now for a little bit. Blanche, would you talk about the children's department?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, I'd love to talk about that. [laughter] Well, did Bob tell about coming out to Westwood and selecting a lot and building a building?

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: He told about that. Well, the children's department started in 1934, five years after we moved to Westwood. By that time, the neighborhood had grown to quite an extent, and there were many more homes, of course, than there [had been] when we first came out there. We had put in a lot of trade books for the neighborhood trade, and that year we decided we should have some children's books. Incidentally, nothing has been said about our daughters, has it?

JACKSON: No, no.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, maybe we'd better go back a little bit and tell about them because they enter into this children's book deal.

JACKSON: All right, let's go back to the family.

B. CAMPBELL: On the old campus, we lived in the back of the store for six months, and we moved out in January, 1925. Our first daughter [Dorothy Frances Campbell] was born in that year-- [on] May 20, 1925. At that time, I was helping in the store and doing all the bookkeeping, which was very simple at that time — there were no taxes, no sales tax. It was just so simple compared to what it is now. My folks had come out from Nebraska and were staying with us for a while. They had rented their home back there. So I continued to work at the store, because we had moved into a bungalow on Burns Avenue less than a block from the store. Incidentally, it was in sort of a bungalow court, and it was on the same street that I had seen that bungalow court originally. Isn't that something? That short street. Mother took care of Dorothy while I spent some time at the store doing the bookkeeping and so forth. I would go home at feeding time to feed her. Well, then, our second daughter [Clarice Helen Campbell] arrived a year and a half later to the day — November 20, 1926. Just a short time before Clarice was born, the folks got word from the man who was renting their home in Papillion, Nebraska. He said that his wife had died and he did not want to keep the home, so he would be leaving. Mother and Dad didn't want to rent their house to just anybody, and so they decided they'd better go back. Dad stayed until after Clarice arrived, and then he went back. Mother stayed until the end of the year. And I remember so well when we took her to the train down at the Union Station. I was sitting in the back seat holding Clarice in my arms, and Dorothy [was] sitting by my side. I felt like the world had dropped on my shoulders--here I was, just a young mother, with two small children and no grandmother to help anymore. [laughter] Well, we had to make a decision whether I was going to keep on working at the store or stay home and take care of the girls. We decided that we'd get somebody else to do the bookkeeping and help at the store; I said that if the girls are spoiled and don't amount to anything when they grow up, I want to be to blame for it. [laughter] So I stayed home. When they were both old enough to be in school until three o'clock in the afternoon — I think that was in the second grade or third grade--Bob said, "How would you like to come back to work while the girls are in school so you will know something about what's going on." We had some friends whose business went to pot when the husband died and the wife [was left knowing] nothing about the business. We were too interested in our store to ever see it go down the drain. So I decided that I would come back to work those hours. After the girls left for school in the morning, I drove out to Westwood; then, by the time they got home, I'd be home. By that time, we had moved from Burns Avenue--well , we lived in two places on Burns Avenue. We had moved up closer to Vermont to a five-room flat (441 Burns Avenue). We were living there when Clarice was born. I think we paid forty-five dollars a month rent for that five-room flat and a garage, and [it was] so close to work--we could just walk over to the store. [tape recorder turned off] We moved out to a house that was a block west of Fairfax — oh, no. First we moved to 428 North Beachwood Drive which was two blocks east of Larchmont. Then we moved on to — what was the name of that street? One block west of Fairfax, I remember.

R. CAMPBELL: Hayworth.

B. CAMPBELL: Hayworth, that's right, 637 North Hayworth. It was just south of Melrose. We made the next move out to Croft Avenue — 355 North Croft--and the girls went to Rosewood School, I remember. I think that was where we were living when I started going back and forth to work. I think it was about five miles from the store.

R. CAMPBELL: We'd kept the old store down on Vermont Avenue .

B. CAMPBELL: We were about halfway between the two stores, and we had a man managing the Vermont Avenue store. Incidentally, his name was Dick Fuller. Dick, I think, went only through junior college.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, he had two years at junior college.

B. CAMPBELL: Then he managed our store full time. When the war came, he went to work for Bendix Corporation.

R. CAMPBELL: Couldn't get in the service because he had some little flick in one of his eyes.

B. CAMPBELL: He worked himself up to be a vice-president. And Bendix sent him back to Dearborn, Michigan. It was a marvelous job, but he didn't like it back there.

R. CAMPBELL: He'd been urged to do that before. He was in charge of a plant out here where they make underwater devices and secret stuff for the navy.

B. CAMPBELL: It was a marvelous job. When they offered him this job back there, he felt he should go, but he didn't like it. He scouted around and found himself another job out here and announced that he was leaving Bendix. Now he's living down in Newport Beach in a beautiful home; he's president of some company that is making [similar] things to what Bendix was making. I believe it's in Orange. Anyway, he has really worked himself up and has a fabulous salary, and it shows to go that you don't always have to have a four-year college education. [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: They were having an alum of the year award at L.A. City College, and they were wondering what to do about Dick. They almost decided not to give it to him because he didn't have four years [of college]. But they went ahead and gave it to him anyway. They had the state college in there with L.A. City College for a while. The two colleges combined had about 20,000 students; then L.A. State College took about 15,000 students to their new campus in East L.A., and the L.A. City College has not had more than 10,000 since.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, anyway, that fall, when I started back to work . . . Incidentally, I had gotten myself involved in all kinds of other activities--PTA work and church work and sorority work. I remember that that particular year, I was ways and means chairman for the PTA . I hated to tell the PTA president at the last minute that I couldn't do it, so I got two girls on my committee, and I just practically turned the whole thing over to them. They say a good chairman has a good committee and doesn't do any of the work. Well, I didn't do any of the work; I can assure you of that. [laughter] We were living at 355 North Croft Avenue, which is two blocks east of La Cienega Boulevard. I was reading in the [Los Angeles] Times recently — I think it was in Jack Smith's column--about the old Kiddy land playgrounds that were around various places. There was one there at the corner of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard; I remember that. It is gone now, too. It had a merry-go- round and all kinds of stuff.

R. CAMPBELL: Very small one.

B. CAMPBELL: It was just a small one.

JACKSON: Just the thing for your children.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. Well, anyway, we were living on Croft, and I was going back and forth to work while the girls were in school. And as I mentioned, we stocked a few children's books that fall. The girl who had been the buyer for them--and was also doing the buying for the trade books, too--took sick early in December and didn't get back before Christmas. So when anyone came in and asked for children's books, the clerks came to me and said, "Will you help this customer?" The clerks felt that I could help them because we had two little girls, you see, and I'd been reading to them. We had a lot of books in stock that I hadn't read. I thought, "Well, I can help my customers so much more if I've read these books." So I took books home and read one book after another. Every evening I read books. That was when I first started wearing these glasses--my eyes gave out on me. I made a review of every book that I read, wrote a short synopsis of [each] . They were so fascinating, these children's books, that I just wanted to read all of them. I still have the notebook that I wrote those reviews in. And that was how I got started in the children's books in 1934. I've been in that field ever since--that ' s forty years. I read practically nothing but children's books all those years. They are so fascinating, and they're so interesting for adults as well as children. But many adults aren't aware of that--they think they're kids' stuff, and they're not interested. [phone rings] When we first had our children's books, they were on the mezzanine. I helped with the bookkeeping some at that time and would go out and wait on the children's books whenever we had customers, which weren't too many then. Well, in a year or so-- I don't remember just how long it was — I became manager of the department. I did all the buying for years and years, up until the time Brentano's bought us. I had a relief for a while, when our grandsons arrived. I had a girl do the buying at that time, so I could spend more time reading to them. When she left, I took it back again. I would see salesmen and go over the books with them and try to decide how many we should have. We moved our children's department down to the lower level in 1954 because we had really outgrown the mezzanine. We took over half of [what was] actually the basement of our store. We didn't like to call it the basement, and so we copied Bullock's and called it the lower level. [laughter] We had half of it at that time. We had also put in a few children's textbooks when we were on the mezzanine. I remember I went down to the California School Book Depository and picked out some of the early primers and readers that they were using in schools, [and] that we were having calls for. And as we got calls for more textbooks and trade books, we continued to stock more titles. That was how our children's department grew--by the demand that we had for certain kinds of books. We always tried to get what our customers wanted. That was one thing that we did — give them service. If they wanted certain publishers' books, we could stock those publishers' books. I devised a little scheme of keeping track of what books we had in stock. I realized that I had to get it down in writing and know how many we sold-- especially the primers. I fixed a sheet where I listed the preprimers. There would usually be one level and the second level and the third level — they were usually paperback, and they still are, incidentally — then it would go into hardbound copies, first grade and second grade, and sometimes there would be a level one of first grade and level two. I listed all those on a sheet in order, and then I had squares out at the side where I kept track of the stock--how many we had in stock and how many we ordered. that continued all the way through, all these years — I still continued to use what we call our stock sheet. It was so great. I knew just how many books we'd sold over a certain period of time, and that was a big help with the buying.

JACKSON: Blanche, you got into a series of talks around different places. I remember I attended one and was very impressed. Now, tell us about those.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I had so much fun showing children's books to customers, and one day one of my customers said, "Would you consider coming to my house and telling some of my friends about children's books like you are telling me here in the store?" I don't even remember who that was-- isn't that too bad? And I don't remember just when it was, but I would say it was probably thirty-five years ago, thirty or thirty-five years ago. I said, "Well, I could do that. I could just bring some books along with me and tell them about them." "Oh," she said, "I'd love it if you would." So she had some of her friends in, and that's how I got started. Then some of those friends belonged to organizations where there were young mothers; they [would] ask me if I'd come and speak, and it snowballed from there. I never had an agent, [laughter] or anybody to go out and solicit programs for me — I never did that. It was always by word of mouth: someone would tell someone else about it. And I never prepared a program. I just picked out books and put them in cartons to take and then I'd put them on display and tell about them. It was such fun to do that, because children's books are so terribly exciting.

R. CAMPBELL: Of course, you did pick them out according to the crowd that was going to be there. Some of them were for very little kids, and some of them here for older ones, and some were for all ages.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right. I went to a great many nursery school parents' meetings, and that snowballed. One nursery school would tell another nursery school about the program. And I don't remember that I ever gave a program that someone didn't ask if they could buy some of the books. So I would sell them right there--it was such a convenience for them. They didn't have their children under their feet; they had heard about the books, and they wanted them right there. I think the most I ever sold at a program was four hundred and some dollars. Well, they would just line up, and the minute I finished talking, they would dive for the table to pick out the books that they wanted. So I have had such a fascinating life telling young mothers and grandmothers about [children's] books.

R. CAMPBELL: And some of them said they would come to the store and buy them, and would often beat her back to the store. Some of them would come in and buy fifty, seventy- five dollars' [worth]. I remember one woman bought sixty- seven dollars' [worth], and the woman with her bought fifty- two dollars' [worth]. That was within a year, year and a half, now. They didn't always announce where they were from, but they would come in and buy a lot of books. Often some of them did say, "Well, I've heard Mrs. Campbell [at] so-and-so," and would wind up buying a hundred dollars' worth of books. There's one woman that comes in every year and buys over a hundred dollars ' worth of books; she heard Blanche first at one of her programs. It's a day's journey for her to come in and do this .

B. CAMPBELL: Customers came in from Long Beach. I can remember they'd say, "Well, here we are again — we're back on our trek. We heard you."

JACKSON: That's wonderful.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, hardly a day passed when I was at the store that someone didn't say, "I heard you give a program, and I want some of the books"; they'd bring out their little lists or have me go over [the lists] with them. So it has been wonderful because I feel that I have helped children so much. I have mothers come in now and say, "My child has just graduated from college. He made such good marks--and it was because of the start you gave him in children's books." I don't know whether that's true or not, but anyway, it makes me feel that all my work was worthwhile. Many times, I would be at work when the store opened in the morning — an hour beforehand, sometimes, at eight o'clock — and I wouldn't get home till midnight. So I put in all those hours. One time, just for fun, I turned my time card in to the bookkeeper. Of course, Bob and I were just on a drawing account when we owned the store, and didn't have a regular salary. I put it in, and I think it was around seventy-five hours that I had worked that week. [laughter] Well, it's been a fascinating life, and I miss it now to a certain extent. But I'm still [getting] calls from people who would like to have me come and speak.

JACKSON: Blanche, I think we should go back and get the remainder of your residences. You were on Croft when we left you.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, on Croft Avenue — that's right. We decided to move to Westwood when Clarice graduated from grammar school and was starting junior high — that would be seventh grade. Dorothy had already had one year in junior high. [Although] we knew that children don't like to be uprooted from their junior highs and high schools, we felt this would be just one year that Dorothy would be uprooted. And so at that time, we moved out to 1926 Malcolm Avenue. That, again, was a flat building. What do they call them now? It was a two-story apartment ...

JACKSON: Duplex.

B. CAMPBELL: A duplex — yes, that's right. We had the entire top floor, and we also had a garage. I think we paid fifty dollars or fifty-five dollars a month rent for that. The girls both graduated from Emerson Junior High School; they both went to Uni [versity] High, and both graduated from there. Both of them went to UCLA. Dorothy had been in UCLA maybe two years when she decided to go back and live with my sister, who was then living in Syracuse, New York, where my brother-in-law, Don Boyd, had a church. She went back and went to Syracuse [University for] a year and lived with Don and Hazel. Then she came back and graduated from UCLA. She continued working on the campus for Dr. George Robbins in the business college. She enjoyed that so much. Clarice didn't like UCLA too much — it was much more difficult than high school. In fact, both girls had just sailed through high school and didn't have any trouble at all. College was a little different. Clarice found that she was down in grade points, and so she decided she would quit school. She went up to Yosemite. She had worked up there in the summer a couple times, and she went up there and worked in the gift shop. I don't remember how long she worked. Then she worked in the ticket office at UCLA for Rowe Baldwin. She loved that, of course, because Rowe was such a wonderful person to work with. She decided [that] maybe she should go back to school, but she didn't want to go back to UCLA. She wrote many of the colleges in the West to get their curricula and decide where she wanted to go. The president of Utah State wrote her a letter and said they would like to have her come there — that they would accept her even though her grade points were down. She was so impressed by the president of the college writing her a personal letter that she decided to go there. She went there, and in one semester, she had a straight-A average. [laughter] She did better there than she did at UCLA. It was a smaller college, and the professors seemed to have more personal interest--which is true in a smaller college. So she graduated from Utah State. She met her husband [John W. Patterson] there; now she is divorced from him. They had a little boy [James Webster Patterson], and when he was two years old, they separated. Jimmy has just graduated from high school and is ready to start college this fall. Clarice decided that she'd have to go to teaching — she had gotten a teaching credential. So she and Jimmy lived up in San Jose, and she taught in Sunnyvale. Then she got the idea that she'd like to go into library work. I mentioned that to Clarissa Bacon, who was a librarian in the Santa Monica schools. I just happened to mention it to her one day when she was in the store buying some children's books. She said, "Oh, if Clarice is going to library school, they're just putting full-time librarians in the Santa Monica schools now. Tell her to go and see Chase Dane the next time she comes home." So when she came home at Christmas, I told her about it. She called Mr. Dane, and he said, "When can you come in to see me?" She went in to see him, and he said, "If you want to become a librarian, why don't you quit teaching and go to library school? You can get your credential in one year." In the meantime, she had been taking a night class; she was planning to take summer classes and probably take several years to get her library degree. Well, she didn't like teaching — it was difficult for her to keep children under her control all day and then come home and be a good mother to Jimmy. He suggested that she quit teaching. So when she went back after Christmas, she told the school board that she would teach until the end of the semester, and then she'd quit. She went to library school at San Jose State College the next year. Mr. Dane told her, "Every time you come home, now, you come see me"; so she'd go down and see him. And when she graduated from library school, and got her library degree, he gave her a job at Grant School in Santa Monica. She loved it there — she just loved library work. We were so thrilled that she'd decided to go into that work-- a children's librarian. She would come into the store and look over the books and decide which ones she wanted to buy for her library. Oh, we just had a ball working together that way. She'd been there six years--oh, in the meantime, she had married again. The man she married [Edward Olcott] was a construction engineer; he was an inspector. He is eighteen years older than she is. Some friends of hers from up in the Bay Area--librarians that she knew — were visiting her, and she said, "Ed will be retiring in a few years, maybe four or five years, and I just might see if I can get a job up around Bishop." They had met in the Sierra Club and had gone up to Mammoth every chance they got. Well, within a month, she got a letter from the superintendent of schools at Bishop asking her if she was interested in coming to Bishop to be their elementary school librarian. She couldn't figure out where he [had gotten] her name and home address. He had gotten it from these two girls [to whom] she had mentioned, just a short time before, that she'd like to work in Bishop sometime. He had met those girls at a workshop in Sacramento, and just mentioned to them, "You don't happen to know of an elementary school librarian who'd be interested in coming to Bishop, do you?" They said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, we do, in about five years. Maybe you can talk her into coming sooner. So that was why he wrote her this letter. She liked the principal at Grant, and she felt that she wanted to stay there another year and work with him.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE AUGUST 26, 1974

B. CAMPBELL: But when the principal at Grant got a better offer and announced that he was going to leave at the end of the school year, Clarice wondered if that job at Bishop was still open. She had met her husband at Stoney Point in Chatsworth at a Sierra Club function. They were very fond of that area and hoped that some day they could live up there. Well, anyway, she got in touch with the superintendent of schools at Bishop, and the job had not been filled, so they went up that weekend. They interviewed her, and she came home with the job. That was in the spring, and they moved up there in July 1968.

JACKSON: And the job was. . . ?

B. CAMPBELL: The job was elementary school librarian for the Bishop schools. At that time they had three elementary schools, and so she was over all three of them. They later consolidated into two schools. She loves the work. It's fascinating, because she was the first professional librarian to come into the system; before that, they just had teachers act as clerks in their library. So she set up the whole thing, and she has a secretary and several assistants. I think she has about thirty children helping check books out, and [she] loves it. It was a natural for her to go into that field. Clarice's boy Jim was about thirteen years old at the time they moved up there. Now, I should tell you about our other daughter, too-- Dorothy. Her name is Dorothy, but her nickname is Dorotho . At one time they were putting an "o" on the end of everything, so she became Dorotho. She married Robert Russell Tolstad in 1950. Bob is a staunch Trojan; he even goes with the football team on most of their out-of-town trips and helps the announcer. [laughter] Dorotho often said she didn't think she'd ever go with an SC man, let alone marry one. But she did. And they have two boys. Jeffrey Iver Tolstad has completed his second year at SC, and our friends can't understand how one of our grandsons is going to SC. [laughter] But he loves it there; he's a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the same fraternity that his father belonged to. I think you belong to that too, don't you Johnny?

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, I was thinking you did. Well, anyway, Jeff is beginning his third year this fall. His brother, Scott Campbell Tolstad, will be a senior at El Camino High School out in the [San Fernando] Valley. They live out in Woodland Hills. Dorotho is a staunch Republican, and she's very active in the Republican Club out in that area. She's also active in her sorority, Alpha Chi Omega. (Clarice was an Alphi Chi, too. During the short time that she was at UCLA, she belonged to the chapter here, and then when she went to Utah State and finished her work there, she lived in the Alpha Chi house on the Utah State Campus, which was very convenient.) It was from 355 North Croft that we moved to Westwood. Up until that time, we still had both stores, and we were about halfway between them. I 'm not sure just when we sold the Vermont store, but I think it was about the time that we moved out to 1926 Malcolm Avenue. We had an upper flat, three big bedrooms, a living room, a great big dining room, and a great big kitchen; and as I said before, we paid either fifty or fifty-five dollars a month for that flat. It's incredible now. I don't know how much it would be--a couple hundred, I guess. Anyway, we lived there about fifteen or sixteen years. At that time, property was going up in value, and so we decided maybe we should own our own home. So we bought our house at 1827 Parnell Avenue and moved there August 5, 1946. We lived there until 1962. We moved from there because we found ourselves being surrounded by apartments. When we moved in there, we did not realize that we were in R- 3 zoning. Anyway, they could build three-story apartments on our block. We found ourselves entirely surrounded by them, and we didn't like that, so we began looking for a home in an area where there weren't so many apartments. We were very fortunate to find the house we're living in now, 11173 Cashmere Street, which is west of the campus instead of east. Incidentally, when we were living on Parnell Avenue, the Mormon Temple was built. We were on the first block south of Santa Monica Boulevard. Bob facetiously said we were living below the tracks, in "South Bel-Air." We would drive north to Santa Monica Boulevard, turn left, and go to Overland Avenue, and then turn right and go across the tracks onto the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard--so we saw every stone put in that Mormon Temple. It was fascinating to see it come to life, and it is such a beautiful place now. I remember one morning when we went to work, we saw them weeding that big lawn in front. They had it marked off in sections about ten feet wide, all the way across, and they had children and adults in there pulling weeds, and of course it is beautiful now. Well, anyway, we moved here on May 9, 1962 — that was the year after the big Bel-Air fire. We could still see many chimneys up in the hills. The people that we bought the place from said they had been told that if the fire wasn't contained very shortly, they would have to move out of the house. So we were closer than a person likes to be. But we have loved living here. It is so convenient to the freeway and the Village and UCLA.

JACKSON: Are you about a mile from the campus, or less?

B. CAMPBELL: Just about. We've clocked it to the store, and we're just a mile to the store. We have walked over to the campus many times. If we didn't have a parking permit on the campus, we'd probably walk a lot more often. [laughter] We walked over one afternoon when the Special Olympic games for retarded children were having their big opening ceremony, and we sat up in Drake Stadium and watched the children come around. That was an exciting day, I'll tell you, to see those little children. Rafer Johnson was very instrumental in that, as you may know. He was on the committee, and he marched in with the children. We wanted to go back the next day and see some of the events . But we had already made arrangements to go to the Scottish festival down at Santa Monica City College, so we went down there. We did get to see some of the swimming events there because they held them at [Santa Monica] City College. I remember seeing a little boy swimming across the pool. He could hardly move his legs, the dear child, but he finally made it across. I think this is such a wonderful thing for retarded children--and to think that it's held right on the UCLA campus. I just think it's terrific that they spend their time with the children.

JACKSON: Wasn't Rafer Johnson one of your good friends in relation to the store?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, we've known Rafer for years and years. In fact, we went to his wedding down in Newport Beach. We saw the movie of him taking part in the — where was it? It was over in Greece somewhere, I think. Very interesting.

JACKSON: The early competition between several athletes [Johnson and Bill Toomey] in the old stadium up at Delphi?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's it. Wasn't it fascinating? Oh, I should say so. Rafer and Betsy, his wife, were both [planning to come] to our May 10 retirement party in front of the store. Betsy came, but Rafer had been in Kansas City, I believe, on a business appointment, and couldn't make his plane in time to come back. Betsy said, "He's in the air right now, while we're having this big celebration." But the other night, Rafer called us from Boston. He said, "I've been trying to get a hold of you folks for weeks. You're never home." [laughter] So he had quite a visit with Bob. He works for the Continental Telephone Company headquartered in Bakersfield, so that he is out of town quite a bit. But Rafer 's certainly a dedicated young man, dedicated to young people. I think the work that he's done in the Olympics for retarded children is one of the greatest things that he's ever done, as well as being a champion in the Olympic Games, and he certainly was.

JACKSON: Well, you've got your family more or less described to us now, and the grandchildren.

B. CAMPBELL: Three grandsons, no granddaughters.

JACKSON: I think that one thing that you should add here is the little story about your car license plate.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh. [laughter] Well, Jeff was the first grandson to come along — Jeff Tolstad. He's the one who's at SC now. He started calling Bob "Pop, " and he started calling me "Grandma Blanche." So all three grandsons then called us Pop and Grandma Blanche. During the years, then, they would sometimes shorten it and call me "G.B . "--especially the girls. They would say to me, "G.B."

JACKSON: Instead of Grandma Blanche?

B. CAMPBELL: Instead of Grandma Blanche — that took too much time. Everything's shortened now, you know. Sears & Roebuck is Sears now, and J.W. Robinson is Robinson ' s--everything is shortened. Anyway, for Christmas — it'll be two years next Christmas; it was Christmas 1972 — Jeff and his brother Scott, the Tolstad boys, gave us a personalized license plate, and it says POPN GB .

JACKSON: Pop and G.B.

B. CAMPBELL: Pop and Grandma Blanche. [laughter] Then our daughter Clarice wanted a personalized license plate, and she wanted one as good as ours . [Her] nickname is "Classie," because when she was in elementary school, she was in a play down at Temple Baptist Church [at which] somebody wrote her name down so poorly after a part that the next person to read it said "Classie," and that has stuck with her ever since. We thought of a lot of things [for her license plate] , but none of them satisfied her exactly. Finally, I said, "If you can think of something good, we'll give it to you for your birthday." All of a sudden we got word from her — "I've thought of it." So we got it for her birthday a year ago; it says, "BK WORM."

JACKSON: Bookworm. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: Bookworm. [laughter] And it's not only because she's a librarian in an elementary school that she's a bookworm, but she crochets bookmarks that look like bookworms. She crochets them in a certain way so that the stitches curl around, and then she puts a couple little eyes on the head; you stick that out at the top of a book, and that's your bookmark. So she's "BK WORM." I was amazed that no one had that license plate. When I went down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to order it, they looked up in a book--they have a book there with all the personalized plates — and it was not in there. But they said, "Now, it might have been ordered since this book was published." So they called Sacramento while I waited, and they came back and said, "No, it hasn't." I thought surely a librarian would have that. Aren't you kind of surprised they didn't?

JACKSON: Well, it is a surprise, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: So anyway, we have a lot of fun with these license plates. Jeff has a personalized plate, too. His nickname at SC is "Toad." That was his father's nickname, too — for Tolstad, you see. His license plate is J--for Jeffrey--" J TOAD." The other day we were on the freeway [going] out to their house, and all of a sudden this car passed us going a little bit faster than we were--we were holding it down to fifty-five, and I guess we had slowed down a little bit--and there was J TOAD in front of us. [laughter] So I said, "There's Jeff." [laughter]

JACKSON: Well, that's good. Well, now. Bob, let's bring you in. One thing that I thought we should have you cover is the history of the Young Men's Club. That goes back to the early thirties, I think. Will you start it, then, and carry that along chronologically?

R. CAMPBELL: We had been helping the football players various ways. I'd been giving them books and supplies to help them. We decided to really organize, like the other schools. Everybody had booster clubs except us — we were young and new, and we didn't get started early. We organized the Young Men's Club of Westwood Village. Bill Ackerman, Joe Valentine, and I started it. Then we got Rush Sooy from Janss Investment Corporation, who represented them, to organize it and start taking members. I think the dues were $50 to begin with; now they're $500. We got a lot of people interested, and we were very successful. We would have a banquet every year; we would all wear tuxedos and go to various restaurants or clubs . We aided the players substantially and gave the boys what the other schools were giving. We had a little mix up when Edwin H. Atherton was the Pacific Coast Conference commissioner . He was investigating all of the booster clubs and asked to see the books of our Young Men's Club. We decided to let him see what we were doing. Atherton told me afterward that we were the only club that let him see their books. The other school showed him a little bit, but he had to dig out all of the rest. Earl J. Miller was the athletic faculty representative at that time. Miller cut some of the boys off when he learned that the Young Men's Club was paying them for work they didn't do. I called him up and said that we had a new assistant coach, and I said, "What good is that going to do if we aren't going to have any boys left?" He said, "Oh, we're going to have boys left. We're just eliminating these things as we come to them. I'm sorry, but we've got to do this." They all stayed in school, however, and scraped up money from somewhere. In a few months we gave them money again without worrying about going through channels. We found out that every school was giving the boys money one way or another, so everybody went on doing just what they'd been doing before. This was known as the "Atherton Investigation." When the war was over and all the schools put in the platoon system, the problems doubled. All of these boys who had been in school before the war and were now back from being in service were receiving $115 on the G.I. bill. The players who had not been in the service had jobs on campus and were paid $75 a month. The Young Men's Club supplemented that with $40 which brought it up to $115, equaling the amount paid the veterans. Everybody up and down the coast was getting the money to them some way, so we went ahead and did the same thing. These other schools kept hearing about "They're getting $40 a month down there. They're getting $40 a month." Nobody would tell them how they were getting it. I got a call at the restaurant where I was eating at a Rotary luncheon one day from the Santa Monica Evening Outlook sports editor. He said that someone up north had spilled the beans, as he called it, up in Oakland — that they had all of the dope about us, and he just wanted to verify that this was true. I said, "I have nothing to say about it. I won't tell you yes or no." I asked him just what it said, and he recited it like a book. One of our players had been unhappy here and had transferred to Cal. The coaches wanted him to tell what this $40 was at UCLA, he said, "No, I can't tell you about it." But one day a sportswriter from the Oakland Tribune called him and said, "Now, we've got all the dope on every school except UCLA. When we get that, they're going to put it all together, make some new rules, and nobody's going to be hurt." So he told them what we were doing down here. Of course, they didn't have all the dope from all the schools. They didn't have anything from USC, but they got it when one of our "brilliant" alums went down to the office of the Internal Revenue Service and looked at the records of USC. He then wrote a letter to the Pacific Coast Conference commissioner, Victor Schmidt, and told him what the booster clubs at USC were doing. Somehow we found out who it was and contacted him, asking him not to send the letter. He said that he had just put it in the mailbox. We finally persuaded him to go to the mailbox and ask the man who picked up the mail to give the letter back to him. A UCLA alum went with him. The mailman said, "I'm sorry, but I cannot return this letter to you. It is in the mailbox and must go to the person to whom it is addressed." So that spilled the beans to the conference commissioner and put USC in a bad light, too. Joe Kaplan was UCLA's athletic faculty representative then. He said, "We'll just say, 'Yes, this is true,'" because all the rest of the schools were doing the same thing, and he didn't think that they would do anything to us. He was asked, "Well, what do you propose as a penalty?" And Joe said, "We'll give them a year of ineligibility, and we will not let them participate in any postseason games or receive any money coming in from postseason games." Joe had no idea they would accept these penalties, but they did. It amounted at that time to about $93,000, plus the boys couldn't go to the Rose Bowl and they lost a year of eligibility . We wanted to talk with Dr. Robert G. Sproul after this happened. Bob Robinson was manager of the Security Pacific Bank and treasurer of our Young Men's Club. He suggested that we call Dr. Sproul from the bank where his secretary, Winifred Hier, could record all of our phone conversation. He wanted this done so that we could know exactly what Dr. Sproul had said. He said, in essence, that they were not going to fine anybody or penalize anybody, that they were getting the records from all the schools, and that they hoped to have them all in by September 1. Then they would have a meeting and make new rules, and if anybody violated those they were in real trouble. Blanche and I started on our trip east. We were in Osceola, Nebraska, visiting my brother when I got a telegram saying that UCLA was penalized $93,000 and a year of eligibility. I couldn't understand it; I still can't understand it today. Dr. Sproul had assured us this would not happen. But we were penalized. The press made so much noise about it that they cut it to half of a season of eligibility. Then the press really screamed--"Either they're guilty or they're not. They can't be half-guilty." But the ineligibility remained, and the boys only played five games that season. Then Washington had a big expose which was turned up by an unhappy assistant coach; and California had some things that had gone wrong, too. Actually, all the schools were giving as much help as UCLA but succeeded in keeping it under cover better.

JACKSON: Excuse me. Bob. You were president of the Young Men's Club for a number of years, is that correct?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, I was president except the first year. We made Marlowe Janss president; he didn't do anything at all, and he argued about his dues. He said he'd already sent in twenty dollars toward the fifty dollars but we couldn't find where it had been received. We dropped him the next year, and I became president the second year. I think we actually had the incorporation papers completed in '33; so he was president then, and I took it in '34 and was president until we were abated. After all of this trouble about penalties and so forth, the conference voted to abate, as they called it, the Young Men's Club, and all of the officers.

JACKSON: Tell just how the SOS was initiated.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, we started disbandment proceedings. If you ever want to get into a long legal battle with the state, just try to disband a corporation. Anyway, we started on it, and then we immediately organized the Sportsmen of the South. The same members were taken in. But none of the officers of the Young Men's Club could be officers of the new SOS club. I am chairman of the board. We go ahead and run it just like we used to, but now we give the money to the university. They do exactly the same thing with it, giving it to the kids for work. They also give the players their board and room and tuition; I guess that covers everything they need. They don't give them any extra spending money. Some schools throughout the United States do give them that, but we don't. We're happy now, and we're getting the same thing done via the university. They all say a man cannot play football, work, and keep his grades up at the same time.

JACKSON: Well now, tell about the death of the Pacific Coast Conference, and how the new setup came in.

R. CAMPBELL: We were very upset about the penalties and fines. And Chancellor Raymond B. Allen was, too, but he wasn't very effective in dealing with the other heads of the universities. We got Dr. Allen to say that we'd withdraw from the conference if they didn't alter the penalties. He'd go to these meetings with the presidents, and had that little folder under his arm; he'd tell them he had evidence of things about every campus on the coast, which he did. But he didn't really have much evidence. There were two or more violations on each campus, so we felt they were all as guilty as we were. He never did show them his files. Allen would go to the Pacific Coast Conference presidents' meetings and come back and say, "Well, I didn't get it done this time, but I'll get it done the next time. They just don't want to believe it, and I don't have enough evidence to prove it." They had a conference of the presidents, about the first of September. We said, "Now, you're going up there; what are you going to do?" He said, "I will withdraw from the conference if the team is not given back all its eligibility and the fines rescinded." He went to the meeting with that in mind, and when he came back, it was the same old thing. Everybody was screaming. So he called a conference of what I believe he called an athletic committee, and he invited all the past presidents of the Alumni Association. I was there as an outsider. And the current president of the student body, Sherrill Luke, was there. Two or three other outsiders [were also there]. I've never heard a man torn apart like Allen was. People like Phil [M. Philip] Davis and Tom [W. Thomas] Davis and several of the leading past presidents of the Alumni Association were all just really laying it on the line .

JACKSON: Bill Forbes, Cy [Cyril] Nigg.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Both of them were there.

JACKSON: You had a combination.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right. It was a combination of interested alumni. Somebody would say, "You didn't do this, now; you're a so-and-so and such and such"--words I can't say on this tape recorder [laughter] and [Allen would say,] "Well, I know, but. . . . Next time, it will take place." And we said, "Next time? You've been giving us that h--- s--- for a long time." [laughter] Finally Ray said, "Now, just a minute, people. Sherrill Luke has raised his hand here. The rest of you talk all at once, and one of you goes ahead and predominates, but Sherrill wants to say something." Sherrill said, "I just wanted to say, Dr. Allen, that you did say that you would withdraw from the conference if they didn't straighten it out at that meeting," and sat down. So we all looked at Allen, and said, "Well, do you want to make any more speeches?" And he said, "No, I will get it [done] the next time." We were looking for a president for the university at that time, and someone said, "If you have any ideas of being president of this university, you can just dismiss them, because you're not going to get it after this thing." [laughter] So he said, "Well, that's all right, but I did the best I could." We all said, "Well, if we only had Dorothy Allen here, it would be all right. We wouldn't have had this mess." But we couldn't have her. So Raymond just let it go; and we were penalized, as I said, for a half a year of eligibility. We did want the league broken up, and we voted to withdraw; then California and SC also withdrew, and Washington withdrew, so that busted it up. Then they reorganized under the title Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU) . A few years later this was changed to Pacific Eight Conference, commonly called Pac-8 . To cover another point that took place earlier: one of the reasons this came to a head was that we had Red Sanders come here as head coach; he took the remnants of a team that had won two and lost eight the year before, and it won eight and lost two his first year. We thought that was very good. He had one season that were no defeats or ties. They were great years and great seasons. We were number one in the nation in 1954. But the other colleges really resented it, and they wanted to get rid of Red. Of course, they didn't punish any of the coaches in their penalties, so Red stayed on as coach. That really was the thing that got them mad enough to go ahead and risk getting their own schools in trouble, too. I had gone back to the Internal Revenue [Service] in Washington, D.C. My captain in the army was in it, and I wrote and told him what they were trying to do--this was before we had been penalized--and I told him I'd like to find out just what we could do. So he wrote back and said, "That's not my department — all I'm interested in is what they make in foreign countries. But I know the man who is in charge of this; I made arrangements for him to be here at this date, and we'll go to lunch together." We went to lunch with the man who was in charge of the eleemosynary institutions, and the man under him who had the colleges. And he said, "Now, this man knows all about the colleges. You tell him just what you're doing now." So I told him what we were doing, and he said, "Well, that's all illegal, and you might get along fine--but somebody's going to come in and look at the records, and then they'll spill the beans." Now, this was before they had been spilled, you see. So I came back, and I told this to our board of directors — that it was illegal to call it a scholarship and give it to them as a scholarship when they had them on their payroll and the federal government was giving some of the money through Social Security. And he said, "That's not right to do that." So we cut it all out, and just paid them the money, and that was it. It was only forty dollars, and we thought that would be all right. It took them quite a long while to finally break, somebody down till they'd talk and tell them where they got the forty dollars. I explained how this happened earlier in the taping. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Blanche, I wish you'd cover some of the projects and organizations you have been interested in at UCLA.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, I've been interested in a number of them. One of them I remember was the volunteers in the alumni office in Kerckhoff, [a group] that was brought into being in the early 1960s, as I recall. They were all girls who were very enthusiastic about UCLA and everything that went on up there. There were quite a few Gold Shield members in it. I think Carroll Johnson and Lou Hoover were sort of the coordinators of it; they made out a schedule, I remember. I'd get a schedule each month on what days and what hours I was to be there. We had enough volunteers so that I think we were there only about two days a month. It was such fun. I would sit at the desk that is right in the hallway of the Alumni Center, and answer the phone calls. I would put in long-distance calls for Harry [J.] Longway, who was the alumni secretary at the time, or anybody who wanted them. Paul [L.] Jones was there, too. And they'd just call in and say, "Would you get so-and-so on the line for me?" We did any odd jobs, and it was so much fun. I got to know the personnel in the alumni office, and that was a real thrill for me. I remember Pat Gallagher was working there at the time; she still is. Now when I see Pat, we're just old buddies. And it's so good, because I feel that if I had never had that experience in the alumni office, I would have lost and missed an awful lot. I really sincerely feel that way about it. Also, the Jules Stein office was upstairs. At that time, Mr. Stein had given the money for the Jules Stein Eye Institute, and they were getting that all organized. That wasn't built yet; now, you see, it's all built. The girls from that office came through the alumni office a lot, and I got to know them and to know about the Jules Stein building that was to be built. So that was a real treat. Well, we were all very enthusiastic about it and wanted to go on and continue. But when Doug Kinsey came in as the alumni director, he apparently didn't feel that we were much help there, so we just disbanded. I can't recall just what it was that he wanted us to do, but it was not the thing we had been doing. And we had been so enthusiastic, because--well , when you answer the phone, for instance, you can show by the tone of your voice how much you think of UCLA. I think that all the volunteers did so much good for the university. We regretted leaving, I'll tell you-- I missed that an awful lot. But they disbanded after they had been in existence for a couple of years. Another organization that I became very interested in was the [University] Affiliates. I remember when Alyce Herrman asked me to join the Affiliates. I did, and I enjoyed their meetings so much. First thing I knew, I was secretary; and the next thing I knew, I was president. [laughter] I hesitated to take it because I was working at the time, but Bob said, "I think you should do it." He let me off work enough that I could go to the board meetings and everything. I had a wonderful year; it was one of the most interesting years I've ever had. I appointed committees, and had a great board. I remember Ann Sumner and Hansena Frederickson were on it, and Georgette McGregor was program chairman — these wonderful, wonderful girls who were so capable of doing things. They had jobs to do, and I expected them to do those jobs. I didn't check up on them — I just knew they'd be done, and they were. That was the year that we honored Larry [Lawrence Clark] Powell. Every year, the Affiliates have honored someone at their annual banquet. I believe they've discontinued that now; there are various other things that they do. But up until that time, they had had a formal banquet every year and honored some department in the university. I remember I thought, "I wonder who they'll honor in my year as president." Ann Sumner, I believe it was, came up with the idea. Why not honor Larry Powell and the School of Library Service? Well, I was so excited, I just couldn't believe my ears, because that was such a natural thing-- the connection with books. Larry was pleased, so pleased. But then they said they had to get a good speaker. And I said, "Well, I know a good speaker I think we can get": and that was Irving Stone. I said, "I know Irving Stone. I'll be glad to ask him." But then it turned out that Carmela Speroni knew Irving and Jean very well; they were very close friends. So Carmela asked him, and of course he said he'd do it. Well, I'll never forget the night of the banquet. You were there, Johnny.

JACKSON: Yes, California Club.

B. CAMPBELL: At the California Club. Dr. Sproul was president at that time, but he couldn't come to the banquet. In past years, the president of the university had always attended this Affiliates banquet. He couldn't come for some reason or other, and so Mr. Edwin Pauley, who was chairman of the regents at the time, was asked to take his place. Being president of the Affiliates, I had to preside at this banquet. I remember I introduced Mr. Pauley as the first one on the program. I had my part all outlined — exactly what I was going to say, introducing everyone. I thought, "Well, I might as well just leave this sheet up here at the podium. I don't need to carry it back and forth with me every time." So I left it on the podium. And when I went back to introduce the next speaker after Mr. Pauley had spoken, I looked at the podium and there was a blank board. I said, "Oh, Mr. Pauley — you took my speech!" [laughter] So I had to step down and go over and get my papers and go back up. And of course by that time, the whole room was roaring because he had taken my speech. [laughter] Well, that was such an exciting evening for me. I sat between Irving Stone and Larry Powell — and that was a treat in itself. Larry spoke, and his subject was so fascinating. [tape recorder turned off] His speech was titled "Dreaming and Doing," and it was great. I just happen to have a copy of it here, and I'm going to read the first paragraph: First, a word of warning. If you are anywhere near UCLA and afraid of doing, don't do any dreaming. It's the darndest place for dreams coming true — a place where to dream one night is to wake the next day and find yourself doing. Larry was great that night. I remember I received a letter from him afterwards, thanking the Affiliates for honoring him and the School of Library Service, and he said, "I had such a good time. Let's do it every year." [laughter] That sounds like Larry, doesn't it?

JACKSON: It certainly does.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, that was an exciting year for me. And I remember a few years later, Ann Wanglin called me and said . . .

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO AUGUST 26, 1974

B. CAMPBELL: She said, "Blanche, the nominating committee has just called me and asked me to be president next year, and I wondered just how much work it is--how much time it takes." I said, "Ann, it was one of the happiest years I have ever had. I appointed committees, and they did all the work--and I mean that. I didn't even have to check up on them, they're such a wonderful group to work with." So Ann took the presidency. And then what did she do but call me and ask me to be her program chairman! I said, "Ann, this is the dirtiest trick you could ever play on me." [laughter] It never occurred to me when I told her what an easy year it was for me and encouraged her to take it that she'd ask me to do anything. So I couldn't turn her down. But I said I just didn't see quite how I was going to do it because I was so involved at the store. She said, "I'll tell you. I have two girls who will help you on your committee. Sue Young and Janice Hamilton. They're both very good." I said, "Okay." I remember the first meeting we had on planning the programs--we had to get those all arranged at the very first of the year, because the Affiliates puts out a program schedule every year so that members know what programs are coming up. Sue met us at Ann Sumner's office. I believe Janice was out of town at the time, but anyway, we went over a lot of suggestions. Sue said she would contact certain people, and she did; she reported back to me and told me whether they could do it or not. Those two girls were both just terrific; both of them were so capable. I had them introduce most of the programs through the year. This relieved me of that responsibility, and gave them experience--they were younger, and they were the ones that really should be doing the work and working themselves up. Of course. Sue became president later, you know. Well, anyway, I lived through that year, [laughter] and it was another happy year because the Affiliates is a great organization with many outstanding members. In fact, I think they have between 500 and 1,000 members. Anyone who is interested in UCLA can join--townspeople, faculty wives, alumni — anyone who's interested can be a member. So that was that. My association with the Affiliates has been very pleasant. I haven't been active for the last few years. I still pay my dues each year, which helps a little bit. But, my goodness, I went over the list of officers the other day, and I don't know any of them. Which is good--it means new blood is coming in, and that's what keeps an organization going. Now, one other organization that I am very happy to be a member of is Gold Shield. We had gone to Gold Shield parties for years. We had gone to their champagne receptions and to their benefits. We always had such a good time because, again, they are a wonderful group of girls and they have wonderful husbands . I was so surprised when they asked me to join. It never occurred to me that I could ever be a Gold Shield member, because I thought they were all UCLA girls, and I had never attended UCLA. But they have honorary members, so that's what I became. And again, I have enjoyed that association so much. I don't get to all their meetings, but as an honorary member I don't have to hold office. [laughter] I can enjoy all their activities. I try to go to their new members luncheon each spring, and we try to go to their benefit each year. If we can't go, we help in some way. So I have really enjoyed Gold Shield. [tape recorder turned off] You can imagine our joy and surprise when we received the following letter a couple of days ago from Greta Waingrow, who is now president of Gold Shield: "My Dear Blanche and Bob: As you well know. Gold Shield's annual champagne reception is held in the fall of the year. In addition to being an occasion for thanking our friends and supporters, the event is always a tribute to a member of the UCLA community who has brought distinction to the university. I am doubly happy for this opportunity to convey to you the board's unanimous desire that Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Campbell be our honorees at this year's reception. For all the reasons that UCLA and the Westwood community have already made most evident, and with special pride in your long and loyal association with us, Gold Shield wants to participate in the Campbell year of 1974. The champagne reception will take place Sunday, October 13, at the home of Dr. and Mrs. James R. Jackson. All we need to finalize our plans and issue the invitations is your acceptance. I look forward to hearing from you. " And I wrote Greta a note of acceptance. I tell you, I'm just almost choked up over this, because it never occurred to me that we would ever be honorees. We go to all these champagne receptions, and I would think how wonderful this is that this person is being honored, but it never once entered my mind that we would be the honorees. So it's really terrific.

JACKSON: Well, it's certainly deserved.

B. CAMPBELL: Another organization that we have enjoyed very much is Friends of the UCLA Library. But I think Bob's going to tell you about that.

JACKSON: Yes, he will — a little later. All right? [tape recorder turned off] Bob, let's have you talk about community service in the Village.

R. CAMPBELL: Beyond the Young Men's Club of Westwood, which we discussed in great detail, there are many things in which I served. I was president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1933. There weren't an awful lot of members — like 50 or 60 then, and there are about 500 now — but it was still a good job, and it was very worthwhile. Janss [Corporation] was running the Village, so to speak, and doing the advertising and so forth. Rowe Rader Baldwin was working for them and was in charge of advertising and such things, and she went from there to the university a few years later and became manager of the athletic ticket department. Then again in 1944, when the war came along, I was president again. Carl Hilbert, manager of Crocker Bank, was president the year before. He was quite upset about the manager we had in the chamber at that time; he said he wasn't doing anything — he was just spending his time writing columns for the two papers that he got them in. He said, "We're not going to do anything during the war, and we just might as well get this man off our hands. You're the guy to do it." So he ran me for president, and I went ahead and told this man ahead of time, "Now, this meeting's going to come up, and it's going to bring up what you're doing. I wish you'd prepare me a list of what you've done and what you're doing." So he prepared a "long list" — it wasn't very long — and it had hardly anything in it that he had done that was worthwhile. The meeting was over, I had him in the next day, and I told him that we were going to curtail all activities, that [there was no use] having it during the war, because the chamber didn't want to expand. We took all of the books and put them up in my office, and we just collected the dues and held them until after the war was over. It was a very nice, easy job then. I've been on the board all the time, because when you're president you are automatically on the board the rest of your life. Most [such organizations call lifetime board members] honorary and don't let them vote, but in this organization you can vote, so it's been a nice arrangement. I have done quite well at being there at most of their meetings. Brentano ' s bought our store and they have not paid the dues the last four or five years, but they say that I'm a member, anyway, because I'm a past president. They have done many things. They've grown very rapidly the last five or six years into a huge organization, since the high-rises have come in, and they have a lot of people in there. They get most of those — some of them for fairly large sums of money--and it's very nice to have an active chamber of commerce located in one of the high-rise buildings . Then there was the Red Cross, which I was chairman of during the war. Bob Robinson of the Security Pacific Bank (whom I mentioned before) and I sort of alternated at being chairman of it during the war. Then we asked for relief of some kind. We were very active during the war. The Red Cross did a very good job, I think; they're still doing it, and I'm still on the board. Now you have to be off every fourth year for one year, so that I do get a little rest then; but I generally go over anyway and listen to meetings. There was the University Religious Conference — I've been on that board for over twenty, maybe twenty-five years. That was very active in the religious affairs of the community. At the time it was organized, the rules of the university did not permit any religious courses of any kind. Recently, that's been changed a little bit so that you can have a class on the campus and you can associate with people from off the campus who are religiously inclined, and it's much nicer now than it used to be. The Religious Conference isn't quite like it was when Adaline Guenther and Mr. [Thomas] Evans were there. When Mr. Evans died, Adaline took charge of it and ran it until 1960, when she retired. But it's doing a good job. It's a place where they have all of the denominations — I say "all"; that's too much, but they have thirteen of the denominations' offices there for the campus. There's a lot of activity going on all the time. Now, the other things — probably the most important thing was Rotary. I took the job of writing the Windmill, the Rotary weekly news sheet, when Al McDaniel was president in 1949. I've been in it ever since, except for one year when we gave the job of writing the Windmill to Bob Kennedy, who was a graduate of Stanford. (He had been in the service and had been wounded very early down in Guadalcanal. He got shrapnel in both of his arms so that they're not free acting anymore. He married Renee Lindquist; her father was a doctor here, Dr. Ariel Lindquist, who was an old-timer in the Village and practiced here as long as he lived. He died in 1956 of a heart attack.) [tape recorder turned off] Kennedy took the job of writing the Windmill. He was in the carpet business in Westwood and had an office on Westwood Boulevard. But he really didn't do much for the Windmill. He was down below the Village, down south of Santa Monica [Boulevard], and he said that he didn't get around enough to get news. He'd come up with half a page, so they gave it back to me the next year. I stayed with it until just about one year ago, when they were cutting all their expenses down and it was a little difficult for me to write a short Windmill. Besides, I was getting old, and I had a few ailments that had bothered, so I resigned as editor of the Windmill. I've been a member of Rotary since 1932. The Rotary Club has been the most important club in the Village, and all the right people, so to speak, are members. We have Dr. Dunn there. Max [S.] Dunn, who's been at the university since 1922, and Joe Kaplan, who's also been there since 1922. And there's Sam Wanous, who hasn't been there that long, but he's been there quite a long while. He was president last year. Max was president in '53 and '54, and his wife (Lois) was president of the Rotary Anns the year before that. It's been very nice to be there in the Village and see these things going on all the time. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Bob, I think I saw somewhere that you were editor of the Windmill for twenty-five years. Is that right?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it is right. I had started on my twenty-sixth year when I quit. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Bob, let's talk about the store at the time you decided to sell.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, Brentano ' s wanted to buy the store-- that was in 1968--and we discussed it with them and finally sold it to them, and we were retained as managers for one year .

JACKSON: Now, you had been at Westwood thirty-nine years at the time you made the sale.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right, thirty-nine years there, plus five years at the old campus. At the end of the year they wanted us to stay on and manage it, and I said that we needed somebody who knew the workings of the chain store. It was so Greek to us that we couldn't do a good job for them, and if they'd send somebody that could handle that end, why, we would stay on, and Blanche would run the children's department there, and I would work with the man who came. So they sent out a young man, Allen Chabin, from Washington, D.C., who is now manager of the Beverly Hills store of Brentano's. But we stayed on until this past spring in May, 1974.

JACKSON: It was May 20.

B. CAMPBELL: No, May the tenth was when we opened our store on North Vermont in 1924. So May the tenth, 1974, is the fiftieth anniversary of opening our store. We decided that that would be a good time to retire. You know, Johnny, I think we told this before--about selling our store.

JACKSON: Well, it won't matter that we repeated it. Let's go on about your retirement party.

B. CAMPBELL: We didn't want to have any fanfare. We had been to several retirement parties where they made a big charge for the dinner and then they gave air tickets to the Orient or the Islands or something; and we said we didn't want any of that, we just wanted to slip out quietly. But we weren't able to do that. [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: They put up banners across Westwood Boulevard the week before, "WESTWOOD SALUTES BLANCHE AND BOB CAMPBELL FRI, MAY 10 — 50 YEARS OF SERVICE." We didn't know anything was being planned.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, it was the Westwood Chamber of Commerce that did the whole thing.

R. CAMPBELL: On the tenth of May they blocked off the street ...

B. CAMPBELL: . . . between Broxton and Westwood, in front of our store.

R. CAMPBELL: And they had a very fine program. Blanche, you tell them about who all was on the program.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, the UCLA band came and played "The Campbells Are Coming" — or going, I don't know which. [laughter] And the UCLA Glee Club sang. They had a flat-top truck across the street from the store, and they had us sitting up on the truck. There was a big banner on the side of the truck like the ones on Westwood Boulevard. John Lamb, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, presided. J.D. Morgan, director of athletics at UCLA, was there, and he spoke. He gave an awfully nice speech about us. [laughter] Robert Donahue, representing County Supervisor Ernest Debs, spoke and gave us a big certificate thing that says, "To the Campbells," something like that. Let's see, who else spoke? Oh, Don Bowman, assistant chancellor at UCLA, was there. And he also said very nice things about us. Of course, it was our party, so they had to say something nice, you know. [laughter] Thelner Hoover took a lot of pictures in color, and Stan Troutman took a lot of black-and-whites . Lowell Lauesen took two rolls of pictures.

R. CAMPBELL: Thirty-five on a roll.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, thirty-five on a roll. And Milo Brooks had a camera, and he took about a roll of pictures. Several people took slides and have sent them to us. So we have a lot of pictures that tell what went on that afternoon. Our daughter Dorothy and her husband, Bob Tolstad, and their two boys, Jeff and Scott, were there. And we didn't know that our daughter Clarice was coming down from Bishop. Brentano's had told us that they wanted to give us a dinner party that night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and they had invited Clarice and her husband to come down for that. But it was hard for her and her husband to get off work, and so they had decided not to come down for the Brentano's party. But then when all of this Chamber of Commerce party came up, her sister, Dorotho , got in touch with her and said, "You'd better get down here for that"-- unknown to us. We didn't know anything about it. And when she walked in the store that afternoon just as the band arrived, we nearly fainted, we were so thrilled to have her there. Her boy, Jimmy, didn't come, because he was in school in Reno, Nevada. But Jeff and Scott Tolstad were there, and we were thrilled to have my sister Hazel Boyd, and her husband, Don — Don is minister at the First Methodist Church at Eighth and Hope. They were there; and their son David came and also their son Dann and his wife. Penny, and their little girl, Laura, about three years old. That's the relatives. And my sister and her husband were also at the dinner that night that Brentano ' s gave us.

R. CAMPBELL: Mayor Bradley was supposed to be there, but he was a little late. He did arrive just about, well, twenty minutes after it had been dismissed, and he stayed around the store for a half, three-quarters of an hour, shaking hands with people and so forth. He brought along a scroll from the City Council on our retirement, and gave it to us, but he said, "You be sure and take that down Monday when you go down to the council because this is the only one we have, and they're going to make the official presentation on Monday." We've known Tom since he was in school, because he was an athlete and he got an athletic scholarship--and he also needed a little other extra help, which we gave him. So we've been friends since that time. But this tenth of May was really a surprise to us, because we didn't know that we'd have anything like that; we were very, very pleased.

B. CAMPBELL: The Westwood Chamber of Commerce gave us two round-trip air tickets to Hawaii, a week's stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and extra money for incidental expenses. We don't know yet how much that is, but we're sort of planning to go this fall, and we're hoping that Milo and Eva Brooks can go with us. They were with us when we were over there in 1970, and we had such a good time. We want them to go along with us again. The City Council had already made an appointment with us to come down on Monday morning at ten o'clock to the council meeting. Now, I had never been in the City Hall, and so that was a treat. Bob had been there before. We went to the council meeting, and Councilman [Ed] Edelman presented the scroll to us, and that was very exciting. Incidentally, as we walked in and they seated us in the front row, the couple in the row right back of us said, "Why, hello, Campbells." It was John Caughey and his wife [LaRee] . They had come down there to receive a citation for the [American Civil Liberties Union] . But wasn't it interesting that we'd run into somebody there that had been connected with UCLA.

R. CAMPBELL: And Joel Wachs was there. Of course, he's a member of the council now. And he got up and added his little speech and said he knew us in his years at UCLA and how we were great people.

JACKSON: Yes. He was student body president.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right.

B. CAMPBELL: And both Caughey girls worked for us when they were in school.

JACKSON: Well, you've had many people of UCLA background work for you through the years. We'll come to that soon. [tape recorder turned off] Blanche, I see a plaque on the wall that looks very interesting. Will you tell the story behind that?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, that is something I'm very proud of. About fifteen years ago, a new organization was formed, the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People. To shorten that we say SCCLCYP . [laughter] It was really organized by Dorothy McKenzie, who teaches children's literature at Cal State L.A. [California State University, Los Angeles] . She knew that a lot of authors and illustrators of children's books lived here in Southern California, and nothing had ever been done to recognize or honor them. So she got in touch with a lot of her friends, and, as a result, this Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People was organized, and Cal State L.A. sort of sponsored us — that is, we had our meetings out there. It is, I think, a wonderful thing to recognize these wonderful authors and illustrators of children's books who live right here in our community. We recognize them, we encourage them, and we honor them. And every year we have an award banquet. Now, we don't have to give an award for a certain thing. It doesn't have to be for illustrations, or it doesn't have to be for a story, but we can give an award to anyone that we feel has contributed to children's literature. The first year the award banquet was given, Scott O'Dell received the award for his book Island of the Blue Dolphins. And I remember I presented him the award, and that was very exciting.

R. CAMPBELL: Do you remember that it won the Newbery Award?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, it won the Newbery Award.

JACKSON: Wonderful book.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and it's an exciting book. It is based on facts, you know. It took place on the island of San Nicolas, the southernmost of the Channel Islands here off the coast of California. It's a book that all ages enjoy reading. It's an adult book as much as it is a children's book, actually. Well, anyway--I was so surprised and so excited when the chairman of the committee who selects the honorees each year called me and said that they wanted to honor me for community service at their annual banquet in the fall of 1970.

JACKSON: Yes, for "outstanding community service."

B. CAMPBELL: Well, of course, this was because of the programs that I had given on children's books all over Southern California, and I loved doing that so much, but it never occurred to me that they would ever want to honor me because most of the honors go to authors and illustrators So that was very rewarding. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Blanche, Bob was a Rotarian. That made you a Rotary Ann, did it not?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and we have a wonderful Rotary Ann group. They were organized purely for getting acquainted with each other. At the time we organized, I remember, several of them said, "Oh, I already belong to too many organizations, and we have to raise money all the time, so I don't want to join another one." We decided that we would not have any money-raising projects at all, but that we would get acquainted with each other at our Rotary Ann meetings. Then, when the Rotarians had dinner parties, when their wives attended, we would know each other and it would be so much more fun. And it has proved to be exactly that. You see, the men see each other every week and they know each other, but before the Rotary Ann club was organized, very few of the Rotary Anns knew each other. Well, it's a marvelous group; and, again, everybody works. When we have parties and picnics, everyone pitches in and does her share.

R. CAMPBELL: Did you say it was every month you meet?

B. CAMPBELL: We meet every month, yes, once a month, and have interesting speakers. Sometimes we have our own members do them. I was president of the Rotary Anns in 1949 — and again, I enjoyed that very much. It's just been a wonderful thing to get acquainted with all of these interesting Rotary Anns. It's amazing what good times we have and how congenial everybody is, because, you see, we have no choice of our members whatsoever. We take the wives of the Rotarians that the men select. So it makes it a very interesting group.

JACKSON: Bob, you were president of the American Booksellers Association some time back. Can you tell us about your experiences there?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, yes. That came about in rather an odd way. The nominating committee called up from New York and wanted to know if I would take it. I said, "Well, the publishers are back there and everything goes on there." He said, "Well, that's all right. There's a couple of things that we want to get straightened out. There's a lot of objection to having New York run it all the time. And then, Los Angeles has now become the second city in book sales, and we can honor them for that, too. You've got a fine executive committee of which you'll be a member, but you don't have to attend the meetings. They can carry on the business, and you just come for the annual meeting. It'll be fine." But it didn't work out that way. I sort of looked at the possibilities and thought, "Well, this is going to be a fine thing," because I knew that [the president] got two free trips to New York or wherever the convention was. So I went back and had a meeting with the director [executive secretary], who was Gil [Gilbert E.] Goodkind. He was a genius, and he was doing a fine job. I said to him, "Now, is there any reason we can't have that fall meeting the same week as the World Series?" That was before television. [laughter] And he said, "Well, no. That'll only make a difference of a week or ten days at the most. Let's do that. That would be fun." So we had the meeting, and we got to see the World Series as well. We had meetings of the board of directors twice a year, and I went back each time for them. We elect the president for two years, and then [he is] chairman of the board for two years. We present 250 books to the White House library every four years. Every president of the American Booksellers Association has the honor of taking part in the presentation of the books. Each president and chairman of the board of the American Booksellers Association presents a small package to the president of the United States, each package representing 125 books. The first one I attended was to Harry S. Truman. George Hecht was the retired president and chairman of the board--he was on one side of President Truman and I was on the other. We had about twenty on the committee selecting the books. We tried to get books from all categories, not just the best books in the country but ones that will serve a White House regular home library. And we figure there'll be children there so we have a few children's books. To begin with, we gave them most of the standard reference books so that they had a good dictionary, etc. And we replace the dictionaries whenever there's a new edition. But the main thing is that they get 250 books every four years. It's a very nice thing for the association and for the White House. This started other people giving books to the White House, so that they have quite a library there.

B. CAMPBELL: We saw the library once when we went through the White House.

JACKSON: Weren't you at two presentations? One was Truman, and what was the other?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I was going to mention that. When we presented the books to Harry Truman, he said, "I'm glad to have these books, because I've read a lot of the other books presented by the booksellers. I know there are a lot of people who think I can't read, but I can and I do read a great deal. The book that I read the most is the Talmud," he said. "That's the book of the Jewish religion. It's got a lot of good common sense in it, so I read that a lot." I remembered that and when I got home, I got a copy of the Talmud, and it had in there something about "Don't have anything to do with the ruling class, because they only want you when you're on their side and you can do something for them; but if you want something and you go ask them, they don't know you." I wrote Mr. Truman and asked him if he'd seen that. He said, well, yes, he had, but he didn't think I was going to check up on him. [laughter] But it was all very funny. The next presentation was to Dwight Eisenhower. I was no longer chairman of the board and was just an ordinary committee member then. We met in the White House in the same room [in which] we had [made the presentation] to Mr. Truman, but when Truman was there they were making over the White House--everything was jumbled up, and this room looked different. Harry had cartoons all the way around, original drawings of cartoons of him. There was one, a copy of the front page of the Chicago Tribune the night of the election, and it said in huge letters "Dewey Defeats Truman"; and that had been crossed out and then [rewritten] "Truman Defeats Dewey." So everything was correct on it. They actually had this thing on the street selling it in Chicago before they got the final count. But to get back to the Eisenhower one, this room had all been redecorated [so that it looked] the way it was before, with selected portraits of past presidents — I believe there are seven or eight of them around the room. It [had been redecorated] in a gold and yellow decor. It was very, very beautiful. President Eisenhower greeted us all and said that he, too, had been reading the books from the booksellers and that he liked them but that he wished he had more time to read. He mentioned that he had been reading a book by Osborn, who had said that we've got to watch out, because we're wearing out our resources and our rivers and so forth. It sounded just like the movement here in the last five years where we've been trying to get the people to cut out polluting everything. It's much, much worse than it was then. But Eisenhower said, "If we don't stop this, we're going to have trouble. We're in trouble right now." But he was very nice, and we enjoyed him very much. Some of us went over to the Hay Adams House for lunch afterwards, and we got to talking about the situation in Washington. One of the people said that he knew a man who had come to Washington, and that he'd come home and said that "it's too bad to go to Washington. You've got all these ideas of straightening things out, and you get there and find that you can't do any of these things. Everything is already tied into somebody else's hands--you can't go ahead and just run it like you'd like, and it is very discouraging." Of course it's more evident now than ever before that that's what they do. But we gave him the 250 books. That was the last presentation I attended. Now, I have the Publishers Weekly from last year in which Mr. Nixon made a speech to the committee presenting the books. He said that he read a great deal, that he got in most of his reading after ten or eleven at night, and that he'd read a lot of the books and was glad to have them. [He also said that] he didn't care for television-- "especially if I'm on it. It's worth a lot more to you to read books." The program went just about the same as the others did — he got the books. That was the principal thing. I used to go back; as I say; I'd go to the World Series, and I'd see a lot of people there who are in the book business. It was a very nice thing for me, and I was sorry when I got off of the board. I was on the nominating committee that nominated Lou Epstein of the Pickwick stores to be on the board. I thought, "Now, he won't go to very many meetings. They won't have him more than one term." But he went to every meeting and he got elected president, too. We only have one from each area, so I gave up hope then. But I was glad that Lou was there, and he did a fine job.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE [video session] SEPTEMBER 9, 1974

JACKSON: Bob and Blanche, a subject I think would be of considerable interest is the story of the Friends of the UCLA Library.

B. CAMPBELL: The Friends was founded in 1951. It's composed of "concerned citizens" [laughter ] --it says here-- "faculty, alumni, librarians and booksellers, devoted to enriching the resources of the libraries of UCLA." Its founding board of directors were W.W. Robinson--who, incidentally, was their first president. Mr. Robinson and his wife, Irene, have written a great many books. I remember so well the children's books--he wrote the story and she illustrated them, just beautifully. One was called Beasts of the Tar Pits. It was all about the La Brea tar pits. An extremely interesting book. It went out of print for a while and then finally Ward Ritchie picked it up and republished it, and I think it's still available. Now, as I say, W.W. Robinson was the first chairman.

R. CAMPBELL: He died a couple of years ago. She is still alive.

B. CAMPBELL: So far as we know. I haven't heard from her for quite a while.

R. CAMPBELL: Their son is over in the east part of town.

B. CAMPBELL: [Also on the board were] Charles K. Adams, Robert B. Campbell, Dwight Clark. ... Is he connected with the library over on West Adams?

R. CAMPBELL: No.

B. CAMPBELL: Glen Dawson — that would be the Dawson bookshop — Majl Ewing, Hansena Frederickson, Gordon J. Holmquist, John B. Jackson, Harold Lamb, Barbara Brinckerhoff Lloyd, Theresia Rustemeyer Long — now, she was a secretary of Dr. Ernest Carroll Moore for some time. William A. Nitze, Ann Sumner, and Robert J. Woods. Those were the founding director's of the Friends.

R. CAMPBELL: Nitze gave the university a great deal of money, I remember, when he died. There was an article in the paper. It was at that time a tremendous sum, like six or seven hundred thousand dollars. It's gone on from that start; it's very large now, and the Friends have given many very important books to the library. I remember the 3 millionth copy to the library was a present from the Friends of the UCLA Library. They have bought books of various kinds for them, and have had a lot of wonderful affairs, and have some of the great people of the area interested in them. I remember Horace Albright, the man who was the first superintendent of Yosemite National Park, is a member. He has given his papers and books. I recall that Larry Powell used to say that the Friends could buy books that the taxpayers really shouldn't be buying, so we got some fine things that way.

R. CAMPBELL: That's correct. They can buy anything, and the taxpayers have to very careful with their money, [laughter] so it's very interesting to see what we have purchased for them.

B. CAMPBELL: Elmer Belt was a very active member, and he gave his library to UCLA. I think that was on Michelangelo, wasn't it?

R. CAMPBELL: No, Leonardo da Vinci.

B. CAMPBELL: Leonardo da Vinci. I always get those two mixed up. [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: But that wasn't his whole library. He has given, I believe, or has signed an intent to give to them the rest of his library, and he also gave them $10,000.

JACKSON: Bob, do you remember some of the prominent figures that the Friends had at their events? I remember Aldous Huxley was one, and Mrs. D.H. Lawrence. Do you recall some of those?

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, and there were the Goodspeeds, Dr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Goodspeed, who were very active Friends of the Library. Of course, they've both been gone for quite a long while. He outlived her by many, many years. We had several pleasant dinners up at their house. I remember one time — what was the lady's name?

B. CAMPBELL: Catherine Marshall.

R. CAMPBELL: Catherine Marshall was out here. She was a technical adviser on the picture of Peter Marshall, her husband, who was the [chaplain] for the [U.S.] Senate. Her agent had written us that she was coming. They wanted us to take care of her. So we got in touch with her when she came, and Dr. Goodspeed heard that she was here. He wanted to take us to dinner. We said, "Fine. We work every night"--this was at Christmastime--"so you can take us to dinner. We'll go to Bullock's, and then we'll come back." And so he called up and said, "Why don't we make it some night when you people can come and stay all evening, and I'll invite a few of my friends in." So we did. There were about sixteen in the party.

B. CAMPBELL: At his house.

R. CAMPBELL: At his house. And we had a delicious dinner He had Georgiana Hardy and her husband, who is now dead. They were exact opposites politically. [laughter] Jack was conservative and she was a liberal, and they got at it hammer and tongs. But not for the whole time — they didn't monopolize it or anything. It was very interesting, too, [laughter] to see this come out like that. We had a wonderful time. It was nice to have Dr. Goodspeed as a member .

JACKSON: Do you recall Irving Stone making his talk?

B. CAMPBELL: I want to tell you how I met Mrs. Marshall, though, may I? She was staying at the Cavalier Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. We were to pick her up and take her to Dr. Goodspeed ' s . We drove up in front of the Cavalier Hotel, and Bob went in to say that we were there, and he talked to the man at the desk. And he said, "Oh, would you ask Mrs. Campbell to come in and go to Mrs. Marshall's room?" So Bob came out to the car and told me and I went to her room number and rang the bell. She stuck her head out, and she said, [whispering] "Come on in, Mrs. Campbell, and zip me up." [laughter] She couldn't get her zipper fastened. So that was my meeting with Catherine Marshall. That sort of opened the whole thing for us, and we became very good friends. We hear from her at least once a year, sometimes more often. She's a very charming person.

R. CAMPBELL: She married Mr. [Leonard E.] LeSourd, who — well, he's not the head, but he ' s a very active member of a religious publication that has millions of subscribers. They travel around the country on that some of the time. Her son, who was about so high when she was here, is now grown up and is an Episcopal minister himself. Mr. LeSourd had three younger children, and they've all grown up now, too. You see them when they're little children, and the next thing you know, they are married and have children of their own.

B. CAMPBELL: Shows how old we are.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes.

JACKSON: Time marches on.

B. CAMPBELL: "Time marches on" is right.

JACKSON: Bob, Irving Stone. He spoke at the campus one afternoon, and you folks, I think, were there. This is some time ago. He told about a book that he was working on, and it was The Agony and the Ecstasy. Do you recall how he told about how he was researching that in Italy?

R. CAMPBELL: I know about his research there, but I don't believe I was present at that meeting. They took about two years to do research there, and [they had] great difficulty getting into many of these places. They are so careful about them that he had quite a time getting to see the material that he really wanted. But he got it and he wrote the book, and it was a very successful book. His last one came out last year--year before last, now. It wasn't quite that successful. But that was an excellent book, The Agony and the Ecstasy. Then [Charles] Speroni — he was in the Italian department; he's now dean of the College of Fine Arts — brought out a book translating the research work, some of it that Stone couldn't understand. Speroni translated that and they had this book on that. But it was of interest to students, mainly.

B. CAMPBELL: I have to tell you how I met Mrs. Stone.

JACKSON: Do.

B. CAMPBELL: We were invited to their house to a book party after one of his books was published. This was years ago--twenty-five years ago, maybe. She told me that she worked with him as his editor. I was kind of surprised about that, because I hadn't known that. And she said, "Yes, I feel very fortunate to work with my husband, because I feel that I see him at his best." She said, "Most secretaries see men at their best. When they come home, they want to put their feet up on an ottoman and read a good book or something and just relax. So," she said, "I feel very fortunate that I can work with my husband." I have never forgotten that, because I have worked with my husband all these years, and I, too, feel very fortunate to have worked with him. I always think of that whenever I see Jean Stone.

JACKSON: Well, maybe now we should go to the Robert B. Campbell contest for the collection of books at UCLA. Bob, will you start that?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, again, Larry was the one who got me started in that. He thought that I should give prizes to students for their collection of books in any category. I thought, "Well, that's all right. It's a good thing and we'll go ahead and do it." So we've done it for many years, and I've gotten more interested in it all the time. It's a wonderful idea. But I found out afterwards what I I should have known--saw in the Bruin that the Dawson bookshop [once] gave three prizes for the student library collection. After Mr. Dawson died, the sons gave it for a couple of years but then decided they didn't want to do it anymore. So that's how he found that he needed someone else . Larry and I were great friends. I wasn't quite bookish enough for him, and he used to kid me about it, but I told him I had to make a living, [laughter] and I didn't make it off of reading books but off of getting books that people wanted. He said, "Oh, that's all right-- just read whatever you want and laugh." I thought he was a great man. He's now gone to Arizona, I guess, to live. He has his house leased and has bought a place over there. He's teaching at the University of Arizona School of Library Science. He, of course, is retired here. He said he'd have a fine time over there, understands the weather and all. So I hope he has a long, happy career.

JACKSON: Well, now, tell how the contest works and what the prizes are for.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, all right. The first prize used to be $100, and then someone added $25 to it seven or eight years ago. The person who authorized it is now retired, and the firm that was doing it doesn't do it anymore, so we've taken that on, too. It's $125 in books for the first prize; the second prize $50 in books; and the third one is $25. Now, I presume that since we've gone from Brentano's and retired they may not honor that anymore, so we'll probably have to put up the money ourselves. But I'll be glad to do that. We'll probably set up maybe a ten-year schedule on it so that they'll have it for ten years at least. Of course, Larry won't be here, but somebody can dig up somebody else that will give it, or the Friends can rake it over. We ran into a strange thing. It wasn't strange when you realize it, but a lot of the graduate students entered into it after the first three or four years. They were walking off with all the prizes. So Larry said, "Well, that isn't fair. They've been out and worked, maybe taught and made money and had money to get these libraries. So," he said, "I'm going to see if I can get somebody to give a contest for the graduate students themselves." And so he got the Friends of the UCLA Library to give the same prizes. They also give one special prize to someone who has an interest in the collection but is not quite worthy of a prize. So we have the two at the same time. It's very interesting to see the type of books they bring in. They write an essay on their library — why they're collecting it and so forth — and send that in. If it's something that is worthwhile, the committee tells them to go ahead and bring the books in. They get lots of letters, but most of them are just trivial things [by persons who] don't have much of a library started. But they do have, every year, plenty of very, very fine ones. I don't see how they can pick between some of the collections, because they're all very, very good. I remember one time--this is many years ago--they had a collection of the first 100 paperbacks, the genuine paperbacks of this country, which only started just about the time World War II started. He [the owner] had collected everyone but one. There was one judge there who had been collecting for longer than he had, and he had three holes in his. He was still looking for three of them. I believe they did give him first prize for it--he got one of the prizes, anyway. But it was interesting to find here was a judge hunting the same things.

JACKSON: What were some of the other categories?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, last year there was a very interesting category on Theodore Roosevelt. There were a lot of books about him. It was fascinating. It was a very scholarly collection. I believe he won first prize. And then one year there was one on comic books, and that was fascinating. Who would ever think of making a collection of comic books? I can't remember--yes, that won a prize, too. Oh, and one that I was particularly interested in was the one about Randolph Caldecott. Randolph Caldecott illustrated children's books over a hundred years ago. There's a Caldecott award given every year for outstanding illustrations in a children's book. This Caldecott award is a very interesting thing, and it has, I think, stimulated artists to make better illustrations for children's books. It was originated in 1938 by Frederic [G.] Melcher, who was the editor of Publishers Weekly. Previous to that, he had made another award called the John Newbery award, and that's given for the book that contributes the most toward children's literature. That was originated, I believe, in 1922. Mr. Melcher didn't feel that children's books were having as much recognition as they should have, and so he wanted to do something to create more interest in them. Well, he didn't know what to name the award, and many of his friends said, "Well, why don't you call it the Frederic Melcher Award?" He said, "No, I'm not well enough known." And then he said, "I've got to find somebody else." He finally found the name of John Newbery (it's spelled with one r; every once in a while, I see it spelled with two r's in a write-up in the paper, and I just cringe every time I see it, because I think Mr. Newbery was such a wonderful man that he deserves the very best, and his name should be spelled correctly) . Anyway, he had a bookstore in London over 200 years ago — well over 200 years ago--and at that time there were no specific books for children. When children came in with their parents, no books for them; he felt sorry for them, and so he had some published especially for children. That's the reason that we remember his name every year. And then, of course, the Caldecott award came along afterward. Each year I look forward to both of these announcements. I usually have some book that I've picked out that I want to get the award. One year my selection got it-- that was the year the Island of the Blue Dolphins was published. Have you read it?

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Beautiful story, by Scott O'Dell. Scott used to be book editor on one of the local newspapers. It was the Daily News.

R. CAMPBELL: And then the Mirror-News when the Times bought it. They had a rival paper called the Mirror, and the Mirror finally bought the News, and then they called it the Mirror-News.

B. CAMPBELL: We'd known Scott for a good many years. When the book was first published, he gave me a copy, autographed it, and said he hoped I'd like it. Of course, it was so intriguing. It's a book that every adult should read, I think. Of course, as I say all the time, children's books are for adults as much as for children, but adults just aren't aware of it. This is such a fascinating story about the little girl who was left alone on the island of Nicolas, off the coast of California. That's the southernmost of the Channel Islands. She was alone there for eighteen years. In 1853 she was brought back to the mission at Santa Barbara, but no one could understand her language. So the rest of the story is Scott O'Dell's imagination. That's fiction, actually--how she survived during those eighteen years alone. The elements, the wild animals . .

R. CAMPBELL: I remember the dogs that were left there that became wild, too. She had trouble with them.

B. CAMPBELL: And she made a pet of one of the dogs. Oh, this is an engaging story. I'm glad you read it.

JACKSON: You're selling it. [laughter] Well, Bob, if you have any other recollections of collections, let's do that.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, there was one nineteenth-century Mormon history, which was another interesting collection. And then there was one on the fine art of magic. I don't know how the judges decide which is the best, because we go in and look over them after the judges have made their awards. We think they're all so great. I think it's a wonderful thing that students are interested enough in books to make special collections of various categories. It's very interesting to see what categories they choose. Very interesting.

R. CAMPBELL: One thing that I've found interesting is that people can reenter if they don't win the first prize. If they win the second or third prize, they're eligible to come in another year. And there's been at least five students who have done that. One person won second prize, and then about five years later he won first prize. He's wondering now if he can go in the graduate students' [division] and win another one.

B. CAMPBELL: And to think that one person would have that many different categories he was collecting.

JACKSON: All right. Well, now, Blanche, I think we'd like to ask you about Dorothy Allen--her story.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. Well, meeting her was interesting, too.

JACKSON: Let's explain who she is.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, Dorothy Allen was the wife of Chancellor Raymond Allen. He was here — goodness, I don't remember.

JACKSON: In the 1950s, as I recall.

B. CAMPBELL: I remember we were at a dinner party, and I was introduced to Mrs. Allen. Someone said, "Well, she's interested in children's books, and she has charge of the children's book department in the bookstore." And Mrs. Allen said, "Oh, there's one book that's my favorite, and that's The Hole Book." And I said, "Oh, yes, that's one of my favorites, too, and we stock it all the time." She was so surprised, because it's an old, old book, and I think not very many stores stock that book. But, anyway, that sort of cemented our friendship, and we became very good friends. She founded the Junior Programs, which I think is such a wonderful organization. Now, this was back in--well, it's about nineteen years ago. When would that be?

JACKSON: That would be in '55.

B. CAMPBELL: She felt that many children were not given a chance to see live performances. They'd seen television and they'd seen movies, but she felt that they should have this live action. And so she had seventeen of her friends together--each one put in one dollar, and that was the beginning of the Junior Programs. Now it's extended. They have them out in the [San Fernando] Valley and I think maybe in the San Gabriel Valley — I'm not sure--but there are quite a few groups around in Southern California. Every year they put on shows of children's stories. Last year, one of the stories was Heidi, and we went to see that. We just loved it. The auditorium is filled with children, and they are introduced to these old classics. Winnie-the-Pooh was put on, and that was fascinating. And Just So Stories. Children are being introduced to these wonderful classics by live people on the stage.

JACKSON: Well, now, these were put on in Royce Hall.

B. CAMPBELL: Some of them are, yes. Many of them are put on in Schoenberg [Hall], too. If they feel there's going to be an overflow for a very popular one, then they do have it in Royce . Oh, here, I found a list of the [Junior Programs]: San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley, Long Beach, Orange, South Bay, Santa Monica, and Culver City. And Mrs. Allen started this whole thing. Isn't that interesting?

JACKSON: That's good.

B. CAMPBELL: Her name will always be remembered because of this great interest that she had in children and the arts.

JACKSON: Bob, I think we could go to some of your stories on personalities in UCLA's history. One I think of right off the bat that I know you had a great interest in was Kenny Washington.

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. Kenny was one of our boys, as they say. He played in the thirties and won a lot of games for us that we wouldn't have won without him. We had him and Jackie Robinson and Woody Strode. They really were great fellows and they really put out. We almost beat USC one year. Kenny graduated, and went on to play pro football for the Los Angeles Bulldogs. He did very well with them. Eventually the Rams brought their club out here from Cleveland, and they took Kenny on. He really was the first black on the team. I don't know if he was the first to play pro ball, because there were a lot of them playing back East, but he was the first one on the Rams team. When they needed another one, two, or three yards on the third or fourth down to get it for sure, they got him in there and he would slam through and get it every time. He went on and worked for Cutty Sark as a public relations man. During the war, he went over to both theaters of operation, the Pacific and the European, and spoke to the boys and was up close to the lines. He really was a help, just as much as Jack Benny and the others who went over, but you didn't hear about it. But they told him, and he knows, that it was a great job. He got sick about ten or eleven years ago. We were going to have a testimonial dinner for him and we heard that he was quite ill, so I said that I would check and find out whether we would have to hurry it up. I talked with Dr. Peter, who was Kenny's doctor, and he said, "Well, I'm trying something that we haven't tried so far. If it works," he said, "he'll be here another couple years at least and you won't have to go ahead and do it in a hurry. I can tell you within a week." So he called me and said, "Well, you can go ahead and have it in the spring." So we didn't have it until a year from that fall. It was a very nice affair at the Palladium. There were a few nice speeches, and then Kenny spoke. He said something about life and what it meant to him and so forth. It was an excellent talk, I called him up the next morning and said, "Kenny, who wrote that for you? You couldn't write that. I couldn't write it," And he laughed and said, "I'll tell you who wrote that for me. It was Mr. and Mrs. Ackerman, Mr. and Mrs. Valentine, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, and Mr. and Mrs. Robinson," he said. "I learned that out there in Westwood in the thirties. You people taught me these things." He went on to say that he didn't understand--he said, "When I was out there, I didn't know if people were black or white, and you didn't, either. There didn't seem to be any trouble about race. Now everybody's worrying something about, 'Oh, this man's black; this man's white.' I wish they'd just forget about it." He would be in the UCLA Hospital for a while, and then they would get him fixed up so that he could walk and get around. He had a disease called arteriosclerosis, inflammation of the lining of the arteries, that affected the blood vessels in his feet. They would get very sore and very tender, and it was quite difficult to get them working again, but they always seemed to--except each time it would take longer, more medicine, and then the medicine wouldn't work and he'd get some different medicine. He was at the UCLA Hospital and was getting much worse. I went over to see him one morning, and he really looked bad. He kind of 'roused up a little and knew me. The he just sank into sleep again. So I called his doctor and said, "Is Kenny going to go today? He looked awful bad to me." He said, "Well, I've given him as massive a dose of this medicine as I could give him, and he didn't respond immediately. I'm afraid he isn't going to. If he doesn't, this is it." I was going to go up and see him in the afternoon, and I thought I'd better call and see if he was alive. So I called the nurse, and she said, "Yes, Mr. Campbell, he's alive, but he's dying. Don't come up, because it would only be hard on you. He'll never know whether you were here or not. He's not going to regain consciousness." So I didn't go up, and he died about six P.M. that night. I think Kenny had about five operations on his knees for removing cartilage. His knees had practically no cartilage when he died. They had a very fine funeral for him at the Holman [United] Methodist Church on West Adams Street. It's a huge place. It was crowded, with people standing around the outside. They sang some beautiful spirituals. Dr. White, the minister, gave a very fine sermon that was a little bit too much on the side that we don't do enough for the blacks, but otherwise it was very good. Then they took Kenny and buried him out at the cemetery, and we went home . They had a bust of him made for the Coliseum the next year. A man named Joseph Portanova who lives in Pacific Palisades had made the last seven and now has made the last ten that are at the Coliseum. He was to have the job. Bob Fischer called and said that he wanted me to go with him and Joe Valentine and Bill Ackerman to see this clay bust and see if it was satisfactory. So we went to see Mr. Portanova. It was fine--a dead likeness of Kenny — and we told him it was all right. He was going to have a little reception for some of his friends and our friends and people from the Coliseum in about two weeks on Sunday. Mrs. Portanova told me that she couldn't find any phone numbers--nobody knew anything about where any of the Washingtons were. "Well, that's funny," I said, "I can give you Mrs. Washington, his wife, his mother; and I can give you his son's phone numbers. Now, I said, "I don't know Uncle Rocky ' s number, but Uncle Rocky should be here. Any of these other three could give it to you." She said, "Well, I'll try them." She called in the morning and said that she tried them and got them all. One of them gave her Rooky's number — he was coming home--she said that Kenny Washington, Jr., was an agent for a clothing manufacturer and he was in San Francisco. His wife was sure that he would come down for it. She was going to call him in the morning when he was at his hotel and let him know about it. So of course he came down, and they had the showing. Kenny, Jr., and his wife came in — they had two of the cutest boys you ever saw. One was five and the other was seven. They walked in, and the younger boy looked around and said, "Grandpa!" when he saw the plaque sitting over there, so we all knew that it was all right. [laughter] Here was this kid without any prompting or anything just said, "Grandpa!" They had a program, and Mrs. Portanova played the harp. Joe Valentine was master of ceremonies. They would have a little talk, and she'd play again. Mrs. Portanova had a very interesting career and got to know Joseph in a very strange way. He was a sculptor-- he'd sculpted back in Boston as a young kid. He'd made a bust of a man named [Fabien] Sevitsky, who was the leader of the Boston [People's Symphony]. He [Sevitsky] worked in Boston a while and was married, and went to Indianapolis and was there a while; and then he went down to Miami as their orchestra leader. His wife died very shortly after, and he fell in love with a harp player, Mary Spaulding . They were married. She typed his letters as well as playing in his orchestra. Then he died. The people down there wanted an up-to-date bust, something that would look like he looked [when he died]. So they said, "Well, this Joseph Portanova made the first one. Let's find him and see if he is available." They had his address — he and Joseph had kept in touch, but Mrs. Sevitsky had never met him. So she wrote to him at Los Angeles, and [he said] yes, he'd do it, and to send him some pictures. She sent him pictures of Dr. Sevitsky, and he made a clay sculpture and sent them a picture of it. They said, "Fine, go ahead and make it, and then when you get it made, let us know and we'll arrange a formal ceremony for it." So they did. He came to Miami and met Mrs. Sevitsky, and they fell in love in three days--and in about three or four months of courting, they got married. She's now teaching the harp at Pepperdine [University] out in Malibu, just taken that on. She's an extremely fine harpist. It's wonderful to have her in the neighborhood. The husbands knew each other all this time, and she didn't know of Joseph Portanova at all. Joseph has just finished another plaque of Frank Leahy, for the Coliseum, which will be given between halves of the Notre Dame-USC game this year. So there'll be another one of those. It was very interesting to see how Mary and Joseph got together. Rocky made a speech about Kenny playing football. Incidentally, Rocky was sort of Kenny's father. His father left home shortly after Kenny was born, and he didn't see him anymore until Kenny was at UCLA and doing fine. But his uncle Rocky was on the police force, tending him all the time--he took him places of interest. He was a father to him, and we've always looked on him as his father. And he talked about Kenny playing for UCLA and some of the things, and then he was playing for the pros. We all had kind of wet eyes when he did that. Then we closed the meeting with Mary playing on the harp, and we all went our ways. But it was kind of sad to think that here was the man who did all these things, and he died early in life. We're all glad that we knew him and that he played so well for us.

B. CAMPBELL: Kenny's mother was there that day. I had a nice visit with her. She has since died.

R. CAMPBELL: I thought she'd be very old, and I didn't stop to think of Kenny's age. She's ten years younger than I am.

JACKSON: You two went to the wedding reception of Kenny and his wife.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, we did.

JACKSON: Tell a little about that.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I don't remember so much about that reception as I do about attending Jackie Robinson's wedding .

JACKSON: Let's save that.

R. CAMPBELL: I'll tell about it, then. We went to this reception, which was at someone's home out near Vermont Avenue and Slauson. It was a very lovely home. The Ackermans were there and the Valentines and the Robinsons and the Campbells. You just couldn't tell it from a regular reception of white people. Everybody was friendly and very, very nice. It was so wonderful to see that it was that way.

B. CAMPBELL: I'd like to say something about Kenny that I thought was so great. When he was being treated at the UCLA Hospital as an outpatient, he would stop in the store when he came over to have his treatment. And one day he brought Karen with him (that's his daughter, who was about thirteen years old at the time) . And he bought a lot of books for Karen. She just loved to read. She came down to the children's department with me that day, and we picked out a stack of about a half a dozen books that I thought Karen would be especially interested in. Incidentally, one day when we were at their house I saw Karen's book rack, and the books were well used. She had read some of them over and over and over, which I thought was great. Well, anyway, this particular day she picked out these books, and I said to Kenny, "I think it's just great that you buy so many books for Karen." He looked at me and said, "Well, I just figure that as long as she reads, she'll never be lonely." And I thought. What a wonderful statement for him to make, because it's so true. You can travel all over the world, you can read about people everywhere, and you'll never be lonely. Karen is attending UCLA now.

JACKSON: Bob, you have a number of these people that you were acquainted with, friends connected with UCLA. Why don't you just pick out somebody. . . ?

R. CAMPBELL: You mean like Max Dunn? Would he be a good one?

JACKSON: Max Dunn would be a marvelous one.

R. CAMPBELL: Max was a great character, I'll tell you. He really was something. We'll get our notes on him.

B. CAMPBELL: I think he has nine lives.

R. CAMPBELL: He surely does.

B. CAMPBELL: He has been so desperately ill so many times, right at death's door, but he snaps back. He's really a great guy.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, Max Dunn was at UCLA when we got there. He came in 1922, and we came in '24. But we got acquainted with him very quickly, because he came over and wanted us to print some of his chemistry lab manuals that he sold every year, and he was having a hard time because the Co-op didn't want to print them. So we printed them for him and sold them by the thousands. He went on to become a truly great chemist. Doing his research, he found amino acids and developed them to what they are today. They're a great medicine really, of the chemistry trade. He also did a fine job of teaching--the kids who took his classes really found that chemistry was worthwhile. He was very active outside of the campus, too. He was president of Rotary in 1953 and '54. His wife, Lois, was president of the Rotary Anns the year before that. Max would always give us a poem to start his programs. Most of them were quite good. Some of them he had to do in a hurry--they weren't quite so good. [laughter] Sometimes, after he was president, he would bring a poem and want to recite it. Everybody would say, "Oh, no, not another poem by Max Dunn." [laughter] He loved to travel. He was going to retire and start around the world. He got sick. He knew he was sick, but he was going to make this trip first. But he had to go to the hospital the day before they were scheduled to leave for Europe. They were afraid that they weren't going to pull him through. But they took out about half of his stomach and some other things in that area, and he got along all right. Charlie Shannon and I were the first to go to see him. Oh, man, he was just skin and bones. In a few days he was laughing because people had thought that he wasn't going to make it. But he said, "Hell, I'm tough. You'll never get me to die in a hospital." From then on, they've had a hard time getting him in hospitals. He and Lois were going to go on a trip up the coast and then across to the New England states and see the leaves in the fall. His doctors told him he should have his prostatectomy before he went. But no, he would have that done when he got back. But it got to bothering him so bad that he drove very hard and got to the University of Michigan, where he had a friend who got him in the hospital. Again, for a day or two they were a little doubtful that he was going to pull through, but he did. I called him up when he was able to talk on the phone, and I said, "Why the hell don't you do what your doctor tells you?" He said, "Ach, they don't know what they're talking about." [laughter] He goes ahead and has it done the hard way. And then this last year they had a bad time getting him in the hospital. He had Dr. [J. Robert] Tolle, and Dr. Tolle doesn't practice at UCLA, so he couldn't give them any instructions or anything. He wouldn't take his medicine unless Dr. Tolle told him to take it. They had quite a time. They finally called Tolle, and Tolle said, "You take everything they tell you to take, because they are experts at it. They would not tell you to take anything that wasn't good for you. You go ahead and take it." "No, this stuff is not good," he said. "Well, I can't do anything but tell you to take it. You go ahead and take it." And so he did. He came to Rotary afterwards, and he was skin and bones then. He's been attending Rotary now about seven weeks, and he's up to just about what he was before, and fat and sassy as can be. [laughter] He's having a wonderful time, kidding all of us about worrying about him. And he's getting good money from amino acids everywhere. He has a plant down in Newport Beach that's in the amino acid business. It's paying him very well. Several other people have made minor fortunes off of the company. Lois, his wife, is very active in the community, too. She goes to Rotary Ann meetings and also belongs to some of the other clubs that Blanche belongs to. They went to Hawaii for their golden wedding [anniversary] three years ago. They took all of their children and grandchildren along. There were about nineteen of them altogether They stayed over there for a week, and they really had a great time. I can imagine them all over there listening to Max reciting poetry.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO [video session] SEPTEMBER 9, 1974

JACKSON: Bob, let's continue with some of your recollections of UCLA personalities.

R. CAMPBELL: Fine. One of the friends that I remember, of course, was Bill Spaulding. He came shortly after we did. He was known as the man who stopped Red Grange. Red was the pride of Illinois then. Everybody was trying to stop him, and nobody could; but Bill's [University of] Minnesota team stopped him — that is, they didn't let him score--but [the University of] Illinois won anyway. So he came here with that reputation. He tried very hard to get a championship, but we didn't have very good material, If they didn't want to go to USC or Occidental [College] or somewhere, why, they'd come here. Actually, we had a lot of good boys, but they weren't top-notch players. We never could win the championship, but Bill tried very hard. He always chewed gum when he was sitting on the bench during the game. He'd just chew it and then he'd spit.

JACKSON: Are you sure it was gum? [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it was gum. [laughter] There was a little bulletin which we sent out at Christmas. It was called By the Way, by a student at UCLA, Leo Frank. It had a caricature of Bill in there — below it, it said that somebody should give him a cuspidor for Christmas, [laughter] He coached for eleven years and then they wanted to get another coach because he couldn't seem to turn the tide with good men. We were getting better men by that time. They finally decided to make him director of athletics. That was something that Bill Ackerman had been doing in addition to being student body manager. So they got Babe [Edwin C.] Horrell, and he did better with them. Mr. Spaulding went on in his job as director of athletics, which really didn't mean much because Bill Ackerman continued to do most of it until later on, when he turned it over to Wilbur Johns. Bill Spaulding had a very bad habit of being drunk at the wrong time. He showed up at the Faculty Women's Club meeting to make a talk. He was swacked when he got there, and he really couldn't talk. That made quite a sad impression--everybody was squawking about it, but they decided to just let it go and let him stay on as athletic director in name. His players organized a group called Bunker Bill's Bruins, to have a dinner every year. Bill came to it as long as he could, but the last few years he was in a sanitarium and didn't know anybody or anything — so he couldn't attend. Bunker Bill's Bruins still meet every year. His first wife died. She was very bitter when Bill was dismissed. She said, "They didn't know a good coach when they saw one." He married a woman that had been his secretary at school, and she took excellent care of him. She kept him from drinking so much, kept him fairly straight. So he had a comparatively good old age. But he finally died about ten or twelve years ago. He could have done better, but he was a fine person when he was sober. The next one here is Loye Holmes Miller. Everybody loved to take his bird course, but he also taught biology and paleontology. They weren't very large classes. But his [course] on birds was always very well attended. He came to the store quite often, especially after we stocked trade books, looking for bird books. He would order one once in a while. He would sometimes give us the trills and calls of some of the birds. At that time Bob Burns, the Arkansas Traveler, was in the height of his glory as a radio entertainer, and he bought all of our books on birds that identified them. He came in one Labor Day. We were closed, but I was there working, and I think Blanche was, too. He came and rattled the front door. I looked and saw who it was and started up there, but he turned and left. So I went out the back door and out to the parking lot and caught him. I said, "What did you want? Come on in." "Well," he says, "I've got a bird that I can't identify. I've looked through every one of your books, and I want to see if you have anything else." I said, "Well, come on in. I don't think we have anything new, but I know a man who knows birds, Loye Holmes Miller. He is the world's expert on birds." I didn't know whether he was or not, but I made it sound good. So he told me that he liked birds and that he fed a lot of them in the morning. He said that he had found this bird with a broken wing. And he set the wing so the bird couldn't move, and fed it; and [he] said, "I never saw a bird like that before. I just don't understand what it is." I said, "Well, I'll call Miller and see if he can identify it from what you tell him." He told him what he knew about it, but Miller couldn't identify it. He said he'd go out the next day. So Miller went out the next day and looked at it. It was a European bird, but he said, "They do get over here once in a while. Now, this is one that's in Central Europe, and it's not very common. But somebody brought this bird over here as a pet and it got away." He said, "They'll start a colony, and very soon you'll have quite a collection of birds. I've heard of this bird being in the Midwest of this country, like in Nebraska and Iowa once in a while, but I've never known of its being out here." He said, "They travel a lot accidentally. Sometimes they get locked in boxcars. The birds will fly in when it's being loaded and first thing you know the door's shut and they can't get out. Most of them die, but there are some that survive the journey and get out and just go on about their business. That's probably what this bird is." So Bob said he'd watch it and turn it loose, and he did. The bird stayed, and he fed it. Then it disappeared--and came back later in the season with a whole flock of little ones that wanted to be fed. "Papa and Mama" were showing off their offspring. So Bob Burns got that satisfaction, knowing that a bird would come back to him. In 1950 Holmes wrote a book called Lifelong Boyhood. It told about his taking journeys. It tells how he started in the bird business. He started when he was two or three, he said, and it must have come from his mother. He said that her bird watching started before she was two or three down in Alabama, and that she knew all about all the birds. She talked to him about birds. And he started really making a collection of birds' eggs [when he was] between two and three. They came to California when he was three years old and lived out in the Riverside area. They found birds everywhere. They collected eggs till they got so many that they couldn't keep any more. He also was a hunter. Usually, people who collect birds don't hunt, but he did. He'd get food for the table and bring it in--they would sometimes have robin, sometimes dove, and sometimes something else. And, of course, they watched for ducks and geese, and rabbits they could get anytime. If they didn't get anything else and they were supposed to bring in something for lunch, why, they'd bring in a rabbit. Now, in this book he also tells about some journeys down the south coast into Mexico and the inlands there, and into the inlands here and on up the coast to Oregon. He has seen practically every bird that has ever been on the Pacific coast. But nowhere in this book did he tell anything about teaching at UCLA or anywhere else. It was just all about the birds and how he was connected with them. Also, he dropped the "Holmes" out of Loye Holmes Miller — didn't have the "Holmes" in it. I wondered about that--whatever happened to the "Holmes." I went back and looked up the records to be sure I had it right when I said, "Loye Holmes Miller." He moved up north and lived with his son after he retired from here, and as far as I know, he's still there. If he is, he's about ninety-five. And I know he was in excellent health, so he might still be alive. He was a wonderful person to know. Let's see, what's next here? Well, Scott Finley. Maybe this should be one that you should put away the tape — I don't know. Scotty Finley was the trainer at UCLA when I came. He was a fine person until he got to drinking, and then things broke loose. I got to know him fairly well. He and three other fellows were going to go to a ball game one night, and they had imbibed a little freely before they got in the car. They went down the road just as fast as the car would go, and they hit a slow-moving vehicle that was carrying pipes for oil wells that were sticking out in the back. Three of them were killed instantly, and the other one was found wandering around kind of in a daze. He owned the car. They asked him what happened, and he said, "I don't know. I was in the back seat asleep. Next thing I know, I'm out on the ground and the car is into this mess." So they never did find out who was driving the car. They found Scotty didn't have any heart--there was a big hole in there; it was gone--and they found it at the end of one of those pipes. It hit him hard enough so that it just crushed right in there and took the heart right out of the man. His widow stayed on and worked at UCLA and educated their son. The last I knew, he was all right, but I haven't heard from him for many years. His wife finally took retirement from UCLA. She was postmistress up there a while. You remember her?

JACKSON: In Kerckhoff Hall.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, Kerckhoff Hall.

JACKSON: Well, you remember Scotty's son Jack played for the team when he went to UCLA. He was a starter.

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, that was Scott's son? When was that, now?

JACKSON: That would be in the fifties, I think. [end of video session]

R. CAMPBELL: Now I'll tell about Monte Harrington. He was a fellow who was bound to get ahead. He seemed to use his head to think all the time. His father had sent him down from Idaho in 1923 to go to Southern Branch. Monte worked on the Bruin, and he was always working at something. He belonged to the fraternity that got out a paper called Hell's Bells which had insults to many of the people in the school — the faculty and students. One year it got very rough, and Dr. Moore dismissed them all for it, but they talked him into taking them back and said they wouldn't publish it again. However, the next year, someone did publish it. Now, some of them say that the fraternity didn't publish it at all, that it was somebody else that did it. But anyway, it was published, and Dr. Moore dismissed all of the fraternity, which included Monte. So he went to New York where he worked on newspapers and was there for two years. When he came back, he finished at UCLA and got his diploma. One day he came in--this was in the Depression--and he said that he'd like to rent a desk space up on the mezzanine and he was going to start selling insurance. So we rented him space up there for $5 a month. And every time he used the phone, he put a dime in the little box that he tied to the phone, and we'd empty it every time it got full. He prospered there. He took a partner in with him, a fellow named Butch Beardon. They were both successful, and by the end of the year they each had gone out and opened his own office. Monte opened his in the Village, and Butch went to Beverly Hills and eventually to downtown L.A. I don't know whether you remember a fellow named Clark who killed a couple of politicians over in Hollywood one time? He was going to run for city attorney. He went over to see a man that was the boss of the Democratic party in that area. After the interview they found the politician and his bodyguard both dead. Of course Clark pled self-defense and beat the case. He was involved with Butch Beardon in a rather strange way. After this had happened, I went down to the Biltmore Hotel. It was a holiday, and they were having some parties down there — one of them was a book party that I was going to attend. I got out of the elevator and started down the hall, and here came a man running like mad. It was Butch Beardon. He said, "Come on, let's get out of here!" I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "Oh, Clark's back there. His wife is stewed. I went in there and she said, 'Oh, there's my man, there's my man.' She came over and threw her arms around me, and I imagined I could see Clark reaching for his gun." He said, "I threw her away. She hung on, and Clark came over and took her by the collar and pulled her back like this," he said, "and I left right then. I hope he isn't coming." The elevator came just then and we went downstairs and Butch ' s life was saved! Monte married Edith Swartz, Helen Matthewson Laughlin's friend. They were very happy, but Edith got cancer and died. Monte enlisted in the navy in World War II. He was a navigator in the naval transport — their job was doing all kinds of transport work in airplanes. He was in the Pacific and many places all over the world. They would fly blood over, or materials, whatever was wanted, and bring wounded out. You've heard that a lot of the wounded were brought to the hospitals in the U.S. the next day or the day after. One time they were coming in to Okinawa from the east, and here comes a bunch of kamikaze planes from the west to bomb the place. He said they never hit our plane, but they were within a few hundred feet of us two or three times. Then they went to Siberia. The Russians were working on some kind of a bomb. They were taking material to them. He said, "We didn't know anything about what we were taking to the Russians. We just took them these boxes and came back empty. We were up there six times." He survived the war and came back. He came in and said, "Well, I'm out now. I'm not going to work as hard now as I did before. I was working all the time. I'm going to take it a little easy. I said, "I think that's a fine idea. You were working hard. You just take it easy. You've got enough customers." So he said, "Well, I'll take new customers if the old customers recommend them, but I'm not going to go out and hunt up any new ones." The next thing I knew, he was dabbling in real estate. He brought a man in whom he'd met in the navy. They started in to buy some property together. But this fellow had been wounded and he got quite sick, so they had to break up the partnership before they really got started. He died soon after. Monte would buy a piece of land somewhere, and next thing you'd know, he'd sold it for two or three times what he had paid for it. He seemed to have the knack of going around and sizing up places where they were going to build soon. He would look at something--here was a piece of land that was down in a gully and wasn't worth much, but he saw they were building homes all around, and very soon somebody 'd want that. He bought one piece like that. I said, "What are you going to do with this? It's nothing but a gully." He said, "Somebody will want that." About a year and a half later, he sold it for about ten times what he paid for it. And the builder came in and cleaned out the gullies — filled in, leveled it off, and then brought in dirt, and filled it up to the level of east and west, and built homes on it. Monte could pick out things like that. He only made one mistake. He and Alfred T. ("Hap") Gilman, an architect, bought the Richard Dix home out in Malibu, about twenty acres or more, for about $20,000 or $30,000. They couldn't do anything with the property because they couldn't get enough water. There was barely enough water for the Dix house. They couldn't get water for the rest of the property. They did entertain some of their friends before they sold it. We attended one of their parties, and it was a fabulous house. Monte bought Hap ' s half and just held onto it, and he finally sold a couple little pieces where they found a little water. And then he gave the rest of it to the YMCA. They kept it for a few years and sold that part for $60,000. Monte met and married Kay McCoy, who was an interior decorator on San Vicente Boulevard. She had been married before and had one daughter. They both went ahead with their own business — Monte doing real estate; Kay her interior decorating. And Monte also had his own insurance business all the time. He sold a half interest in it to a man downtown, and let him run it. Eventually he and Kay moved up to Carmel. When he left here, he was more than a millionaire. They built a beautiful house up there. Their address was Carmel, but it was south of Carmel, right above Highlands Inn. Have you been to Highlands Inn? You turned in the same driveway, but keep to the left and follow that road to the top of the hill. And you can look down at the ocean in three directions, and the other way you can look into the valley. It was a wonderful piece of property, but I would hate to go up there in the fog very often. We went up one time in the fog, and I'll tell you, I'd rather just not do it. They were going to keep that and live there, but now it's too difficult to get help that's dependable, so they decided to sell it. They sold it to a black who is some kind of a religious leader, and they got $250,000 for it. He's only there a little bit of the time, but he has a man there and a woman, and other people who come in and take care of the place. Kay is doing some decorating work for him now.

B. CAMPBELL: Wasn't that Reverend Ike [Reverend Ike Eikenbronner] ?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it's Reverend Ike.

B. CAMPBELL: Nationally known.

JACKSON: Yes. He's been on the radio and television.

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, he has? We'll have to watch him. Monte was active in the Republican party as treasurer-- he was the head of the county fund-raising committee. Kay works at her own interior decorating. They're still doing that right now and, I suppose, will go on doing it. He sold the rest of his insurance agency to the man who bought the first half of it, so he really has nothing down here anymore to come down for except friends . He came down for our golden wedding celebration in 1973. They used to come down fairly often to see their daughter, but she has moved up there now. They're opening up a store called Harrington's Country Living. It's going to be very exclusive and expensive. The daughter is going to run this.

JACKSON: Is this in Carmel?

R. CAMPBELL: In Carmel, yes. They're just about to open today or tomorrow. Monte is very happy, and he looks as young as he did after the war. He aged a little during the war, but he looks just like he did then. I forgot to tell one story about him. He was in the Daily Bruin office when he was attending UCLA, and a woman came in who had graduated from the University of Colorado — she was from Denver. She had a whole portfolio with some of her drawings, and she was trying to sell them to newspapers or to advertising agencies. Monte was a major in philosophy, and this girl graduated in philosophy, so they'd talk. Every once in a while, she'd call him up and say, "Well, let's have dinner tonight, and we'll get the world straightened out." They would go somewhere and each pick up his own check. He didn't hear from her for six or eight months. She called him up and said, "I want you to come down to The Paris Inn downtown tonight, and we'll have dinner down there." He said, "Well, that's kind of an expensive place, isn't it?" She said, "Well, I'll pick up the tab, don't worry. I want to tell you something." So he went down. She said that she just couldn't sell these drawings and that she had decided to commit suicide. She had it all figured out, what she was going to do. She was going to go call her mother and tell her she was a failure and she was going to end it all. She went into a phone booth and put a coin in and she dialed the operator and money started coming from the coin box. It threw out about ten dollars' worth. So she picked that up, looked at it, and she decided that that was God telling her not to kill herself. [laughter] So she went back and looked at her artwork, and most of it she threw away. One or two pieces she saved. Over the dinner she said, "I've sold every piece just as fast as I can get it drawn and made. I'm making good money right now." So that's the story. I remember one more thing. During the Depression, Monte and I used to walk around the corner to the Janss drugstore for morning coffee. We were good for about ten cups a day then. For a time if we saw someone, anyone, on the street, we'd wave, and they'd wave back. The Village was a lonesome place in those days. When they closed the banks Monte had a $7.50 uncashed check in his pocket. We posted it with Marlowe Janss against our coffee chits. I asked Monte once why he pushed so hard. He replied that he was driven by the smell of sheep. At age nine he had helped his family by herding a band of woollies when he lived in Idaho. Later he was a powder monkey in a silver mine, then cook for harvest crews. Times were still tough when he got out of high school and his dad bought him a train ticket for Los Angeles. Somehow he found my bookstore on Vermont on the old campus and we got acquainted. That was some fifty-four years ago, and we've been close friends ever since. I've left out a lot, but that's my story. Earl J. Miller was here when we came and was very well liked. He was dean of men. Incidentally, he graduated from [Simpson College], Indianola, Iowa, where Max Dunn graduated. He had a very nice wife. She was wonderful and was with him at all social events. I used to see them in the bank. They had retired seven years ago. They celebrated their golden wedding at the the Sunset Recreation Center on the campus. They were both in fine condition then. As I say, I'd see them in the bank every week or two. I didn't see them for quite a while, and I saw him somewhere. And he said they'd moved down into Palos Verdes Estates on the peninsula. They had a house that overlooked the Pacific on the west and the valley on the other side for miles inland. He said that he guessed that they wouldn't be up anymore; they were changing their account from the [Westwood] Village Security [Pacific] Bank to the one down there. Someone saw him at a wedding the other day, the week before last, and said that Mrs. Miller is just fine. She was not very well for a year or two, and we were worried about her. But he said that they were both just fine and each of them eighty-two years old and going strong. When he retired, he took a job listening to labor disputes where [the parties involved] don't want to wait for the courts and the judge because they're way behind, and they both agree, to begin with, that they will do what this man tells them. He listens to all the evidence and then he makes his judgment on it. That's something that's become very great all over the country now. They're doing it everywhere. We found out that our lawyer was doing the same thing. That's about all about Earl J. Miller. [tape recorder turned off] C.A. [Charles] Marsh was the husband of Jessie Jean Marsh, who after Mr. Marsh died became a society editor of the Los Angeles Times. She had written on the Santa Monica Evening Outlook before that. She went to the Times downtown, and was there for several years, and finally retired. She's gone by now. She was a very lovely person. C.A. Marsh came here from Morningside College, which is in the northwest corner of Iowa. He hated to give a flunking grade. It really upset him. But he had to once in a while. When he would do it, he'd come over and talk to us. You'd see him coming, and you could tell whether or not he'd flunked someone. He gave most everybody a passing grade. He was a fine teacher, and it's too bad that he wasn't at UCLA longer. He was there for ten or twelve years. Jessie Jean was a very good friend of ours. Then there was William Miller, who was head of the geology department and eventually wrote a book on the subject. He was a friend and we talked about the book while he was writing it. The first year he used it at UCLA, we sold hundreds of copies. Of course, we bought back many copies of the book from the students, and so did the Co-op. The second year, we didn't sell very many new copies. He came to me and said, "Well, why didn't you sell as many copies of my book as you did last year?" I said, "We sold all these secondhand books that we bought back. It's going to be that way all over the country, because almost all schools that have adopted this book will be selling used copies bought back from the students." It was a fine book for elementary geology, and it sold well all over the country. He said, "I waited till I got my royalty check to see how much it was. A week ago we started our house." He was building a place out in Pomona where they were going to retire. They got the house started and, he said, "I didn't get much royalty this year. You're interfering with it. I just never thought about what happens to a textbook when you get into the second year, unless it's something that they have to keep. There's really no reason for their keeping this book, but it's kind of a surprise to me." He wrote another book called Historical Geology, for the second semester, and the same thing happened to it. He was very upset but couldn't do anything about it. He just thought that it would go on year after year selling new copies. They eventually did retire and move out to Pomona, and I haven't seen them since they left. It was very nice knowing him and knowing her and the children. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Blanche, I would suggest now that you talk about some of the visits you and Bob had to the campus when we had world celebrities visiting there.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I remember one that I got a big thrill out of that took place March 14, 1966, when Prince Philip visited the UCLA campus. There was a nice reception for him in the new Ackerman Union building. They asked me to be a hostess, which meant that I had a group of UCLA people--I think there were maybe twenty in the group--and it was my duty to introduce Prince Philip to all of them. So I just took him right around the line and introduced him to everyone. When I introduced him to my husband, I said, "This is my husband, Mr. Campbell — Bob Campbell." I pronounced it like "Camel." Bob had especially worn his Scotch tie that day, his Campbell Scotch tie, and the prince noticed that. And he looked at me and he said, "Camel? You mean Campbell." [laughter] To me, it made him seem very human, and very down-to-earth, that he would take the time to make those side remarks, because he has been presented to people all over the world and never sees them again, so why should he be interested? He is a charmer, no doubt about that. I'm holding here in my hand a picture taken that day. The prince is shaking hands with Helen Ackerman. Also in the picture are Mr. and Mrs. Norman Miller and myself, and in the background in the distance is Johnny Jackson looking on. [laughter] It's a marvelous picture of the prince. He really is a handsome man — there's no two ways about it. Well, that was exciting. Then we were there when Haile Selassie was on the campus. As I recall, his speech had to be translated. He would speak a line, and then the translator would speak a line.

R. CAMPBELL: That was in the new Pauley Pavilion, right?

B. CAMPBELL: I believe so, yes. I was thinking it was outdoors. But it was the shah of Iran that was outdoors. They built a platform and had a little canopy on the west side of Westwood Boulevard across from Ackerman Union. And that, too, was very interesting. I remember that some of the students were protesting--the police did not let them come up close to the stand where everyone was seated, but we could hear them down Westwood Boulevard chanting and singing "Down with the shah," I guess. I don't remember. Do you remember what they said?

JACKSON: Yes, I remember that. I don't remember exactly what they were chanting. But there was another group that was on the opposite side. They were for the shah. And they did a counter-demonstration . Now, you were there when Lyndon Johnson came?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, we were there when Lyndon Johnson was there.

JACKSON: Tell a little about that, your impressions.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, as I remember, the Bruin Belles were the hostesses and brought people in. A special platform had been built on the west side of Westwood Boulevard. I was especially impressed by how closely he was guarded, his bodyguards. And there were security officers, I remember, up on the buildings around there that were watching to see if anybody might be in the audience wanting to harm him. I think we just went to the program. It seems to me it was hot, too--the sun beating down on us. [laughter] Another interesting event that we attended was the groundbreaking for the James E. West Alumni Center that is to be built on the parking lot that presently adjoins Pauley Pavilion. That was very exciting. The Chancellor's Associates had a meeting that morning up in Kerckhoff, I think it was--one of the buildings on the campus, anyway. The wives were invited to come along, and we were given a tour of the campus. That was interesting because there are always new things being added. And then we all went down to the parking lot. They had built a kind of a little platform that was about two or three steps up from the ground, and then they had a frame built across it with blue-and-gold ribbon stretched across that. They cut the ribbon instead of digging into the cement and digging up a portion of the dirt like they do at groundbreaking. One of the very interesting things that day was that they had an outline of the building drawn on the parking lot. The outline of the building was in blue, and the rooms were marked off in gold, so that we could see just exactly where it was going to be. I wonder when that is going to start. They've had the groundbreaking, but do you have any idea when they're going to start the building?

JACKSON: Anytime now.

B. CAMPBELL: Anytime now. That's good. Well, then we all went back up to Kerckhoff and had a beautiful luncheon. I remember the flower pieces in the center of the table were blue and gold. We've had so many exciting times going to UCLA affairs. It's great that we still live close enough, since we've retired, to go to those affairs. And as I have said a number of times, we may be retired from business, but we're not retired from UCLA. [laughter] We'll keep on going up there. [tape recorder turned off] Recently, we attended the Ralph Bunche scholarship benefit basketball game at Pauley Pavilion. And preceding that, in the afternoon, was a reception in the [Franklin D. Murphy] Sculpture Garden. They had great big hot dogs and sauerkraut, which I thought was unique to serve, and potato salad. And I think they had baked beans and rolls. It was all very delicious. We had taken John McCord and his son and nephew with us. John McCord went to UCLA--he is a CPA now. He does our tax report for us each year. He called at the last minute to see if by chance we had some tickets, and we had three tickets-- some friends that we had invited to go couldn't go at the last minute — so they went with us. And those two youngsters--they were about eleven and thirteen, I think-- just had a ball going around getting autographs from all of the players. [Kareem Abdul-] Jabbar — Lew Alcindor, as we knew him when he first came to UCLA--was there, and Bill Walton. Oh, Keith [Jamaal] Wilkes came around. I had taken my camera, and I thought it would be fun to take a picture of these two young boys, who were having so much fun getting autographs, with one of the players. So I asked Keith if he would mind if we took his picture with them. He said, "Oh, no." I have a very good picture of Keith Wilkes and these two little shorties on each side of him. [laughter] The players were around there quite a while, and then someone came up and said, "Mrs. Bunche is here." We hadn't seen her. And so we looked her up and found her, and had our picture taken with her, which turned out to be very good. She said she was going to be here for about a week. And so we thought maybe we could have a better visit with her, because everybody was wanting to talk with her there at the reception that afternoon. We thought it was so nice that she could come for it. She gave us the number of her niece, I believe, where she was visiting, and we called her the next week. But she said, "Ralph has so much family living here. They've just got me all dated up for luncheons and dinners. I went to a wedding last weekend, and there's another wedding this weekend. I'm sorry, I just can't make it." But she spoke at the basketball game that night, and that was very interesting, I thought. She said how pleased Ralph would be if he could know that they were doing this in his name. She said that basketball was always his favorite sport. And I thought. How nice that they have started this annual event, especially a basketball game. You know, there were some letters in the Times — did you see those? the rip off of UCLA — and that made me so mad that I sat right down and wrote a letter to the Times. But it didn't get in. [laughter] The person who wrote this letter was so mad because Walton didn't play and Lucius Allen didn't play, when the publicity had said they'd be there.

JACKSON: Julius Erving was missing, too.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 7, 1974

JACKSON: Bob, I think a subject that we should delve into is the store expansion right after the war.

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

JACKSON: We should cover that.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right. We had the west side of the building leased out from the beginning. First it was a restaurant, which didn't last very long, and then it was a cleaner--and he was a very fine cleaner. He kept it for the rest of the time; we were sorry to have to put him out, but we did.

B. CAMPBELL: And it was so handy to have the cleaner right next door. [laughter] Take all our clothes in and then pick them up so close.

R. CAMPBELL: And, incidentally, it didn't cost what it costs now to go to the cleaner.

B. CAMPBELL: He didn't take us to the cleaners. [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: We knocked out two very large arches, one at the front and one at the back of the store in the wall separating the two rooms. We put in new linoleum and moved the stationery over there from the east side. It was kind of interesting when we were doing that--some of the fixtures had to be redesigned — and we got some people from the Weber Showcase Company (who had put the fixtures in, in 1929) to help us. They said, "You've got to buy some saw blades--we won't touch the stuff with our saws because this is solid oak. It's been here for years, and it's just as hard as rocks. We'll ruin our blades, so you've got to buy us some saw blades to use. So I did. And incidentally, it was at Christmastime that we were having this done--that's just when we got to where we needed these people--and they were all tied up. They couldn't come--they couldn't possibly come. They were all working both day and night. They'd work for Weber in the daytime and then go work for somebody like us at night. I finally mentioned something about Rose Bowl tickets. And that's how I got the four of them to come and do the work. It was by giving them these four Rose Bowl tickets. [laughter] We got it fixed up very nicely and moved the stationery department in there and expanded the book department. We simply enlarged our book department and made it more complete .

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and we enlarged the stationery department by adding more gift items at that time, in early 1947. It was all stationery items on the west side of the store and books on the east side.

JACKSON: Well, now, you did a face-lifting job in '54: the front of the store, and changes inside, and the children's department was involved. Blanche, do you want to talk on this?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. They took out the pillars that were across the front of the store and made great huge display windows. It ended up so it looks like it does now. The children's department, at that time, was on the mezzanine. And we wanted more space and could have it in the basement. (We hate to call it basement, so we call it lower level, like Bullock's with their lower level, middle level, and upper level.) [laughter] So we moved the children's department to the lower level. In order to do that, we had to put a stairway at the front of the store. There was already one at the back. We put a very nice wide stairway at the front of the store which leads down into the children's department. And at that time, I remember, when we moved the children's department down there. Bob gave me the choice of moving down there or moving on to the main floor. No, I guess that was in 1959 when Bob Tolstad, our son-in-law, bought the stationery department. It was then he gave me the choice of moving the children's department back up there in that space on the main floor or putting the new paperback department for the adult books downstairs. But I chose to stay downstairs.

JACKSON: Why did you do that?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, because the section under the stationery side was storage space for extra stock for the stationery department.

JACKSON: Oh .

B. CAMPBELL: When we moved the stationery out, then we had all that extra room down there. So that made double space for the children's department. I said that people were used to coming down there for the children's books; and it was also a kind of security measure, because many mothers brought their small children in, and the children would run around down there and maybe start up the stairs. But they had to go up the stairs before they could run out into the street. And I think that was a very good point.

JACKSON: Well, I think it is.

B. CAMPBELL: So we kept the children's department in the downstairs area and enlarged it.

JACKSON: When the Tolstad store — I understand that's "Tolstad hyphen Campbell. ..."

B. CAMPBELL: No, it's "Campbell hyphen Tolstad Stationers."

JACKSON: Campbell-Tolstad Stationers.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right. They first moved into where Sheetz used to be. That was in 1959.

JACKSON: Yes, I remember.

B. CAMPBELL: The old Sheetz Restaurant there on Westwood Boulevard. And they put a big double door at the back of the store so that when customers came in our store and said, "Oh, where is your stationery department?" We could say, "Just go out our back door, down the alley a few doors, turn left, and go into the Campbell-Tolstad Stationers." What I wanted to do was to put footprints on the alley back there, have footprints going down to his store. That was city property — we couldn't do that. [laughter] But it was easy to tell them to go down there. And of course Bob — Bob Tolstad — had a wonderful business all set up for him; it was so convenient for him to be located so close to us that the customers didn't mind walking down there. Then-- when was it that he moved over to the Weyburn address?

R. CAMPBELL: That was in March 1967. He found the front was too narrow at this location on Westwood Boulevard. There was a small storefront there, and it didn't look big at all like the size of the rest of the store, because it went back about twenty feet and widened out, and then it went another twenty feet and widened out some more. They had an upstairs in it for the office--so it was a very ample space, but it wasn't arranged well. Bob Tolstad felt that that was holding him back a lot. Mr. Bornstein came in one day and wanted him to move over to his building on Weyburn across from Bullock's, so he moved over there to this new location which has a front as wide as the store is wide — well, it isn't quite because it's wider in the back. It also has an entrance on Glendon Avenue.

B. CAMPBELL: Wasn't that part of the old Slater Garage?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, the Slater Garage was in there.

B. CAMPBELL: It's a much better location for the stationery store.

JACKSON: Right across from Bullock's.

R. CAMPBELL: I think that that is the best place in town, right across from Bullock's.

JACKSON: Good.

B. CAMPBELL: Previously, when he was on Westwood Boulevard, that location was good, except that there was a vacant lot, just a parking lot across the street--no stores. That's where the Security [Pacific] Bank is now.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right. That was a parking lot.

JACKSON: Well, I think that gives us the picture then on the expansion. The face-lifting, I recall, was 1954. Would that be right?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes.

JACKSON: You mentioned about what you put out front while they were constructing.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, they had a board front around it. I took some slides of pictures painted on there in color of little men with paint brushes and ladders, etc. One said, "Campbell's is getting a new look." Another one said, "Campbell's this way. Let's all go to Campbell's."

R. CAMPBELL: They were very clever. I remember that George said, "It won't affect your business nearly as much as you think it will."

B. CAMPBELL: George who?

R. CAMPBELL: George Gregson, who owned the building. He said that when you put up these boards, people will come in to find out what's going on--they'll be curious, and people will come in that you never saw before, and they'll buy something. That's exactly the way it worked out. Our business was better while we had the boards up then it was before. [laughter]

JACKSON: That's interesting. Well, I think now we can go to our next subject. Bob, the Meredith Willson gift to UCLA. Do you want to start in on that? And we'll get Blanche to talk on that, also.

R. CAMPBELL: We first became acquainted with Meredith when his first book came out. He'd been in, and told us that he and the publishers were arguing about the title. We discussed it with him and got very well acquainted with him and his wife, Rini . The book came out and the title was And There I Stood with My Piccolo. He was anxious to have it sell. So Meredith and Rini would put on a program at clubs all over town. We sold his book there and they autographed them. They'd put on for free a show that they ordinarily got $6,000 for.

B. CAMPBELL: A later book was Eggs I Have Laid.

JACKSON: Wonderful.

R. CAMPBELL: It told about his mistakes, one of which was up in the chancellor's residence, when he asked Vern Knudsen to come over and see him. So Vern came over, and he caught his toe on a little step up about six inches and went flat on the floor. And Meredith said then he saw the little rise in which the toe went, but he said, "That was just another egg I've laid." [laughter.] It was full of incidents like that.

B. CAMPBELL: I'm reminded of how he got the title for his first book. An orchestra was playing for an important king, and he enjoyed the music so much that he said they could all go to the counting house and fill their instruments with gold coins. "And there I stood with my piccolo." [laughter] B. CAIIPBELL: Incidentally, he is now working on another book.

JACKSON: Good.

B. CAMPBELL: And the title — [the one] he is temporarily using, anyway--is More Eggs I Have Laid.

JACKSON: Oh.

B. CAMPBELL: Meredith is such a ham. I think it's so great the way he exposes himself on the boners that he's pulled.

R. CAMPBELL: His best book was probably the one that has to do with the story of the . . .

B. CAMPBELL: . . . music man?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. The Music Man. It ran for a number of years on Broadway and then also toured the country very successfully--Dallas , San Francisco, Denver, Omaha, Los Angeles, and so forth. Oh, the title of that book was But He Doesn't Know the Territory. And people from all over would write in and want it, but it went out of print very shortly. We advertised for it--as a matter of fact, lately, we advertised for all of his books about once every year, and we'd get a supply in and have enough to last us out that year. But we've corresponded with people all over the country where high schools or colleges put on The Music Man and wanted copies.

JACKSON: Fine. Well, Bob, tell about his giving the gift to UCLA, and describe the gift.

R. CAMPBELL: It was the Stanley E. Ring collection. [Archive of Popular American Music (ed.) ] Stanley E. Ring had — well, you'd call it sort of a secondhand music store up in Hollywood. It was a huge collection of sheet music and records. It consisted of American popular songs of the nineteenth and twentieth century that Stanley Ring had collected over the years. When he died, there were no heirs, so the entire collection was sold at a public auction. Meredith knew the store and had bought some music there. It was sold as a unit, and Meredith was the highest bidder. He gave the entire collection of more than 250,000 pieces of sheet music and records to the UCLA music department. There was no comparable collection on the West Coast until Meredith gave this generous gift.

B. CAMPBELL: They hadn't done anything with the collection, and Meredith was a little disappointed about it. So when they realized they had this vast amount of music and that much of it was out of print, Professor David Morton then produced A Cavalcade of American Popular Music.

B. CAMPBELL: He's put on three performances. The first one was in honor of Meredith Willson. It was absolutely fascinating! They had a lot of singers from UCLA, from the Men's Glee Club and Madrigal Singers, and Donn Weiss was the director. Members of the UCLA Band were there, directed by Kelly James. The choreography was done by Martha Hatem. There were a lot of the old-time songs, so it made it very nostalgic. They threw a picture of the sheet music on a big screen up on the stage, and then one of the singers — or maybe half a dozen or a dozen of them — would sing that song. Then they would throw another one on the screen. And I think some of the titles might be interesting for you, Johnny.

JACKSON: Yes, do give us some.

B. CAMPBELL: "Peg O' My Heart" was one of them.

R. CAMPBELL: Who did that?

B. CAMPBELL: That was Fisher and Bryan, 1913, recording of The Three Suns. And then they had one section of Memories, which I was thrilled about, "In the Good Old Summertime," "Sweet Adeline," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "In My Merry Oldsmobile," "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," "Shine on Harvest Moon," "Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet with the Blue Ribbons on It," and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon" — all those wonderful old nostalgic songs. We had taken our daughter Dorotho and her husband, Bob Tolstad, and their two boys, Jeff and Scott. Scott, who was fifteen at the time, was sitting next to me, and he was just getting the biggest bang out of it. I was surprised, because I didn't think he would know those old songs. "Oh, yes," he says. "I've heard them." They have records of them, because Bob, his father, is very nostalgic on old-time music. In fact he used to be in a band, and so they have heard a lot of them on records. But anyway, that was an exciting evening. That was back in 1972--April 8, it was, in Schoenberg Hall. The next year, it was honoring Irving Berlin, and was that ever exciting! To hear all the wonderful songs that Irving Berlin had written.

R. CAMPBELL: Someone told me that they have over 1,000 pieces by Irving Berlin there, and that there are some that are missing. He really kept at it.

B. CAMPBELL: It was so nostalgic. And then they turned away so many people that night that they decided to have it two nights this past year, in 1974. And who did it honor this year? I remember now it was Harry Warren, composer of songs for films. They always honor someone, and, of course, Meredith is always there. We have gone every time, and they always introduce Meredith in the audience--which is right. They should, because this is an extremely valuable collection of music. I'm so glad that they're doing something with it, and of course Meredith is very pleased about it because that's why he gave it to them. David Morton is just marvelous! He plays the piano, announces everything, and does some of the work. It's a very good production put on by the music department at UCLA. An interesting thing [happened] when The Unsinkable Molly Brown came out. This was before it had been produced as a play. . . .

R. CAMPBELL: They were working on producing it in New York.

B. CAMPBELL: Meredith had done the music for it, and Richard Morris had written the story. Meredith and Rini invited about twenty-five friends up to their house one afternoon to hear a reading of the play. And that was most exciting. Richard Morris read it, and we all sat there in the living room and imagined the scenery in Colorado as he described it. Whenever a song came up that Johnny Brown was to sing, Harve Presnell was there, and he sang the songs of Johnny Brown. Later he was the lead — he was Johnny Brown on the stage in New York. And every time a song came up that Molly Brown was to sing, Rini sang it.

JACKSON: Oh,

B. CAMPBELL: And if you ever heard her sing, you know what a beautiful, beautiful voice she had. So that was a very wonderful, interesting afternoon, to sit there and go through this entire play. We saw it on the stage then when we went to New York later. Tammy Grimes took the part of Molly, and Harve Presnell, of course, was Johnny. And then we saw it in the theater-in-the-round in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Of course, that production was entirely different than either of the other two that we had seen. Nanette Fabray played the part of Molly. I don't recall who did Johnny Brown. Then a fourth version was the movie, when Debbie Reynolds played the part of Molly. Of course, that was really more expandable — that is, they could do so much more in the movie. And it was hard to say which one we liked the best, but it was interesting to see The Unsinkable Molly Brown in four entirely different versions.

R. CAMPBELL: Did we see that many of The Music Man?

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, well, let's see. We didn't see it up at their house. I don't know whether they had a showing of it there or not. We saw it on the stage in New York first--oh, we've seen it any number of times. High schools put it on; in fact. El Camino Real High School out in the Valley, where our grandson Jeff graduated, put it on--I think it was his senior year. Jeff thought of trying out for the lead in that, and then he decided not to. But we invited Meredith and Rosemary--this was just a couple of years ago--to go out with us, and they thoroughly enjoyed it. It was just as cute as it could be. Of course, I get a big bang out of seeing these high school kids put a play on. I think they do a better job than the professionals. [laughter] We've seen it various places, because it's a show that high school students quite often put on. And of course the movie was so terrific! And what's going to happen two years from now, in 1976? They're going to be playing "Seventy-six Trombones" all over the place, I'm sure .

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: I mentioned that to Rosemary a couple of weeks ago when I was talking with her, and I said, "I'll bet they'll really be using Meredith's 'Seventy-six Trombones.'" And she said, "Oh, yes, we've had just one request after another already." And Meredith refers them to his publisher, she said--the publisher in New York who published the music. And he's taking care of all arrangements. It will be so typical of the [Bi] centennial that we'll be celebrating.

JACKSON: It's a natural.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes,

R. CAMPBELL: I think we should explain here that Rini was his first wife, and she contracted cancer and died about seven or eight years ago. And then he later married Rosemary . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Sullivan . . .

R. CAMPBELL: . . . Sullivan, yes, who had been their secretary for years before and then had quit and gone somewhere else. But they were still friends and they'd have her over every once in a while. To go back to Rini, she had not felt very well, and she got very sick up in Montana when they were on a road tour and were doing a show in Bozeman, Montana. My nephew, Henry Campbell, who is in the music department there, was in charge of the show, as he still is in charge of all the shows they have up there.

JACKSON: Now, which school is this?

R. CAMPBELL: Montana State [College] . And they went from the show over to their house for refreshments . They got back to L.A., and Rini said, "Oh, I was never so sick in my life as I was there. They'll think I'm a real stick-in-the-mud because I didn't have much of anything to say." That was the beginning of her illness.

B. CAMPBELL: Meredith called us after they got back, and he said, "Why didn't you tell me you had such a nice nephew up in Bozeman, Montana." [laughter] Well, then, Rosemary and Meredith were married at the [Westwood Hills] Congregational Church on Westwood Boulevard at the corner of La Grange. Dr. Hogue, Mark Hogue, married them. Rosemary called me a couple days before the wedding and invited us to come. It was the fourteenth of February, Valentine's Day, and it was at noon. I did have an engagement about one-thirty, but we managed to get there for the wedding, and it was very interesting. They didn't walk up the aisle; they came in a side door. The minister came in first, and then Meredith and Rosemary and their attendants. Oh! But I forgot to say that first three men came in from that side door and sat down in the front row, and each one had a carnation in his coat lapel. We recognized one as Richard Morris, who wrote The Unsinkable Molly Brown, but we didn't know the other two. When the minister said, "Who gives this woman to be married to this man?" those three men in the front row said, "We do."

R. CAMPBELL: They stood up, didn't they?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, we all stood up for the ceremony. We had never heard that before, and we wondered who the other two men were. We met them afterward in the narthex of the church, and one of them was a musician, a very good friend of theirs, and the third one was Rosemary's immediate boss, that is, where she had worked at the studio. Shortly after that, when we were with the Willsons one night, why, we were talking about this, and Rosemary said, "Well, I'll explain to you how it happened." She said that she was calling various friends to invite them to the wedding, and when she called her boss he acted so strange. She couldn't figure it out. She said, "Is something wrong?" "No, no." But as she talked with him, she could tell there was definitely something preying on his mind. And finally she said, "Now tell me, what's wrong?" "Well," he said, "as a matter of fact there is." He said, "When you and Meredith came by to tell me that you were engaged and going to be married, Meredith said that you were going to ask me to give you away. And I haven't heard from you." Well, Rosemary didn't know what to do because this was never heard of before and Meredith was out of town--he was in New York — but he called her that night. And she told him about it. "Oh!" he said, "That's right. Call him and tell him he can come and give you away." But then they remembered that they had also told this musician friend and Richard Morris that they could give her away. [laughter] This is what is so interesting about Meredith-- he's such a ham. And he'll say things that are so funny that way. That's how the three of them happened to give Rosemary away. Well then, shall I tell you about what happened a few days later?

JACKSON: Do .

B. CAMPBELL: [It was] the same week. Their wedding was on the fourteenth of February, Wednesday, and Maida Sharpe and John Dullam were married the seventeenth of February, which was the following Saturday. We were invited to their wedding because we were like family. It was Maida 's third marriage and John's second marriage. They had known each other in college — did you know that?

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: John was a fraternity brother of Maida 's first husband, Floyd Wood, who was killed in a plane crash in 1944 when he was in the service. And they were very good friends. In fact, John's daughter had been in Maida 's daughter's wedding several years back. They were married at the [Brentwood] Presbyterian Church at the corner of Bundy and San Vicente, in the little chapel there. John came in the side door at the front, and his son, John; Maida 's son, Bud Wood; and John's daughter's husband, Bill Hooper, stood with him. Then Maida came in the side door at the front on the other side with her daughter-in-law, Sherry; John's daughter, Toni Hooper; and John's daughter-in-law, Pat Dullam, as her attendants. Her daughter, Beth Wood Belzer, was living in Texas at the time and couldn't come. There were those six young people standing up there with their parents. It was most effective. And when the minister said, "Who gives this woman and this man to be married to each other?" those six young people said, "We do." And believe me, they meant it. Because they were so happy that these two wonderful people realized that each one was alone and that they could have a happy life together. [laughter] Johnny, I get goose pimples every time I tell that story.

R. CAMPBELL: That's the only two times we've ever seen that done .

B. CAMPBELL: Have you ever seen that done?

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: To have it happen within four days.

JACKSON: That's fine.

B. CAMPBELL: It was just fantastic. And a year or so later, Rosemary and Maida were at the UCLA Affiliates tea, and I introduced them. They were so glad to meet each other because they had heard each other's story. So that was the ending for that.

JACKSON: I remember that at the time Meredith Willson gave his gift he led the UCLA Band on the steps of Royce Hall. Do you recall about that?

R. CAMPBELL: No, we weren't up there. I remember when he led bands at the Coliseum some time before that. Bill Ackerman asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with him, and he said that we were going to have lunch over at Carl's by the Coliseum and that Meredith was going to lead bands. It was Band Day. It wasn't just the UCLA Band--it was all the bands in the high schools in Southern California. They were going to practice at eleven o'clock, and then they were coming over there for lunch. I said, "Sure, I'll be glad to go." So we went over, and Dorothy Allen was there, too. Raymond was away on something else. I remember that Dorothy and Rini had a little kind of a set-to. Rini said, "Gee, you look awful. You shouldn't do so much--you just look awful."

JACKSON: Really?

B. CAMPBELL: Dorothy got up and walked out. So I got up and walked out after her, and I said, "That's all right, don't bother about it." And I said, "I know that your mother's sick and you got all this stuff on your mind. ..." But she said, "If I could just keep their mouths shut." She said, "What I wouldn't give to just have a luncheon of people that I liked and that I wanted to have instead of having some duty dance to entertain." [laughter] We talked for about, maybe, ten minutes, and we went back in and everything was all right. But she got so upset over that. And Rini, of course, was very hurt to think that she said something that upset her. But she was always so frank. She spoke that way, you know--she would say, "Gee, you look terrible," or "You look fine tonight," or something like that. She just thought that Dorothy looked really beaten, which she did. Well, as Bob said, Meredith led the band, and I think UCLA should have him do it again. I've mentioned it several times, but it's never followed through. I think that UCLA should recognize Meredith. Since he's given UCLA that music, the Ring collection, they should really honor him more.

R. CAMPBELL: He gave something to SC though, too, rather recently.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, SC ' s had him play there.

R. CAMPBELL: I know that.

B. CAMPBELL: Meredith and Rosemary have gone to the SC football game with us for years. It's just a standing invitation. So he is interested.

JACKSON: Well, we'll have to try to get him back.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, I think we should.

JACKSON: That would be fine. Well, I think now, unless you have something else on Meredith, we might go on to the next subject. Do you recall anything else about Meredith Willson?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I do recall one thing. He came into the store one day--this was about five years ago--and he said that he wanted to buy something for two dollars. He had to get his ticket validated, because he'd forgotten about it in another store. And he came over to get the car and . . .

B. CAMPBELL: He wanted to save thirty-five cents!

R. CAMPBELL: . . . [to see] what we had that he could buy. And I said, "Well, did you ever see the Alice in Wonderland that Dali [did]?" He said, "No, Dali, Alice in Wonderland, that would be good." He said, "We saw Dali this past winter when we were back East and he was in our hotel . He went through so ostentatiously that I didn't even dare to say anything to him." Meredith said, "Let's see it." So I said, "Well, come on upstairs." We went up there, and I said, "I'll go get it back in the office." So I bring out this $600 . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Seven hundred and fifty.

R. CAMPBELL: Seven hundred and fifty, yes. The $600 one was just the regular edition; this was the deluxe one. And it had extra copies — that is, the other one had [the illustrations] in the book, and this one had an extra copy of each one of the thirteen pictures, that you could take out and frame. So I showed it to him and he said, "Oh, I think Rosemary would just love that for Valentine's Day"-- which was coming up in about five or six days. He says, "Will you wrap it for that?" I said, "Yes. We'll wrap it for that! "

B. CAMPBELL: "And validate your ticket." [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, "Validate your ticket." So I got somebody to wrap it, and I gave it to him, and he took it home. They still have it, of course, and naturally they're very proud of it. But I thought that was a very good way to get a ticket validated.

JACKSON: That's a very good story.

B. CAMPBELL: We'll never let him forget that. We kid him about that all the time. [laughter]

JACKSON: Well, now, the next thing that we should take up, I think, is with you, Blanche--your contacts with children's authors and your stories about children's authors. . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

JACKSON: Especially where they had a connection of some sort with UCLA.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I have a celebrity book, Johnny. I started it back in 1962. And I'll tell you how we happened to do it. We were back in New York, and I said to Bob, "I want to go into the children's room of the New York Public Library. I want to see where Frances Clarke Sayers held out before she came to UCLA to teach children's literature." (She was the children's librarian of the New York Public Library.) Well, I don't know how anybody finds that children's room in that big library, because we would go down one hallway, down another, turn left, turn right--I don't know how the children ever found it. Anyway, we finally did find the children's room, and we went in and told them that we were from Los Angeles and that we were friends of Frances Clarke Sayers. Well , if we were friends of Frances Clarke Sayers, we were friends of theirs. And they practically rolled out the red carpet to us. They brought out their guest book for us to sign. I said, "But we're not authors or illustrators." "Well, you're a friend of Mrs. Sayers. We want you to sign it." So we did. And then we started looking through that guest book. We spent an hour.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, a good hour.

B. CAMPBELL: And there were fascinating signatures in there: Carl Sandburg and Rachel Field; famous authors, some of them no longer living. And we noticed that the first one signed in 1925. I said to Bob, "Why haven't I done that? We could have had a book similar to this since we started our children's department way back in 1934." So that was the first thing I did when we got back. I went out and bought a notebook, and Scott O'Dell was the first one to sign in it. I mentioned before about his Newbery Award book Island of the Blue Dolphins.

JACKSON: Yes, before you go on, I think you ought to describe this book a little more. Now, this is a ring binder, and each author has a page, isn't that right?

B. CAMPBELL: No. Some of them have a page, especially the illustrators who sign, who draw a picture--I have a lot of original pictures. And [the New York Public Library's] book was bound with posts like a scrapbook. And it was kind of coming apart. So I got a big loose-leaf notebook with big rings, and then I got the paper that is reinforced where it goes in the rings, because I felt it would be so much more durable. It was just a plain brown notebook. I kept it under the telephone stand by my desk. And when people came in, I'd show it to anybody who was interested or get it out for an author to sign. One day, I went to get it and it wasn't there. I looked everywhere for it. I couldn't find it, and I was so upset. I thought, "My glory! Anybody could walk off with that." And I have original illustrations in there that really are worth a great deal, I feel. I told Bob about it, and he said, "Well, don't worry about it — it will probably show up somewhere." And I got busy and kind of forgot about it. A few days later, it appeared. And I thought, "Where was that?" But, again, I was so busy that I thought, "Well, it's back." But then, from that day on, I locked it up in the closet that was right by my desk because I wasn't going to take a chance on losing this book.

JACKSON: Did you ever find out what happened to it?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. At Christmas, Viviane Brill, who works in my department — she's going on her fifteenth or sixteenth year, and this was, I guess, maybe five or six years ago, maybe more--gave me a felt cover for it. It's a beautiful shade of blue, and at the top of the cover it has pink and white felt that's shaped like an open book, and a great big C on the left side and a great big B on the right side, both letters in blue. She said that can stand for children's books or celebrity book. Then down in the lower right-hand corner it has big pink felt initials BC for Blanche Campbell. She had taken the book home with her to have it measured for this felt covering. Since then, I have definitely kept it locked up in the closet. And now, since we've retired, I have it here at home on my desk.

JACKSON: Good.

B. CAMPBELL: Did I tell you before that Brentano ' s let me bring my desk home?

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I worked at this desk, and it's a solid walnut, or oak, top. It's not veneer like most of the desks are nowadays. One day when Mr. Cowen was out from the New York Brentano's head office, Bob asked him if it would be all right if I could take my desk home with me, my desk and chair that I had used all these years. Our daughter Classie gave us the idea. We hadn't thought about it. She said, "Mother, I think it would be so nice if you could take your desk home." Well, anyway, Mr. Cowen made a note of it, and he came downstairs in the lower level to see me, and he said, "I have a note here about a desk. That desk can go to the person who has been in the book business fifty years and who has been married fifty years . "

JACKSON: Oh!

B. CAMPBELL: So that was saying "Okay." I have my desk here with the beautiful stitchery patterns of Beatrix Potter's characters that Dorotho and Classie have made for me hung up on the wall. And on the wall on the left I have one of Don Freeman's original drawings from one of his books, and the plaque that the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People gave me back in 1970 for outstanding community service. And I also have a picture hanging up here of Prince Philip. It was taken the year that he was here and--you are in that picture Johnny!

JACKSON: You were the hostess with Prince Philip.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. I already told you about that.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 7, 1974

B. CAMPBELL: Well, anyway, I have my celebrity book now here at home on my desk. And there are a lot of what I call very famous signatures in this book. One of them is Roald Dahl, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When that came out--about eight years ago, I believe it was--we had a call for it in our department, and we didn't have the book. The customer seemed very much surprised about it, so while the customer was still there, I went upstairs to see if by chance it was up there. And sure enough, there it was up there in the adult book department, a whole stack of them. I opened it up, and on the inside of the jacket it said, "For all ages." This was the reason it was left upstairs. [tape recorder turned off] On the front of the book it said, "Concerning the adventures of four nasty children and Our Hero with Mister Willy Wonka and his famous candy plant." Well, there are many books in the adult department that we would not want in the children's department! And I thought maybe we didn't want this book about these four nasty children. So I took it home to read it first. Well, I fell head over heels in love with it. It is an absolutely fascinating story. Have you read it?

JACKSON: No. I know of it, but. . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. These four nasty children. One of them was Augustus Gloop, and all he wanted to do was eat. A girl's name was Veruca Salt, and she was spoiled because her father bought her everything she wanted. Violet Beauregarde was the world's champion gum-chewer . And Mike Teavee, you can guess, all he wanted to do was watch television. Well, Mr. Willy Wonka wanted to give his factory to a child, and in order to decide whom to give it to, he put five lucky tickets in five candy bars. And the five children that got those lucky tickets would go through his factory, and then he would decide which one to give it to. That was how these five — Charlie and these four nasty children--happened to go through his factory. Well, I read the whole book that night; I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. I went back to the store the next morning, and I said to the three girls who were working in my department at the time, "Come on and sit down over here." (We have a little table over at one end of our children's department for children to sit there and look at books while the mothers are shopping, and we have a few toys there.) "Now, sit down, and before we get busy I'm going to tell you about Charlie." I told them just what I have mentioned here. I said it's a clear-out fantasy. And you can sell it to anybody. It is for all ages. I was just so enthusiastic about it; I was so thrilled that I had found out about it. That afternoon I went to a tea out at Claremont that was being given for authors and illustrators of children's books. I believe that was the afternoon I met Maurice Sendak, who has done maybe fifty books for children and illustrated them--very, very famous children's writer. When I got back, the store was closed. The next morning I came to work and the girls met me — they were all excited. They said, "You missed a treat yesterday afternoon. Roald Dahl came in." I looked at them and said, "You don't mean Roald Dahl who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? " And they said, "Yes." And they saw how disappointed I looked, and they said, "Now, don't be too disappointed, because he's coming back in about ten days. We have more books on order. They should be in in ten days, and he will come back and autograph them." And they said, "We have an autographed copy for you from him, because we told him how enthusiastic you were about the book." Well, the first thought that entered my mind was, what if I hadn't read that book the night before and told the girls about it the next day? He would have come in asked for the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and they wouldn't have known a thing about it. If there's anything an author doesn't like, it's when you don't know about his book. He probably would never have come back; we probably would have never gotten to know him. He did come back in about ten days, and he had two of his little children with him. He and his wife, Patricia Neal, had come over here and rented a house in Pacific Palisades because she was going to be in a movie. (Do you remember? Was it The Women, or some such title?) And so, of course, he brought his whole family. And there was a little nursemaid that brought the youngest, the baby, in that day. We went upstairs; I wanted him to meet Bob. And Lillian Hellman was in the book department. He rushed up to her, and greeted her, and introduced her to me. And then we were talking, and I said, "How long have you known Roald Dahl?" "Oh," she says, "I've known him a long time." She said, "In fact, he and his wife met in my home . "

JACKSON: Oh.

B. CAMPBELL: So that was interesting. And then, of course, I introduced him to Bob. Two days later, I was on my way home from Trancas Restaurant, where I'd given a program--you know, that's north way up the beach?

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Larry Powell lived up that way. If you were ever at Larry's house, he was just beyond Trancas Restaurant. I had the radio on listening to the news, and I heard that Patricia Neal was stricken by a stroke and was in the UCLA Medical Center. Well, from that time on, Roald Dahl was in our store, I suppose, an average of twice a week. We had a firsthand report about Patricia Neal all the time that she was there. He came in to pick up copies of his book to give to nurses and doctors up there. I remember the first time that he told me that she had squeezed his hand a little bit and how encouraged he was. Well, you know the outcome. She was there for about a month and received such wonderful care. Roald Dahl has highest praise for the UCLA Medical Center, and I don't blame him, because many of the doctors at that time felt that she would just be a vegetable the rest of her life. However, she did gain strength enough to go back to their home in Pacific Palisades. He was having quite a time, because the friend they had brought over from England to get their meals for them didn't know much about cooking. [laughter] In the meantime, he had met Mildred Knopf, who has written a number of cookbooks: Cook, My Darling Daughter and Perfect Hostess Cookbook. The Knopfs, Mildred and her husband, Eddie, live up in Mandeville Canyon--not too far from where the Willsons live. Well, anyway, Mr. Dahl got Mildred Knopf to come over and give their friend cooking lessons. [laughter] Well, I said, "I'll relieve you one night." And so I went to Colonel Sanders and got fried chicken and cabbage slaw and mashed potatoes and gravy and biscuits and took them out and had dinner with them. At that time, Patricia Neal was walking around; one leg had a brace on it, but she managed to get around with care. And I was so tickled- they didn't take the chicken and the salad and things out of the cartons, they just put them right in the center of the table and dished them up from there, which showed what down-to-earth people they were.

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Patricia Neal at that time was having a very difficult time talking. She couldn't think of the words she wanted to use. She was very frustrated and would get out of patience because she couldn't think of the words, but he would help her. Just before they went back to England, they both came in the store to tell us good-bye. And we've corresponded ever since.

JACKSON: Oh, how nice.

B. CAMPBELL: He had already written several adult books which had gone out of print, I believe. They were brought back into print. I don't know whether they're out now in paperback or not. But they are entirely different than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And if I would have read any of those beforehand, I would have wondered how he could ever write Charlie for children. [laughter] Anyway, you know that she has had a complete recovery.

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: And [she] has been in several movies.

JACKSON: I saw her on television last night.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, did you?

JACKSON: A commercial.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. She does a commercial for — is it for coffee or something?

R. CAMPBELL: She's going to have [a movie] on a Saturday night, too, soon. She was just signed for that.

JACKSON: It's coffee, I think.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. And there's another movie coming up in November. I read about it this past week — that she's going to be on a special again.

JACKSON: Good.

B. CAMPBELL: Every time they come to Los Angeles, they come in to see us . And so I have their signatures in the book a number of times.

JACKSON: Oh, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: He came in one time after Christmas, and we were out of his book. And he was fit to be tied. To think that we didn't have any copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! I said, "But, Mr. Dahl , you should be happy because your books have sold. Look at all the books we have here that haven't been sold." [laughter] Well, he was going to be here a week. And I wanted to have autographed copies. So I called New York. And I made it very specific that I had to have them right away. "You've got to get them in the mail right now. ..."

R. CAMPBELL: Whom did you talk to there?

B. CAMPBELL: He told me to talk to a Miss Fowler. I don't remember whether I talked with her or not, whether she was in.

R. CAMPBELL: I don't think so.

B. CAMPBELL: No. I don't remember whom I talked with. But anyway, those books came in in five days . That is practically a record. Now, that was back in 1966, about eight years ago. Now if books come in within a month, we're happy.

JACKSON: Oh.

B. CAMPBELL: But in those days, we could still get them in good time . He autographed the hundred copies that I ordered. [tape recorder turned off] And then he wrote in my celebrity book, "To Blanche Campbell, the terror of the publishers. With warmest wishes from Roald Dahl . " Because I had insisted that those books get here, he called me the "terror of the publishers." A few months later, Mr. Knopf, Alfred Knopf, came in. Now, we've known Mr. Knopf for years; he was the publisher of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I said, "Look. I want you to see what your author wrote in my celebrity book." So I showed it to him. He wrote under it: "Like hell she is--says this gentleman's publisher," and signed his name, Alfred Knopf. I have a lot more signatures in here of Roald Dahl . One day, he called and said he was just going to be here a few days and he wasn't sure whether he could get out or not. I said, "Oh, come if you possibly can." He said, "I will." And he did. Patricia Neal came with him and also Robert Sherman, who did the music for the movie, [Willy Wonka] and the Chocolate Factory. He signed in then, "To Blanche, my old chum and best seller. Love, Roald Dahl." Patricia Neal signed, "My dear Blanche, I agree. Patricia Neal Dahl." And Robert Sherman signed it--this is all on the same page--"To Blanche Campbell, ditto. Supercalifragilistic escipaliodious." [laughter] I never can say that, can you? ["Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious " is from the Walt Disney film version of Mary Poppins . [ed.]]

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: But you remember what it was.

JACKSON: Oh, Mary Poppins.

B. CAMPBELL: In the song. Yes, it's from Mary Poppins. Anyway, it has been a lot of fun knowing the Dahls. There is a book out now called Pat and Roald; it tells all about all of their tragedies and about how she gives him full credit for her recovery. He just made her do things that she didn't feel she could do, and he just insisted on it. He had neighbors come in. They were there all day long. They took turns coming in and talking to her, and they just kept her going until they almost wore her out. But she now lives a normal life.

JACKSON: That's great.

B. CAMPBELL: He hasn't been here for a long time. I think he likes his home just outside of London and hates to leave there. In 1972 he wrote a sequel to Charlie called Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, but it was not as popular as the original Charlie. Now, Bennett Cerf was another very good friend of ours. He started his Random House publishing company about the same time that we started our bookstore. Of course, he's made a lot more money than we have, as you know. [laughter] He became very well known on "What's My Line," and we always got a big kick out of watching him.

R. CAMPBELL: I remember — she's talking about the money he made. He sold Random House because he reached a point where if he died most of it would go in taxes.

B. CAMPBELL: He signed in my celebrity book one day. I wasn't there. So he drew a picture of me, of just my face, and under it he put "Mrs. Campbell" so that anybody would know that's who it was. And then he signed, "Picasso Cerf in his bluest period." [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: Blue ink on that, undoubtedly.

B. CAMPBELL: That was on April 22, 1967. And I prize that. When Bennett died, we could hardly believe it, because it, because it seemed like he would go on forever. And, incidentally, whenever we went back to New York, we would always go to see "What's My Line" and have front row seats. Then we'd go backstage afterwards and meet the people that were on the program and panel.

JACKSON: I recall that when he was here he came up to UCLA and sold books behind the counter to show the others up there how you do it.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. [laughter] Oh, he was quite a guy.

JACKSON: Ralph Stilwell had him there, and the salespeople were around.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, he spoke there at an assembly. I suppose it was in Royce Hall.

JACKSON: Royce Hall, I guess.

B. CAMPBELL: He was an excellent speaker.

JACKSON: Well, we went to hear him once at the Beverly Hills Hotel. You were there.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, it was a Rotary Ann luncheon. The Rotary Anns had me get authors to come and speak. And at one of their meetings I had told them that I thought I was going to get Kay Spreckels, Clark Gable's wife.

R. CAMPBELL: This was after Clark had died.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and she had written a book about him. Well, then, her doctor told her that she had to stop making appearances, and so that was called off. And so the Rotary Anns thought I just wasn't as good as I thought I was--to get a big name author there. I remembered that we'd had a letter from Bennett, and he said he was coming out to the Coast sometime the next few months. So I went to the phone to call him. The Rotary Ann meeting that day was at Mildred and Al Campbell's. First I called Bob at the store to get Bennett's home phone number and the Random House phone number in New York City. It was along about two o'clock in the afternoon, maybe later than that, and of course three hours' difference in time meant that he might not be at the office. Anyway, I dialed his home. He answered the phone. I told him what I wanted: could he come out and speak to the Rotary Anns? He said, "Yes, I am coming. Yeah, maybe I can." And so he said, "I'll call you back on it." I said, "Now, Bennett, I want you to understand that there's no money in this." He said, "Oh, that's all right. I'll do it for you. I'll take it out in trade." [laughter] So I went back into the meeting and told them that and had a lot of volunteers to help me pay the bill!

JACKSON: Oh, that's cute.

B. CAMPBELL: And he did come out. We had the luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And you were there that day.

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: We got a lot of pictures. And you know all those mirrors there at the back of the Crystal Room?

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, Thelner Hoover took the pictures.

JACKSON: Undoubtedly.

B. CAMPBELL: And he got some pictures where one person is in the picture two or three times because of the mirrors. They were terrific. That was an exciting day. And then that night was the Affiliate banquet, do you remember? And I was president of the Affiliates. . . .

JACKSON: Oh, yes, down at the California Club.

B. CAMPBELL: I told about this.

JACKSON: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: I may have told this about Bennett, too.

JACKSON: No, you didn't.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, then that's all right. Anyway it was a big day for me because we had to pick up his wife, Phyllis, and him at the airport and go to the luncheon. We wanted them to stay for the Affiliate banquet but they couldn't. And I had to preside at the banquet that night. Ninon is Wilbur Smith's wife. Wilbur is in the Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library.

JACKSON: This is her pen name?

B. CAMPBELL: Ninon is her pen name — well, that may be her real first name, I'm not sure. But that's what she writes and draws under, and her artwork is beautiful. They live not far from the Village, and so she came in many times, and we got to know her very well. One of the books that is so great is her ABC of Cars and Trucks. [Anne] Alexander wrote it, and she illustrated it in color. There's a car or a truck for every letter of the alphabet. And do little boys like that!

JACKSON: Oh, I guess.

B. CAMPBELL: I remember reading that to my grandson, number three, Scott Tolstad — who's now a senior in high school. He was about two, I think. Oh! Did he love that book, just wanted it read to him over and over. It has now come out in paperback. So it's been one of the most popular books we have. And then two other books that she illustrated are also available: The Very Little Girl and The Very Little Boy. They are just darling books, and they now have come out in paperback, too. Ray Bradbury lives over in Cheviot Hills. He's been on campus, I'm sure many times, speaking. He had four daughters. He used to come in almost every Saturday, and with his four girls, come down into the children's department. They'd browse around, and he would sit patiently while they looked at books. I thought that was such a wonderful thing for him to do. So, of course, we got to know him and he's in my celebrity book time and time again.

R. CAMPBELL: Of course, we handed him some nice adult books as he was going down so he'd have something to read. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: But you know that Ray Bradbury doesn't drive a car; he rides his bicycle everywhere he goes. I suppose he rode his bicycle to the Village. Maybe the girls all had bicycles, too.

R. CAMPBELL: He lived near the Village then.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, now, another person that was at UCLA is Sid Fleischman--he taught up there. His first book, Mr. Mysterious & Company, is a very good book about a magician and his family driving across country from the east to the west and putting on magic shows in the towns where they stopped. Sid himself is a magician. He goes out to schools and entertains children with his magic. And he is absolutely fabulous. I've tried to figure out how he does some of the things, but I can't. He's too much for me, I'll tell you. He's written some more children's books, quite a number of them, and is devoting most of his time now to writing children's books and movie scripts. He's very busy. I don't know whether you remember Harriett Weaver or not .

JACKSON: Oh, yes, Petie Weaver.

B. CAMPBELL: Petie Weaver. Petie worked for us down at the old campus. After she graduated from UCLA, she went to work for the National Parks system and became the first lady ranger. She had some very interesting experiences there. And she has written about a half- dozen books. A couple of them are used in the California schools. We've been very proud of her as one of our "alum" employees. One of her first books was There Stand the Giants. This is about the redwood trees, yes, beautifully done. She was with the Park Service for twenty years. Then she went to work for Lane Publishing Company, and I think she may still be doing some editorial work for them. She brought out a book called Frosty, A Raccoon to Remember. This is a true story about a baby raccoon that a little boy found in the park. A tree had fallen and killed the mother and the other babies, and this little baby raccoon was still living. Petie estimated it was about a month old. He brought this to her and said. Would she take care of it? And she fed it; she had to feed it originally with an eyedropper, I think, every two hours. This book is about the devilment that little raccoon got into. He could outwit her all the time. It was just too funny for words. She'd think she had things under control, and first thing we knew, that raccoon had gotten her into more trouble. It lived with her for, I believe, several years. And then one day it disappeared and went out and met its own. She has never seen it since--it never came back. But it was ready to go and live with its own people. She had some very, very interesting times with that raccoon. Well, let's see if there's anybody else. I think that kind of winds up the ones in my celebrity book that have anything to do with UCLA.

JACKSON: Well, later you will be doing the others in a different interview.

B. CAMPBELL: I have a lot of others that are extremely interesting, like Don Freeman and Bill Peet.

JACKSON: Oh, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Bill, you know, was at the Friends of the Library meeting the night that they honored us here a couple of months ago. He was sitting back to back with Jack Smith, and they got to reminiscing.

JACKSON: Oh, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Did you see Jack's column that he wrote about Bill Peet?

JACKSON: I think I read that, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Jack became very nostalgic, being on the UCLA campus and seeing all these friends and everything. And it turned out that he had never attended UCLA. [laughter] And the same way with Bill Peet. They went over all these nostalgic recollections of things that they had never, never even experienced.

R. CAMPBELL: They were back in New York. They never were there, either.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, Jack Smith told about living in New York City and all the things they did there, and then at the end he said he'd never lived in New York City. [laughter]

JACKSON: Oh, my. Well, thank you, Blanche; that was really lovely. Bob, let's switch over to you now. You have people that we thought you should talk about: Dr. Moore, Jackie Robinson, and so on. Why don't you begin with Dr. Moore?

R. CAMPBELL: All right.

JACKSON: Tell us your recollections of him.

R. CAMPBELL: We rented our storeroom in 1924, while they were . . . [gap in tape] getting the store fixtures built and installed I made the rounds on the campus faculty to see what books they were going to use in their classes. I bought a catalog of courses, and I noticed that Dr. Moore, who was the director, taught a class in psychology. Psychology X. So I went in to see him, to see what book he used. I found him a nice person; he seemed friendly and interesting. He told me the title of the book he used; but he said that he didn't think we'd sell very many, because all the fraternities and sororities and the rooming houses around seemed to supply them all. The student store didn't seem to sell many new ones. He said that he hoped we would have some luck and sell some--I took his word for it. But in a few weeks, when school was ending, the students brought them in to sell. There 'd been no place they could sell them before, and so they just left them at the houses. We bought over a hundred of them; and, of course, we hoped they would sell. And they did sell that fall--we sold out of them. After school started, Dr. Moore dropped by to see how we were doing and seemed quite pleased that we had done very well. He said, "That is good. That gives the students a chance to sell their books." I thought that was very good, and I told him that they had sold a lot of them and bought a lot of them. In the spring, he said, "But I expect that many of them will spend the money unwisely and spend it on picture shows or on something to eat." And I laughed and said that I'd never checked on that at Nebraska where I'd been, but that we had issued due bills which they could use to buy merchandise in our store. I said that about 25 percent of the books that the students sold to us were paid for with due bills in the summer, and in the fall at least 40 percent were due bills. They could turn them in on other books, or they could keep them till the next semester. And he said, "Well, that's very good. I guess the students are smarter than I thought they were." [laughter] He had attended the University of Chicago, where he received his MA and his PhD degrees before teaching in Berkeley. He was chosen as superintendent of Los Angeles schools in 1906 and served for four years, when he took a position with Yale as professor of education. I don't know if he ever had any trouble here when he was superintendent of schools, but most superintendents do have a little trouble of some kind--he probably did. . . . Then he went from Yale to Harvard in the same position and was professor there for four years. And in 1917 he came to Los Angeles and was president of the State Normal School . He and Regent [Edward A.] Dickson started a movement to make it part of the university and succeeded in 1919. Dr. Moore became the provost of the Southern Branch, and the normal school just went out of existence--but it was still a typical normal school, with about 80 percent girls and 20 percent men. That soon changed. He served there for seventeen years and then taught for five more. During that period the school grew very greatly, and in 1926 I heard a rumor they were going to move, that they were looking around for a bigger site. So I went over to see Dr. Moore about it. He said, "Oh, no. Columbia University has the largest enrollment. They have about 10,000 students, and they're on just a few acres like we are." He said, "We'll never reach 10,000 students; there'll be no reason to move." But we did. That was in the fall of 1929. We bought a lot across the street from the new Westwood campus, built on it, and just got it done before the university moved. And we found out we were not going to buy and sell books like we had on the Vermont campus. At Vermont we were right across the street, and we had a better store than the Co-op--they had a long narrow one which had been a garage where cars parked, and they had just knocked out all the walls. They had a long narrow store; it was hard to do business very well in there. We had done extremely well at Vermont and had picked up all the increase — there was an increase of about 1,000 students per year. In the fourth there was practically no increase, and we went ahead, again, another 20 percent, which meant that the Co-op had lost a lot of business. So at that time they started in trying to figure out what to do about it. And they started to buy books. Their machines weren't fixed to give you more on the due bills, so they started paying 50 percent right away in cash. So we had to go up to that point, too. When we moved to Westwood, we found that there was just no way that our sales of books and supplies could be anywhere near as good as they had been on Vermont Avenue. We were rather desperate; we had bought the ground and built the building and owed for almost all of it. We finally got Janss [Corporation] to sell the building, and we took a lease on it for several years. But it was very much of a struggle, and it went on that way for some time. We got kind of used to it. The banks were good, and they loaned us money; and the publishers took notes for what we owed them. We would pay them all a little all the time. We struggled along and eventually got out of debt. Now, to get back to Dr. Moore — he did a fine job running the school but had the usual amount of problems with the students. One time, four students were expelled by Dr. Moore for wanting to have a forum to argue politics and other things. He got all excited and [said] that they were turning the school over to Communists. This got all the kids excited, and they had meetings about it. Dr. Sproul came down from Berkeley to see what was going on and get it straightened out. He heard them all and said that the four of them were not Communists and that they were guilty only of refusing to obey some of Dr. Moore's edicts. [He said that] they had been punished enough, so they could come back--that was at the end of the first week. But Celeste Strack was a Communist, and she wasn't reinstated for about two months. She had been at SC the year before. When they found out what she was, they didn't want to expel her and make a lot of fuss, so they just let her stay through the semester. Then she came over that fall and enrolled in UCLA and neglected to tell anybody she was a Communist. Dr. Moore retired soon after this affair, after the expulsion of the students. It was the time that he should have retired, and they didn't let him stay on like they do occasionally. He then taught for five more years and lived near the campus for a long time. His wife died, and he married Kate Gordon, who was in the psychology department. It was a happy marriage for both of them. They lived near the campus until his death. Now I'll tell you about Jackie Robinson. I first saw Jackie Robinson the year before he came to UCLA, 1938. Babe Horrell, the UCLA football coach, asked Mrs. Campbell and me if we would like to go over to Pasadena Friday night and see [Jackie] play. He was going to the Pasadena Junior College then, and I knew very little about him except that he was getting an extra big write-up in the paper nearly every week. We went over and watched him, and he just did everything that anybody playing football wanted to do, and did it right. Babe, on the way home, said, "Would you like to have Jackie come over and play for us?" And I said, "Gee, that would be great. Do you think he would?" And he said he was working on it and hoping. He came to UCLA the next fall in 1939 and Babe brought him in and introduced him. We seemed to hit it off very well and became lifelong friends. He played two years for UCLA, and they were very wonderful years. He won a letter each year, not only in football but also in baseball, basketball, and track. He sometimes found it difficult to participate in all of them, but track was the hardest because he had to be in Berkeley with the baseball team when they were having a track meet down here. But he did make many of them. He broke two records in track--one in the long jump and one in the hop, skip, and jump. (They have fancier names for them now--I don't know what they call them.) Sometimes they'd be playing baseball and having a track meet, and he would go over when he wasn't up at bat and make the high jump or the hop, skip, and jump.

JACKSON: Broad jump.

R. CAMPBELL: Broad jump. Once in a while he'd have to come back to make the two of them. He had the record for average [yards per carry, twelve yards] in football in the Pacific Coast Conference, and the highest punt return [average], twenty-one yards. In basketball he led the league in average points scored; in baseball he broke several records, including most hits and stolen bases, and always played a perfect game on defense. I saw him pitch part of one game. It had started to rain in the top half of the fourth inning. Cal was way ahead, and UCLA was trying to keep the game going so that they wouldn't complete five innings and make it a game. UCLA did not score in the last half of the fourth inning. Cal came to bat in the first half of the fifth. UCLA had a little consultation and Jackie went in to pitch. He pitched high and outside to them so they couldn't possibly hit them; the catcher couldn't catch them, and he took his time about going to the backstop to get the ball. And they couldn't be called strikes, so they got walks. Cal protested against it, and the umpire said there was nothing they could do about it, that Cal had swung at everything in the top half of the fourth inning to hasten the game. They couldn't do anything to make him pitch better to them. Finally, it got to raining so hard that they called the game off and started over again the next day with a doubleheader . Jackie gave everyone plenty of thrills every football game, and of course the same applied to baseball and basketball and track. Wilbur Johns coached the basketball [team] , and he told me that Jackie was a very willing worker but that he was trying to do too much and he skipped basketball practice. He called him in and laid down the law to him. He said that if he was going to play basketball, he'd have to make every practice. So Jackie did make every practice and went on and played basketball. That was in the days when they didn't have to get the ball across the center line in ten seconds. We had some very exciting games [whose scores] came out about 19 to 20 and 21 to 22 or 24 to 20. But they were very dull to watch because [the teams] didn't make any effort to take the ball down court.

JACKSON: Well, you remember. Bob, those were the days when the ball went back to the center after every basket and they jumped center again. That slowed it way down.

R. CAMPBELL: Slowed it way down a lot--if you were ahead you would hold it and not throw and not shoot. You didn't even have to pass the ball--you could just sit there and hold it. I remember one time seeing somebody--it might have been Jackie — sitting there on the floor reading a newspaper. But they have gotten over that now. Everything goes much faster. Then the war came along. Jackie enlisted and was sent to the army depot at Leavenworth, Kansas. He took an officers' training [course] and won a commission in cavalry, where he served for three years. He got in trouble for refusing to sit in the back of the buses like the Negroes were supposed to do. They arrested him and told him not to do it again. Jackie said that he would take a seat in the front whenever there was one available, that it was his right to do so. They had a long talk about it. They didn't come to any different understanding, but they let him go out again and he did it over again. They had quite a time, but the war ended and he came back home. I was sick at home one day with kind of a cold and heard the doorbell ring, and there stood Jackie. We greeted each other with big hugs, and I invited him to come in. We talked about what he was going to do. He said he was going to play baseball with a black team in Kansas City. I couldn't think of anything better for him to do . I talked about him coming back and getting his degree. And he said he'd been up to school and had seen Wilbur Johns. Wilbur had said that he should have his degree and [asked] what would it take to get him to do that. [Jackie said he had] told Wilbur that he was going to get married and it would be very difficult to [support] a wife and him, and he thought he'd better just drop out of school. Wilbur told him he'd get his wife a job, but Jackie didn't want to have her work. I asked him whom he was going to marry. He said Rachel Isum, who had been at UCLA and had graduated in nursing, a two-year course. I asked him where she was right then, and he said, "Well, she's outside in my car." And I said, "Well, gee whiz, you should've had her up here because we've been talking for an hour." He said that was all right. He had told her that he was going to be gone, talking for quite a while, and she was used to it . I said, "Well, I want to go down and meet her." So I went down and met her; she was a very nice woman, very good-looking--and still is. He also told me that he was going to play golf. So I said, "Well, do you have any clubs?" And he said, "No, I haven't." I said, "Well, I've got two sets, my father's and my own." I said, "They're not much. But you look at them and take the ones you want." So he looked them over, and they were both just about one equal to the other. They were typical (from Osceola, Nebraska) sets of clubs-- four clubs each. So he took mine--I said that I probably should keep my Dad's. About two weeks later, a man was over who told me that he had been playing with Jackie and that he'd started to show him how to swing clubs. He said that he had the natural instinct of an athlete who knew just when to put the extra "oomph" in the swing. He shot ninety-nine on his third day, and he soon had it down in in the low eighties. He said, "Don't worry about Jackie. What he wants to do--he wants to get some more clubs. He would like a couple of fillers." He said that sometimes the clubs just aren't right for the distance. So he bought the two other clubs and went on to be a very good golfer. He was already a good tennis man, good at anything that he tried in athletics. Well, Jackie married Rachel, and Blanche and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Babe Horrell, and Mr. and Mrs. Valentine (that's Joe), and Mr. and Mrs. Bill Ackerman, and Mr. and Mrs. Sturzenneger ("Sturzy") attended the wedding. There were probably some other people from UCLA, like Wilbur Johns, but I don't remember them. It was a very large black church on Central Avenue. The place was packed. Jackie came in at the first and stood down in front. He looked terribly nervous and was fidgeting around all the time . Then, when "Here Comes the Bride" started to play, he smiled. He kept trying not to look around the left at the back where Rachel would be coming in. He just looked around a little further all the time until he finally turned his head around so he could see the entrance. She wasn't out yet. the bridesmaids were coming, and then very soon here came Rachel. And then he really smiled. [laughter] It was a lovely wedding. Jackie was playing baseball in Kansas City at that time on the black team. He soon had a call from Branch Rickey saying that he was going to break the color line in baseball the next season and he was going to send Clyde Sukeforth out to see him. Clyde was a scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sukeforth came out and talked with Jackie, and then took him to the Brooklyn office to see Rickey .

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 11, 1974

R. CAMPBELL: Now, I shouldn't have to tell you what took place there, but that was twenty-seven years ago, and many of the people aren't familiar with what happened. He told Jackie, "I want more than a ballplayer, a great ballplayer. I need a man who can fly the flag of his race, but who can turn his other cheek. If I get a firebrand who blows his top and comes up swinging after a collision at second base, it would set the cause back for twenty years." Jackie said, "Mr. Rickey, I know that I can play baseball, but you'll have to decide this for yourself. I think I can play in the minors, or I can play in the majors I'll keep my head and tongue where they belong." Mr. Rickey then put Jackie through several of the cruel things that he would be called, and Jackie took them all. Mr. Rickey later signed Jackie to a contract and sent him to Montreal for the 1946 season. They trained down South with the Dodgers. Many trials and tribulations took place, but he managed to keep an even keel. At the opening game in Montreal, Jackie got three hits, including a home run, stole three bases, and played a perfect game, so that they couldn't help but win. The Montreal team and Jackie went on to win the pennant for the season. They played Louisville, Kentucky, for the championship of the minor leagues-- Montreal was in the minor leagues then. Of course, the Montreal team won it, and largely on Jackie's playing, The next year, 1947, Jackie went to Brooklyn and was in the majors. There was lots of trouble, but Branch stuck to his guns and said that he would transfer any members of the squad that were upset about Jackie playing. But none of them took him up. The Dodgers won the league but lost the World Series. Jackie was named Rookie of the Year. He played in five World Series, but they won only one of them. He spent ten years with the Dodgers and left them when they traded him to New York and he refused to go. By that time there were dozens of black players in both leagues, and the color line was really broken for good. Jackie was permitted to talk after the first year. He played every infield and outfield position except pitcher and catcher. His batting average for the ten years was .311. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 — the first black to be selected . I used to see Jackie and Rachel occasionally when I went to New York for meetings of the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association. One of the first things I did after being elected to the presidency of the booksellers was to change the date of the fall meeting so that it coincided with the World Series. The World Series was almost guaranteed to be in the New York City area, because the Yankees were playing and they were winning year after year. One time when I was in New York for the board meeting, the Dodgers and the New York Giants tied for the championship, so they had to play a two-out-of- three [playoff] to see who was really the champion. Each team won one game. I attended the third game with Rachel. The Dodgers were ahead by one run in the last half of the ninth inning. The Giants managed to get two men on base with two out, and the manager decided to change pitchers. He took [Don] Newcombe out and put in [Ralph] Branca. He threw a high ball, but [Bobby] Thomson of the Giants swung on it anyway and knocked it into the left-field stands for a home run, which won the game and the series. As Rachel and I walked slowly across the diamond after the game, she said, "I feel so sorry for the boys. They had all been counting on the World Series money." A few minutes after that, we were in front of the Dodger dressing room, waiting for Jackie. He came out and said, "Well, we let the Brooklyn fans down." We laughed a little weak laugh and told him what Rachel had said. He said, "Yeah, that's true, but they have no business counting on it until the season is over and the pennant is cinched." Leo Durocher was managing the Giants that year. I got four tickets for the World Series from Daniel F. Rice, whose firm is on the New York and Chicago grain exchange. His son was working for us and going to UCLA at that time. The tickets were right behind the Giant dugout, and I saw Laraine Day, who was then the wife of Leo Durocher, and Gail Patrick Velde (she has recently acquired the name of Velde, and has a very nice husband) was with her. Laraine and Gail knew everybody, so they were pointing out the people to us . I had with me Leah Zollinger, who was a friend of our daughter Clarice — [they had met at] Utah State. She was in New York going to summer school and had decided to stay through the winter, so we went to the game. We asked Laraine and Gail who this was and that was, and they pointed out all the notables. They saw General MacArthur with another general, and at almost the same instant we saw Margaret Truman, who was in the middle of the park. This was very shortly after President Truman had recalled the general from Japan for refusal to obey orders. We wondered whether the general saw Margaret, or Margaret saw the general, but we never found out. My other two tickets went to Stu Woodruff, who had been selling us books for Doubleday and Company for years. Stu now lives out here and has a co partnership in Raymar, a large book-distribution organization in Monrovia. The Sunday before that, Brooklyn had played in Philadelphia. [It was] the last game of the season, and if they won, they were tied with New York for the league. I had no radio in my hotel room, but Stu did have one, and he would call me every few minutes when something happened. Jackie made an error in the eighth inning and let Philadelphia get the go-ahead run, but he knocked in a run in the ninth, so it was tied at the end of the ninth. They went on into the fifteenth inning, when Jackie got a home run. It eventually won the game and the right to play [the] New York Giants for the championship of the league. I've already told about these games. [tape recorder turned off] Jackie and I used to talk about the troubles he had. For one thing, his own people in St. Louis brought on much of his troubles. They would run excursion trains from the South into St. Louis every Sunday that Jackie was playing. The minute Jackie got a hit or made a fine play, the blacks would turn around to the whites and taunt them, and they would say things like, "How do you like that, Whitey; how do you like it?" And there were fights nearly every week that they were there. Mr. Rickey tried to get St. Louis to do something about it, but they weren't interested, so it went on all the time that he was playing. Another thing that bothered Jackie after he was a star was the restaurants saying, "Good evening, Mr. Robinson. Your table is ready," when half a hundred people were waiting and he hadn't made any reservations. One time we went to Lindy's Restaurant, and they gave him the glad hand and said, "Your table is ready," and seated him. As we sat down, Jackie said, "Now, if I was just Joe Doakes, an ordinary guy, instead of a big-league ballplayer, they wouldn't know me. They would tell me that I could be served, but I'd have to wait, and it probably would be hours. " After Jackie retired, he took a job as vice-president of Chock Full o' Nuts, a large restaurant chain. He had been there about six months when we first saw him, and he really had learned a lot. He was in charge of personnel, and as such he had to interview people who cheated the firm. The thing that got him was that they cried and said they didn't do it; or they had done it, but their child was sick and had to have medication; or it was the first time. And he'd find out that they had done it before and had been fired from other places. He said, "And they looked right at you, looked you right in the eye, and told you these things, and it wasn't true at all." We told him that we knew what he was talking about, that the same thing happened with us. People cheated us, and when they got caught they said they hadn't done it, and when we proved they had, why, it was always the first time. Jackie left Chock Full o' Nuts and formed a big construction company which builds millions of dollars worth of housing for blacks and other minorities. It's a very fine company and doing very well. Rachel and her son David are now running it. Rachel had been very active in the firm for some time, knowing that Jackie was critically ill and that he might pass away at any time. Their son Jackie, Jr., was quite a problem for Jackie and Rachel when he got hung up on drugs. That was in Vietnam. After he got back he was arrested and took the cure, but he went back right away and was again sent to take a cure. They finally got him into the fine Daytop House, and he did get cured. He was working on a big benefit for the Daytop when he started home from New York City (their home is in Stamford, Connecticut, north of New York City) at 2 A.M. and went to sleep behind the wheel of his car, drove into a cement post on the roadway, and was killed. There were many who feel that Jackie Jr . ' s troubles with dope had been very hard on Jackie Sr., and contributed to his death. Jackie himself said that it was his fault, as he had spent too much time with other people's kids and not enough with his own. Jackie died of a heart attack, October 23, 1972. I flew to New York for his services. They were held at the Riverside Church at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive--a very beautiful church, seating 2,500 people. Thousands more watched the affair from the outside. I had a telegram from Rachel telling me to report to the Union Theological Seminary across the street from the church. I went there and presented my telegram, and they gave me my ticket for the church--a plain blue card, three by four inches. I never had to use it. It was very early when I got there, but there were many people already there. They told me that coffee was being served upstairs. I went up and got a cup of coffee and started looking for a place to sit down. I saw a table where a nice-looking black man was starting to sit down, and I asked him if I might sit there, too. He said, "Certainly, I'm glad to have company. I'm Reverend Covington, from Jackie's old Brooklyn church." I introduced myself and told him I'd flown in from Los Angeles the night before and was going back that night. We spoke for about half an hour before it was time to get lined up to go into the church. He told me that Jackie was at his church the day before he died, that he brought a load of meat, food of all kinds for the poor people of the church, and that he did this quite regularly. He also told me that Jackie kept him supplied with new suits. Whenever one started to look at all bad and Jackie discovered it, he got him a new suit. He said that, actually, Jackie could find flaws in them that he couldn't see. He said that Jackie would be missed badly by all of New York and vicinity. Jackie had so many friends. Reverend Covington gave one part of the memorial service, so he left with the first ones to go into the church. The service was excellent, except it was sad. In an hour and a half it was over, and the family and the procession left the church for the cemetery. I finally got a cab and invited two men who also ran for the same cab to join me. I'd seen them at the services. One of them turned out to be the president of the New York Urban League. We talked all the way back about Jackie and what a fine person he was. We were all glad that he didn't suffer longer, but we were sorry he had to go so young. I went right up to my room and called United Airlines, and made a reservation for Los Angeles at 4 P.M. I packed and came downstairs and got a cab, the driver which looked like a Northern European. He sure could drive but couldn't speak English. He knew United Airlines, Kennedy field, but outside of places like that, he couldn't speak English. I got to United on time and got home about 6 P.M. The plane was an old one, with very little leg space, and I got leg cramps twice and had to get up and walk them out. When I got home I cleaned up, and Blanche and I went to the Bel- Air Hotel to a reunion, as guests of the UCLA class of 1927. I forgot to tell of the trip to New York. We were to leave at four-thirty. I got on the plane, but we didn't start. They finally told us that one of the sets of signals was not working. We finally left about one hour late and arrived in New York at Kennedy Airport at 2 A.M., instead of 1 A.M. I had a nice ride to Brooklyn, to the Barbizon Plaza--it used to be a fine hotel, but I found that it had slipped terribly. I couldn't get to sleep until four-thirty because of the noise, just plain old noise. I woke up at seven and started to take a shower but couldn't get any hot water, so I called the office. They had repaired some of the water pipes during the night, and there would be warm water in two hours, but that was too late for me. So I took a cold shower and started a busy day. I went to the dining room, and no one came to serve me. I finally went to the hostess and said that I was going to a funeral and I had to get there--it wouldn't wait — and that I really needed some service. She said she would get someone for me, and someone came right away and took my order. But it took fifteen minutes to get prunes and oatmeal and coffee. I ate it too rapidly and then waited for someone to come and take my money. I finally persuaded the hostess that she could take the money, and I left for the Riverside Church. Jackie was born in Cairo, Georgia, January 31, 1919. His father disappeared shortly after Jackie was born. Jackie's mother, Mallie, took her family of six and headed for Pasadena. She worked very hard to support the family and got them all raised the educated. Jackie's brother Mac was a track star at the University of Oregon. He came in second behind Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. We met Mallie at the first football banquet after Jackie enrolled at UCLA. She was a very nice person, and we liked her from the start. She came every year and sat with us at the banquet. Sometimes Jackie's sister, Willie Mae Walker, came. Both of them were back at UCLA when Jackie was named UCLA Alumnus of the Year in 1962, and they were also back when Jackie was grand marshal for the homecoming parade. We never learned until Mallie died that she had taken care of a crippled son for one of Jackie's brothers, from shortly after his birth until she died. He had a disease that left him paralyzed and completely helpless. Mallie died about seven years ago, and the crippled son was then twenty-one years old. So Mrs. Robinson has taken care of him for that length of time. She was very active in church work in Pasadena, and at her funeral the minister reminded the people there, all black but three of us, that if they would follow Mallie 's example and work hard, they could get by without getting all of the super help that everyone was asking for. When Jackie was playing, if he couldn't get control of himself after he came home from the game, Rachel would try to straighten him out. But if she couldn't get him straightened out and he would say he was gonna quit, she'd get Mallie on the phone, and Mallie always got Jackie straightened out. He did have some very tough times, and it was very remarkable that he did come through like he did. But it was a three-team affair; he and Rachel and Mallie were the ones that got him through. Knowing Jackie and Rachel and Mallie Robinson has been one of the highlights of my life, and of Blanche's as well. Watching Jackie perform on the baseball field, and off as well, was very inspiring. As Jackie got older, he took on greater tasks in the racial issues, always attacking these things in terms no one could honestly refute, although some did refute them in words that didn't stand up. It bothered him greatly that some people, black or white, would say that the blacks were advancing too fast. Until his death he kept on trying to help blacks get their respect and keep it. One thing that bothered him greatly was that no black was ever made a manager of a baseball team in the major leagues. And he had not won the fight for that at his death. He believed that there were several blacks capable of managing teams and never hesitated to tell the owners so. He had a falling-out with the Dodger management over that very thing. Things are a lot better since Jackie broke the color line in baseball, but there's still a long way to go. I have neglected Rachel Robinson, badly. She is a very fine person. She went on to college when the kids were grown up, and then taught at the Yale University medical psychology department. She worked with Jackie in many of his efforts in business and in social work. She was exactly the kind of a wife that Jackie needed, and she looked after him and kept him from going mad at the things that were being said to him and about him and about the rest of his family. She was a great, great lady and just the right wife for Jackie Robinson. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: And now, Bob, I wonder if you'd tell us the story of Dr. Milo Brooks.

R. CAMPBELL: Dr. Brooks and his wife, Eva, are two of the many fine persons who have been connected with UCLA. On Thursday, May 25, 1972, the Westwood Village Rotary Club gave a "This Is Your Life, Milo Brooks" program, honoring him. [The text of this report is included as an appendix to the manuscript.] Milo has had such a prominent part in the lives of so many people that I will supplement the program rather extensively — not necessarily in order, but as I recall it. I first knew Milo well when he joined the Rotary Club of Westwood Village on March 25, 1943. He had been on the board of the Boy Scouts for seven years. Gordon Chapman, who was the pastor of the Westwood Community Methodist Church, had just been made chairman of the Westside Coordinating Council and asked Milo to become assistant chairman and Milo said okay. The most important thing that Reverend Chapman wanted was to start a YMCA that would reach the many youngsters on the west side of town. Later on to get it going, Milo and the late Dr. C.A. Elliot, the late B. Frank Redman, the late Claude Wayne, all Rotarians, and the late Dr. Hugh McLean got together and bought two lots, one block west of Westwood Boulevard on Santa Monica Boulevard. The five of them borrowed the money to buy the lots and deeded them to the Y, then started raising money for the building. It was tough going, but they kept on. At the same time, a west area youth center committee had been raising money to build a youth center behind the University Religious Conference on the north side of Le Conte Avenue. They had run into difficulty with the zoning department of Los Angeles and started looking for another place, but they could not find a suitable site; they so notified the donors to that effect in a letter dated November 15, 1946, and continued the search. In a letter dated June 20, 1949, the donors of the youth center committee were notified that it was proposed to give the more than $6,000 to the YMCA, and [the letter] asked notification in ten days if a donor did not want this done. Only two wanted their money back, and the amount involved was less than $25. So the money, just over $6,000, was given to the YMCA, and they started building right away. This building was a great help, but it was outgrown twenty years later. So the present family YMCA was built on La Grange Avenue, and it is a wonderful institution. Milo and about one- third of the Rotary Club join in the drive for the yearly budget. Many of the Rotarians take advantage of the physical fitness program and keep in good shape. Milo started his pediatric practice in 1933 with an office in his residence at Mississippi and Overland Avenue in Westwood. He was also teaching pediatrics at Loma Linda University, which was located downtown in the White Memorial Hospital. A year later he moved into an office with Dr. Herb Andrews on the west side of Westwood Boulevard, near Ohio, for two years. He then moved to his own office, across the street on Westwood Boulevard. He stayed there for two more years and then moved into the still larger office at 1033 Gayley Avenue in Westwood Village. Milo stayed there for ten years or more and built up a large practice. Over the years, he had been promoted to professor and then chairman of the pediatric department at Loma Linda, but he found his practice of pediatrics taking more and more of his time and resigned from Loma Linda in 1951 after eighteen years. In 1956, he took in a fine young partner, Les Holve, to help him with his work. Milo saw a number of babies born without a leg or an arm, or both arms or both legs, and wanted to do something about it. After consulting with Dr. John Adams, Sr., chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at UCLA, they decided to open a Child-Amputee Prosthetic Project at UCLA; in 1953, Milo became the director of the project. It has become the best in the world, and visitors from everywhere come here to study and then go back and start a project, or to work in one already established. Dr. Brooks has been called to go to many places around the world and lecture on child-amputee prosthetics. When the project started at UCLA, Milo realized that most parents are shocked and humiliated when a child is born without a limb. They think they are the only ones that ever had it happen. Actually, such children are fairly common around the world, but people keep them hidden. Milo has alerted many doctors to call him when such a child is born, to let him present the child to the parents, tell them what a wonderful opportunity they have, and make them glad they have such a child to raise. But most doctors don't do it; they just let the parents find out for themselves. It's a real shock to most people-- [the doctor] presents the crippled child and they can't help showing [their shock], which upsets the baby, who really needs extra-special help and care and love. Even at one day old, the child recognizes the repulsion of the parents. A few doctors do call Milo--or Yosh Setoguchi, who heads the department now that Milo's retired. Either one, Milo or Yosh, tells the parents that they have an exceptional child, one worthy of their love and affection, that they can make the child happy if they realize that, and that such babies are born in fairly great numbers. But most parents keep still about it [as if] they had never heard of it before. Most parents to whom Milo or Yosh talk about their baby that is born crippled accept it with love and determination--determination that it will have every opportunity to get an arm or a leg or both of them. One man thanked Milo and said, "You held our baby like he was a piece of God." If all persons would take that attitude, the babies would all be happy and go through life with artificial limbs with minimum complaining. Currently, Milo is experimenting with salamanders in hopes of finding a way for humans to grow a new leg when one is lost, like salamanders. They used mice next in hopes that mice and men could eventually regenerate lost limbs. It's a slow process, but someday Milo will learn their secret. Milo and the staff are revising The Limb- Deficient Child. This is a textbook on the care of limb-deficient children. It is based on the experience of the first ten years of the UCLA Child-Amputee Project. This will be published by Charles Thomas, a very large medical publisher. The first edition was published by University of California Press.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 11, 1974

R. CAMPBELL: Milo is working on this revision at the Child-Amputee Project, so that he'll be handy to take over in case Yosh has to go somewhere to lecture about the project work. Milo is just as interested as he ever was, and loves it; and when he gets a chance to take charge, he's very happy in that position. Milo had been chairman of the International Service Committee of Westwood Village Rotary Club from July 1, 1973, to July 1, 1974. This, if done properly, requires meeting and knowing several candidates for Rotary International fellowships and bringing them to our club and to other clubs in the district. Milo did a superb job, with Eva's help. They decided to go to Mexico this last summer and take special summer courses for adults. Milo took two Spanish courses, and Eva took Mexican culture courses, both for six weeks in Guadalajara. They stayed in a private home [Mr. and Mrs. Francisco Camberos] with three maids and good beds. Breakfast was at eight every morning. They got home from classes at twelve o'clock and relaxed until three when dinner was served. They would take a light supper at eight-thirty. Their host was an architect who [designed] the home they lived in. It was a very fine home, one of the best in Guadalajara. The hosts entertained several Mexican and university people. They had a wonderful summer, but they returned to the illnesses of Milo's three sisters, two of whom died of cancer; the third one, Julia Cates, who was part of the "This is Your Life" program two and a half years ago, came down and stayed with the Brookses while she had examinations and then had an operation to replace a blood vessel in her neck. She is okay now. On top of that, Eva turned her ankle, and the knee slipped out of place and made her lame; so she now goes up and down stairs putting her foot on the next step and bringing the injured one either up or down, depending on which way she's going. So Eva and Milo lead a busy life.

JACKSON: Blanche, I think it'd be appropriate at this time if you'd tell more about that trip to Hawaii.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, we had a fantastic trip in October. It was given to us, you remember, by the Westwood Chamber of Commerce the day we retired, May 10, when they had the big celebration in front of the store. They gave us our round-trip tickets and paid for all our hotels, everywhere we went, and then there was enough money left over to pay for our rented car, on all three islands. Well, we wanted to fly to Honolulu, but we couldn't get reservations at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. In fact, we couldn't get reservations, period, in Honolulu, because there was an American Bankers Association convention there at the time that we wanted to go; so we decided to reverse our trip. We flew to Hilo on Western Airlines. Virginia Hull, who owns Bel-Air Travel, Inc., has us booked on another line, and I said, "Oh, we want to fly Western." She said, "Why do you want to fly Western?" And I said, "Because Western advertises lots of leg space, and we know Mr. Arthur Kelly, the president of Western Airlines." "Oh, well," she said, "then I'll get you booked there." So she did. Then she got in touch with some powers-that-be and arranged for us to go to the Horizon Club, which is the private club at Western Airlines, and she also arranged to have a limousine come and pick us up, mind you, and take us to the airport. [laughter] They also picked up Milo and Eva Brooks — who went with us, you remember--and we got out to the airport early and had coffee and visited in the Horizon Club. And that was fun. It's a VIP club--anybody can join, for a fee--but I had never even heard of it before, didn't know it existed. Well, anyway, we got on the plane and were nicely settled when they announced that one of the engines was not working properly and that we would have to get off and take another plane, and I guess we were maybe about an hour late leaving. We flew to Hilo--a delightful flight. At the Hilo airport, we were walking over toward the baggage claim place, and here was this cute young girl--Hawaiian, I guess, or of Japanese origin--calling "Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, Dr. and Mrs. Brooks." So, of course, we walked up to her, and she put leis on all of us, and kissed us, and welcomed us to Hawaii. [The leis] were from the Westwood Chamber of Commerce — can you imagine that? Then we rented a car and drove on to the Volcano House, which is about thirty miles south of Hilo. We had just registered there when this great big ... I guess he was Hawaiian, a dark-skinned fellow, jolly as could be, very vivacious, [wearing] a red shirt, came walking up to us and said, "Welcome to Volcano House. We have a mutual friend, Virginia Hull." She had alerted him that we were coming, and as soon as we registered, why, he was right there to welcome us. And he gave us the red-carpet treatment all the time we were there. At dinner that night, he had a table arranged right at an outside window so we could see the volcanoes steaming--I don't know what it is, vapor or something that comes up from them. We had a delightful stay there overnight. The next morning, we drove to Hilo and went through the Royal Hawaiian macadamia-nut farm. And that was interesting; we took quite a few pictures there and saw orchards and orchards of macadamia trees . Some of the trees were very small, and then some were a little bit larger, and a little bit larger--all sizes. So we'll have macadamia nuts, I think, for quite some time.

JACKSON: Did you go from Hilo to Volcano House and back to Hilo?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, we drove back to Hilo because Bob and Milo wanted to go to Rotary. They went to Rotary there, and that was fun. We drove around the upper part of the big island-- when we were there four years ago, we had driven around the lower part, so we thought it would be interesting to go the upper part. We drove to Kona and registered there at the Kona Hilton. That's a beautiful hotel, about twelve stories high. Every room has a lanai, with bougainvillea vines hanging over the outside. You can just imagine how beautiful that looks from the outside of the hotel. I have pictures, which I'll show you if you want to see them. We had a delightful time there. On Saturday, we went up the hill, about five miles, to see my cousin, Miriam Swain, who is living there. She's eighty years old and just as lively as can be. We took pictures of her house which is an old post office, with the boxes on the front wall of the house. You know the post office boxes, how they look? They're still there. And on the same wall next to the boxes is a great big mural that she and her daughter have painted in bright colors. We didn't stay there too long. because we wanted to drive to Mauna Kea and have lunch at that beautiful Rockefeller hotel. And we did — they have a beautiful buffet luncheon there. We had a marvelous time. We came back to Kona, and Eva and Milo wanted to go out to the boat dock and see the fishing boats come in. A couple of years ago, their daughter Donna and her husband were there and went deep-sea fishing, and Donna caught two tunas. First time she'd ever been [deep-sea fishing], and she brought two tunas in. One was over 150 pounds, and the other was over 160 pounds. We wanted to see where this had happened. We were there for quite a while. It wasn't so successful that day; they didn't bring many fish in. We could see up in the mountains, up toward where my cousin lived, that a storm was brewing--clouds getting blacker and blacker. And then, finally, it started sprinkling a little bit. We said we wondered if we should start up the hill, and my cousin, Miriam Swain, said, "Yes, I think we'd better, because sometimes we have flash floods. Maybe you'd better take me home while the storm is still young," We got up there, and it was just pouring down, just pouring down, almost all the way up there. She wanted us to come in, but she thought it would be safer for us if we went on down the hill. So we did. We got back down to the hotel, and it had almost stopped raining. This was what was so strange about the whole trip, Johnny. It rained some, but we were always in the car, or else inside.

JACKSON: Well, good.

B. CAMPBELL: It was really funny.

JACKSON: Your timing was perfect.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, anyway, we got back to the hotel and got ready for dinner. About a quarter after six, we went over to Milo and Eva's room, which was right next door to ours. Milo was husking, or taking the outer part off of, some macadamia nuts that Miriam, my cousin, had given us. She said we can take the nuts into the mainland if they have that outer husk, or shell, off. He was digging some of those off, showing us how to do it, and the lights went off. It was absolutely pitch black. Eva remembered seeing a candle in one of the drawers, so she went and found the candle, and we had candlelight. I said, "Well, I bet we've got one, too. I'll go over and get ours." She told me where to look, and I felt my way over to our room and then felt all around in the pitch-black room. I felt in all the drawers till I finally found the candle, and then I remembered that we had our transistor radio with us. So I found it--I knew right where it was--went back over, went out on their lanai, and turned the radio on. They were out there watching the storm. There was lightning and thunder, and some rain, but it didn't rain very much. All of Kona was black; I don't think there was a light left in Kona . I turned the radio on, and I got a football game. And Eva said, "It sounds like Fred Hessler." It was Fred Hessler, and we listened to the last eight minutes of the UCLA-Washington State game, where we made a goal- line stand. It was so exciting to listen to that game. And then when they got down on the one-yard line, and UCLA held them--oh, it was really exciting. [The score was] 17-13, a great victory for UCLA. After we had finished listening to the game, we were beginning to get a little bit hungry, and Milo said, "I wonder if that liquor store down on the first floor is open?" (We were on the fifth floor, incidentally.) "They were selling bread and cheese and crackers and things. Maybe we could go down there and get something to eat." Well, he had mentioned Bob going down with him, and Bob doesn't see very well in daylight, let alone pitch black, [laughter] Eva had turned her ankle about a month before we had started on our trip, and had fallen and had hurt her knee, so she had to take one step at a time. It was impossible for her to go down five flights of stairs, so I said, "I'll go with you." So Milo and I felt our way along until we found the stairway; then we went down four steps to a little landing, then turned and went ten steps to another landing, and then turned and went down four steps, and we said, "This is the fourth floor." Then we felt our way along again, and [went down further], "This is the third floor." We finally got down to the first floor, and the liquor store was closed. But we did hear somebody say that they were serving in the coffee shop. We just didn't think about their serving, or calling room service, or anything. By that time, the hotel had put out a lot of candles, and they had parked a car directly in front of the entrance to the hotel, so the light was shining in there. And, of course, over there so many of the hotel lobbies are just open--you don't go through doors; you just walk right in. So we found our way to the coffee shop and asked if we could have some food to take up to our room. "Oh, no," they said. "You'd have to come and eat here." They were serving by candlelight and they had gas stoves, so they still had warm food. We told them about our cripples--that Bob couldn't get down and Eva couldn't get down--and [asked] could we possibly take some food up. We'd carry it up, we said, ourselves. So they said yes, they'd arrange for it. We ordered hot soup and pineapple boats filled with fruit--four of them. And when they finished getting it ready, a young boy brought it out on a tray. He said, "It's against the law for you to carry it up; I'll take it up for you." So he carried that big tray of food up five flights of stairs. [laughter]

JACKSON: In dim light?

B. CAMPBELL: Well by that time they had put a torch at the bottom, and it did shine up the stairwell fairly well, because the stairway was open. You could see it quite well. We ate by candlelight, and I said, "Oh, we ought to have a picture of this." So Milo found his camera in the dark and got it set, and we have pictures of us eating there in the candlelight. And that was fun. Well, the lights didn't come on for two hours. It was an exciting evening. We had gotten over there, Johnny, and we had completely forgotten about anything here at home. We hadn't even thought of the football game, which is bad. [laughter]

JACKSON: That's not like you.

B. CAMPBELL: For us not to think of the football game, and Eva and Milo, too. But we thought, now, this was serendipity, because we wouldn't have heard that football game if it hadn't been for the storm. We didn't know that was going to bring us such pleasure, you see. The next day we drove to the airport early, to fly to Kauai. I was driving the car, and Milo was usually my navigator-- he'd tell me where to turn and so forth. We got there, and Blanche locked the keys in the car. The luggage was still in the trunk, and the keys were inside. Fortunately, we'd gotten there early enough, and I said, "They'll surely have a master key at Hertz rental, here at the airport." They didn't have. We had picked the car up in Hilo, so the other set of keys was back in Hilo, and we were in Kona . Well, they started working on the car-- one window was open about half an inch, and they put a wire down in there and tried to lift up the lock but the head came to a point instead of the usual shape so they just couldn't get it open. Milo tried, and the man from Hertz tried, and finally a man came over and said he'd try. He worked in from the side of the door, and after about forty-five minutes he got the door open. I said, "What is your name and where do you live?" He lived in San Bernardino. Wasn't that a coincidence? He had a block company there, making these great big cement building blocks. In the meantime, they had made a long wire, stuck it in the top of the door, and hooked the keys. They had gotten them out of the switch and had them over there at the window trying to get them out. If they hadn't been able to open the door, we had decided that we would have to break a window in order to get in. We got on our plane all right, in plenty of time, and were nicely settled, when the stewardess announced that we had a flat tire, and so we'd have to get off and take another plane. We got off, and I saw one of the pilots as we were walking back to the airport. I said, "What's so difficult about fixing a flat tire?" "Oh," he said, "this is a heavy plane, and it takes heavy equipment to lift it, and there is none here at this airport. So we'll have to send to another island for help." We waited probably an hour, and another plane came in and we took it. When we got on the plane, they said that we would have to change planes at Honolulu. Originally we had a two-stop flight, but not to get off and change planes--we were to stop at Maui and Honolulu. So when we got to Honolulu, Eva and Milo got off right away and took the hand luggage. They were on the side of the aisle that had two seats, and we were on the side that had three seats; we were next to the window, so we had to wait until the girl that was sitting next to the aisle got out, and she was very slow. By the time we were ready to get off the plane, they announced over the loudspeaker, "Will all those going to Kauai stay on the plane, because we're not going to change planes." Of course, by that time Milo and Eva were off, and they didn't hear it. So Bob got off and got them back on. [laughter] We finally got to our destination and rented a car there. When we made arrangements originally, we decided we'd take a smaller car; there were only four of us this year, and four years ago there were six of us. So we thought that [a smaller car] would be fine. But we had never ridden in a Datsun, and we had never seen the trunk of a Datsun car. It was just all we could do to get our luggage in the trunk, and we had taken Renee Lindquist Waldo's golf bag and clubs back that she had left in Reno. We'd brought them down from Reno when we were up there a couple of weeks before we left L.A. to take back to Renee. We had that long golf bag, and we finally laid it in the window, above the back seat. But the leg space in there was so crowded that Bob was very uncomfortable. And so when we got to the Lihue [Municipal] Airport on Kauai, we asked for a bigger car, and we got a better one. We were surely glad, because they had a Pinto lined up for us there, and I don't know how we could have gotten our luggage in it. It didn't have a place up back of the window--their trunk is the back window. And it was so small, I don't know what we'd have done. Then we drove to the Coco Palms [Resort] Hotel and registered there. Were you there, at the Coco Palms Hotel?

JACKSON: No.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, then you didn't see the big wash basins that are shells. Great huge . . .

JACKSON: It was on the card you sent us.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. There was one of those shells in every room. We had beautiful rooms, both of them overlooking the Queen's Pool. And the coco palms are so beautiful there, gorgeous. We had written to Kathryn Hulme, who wrote The Nun 's Story a number of years ago--she used to live over here in Eagle Rock, and we knew her when she was here, but we'd kind of lost track of her since she'd moved over there. We didn't hear from her, so we thought, well, maybe she didn't live there anymore. But I looked in the phone book, and she was listed. I gave her a ring, and she was so excited of course; she wanted to see us. She said, "I've been in Paris. I just got back, and I haven't even had time to go through my mail." Our letter was probably there, but she hadn't had time to read it. Anyway, she came down then to the Coco Palms Hotel and met us at the Smith boat place right across the street from the entrance to the Coco Palms — that's the boat that takes people up the river to the Fern Grotto; we had taken that when we were there in 1970. She met us there and led us up to her house; she lives way up in the hills back of the Coco Palms. Beautiful home--it was a Quonset hut to begin with, and they put sides on it; and you are not conscious of it at all from the outside, until you get inside and see the curved ceiling. She lives there with Lou Habets, who was the nun in The Nun's Story . They've lived there about ten or twelve years, I believe. Anyway, when they first moved there, she said, she wondered how they'd get acquainted with people and make friends; but she said they didn't have to wonder long, because everybody was so curious about the author and the nun moving onto their island. Incidentally, someone told me that the population of all the islands is only 700,000. I was amazed at that. It shows how small each community is. They didn't have to worry about getting acquainted with people because everybody invited them to parties. It got to the point where they had to turn down every invitation because everybody wanted to have them at their parties, Then they brought sightseeing buses up and drove around their house to show [tourists] where the author and the nun lived. They live on a cul-de-sac, actually; it's a narrow street that goes back a block or a block and a half, and then you come to their house and make a circle drive and go back. It's a narrow street--I don't think you could meet a car there. And the buses were doing that, and they finally had to put a stop to that because they had no privacy at all . Well, we had a delightful time with her, and when we left, she said, "By the way, when you get back to the hotel, ask for Grace Guslander, and tell her you saw the nuns." Grace Guslander is the vice-president and general manager of the Coco Palms Hotel; we had an invitation to a cocktail party from her, but we hadn't met her. I suppose they do that for everybody that comes to the hotel. We had reservations that night for seats next to the lagoon, in the Lagoon Dining Room, for the lighting of the torches. We wanted to be there especially for that. And Grace read the story of the lighting of the torches. We were right there and had ringside seats. This lagoon is just beautiful; they bring a canoe out and go up the lagoon and light the torches from the canoe, and then they go all around in the Coco Palms and light all the torches. It was very, very exciting. I tried to find her afterward, but I couldn't find her. So the next morning, in the lobby, I saw a woman that I thought might be Grace. I walked up to her and asked her if she was Grace. She smiled at me and said, "No, but I'm very flattered." I told her that we had a message from the nuns, and her face just lit up. Everybody around there knew Kathryn Hulme and the nun--the author and the nun. She said she would give Grace the message, because she was in a conference at that time. We never did see her, but when we checked out of the hotel that afternoon, this woman that I'd spoken with in the morning came up and put leis on all of us, from Grace. Now, wasn't that something? Well, from there we flew to Honolulu and got a car; it took us over an hour. And it was so funny, because Hertz had signs up at their desk there — "INSTANT HERTZ." Instant Hertz! We had to line up. There was only one girl working, and they have so much paperwork in writing them up . . . . We had to go to the place where they store the cars to pick it up. They had a van that took us there; Milo and I took care of that, while Eva and Bob took care of the luggage and had that ready. Everywhere we went we had this red golf bag. [laughter] You know, Renee ' s golf clubs. The clubs wouldn't have been such a nuisance if we had flown to Honolulu instead of Hilo. Well, we finally checked in at the Royal Hawaiian, and we had a wonderful time there. We just relaxed and really didn't try to do too much sightseeing, because we had been there before and it's so commercialized and we weren't interested in nightclubs or anything. We did get around to see a few things that we hadn't seen before. We had several friends in Honolulu, so I got on the phone and called Joette McDaniel Wheelan. Do you know Al McDaniel, her father, who has the Westwood Garden Center on Sepulveda near Ohio? We called Joette because we wanted to see her while we were there. She was opening a new shop — it's called Jenny's Plants--in the Kahala Mall Shopping Center. She was hoping to get it opened by the end of the week, so she was terribly busy, but she said, "We'll reserve Sunday for you, because we want to see you." Then I called Lorita Baker Vallely. Does that name ring a bell with you? I thought it would, because she used to review books all around Southern California. She's living over there now with her daughter and son-in- law, Pat and Bud [Howard C.] Taylor. They used to live up on Linda Flora, and their house was completely destroyed by the Bel-Air fire; it's rebuilt, of course, but they've sold it now and moved — lock, stock, and barrel--over to Hawaii. Bud Taylor was a veterinarian, and had a dog and cat hospital on Sepulveda Boulevard. He has a terrific job over there now. He is head of meat inspection for the island of Oahu. He sometimes goes to the other islands, and has twenty men working under him. He likes that job much better than [the job he had] when they were here. They're very happy there. Well, anyway, when Rita heard my voice, she was so excited, because we hadn't seen her for I don't know how many years. We used to furnish all her programs for her book reviews . She had reviewed for twenty-five years, I guess, so you see we had known her all this time. And she said, "Where have you been? Did you just land here now?" I said, no, we'd been to Hilo and Kona . "You've been to Kona? Oh," she said, "I wish I'd have known you were going there, because Bud and Pat's two boys, my grandsons, have a boat there that they take people for rides on. They would have taken you for a ride. The name of it is the Allure . " And I said, "Oh, we saw that when we were down at the boat dock. We saw that boat." She said, "Not really." Well, of course, we didn't realize that their boys were on it. She said, "How long are you going to be here?" And I said a week. "Oh, good," she said, "because Pat has a showing of her paintings at the Kahala Mall, and she's down there every day from nine to nine. But that ends Saturday, so if you're going to be here next week we'll get together." And she said, "I can't wait to tell Patricia you're here." (She always called her Patricia.) I said, "Well, we'd like to go and see Pat's paintings." She said, "Do you think you might be going tomorrow?" And I said, "Yes, we can." So she said, "Good, I won't tell her. You can just walk in and surprise her." The next day we went to the Kahala Mall and walked around looking at the paintings. We hadn't been there but two minutes, I think, when she popped up to us. She was so excited when she saw us. So we had a visit with her, and made a date with her for Tuesday night to go to the Halekulani Hotel for dinner and to hear Emma, a very famous singer who has been there at the hotel between two and three years. You know she's good or they wouldn't keep her that long. And she said, "We're just crazy about Emma. We go every chance we can, so we'll take you there Tuesday night." It was very exciting to have that to look forward to. When we were there at the Kahala Mall, we found the place where Joette McDaniel Wheelan was going to open her plant shop. It was just a very small area right in the center of the walkway, where people walk back and forth all the time. Joette had told me that it was there and that it had been a Kiddy Photo Shop; and it wasn't hard to find--it was closed, but the sign, Kiddy Photo, was still on it. So it was interesting to see where her shop was going to be. Then I called Renee Lindquist Waldo, whose golf clubs we had, and made a date with her for Monday night. She said, "We'll pick you up around four o'clock in the afternoon and we'll show you around Honolulu." They did, and, oh, we saw the Bel-Air of Honolulu--beautiful homes, just gorgeous. Of course the flowers and the shrubbery were so beautiful, because everything is so lush over there. They took us out and showed us the Kahala Hilton, which is a gorgeous hotel. The chandeliers are so beautiful, and the rugs, the carpeting, and the decor are in such good taste, in contrast to the Sheraton Waikiki right next door to the Royal Hawaiian. That was so gaudy--I have never seen anything like it. I walked through it twice; I couldn't believe it the first time. Renee told us that some New York decorator had come out here and made it just as wild and gaudy as could be. We understand they're going to redo it, which is good. Their lobby is open; you can just walk right into the lobby, and there are no doors at all. It's very interesting. Well, we had dinner that night at Renee and Vern Waldo's. We were so glad to have a home-cooked dinner, because we'd been eating out for two weeks. It was getting awfully tiresome. She had such a lovely dinner for us. They live on a little island, just a little drive out from the mainland. They have a beautiful home there. So that was an interesting evening. In the meantime, Joette had called, she said she'd have to take a rain check on that visit. She said, "We are so bogged down with getting this shop in order that we just can't take the time to be with you, much as we'd like to." So that was kind of a disappointment that we didn't get to see her. We went to dinner Tuesday night with Bud and Pat Taylor and Rita, and they took us up to their apartment first. They have a spacious condominium on the twentieth floor of an apartment [building] . And they have the most gorgeous view you ever saw. The lights of Honolulu--I've never seen anything like it; it was absolutely breathtaking. And their apartment is just beautiful. We saw some more of Pat's paintings, and then we went on down and had dinner. And Emma was every bit as lovely as they had told us. Her voice was so beautiful, and she herself is so attractive. She's half-Hawaiian and half-white, and she wore elegant gowns. At intermission she went out and changed gowns, and the two piano players who accompanied her entertained us at that time. When she came back, she had on a replica of a gown that one of the queens of the island had worn. That's what she does, for the second part of her show she always wears a replica of a gown that a queen had worn. Oh, it was just beautiful, and she had the figure to wear it. She used her hands so gracefully, and it was the nostalgic Hawaiian music and songs--none of the sexy, filthy stuff that so many nightclub entertainers give us nowadays. Oh, it was absolutely beautiful. And the Halekulani--were you there?

JACKSON: Yes, we stayed there.

B. CAMPBELL: Then you know how the dining room opens on to the beach. People walk up on the beach to hear her sing, and every night she dedicates a song to them. That night she said, "And now, I will dedicate my next song to my scholarship friends." It was kind of cute the way she called them "scholarship friends"--they were getting in for free, you see. They were nice-looking people on the beach. Oh, incidentally, there are very few longhairs over there, very few beards. It must be going out, because you know the hippies invaded Hawaii years ago, and now few of them are there anymore.

JACKSON: Maybe the cost is being felt.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, that might be. Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed that. Oh, one of the days that we were there we went out to the Salvation Army Tea Room. Did you go out there?

JACKSON: I think so.

B. CAMPBELL: It's where Robert Louis Stevenson's grass hut is.

JACKSON: Yes, we went out there.

B. CAMPBELL: We went out and had lunch there; that was interesting. When we got there, it wasn't crowded at all. We found a place to park right away. After we finished lunch, we decided we'd go out and see the grass hut. Bob counted nine buses that had arrived, with sightseers. And that place was so crowded that you had to get in line to get out and go through his little hut — to just walk around and go through it. It was quite something to get our car out of the parking lot, because the buses were parked all over the place. We finally got out, of course, and got back. Oh, and then we went to the Kodak show. Did you see that?

JACKSON: Yes. Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: We thought it was ten-thirty, but it was ten o'clock, so we didn't get there for the first half of the show. But we did see some of it, and it was fascinating, when we go to Hawaii the next time, I hope we can go there. [laughter] We went out to the airport early. Our plane didn't leave till 4:50, but we had to check out by noon. We drove around for a while; and driving in Honolulu is not very much fun, I can assure you, because they have so many one-way streets. If you get on a one-way street and want to go in the other direction, it's something to get turned around. So we decided that we would go out to the airport and rest there till the plane came. We were there a couple of hours before the plane left, and we couldn't even get into the waiting room, because Security had not arrived--we just had to sit out on some benches. There was sort of a tram that was running back and forth and had three cars hooked together. When we went [in to the airport] they took our apples away from us. They said if we wanted to come back and eat them there we could. Well, we had plenty of time, so Bob and I decided we'd walk back; and we sat down and ate two apples. [laughter] Then we took that tram back because it was quite a walk to the waiting room. When were you there? How many years ago?

JACKSON: Oh, '54 is the last time I was there.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, well, then the airport [was built after] you were there. It's huge, just huge. We walked for blocks and blocks and blocks to get to gate 28, where we boarded our plane. We got on the plane then and got settled. It was a DC-10, and I had never been on one of those big planes before. Two seats, then an aisle, and then four seats and an aisle, and then two more seats. Oh, it was just huge. And they seated us in the center section so that the four of us were together. That was nice. We had just gotten settled there, when this cute young girl came up and said, "Mr., Campbell and Dr. Brooks?" And we looked at her. We thought. How does she know who we are? "Oh," she said, "the man at the ticket window was supposed to tell me when you checked in, because you were supposed to go to the Horizon Club." They have a Horizon Club, I suppose, in every airport where Western flies. It was too late, and we were just sick, because we would much rather have relaxed there than sitting in the waiting room.

JACKSON: You couldn't have eaten your apples.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh. [laughter] That's right; I didn't think about that. Well, anyway, she gave us her card, gave us each a free cocktail on the plane, and said when we came back to be sure and get in touch with her. Now, I don't know who alerted her, but I have an idea it was Virginia Hull, because she had alerted every hotel manager. At the Kona Hilton, the hotel manager called us and welcomed us; he said, "If there's anything we can do for you, just say the word and we'll be there." It was really something, the way we were treated so royally. When we arrived in Los Angeles, who do you think was there to meet us? Some friends of yours .

JACKSON: Oh, the Hoovers?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes! Lou and Thelner Hoover.

JACKSON: They had told us they were going to meet you. That's right.

B. CAMPBELL: And their car could only accommodate two of us. We had planned to go back with Eva and Milo in a cab, but when we went out to get in the cab, the cab driver said, "I can't take all of you." So we said we might as well go with Lou and Thelner then, [instead of] hiring another cab to take us back. Anyway, they brought us home, and it was so much fun visiting with them all the way home and telling them about our trip--of course, they've been over there a number of times. Our plane got in at 11:55. Wasn't that nice of Lou and Thelner to come over at midnight to meet us? And the next day, in the afternoon, I said to Bob, "Let's go over to the Chamber of Commerce and thank them again for this wonderful, wonderful trip that we had." We went over there and had a nice visit with them. We took some pictures along and showed them the pictures, and we gave them some macadamia nuts that we had brought back from the macadamia nut farm. We stopped to see Bill Langdon in the bank--he was on the committee with the Chamber--and thanked him again. We called Lowell Lauesen, but he was out of town, and Herb Smith was not in; they were the [other two persons on] the committee that worked with the Chamber. When we got home--it was about four-thirty going on five, I guess-- I said, "Let's call Virginia Hull and see if she's busy or could see us for a minute, and go up and thank her, because all the arrangements were so great, everywhere." Incidentally, at the Royal Hawaiian she sent a gorgeous arrangement of anthurium and red ginger. The Brookses got one and we got one from her. She doesn't forget a thing. Well, anyway, we went up to see Virginia, and we were telling her all about our trip. And she said, "Why don't we go to dinner? And you can show me the pictures there. I'll call the Brookses and see if they can go." They met us up at the Hotel Bel-Air. We had dinner with Virginia that night, and that was such a perfect evening, and such a perfect ending for our trip. We hadn't been home long enough to fix anything to eat. I had gone to the market and picked up milk and fruit and vegetables, but I hadn't planned anything and I guess Eva hadn't either. So it was a real treat; we had such a delightful evening with Virginia. She really is a great person.

JACKSON: Well, that was a wonderful trip.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, it really was. Oh, another place that we saw in Honolulu was the King's Alley. It's a very beautiful, new shopping area--very exclusive shops in there. We browsed around in there one day and found some beautiful pieces of wood things--vases and bowls and things made of milo wood. At the Kona Hilton, we found a tree, and it was a milo tree! And when we were near the macadamia nut farm over in the Hilo area, we found a Milo Street! We have pictures of all of them. [The Hawaiians] pronounce it mee-low. We had so much fun kidding Milo about all these things that were named after him. We've just been living our trip over and over ever since, and sometime we'll show you the pictures. [tape recorder turned off] Oh, I forgot to tell you, Johnny, about the beautiful display of flowers at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at the end of the lobby. I got a very good picture of them. They had Vanya orchids and hibiscus in the arrangement. You know, they're changed every day, because they're just put on sticks--long sticks. Oh, that was so beautiful. Milo took a picture of a sunset there at Waikiki Beach. We took quite a few pictures. Milo went in swimming a lot, but I just went in once in the ocean, and then in the Queen's pool at the Coco Palms. We saw a lot of surfers, especially at Waikiki Beach. We decided we'd all eat in our room one night, so Milo and I went out and got some food. Incidentally, there's a refrigerator now in every room in every hotel.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 20, 1975

JACKSON: Bob, I think we might go into more of your recollections of individuals. Why don't we start with Paul Wellman?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, okay. Paul was a rabid football fan at UCLA. He liked basketball, but not as well [as football]; and once in a while he went to a track meet, but that was all he was interested in. He geared his writing schedule so that he could go to football practice every day. He'd get up at six and start writing by seven at the latest and sometimes earlier. He would end anywhere from eleven-thirty to about one. He would have lunch, and then saunter over to the football field and watch practice. He did this six days a week, not only in the fall, but also in spring practice. The athletic department finally built him a nice bench that said "Paul I. Wellman" on it and moved it down there; he was surprised and very pleased with it, and it remained there until he passed away. I don't know why I started Paul off by getting his death into this first few minutes of it, but since I did, I will go ahead and tell about that, and then get into the more pleasant things. On March 6, 1966, Paul had an operation. Before the operation, he told his doctor, Bob Tolle, that he wanted to know the truth about it, and that if [he had] something [so severe] that they could prolong his life [only] by giving him some chemotherapy or something, he didn't want to do it unless it would leave him clear enough so he could write and do the things he'd been doing; and if it wasn't going to do that, why just let him die. He said that he'd had a very good life. He had been fairly successful in his writing, and his family was well provided for. He'd had a lot of fun, and he just didn't care if he died [then] . He would rather do that than go on making himself a nuisance to people. Bob Tolle told him afterwards that there was cancer there, and they couldn't get it all. [They told him] that he had from three months to, oh, seven or eight months to live — it might be a little more and it might be a little less. So Paul said, "Okay. I feel well enough now to go ahead and finish my book. It is about 80 percent done, and I can go ahead and concentrate on that and finish it. Then don't give me anything that will keep me alive." He asked me if he could borrow my secretary, Betty Vedder. She had worked for him for a number of years and typed several manuscripts for him.

JACKSON: What was the name of the book?

R. CAMPBELL: The name of the book was The Buckstones. So Paul went to work on it. He would type the manuscript (he typed rather than wrote his manuscripts) . Then he would work it over and write in what he wanted to change; and when he got enough so that it was a half-day's work, he'd call and ask for Betty to come over. She would go over and type the final manuscript for him, and send it to the publishers. He finally got it finished and sent the last of it to the publishers. Paul had specified that Betty would proofread this for him, because she had proofread several of his other books. The first one that she proofread he was a little worried about, but he looked at it and he found that she knew more about dates and spelling and so forth than he did. He never found one mistake. She would correct his spelling of a city, or something that [happened] way back in history, and he'd say, "Well now, let's see." And so they'd look it up, and she was always right; so he had her type his manuscripts for years. He hoped that he could live till the book was out, but he didn't make that; he died on — September 17, 1966, and the book didn't come out till after the first of the year. Not long after Paul's surgery. Chancellor Murphy called me and said, "Now, don't say anything about this conversation or worry about it. How long does Paul Wellman have to live?" I said, "Well, the way it looks now it's going to be three to five months." And so he said, "Oh, my. Now, don't say anything about this." He said, "I'll call you back either today or tomorrow at the latest." He called back late that afternoon, and he said, "Well, I had Paul scheduled to receive an honorary degree next year, but I've just now got them to move it up to this year. You can tell anybody about it, because I have already called Paul and told him that we were going to do this; so you can go ahead and tell anybody else you want to now." Paul was very pleased about it, and he said, "I'm going to walk down there with the rest of them." But when the time came, he couldn't do that; he rode down on the elevator to the lower level of Pauley Pavilion and walked up on the stage while someone held his arm all the way. He received the honorary degree and was very proud of it. It made him a very happy man. [tape recorder turned off] I talked to Murphy and said that I was very grateful to him for doing this for Paul, and I knew that Paul was also very grateful. He said that Paul had already thanked him several times. So much for the sad part of Paul's life; now we'll go into the fun and entertainment. He was a member of the Westwood "Kulture and Filosophy Club"; there's no culture and no philosophy in it, so we just don't let the name fool anybody. It was started by Joe Valentine and Bill Ackerman and me in 1933. We started going to the Farmer's Market for lunch every Tuesday. Once in a while we would take somebody along, but we held the membership down to three until the war came along, and then we moved back to Westwood and ate lunch somewhere in Westwood or near there. We changed the day from Tuesday to Friday. During the war we took in a few more members. We took in Bob Tolle, and he's been a member all the time since then; and then we took Paul, and later Red Sanders. Right now we have seven in it, and many have come and gone; some have died, but the three original ones are still going on. Paul loved this club, and he liked to take us wherever we were going. Someone would say, "Well, let's take my car," but no, he'd take his. So he hauled us all over everywhere. At Farmer's Market, we'd always eat shrimp salad to begin with, with a bun, and then we'd get to the dessert. The dessert was a hot fudge sundae, with lots of hot popcorn on top. They had the best popcorn I've ever eaten; and that is saying quite a bit, because I've eaten a lot of popcorn. This dessert became quite well known because Fred Beck told about it in the column he was writing for the Farmer's Market in the L.A. Times. Fred Beck moved up to Idaho for a number of years, but he's back in Malibu now. That's another man I forgot about that I could tell a lot of things that would be of interest. But he [wrote] in [his column] that we'd been down there and that we ate this hot fudge sundae with popcorn on it to keep us thin. Then in the war he was away, and his wife wrote the column; we got in it three or four times about eating there. I went down to Temple Baptist Church one Sunday, and there was a woman who belonged to the church but hadn't been there for a year or two. I said, "What are you doing down here? My goodness." She said, "I'm down here to pray for you. I saw in the Farmer's Market column this morning that you were there with Kay Winsor. I think you need some prayer." She really didn't want to pray for me; she just wanted to razz me about it. I took it all in good [humor], but I was very glad to have had lunch with Kay Winsor, because she was a very well-known figure right at that time--her book Forever Amber had sold more than a million copies, and eventually over 2 million. As I said, Paul would take us wherever we were going. We ate at different places, but we sort of settled on the Malibu Rendezvous after the war was over. Several times, Paul would discuss some things that he was writing about in his novels and wonder what we thought of them. He said that during the war, at the tail end of it, he was writing a book that had a brain operation in it. The publishers told him to take it out because it was too gruesome and the women wouldn't read it. And he said he just didn't know; what did we think about it? Some thought it would and some thought it wouldn't. When the war was over, he said, "Well, I'm going to put that back. The publishers have written and said that all these books are coming out now with blood and thunder about the war. The women are just eating them up and not worrying anything about this." So he put it back in his book The Chain, and that proved to be the best seller that he ever wrote--it sold more than 2 million copies, which even right now is quite a lot of copies; there are many books that sell more than that, but there are a lot more readers and ways of promoting them now. He was very happy to have the brain operation in the book. [tape recorder turned off] There was another thing we talked about quite a lot: he was wondering how a department store would raise a lot of money in a short time. He said that one of the owners of a department store in the city that he was writing about had gone to Denver and had an affair with a lady out there, and that when he got back home, the Denver paper wanted an ad. He said, "Well, no, I can't advertise in the Denver paper." So they sort of casually mentioned that it would be better to do that than to have them tell about his visit out there. And he found out that they knew what they were talking about; so the paper outlined a campaign which would cost him several thousand dollars. He'd have to borrow money to finance it. He didn't want anybody in town to know that he was in trouble. [Paul] thought maybe some of us had had some experience in getting money for some of our enterprises, but nobody could help him on that; we were all afraid that if we did they'd think that we'd been in the same fix. But he didn't have it in the book in the final draft; he had taken it out.

JACKSON: Which book was that?

R. CAMPBELL: That was Jericho's Daughters. It was the fourth book in a series about Jericho, Kansas. We used to go to Berkeley or to Palo Alto to see the UCLA football games up there. Paul and his wife, Laura, were in the group. On these occasions Paul wore a big yellow button about five inches in diameter that said "Official Worrier." We would start out Friday night on the Lark, or Friday morning on the Daylight; there were enough of us that we had a special car. We ' d play all kinds of card games, some would sit and talk, and we always had a lot of fun. Everything was all right to begin with, but toward the tail end, before they started taking off the trains, they would run out of eggs before they got halfway back. And the boys would want some more drinks, so they persuaded them to phone ahead and have some eggs put on at either San Luis Obispo or Santa Barbara so they could keep up the drinking. And then the final time we went, the bartender said he couldn't mix any more drinks, that according to the bartender's rules he had mixed as many as was allowed. This was shortly after noon, so the boys just had to go thirsty. They really raised Cain about it, and didn't go up to any more games after that. It was only a year or two until they took off most of the trains. [tape recorder turned off] Now to the more serious part of Paul Wellman. He came out here with his family, his wife Laura and his son Paul, Jr., in 1944, having just resigned from the Kansas City Star. He wrote for two years for Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer . Then he decided that he would be better off devoting full time to writing books, which he did until his death. Paul did lots of his research here on the UCLA campus, and he found everybody willing to help him. It was a very cooperative library--it has been that way and always is--with authors and other people. Sometimes they wouldn't have the book [he needed], but they would find it in another library in the system and get it for him immediately by parcel post. He thought they were great. He said once that he wondered if he spent more time in the library than he did at football practice. He hadn't timed it, so he couldn't tell; but he did spend a lot of time in their libraries. He always gave books for Christmas, and he bought most of them from us. One Christmas he had us send a very advanced philosophy book to his father, Frederick Creighton Wellman, who was a retired university professor, but [his father] received three little teeny kids' books for somebody about two years old. He wrote Paul about it, and Paul came in. Mr. Wellman, Sr., had said that there was a card in it that was addressed to somebody else. So we wrote the people [to whom] this card [was addressed] , and learned that they had received the advanced philosophy book and had wondered why it was sent to their little son. They thought maybe they just wanted him to wait for it and grow into it; but, anyway, they had kept it. So they sent it to Paul's father, and then he sent the three books to us, we sent them to the children, and everybody was happy. [laughter] After that, every time Paul would send a book to his father, he'd say, "I don't want you to send this somewhere else, now, because I don't want you mixing it up with any kids' books. He won't read kids' books, so just send him this book." This went on for years. Paul liked to go fishing up in the Lake of the Woods, at Portage Bay, Canada, every summer, catching walleyed pike. He took Paul, Jr., with him until Paul was graduated and out in the business world. He would also take a friend or two along; he got Bob Tolle started, and he went along for ten years. Before that, Charlie Shannon, who was the manager of the Security Pacific Bank here, went for two years. A few others went once or twice, but it was quite an event for Paul to go with Tolle every year. One year he came back, and he came in and autographed two copies of a book to go to two people in Detroit. One was a man, and one was a woman. He said, "Now, don't get these mixed up, because they don't know each other. It would be a lot of trouble and embarrassment for them to exchange them." He laughed, of course; so I immediately wrote the man, and sent him the right book and my letter. I told him about the trouble we'd had with Paul about his books, and I said, "Will you please write back and say that you got the wrong book and had to go across town, that you had to call up and see if she had your copy and then go over and exchange them?" I got a letter from him, and he said, "I'm enclosing a copy of a letter I sent to Paul, and I hope you'll enjoy it and what happens." This letter said that he'd gotten the wrong book; that he'd had to call this lady and she said, yes, she had his book, so he went clear across Detroit and back, even though it was a nuisance. He wanted Paul to know that the bookstore sent the wrong book. So the next Friday, when the Kulture and Filosophy Club met, I noticed this smirk on Paul's face, and I knew something was going to happen. He didn't say a word until we got down to the Malibu Rendezvous, sat down and ordered all of our meals, and everybody had their drinks. And then he said, "I want you people to listen to this letter. You know I've told you how sloppy Campbell's shipping department is. And just the other day I gave him specific instructions to see that these books went to the right place, and here's this letter." And the letter said to the effect that he'd received the wrong book and that he had called across town and had to go over there to exchange books. Paul then said, "Now, I just hope this Campbell will someday get his shipping department on their toes, so they will do things right and not get all mixed up." They all had a big laugh, everybody but me, and I didn't laugh. After about a minute, I reached in my pocket and said, "Well, now, let me see. I've got a letter here, too, from that fellow." He wrote, "Enclosed is a copy of a letter that I am sending Paul. I hope you have some fun with it and have a good time. I received the right book." So Paul said, "Well, I'll be damned! You sure pulled my leg." I want to tell you something about Paul's personal life, too, because that was very interesting. He was born in Enid, Oklahoma, October 14, 1898. Six months later he and his family were on board ship headed for Africa, where his father, Dr. Frederick Creighton Wellman, had been appointed medical missionary. Paul says, "Medical he was, but missionary he wasn't." He had quite a time keeping the job; but he was an expert on tropical medicine, and that saved him from being kicked out. Paul's father told him later that his mother had once knowingly signed a petition to have him removed from his missionary work. It didn't work out that way, but they did fix it so that he would have his medical job but wouldn't have to be the missionary. Paul spoke Umbando, which was the official language of the nation there--everybody spoke it except the people in the mission. He used that a great deal more than he did English, and he could still rattle off a long string of this stuff. Of course, we didn't know what it was, and he didn't tell us, but he could really rattle it off. They lived there in Angola, Portuguese West Africa, for twelve years, except for periods when Paul and his younger brother [Manly Wade Wellman] spent a year in Lisbon at school, and then in Liverpool and in London. Paul and his younger brother returned to this country before his father and mother did, and they spent the time in Vernal, Utah, with an aunt. They went to school there, and the place was out in the country, the sticks--you could only get there by stagecoach. He graduated from Wichita High School and attended the University of Wichita, then called Fairmont College. I was down there one time buying books and bought books at Fairmont College. He spent a short period in the army in World War I and reached the rank of sergeant. He started his journalistic career after being discharged from the army and worked on the Wichita Beacon. He stayed there ten years and then switched over to the other paper in town, the Eagle, where he was news editor. He worked on that till 1936 and then went to the Kansas City Star, where he stayed until he came to California. I mentioned Paul's fishing trips each year, going to Portage Bay in the Lake of the Woods. Paul wrote a book about Portage Bay and the islands there, and the publishers drastically underestimated the popularity it would have--they only published 6,000 copies, so it went out of print very quickly.

JACKSON: Do you remember the title of this book?

R. CAMPBELL: It was called Portage Bay. And if you see a copy of it now in a bookstore, grab it, whatever the price is. Each year Paul brought back enough walleyes to entertain his friends at a fish dinner in one of the local restaurants. Unfortunately, it ended one night when a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times had too much to drink and insisted on making a speech. One person talked about the silliness of the speech while it was going on. He demanded to know who was talking. It was a very popular lady, and no one wanted to say anything. So he went to the back of the room and said he wanted to know who said that. Bob Fischer said, "Well, I did." He came back a little further, and Bob said, "Now, everybody was talking here. If you're going to do anything to anybody, you've got to do something to all five or six or eight of us back here. We were all talking about it, because nobody's supposed to make a speech at this fish dinner except the people who were on the trip. And you insisted on getting up there, and we were just talking about that. If you want to hit somebody, why, you can hit me." He said, "Well, all right." And he slapped Bob a little slight tap on the cheek that didn't hurt him any and went back up to finish his speech. But when he got back up there and started talking, everybody started to boo. Paul got up and said, "Well, the party is adjourned." And then he did not have any more fish dinners. He was afraid he'd run into something like this again. Each year he brought enough fish for all of his close friends to last them for a semester, we'll say, in school terms. But he finally stopped going because he couldn't get anybody to go with him. Paul had a total of thirty books published, including novels and histories. Two were in the Mainstream of America series that Doubleday brought out covering the whole history of the United States. His first two books were combined into one called The Indian Wars of the West, and it's still in print. It's considered the best book on the Indian Wars, of the Indians west of the Mississippi, to be had anywhere. Mrs. [Laura Broder] Wellman still goes to the football games. She does volunteer work at St. Alban ' s [Episcopal] Church and can walk up there from where she lives at Park Westwood Tower on Hilgard Avenue, the first high-rise in Westwood. Paul, Jr., and the family now live in Santa Monica; his children are all grown--two of them are married, and the other one is still in college.

JACKSON: Good. [tape recorder turned off] Blanche, we were talking the other day about Maida Dullam, and I think you have a very good story about her. Would you like to give us that?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, I certainly would. Maida is such a wonderful person, and we've been very dear friends since she was in UCLA. I'd like to tell you a little bit about her life, because she's had a fascinating, interesting life. She married Floyd Wood, either when they were still in school or right afterwards. Floyd went on to Yale and got his doctor's degree.

JACKSON: They were both at UCLA. That's where they met.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, they graduated from UCLA in 1930. And, as I said, he got his doctor's degree at Yale, and had been promised a teaching position at UCLA as soon as the war was over. He served in the air corps and was stationed at Asheville, North Carolina. There had been a great many fatal accidents in the air corps, and the officers were very upset about it — they felt that they should try to do something about eliminating them. So a young lieutenant (who was the pilot of the plane), another officer, and Floyd were on their way to Washington, D.C., to a meeting to see what could be done about eliminating the accidents. Their plane crashed, and the three of them were killed. This was in January 1944. Maida got in touch with me right away, and I said, "What can I do for you?" And she said, "Find a place for me to live, because I'm coming back to Los Angeles with my two small children." I think they were about nine and eleven at that time. I couldn't find a place; there were absolutely no apartments for rent. At that time we were living in a three-bedroom upper flat at 1926 Malcolm Avenue, and each one of our girls had a separate bedroom; so they doubled up, and that left a room for Maida and her two children, Floyd and Beth. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] She and the children lived with us for four months, until we finally found a one-bedroom apartment for them to move into. She went back to teaching in the Los Angeles City Schools, and eventually she met Cecil Sharpe, who was a high-school principal back in Spring Valley, Illinois; they were married on June 20, 1953, which was our thirtieth wedding anniversary. They lived in Illinois for several years and eventually moved to Los Angeles . Every year we celebrated our anniversaries together at a nice restaurant. The men paid half of the bill--we always said we were taking them, and they were taking us, so we didn't have to remember whose turn it was each year. She had a very happy life with Cecil. Once, they were all ready to go back to New York; they had their car all packed and were leaving early in the morning. At 3:30 that morning Cecil had a heart attack and died. So this left Maida alone again, and eight years later on February 17, 1968, Maida married John Dullam, a very happy marriage for both of them. I've already told about their wedding. John is a row-crop rancher at Oxnard--raises a lot of celery and tomatoes and cauliflower, and it's all top grade. It's a big operation, and John's kept very busy. For one person to have three happy marriages shows what a great person Maida is, actually. One of our mutual friends, who has never been married, said, "How does Maida do it? She's had three happy marriages and I haven't had any." I wanted to say, "Well, there may be a reason. You two have entirely different personalities." She's a great friend and such a loyal friend. I want to tell you a great thing that she did. She belonged to the same sorority I did. Phi Omega Pi, which is now extinct. It folded about twenty-five years ago, and most of the members at the time initiated into Delta Zeta. I did not go in; Maida did. We had a house on Sorority Row, right above the Tri-Delt house; of course, we sold the house, so we had all this money and we didn't know what to do with it. Maida, bless her heart, thought that it might be a good idea to put it into the scholarship endowment fund at UCLA. So she went to Johnny Jackson, [laughter] who was then working in that department, and of course he was delighted — who wouldn't be? [laughter]

JACKSON: I remember.

B. CAMPBELL: And I don't know exactly how much was put in, but I think it was around $7,000 that went into that endowment fund; and it is now being used for worthy students as scholarship funds.

JACKSON: Yes, the interest from the endowment.

B. CAMPBELL: And to think that this was Maida 's idea. This shows her great integrity, her great love for people and for doing the right thing — and I just want everybody to know about that. Incidentally, they come down to almost all of the football games and some of the basketball games. The two of them are still very much interested in UCLA. They're a wonderful couple. [tape recorder turned off]

JACKSON: Bob, perhaps you could give us some capsule words on a number of the UCLA personalities that you knew. Let's start with Ducky Drake.

R. CAMPBELL: Ducky and his wife, Ethelyn, have been here since around 1923, when they came out from Nebraska. I remember he came from the town of Friend, Nebraska. He's a very friendly person. [laughter] He was the head track coach part of the time, and before that, an assistant; and all the time he was a trainer of all sports. [tape recorder turned off] He coached Rafer Johnson and Yang Chuan-Kwang in the decathlon of the 1960 Olympics. They were both UCLA boys, but Yang ran for free China [the Republic of China] , which was his home country.

JACKSON: Don't you pronounce that "yung"? Even though it was spelled y-a-n-g?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it's pronounced "yung"; that's right, I got so interested in pronouncing the rest of his name that I got confused. There were other people in the decathlon, principally the Russians; Rafer was in first place and Yang was in second place going into the last event, which was the 1,500-meter [run]. Rafer came in one and one-tenth seconds behind Yang. The Russian was way, way behind, so Rafer won the decathlon with 8,932 points; Yang took second with 8,874 points, and Vasily Kusnetsov of the Soviet Union came in third with 7,809, Each of them was a thousand points ahead of Russia. While Yang was a UCLA boy, he ran in the Olympics for his native country, as I said. Ducky coached them both in the Olympics. Rafer told me once, as had many other athletes, what a fine man Ducky was. He said to me that Ducky was the finest person that he'd ever met, that he had helped him immensely many times, and that he just didn't know of anyone that was any better. When athletes told me that he had helped them but that they didn't realize it until later years, I'd say, "Well, did you go back and tell him that he'd helped you?" And most all of them said no, they didn't. A few said yes, they had. But, anyway, he is a very fine person. [tape recorder turned off] Mrs. Drake takes very good care of Ducky and is a wonderful person, too, just like Ducky. Next is Rafer Johnson. I mentioned him before. Rafer and I have been very good friends since he was in school here. He was student body president his last year, and we gave him a scholarship on that account, and we've been friends since then. But lately we haven't seen him very much, even though he does live just over the hill in Sherman Oaks. He's public relations director for the Continental Telephone Company, at their national headquarters in Bakersfield. They have phone systems in more than half the states in the union; so he is on the road a great deal. He married Betsy Thorson about four years ago, and they have a lovely girl a year and a half old, Jenifer Ann. They're expecting another one before very long. I talked with Betsy last night--Rafer was gone, but she said that they were going to be at the basketball game Thursday night and would try to see us. She says it's such a big hassle there when the game's over, and between halves, that the best thing to do is to get right out; but she said they will wait this Thursday and come down and see us. So we look forward to that. Red and Ann Sanders came to UCLA from Vanderbilt in 1949 and were here nine years. Coach Sanders inherited a football team that had won three and lost six games. In his first season the Bruins won six and lost three and he got off to a fine start. He coached us into a national championship and took us to the Rose Bowl twice, in 1953 and 1955. He did very well, until we had a mix-up in the Pacific Coast Conference where they penalized the players one half-year of eligibility, and it also hurt the school as far as recruiting went. But he stayed on until he died; and as it turned out, he was probably the best coach that we ever had . And then there's Joe and Katharine Kaplan. Joe was a professor of physics, and came here in 1922 before we did. He was very popular. He discovered something about the Aurora Borealis that makes it roar--I don't know what it is, but it's a very important discovery; it has enabled them to know a great deal more about it, to take power from it in some places, and to do some other things. Ever since he's been here, Joe has taught a course in physics for the [students] who don't want to go into physics deeply but want to know something about it, as well as advanced courses. He experimented more and more with the upper atmosphere. During the war, he was in charge of the air force program for meteorology, where they were training meteorologists all over the country, and he also went various places around the world for the air force. When the war was over he stayed on, both teaching and in the air force as a civilian, until just recently. He's gotten too old to do it anymore, but he is probably the highest- [ranked] citizen in the air force. We don't know what he did, but he really helped them a great deal. Katharine herself was a very interesting person. She was a volunteer in the police department during the war, when they were shorthanded . She had complained about them not doing a good job, and the chief said, "Well, why don't you come and join us? We have 800 people who are out in the service, and we're very short- handed. We're looking for women who know their way around. Why don't you come and be a policeman?" So Katharine did. And she often regaled us with stories of some of the people who were in and out of jail there, mostly for drunkenness. And we told her, "You should write a book about these [people]." She said, "No, I don't think that there's anything that's long enough-- you'd just have a little bit to tell about each of them, and I don't think it would be a book." And so I said, "Well, you write the first episode or two, and we'll send it to Bennett Cerf and see what happens." She did that, and we sent it to Bennett Cerf. He wrote back and said, "Well, this would be fine stuff to talk about at a cocktail party, but the incidents aren't long enough to make a book." Katharine was right. So we didn't get her book published. She's not well now, and she's having a bad time. But they're still managing. We'll go to the next ones. William C. and Helen Ackerman. They are two of our finest and most famous alums. Bill was around the university for fifty years. When he retired in 1967 he was called graduate manager and executive director of the ASUCLA [Associated Students, UCLA] . He too was a man who has done many, many people some very fine favors. He talked to many students, talked them out of doing something which they wanted to do but which was a bad idea; and he really made men of lots of them. I know that many of them are thankful to Ackerman, and many of them have told him so. He could quiet down some revolution that was going to take place, and it would seem very easy and simple — but, of course, it wasn't. I remember one time: a man had been elected president of the Graduate Students [Association] , and he said the first thing he was going to do was to fire Ackerman. He said he was going to get him out of there right away. I told Ackerman this, and the next thing I knew Ackerman had had lunch with him and they went over everything, and this fellow became one of his best supporters. So many of the kids don't know what the true facts are, and when Bill can explain things to them, they can see his point and see why their plan will not work. He worked very, very hard, and I want to thank Helen, who let him stay in his office when he needed to, at nights, and let him go away on school business .

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO JANUARY 20, 1975

R. CAMPBELL: I've always admired Helen for letting Bill do this. There are some wives who will not let their husbands get away like this, and it's helped Bill immensely and made his job easier. It's a tough job now to be in this position; the school has grown many, many times greater than it was. It takes two men to do the work now, and both of them are overworked; Bill, of course, can just sit back and laugh. Right now he has a bum ankle from playing tennis. He said he went after a ball that he should have let go, but he'd just returned from watching his grandson and granddaughter win the Los Angeles mixed doubles, and that he felt young like them, and he went after it, and his ankle turned under him and has given him a black and blue leg from his ankle clear above his knee. He says that the doctor tells him it'll all go away in a month or two, so he hopes that he's right. The doctor says, no more playing tennis. He and Helen are both reasonably well and enjoying life very much. [tape recorder turned off] The two Mellinkoffs at UCLA are interesting people. Dr. Sherman Mellinkoff, of course, is head of the medical school, his brother David is professor of law. He could have been head of the department, but he did not want it and refused it [when it was offered to him] several years ago. He says he's a lot better off just teaching law and writing. He has written a couple of books in his field, but they're ones that don't sell very much, at least not through our store because they are for a specific audience. Sherm has a very hard time in his department. Right now the minorities are supposed to have special treatment [in admissions], and it makes it very bad in the medical school because there you're dealing with life and death--if you have someone who's gotten his doctor's degree without proper background to begin with, it makes a little trouble. But he has survived it very well, he runs a good school and is a very fine person. Mrs. Mellinkoff and Mrs. Campbell got very well acquainted eight or nine years ago now, when they both took a cake- decorating class at the Santa Monica Y. They were slightly acquainted at the time; Mrs. Mellinkoff was in the store and Blanche was just leaving. She said she was going to a cake-decorating class down in Santa Monica. [Mrs. Mellinkoff] said, "Oh, I'd love to go to that myself." And Blanche said, "Well, the class has just started. Come with me next week. So Blanche picked her up each week and they went to the class together. We don't see them very much anymore. It just seems like we don't have time. I don't understand where our time has gone. Everybody is in the same fix. And [the Mellinkoffs] are so busy at the medical college that they don't have time to get away. But they're still running a very fine school; they have been in the top ten schools in the United States for some years, and I believe that now they are considered the sixth in the country. In some fields, they are number one and number two. They have gotten some very fine grants there to permit them to experiment in several fields, and that has enabled them to go ahead more rapidly than many other schools. Sherm runs a good clean school. If they were all like that, everything would be fine. [tape recorder turned off] J.D. Morgan is the director of athletics and is well known to most everybody around. He's done a very wonderful job. He makes the athletes keep their grades up and not fool around any, and he urges them to stay in school until they graduate, after they have finished their athletics. He goes with the teams most of the time. I was talking with him just the other day, and he said that he'd been to Washington twice in the last two weeks: once for a four- day meeting of the NCAA; the other for our basketball game with Maryland, which is very close to Washington, D.C. — they stayed in Washington. He said he had to go to the NCAA meeting, and that he considered it a time lost, but he had to be there. The only thing that he said [was of value] at the NCAA [meeting] was a motion to cut out the multiple football teams--now they have an offensive team, a defensive team, a kicking team, and a receiving team, and it takes a lot more men and money. Eliminating these extra teams would cut down greatly on expenses. Many of the small schools are going out of the football business because they can't afford it. There was a motion to cut it down so that everybody would be the same, but it was defeated — only forty voted for it, and there were hundreds who voted against it--so they're still going to go ahead the same way. He has a lovely wife, Cynthia, who has been prominent in several of the clubs around the university. J.D. was coach of the tennis team for some time, and he was also assistant business manager of the university for a number of years, before he became director of athletics, All of these things he did very well, and he is doing a fine job as athletic director. Babe and Winnie Horrell were two of the very, very nice people we had around the university with us in the 1930s and 40s. Babe played at California; he was on the Wonder Team and was All-American for two years straight. He played center there and came to UCLA to coach their centers on a volunteer basis. He was in business down here, and came out and saw the need, and coached as a volunteer for several years. When Bill Spaulding assumed the duties of athletic director, [Babe] took the job in 1939 and was head football coach from then until the middle of the war. He was too nice a man to be head coach--that was his trouble. He couldn't be tough enough with the players. He didn't win all of the games. The war had started in late '41, and his team won the conference championship [in 1942] and played in the [1943] Rose Bowl, and they lost to Georgia 9-0. Georgia had a very fine back [Frank Sinkwich] who had a badly injured leg and they insisted on playing him every time they got close enough to make a touchdown; and he couldn't even fall over the line. [laughter] They should have beaten us about 30-0. They finally let somebody else make the touchdown. I'd seen them play two years before at Texas A & M when I was on the way home from a New York trip, and I thought they looked awfully sharp; but this time they didn't look as sharp, simply because they were trying to give this man the ball all the time. We gained almost as many yards as they did, but we didn't make any points at all. Babe and Winnie have a party on Christmas night every year. It was started by Winnie's parents many, many years ago. When they were no longer able to have the party, Winnie and Babe took it up and had it at their home. They have had it there ever since. We have attended the party for over thirty years without missing. It's a very nice affair. They have a lot of their friends, a lot of their coaching friends, and friends of their children. They have two daughters; and the daughters, between them, have eleven children. They're all living in Los Angeles or Southern California. Their son, Steve, lives down near San Diego and runs a golf course down there, which Babe has a half-interest in. Steve recently married a very nice widow with two lovely girls, and they have been at the last three parties . For years, Babe had a wholesale produce market down in the wholesale market, but he does not have that anymore. He operates an orange ranch up in the San Joaquin Valley and an apple ranch up in the mountains back of Beaumont, near Yucaipa. Every year they sell their apples to the public right at the ranch. They have great crowds there on Sundays during the season, and they have picnic grounds where you can go and take a picnic lunch and buy apples. They have been down there most all of the time this past year — their manager left, and they can't find another one, which is what happens to most everybody nowadays. But they did have their wonderful Christmas party. Blanche and I have been going to San Diego for the Christmas Eve party of our son-in-law Bob Tolstad's family; then we fly back the next afternoon so that we can make the Horrell party — we did that this year. It was a very lovely party, and both of them were in very good shape. It's always a pleasure to see them. Sometimes we don't see them for a year. Babe used to come out to the barbershop next door to our store and get his hair cut, but I haven't seen him for quite a while, because he has been down in Yucaipa tending to the apples . Wilbur Johns was director of athletics for a number of years. He got Red Sanders here, which was a very fine thing because Red really, as I said before, turned the boys around and got them headed in the right direction. Wilbur was basketball coach before he became director of athletics.

JACKSON: He also got Johnny Wooden.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, he also brought Johnny Wooden here. Of course, I was going to give a life of Johnny, but so much of it has been in the papers and books and everything, particularly in the last two years, that there isn't much I could tell you that you don't already know. Wilbur did get him here, and he's been a huge success. Wilbur died a few years ago of heart trouble. Mrs. Johns is still living. Their daughter was in our house last Saturday with her husband, who is a painter. He came in to give us an estimate on the house and brought her along, and we had a very nice visit with her. Wilbur also had a son, who is just finishing college now. Dean Helen Laughlin, dean of women, was way, way back. Not very many remember her. She was a person who had empathy with the students. Some of them would get in a little trouble, and she was excellent at talking with them; she knew what to say and saved a lot of them from really going berserk. Kids get in circumstances which are peculiar to them — they did then, anyway — and they really didn't know what to do. Helen Laughlin was very sympathetic with them; she would talk with their parents so that they could go on and face life. She wanted them to. She had been retired for a number of years, and she died fifteen or twenty years ago. She was a fine woman. Joe Osherenko was another student who worked hard on whatever he did. He was manager of advertising for the Daily Bruin and got a lot of ads for it. He was down at the old campus, and they were coming out [to Westwood] the next year to the [new] campus; Joe thought it would be a good idea to sell the people out in Westwood a lot of ads. He didn't have any trouble there; they were so delighted the university was coming that he sold nearly everybody in Sawtelle a full-page or a half-page ad in the Bruin. When they got out here, of course, it didn't work out that way. They didn't have much to do with the university, they were so far away. But he went on from that into publishing in Los Angeles. He published fashion magazines; the industry was just starting and getting going good, and he started with them and they grew together. He had a very good magazine, and then another--I don't know what all he was publishing when he died five years ago, but he had a very substantial estate. He published the programs for UCLA athletics at a very low rate, and sometimes he would give them free when we were having some bad times; he really endeared himself to the students. Mrs. Osherenko was a very capable person. She kept the businesses going for a while and then sold them off one at a time. She is now living in Santa Barbara. We saw her at a basketball game just recently and also at a farewell party for Harry Morris and his wife, Janice. She says she loves Santa Barbara. One daughter is with her and the other one is married. Page Ackerman, our present librarian, was here on the Westwood campus and she remembers the balloon that we had up above our store in September 1929, trying to get people down here. Page has been in library work all her life, working her way up; she is now director of the library and doing an excellent job.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 24, 1975

GARDNER: Well, I'll begin at what I think is the beginning, What was the competition in the textbook business when you first opened your store on the old campus?

R. CAMPBELL: When we started our store, we were the only secondhand store in the city that did textbook business. The competition we had was the Co-op, and the Co-op did not handle used books; they took them in on a consignment basis, and when they sold them they would give the student the money. They always sold all of their new books before they sold any of the student's used books. So we really had no competition in used books for the first three years. During that time the enrollment had increased by about a thousand new students each year, and the new Co-op's sales increased a small amount. So they didn't think anything about it. There was a slight increase in the enrollment the fourth year, and their sales were down, and then they commenced to worry about it. It was then they started buying used books from the students and competed with us in that field.

GARDNER: So, in other words, at the time you came out here, [your only real competition] was the UCLA Co-op.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, yes. We kept the store there after UCLA moved out to Westwood because the city started a junior college--now it's Los Angeles City College. We handled all of their books for three years, and then the students decided they wanted to have a store on the campus. So to begin with we sold them the books on a consignment basis, and then they wanted to buy on their own, so we were in open competition. They had a man who was in charge of all school stores in the city--the high schools and the grade schools all have student stores, too, selling paper and school supplies to the kids. And he was the supervisor of all of them. He ran a good store at City College. We still had our store on North Vermont, and Dick Fuller was managing it, as I mentioned before.

GARDNER: Well, I suppose there's not much more to say about the textbook business. I think you covered that in your discussion with Johnny about how Bill Ackerman and Ralph Stilwell bought the textbooks they could use in the student store on the campus. When exactly did you go into the trade books?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, we went into it down on the old campus, in a very small way. A man from the Los Angeles News Company kept stopping by and saying, "You should have some of our books here to sell when you don't have these textbook rushes on." We said, "Okay, you send us an assortment of these reprints. Reprints were a great thing then, and they had a lot of fine dollar books. And I said, "You send us a selection of these." He said, "Well, how many?" And I said, "Well, 100." He said, "That won't make any kind of a showing." So we compromised on 200, and brought them out. We did exceptionally well, I thought. So we started it, really, with that, but we didn't have anything except these reprints. When we came to Westwood, we soon saw that we couldn't make a go of it any other way, so then we really got into the trade-book business, and did very well from the start. But we didn't start the children's department until 1934.

GARDNER: Was anybody else handling children's books at that time?

B. CAMPBELL: I don't believe so.

R. CAMPBELL: If they did, they just brought them out at Christmastime and displayed them. They did that in the department stores downtown.

B. CAMPBELL: That's right. I remember once, when the girls were little and before we had our children's department, I went down to the Broadway to get some books for them — there were no shopping centers anywhere then. I couldn't find the children's books. I looked all around, and finally I went up to a clerk and said, "Where are your children's books?" She said, "Oh, they're over here, under the counter. We bring them out at Christmas." So you see, there were very few children's books sold at that time. I think I told this before.

R. CAMPBELL: We really didn't know much about the trade- book business — what other stores were handling them-- until we got to Westwood and had to really get going on it. As far as we knew, there were no trade-book stores in Los Angeles. Then somebody said something about Dawson's downtown, and we heard of Parker's. Parker had a big store downtown; he also had a son who graduated from Harvard Law School, who needed more and more and more money all the time, until his father finally went bankrupt. I remember they had a big sale. By that time we were in the trade- book business, and I went down, but there wasn't anything that we wanted, because other people had already bought everything that was any good. Then there was the Fowler Brothers store that always had a book department and general stationery. It's kind of a family affair, [run by Sieg Lindstrom] , a nephew of the Fowlers who founded it; he likes the stationery and wishes they didn't have any book business. There's another relative in there that's running the book department, and he's doing a very fine job. But the situation they have down there is a little awkward. Lou Epstein had a secondhand-book store on Sixth Street downtown. We also discovered a bookstore out in Hollywood--the Satyr Book Shop, on North Vine Street, owned by Mac Gordon. Another store in Hollywood was owned by Stanley Rose but he went out of business quite early. He infringed on a copyright. The Satyr Book Shop across the street had a little book called The Specialist by Chic Sale, a small humorous book about building outhouses. Stanley couldn't see where it was copyrighted; and so he printed some and started selling them. They arrested him and said that he was pirating copyrighted material . They showed him the laws and he pled guilty before they had to convict him. So he went to jail in Hollywood for six months. When he came out, he opened another store selling new books on Hollywood Boulevard. He also became an agent for authors. Satyr Book Shop was on North Vine for a long time selling secondhand and new books. Eventually the shop was moved to the south side of Hollywood Boulevard just east of Vine. Mac Gordon died, and his widow sold the store to Eddie Gilbert, who later changed the name to Gilbert's Book Shop. Eddie is a graduate of UCLA and worked for us in the summer of 1934. I remember if somebody wanted a set of Conrad or Shakespeare or something like that, I'd call Eddie up, and nine times out of ten he had it. I would send the customer up there, and almost everybody came back well satisfied, saying that it was a fair price.

GARDNER: Were there any bookstores around Westwood at all?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, Jake Zeitlin had a branch store just east of us for six months. I would say he started in January after we'd opened in September 1929. He ran it for six months and then closed it out, because the Depression was here and they really weren't selling much. He had a girl running it who was quite good. She'd come out from Texas, so she went back downtown and worked in Jake Zeitlin's store down there. But that was all that there was for a number of years. Now there are so many that you can't keep track of them. A new Bruin Book Company has opened up on Weyburn Avenue between Broxton and Gayley. It's quite large, and it's just loaded with secondhand books--I don't know where they got them, but they have some for UCLA. They told me they were going to cater to UCLA and have more of their books; but they don't have them yet.

GARDNER: According to my notes, the Martindales went into business around 1932.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, I believe it was '32, but they were in Beverly Hills, not Westwood. Walter Martindale was president of the Southern California Booksellers [Association] at one time, but he really wasn't very active — I wasn't either when I was president. They have two meetings a year, and they have authors speak who have had books published recently. Lately--for the last few years — they've turned it into a retirement party for some of the publisher's representatives. They had a very nice one last fall when Blanche and I were guests of honor. At some of the meetings they discussed censorship. We'd have been thrown in jail, even ten years ago, for selling the books that everybody sells now. It's too bad.

B. CAMPBELL: What was that book--there was a big lawsuit, and we were notified that we were [named in it]. Wasn't it a million-dollar lawsuit, or something?

R. CAMPBELL: We've been in two million-dollar lawsuits. Hedda Hopper had a book [The Whole Truth and Nothing But] , and she intimated in it that the husband of a very famous motion picture star, who was a star himself (they shall be nameless, because they're both alive), was homosexual, and that a certain "man" was his friend. We got a notice that we were in this suit, that it was for $6 million. Doubleday, the publisher, said they would take care of all the fees and everything else. [They told us] not to worry about it but to send back all the books that we had previous to the sixth printing. We didn't have any of those printings We had to scurry around to find one so we would know what was said. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: We hadn't read it. You see, booksellers don't read books; they just sell them!

R. CAMPBELL: That's right.

GARDNER: Well, you wouldn't have time to read them all.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right. Well, we finally found a copy and read that page. As a matter of fact, we still have it here, but that was all settled. And then there was another one, [involving] Jake the Barber, in Chicago — his brother works in Hollywood and lives in Beverly Hills now. Anyway, Jake was kidnapped in Chicago. A man was convicted of kidnapping him and holding him for ransom. The kidnapper served his time in the penitentiary and got out, and he wrote a book telling about the kidnapping and saying that it was all a frame-up and that he was in the penitentiary illegally. He had a bodyguard; and one day he came home and got out of the car to go in the house, and a car that was following them picked him off and killed him. They shot the bodyguard in the arm. I think Jake's brother still lives in Beverly Hills. He ' s a very generous person — he gives away lots of money. Nothing's been said about this except amongst booksellers. Anyway, they had a $4-million suit, and they named the five stores closest to his home in Beverly Hills. Lou Epstein was in it, and we were in it; and Martindale ' s , and Hunter's in Beverly Hills, and (I believe) one of the department stores were the others. And again, the publishers said they would take care of all expenses and so forth and told us not to worry about it. It was not a big prominent publisher, and we weren't too sure of what we were into. They asked us to send back all the books, so we sent them all back but one. I have that copy.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, at least we never had to pay out any money in lawsuits or anything.

GARDNER: You never had anything like the [Memoirs of ] Hecate County?

R. CAMPBELL: No, we were not in that. That was when the Examiner was having a campaign against alleged dirty books. They arrested the man who was running the bookstore in the Farmer's Market [Harry Wepplo] ; and they went out to Pickwick and arrested Lou Epstein and the clerk who sold the book [Herman Mann]. The book hadn't done very well, and we had just taken them off the center table — we were going to keep three and send the rest of them back--when this happened. So I got them back out, and put them on the table in full display, and sold them in two days. It was fifty that we got at that time, which was a lot of books in those days. So we asked them to come and arrest us, and Bullock's Downtown asked them, "Please come and arrest us. " They said, "No, we have enough for the evidence for the trial, and that's all that we want." And so they didn't go and arrest anybody else. But they were first tried before time . . . [The judge] was very biased, and all three of them were convicted. They appealed the case, and it was reversed because of judicial bias and ordered tried again. It was tried then before Judge [Mildred L.] Lillie. She was a Catholic, but she was very, very fair about everything; she said there was no way she could do anything but find them guilty--they had sold the books, and that was against the law at that time. So she gave them a suspended sentence and fined them fifty or seventy-five dollars, which the publishers paid. But it took five or six weeks for the trial, and Lou had to be there every day. We tried to have some booksellers down there every day, but after a while we got kind of tired; and [Lou] said, "Don't come down anymore. That's all right." [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: One thing about Southern California booksellers --they have all stuck together. It's been very interesting. [Take the] Southern California Booksellers Association, [for example] --Bob says we have two meetings a year. All the booksellers go and visit with each other and have a great time. And I remember when we were still in the store, if we didn't have a book and a customer wanted to know where he might be able to get it, sometimes we ourselves would go to the phone and call another store and ask them to hold it for this customer. [We'd tell them] she'd be right over to pick it up. We worked together very well, much better than the bookstores did up north. There were rumors up in San Francisco that they were at each others' throats all the time.

R. CAMPBELL: There was an old-timer up there, Mr. Newbegin. He and Paul Elder were the two leading booksellers there. If they were going to have a book party, they would say, "Well, who's coming? Is Mr. So-and-so coming? If he is, why, I won't be there." They now have a good association up there; those two are no longer in business. Oh, yes. On this Hecate County trial, the local Westwood paper then was owned by the McNitts. Mr. McNitt bought it for his son Frank, who wanted to get started in the newspaper business. And he really went after this. Frank was for the booksellers, and he would publish excerpts from other books that were dirtier than this, and nobody ever arrested him.

GARDNER: That's the Westwood Independent?

R. CAMPBELL: No, it was the Westwood Hills Press. He called up to see if we had the book and I said, "Yes, I was just putting them back on the table so people can see them." He said, "May I take a picture of it?" And I said, "Sure." So he came over and took a picture of it and ran it on the front page of the paper. Oh, it was a big picture — there was the table, and there was a big arrow pointing right down: "This is the book." He would have long interviews-- they'd sometimes fill up a full page and that was a full- size newspaper. I remember Catherine Drinker Bowen was up at the Bel-Air Hotel; she was working on a book. She had been up there for a couple of months, and he knew that she was there, so he went up and had a long, long interview with her. She, of course, was for the book, and for the right to say what you want to. I then read that book, but I didn't see [anything pornographic]. One story--I believe it was called "The Girl with the Golden Hair" — was a little dirty for the times; but you could have read the book and you wouldn't even have noticed it.

B. CAMPBELL: Times have surely changed. Now it's the opposite way. You can hardly find a book that isn't pornographic .

GARDNER: Outside of the children's section.

B. CAMPBELL: That's right, and some of them are getting quite bad.

R. CAMPBELL: We were looking at Publishers Weekly last night; there's an article in there by a man who was bewailing the fact that the poor authors spend years of their lives writing books, and they can't find anyone who will publish them. But he says there are too many books published--he says they are remaindering some of them within two years. I noticed in 1974 that one book which came out in January was on the remainder table in December. But many, many of the '73s and hundreds of '72s were remaindered in '74. This article said that there were 40,000 books published last year, and there were not quite 11,000 published the year after World War II. He said about half of them are textbooks and half are trade books; you've got 20,000 trade books, and, he said, that's too many.

B. CAMPBELL: But don't the remainder companies republish a lot of them? They keep on republishing them, too; it's not just the overstock of the first few printings.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Whether the book is good or not, if it sells well, they will keep on publishing more copies and still call them remainders. The oldest remainder house is Harlem, I think. They do their own printing, and so does Crown.

B. CAMPBELL: You see full-page ads in the paper all the time now for remainders.

GARDNER: Yes, the College Book Company in Westwood is now doing an immense business on that. Their whole upper floor is remainders.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, it's a very good store. And they have texts in the basement where students can come in and get them when the semester opens, and also sell their old texts. Don Farley, manager of CBC , wanted to enlarge the section of current trade books three or four years ago, and he hired a woman from our store to help him.

GARDNER: Who was that?

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, that was Yetive Moss. She was very unhappy with our store, the way Brentano ' s was running it; and she talked it over with Don and with me, and she decided to go to CBC. He was going to really stress the trade books, and she did build a very good art-book department. Then he changed his mind, for some reason or other.

B. CAMPBELL: He wasn't selling enough, probably.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, yes. Yetive was over there about two years; then she wanted to come back to our store because she wasn't getting much done there except sell remainders. And so she's back to Campbell-Brentano ' s . And now Brentano ' s has told her that she's over sixty-five, so she has to retire.

B. CAMPBELL: She'll find a job somewhere, because she has a knowledge of books that is really tremendous--especially art books. She's great.

GARDNER: She had worked at Pickwick at one time, hadn't she?

R. CAMPBELL: No, she worked for Stanley Rose. She came to us when he closed his store. This was many years after the Specialist episode. He went into the agency business; he sold one or two very good books and did quite well. And he married, and had one child. He met his wife when she was working for the Los Angeles News Company.

B. CAMPBELL: Is he still living?

R. CAMPBELL: No, he died many years ago. He drank a great deal, and he had a little liver trouble that sort of took him away. He had an art gallery in the back, with students studying, and he always managed to have a nude model there. I was up there one day--I didn't know this — and he said, "Come on in the back room, and let's see what's back there." So I went back, and here was this nude sitting up on the stool--her hand under her chin, and people were painting away.

GARDNER: Who were the first other book dealers with whom you were friendly? Who would that have been?

R. CAMPBELL: Westwood Book Store opened in 1933 or '34.

GARDNER: Oh, did it open that early?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Jimmy Hakes and his wife, Betty, both worked for us in our Westwood store. Jimmy had also worked in our store on Vermont Avenue before we came out to Westwood Every summer I went back East buying used books from the stores for our use in the fall--I would be gone three weeks or a month. While I was back there, I received a letter from Jimmy saying that he and Betty were going to open a bookstore in Westwood Village. They said there were a lot of people who felt that they should have a trade-book store and not be bothered with the students, and they said they were going to try this. They opened up on the east side of Westwood Boulevard, north of the old Security Bank building. Then the bank wanted that space. So Westwood Book Store moved over on Weyburn Avenue where a clothing store [The Wilger Company] is now. After a few years, Mr. Wilger bought the building for his son to operate the clothing store. Jimmy had a big removal sale. I went over to see him, and I said, "Well, aren't you going to [rent a place] here and go on?" And he said, "Well, there's no place." I walked down the street that afternoon, and I saw a place on Broxton Avenue that had nothing in it. I knew that Mr. [Manny] Bornstein owned it, and so I said to Mr. Bornstein, "Do you want to rent that place there, now?" And he said, "Well, yeah. Sure, I'd like to." He said, "Who's got the money?" And I said, "Jimmy Hakes, the bookseller on Weyburn, hasn't been able to find a place." This had just been vacated three or four days ago. Mr. Bornstein said, "I'll go down and see him." So he went down and they worked out some kind of a solution, and Westwood Book Store is still on Broxton Avenue. It's a small store and they have good knowledgeable clerks there, and they've done a good business.

GARDNER: Was he ever in competition with you in any way? Or did you more or less deal with just the . . .

R. CAMPBELL: Well, we had a trade-book section by that time .

GARDNER: But did you have a different clientele, or did people go from one to the other?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, they took quite a few customers when they left our store.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Betty was in charge of our trade- book department. She took quite a few of our customers. But we never missed it, because we were growing so much right at that time.

B. CAMPBELL: The neighborhood, you see, was growing so fast then.

R. CAMPBELL: But not fast enough, because the Depression wasn't over yet.

GARDNER: Were there any other bookstores in Westwood?

B. CAMPBELL: Bullock's had a very small book section in their old store, when they were on Westwood Boulevard. You're too young to remember that. That's where College Book Company is now. Bullock's used to be there. They had that whole corner where the drugstore is, too — and all the floors, that whole building.

R. CAMPBELL: After the war, Bullock's built a much larger store, where they are now. Their old location has been leased to various stores since that time. There was a bookstore that opened up on Glendon Avenue. I'd heard that he [Robert Klonsky] was a Communist. I didn't say anything about him, but I thought, "Well, I'll find out." So I called the police department, and I said, "Is there any way of checking to see if somebody who has opened a business is a Communist?" I gave him his name. Later the police officer came in the store and said, "Well, yes, this man is a Communist." He gave me some papers, government documents, showing that he had been the manager of a Communist party district right outside of Philadelphia. It had his picture in it, and sure enough it was the same man. He moved the store over into the Fox Village Theatre building, where Mr. C's clothing store is now. It had a fire one night, and it burned or smoke damaged all of the books. He wasn't even home yet, from locking up the store. He was arrested and charged with arson. They had a trial, and they found him not guilty. The man from the fire department told me they never, never actually file a complaint unless they're sure they're going to get a conviction. They filed a complaint, and then the trial was handled very poorly — and they didn't bring out all the facts that were known. They had a list of questions that the lawyers were supposed to ask, and they didn't ask him half of them. The owner testified that it was done by somebody who had broken a window, thrown some burning material in there. There was a broken window in the back, so someone could have done that. He is now somewhere about town. He had a bookshop in The Egg and Eye; Mrs. Moss asked [the owners] -- she knew them quite well — if they knew that this man had been a Communist. They said, yes, they knew that, but they were letting him in there anyway [because] he wasn't a Communist anymore. But who knows? And what other bookstores have we had? There was one over on Gayley. [The owner] had had a huge store in Hollywood, and he'd sold that, minus certain sections which he brought out here. I went in and looked at it when he was unpacking it, and talked to him. I said, "My gosh, what are you going to do with all these books out here?" And he said, "Well, I figure that this will be a good place for it; it's close to UCLA," And before a year was up, he said, well, he was just not doing well at all [or] anything. He had run ads in the Bruin, and also in the West Los Angeles papers, but it just didn't bring him enough [business] .

B. CAMPBELL: Well, there was that bookstore on east side of Broxton in the Bruin Theatre building, too--remember? It was one of those storerooms north of the Bruin Theatre entrance .

R. CAMPBELL: It was there for a long time. He had used books and after we'd sold to Brentano's, I wondered whether they'd be interested in it or not. I went over and took a look at it, and it was largely scientific books. He didn't have late novels. It looked like good stuff, but no fast-moving titles. So I told Brentano's this, and they said, "No, thanks." They had kind of a closing-out sale, and then the man who owned it--who was the brother of the one who ran it — took the rest of it down to Palm Springs, where he has a bookstore.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 24, 1975

GARDNER: Now, you're going to tell me about Louis Epstein and his gift of books.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, when Lou got rid of his used books, he gave the UCLA Library a great many of them. He wanted me to appraise them, and I said, "Well, I'm not an appraiser, but I'll do it for the university." I did, and about nine- tenths of them were [books] that the universities could use and would be using. The university was expanding then, adding some more branches, and [I knew] they would love to have these; so I did what you customarily do: you take one whole section and figure out what it's worth. I think there were ten sections, so I took every third one; I figured that each one would be worth more or less, but that was a good average. So I took these and figured the average on them, and it came out to just about $24,000. It was a lot of books. If they'd been new ones, it would have been much more than that. Then I kind of wondered whether [it was really] that much, so I went back and evaluated three different sections and it averaged about the same. So I said, "Well, this is it." About a year and a half later, Mr. Epstein's lawyer [Robert M. Robertiello] called up and made an appointment with me; he said that the tax people were wondering how I had appraised those books--they thought [the figure] was a little high. So I said, "Well, come on out, and I'll show you and tell you just how it's done." So I told him that that was the way you [appraised] a big supply of books like that, where they were all used books and there was just one of everything (once in a great while there would be two) . They figure one section, and then they multiply it by three or four or five, depending on how many sections there are. So I said, "That's what I did, and that's what I got; and I think it's a fair price." I said, "They were all textbooks that are current, or they are ones that are out of print." A lot of them were out of print and being advertised for, and they couldn't get them any cheaper anywhere else. I put in what I thought was a fair price. I said, "If I had been in the secondhand [book] business, I'd have been delighted to have gotten those for that price." So he went away, and nothing else ever happened. I guess Lou never even heard about it.

B. CAMPBELL: How did he happen to have so many textbooks that were used in the schools? Did he buy books back from students?

R. CAMPBELL: I don't know. Well, I guess he would if a student went up there, but he really didn't make any effort to get the regular college books that were in town; he just bought them in homes, and here, there, and everywhere.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, he used to go out and buy in homes. That's where he got them.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right, he used to go out and buy in homes all over Southern California. He had a very big supply of used books there, and then he commenced getting more new ones in; and, of course, he had that building that went clear up three stories, and he had a top floor full of remainders. He'd buy anything; the whole remainder of anything that had to do with show business. He had one [book] up there, he'd bought 10,000 copies. He said that he had paid twenty-five cents for them and that he was getting three dollars apiece for them when anybody wanted them. He said, "All you have to do is quote them to anybody who advertised for them in Antiquarian Bookman, and they'll pay three dollars." So that's just like money in the bank. But it's trouble to move them and store them. Of course now, if you have to move [books] --even within the city — your freight costs are way, way over what they were then; I think that the freight rates now are about four times what they were seven or eight years ago.

B. CAMPBELL: And how much more are they now than they were when we started?

R. CAMPBELL: It's just like the wages. When we started down on the old campus, we would pay people twenty cents [an hour] the first year, if they were without experience; and the next year, we'd pay them twenty-five cents. And that was sort of the top of what anyone was paid.

B. CAMPBELL: And now they start gift wrappers, the young high school girls at Brentano's, minimum of $2.25 per hour for two months on a trial basis. Then you've either got to advance them ten cents per hour or else fire them and just say that this was the trial period, then let them go at the end of that time. But most of them don't seem to stay that long, anyway.

GARDNER: I do want to talk about the changing book trade, but we'll save that for later.

R. CAMPBELL: Lou is a very fine competitor; he and I always called each other and asked, "What are you doing about the price of a certain book?" And [customers] would tell me he was selling this [book] for this [price] . Lou said, "Well, if we are, it's a mistake, I know that it's three dollars. Just a minute; I'll look and see." And he said, "No, these are marked exactly like yours. Somebody was just trying to get the book a little cheaper."

GARDNER: How long have you known him?

R. CAMPBELL: I've known him since he moved out [to] Hollywood. I was in his store down on West Sixth Street once, and he was out. Then, after he [had moved] out to Hollywood I heard that he had a good store and was doing quite well, so I went over there and got acquainted with him.

GARDNER: Did you used to do that — go from shop to shop?

R. CAMPBELL: No, not very much. No. But I would sometimes go around--in the summertime, especially--looking for used books from UCLA that were marked low enough so that I could sell them and make some money on them. But our business got bigger and bigger, and I didn't have time to do it in the summer. I always went back East, as I said before, on a buying trip. Then after about 1938 or -9, we decided that we would quit making any great effort to get the student trade and concentrated more on the neighborhood book business.

B. CAMPBELL: His traveling days were over.

R. CAMPBELL: Except we would go back to the American Booksellers' Association conventions.

GARDNER: What about Walter Martindale? How long does your acquaintance with him go back?

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, I met him within two or three years after he opened his store in Beverly Hills, but I didn't really get well acquainted with him until we reorganized--or reactivated — the Southern California Booksellers Association.

B. CAMPBELL: Did he start downtown, too?

R. CAMPBELL: No, he put in the store downtown afterwards.

B. CAMPBELL: He started in Beverly Hills.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right. Then he put in one downtown, and one in Phoenix.

GARDNER: What about his brother [Bill] in Santa Monica?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, he has another brother [Richard], you know, who was also in the book business.

GARDNER: Oh, no, I didn't know that.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, he was on Wilshire, down in the Miracle Mile ...

B. CAMPBELL: ... on the south side, not too far west of La Brea.

R. CAMPBELL: And both of them kind of irked Walter. They were never very big stores. Walter bought the store on Wilshire, and that brother moved up to Northern California. I can't think of the town, but there was a big story in Life about it when some Ku Klux Klan was going to run somebody out of town or something. [There was a feature in Life] about that, and it showed a picture of the main street. And he had a small bookshop there. I never really knew him. The brother Bill, in Santa Monica, has a fairly big store now. He always wants to get the maximum discount, and his purchases are one or two instead of a hundred or fifty. But he seems to be doing quite well.

GARDNER: They don't have the best of relationships, though, do they?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, they don't really have any relationship with any other bookstores that I know of, unless it's with some in Santa Monica. They go to the booksellers convention here in town. Did they ever go to the national one? I don't think so.

B. CAMPBELL: I don't believe so. The Walter Martindales did, but I don't believe the Bill Martindales ever went.

GARDNER: Well, let's talk about the Southern California Booksellers Association, then. I know it would be almost impossible for you to remember any specific dates or times — Mr. Epstein also went crazy trying to remember which time was which, and which reorganization was which-- [tape stopped] so instead, let's talk about the organization in general: the reasons it came together, when it came together, and some of the people who were really involved, besides you and Lou Epstein.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, to go way back when I first remember it, when we first got together, there was a fellow named Les Hood, who ran Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. Mr. Vroman had no close relatives; he had some nephews who were working [there] . The oldest one was working there when we first came; the others were still in school. But within a few years there were four of them working there, and they were waiting for him to die so they could get the store; and he finally died. He smoked all the time--just a real smokestack — and consequently he died of cancer of the lungs. They moved their store two or three times. They have moved their wholesale place out east of Pasadena, now; they still have the retail store in Pasadena, and they do a very fine business. Their stationery department is very good, as is their book department. They have a man there who was president of Southern California Booksellers' Association--Dave Jamison. And he's getting old, too.

B. CAMPBELL: But he ' s a great bookman. He's one of the real old-timers.

R. CAMPBELL: He's just devoted his whole life to books. He never married; the bookstore is his whole life. And he's interested in selling books; for example, Dave lets Lloyd Severe (Lloyd was manager of the book department at Brown's shop in Pasadena until he retired about ten years ago and moved to Leisure World) take books to Leisure World to sell when an author's going to speak there and Lloyd can return what he doesn't sell. Dave also lets Lloyd take books to sell at the Authors Club meetings in Los Angeles. Incidentally, Lloyd and Gladys celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary the other day.

GARDNER: Oh, wow.

B. CAMPBELL: And he doesn't look it; she doesn't either. And neither one acts it. They're both so active. Wonderful. He's a wonderful bookman, too.

GARDNER: He was also very involved in the Southern California Booksellers [Association], wasn't he?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, he was very involved in it. Is he here in this? [examines photograph] Yes. There he is, right there along with Walter Martindale; Richard Nixon (he was running for governor of California); Muriel Gates, book buyer for all the Broadway stores; Lou Epstein; Bob Campbell; and Dave Jamison.

B. CAMPBELL: The Severes were at the Friends of the Library [meeting, last summer] when they honored us.

R. CAMPBELL: We went to see them at Leisure World, and he said, "Now, I'm going to show you how to get out of this place. Leisure World is very big, and there's four or five exits. We go this way; it's closer to the freeway right here than it is to go back the way you came in." And he said, "Incidentally, I'll show you where you can get some melons and produce at a good price." We got outside, and there was a vegetable and melon stand there. They said, "Special prices today. We're going out of business because we're going back to school." Well, the cantaloupes were ten cents, and the heavy cranshaw melons--the ones that were $3.80 in the markets in Los Angeles — we got a very nice large one for $1.75. It was, I think, the best one I ever tasted--it was just wonderful. Lloyd is a past president of the Southern California Booksellers Association and Dave Jamison is also a past president of Southern California Booksellers.

GARDNER: I also have the name Virgil Ruick.

R. CAMPBELL: Virgil Ruick was the manager of the medical book department of Fowler Brothers, in downtown L.A. He died very suddenly. He's been dead ten or twelve years. He was quite young, and he had no indication of any heart trouble at all. He was out on the golf course one day and just dropped over dead. His widow is still alive, and once in a while we hear from her. She has two sons; one of them is an Episcopal priest in Hawaii, and she goes over there and stays every once in a while. Virgil ran a very fine store, and we had an exchange account. He'd call up and see if we had something that he needed in a hurry, and if we did we'd send it down--and vice- versa. And after he died, it just sort of stood there. We'd call down, and they couldn't send it out — we finally got it all straightened out. The [Booksellers Association] goes on now with two meetings a year. That's enough to keep us going; and we have a fairly substantial sum in the treasury, so that if we have to do some work in the legislature and people have to go up to Sacramento, we have expense money for it. They try to keep the price down at the parties that we have. They have actually dipped into the treasury to pay some of the bill on the dinners lately because prices have gone up so much the last couple of years.

GARDNER: Well, you're a past president. What did that consist of? What did you have to do as president of Southern California Booksellers?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, the president had to preside at the two meetings. They wanted me to be president so much that I finally said, "Well, okay." And then, I didn't want to be [president] the second year. Everybody else had had a second term except Walter Martindale. I refused to take it another year.

GARDNER: Well, you talked Johnny somewhat about the ABA, but what exactly was the president's role in that? You were the first area president, weren't you?

R. CAMPBELL: I was the first one from the West Coast.

GARDNER: How did you get active in that, originally?

R. CAMPBELL: We had heard about it; and then when we switched to the trade-book business, the publishers' representatives would say, "You ought to go back to the ABA. They have good meetings there. Go back and listen to them talk." So I went back, and they were talking about being able to return books that didn't sell. When I first went back to the convention, nobody really had any permission or really any authorization to return anything. [The publishers] were letting the department stores and other big stores return most books; but the little fellows, who were hurt the worst, couldn't return anything. By the time I was president, that was very prevalent. George Hecht was the president before me; he is the vice-president of Doubleday, and he's in charge of all their retail stores — in the San Fernando Valley, and many others on the East Coast. Sometimes I would stay in New York a day after a convention or a meeting of the board, and he and I would go to some of these publishers who weren't giving us any permission to return anything. They'd all say, "Well, we're trying, you know, but the big shots upstairs have to say yes." And we'd say, "Who are they? Let's go up and see them right now." "Well, they're out right now." However, eventually we were able to get some kind of returns for everybody. Now, practically all overstock books of all the publishers [can be returned] for credit. The stores pay the carriage charges both ways. You send them by mail. And you know how the postage has gone up: it used to be three cents a pound anywhere in the United States; now it's eighteen cents for the first pound and nine cents for each pound thereafter. And they're talking about raising it some more. The amount of charges for freight is determined by distance, so it is cheaper to send books from California to New York by parcel post, book rate. You don't realize how much it's amounting to because it's down in the shipping room, but you find out that it adds up at the end of the year. The last time I took a count of it, before we sold to Brentano's, we'd spent a little over $2,000 postage on returns, that year. Now it is more than twice what it was then, so it would be $4,000 now and $4,000 to get them out here--plus handling them twice and being sure that everything was nice and clean. You don't do it just for fun, but it's cheaper to return them rather than take a loss by keeping them and trying to sell them at a discount.

B. CAMPBELL: The first years when Bob went back to the book convention, I didn't go; I stayed home and took care of the store and the girls. I didn't go to a book convention until [Bob was] elected president, in 1948. You see, he got interested in it, and then they put him on the board as the West Coast representative. That was how he happened to work himself up on the board.

R. CAMPBELL: I think the first year that I went back and joined the ABA was the first part of the war. That was 1942. So I was on it from '42 to '48. As far as the presidency went, they let me know that there wouldn't be very much work, that they had a committee back there that ran all the things, and that I would just have to be there for two meetings; the executive committee could do all the other work. "Besides that," they said, "we want to honor Los Angeles for being the second-largest bookselling city in the country, and we also want to shut up the cry within the [organization] that it's being run by New York." [laughter] So I said, "Well, if that's all there is to it, I'll take it," But there was a lot more to it than that, and I knew there was at the time.

B. CAMPBELL: But then you made a provision about the dates for the meetings, too.

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. My first really important act was to change the date of the fall meeting so it coincided with the World Series! Now, of course, you can see it on television faster than you can see it sitting in the stands at the [stadium] in New York.

GARDNER: What benefits would you say you got out of the participation in the two booksellers associations?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, we got the biggest benefits from the American Booksellers Association. The return privileges did come through quicker and that's a very great thing — it's been a lifesaver for a lot of people. A lot of people couldn't have gone through their first years in business had they not been able to return unsold books. [The biggest benefit] from the Southern California [association] is that it gives you a feeling that there is money there when you have to fight on censorship — or anything else. There really hasn't been anything else that's come up particularly that's bothered us. We occasionally said, "Well, let's get together and buy [co-operatively] so that we can always get a hundred pounds." But you got into it [and discovered] that it took too long, or maybe the jobber, Vroman's, would get them, and they'd have to ship them to the various stores; and the extra shipping cost is more than the savings you make. In those early days the freight rates on 100 pounds was better than parcel post. So right now it's largely a social thing, with the knowledge that you can have somebody up at Sacramento immediately seeing the legislators if necessary.

B. CAMPBELL: It's just nice to know that there are a lot of other people in the same boat you are.

R. CAMPBELL: There are a lot of people in the legislature who are very anti any censorship, [although there are] some who will introduce a bill because their constituents want it, or because a small group makes enough noise to make it important to them to do it.

GARDNER: Are there any other booksellers you were close to that you'd like to talk about?

B. CAMPBELL: At one time. Bob, it seems to me there were six or seven bookstores in the Village. [This was] back about ten years ago. Was it Ted Maas that had a bookstore?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, Ted Maas.

B. CAMPBELL: He's the one I was trying to think of, on Broxton. And let's see--there was Jimmy Hakes 's Westwood Book Store and the one there in the Bruin Theatre building, and another one in the Vilage Theatre building that we thought was run by a Communist; and College Book Company was here at the time, and ours. That's six. It seemed to me there were seven or eight, but I can't remember now where they were. But then, some of the smaller ones, you see, have phased out. Of course, now we have the Logos book store on Weyburn Avenue, which is primarily religious books. And I guess they're doing all right; they have been there quite a while.

R. CAMPBELL: There's another store, sort of like Dawson's. Down on Westwood Boulevard below Olympic there is Needham Book Finders, now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Kurman .

B. CAMPBELL: And then there was a rental library on Westwood Boulevard, just this side of Ohio.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. I wonder if it's still there. And there's also the Sisterhood Bookstore, the women's lib one .

B. CAMPBELL: It's at the corner of Rochester and Westwood,

R. CAMPBELL: It was there for five or six years. And they did call it something else, and changed it to Sisterhood .

B. CAMPBELL: And then, of course, Pickwick--when Pickwick came to Westwood, I said, "Oh, this is goodbye to us," because they had stores all over and they advertised so much. Now they have this huge store right there on Westwood Boulevard.

GARDNER: It had already been sold to Dalton's, hadn't it?

R. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. It had been sold. We'd sold ours, too. Pickwick had stayed out of Westwood as long as we owned the store.

B. CAMPBELL: It was the same way with the College Book Company. They didn't go into trade books to any extent while we owned the store. I think they handled dictionaries and a few things that students would buy along with their textbooks.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, they had just a small line like that. They said, "We're not going to handle the general trade books as long as you own the store."

B. CAMPBELL: The book business is so different now from what it was when we started.

GARDNER: Yeah. Well, let's talk about that.

B. CAMPBELL: When we started in, it was service. We would get any book for anyone, no matter how small the publisher was. And sometimes we would lose money on it. Maybe it was a dollar book; by the time we'd typed up the order, sent it to the publisher, paid the postage and handling and everything, we didn't make anything on it. But that didn't bother us because we felt we were giving service to our customers. In fact, when we sold, Brentano ' s told us that we could continue to run it the same way; but right after that, Macmillan, who owns Brentano’s--and Macmillan is a big stock company — started putting pressure on Brentano 's to make more money. And the way to do that is to cut down on the overhead and cut down on your stock so you don't have so much inventory. Money is tied up in inventory, you see. And we used to stock a book--a basic stock item--if we sold three copies a year.

B. CAMPBELL: We probably didn't have too many titles that we only sold three a year--and we probably didn't make any money on them--but when a customer asked for it, we'd have it, you see. And I know some of the bookstores here in Los Angeles have said to a customer, when they didn't have a book, "Try Campbell's. If Campbell's doesn't have it, nobody will." Well, then, one of the first things that Brentano ' s did to us was to say that we had to sell thirty dollars worth of a book a year in order to stock it. In other words, for a dollar book we had to sell thirty copies, for a ten-dollar book we had to sell three copies, and so forth. Well, that cut down an awful lot. I didn't stick to that rule in the children's department. When the buyer was out here from New York one time, I said to her, "Does that mean that, for instance, in the Hardy Boys series for boys, and the Nancy Drews for girls "-- there are about fifty titles-- "does that mean I have to sell thirty dollars worth of every title?" "Oh, no," she said. "That's a series." So I had a lot of series of books. Which was true. Don Freeman, for instance, had written about fifteen or twenty books. Also Bill Peet . I didn't sell thirty dollars worth of each title, but combined, I sold much more than that. That way I had a complete stock, you see. So we more or less stuck to that in the children's department. In the adult book department upstairs, they cut a lot of titles. Then they found out that they just had to have more titles, so they gradually worked back into it. You remember when Jean Kelly Mickey was going over those stock cards and trying to rebuild that department again? Bob and I feel that we had our bookstore at the best time because books were becoming more popular and there were not very many stores at that time. But now, there are more good books coming out all the time and many lousy ones, We could still give that service while we owned the store; now, it would be difficult for us to continue the way we did.

R. CAMPBELL: In the last ten years, the wages have gone up and our help has deteriorated, except for the basic ones that we've had there for so long. We would start to train them, and then when we got them well trained they were gone. They would say they were going to stay, and we thought we were paying them quite a little, but prices and everything else were going up so fast that it really wasn't very much--I realize that. Now there's fewer employees. Brentano ' s is unionized in New York; that's why they have this $2.35 an hour minimum to begin with. Here in California, I think, the minimum is--did they pass that $2.25 the other day?

B. CAMPBELL: I'm not sure what it is now.

R. CAMPBELL: But it was $1.80.

B. CAMPBELL: There's quite a bit of difference in that. And they've cut down on the help so much. The big conglomerates that have stock have to make money for their stockholders, and the way they're doing it at Brentano ' s is to cut down on the overhead and the basic stock. All they're interested in is making money. We were interested in a good living, but we weren't interested in bleeding the public and just getting all out of it that we could. We wanted to give service all the time. And we had so much fun doing it. That's why I say that we're glad we lived in a time when service really counted. Incidentally, we're reading Minding the Store now, by Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus . Have you read it?

GARDNER: No, I haven't.

B. CAMPBELL: It's extremely interesting — especially to us, being in the retail business so long. And that's the way they built their business, with excellent service.

GARDNER: Well, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: And now they've been sold.

R. CAMPBELL: Broadway Hale owns it.

B. CAMPBELL: I just wonder if they will be able to keep on giving the same service. Well, it's made it much easier for Bob and me to retire--believe me.

GARDNER: Well, of course. Well, what year did you sell, exactly?

R. CAMPBELL: Nineteen sixty-eight. September 23, 1968.

GARDNER: What prompted the decision to sell, really?

B. CAMPBELL: We were getting to the age. [laughter]

R. CAMPBELL: And people were wanting to buy it, and they didn't have any money. The ' d come in and say, "Is your bookstore for sale?" And I said, "Well, we really aren't ready to retire yet, but maybe we'd sell it. How much money do you have?" Well, they'd have $5,000 or $10,000 — and actually, the price that it went for was much more than that. I discovered I had diabetes, and that worried me; I worked all right but I could see that we were going to have to sell sometime, and there wasn't anybody in our family that wanted it. I asked Joe [Joseph A.] Duffy, who was the executive director of American Booksellers [Association] if he knew anybody. He said, "Well, no," but [he said] he'd look. So he sent me a card a year later and said, "If you're still interested in selling your store, let me know." I didn't let him know, because in the meantime, we'd had a couple of people come out who said they had plenty of money to buy it. But then when you'd get right down to it, they had maybe $80,000 or $100,000, and all the rest we would have to wait for. I was afraid that the new owner might not be successful and we wouldn't get the rest of our money, and so it was no-go on that. I finally decided I would let Joe know. I wrote and told him that we would consider selling. He wrote back and said that it was Brentano ' s that was interested. I said, "Well, we'll contact them when we go back to the convention in Washington, D.C., which was the following week. So we got in touch with Mr. Leonard Schwartz, president of Brentano 's, and a couple weeks later he and Mr. Steinhart came, along with the manager of their San Francisco store, to Los Angeles. They looked over our stock, and we worked the sale out from there. Brentano ' s signed the bill of sale for the Paul Elder store in San Francisco the morning of September 23, 1968, flew down here that afternoon, and our papers were signed that evening.

B. CAMPBELL: I wonder what Paul Elder's doing now?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, he's playing the violin with some other people, and I guess he's having a good time. I don't know, but I'm sure he's having a better time than we had in our store--because he got out, and we didn't.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I'm glad we stayed in, though, because it's easier for us now to get out.

R. CAMPBELL: Yeah, that's right.

B. CAMPBELL: And I think that if we hadn't been there and would have seen what they were doing to it, we would have said, "Well, it's too bad we aren't there. Maybe we could have done something." And we did do some things, I'm sure.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Blanche stopped them from moving the children's department upstairs on the main floor.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE MARCH 3, 1975

GARDNER: Now, you mentioned that you had a recollection you wanted to start off with.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Early at the old campus, there was a cop on the beat, and he was a very nice guy. He came in one day, and said, "Say, do you have a license to buy and sell books?" I said no. He said, "Well, they're checking up on everybody all over town to see who has them and why they don't have them. You'd better get downtown and see that department down there." I went down, and they couldn't find anything under "books," so they looked under "junk dealers." And in the junk dealer ordinance, it lists books as one of the [categories] . [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: Isn't that something?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, there were several [book dealers] in town that had never heard of the license either, and so we wanted to get them to change it--give us a separate section and let us have our own license. But they didn't want to monkey with it because it takes a certain length of time to have a new ordinance put into effect; it's got to be posted, and weeks or months later, if nobody protests, they act on it. In about seven or eight months, you can get it into law. But we insisted, and they finally made us a separate section. It went on and on and they finally put a section there so we could buy and sell used books. We had many arguments, because the junk dealers' [ordinance] said that after you bought it you had to put the person's name in it and keep it for six months before you sold it. And, of course, during the rush at the beginning of each semester we would buy books and sell them the same day. We finally got them to put in [the requirement] that we had to keep [used books] three days. Of course, we never did, but it satisfied them. And you're supposed to send a report in every day of every book you've bought. On big days, you'd have to have two extra people making out these reports. But we just went ahead, and really nothing ever happened; and we never got questioned on it anymore. But it was a little trying for a time to get out of the junk dealers' classification.

B. CAMPBELL: Do you remember how much the license cost?

R. CAMPBELL: The license cost $2. Now they're all based on the amount of volume you do in a year, and they run anywhere from $100 to--well, our last one cost us around $600.

GARDNER: That's a long way.

R. CAMPBELL: They kept raising the rate. Of course, we did more business, so that helped, but they raised the rate very, very high. It's higher than that now.

GARDNER: When we left off last time you had just described selling the store to Brentano ' s and had begun to give your thoughts on what it was like in the interim period.

R. CAMPBELL: They told us that we could go ahead just like we were before and run through Christmas. Well, that lasted until the next morning. [laughter] The president of Brentano ' s was out here with the trade-book buyer, and they looked over our stock cards; he came to me and said, "Well, your stock cards are just like ours, except they aren't printed. You're just using a three-by- five card. Otherwise it's exactly like ours. I don't see any reason why you couldn't integrate ours right now. We'll send you some cards that are printed, and you can copy all these over and send them to us right away. Then you'll get in on our buying. We were a little bit upset by that, but we couldn't do anything about it. From then on through Christmas, they really didn't bother us very much; but after January 1, they commenced wanting these reports they'd requested. I didn't fill them in or do anything about it. They wanted to know how many of this we had, and why didn't we sell more of something else. [And we knew] right away that it was not going to be anything like it had been; we survived it, but just barely.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, you mentioned [that they wanted] to incorporate our buying with theirs. They have a system whereby each store sends in the titles of books they want to reorder; Brentano ' s buys all the new books. We didn't see the salesmen anymore to order the new books that were coming out. They do all of that in New York, for all the stores, and they do it all at one time, because they get a bigger discount by buying more copies of each title. So we had to send our stock orders in to them, and in their system, [all the orders to] publishers [whose names] began with A, B, and C had to be there on a certain date. Then the ones that began with D, E, F, and G, we'll say, and so on. So we had to keep doing that all the time. The bad part about their buying the new books in the East was that they didn't know local authors. Sometimes they wouldn't order any books of an author that we knew and had sold a great many copies. And then we were busy getting stock taken, and they started cutting down on our staff right away; so each person had so much more to do that we didn't really have time to read the Publishers Weekly, which gave an announcement of new books that were coming out. The buyer was out here one time, and I [mentioned] that she hadn't bought any of a certain author's books. She said, "All you need to do is just let us know what you want us to buy for you." And I said, "Well, we just didn't have time to read announcements of new books to know what was coming out." One day an author came into the children's department and wanted some copies of his book, and we didn't even know there was a new one out--and it was already out and in the stores. Fortunately, that time, we could pick some up from Raymar, the local jobber. We did do that a lot, but the [way it was run] was so different from what we were accustomed to that it was a little rough on us.

GARDNER: Well, how long was the layover? It was about four years or so, wasn't it, between the time they took it over and the time you left?

R. CAMPBELL: No, it was six and a half years.

GARDNER: What were some of the changes that went on during that time that were particularly abrasive to you?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, just what Blanche spoke of. Someone would leave, and they wouldn't replace them. This went on and on, until they finally had to replace some of them. But in the last two years they have really just not been hiring anybody when someone leaves. When we retired, they didn't hire anybody to replace us. Now, they're going to make a warehouse out of our store and they're going to move the children's books upstairs [so there will be] more room downstairs for the warehouse. They had wanted to do that for the last two or three years, and Blanche just said, "No, we can't do that." They'd be around and talk about it, you know, to Mr. Allen Chabin, who is running the store. He'd come to us and say, "Well, we're going to have a warehouse down there. We're going to move the children's books up." Before the Brentano people left for New York, Blanche said, "You're just not going to do this. The mothers bring their small children, and we have the table over there and there are things for them to play with, and they can't run out of the store into the street." [They said], "Well, we'll put you at the back of the paperback section." And you can't imagine their putting the children's department up there because there's just not room enough.

GARDNER: Exactly.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, they had a warehouse when we left that shipped books to the three Brentano ' s stores in Southern California and three in the San Francisco area. The manager of the children's department, Alice Berry, went to the basketball game with us to see Stanford--she went to Stanford. And she was rather upset with Brentano 's; she said that they had told her in January that they would move the children's department upstairs by the end of February. Nothing has been said about it since then, but that goes along with [everything else] . We soon discovered that there is nobody in the home office who knows anything about retail except one woman [Lillian Friedman] . She antagonizes everybody. I've known her thirty years. She was on the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association when I was on it, and also when I was president.

GARDNER: Did you have yourself set for that fifty years? Is that why you stayed through those final years?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, we did when we talked about getting out after we had a couple or three years of this; we said, "Well, let's wait till it's fifty years, and we'll get out then." There were times when we didn't think we could make it, but we did. We explained previously how when Mr. Cowen came out from the New York office that we agreed to retire on May 10, 1974, the fiftieth anniversary of opening our store. We asked Mr. Cowen at the banquet they gave for us how he happened to come to Brentano ' s . Had he been in the book business? Well, he'd never been in the book business in his life, and he didn't read any books except sport books on the pros, like football . . .

GARDNER: Instant Replay, that kind of thing?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, like Instant Replay. He was more interested in old-timers. He had had Vince Lombardi for a coach in high school forty years ago, and he followed him all the time. And he was crazy about basketball. I think we told about him missing the plane at the airport so that he could come back and go to a game, one night before he went back to New York. [laughter] But he had a completely different background, and we think that you have no business being in the head office of a chain unless you know something about books. But [these] people have just come from another department store, or some other business, and it's very discouraging.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, they told us right out, point blank, that what they were interested in was making money. And if they could cut down on the staff, that would reduce the overhead right away. And they also cut down on our telephones. We had a switchboard, six local phones, and two Los Angeles phones; and they cut the Los Angeles phones to one and the local phones to three--which is right smack in half--and took the switchboard away. So now the employees on the main floor have to answer the phone; and if they're waiting on a customer, they have to excuse themselves and go answer the phone.

R. CAMPBELL: Now there are calls coming in for the warehouse so they'll have even less time to talk to customers. People tell us that it's hard to reach the store by phone.

B. CAMPBELL: It's so different from when we ran the store, because we had more staff; the staff could work with the customer and suggest books. But now, if someone comes in and asks for a book, the clerk will say, "It's over there in that area," and point where it is, and the customer goes and tries to find it himself. Alice said that one day--I think it was a Saturday--she was alone in the children's department, downstairs, and there were I think only three clerks on the main floor. Well, one of those has to come down at noon hour to relieve her while she goes out for lunch. And you can imagine what service they can give--that is, they just can't give personal service at all.

GARDNER: Especially at noon.

R. CAMPBELL: And someone is supposed to stay by that register all the time.

GARDNER: Which eliminates one.

B. CAMPBELL: Can you imagine how they take stock and get the orders sent in all the time? I frankly just don't see how they manage .

R. CAMPBELL: Well, they don't manage.

B. CAMPBELL: No, New York doesn't care as long as they can show a profit. They told us once that they didn't care if their sales were down. If the overhead is down enough, they can show a profit.

GARDNER: But can they be showing a profit? I can't imagine how they . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Well, if the overhead is down enough, they can, and they certainly are [bringing] the overhead down.

R. CAMPBELL: They tell us that Macmillan and Company, who owns it — it's a big conglomerate--has been putting the pressure on in the last year for them to make more money.

B. CAMPBELL: That's true. That's true.

R. CAMPBELL: Now they've opened up three stores in the Los Angeles area and they haven't done well at all in them. I suppose that is hurting Macmillan too.

GARDNER: Well, that Beverly Hills store opened with an incredible amount of . . .

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Now, it is doing all right. It's not doing quite as well as they expected, but it's doing very well. And it's the only one that is.

GARDNER: Where are the other two?

R. CAMPBELL: In Woodland Hills and Costa Mesa shopping center.

B. CAMPBELL: They're in the new shopping center on Topanga Canyon [Boulevard], where Saks Fifth Avenue, Robinson's, and Bullock's Wilshire are located.

R. CAMPBELL: Quite close to Robinson's.

GARDNER: And Brentano ' s was able to get in there?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes.

R. CAMPBELL: But the shopping center is still not full, and it's not doing too well.

GARDNER: They have a bigger store than yours?

R. CAMPBELL: I don't know whether it's bigger than our overall store with the basement, but it's bigger than the main floor.

B. CAMPBELL: It's a very nice, big store, but another thing that they cut down on so much when they open these new stores is their office, and their receiving and mailing departments. It's so small I just don't see how they manage. But as long as they can get by, why, they keep going.

R. CAMPBELL: They're doing all the bookkeeping back [in New York] now. I don't know how it's going, but in the previous years we had fought to keep the accounts receivable when the other stores were all having it done back there.

B. CAMPBELL: We haven't done the accounts payable since they took over. We send all our invoices back to New York, and everything is paid back there. We kept our accounts receivable here, but they cut them down so much. That's another very big change. We had many charge customers over the years--this was several years ago. It was only a couple years after they took us over that they said we would no longer have charge accounts through the store, except . . .

R. CAMPBELL: It was the second year, before Christmas. B. CAI-IPBELL: Except business accounts and professional accounts. We had to charge everything to BankAmericard, Master Charge, American Express--and Diner's Club, at that time; since then, they've dropped Diner's Club. And I can see that that was an advantage, because it was costing us a great deal to handle the charge accounts through our store. Especially now that postage has gone up--if you mail out a thousand statements a month, why, you can see...

GARDNER: On the Other hand, what did it do for that personalized business?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, that's what hurt. A lot of customers just closed their accounts. They said, "We just don't want to use credit cards."

R. CAMPBELL: But you couldn't fault Brentano ' s for that, because the cost of running the accounts was getting so big. Wages were going up all the time, and the inflation was already here.

B. CAMPBELL: At Christmas, we'd have three full-time employees in our office taking care of the charge accounts, our accounts receivable. Brentano ' s figured that it cost 6 percent of the retail sales to handle those charge accounts. And then some of the customers would not pay right away, and we never charged interest when they were slow. Well, some of them would be customers who would charge once a year, and maybe they wouldn't pay their account for six months. We'd mail out a statement every month, and there was that postage over again, you see — carrying them all that time. I don't know just how much BankAmericard is charging now, but at one time we were paying only 2 percent. All we had to do was simply add the BankAmericard charges, record it on a certain form, and send it in; we deposited it at the Bank of America, and we could use that money immediately, which made a lot of difference .

R. CAMPBELL: The Bank of America transferred it to San Francisco, where it went in with the account from the stores in the Bay Area, and they all went into one account. So it built up big enough so that we were charged 2 percent instead of 2 1/2 or 2 3/4, or 3.

B. CAMPBELL: That was an advantage, and I especially liked it — I helped in the office some, and I knew what a job it was to carry those accounts all the time. But they did let us continue to carry the business and professional accounts. But now, since we left, they have to send all the charges back to New York, too. And we felt that it was much to our advantage to have them here because many times a customer would call in and ask about his account. We had some that were very good, and we felt that having them in New York would not be very satisfactory for our charge customers. But now they send them to New York, and someone said the other day they've cut Marianne [Grant] 's time now — she's the bookkeeper. She was only working half a day as it was; if they've cut her time again, I suppose [it means] all she has to do now is come in and do the daily cash records to send in, make the deposits, and keep change on hand. So the bookkeeping is much different.

R. CAMPBELL: The sales report is supposed to be initialed by the manager, but the present manager isn't there approximately half of the time to okay them. I don't know what they do about it.

B. CAMPBELL: Maybe Serena Morgan does it; she's always there. But it certainly is different. And I said so to Alice the other day, when she said that she was so busy in the children's department. She said, "Of course, you know how everybody wants everything wrapped--not everybody, but so many of them do because they're going to birthday parties with the kids, so they want things gift wrapped. I said, "How do you manage?" She said, "Well, customers are getting used to it. They're being more patient." And that's true. Because everywhere you go nowadays, you find the same situation. Customers don't expect the service that they used to get.

GARDNER: Or are too young to remember it.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, they don't remember it. And we didn't realize how bad it was in many places until we were doing the same thing ourselves and sort of looked around, at Bullock's, Desmond's, etc.

GARDNER: And they don't particularly care to help you when you come in, and you've got to go out of your way to find a salesperson. That's a trend.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, they're taking stock, doing that part of the work, and you have to hunt them up to find them to wait on you.

B. CAMPBELL: And that's what hurts us so. Really, Joel, it's made it much easier for us to get out, because it was so hard on us to see how it was being managed.

R. CAMPBELL: More and more things are getting to be chain- store operations. All of the shoe stores — and there's a lot of them in the Village--most of them are chain-store operations .

GARDNER: Well, is this a trend in the book business, too, do you think?

R. CAMPBELL: Well, yes, I think it is. It's become fairly active here. There are places like Vroman ' s in Pasadena, but the ones that know much of anything about books are all getting quite old, getting ready to retire. I asked, "Who's going to take over at Vroman ' s when Dave Jamison retires in a year or so?" "Well, we just don't have anybody; we don't know."

B. CAMPBELL: I was so lucky in the children's department, because Viviane Brill had been with us, I think it's fifteen or sixteen years. She is a dedicated person to good books and has read so many of them, and customers come in and ask for her to help them.

R. CAMPBELL: Can I interrupt that for just a minute? A number of years ago she went to Salt Lake City. Her husband got a job over there when they were building the theatre-in-the-round up there, and we got her a job at the Deseret Bookstore, It's a huge bookstore, and we thought it was a very fine one. The first day she reported for work they were having a sale. They had books on sale that we ordered and reordered, and had always stocked for years, some of them we sold seventy or eighty copies a year. They had many good books on sale at one-third off list price. Some were in new condition, and some were shopworn. You could tell that they hadn't been wanted.

B. CAMPBELL: And she just really got sick. She went home at noon and called them up, and told them she couldn't take it. She couldn't stand to see such good books like that sold at a sacrifice. [laughter]

B. CAMPBELL: She said it just showed that the people in Salt Lake City didn't appreciate good children's books. She never went back. Well, then, Alice Berry is the other girl that has been with us now, I think it's going on six or seven years. She used to teach at the John Thomas Dye School, and I knew her up there because I had helped the school the same year we started our store, and we've been associated with them practically all that time. Alice came in the store one day, and she said, "Do you need any help?" I said, "Who wants to work?" And she said, "I do." I said, "You do? You're going to quit teaching?" And she said, "Yes, I'm going to go back to UCLA and get my master's. I'd like to work part time." I said, "When can you start?" Because I needed somebody desperately right then. Well, this was early in the semester, and Alice is the kind of a person that plans ahead. And she had to teach till the end of the spring semester, but she came in Saturdays and worked. And then she worked almost full time the two years that she was getting her master's. Because she could regulate her classes to fit in with the work time. About a month before graduation, I thought, oh, how am I ever going to get along without Alice? Because I had turned so much of my work over to her; she was so good. And I said, "Alice, what are you going to do when you graduate?" She said, "I just wish I didn't like my job so much." And she is still with us. She is just wonderful. Those two girls can advise anybody about any kind of children's books. I left the department in a very happy mood, because I knew that they would carry on. Well, now they've cut Viviane's time down; so she only works, I think, a total of three days a week. And two days, she works only a half a day-- ten to two, I think, or something like that. Which we would never do — we would not ask a person to drive from Hollywood out here and cut down on the hours that they worked. If we had them work, they'd come in and work the full day, because we just don't think that's fair, to ask a person to do that. But they've cut her down now, so that Alice is alone there so much of the time. And she has to do all of the reordering. The other day I was in, and Viviane was there alone. And she said, "I've been so busy, I haven't had one minute's time to take stock or look at the cards that I should have gone through for Alice." So if they move the children's department upstairs, onto the main floor — you've been in our department, haven't you?

GARDNER: Oh, yes, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, you know how big it is. I don't see where they're going to put it upstairs. First they were going to move it up to the mezzanine. And that would have not been as bad. But now Alice says they're going to move it up on the main floor. And I just don't see where they're going to put it. . . .

GARDNER: Well, they'll keep cutting down on titles, I suppose.

B. CAMPBELL: I suppose so. I was in Pickwick the other day, and when they opened, several years ago, they had a wonderful children's department. [They had] several tables, with the books lying flat so you could see the titles, and they were displayed on the shelves so beautifully. They also had paperbacks--they didn't have them displayed like we do. We have them with the front cover showing, instead of just the spine. It makes all the difference in the world, especially paperbacks, because they're so thin you can hardly see the titles on the spine. And I said right away, "Oh, they're going to kill our children's department." Well, it didn't make much difference. Maybe it did for a short time, but then our business started picking up again. I went in [to Pickwick] again recently and they have cut their children's department. They have one table now, and very few books on it. I was just amazed. So I think that's one reason why our children's department has kept on doing as well as it has and that it's as busy as it is, because it's the only department that I know of in town that displays the books so you can see them, and that has clerks that can help the customers, clerks who know children's books .

R. CAMPBELL: So many people just don't know what to buy in the way of children's books. They never had them as children themselves.

B. CAMPBELL: I had customers that would write to me at Christmas, give me the names of their children they wanted books sent to--names and addresses, and ages--and I would pick them out, gift-wrap them, put tags on them, "to so- and-so, from so-and-so," and mail them out for them. They didn't do a thing but just send the list. I had one customer who did that for years. I would keep track of exactly what books I sent to each child, each year, so that we wouldn't duplicate. I had one customer that came in once a year. She'd call and make an appointment with me. In fact, it was Dr. Lloyd C. Douglas's daughter, Betty Douglas Wilson. She had no children of her own, but her sister's son had three children--I think they were all girls; they lived down in La Jolla. Betty came in once a year. She'd call and make an appointment with me, and she would have me help her always, because she didn't know too much about them. I would suggest books for each one. She'd buy a couple hundred dollars' worth of books, have us ship them down to La Jolla. We didn't have to gift-wrap them; we just shipped them down. And then they would have those books to use the whole year. Well, this was just terrific. Of course, I don't know whether she's still doing that or not, since I'm not there. I know there were a lot of people that did depend on me, but I kept telling them, "Well, the other girls are just as good, and they can help."

R. CAMPBELL: You run into these people every once in a while. On my walk one day, there was a man out in his front yard. And he said, "Well, your store is not like it was." He said, "I used to go in there at Christmastime and give Mrs. Campbell a list of books, but it was no good last time. They couldn't do it, and nobody there knew anything about it. They were just so busy that they couldn't take time to do it. It's too bad, because I gave a lot of books, and your wife had a record of what everybody got every year, so that they wouldn't duplicate anything." And he said, "They just have cut that clear out." But, who knows, maybe this is the trend. If it is, why, we're glad we were in business when we were.

GARDNER: Do you ever go into the store anymore?

R. CAMPBELL: I'll go in two or three times a week to get our mail--some of it still comes there. Once in a while there is a first-class letter, but most of it is so-called junk mail, where they want money. And we still get books from two or three of the publishers, which we're very glad to have. Blanche particularly gets some. I was not the buyer, and so very few publishers sent me any. There was one vanity publisher — that means the author pays for the publishing, and they tell him they're going to send one to every reviewer in the country, which they seldom do--one of them sends me books, and there's about one every three or four years that's worth reading. It's a big racket. It's too bad that people do that, but one of these vanity publishers [Edward Uhlan] told me that it satisfies the ego of the people that write, and it's worth it for that reason. And, of course, he's made a fortune off of it. He's a crippled fellow. It's his leg, and he has quite a limp, a hard time getting around, but he's really making money. And I think he's been publishing twenty-five or thirty years, now. I went in and saw him when I was president of the ABA, and I got out of that in 1950, so that should be about twenty-five years ago. And he was fairly new; had been there five or six years, then, and had some very interesting stories about the people whose books he published. He said that it's worth it to these people to have their name on a book. They want a book published so badly, and most of them have tried other regular publishers. Two or three of the vanity publishers are advertising out here for manuscripts. He has a newspaper ad once or twice a year. So much about vanity publishers.

B. CAMPBELL: Did you tell about meeting Mrs. Johnston last night?

R. CAMPBELL: No. That's very interesting.

B. CAMPBELL: We were out for a walk, and we saw her planting some flowers. And we said, "Hello"--which we do when we see neighbors, even though we don't know them — and we were visiting with her for a little while. And all of a sudden she looked up at me and she said, "Mrs. Campbell. I know you. I used to bring my boys in, and you sold us books all the time." And she said, "Now they're both in college, back East, and they still just love books." Well, of course, this thrills me, because I feel that books are so important for children, if they can get started early enough. Of course, that's what I did, an awful lot, was get them started, and recommended starting them when they're six months old. If you start them early enough, they'll like books.

R. CAMPBELL: The older one is in his fourth year of medicine at Columbia. And the other one will graduate from Harvard this year.

GARDNER: Oh, terrific.

B. CAMPBELL: Isn't that exciting? I run across this all the time. The other night at the basketball game Mrs. Tanguay came down and said hello, and she was a customer that came in and we had so much fun picking out books for her children. It really has been an exciting life.

GARDNER: Well, let's talk about children's books for a minute.

B. CAMPBELL: We did talk about it. [laughter]

GARDNER: Well, no, I mean. . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Because I could never run down talking about children's books,

GARDNER: You told Johnny about how you got started in children's books. But when you did get started, was anybody else selling and merchandising children's books in the big bookstores around town?

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, no. I don't think any of them were. I think I mentioned this before, but I'll say it again — when our children were very little, before we had our children's department, I went down to the Broadway one day. I wanted to find some children's books for them, and I wanted to browse around, and so I tried to find them and I couldn't. I went up to a clerk and asked her where the children's books were, and she said, "Oh, they're down here under the counter. We bring them out at Christmas." So you see, there really were no children's departments.

GARDNER: Well, did anybody else follow suit after Campbell's began to . . .

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, eventually. I don't know that our having them made any difference in their decision--but now, of course, all bookstores have a few children's books.

GARDNER: Right. But just a few.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, there is a lovely children's store out in Montrose. Now, I haven't seen it since she moved into the new store. Her name is Jane Humphrey. And the name of her store is Once Upon a Time.

GARDNER: Oh, that's nice.

B. CAMPBELL: It's all children's books. It has some of the novelty things, too--I think she has some Beatrix Potter figurines that fit in with the children's book theme. She has a very good stock. I remember one day, Raymar was having open house. When Raymar has open house before Christmas, we get book carts, and we go around and select the books that we need. Jane came up and introduced herself, and she said, "Mrs. Campbell, I've been following you around picking out the same books you do." [laughter] She had probably heard about me and knew that I liked good books, and that's what she liked. She had just started her store, and this was a big help to her.

GARDNER: Well, that's what I was interested in getting at, because obviously Campbell's was the first. Children's books are a huge business, you know, and an awful lot of people buy them. So after that, in the forties and the fifties, there must have been a lot of people starting up children's book departments.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and then one reason for that, too, was that there were so many more children's books published.

GARDNER: So many more children.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right.

R. CAMPBELL: That's right. The same as adults.

B. CAMPBELL: We have our books displayed differently than most stores, as I said, with the front of the book out flat so that they can see the titles, and the pictures on the jackets. There was a customer who came in one day and browsed around for quite a while. I heard her ask to see the buyer. And I thought, "Oh-oh, a complaint." She came over to me, and she said, "I just want to congratulate you on your department. I have never seen anything like it." Well, I was so surprised, and pleased, of course. It turned out that she was from New York City, and she was the assistant buyer of children's trade books for the New York Public Schools — not the textbooks for the schools, but what we commonly call trade books, the fun stories and picture books for children. She said, "I'm out here with my husband--he ' s up at UCLA at a business conference, and I just came along with him. I walked down from the campus to the Village, and when I got here to the entrance" — there on Westwood Boulevard, at Le Conte--she said, "I saw the Campbell's Book Store over there. And I said to myself, 'I'm going to go over there and see what kind of a children's department they've got .' "--because she had been visiting stores on the trip. Well, she just couldn't get over it. She said, "I have seen books here today that I had forgotten existed. Good books." Because of the way they were displayed, you see. I said, "You have some very good bookstores in New York." "Nothing like this," she said. "Nothing like this." And she just raved on about our department and how much she had enjoyed it. I just mentioned that because it shows that our department was so different from children's departments in other stores. My theory has been, all the time: "Get children reading, and you've got your book buyers for the future." I have given talks or been on panels at the Southern California Booksellers [Association] and the American Booksellers [Association] conventions or meetings, and I'd bring this out, but the other stores don't seem to pay a lot of attention to it. I don't know why.

R. CAMPBELL: One reason is that rents are high, and they're getting higher all the time; if you've got a certain amount of space, you want to get as many books in it as you can, and so you just put them spine wise instead of flat, and it makes a big difference. And it's because that basement was down there, and we used it for other purposes to begin with, that we had that space. Now if they're going upstairs, they're not going to have it — you can count on that. They'll insist you put them in spine wise. And they're going to have to cut down on the number of titles, something like 40 percent; but they have to do it, in order to get them upstairs.

GARDNER: Well, then, little by little, I imagine, it'll just be phased out, more and more. Until it gets to be one table, like Pickwick.

R. CAMPBELL: Well, I think that they are going to run out the lease, which has about three and a half more years to go, and then close it down.

GARDNER: Oh, you really think so?

R. CAMPBELL: I think so. I think that's what they're aiming to do, is to close out the lease. It was for ten years, when they bought the store in 1968.

GARDNER: Do they own the property now?

R. CAMPBELL: No, they leased it from Bing & Bing. And now I understand that Bing & Bing has sold it to somebody else-- just the last week or two--I don't know who it is. They told me that at the store the other day. And the man, the nice man that comes in--well, they're both nice-- but the man that is in just once in a while and was head of Bing & Bing is still going to be handling the lease.

B. CAMPBELL: You know, we originally owned the property-- did you know that?

GARDNER: I thought so.

B. CAMPBELL: But during the Depression we couldn't manage .

GARDNER: What a shame.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, what a shame. You said it.

R. CAMPBELL: We moved out to Westwood in the fall of 1929, and we were half a mile away from the original buildings on campus, and the kids couldn't see us. The Depression came along and we didn't do very well, so we saw very quickly that we were going to have to go after other business.

GARDNER: So you sold the property and leased it. It's been sold four or five times since then.

B. CAMPBELL: But we're just glad that we could hold on. If the publishers hadn't gone along with us, we would have had to file for bankruptcy, because we owed the publishers so much. I think they were smart enough to know that if they didn't go along with us, they would lose it all.

R. CAMPBELL: Right. Well, the publishers wanted stores to see their books; and they took our notes, and we gradually paid them all off about 1948 or '50, somewhere along in there. After the war came along, that really helped the business, but it was difficult to get good help, and sometimes we ran on rather skimpy staffs. But we made money. And we had our biggest profit year during the war, along about 1944. And in '45 we were able to increase our staff, so the profit was down.

B. CAMPBELL: There were so few people living in the area when we started out here, and of course, as the population grew around Westwood, our business also grew. As we mentioned earlier, we discontinued handling textbooks for UCLA classes early in the war, and so we became a neighborhood store.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO MARCH 3, 1975

GARDNER: Howard Henkes.

R. CAMPBELL: Howie is the best jeweler in the Village. He's been around a long time. When he was a young kid he delivered papers up in Bel-Air, and he said that there was a narrow pavement up to Bellagio Road, and then you went on a dirt road, and there was quite a distance between the [houses] . He always took his rifle along, and he would get a rabbit about every other day, so he said they sort of lived on rabbit while he was doing this. He did this for several years. But he said that there were very, very few houses there then. After the war, they filled up one gully and got a whole new section; and it's full, so that everywhere you go it's full of people.

B. CAMPBELL: And the roads have been extended so many places; I can remember, I think it was Bel-Air Road that went up past the old Alphonzo Bell estate up there in the hills, just a little bit beyond there, and it came to a dead end. There was a beautiful view of the city from up there, and when we'd have friends visiting here, we'd go up there, especially at night, and show them the lights of Los Angeles.

R. CAMPBELL: Now the trees have grown so high it's hard to find a place you can peek through.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, we used to turn around then and come back down. And [it was] the same way on Roscomare [Road]--I can remember when that came to a dead end, not too far up--now it goes all the way through to Mulholland. So, goodness, times have really changed.

GARDNER: Times have changed.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, we've seen a lot of it come and go, and I wish I had kept a diary and taken pictures of the Village, how it has changed, because there are some buildings--I wonder how many different stores have come and gone in them.

GARDNER: Right.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. There used to be Potter's Hardware, on Weyburn. You don't remember that, I bet. It was where the Hamburger Hamlet is now.

R. CAMPBELL: Before that it was on Westwood Boulevard.

B. CAMPBELL: That's right, it was on Westwood Boulevard to begin with.

GARDNER: I can remember all the supermarkets.

B. CAMPBELL: Ralphs?

GARDNER: Ralphs, and was there an A & P?

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, there was an A & P where the National Theatre is now. And Ralphs was where the Bratskellar restaurant and the United Artists theatre is now. Safeway was over on Glendon.

R. CAMPBELL: Then they moved into that big building on Gayley after Mr. Bornstein bought a big portion of the Village.

GARDNER: The next thing I wanted to talk about were the newspaper columns that you did at one time or another. You showed me the scrapbooks . How did that come about, originally?

R. CAMPBELL: It came about really when I became president of the American Booksellers Association. We had an advertising agency handling our public relations then. Lee Ringer, do you know him? Well, he was on the old campus and out here, too. When I got back after I'd been elected president, he said, "You should get a job writing a column. You could get it on that name. Let me see what I can do." He called up a few days later and said, "You're going to do a column every week for the Daily News. It'll be about books. You won't review them, but it'll be about books and interesting sidelights about authors. It will be called 'Bob's Bookshelf.'" I wrote the columns and sent them to his office. His secretary would call up and read them back to me the way that she had rewritten them. She changed them greatly--and it didn't sound like me. So after about three weeks of it, I called Ringer, and I said, "Look, Ringer, I'm not writing that column; your girl's writing it, and I'd like to have it my style." He said, "Is she changing it much?" I said, "Well, she changes the whole thing." And he said, "I hadn't seen them until they came out in the paper, and I thought they were very good." And I said, "Well, they're good the way I write them, but she changes them." So he said, "Well, I'll see to that." And so [after that] she didn't change much of anything. Once in a while I'd make a grammatical error, I guess, but she just changed them what little she had to and sent them in. I continued the column for a long time. The Brentwood Pacer asked me to write a column for them. They wanted a review. I hate to review a book I haven't read and I told them that I might do it once in a while if I read a book, but basically it would be about people out in their area who were authors. So they let it go at that. I did read a book maybe once every two or three months in those days, and if it was a good book, why, I would review it for them. And then the UCLA Alumni Association asked me if I would write a column for their magazine--the format was different than it is now.

GARDNER: Who was editor of it then — do you recall?

B. CAMPBELL: Johnny Jackson was.

R. CAMPBELL: Jackson was, I think, at the time that I started it. I had a review in that for several years — I would say, maybe ten.

GARDNER: Did you review books about the university?

R. CAMPBELL: If there were any by faculty members --not a textbook but a trade book--I'd review that. We had subscribed to Current Biography published monthly by H.W. Wilson Co. of New York. This gave biographies of many authors and other prominent people. I found many items of interest to include in my columns. This was a great help because there would be a lot of information in there that I couldn't get from the author. Some of the authors would come around and say, "Where ' d you get that?" And I'd say, "I got it out of Current Biography." "Oh, yes," they'd say, "I see."

B. CAMPBELL: Bob wrote about a great many authors whom we knew personally, and he told little interesting things about them. The people who read books are always interested in learning more about the people who write them. I filed all of Bob's columns consecutively by date in a scrapbook. I also made a 3 x 5 card for each person he wrote about, listing the dates. Paul Wellman was continually writing, and when he had a new book published Bob would write another column about him. He'd say, "I wonder what I wrote about Paul before. I don't want to repeat anything." For instance, here is Paul's card: 10-2-48, a paragraph; 4-9-49, a mention. And here's 7-28-51 and 7-5-52, B.S, (that means "Bookshelf" ; that means the whole column was about Paul) . So Bob would look up Paul's card and find the previous columns. This was a big help to him.

GARDNER: It must have been.

B. CAMPBELL: It was a big job to do it in the first place, because I got up to about 1,000 cards--that many different people he had written about.

R. CAMPBELL: And Wellman's, of course, is the biggest one, but some of them will have ten or twelve entries on them.

GARDNER: You did it all through the fifties?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes. Well, and partly into the sixties. The Times started a newspaper called the Daily Mirror, to have an afternoon paper in order to kill the Daily News. They finally got it killed, and I went over to the Daily Mirror and was on it almost till its end. The man who was in charge of it there eventually wanted me to review books, and I refused to do that, so that was the end of my writing for the Daily Mirror.

GARDNER: Who was that? Do you know?

R. CAMPBELL: He's dead now; his name was Rex Barley. He lived over in Pasadena. Great big Englishman. He'd been in the war, had a wife and one son.

R. CAMPBELL: The girls in the store called him Sexy Rexy- they really thought he was handsome, this great big brute. They thought he was grand — and he was. He ran a good book section, but he was all business. One day they decided to just review books of the publishers that ran an ad in their paper. They also had syndication of several of their [columns], and he was in charge of that; he used to go around the country selling that, but he did it principally in New York, where the big newspapers were. And then one day Mrs. Barley called up and said, "Papa died last night. He had a heart attack and passed away . "

B. CAMPBELL: I was looking through these cards here. Bob, and I find here--here's Dr. Ada Nisbet, who was a professor of Victorian literature at UCLA. And Ed Nofziger, who graduated from UCLA.

R. CAMPBELL: Ada Nisbet and Ed Nofziger. What did they do?

B. CAMPBELL: Here's a "Bookshelf" dated 12-28-52. That means a whole column about her and her book called Dickens and Ellen Ternan.

R. CAMPBELL: One day Ada came in with some pictures about eighteen inches high from an English newspaper that was published back in 1840-50, along in there. And she said that she'd been selling some, and that if she'd get them exposed to the public they would sell faster. They were black and whites, but these had been cut out of the London Times, and put in books-- just this man's drawings. We would sell them for $2.50 and split with her. She finally ran out of them, but it was interesting to have these and sell them. She came in, and we found out all about what she was working on; she had a leave of absence later, and she went to England and Europe, doing some research on a book. When she came back, she had all of her material in some suitcases, which she checked to herself at home. They never reached her. I saw her about, let's see, six or seven months ago. She had a retirement party of her own, and I said, "Did you ever get your material back?" She said, "No, I never did get it back." She said, "It wasn't just that one year. I had taken the material over that I had already worked on. I've lost thousands of dollars worth of research." And she said, "I couldn't get any value out of them. They said there's no way of knowing how valuable it was." And so it was a sad day for her, but she took it all right.

B. CAMPBELL: Looking through these cards here certainly brings back memories.

R. CAMPBELL: Now who do you see?

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I see Ernest Hemingway, and James Hilton, and Hedda Hopper.

R. CAMPBELL: James Hilton I did in one of my first columns.

B. CAMPBELL: And Eleanor Kask--that was in 1949, and that must have been when we met Eleanor. That would be twenty- five years ago.

R. CAMPBELL: I had seen her at booksellers conventions before, and talked to her.

B. CAMPBELL: She's the one that discovered the [author of] Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was she who . . .

GARDNER: After eighteen other publishers had turned him down.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, that's right, that's right. When we first met Eleanor she was promoting a book by a man named [Ralph] Hancock called Fabulous Boulevard. It was about Wilshire Boulevard. She came into the store and said, "We're going to be promoting Fabulous Boulevard, for Funk and Wagnalls." And she said, "Hancock is out here. We're going to have him at a luncheon at the Ambassador Hotel. I want every bookstore on the boulevard to attend. I want to know who they are and where they are." I wound up getting in the car and taking her to all of these stores. She thought I did something great for her, and so she has a very kind spot in her heart for me, now. The Coconut Grove was filled. The book was three and a half [dollars]. She had books on each table. And I said, "Are you going to leave those there?" She said, "Yes, they won't take them." I said, "Why, sure, if they're out there like that, they'll think they're free." And she lost about twenty books. But she said, "Well, we'll just write them off as promotional expense." The book had a very good sale — I think it was partly because of that promotion. It had at least five printings. I was amused at Lindley Bynum. He said Fabulous Boulevard was not a true account of Wilshire Boulevard. There were many errors in it. Lindley Bynum was assistant to the president of the University of California, and nobody knew what that meant. Many people really thought that he was assistant to the president in a way that counted; he told me, he used to come in and he'd laugh, and he'd say, "Well, I had another one of those people that--assistant to the president--think I have some control and that I have influence with Bob Sproul . " And he said, "Just because they didn't have any title to give me, so they gave me that." His main job was looking at books that people wanted to donate to the university and seeing if they were worth having. He did a fine job on it. He came in one day and said, "Well, I got a notice I'm going to get $250,000 from an old aunt that I haven't seen in years." And he said, "I'm resigning, and we're going to go up to St. Helena, California, and build a home up there. We've already been up and looked around, and we have a lot that's up on a hill. Nobody can get in front of it, and we look out over the bay, and over here, and over there." And he said, "I'm just going up there and read and write and walk around." And he did, but he died after about four or five years. The last I knew, Mrs. Bynum was still living there.

R. CAMPBELL: He and Norm Padgett and Barney Atkinson and one or two others were always going out to investigate wineries. [laughter] And he used to tell me about the times they'd have. Everything was great going out, but coming back it was sometimes a little bit difficult-- they didn't know who was driving.

B. CAMPBELL: Here's Vicki Baum's card. And Fred Beck; you remember, who used to have a column.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, I remember Fred Beck, who had the column about the Farmer's Market in the Times. He's back in town now. He went up to Idaho for several years.

B. CAMPBELL: Margaret Mitchell. And we saw her picture; we mentioned that, didn't we, in our write-up of our trip to Hawaii.

B. CAMPBELL: Very interesting.

R. CAMPBELL: Vicki Baum had two children that went to UCLA.

GARDNER: Oh, is that so?

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, she was a German author; she and conductor Richard Lert and their children left Germany at the time of Hitler. Her son, Peter, who coached ice hockey at UCLA, told me that his mother wrote her novels in German and sent them to a woman in England who translated them into English. When she returned them Peter and his sister read them to correct any misinterpretation of the slang she used. He said, "We Americanized her slang."

GARDNER: Well, let's talk about your celebrity book, Blanche. As long as we've gotten on the subject of celebrities now, we can follow on through.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, I started this back in 1961. It was after we had been to New York. Frances Clarke Sayers had come out here from the job as children's librarian in the New York Public Library, to teach children's literature at UCLA. We had become very good friends, having much in common. [laughter] And so when we went back to New York that year, I said to Bob, "I've got to go in and see where Frances held out." We finally found the children's department. Have you ever been in the New York Public Library?

GARDNER: Yes, I have.

B. CAMPBELL: Have you been in the children's room?

GARDNER: I must have, because I used to go there when I was a child. It's an awesome place.

R. CAMPBELL: Those great big lions out there in front.

B. CAMPBELL: We had to go from one floor to another, and down this corridor and that corridor, and we finally found the children's department. We introduced ourselves as being from Los Angeles; [we said] that we knew Mrs. Sayers and we wanted to see the department. Well, they rolled out the red carpet to us. If we were a friend of Mrs. Sayers, we were a friend of theirs. They brought their guest book out for us to sign. We kind of glanced at it and saw that it was authors and illustrators." [They said], "You're a friend of Mrs. Sayers. You sign the book." So we signed the book, and then we got to looking through it. It was so fascinating. Carl Sandburg, and, oh, a lot of authors had signed. Some of them were no longer living. We noticed they started it in 1925. Well, I thought, why didn't I do that? So the minute we got back, I went and bought this book. And Scott O'Dell was the first one to sign in it. He wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins, which [won] a John Newbery award the year it was published. I have a lot of interesting signatures in here.

R. CAMPBELL: Some of them, you have more than signatures. You have illustrations.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, a lot of them are illustrations. Here's Norman McGary — Huck Hound, 101 Dalmatians, and Yogi Bear. He made a drawing here for me.

R. CAMPBELL: And they sold fairly well in his day.

GARDNER: Well, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: Then each one would sign each time he came in--I have Scott O'Dell's in here a lot. And here's Paul Wellman, and W.W. Robinson and Irene Robinson--do you remember that name?

GARDNER: Oh, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: Ogden Nash.

GARDNER: Oh, yes.

B. CAMPBELL: He came in February 22, 1962, and he made that little drawing. He saw some of the other drawings in there, you see, so he drew a picture of his nose with glasses on it--which I thought was very clever. Don Freeman is a very famous children's author. He lives up in Santa Barbara. He came in quite frequently, and always signed and made cute drawings.

GARDNER: Oh, that's nice.

B. CAMPBELL: And that little sketch up there on the wall is a sketch from one of his books; he gave it to me one Christmas and signed it. And so those things are very dear to me.

GARDNER: That's lovely.

B. CAMPBELL: And then the Christinas card up there on the wall in color — it says, "Noel, Noel, Noel," and [shows] the mice playing various instruments — a cello, a violin, and a harp. That is drawn by Charles Payzant. Terry Shannon wrote the books, and Charles illustrated them. They lived here in Los Angeles at the time. They've now moved down to Corona del Mar. Every time they came in, he'd make a drawing in the book, and they sent me that Christmas card one year. I thought it was so adorable, I had it framed.

R. CAMPBELL: She always liked books about mice, and so he drew the mice for her .

B. CAMPBELL: And then we have the Churchills — Reba and Bonnie Churchill?

R. CAMPBELL: Do you remember them?

GARDNER: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: They still have a column, I think, in the Times.

R. CAMPBELL: They were two very nice girls. They lived at home with their father and mother, and I don't know whether they ever had a date or not. They were nice-looking, and you could just as well have had them, but they were so devoted to their father and mother. Their father was blind.

B. CAMPBELL: And Ed Lindop. Now, Ed went to school with our daughters at Uni [versity] High, and he's now teaching there. He has written a number of trade books and textbooks that are being used, so he's really doing very well.

R. CAMPBELL: He had the geography [text] that was adopted in this state and then in many other states, and that's where you really make the money. When you get a state adoption for an elementary school book, that sells thousands and thousands of copies.

B. CAMPBELL: And Margaret and Munro Leaf signed in 1963. Now, they lived out here--oh, when was that?

R. CAMPBELL: They were here when the war came along.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, that would have been in the '40s, wouldn't it? We got to know them very well then, and we hear from them at least once a year, at Christmas, and they're always cards that Mun has drawn. They're very clever.

GARDNER: Now, that's really striking close to home, because I grew up on his books.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes. Grammar Can Be Fun, Manners Can Be Fun. All those. Oh, they were wonderful. His most famous book was The Story of Ferdinand (the bull) .

R. CAMPBELL: When they first came here, they had one child and another boy was born here. And now both of these kids have graduated from Harvard University long ago, and they're out in the business world, and Mom and Pop are left at home alone. One of the sons has three children, and the other one, I think, has two. And they're both doing very well.

B. CAMPBELL: Ray Bradbury used to come in and bring his four daughters. Almost every Saturday, I think, he came in. And he would sit and let the children browse around in the children's department. That was really a treat for all of us. He ' s a great guy. Ninon illustrates books for children, and her husband is Wilbur Smith.

GARDNER: Oh, right, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: In the library — I believe he's retired now.

GARDNER: Yes, he was formerly my boss.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, was he?

GARDNER: In the Department of Special Collections.

B. CAMPBELL: She's illustrated some very nice books for children. She did the ABC of Cars and Trucks, which was very popular and is now in paperback. That's one of my favorites, because there's a car or a truck for every letter of the alphabet.

GARDNER: Right. I think I've seen that.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, and oh, did our grandchildren love that! Our grandchildren were our guinea pigs, you know-- we tried all the books on them. Bill Peet would come in every time he had a new book coming out; he'd come in and draw another picture. And here's another one of Don Freeman, with his Dandelion. Rosemary de Camp did a book about her dog, and she came in and had a rubber stamp of the dog's paw.

R. CAMPBELL: And her husband was a prominent judge downtown. She always mentioned that--that her husband was a judge.

B. CAMPBELL: And P. [Pamela] L. Travers , who wrote Mary Poppins.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes, tell him about that. That's a very interesting little story.

B. CAMPBELL: We had such a good visit with her. She was out here talking with Disney about doing Mary Poppins. I said, "Well, is Disney going to do your book? Your Mary Poppins? " And she said, "He wants to do it his way, and I want to do it mine." And I didn't think Disney had a chance. Later when the rumors got out that Disney was going to do Mary Poppins, I didn't believe it, because she's a spunky person, and I didn't think she'd give in.

R. CAMPBELL: She's from England. She lives in London.

GARDNER: Well, I thought Disney did it fairly faithfully,

B. CAMPBELL: Then on August 27, 1964, she came in again; that was when she was here for the premiere of Mary Poppins. And she wrote in my celebrity book, "The best bookshop I know. That's why I came back to it today."

GARDNER: Oh, how sweet.

R. CAMPBELL: When she came out the first time her editor in New York had said, "When you go to Los Angeles, you go out and see Blanche Campbell's department."

B. CAMPBELL: She was very disappointed in [the movie]. And I was disappointed in it, too, in some ways.

R. CAMPBELL: Like that dance up on the roofs — that went on forever.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, the chimney sweeps--that went on and on and on and on and on, and I kept thinking of different episodes of the book that they would be doing, and they didn't even do them. That was why it was a disappointment to me, and it was to her, too. She was very disappointed about it.

R. CAMPBELL: Sort of like the series on television now. The characters are all like the books and so forth, but none of the episodes ...

B. CAMPBELL: The Little House on the Prairie.

R. CAMPBELL: The Little House on the Prairie . . . and very few of the things were in the books. They're a different kind of adventure.

B. CAMPBELL: Little House on the Prairie is what the television show is called that's the second book in the series of the Little House books. It's very good, because it's a family story and the whole family can watch it, which is not true about much of television nowadays. I've been disappointed in it because they do not follow the many interesting episodes in the books. But then that's what happens every time that a book is made into a movie. And incidentally, did you know that if a book is made into a movie, it practically kills the sale of the book?

GARDNER: Is that so?

B. CAMPBELL: That's something that I had to learn.

GARDNER: That's interesting.

B. CAMPBELL: When Mary Poppins was made into a movie, the publishers brought out a Disney edition and we couldn't keep the books in stock the first year. So the next year we loaded up on them because we figured that it would keep on selling. And it just didn't sell. And now, well, I don't think we sell more than maybe half a dozen copies of all four titles in hardbound in a year. Maybe not even that many. Of course, it's out in paperback now, and that sells better. But anyway, it's kind of interesting, And Dr. Dolittle was the same way.

R. CAMPBELL: The publishers bring out motion-picture editions in a short form. That's what I want to bring out--we sold a lot of the motion picture editions, but not so much of the other.

GARDNER: Of the original.

B. CAMPBELL: Well, we sold a lot of the original at the beginning.

R. CAMPBELL: Yes.

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, because there were a lot of people who wanted the original . But on the other hand, there were a lot of people who wanted the movie edition, too.

GARDNER: Yeah, right.

B. CAMPBELL: But Dr. Dolittle --we used to sell thirty or forty copies of The Story of Doctor Dolittle — that's the first one in the series — a year. And after the movie was out about a year or so, it just dropped. And we used to stock all the titles--I don't remember how many there are; there must be a dozen or more. We finally just closed them out. Now it is out in paperback, and so it sells better. But I was very surprised at that because it seemed to me that if a book came out as a movie, it would make people want to read it. It does to begin with, but then it drops off. And here's Joan Walsh Anglund's delightful picture that she drew when she came in the store. I don't know whether you're familiar with her or not.

GARDNER: I don't know her.

B. CAMPBELL: She draws those little faces that have eyes but no nose or no mouth.

GARDNER: Oh, I see, sure.

B. CAMPBELL: Her books have been very popular.

R. CAMPBELL: I remember Pamela Travers came back a few years later when she was author in residence at Claremont Colleges, and she came over and visited us, stayed overnight, and sent us three rose bushes.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, that's right. That's right. She has some roses named after her. And she came over and stayed all night with us, and we had a wonderful visit with her, and then she sent us some of her Mary Poppins roses .

GARDNER: Oh, terrific.

B. CAMPBELL: Roald Dahl . Now you know, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Did you read it?

GARDNER: Of course.

B. CAMPBELL: Good for you. Well, every time that he comes to Los Angeles, he comes to see us. And Patricia Neal, his wife, comes to see us, too, and I have a lot of their signatures in here. Richard Chase — he's a very famous folklorist and he's living out in Pomona now. We went to see him when we were out there not long ago.

R. CAMPBELL: He lives practically across the street from Adaline Guenther .

B. CAMPBELL: Yes, on the same street, Bonita Avenue. He lives in a cute little bungalow-court. Remember those bungalow courts that they used to have? They don't have very many of them anymore. And Eleanor Cameron, who wrote the mushroom stories. She used to live here, and so she came in often. Oh, and Brian Wildsmith. He's an English artist, lives in London. He was here once, and he came out and signed in here. He drew that drawing, and he's . . . what do you call it when they can write with their right hand and left hand at the same time?

R. CAMPBELL: Ambidextrous.

GARDNER: Right.

B. CAMPBELL: And he drew this picture here, with both hands at the same time.

GARDNER: No fooling.

B. CAMPBELL: Oh, he's absolutely great. There's another one of Roald Dahl's. And Bill Peet's. And Richard Bach. He came in, and I'm sure I've told about him.

R. CAMPBELL: What does he say in his signature?

B. CAMPBELL: "With joy and glad thanks for helping Jonathan Seagull fly." Do you know the Gordons, Millie and Gordon Gordon?

GARDNER: No.

B. CAMPBELL: Do you remember That Darn Cat!

GARDNER: Oh, yes, of course.

B. CAMPBELL: That was made into a movie. And they're still writing. We were at the Ebell Book Chamber last week, and they were the guests there. They put on a beautiful program. They are two talented people. They write together, which amazes me, how they can weave everything together. I've been after Bill Peet to write a book about a camel. So one day when he was in he drew this awful, awful-looking camel. And he said, "Who would want to write a story about me?" And Bill said, "A Camel for the Campbells, with best wishes, your friend Bill Peet." Now he's with Disney for, I think, twenty-eight years. And he finally resigned, because he had started his children's books, and he was being so successful with them. He told me that when he told Disney that he was resigning, Disney didn't believe it. He didn't think he'd quit. I think he was Disney's top artist, for many years. And so Disney really missed him, I imagine, when he left. I do have some wonderful signatures in here, and I really have loved this celebrity book.

GARDNER: That's wonderful.

B. CAMPBELL: I just wish that I had started it right at the very beginning.

GARDNER: Well, are there any other authors who. . . ?

B. CAMPBELL: Mrs. Peale. Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale. I'm quite sure I told Johnny about her. It's kind of hard to remember just what we did say because . . . well, I talk so much.

GARDNER: You have so many good stories.

B. CAMPBELL: And I tell so many different people about a lot of things that I forget what I've done. Oh, here's Jack Smith; he was in, too. He says, "To Blanche, Thanks for a serendipitous visit to the children's department." You know. Jack mentions serendipity so much in his column. And Gwen Bristow, another famous, very famous writer. Here's Don Freeman's illustration of a penguin; for his book, Penguins, of All People. It's a story about a penguin that goes to the United Nations to make a speech. And, of course, he becomes very famous, and he makes his speech on a cake of ice. [laughter] And he went back to the Arctic region and his penguin friends welcomed him back; they asked him what people were like. And he said, "Well, they're very much like we are. They talk more than we do, and they look funny when they walk." [laughter] That just sent me--I just couldn't get over that. A penguin saying people look funny when they walk. I thought that was such a clever ending for the story. I was looking here to see if I could find some more interesting people. Oh, Jean Pierre Hallet, who wrote Congo Kitabu. They were African stories, and his personalized license plate is KITABU. Do you remember his books at all?

GARDNER: Not really.

B. CAMPBELL: Jean Pierre Hallet. "To my very good friends, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, with my sincere appreciation, for all best wishes." Richard Scarry signed in the book one day when I was gone. I was out on a program, I guess, that day, and I came back and the girls told me that he had been in. And I was sorry to miss him, because he's done a lot of books for children. The best one, the one that has sold the best, is Best Word Book Ever. Children just love it. It has 1,400 illustrations in full color, with the words beside everything that he has pictured. And small children love this, and it's such a wonderful way for them to learn words; by the time they start to school, they can be familiar with so many of those words. That's why I think children's books are so informative. I just wish that they could be promoted more. That's why I like to go out and give my programs, because I would speak to maybe twenty, up to fifty or a hundred people — at one time. And mothers would come up to me afterward and say, "Oh, I didn't know there were so many good children's books," or, "I've been neglecting my children. I'm going to have to read to them more." Over the years people would come in and tell me how much their children had benefited from [their] reading to them. I just wish there was some way of getting more people to know about good children's books and have them read to them more. I wish the television would put on more shows about books.

R. CAMPBELL: And stick to the books.

GARDNER: Right.

B. CAMPBELL: I was asked a couple of times to interview somebody at Dinah Shore's office about whether I'd go on, and then I never heard from them again. I guess I didn't give a good impression, or something.

GARDNER: How strange. I would think you'd be marvelous.

B. CAMPBELL: I met Dinah the night that the Norman Vincent Peales were taped, because Mrs. Peale had been here a few days, and I had taken her around to various studios, and so I went that night. But then apparently Dinah doesn't choose the people--she has a secretary and office force that chooses the people to be on her show. And I don't know whether it was the subject, whether they felt it wouldn't appeal enough or what. I used to be on Dorothy Gardner's show quite a bit. I don't know whether she is still around or not. Do you remember her?

GARDNER: Yes, I remember; but I don't know . . .

B. CAMPBELL: I haven't seen her or heard anything from her lately. I was on her show, oh, at least once a month for I don't know how long. And it started out as games, because Dorothy liked to play games. And then I gradually sneaked in a few children's books. And she was interested in them, too. I can't help but feel that if there could be some program introducing children's books to parents and children, it would be a wonderful thing. I just wish it could be, because I think they're so important. And I've seen it happen time and time again: children who read a lot get along so well in school and don't have any trouble. Like Kenny Washington said once, "As long as Karen" — his daughter — "reads, she'll never be lonely." And that is so true.

A TEI Project

Interview of Blanche & Robert Campbell

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1974

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO AUGUST 12, 1974

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE AUGUST 26, 1974

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO AUGUST 26, 1974

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE [video session] SEPTEMBER 9, 1974

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO [video session] SEPTEMBER 9, 1974

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 7, 1974

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 7, 1974

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 11, 1974

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 11, 1974

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 20, 1975

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO JANUARY 20, 1975

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 24, 1975

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 24, 1975

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE MARCH 3, 1975

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO MARCH 3, 1975