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64 Chapter 4 The Berkeley Years, 1946–1953 n D uring my sophomore year at Stanford, I ran across the highly romanticized writings of Edgar Lee Hewitt, one of the protean figures of southwestern archaeology, and I became an instant convert. I made up my mind that after service in the armed forces I would enroll at the University of New Mexico, where Hewitt was, or had been, chair of the anthropology department. As my time for discharge from the navy approached, I duly applied for admission and was accepted. Then, just a week or two before my discharge, I received an apologetic letter informing me that, because of an unexpected flood of in-state applicants, all admissions of out-of-state students had been canceled. I decided to wait out a year and work, hoping to get into New Mexico in 1947. In the meantime, on a visit to the Barton School shortly after my discharge, I was offered and accepted a job as a Spanish teacher. A few days later, however, I happened to pick up a copy of the University of California catalog and was astonished to see the rich assortment of anthropology offerings. Up to that moment I’d had no idea that this was one of the premier anthropology departments in the country, and one of only about a dozen that offered a Ph.D. I made up my mind then and there to enroll at Cal. It was one of the luckiest of my many lucky accidents, and one of the best choices I ever made. I inquired if enrollment was still possible, was told that it was still open for veterans and for California residents, and filled out my application forthwith. I made my apologies to the Bartons and packed up my worldly goods for the move to Berkeley, which would be my home for the next several years. The Berkeley Years, 1946–1953 65 The G.I. Bill and the Veterans The G.I. Bill of Rights (properly the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), enacted by Congress in 1944, had a revolutionary effect on college education that was almost wholly unforeseen. For every veteran, regardless of time served, it provided one full year of college, plus one additional day for each day spent in uniform. There was a monthly subsistence allowance of $65 for unmarried students and $95 for married students, and tuition and supplies together were covered up to a total of $500 per year. Prior to World War II college education had been regarded by nearly everyone as a kind of perquisite of the privileged few. According to the 1940 census, only about 3 percent of Americans at that time were college graduates. The legislators who enacted the veterans’ bill apparently took it for granted that few veterans would opt for college benefits except those from the educated classes who would have gone to college anyhow, and to a large extent the same delusion was shared by the college administrators. But at Cal, something like fifteen thousand new students showed up rather than the expected two thousand or three thousand. Since all the rooming houses in the town of Berkeley were insufficient to accommodate the flood of entering students in 1946, the university hastily acquired title to empty prefab housing in Richmond, twelve miles away, where shipyard workers had lived during the war. This became the Cal veterans’ village and my home for my first year at Berkeley. There were similar veterans’ villages at scores of other universities. The veterans came immediately to constitute a majority of the male student population at Berkeley. On average they were two to three years older than the sophomores and juniors, who had been able to attend college because for one reason or another they were not drafted. The veterans were also generally more serious students, anxious to make up for their lost years and with little time or patience for the adolescent hijinks that had been an accepted part of undergraduate life. Many were married, a condition that up to that time was virtually unheard of among undergraduates. College became, and was to remain for half a century, a more serious place than it had been in the years when it was accepted as a time for playing around. I did not, however, avail myself of the G.I. Bill during my first two years at Berkeley. The California state legislature, anxious to join the chorus of those rewarding the veterans, had passed its...

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