Newton Bishop Drury Oral History Interview, Part I

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Newton B. Drury, dated October 18, 1972. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.The legal agreement with Newton B. Drury requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

Opened 1972
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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PART I

BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION

FOREBEARS

FRY:How far back would you like to begin?

DRURY: Well, I might make reference to this Lineage Record Book which was found in my brother Aubrey's effects after he died last October [1959]. He had voluminous files, the depths of which we haven't yet fathomed. Among them is a considerable amount of data about the Drury family and my mother's family, the Bishops.

FRY:I think we ought to mention that you are giving a great deal of this to Bancroft Library.

DRURY: Yes; Aubrey Drury's files and the files of the Save-the-Redwoods League and related conservation organizations at the Drury Advertising office in San Francisco. They have a bearing on the history of the conservation effort, preservation of forests and establishment of the parks in California. Both my brother and I, at various times, have been associated with the Save-the-Redwoods League and the state park movement.

FRY:You were just about "it" there for a while.

DRURY: I was in the thick of it and bear the scars of many battles.

FRY:Your father's book*(Drury, Wells: An Editor on the Comstock Lode. Foreword by Ella Bishop Drury, Ferrar and Rinehart, Inc., New York and Toronto, 1936. Also Pacific Books, Palo Alto, 1948) reminded me of how much of a family tradition you seem to have carried on.

DRURY: Well, I'm afraid that both Aubrey and I, and for that matter my sisters Muriel and Lorraine, are typical sons and daughters of the golden west. We have all taken pride in the beauty of the state and its rich historical background.

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Family Tree

FRY:While we are speaking of relatives, somewhere on your family tree is an Apperson of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst forebears. Where does that occur?

DRURY: My maternal grandmother's name was Elsie Helen Apperson, according to Aubrey Drury's Lineage Record Book which contains information that he so meticulously ferreted out from authentic records and publications. To go back even further, the first generation in America on my mother's side was Simeon Bishop, and Aubrey writes, "probably our family dated from old Rhode Island records." Simeon came from England at an unknown date and lived near Providence, Rhode Island. If you follow the Bishop line, you find that my grandfather, also a Simeon Bishop, was the fourth generation in America, and he's the one that was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, April 11, 1833, and died in San Francisco in February of 1920. His wife was Elsie Helen Apperson whom he married at Louisville, Illinois, in 1854. She was born in Clay County, Illinois, in 1836 and died at Reno, Nevada, in 1868 or '69. Her father was Francis Apperson who resided in Washington County, Virginia and later in Clay County, Illinois. He was my mother's grandfather.

I think my mother and Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst were of the same generation. As I recollect, my mother indicated that she and Mrs. Hearst were second cousins, that her mother and Mrs. Hearst's mother were first cousins.

FRY:So Francis Apperson was the brother of Phoebe Apperson Hearst's grandfather?

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DRURY: It's all too deep for me! (Laughter)

Mother, Ella Lorraine Bishop Drury

FRY:Did your mother have any other brothers and sisters?

DRURY: Yes, she was one of eleven children; her father, Dr. Simeon Bishop had two wives. My mother's mother died when she was very young and he remarried. (Incidentally, Dr. Bishop's second wife was named Harris, and she was a cousin of the Miss Harris who was in the box at the Ford Theater when Lincoln was assassinated, an interesting association.) My mother was the oldest child, and she had a sister Persia and a brother Simeon. They were from the first marriage and the rest of them were half brothers and sisters--a very wonderful and very capable family. Most of them were in some form of literary work. Fred Bishop and Harry Bishop were both newspaper men, and Charles Bishop had been in the newspaper publishing business. He was many years in charge of the press room of one of the leading New York newspapers. Minnie Bishop was an actress for a while, a very talented one and quite a talented musician. And Clara Bishop, the youngest one, in her early years became a practicing attorney up in Oregon. The last of her half brothers, Frank Bishop, I think is still alive in Southern California. He was a singer for a while and then he was in business; he is retired now.

FRY:The propensity for something creative, then, stood out in all her brothers and sisters.

DRURY: It was also true in my mother. She always took the position that my interest in conservation was an inherited tendency, and she cited the fact that when she graduated from Mills College in the eighties she gave the valedictory address and the title of it -- it

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was a pretty high-flown poetical sort of a paper was--Nature's Voices. [Laughter]

FRY:Was this specifically on the redwoods?

DRURY: Oh no, but she was a great lover of nature and things beautiful.

Father, Wells Drury
Early Childhood

FRY:Where was your father born?

DRURY: He was born in New Boston, Illinois, September 16, 1851.

FRY:But he didn't live there very long, did he?

DRURY: No, at the age of about two months he was brought across the plains in a covered wagon by his family and settled in Oregon.

FRY:Do you know what it was that urged his family to start across?

DRURY: I haven't a very clear idea and my father, having been so young, of course didn't have any knowledge of the family circumstances or history. I think they had the same urge as a great many middlewesterners -- to better themselves. His father's name was Squire Thompson Drury; he was born in 1817 and died in 1852. That was when they were crossing the plains. Both my father’s father and his mother were stricken with Asiatic cholera, as so many others were, and they died out in Wyoming somewhere. There was a general epidemic at that time and it was a very often fatal disease. I revisited New Boston, Illinois in the 1940's when I was making one of my tours of the national parks. I visited the old farm of William Drury, who was my father's uncle and who had offered to adopt my father when he was visiting Illinois in his twenties. He wanted my father to move to Illinois and become a rancher, or

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farmer as they call them there, but he had the spirit of adventure and he preferred to return to the West.

By the time of my visit all of the people who had any touch with William Drury were gone, though his name remained there in the William and Vashti College, which had been established near New Boston and which was later merged with another college. It was named for William Drury and his wife.

But to return to my father's youth. There were several children in the family, five altogether, of which he was the youngest. Melissa, Emily Frances (of whom I have no knowledge at all), Celinda, Newton and Wells; they were born in that order. Aunt Melissa and Aunt Celinda I remember very well. After the death of their parents on the wagon train, the five orphaned children separated because it was a very difficult thing for any family en route across the plains to take care of so many. I think each one was taken by a different family -- my father by a very wonderful man named Elfred Elder, who went up to Oregon and established himself there. The other children joined other parties in the wagon train. That again we don't have much record of except what Aunt Melissa, who was about eight years old at that time, was able to remember. In later years, as my father tells it in his book, Editor of the Comstock (Drury, Wells: Editor of the Comstock Lode. Ibid,) the family was reunited. They had kept in touch with each other by correspondence.

FRY:I have a note here that Elfred Ridgely Elder was a friend of Lincoln. He was a minister, wasn't he?

DRURY: I don't believe he was a minister by profession; he was a very pious man, but he was a farmer and they went up into Oregon – southern Oregon -- and established themselves.

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I think that he had eleven or twelve children already.

FRY:Yes. That's what your mother wrote in the introduction to your father's book.

DRURY: But I imagine my father more than held up his end because he was a very energetic youngster. He was full of stories about his adventures as a boy in Oregon. He naturally got a great deal of pleasure from activities out-of-doors. I remember one of the things he used to say to my brother and me was that he felt sorry for boys of our generation because they never had the excitement or pleasure of a raccoon hunt. He'd give a very graphic account of how they'd go out by the light of the moon and the dog would tree a 'coon and they'd cut down the tree and capture or shoot the 'coon. Apparently that was one of his vivid recollections of the excitements of youth. That was before the days of forest conservation! [Laughter] Trees were a drug on the market in those days.

Another story my dad told about his early youth was when he built a raft and went down the Willamette River. He had to get down for some reason or other, and in time of flood he made this trip only by the skin of his teeth.

FRY:Does he have this written down anywhere?

DRURY: I think it's probably in his Editor book; he wrote a lot of discursive asides in that book although it was primarily about the Comstock. And it may be in some of his other papers.

I have here some files on my father's biography and his correspondence, and quite a few on the Drury family history including the family history of my mother, Ella Lorraine Bishop Drury. Those materials

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I can make available to Bancroft Library as well as this genealogical record which my brother Aubrey made with the help of the American Genealogical Society.

FRY:What was your father's attitude, by the way, toward nature?

DRURY: He was an outdoor man; as a boy he was in the woods of Oregon and Washington, and he had many stories to tell about his early youth. He drove sheep. In fact, as a small boy he had his own flock of sheep and his own dog.

FRY:Would you say that you had your father's love of nature?

DRURY: Yes, although in his later years and in most of the years I knew him he was rather sedentary in his habits; but he was a very robust man. He lived to be eighty-two.

From Indian Interpreter to Printer

DRURY: One of the earlier experiences of my father up in Washington Territory, where they moved from Oregon, was as an Indian interpreter when he was ten years old during the Lincoln administration, during negotiations for the Medicine Creek Treaty.

FRY:That was pretty young, wasn't it, to be an employee of the Federal government?

DRURY: Yes. His foster father, Elbert Elder, had been a neighbor of Abraham Lincoln in their youth in Sangamon County, Illinois. When Lincoln was elected, Mr. Elder wrote to him; I suppose he asked for a government job or something he could do. And having confidence in him, Abraham Lincoln appointed him as interpreter to the tribes that speak the Chinook jargon; they are along the Washington coast. He was asked to name deputies. My father as a boy had mastered the Chinook speech; they

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called it jargon. It was a sort of pidgin English, I think, or at least it was a rather elementary language. Elder wrote that he would like to appoint his stepson, who was then about ten years old. And after considerable argument about it he was appointed.

FRY:Do you have any letters now in your files about that?

DRURY: I have a copy of the letter that my father wrote to a cousin, Marion Drury, in 1872. It was addressed from Monmouth, Oregon, and it gave the history of this appointment.

FRY:I was wondering if there would be any Abraham Lincoln letters in the files.

DRURY: I don't think so. One of the unfortunate things is that in the Berkeley fire, I believe in 1924, my father's scrapbook, which had a tremendous amount of interesting material, was burned along with the other family records. The things we have now were either gathered afterwards from his sisters or were in the files of the Drury Advertising Company in San Francisco.

FRY:That's an argument for getting these things put in an archives library as soon as possible.

DRURY: That convinced me, yes.

FRY:How did your father happen to learn this Chinook jargon?

DRURY: Oh, I think by playing with the Indian boys.

FRY:There was a lot of free socializing, then, between the Indian families and the white?

DRURY: Oh, I imagine so, yes. I don't think they were one of the most highly developed tribes. One of the things I remember was that my father had a hole in the muscles of one of his legs which he said came from having been struck by a spear that some angry Indian had thrown at him. It wasn't an Indian war, but it was a quarrel and he got

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this wound. Something had happened that the Indian didn't like. Maybe he thought he hadn't gotten a good deal from the government, or something. Nothing serious. I notice in these papers -- have no recollection of my father talking about it--a letter from a Mr. Owen to his friend or relative, a Mr. Pottol, telling the fact that my father was engaged in some of the Indian wars in the early days. This letter was addressed from Oakland, California, to Mrs. Laura Leed Pottol's father. It says that "One of my boyhood associates, Wells Drury, became a captain in the state militia, and was sent east of the mountains to fight the Warm Springs Indians who had started on the warpath. He knew enough to hold their confidence and was quite influential in getting the Indians to return to the reservation without a fight."

Apropos of that, I remember my father talking about his days in the militia, including a visit that they had from General U.S. Grant when he was touring the West. He mentioned the fact that they were in their best uniforms and all spruced up. Grant looked at him and he said, "Young fellow, in all my military career I never had as fine a uniform as you have." (Laughter) Grant wasn't noted for his military spic and span qualities. I think it happened up at Olympia in Washington; that's where they had their headquarters for the Indian service.

FRY:Your father was also an apprentice printer at a very tender age. How did he get into printing?

DRURY: Well, he was quite studious. I know that he went to Christian College in Monmouth, Oregon. I imagine that while he was at college he got interested in printing and editing. He told me one thing that I've never

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verified and I doubt that it would be possible to verify, but there would have been no reason for him to tell me unless it were fact: When he was a very young man, twenty or so, running the newspaper which he owned, called the Monmouth Messenger, he made a trip to San Francisco and called on President Durant at the University of California. The University was just establishing its printing office and, knowing that my dad had been a printer, Durant asked him to inspect the printing presses and type and other machinery that they were buying for the University. He just mentioned that casually.

FRY:But your father never did attend here, did he?

DRURY: No. He talked about the possibility, he said, but by that time he was a master printer, a journeyman printer. He'd had this newspaper up there in Oregon which he sold as soon as he founded the printing business. Apparently printing was one of the early organized crafts because they had their own typographical union, I think; in fact, to his dying day he had a card as a member of the typographical union. Later he came to San Francisco as a printer and then branched out into editorial writing.

FRY:Was he active in the unions?

DRURY: I don't know that he was a union officer, but he may have been. Printers apparently were one of the top crafts in those days because he said that printers always wore plug hats--top hats--and all dressed very stylishly. He told of this episode where he and some of the others were getting ready to go to work, but cases of type were being delivered to the paper and the question came up as to whether the printers

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should help carry them in. And someone in the typo graphical union, I guess it was, said, "No, sir, that isn't part of the job for a printer to carry in the cases. Let the other fellows do that."

FRY:So the union did have some strength.

DRURY: Apparently they had very definite strength. They were what they called "journeymen" printers. That and the fact that he was a newspaperman and all newspapermen are rovers was why we moved from one place to another. That's how he happened to go up to the Comstock early in his life when he found that the mines were paying off.

FRY:In his book I believe he mentioned that while he was in San Francisco he had put some of his money into some mining stock that really paid off, so he went across the state to look at the mine and didn't come back for several years.

DRURY: When I was a small boy in Sacramento my father was the editor of the Sacramento Union. They woke us up in the middle of the night to say that one of the principal stores was burning, Weinstock-Lubin Company, up there in Sacramento. That was before the days of automobiles, or even street cars that ran all night. I remember very clearly our dressing and rushing down town to see this store, and of course the paper had to get out an extra on it. Well, the printers hadn't appeared. So my father went down into the composing room although he hadn't set type for many many years, and he picked up a case and started to set the headings for this extra so as to be a little ahead of time. But he cautioned me not to tell any of the union printers that he had done that!

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Wells Drury and Other Journalists

FRY:I wanted to talk about the papers that your father worked on after he left politics and married and settled down to the life of a newsman in the Bay Area and Sacramento.

DRURY: My father and mother were married in Reno, Nevada, on May 23, 1888. Then almost immediately-- as soon as his term as speaker pro tern of the Nevada House of Representatives ended-- they moved to San Francisco, where my father for a good many years worked on various newspapers.

FRY:And you were born, then, about a year after they were married?

DRURY: Yes, I was born in San Francisco.

FRY:Do you know which paper he worked on at first?

DRURY: I think that he first worked on the Examiner, as reporter, city editor, and night editor, because in compiling my father's book, Editor on the Comstock Lode, my brother Aubrey performed a remarkable feat of digging up the old files of the Examiner and finding the signed columns. It was very unusual in those days for anybody to sign any articles in the papers. But Wells' story has him coming down from the Comstock with a great store of interesting mining stories. He wrote that column for many months under I guess it was his own name, but he had a favorite character, Colonel "K.B." Brown, a very portly gentleman who was the honorary president of the Virginia City Fire Department, which was a most important post in those days. The fire departments were the social clubs of the day, like the Bohemian Club today. It's a matter of deep regret to me that my brother Aubrey

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wasn't interviewed to give from his wealth of recollection much more than I can give you, particularly as to the time of events. The compilation of my father's articles was an act of devotion on my brother's part, because my father had had a stroke in his later years, and then the original manuscript that he had written several years before was burned in the Berkeley fire of 1924. So except for segments of the manuscript that happened to be in the office in San Francisco, my brother had to piece together this book from the files of the old Examiner, taking this series of articles, and he did a remarkably fine editorial job. He was full of it and he maintained the idiom that my father used. Of course my dad belonged to the old school. The writers today are not quite as flowery as they were in the gay nineties. Then my father went over the manuscript with Aubrey's help. That's how the book came out. But it's essentially my father's material.

FRY:He wrote these articles, then, not very long after having the experiences at Virginia City?

DRURY: Yes, he wrote them right after coming down to San Francisco.

FRY:Do you remember any other things your father told you that could provide some measure of the type of experience he had in Virginia City? He was a very young man when he went, wasn't he? Fresh out of college, and young even for that.

DRURY: Yes. Well, according to all of his accounts in that book and what he told us in his yarns about the Comstock, it was a pretty wild place; it apparently lived up to some of the fictional episodes and characters that they attribute to it to this day.

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FRY:Your father knew Mike De Young, too, in San Francisco?

DRURY: Very well, yes. In fact, Father was news editor of the Chronicle for a while. Newspapermen moved around from one job to another, you know.

But the most responsible position my father had for some years was as managing editor of the San Francisco Call in the mid-nineties. It was then the morning newspaper; it was owned by Glaus Spreckles and Charles Shortridge, and was later a part of the Hearst interests. The Spreckles-Shortridge combination broke up when they discovered that both Spreckles and Shortridge had an ambition to run for United States Senator and they couldn't decide between them which should be it. My father was in the middle of that controversy and it ended unpleasantly for all of them.

FRY:Did your father prefer Spreckles or Shortridge?

DRURY: I don't know. His job was to get out the paper. In his later years my father for a while was city editor of the Oakland Tribune that incidentally was before Mr. Knowland owned the paper. It was when it belonged to William Dargie.

FRY:Did your father know the other journalists of the day? I'm thinking particularly of people like John Barry.

DRURY: Of course, John Barry was a great friend of his in his later years. When my father died John Barry wrote a very fine tribute to him and he ended it up by quoting something that my father once said to him. Barry had written an essay on Loneliness. He recalled that my father, a very merry sort of a person, very much of an extrovert, said to him, "Well, you know, you may not believe it but I can't remember in my whole life that I've ever been lonesome." Which Barry thought

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was a very remarkable thing, unlike most people's experience.

FRY:Does this mean that he always had friends around him, or that he never felt lonely when he was by himself?

DRURY: He always had inner resources that he could call on. That's what Barry pointed out.

FRY:Did John Barry appear to be a sensitive sort of person?

DRURY: I think so. Of course he was a much younger man than the others my father knew.

FRY:A different generation?

DRURY: Yes.

FRY:He changed to another newspaper, too.

DRURY: Most of these men did. They were professionals and sometimes there were recombinations. I have friends today who have been on most of the newspapers in San Francisco, just as my father was. In fact, as a boy--I never got beyond the reporter stage--but I worked on the Examiner. the Chronicle, the Call, the now-defunct Berkeley Independent, the Oakland Tribune and doubtless others -- wherever they needed a reporter.

FRY:Your father's times were studded with writers of the new West.

DRURY: Well, so many of the famous names of course, Mark Twain and Dan DeQuill and Alf Doten and a whole series of them he knew in Nevada on the Comstock. He was very well acquainted with Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller was quite a friend of my father's.

FRY:Did any of these men visit the home when you were little?

DRURY: Yes, I can remember Joaquin Miller visiting our home.

FRY:Could you describe him?

DRURY: He would have gone over well in Hollywood. He was a large man with a great flowing beard and flowing tie

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and he wore high boots and conducted himself the way a westerner was supposed to. I think he had assumed all of that costume when he went to England where he was lionized quite a lot. But, I know, my father when in the newspaper business published quite a few of Joaquin Miller's poems, just as he was later on the one who happened to have bought from Edwin Markham his poem, "The Man With the Hoe," which was the thing that made Markham’s reputation. That was when he was on the San Francisco Call.

FRY:And your father was the one who picked that up?

DRURY: Yes. He and Markham were very good friends. I mentioned Ambrose Bierce, who was quite a character.

FRY:Were you able to know Bierce also?

DRURY: I don't remember him. I do remember Sam Davis, who was quite a writer in his day both in prose and poetry. In fact in his book my father quotes one of Davis' poems, "The Lure of the Sagebrush." I remember Sam Davis largely because when he visited our home my mother didn't approve very much of him and the stories he told of his misspent youth. [Laughter] She told Father afterwards that she preferred not to have her offspring hear such kinds of talk.

FRY:Fremont Older was editor of the Bulletin. I believe, and later on of the Call. Was he an editor later than your father?

DRURY: Yes, he comes along afterwards, but he was a good friend of my father's. And Mrs. Fremont Older also. And Lincoln Steffens was a good friend of my father's. Another very dear friend of his whom I remember was James H. Barry, who ran a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. Barry was probably older than my father. My father thought very highly of him and I think

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sometimes wrote things for The Star, as I believe his paper was called. Barry was quite an advocate of the Henry George doctrine of the single tax, as was my father, who knew Henry George. In fact, one of my father's associates was a single-taxer, a very capable attorney named Joseph Leggett. They had quite a group who believed in the theory of the single tax, which is still a sound theory even though it might not work out in reality. Life isn't as simple as Henry George apparently conceived it to be--although chances are if they had established in his day a system of taxation based on economic rent or on unearned increment we wouldn't be plagued with making out our income taxes every year. (Laughter) It would come out of values created by the community. I was always a very mild devotee of the single tax theory, but I still think it's sound. You still get echoes of that theory every so often in discussions of taxation. Just recently the Commonwealth Club issued minutes of their hearings on the report of an attempt to revise the tax system of California, in which some attention but not much emphasis was given to the idea of capturing more of the so-called unearned increments on land value.

FRY:Your father worked for Hearst newspapers. Could Hearst have been for the single tax?

DRURY: I'm not so sure he couldn't. Hearst was pretty much of a radical in many things.

FRY:Was he?

DRURY: Yes, indeed! But I don't think he ever had any views on that subject.

FRY:My rather simplified view was that the single tax probably would not be favored by men who had a great deal of land, and therefore a reporter or editor in

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favor of the single tax might have a little trouble getting his views published if the owners of newspapers were rather wealthy.

DRURY: But it made no difference to a reporter. Then, as now, reporters held views on economics, government, and many other subjects that were quite different from those of the proprietors of the papers. But in those days there was less coloring of the news in accordance with the views of the writers than there is today. My father was never a rabid single taxer, or anything else.

But I'll say this to you about my father. Above everything else my father was a patriotic American. There was another single tax publication besides the Star, called the Post. I think it was published in Philadelphia and I've forgotten the editor’s name. I believe it was a German name. But I do know that when World War One came along my father felt that the Post was disloyal to the American government, and he immediately dropped all associations with any of those people, and I don't think I ever heard him refer to the single tax again. In other words, his patriotism was far greater than his concern about any economic theory.

Newspapermen Then Versus Now

FRY:Do you think that the modern press man is much different from the one of the 1880s and 1890s?

DRURY: No. I think the motivation of the average reporter, if you want to call him that--Well, take a top-flight reporter like Bob Considine, or my friend William Randolph Hearst, Jr. --I think those men write and observe for the joy of the game. It is pleasurable

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exercise to them. And their desire, of course, is to hold people's interest and to inform them, which is all that writers of the earlier day did. The style of the 1870s and even the gay nineties was a little more elaborate and flowery than the style of today, but there was some pretty direct writing. The ornate language was part of the manners of the age.

FRY: The newspaperman then did have a keen sense of what the public wanted to read and wrote for this, just as he does now. Is that what you are saying?

DRURY: Yes, I think so. They addressed themselves to the same kind of audience, but perhaps the audience has different tastes today from what it had then although sensationalism was just as common in the Territorial Enterprise as it is today in the San Francisco Chronicle or Examiner. Naturally the main happenings were violent deaths and accidents, robberies and that sort of thing.

FRY:You mention that you thought that the same type of thing motivated all newsmen. What is this motivation? Could you describe it a little more?

DRURY: Well, it was the same kind of appeal athletics has to people of robust temperament--meeting a deadline, skating continually on the thin edge, having something new and unexpected turn up every minute. I got a taste of that kind of thing not only in journalism, but also in government. I found in administrative work in government there was never a dull moment.

FRY:Maybe journalism is good training for our government officials. (Laughter)

DRURY: There are many disappointments that you have to inure yourself to in both fields. They say that to be a

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good administrator you have to have a high frustration tolerance. I certainly learned that in government, and I think it's true in the newspaper business.

FRY:We do have a number of newspapermen who go into politics or into serious government positions.

DRURY: My dear friend Joseph R. Knowland was an example of that.

FRY:How about the wide range of different types of newspapermen? I was reading what your father said about DeQuill. He had to have his own private shed to write in at first because he couldn't bear to be in the hubbub.

DRURY: And according to accounts I got from my dad, Mark Twain was much that type of man, too. Mark Twain was quite retiring and they considered him a tenderfoot. One of the stories, and I guess there is some accuracy to it, was that Mark Twain wasn't as popular as some of them because sometimes when he entered a saloon he would drink by himself and not treat the gang, which was more or less an order of the day at that time.

FRY:I got the idea, too, that even in his non-drinking activities Twain never became one of the boys.

DRURY: That's the impression my father got in those early days.

FRY:One thing that interested me was that not only Mark Twain but Mr. DeQuill often took great liberties with the truth when their newspaper was a little low on print. I think everybody around there knew that this was with tongue-in-cheek.

DRURY: Of course, the buffoonery and practical jokes and the tall stories were the mode in those early days, but they were always labeled as such. They were great people for hoaxes of various kinds and they'd play

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very elaborate practical jokes, but I think the code of the newspaperman of that day was probably higher than it is today, so far as the coloring of news is concerned. They'd tell the news story straight, as my dad brought out in his book. After all, the man who wrote it would have to defend its veracity, sometimes, with his life. In my long observation of my father's career as a newspaperman I don't know of his ever condoning the coloring of news, or mixing editorial comment with the straight news, as you find today.

FRY:Do you think that this has anything to do with the fact that newspapers are no longer connected to personalities?

DRURY: I think that probably has a great deal to do with it, and I think it also has a great deal to do with the effect of the advertising and circulation departments on the editorial department. In those days the editors were king, and their circulation was just what they could get and their advertising was about the same. They were not usually very profitable enterprises and they weren't run on a mass production basis primarily for profit, as newspapers are today. But I think the general standard they tried to maintain, from a newspaper standpoint was a pretty high one,

FRY:Did Dan DeQuill [William Wright] work for your father?

DRURY: No, I think he was an older man than my father. He was on the Territorial Enterprise for a while. He was quite a friend of Mark Twain. One of the interesting things my father told me was that as contemporaries Dan DeQuill was rated much higher as a writer than Mark Twain. Everybody thought Dan would be the

[22]

famous writer of western tales. You are probably familiar with his book, The Big Bonanza. That book, according to what I've been told, was more or less financed through the generosity of Mark Twain after Twain had the same success, because Twain himself felt that Dan DeQuill was a very effective writer and that he had the spirit of the early West, so he was a party to seeing that Big Bonanza was issued. But it didn't catch the public imagination as Mark Twain's books did and obviously Twain painted on a broader canvas with bolder strokes. He caught more of the spirit of the life of America, not just in the mining camps but on the Mississippi and other places.

FRY:I wonder why DeQuill doesn't rank, say, with Bret Harte, who wrote the mining stories earlier?

DRURY: Well, it's pretty hard to tell. It may be that The Big Bonanza by Dan DeQuill will become just as much of a classic as any of the works of Mark Twain a century or so from now.

FRY:I wonder if any of his newspaper columns have ever been gathered anywhere.

DRURY: Oh, yes, I think among my father's papers there were a lot of them. [But they were among those burned in the Berkeley fire.]

Pry: Have they ever been published as a collection?

DRURY: I don't know about that.

FRY:How was advertising handled in those days, so that they didn't feel pressure to please a large account?

DRURY: Well, I don't really know very much about that except what I've read, but I do know that the editorial department was dominant. In his later years my father

[23]

regretted that he didn't go in for the business side rather than the editorial side. I remember his saying to me, "You know, those fellows downstairs in the business office, they say it don't and he ain't, but they're the ones that make the money!"

FRY:Well, I was wondering if the advertising was almost a week-to-week-affair--

DRURY: It was, and usually just the card-to-the-public type, you know, the arrival and departure of steamers and trains and listing of supplies that had arrived and were for sale. It was news almost as the chronicle of events was. We've gone far away from that today.

FRY: Were the newspapers like the Enterprise and the Gold Hill News that your father worked on more like public service institutions in the community?

DRURY: I don't know that they were, and having been a reporter myself in a small way and having had touch with them in the public relations business over all these years, I would say that the motivation of the average newspaperman is not much different now from what it was at that time. To his dying day my father always wanted to get back into the newspaper business because he liked the movement and the color and the excitement of it. That's the compensation
that the average newspaperman gets. The reporters and the editors of course weren't like the printers. They weren't so well organized. But today the newspaper guild carries considerable weight and I have noticed that the lot of the average newspaperman is much better than it was, say, a generation ago.

[24]

Politics and Views

FRY:It might be a good idea to tell something about your father's political life, although his days as a lawmaker antedated your life.

DRURY: There are memoranda about my father that I've given Bancroft Library which contain something about his political experiences. He was deputy secretary of the state of Nevada, 1882 to 1886, and then was a member of the Nevada legislature in the lower house, speaker pro tern, 1887-1888. He took quite a prominent part in Republican politics; he was a delegate from Nevada in the 1884 convention that nominated James G. Elaine for the Presidency. I remember his telling me about being seated next to Theodore Roosevelt who was a delegate from the state of New York. They had the states arranged alphabetically and just across the aisle from Nevada was New York. Teddy Roosevelt was then just as vociferous as he was later on, and was bursting with the desire to make a speech. But they had a very suave but very firm temporary chairman who every time Mr. Roosevelt got up put him down again. My father said that Roosevelt never did get to make his speech and he looked as though he were going to have a stroke of apoplexy. [Laughter]

FRY:Did your father get to know Roosevelt very well at this time?

DRURY: Over the years I think he knew him fairly well.

FRY:Was this the type of Republican that your father was, a Theodore Roosevelt Republican?

DRURY: Yes, we were all of us more or less Progressives. In fact, my only claim to respectability under the New Deal when I served as director of the national parks was that at one time I'd been a Hiram Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt Progressive. I was registered

[25]

as a Progressive, as practically all of us were here in California, for about four years.

FRY:I guess being a Progressive wouldn't put you in the camp of sinners as readily as if you had been a Taft Republican.

DRURY: I was never an ultra-conservative, although I find myself becoming more and more conservative every day. A lot of good it does you.

FRY:Do you think you're more conservative now than you were, say, when you first got out of college?

DRURY: I think so, yes.

FRY:I've heard a number of people say that. I wonder if this is the result of more wisdom or just kind of getting tired of being progressive. [Laughter]

DRURY: Tired of contention. I don't know what it is.

FRY:So at any rate your politics and your father's politics were just about the same, is that right?

DRURY: Yes, and my mother's father, Dr. Bishop, was also a Republican. He was also a Nevadan. That's where my mother and father met.

FRY:Your father didn't use his columns, then, to put forth any political viewpoints on current events?

DRURY: Oh, no. He wrote editorials over the years. Of course, those usually weren't signed so you couldn't identify them, but the columns he wrote on the Comstock and other things later were usually narrative, telling of incidents.

FRY:I'm trying to get here a pretty clear picture of where he fitted in as a Progressive Republican. It was during about the same span of years that the trustbusters and the muckrakers were in the

[26]

headlines. What were his ideas about this?

DRURY: I think the doctrines of Theodore Roosevelt were just about what my father believed. He always supported him.

I will say this that--I narrowly escaped voting for William Jennings Bryan. I was less than two years from becoming twenty-one when Bryan ran for President in 1908. All of our family at that time were swept up in the enthusiasm for Bryan and his progressive ideas, which nowadays would seem almost ultra-conservative. Just as the other night on a newscast I heard Norman Thomas, the perennial old socialist candidate for President. William Winter introduced him. Today, in the light of what's gone on in the New Deal and afterwards, honestly, socialist Thomas almost sounded like a conservative.

FRY:I think that what you say is true, that William Jennings Bryan had become a symbol for the progressives at that time.

DRURY: I think my father voted for him. But four years later my eyes were open. I've voted Republican ever since.

[27]

THE CHILDHOOD OF NEWTON DRURY

FRY:I'd like to get a picture of your home, as far back as you want to take it. I don't want to strain your memory, or make you draw pictures where there are none.

DRURY: We lived in what I consider the best part of San Francisco then, climatically and as far as the neighborhood was concerned. It was up on the hill at Twenty-first and Dolores, about four blocks up the hill from Mission Dolores. I think that Dr. Sproul was born in that same neighborhood.

The Mobile Drurys

I myself was born on Guerrero Street, which is downhill from where we lived later. In the early years in San Francisco we lived in flats which were the typical dwellings of a good many families in San Francisco. I remember the one at the corner of Twenty-first and Dolores had the most magnificent panoramic view of the whole bay region. And we had a little porch outside the window which was a matter of concern to my mother because she was afraid the children would drop down two stories.

FRY:[Laughter] You and your brother were just two years apart, weren't you?

DRURY: Yes.

FRY:Did you have an older brother or sister?

[28]

DRURY: No. My brother Aubrey was a twin and his twin died at birth. And my sister Muriel was born six years after I was. Quite a few years later my other sister, Lorraine, was born in Berkeley.

We moved to Sacramento in my youth where we owned a house that still seems to be in pretty good condition on the corner of 16th and Q Streets. I went by it occasionally when I was working in Sacramento in this last shift with the state parks in the 1950s.

Aubrey and I had very interesting boyhoods in Sacramento. Perhaps not typical; we had a lot of outdoor life; we were just a block from the R Street levee which has since been leveled. As far as we could see were open fields except when the river would break through and all that country would be flooded. In the wintertime there would be at least a foot or two of water standing just beyond this R Street levee. It was a common thing for much of the agricultural land just outside Sacramento to be flooded.

FRY:When did you live in Sacramento?

DRURY: We lived in Sacramento twice. My brother was born there in 1891. That was the first time we lived in Sacramento, and my father had his own newspaper, the News. He finally decided to give it up, partly because of my mother's poor health, partly because the newspaper business was a pretty tough game in those days. He published this paper about the same time that the Sacramento Bee was established. The Bee, in fact, was the rival paper. There was quite a rivalry between my father and the McClatchys,

[29]

but I'm glad to say that the later generations of McClatchys and Drurys have always been very good friends.

My father was also on one of the newspapers in Los Angeles at various times between the San Francisco and Sacramento episodes. We lived in Los Angeles for a few months, around 25th Street near Main. Everything beyond us was undeveloped open fields. We had fruit trees; we had a horse and buggy and barn. I was in grammar school, I think. Then we went back to Sacramento for the second time, and that year I believe my father was the editor of the Sacramento Union. It must have been around the time I was in the eighth grade.

We moved to the San Francisco Bay Region in 1906, just after the earthquake. The family has been around the bay ever since. At the time of the San Francisco earthquake we happened to be in San Francisco on a visit. A few months later, in 1906, we moved from Sacramento to Berkeley, where the family has been established.

The Earthquake and Fire

DRURY: On the occasion of the earthquake I, as a music student, had tickets to the grand opera which was playing at the Metropolitan Opera Company. I had 50¢ tickets in the uppermost gallery for every one of about 20 operas that were playing. Well, as you know, about the second night--or the morning after the second night--the earthquake

[30]

came. I was, that night, sitting in the upper most gallery; they were playing Bizet's Carmen with Caruso. Framstad sang Carmen, unusual for a contralto. Louise Homer and Antonio Scotti and Marcel Journet were in the cast--I remember all of them. The building had been condemned; when an usher ran across the floor in that upper gallery you could hear it creak and feel it sway. The earthquake occurred during the next morning and they tell me that that building came down just like a pack of cards. So I've figured some way that all the time I've had since 1906 has been velvet. [Laughter]

We were all there in this apartment house on Larkin Street when the quake came. It was a pretty severe shaking and we looked out the windows and saw all the disturbance. But we thought that was that so we all went back to bed again. [Laughter] Of course another quake came on and that jarred us loose.

My mother was of a very affectionate disposition, and at one point when it seemed to be going pretty bad she said, "Well, anyhow there is great comfort in the fact that we'll all die together." I was young and alert; I wasn't quite as philosophical as she was.

But we stayed for, oh, over a day, over 24 hours in that building, until the fire came up to it and they warned us they were going to dynamite it and we had to get out. Some of my mother's family were living near the Presidio, so we started out there. We had to walk, of course.

[31]

We had an express wagon take our trunks to Van Ness Avenue. They deposited those trunks on the sidewalk opposite the old St. Mary's Cathedral. Then another expressman came along and for a consideration he agreed to store the trunks in a warehouse in the Mission district. We went on up to the Presidio and stayed there a day or two, until we got a conveyance to take us down to the ferry, and we went back to Sacramento. We gave up the trunks for lost because we heard or read in the papers that the warehouse to which they'd been sent had been destroyed by fire. About a year later we got a notice that before the fire came they had transferred the things from the warehouse and we got back the trunks. They had lost our address, and the only reason we got them back was because as a small boy I scribbled my name on some of the papers that were in the trunk with my address in Sacramento.

Family Life

FRY:Could you give a picture of what it was like to live with a newspaperman?

DRURY: Then, as now, a newspaperman worked very hard. His hours were long; there wasn't any eight-hour day then. Usually my father worked on the morning paper, and that meant that our sleeping habits probably never were normal because he'd get home late at night and sleep late in the morning. In San Francisco in those days they didn't have taxi-cabs and the street car stopped running around

[32]

midnight. My father would come home maybe at one-thirty or two in the morning so he often rode a bicycle, which was a rather common conveyance in those days.

My mother was a little wistful woman but she had the courage of a lion. They'd been having a lot of what they called "foot pads" holding people up in the streets in San Francisco. One night, looking down at the corner below our house, she could see a man standing in the shadow. She convinced herself that he was lying in wait to rob my father when he came home. So what did she do but put on her coat and go down to the corner and ask this fellow what he was doing there. It so astonished him that he moved on. She didn't weigh a hundred pounds, but as I say she had courage; it might be called fool-hardiness.

FRY:Your father would be asleep after you left for school in the morning.

DRURY: Yes. Oh, but we saw him Sundays and holidays. We had a great deal of family life together. My father was a great hand for dealing with all children, but particularly with boys. He remembered his youth. Both he and my mother were more tolerant than most parents. I don't remember ever being chastised for anything.

FRY:He wasn't the old Victorian father, then.

DRURY: Oh, not at all; he was very liberal. Years later when we lived in Berkeley, there was a fraternity house, across from us, on Euclid hill that burned down in the Berkeley fire and wasn't rebuilt. Periodically the boys would have an

[33]

initiation and keep everybody in the neighborhood awake all night with their hilarity. One morning after an initiation one of our neighbors met my father going to work and said, "Did you hear all that noise last night?" My dad said, "Yes."

"It didn't make you mad?"

And my father said, "It sure did. It made me mad that I wasn't young enough to be over there with them." [Laughter]

FRY:He must have taken you and Aubrey on a lot of outings.

DRURY: We used to walk in the San Francisco hills. We used to pick wild strawberries up on Twin Peaks.

FRY:What sort of reading material was available to you in your home?

DRURY: We had almost anything you could think of. My father was an inveterate reader; all his life he was a student. Although he didn't graduate from Monmouth College he had three years there, and he continued his studies on his own as a young man. He read some Latin and Greek and he was interested in the classics. My mother was even more inclined toward literature. When I say that we didn't have normal hours one factor in it was this: Because my father came home so late from work, many nights we'd sit up in bed and my mother would read to us. She read all of Scott's novels and Dickens, and Thackeray, and all the stand-bys. Unquestionably this reading aloud by my mother was of great help to my brother

[34]

and myself in later years,

Theatre and Music

DRURY: The other phase of our education occurred in the old Clunie Theatre in Sacramento where as editor of the local newspaper, my father always had at least two complimentary seats. En route to San Francisco from the East, the theatrical companies stopped over for a one-night stand in Sacramento. Many a night when we should have been in bed my brother and I would be sitting in the front row in this theater hearing all the things that came along, and that was everything in those days. I remember Ward and James, the tragedians; they played in Shakespearian plays. Mrs. Carter and Patrick Campbell, and I don't remember for sure that Barrett and Booth played there but I think they did. I'm sure if they played in Sacramento I heard them. All the musical comedies, like The Merry Widow, would stop there for just one night, apparently to get reorganized before coming to San Francisco--getting the baggage together and rehearsing their parts. So their Sacramento performance was probably pretty rough. They had repertoire companies in those days, you know. They called them the ten, twenty, thirty-cent companies, like the Ellerfords, who for two or three weeks would play a different play every night. East Lynn, and Shenandoah and Ten Nights in a Barroom -- all

[35]

those old-timers. Well, whether that was good or bad education, we had it.

FRY:At least you were introduced to Shakespeare live that way.

DRURY: Oh, we heard practically all of the Shakespeare plays--King Lear and The Tempest and As You Like It, Merchant of Venice and all--played by those who were then the leading Shakespearian actors.

FRY:You mentioned your interest in music. Where did that come from?

DRURY: My mother played the piano, and she first taught me to play it, but my interest in music was not particularly deep--although I'm still interested in it. I studied with a man named Anderson in Sacramento and I got a great deal from him. I did a little composing and later I played in an orchestra.

Pry: What sort of things did you compose?

DRURY: Very conventional waltzes and marches and things like that--very inconsequential.

FRY:Did you put words to them too?

DRURY: No, I never went that far. I thought at one time that I would make music my profession, but I got bravely over that because I had sense enough to realize that I wasn't good enough for that.

FRY:How old were you when you had this great interest in music?

DRURY: About sixteen. As I say, that's what brought me to the San Francisco Opera House. And a month after the earthquake the Metropolitan Opera Company refunded every cent that I paid for my

[36]

tickets, which was a windfall.

FRY:What did you play besides the piano?

DRURY: I played the cornet, which has now been superseded by the trumpet, and I occasionally played the flute in an orchestra.

Church

FRY:Did your family attend any particular church?

DRURY: All of us are nominally Episcopalian. My mother and my sisters were very devout Episcopalians. My brother and I were not quite so regular in our attendance as the ladies of the family.

FRY:I was going to ask you if going to church was a regular family ritual when you were a child?

DRURY: Well, we went to church a great deal and we were very fond, particularly in our youth in Sacramento, of the Reverend C. L. Miel, who later came to San Francisco. He was a rather unorthodox, too-progressive minister for those days. He finally left Sacramento. One of the deadly sins he committed was smoking a cigarette, which then was beyond the pale.

FRY:Did he have a better reception in San Francisco?

DRURY: I think he did, yes. He was out on North Beach. He was always very friendly with the Catholic priests wherever he was; he was sort of inclined toward High Church. But neither my brother nor I were confirmed in the Episcopal Church, although

[37]

we kept very close to men like the Reverend W. R. H. Hodgkin who had married five or six members of our family. My wife and I were married by Reverend Hodgkin. He was at All Souls Church in Berkeley, a very wonderful person and still a great friend of the family. He officiated just recently at my brother's funeral, and before that at my mother's and father's funerals, all at All Souls.

FRY:You still maintain contact with All Souls.

DRURY: Yes. My sisters go there, and we do occasionally.

FRY:Were there any special trips that your family took that you think left a distinct impression on you?

DRURY: Oh, not anything special. We used to travel in California quite a bit. I can remember going to Long Beach, for instance. We went down there about noon and we got a little tired about four o'clock in the afternoon, and we had to wait over an hour before we could get a train back from Long Beach to Los Angeles. I do remember one trip we made to Denver, Colorado. I think it was on newspaper business but the family all tagged along. Later on, of course, we traveled quite a bit. We went frequently to Nevada, where some of my mother's relatives were.

But as far as I'm concerned my travels, most of them, were during and after my college days.

Schools

FRY:Didn't you attend Edison and Horace Mann schools?

[38]

DRURY: Yes; Edison primary school, where I had my elementary education, and Horace Mann, which was my grammar school. I also went to certain schools in Los Angeles. I think my last two years in grammar school were in the Sacramento grammar school, and then I had two years in the Sacramento High School before we left in 1906. I went to Lowell High School in San Francisco one term, and then we moved to Berkeley. I graduated from Berkeley High School. It's debatable whether moving so often is a benefit or a deterrent to your education. I don't know. I know I resented the fact that I had to memorize Milton's L' Allegro and Il'Penseroso twice, first at Lowell High School and then again at Berkeley High School. I just wore the covers off The Merchant of Venice at different schools. I think I had it three times.

FRY:What about school activities?

DRURY: Well, I was active both in Berkeley High and in college in debating. That was an interest that my father undoubtedly encouraged. Both my brother and I were on the same debating teams at Berkeley High and at the University of California.

I think moving around was an advantage. I was glad I went to the University of California, rather than to college in the East, because afterwards most of one's associations are with people from one's own community. I think I got the most out of the Berkeley High

[39]

School because I was quite active in student affairs. I didn't know any better than to run for President of the Associated Students there and four years later at the University of California.

FRY:You became President both times?

DRURY: Yes. Sometimes just by the skin of my teeth. But I think that's probably educational, although it makes me tired to think of it now.

FRY:You have had all these executive jobs thrust upon you in later years, and I wondered if you had had this leaning when you were in junior high or high school?

DRURY: I have done, as I say, a lot of discussion and debating and things of that sort. And the newspaper business is inclined to divest one of modesty. It's not exactly a vocation for anyone who is too retiring.

High School

FRY:Which high school did you first attend?

DRURY: I went two years to Sacramento High School which, incidentally, was an excellent school. They had an outstanding faculty--quite a few of them University of California graduates. I remember particularly my teacher in English, Mrs. Molly Morton, who was much more than an English teacher. She was a philosopher and a wonderful person. I trace the effect of my teachers upon me more to Sacramento High School than perhaps to any of the other institutions I attended. Then there was a

[40]

Miss Kate Herrick who gave me my grounding in Latin. She was a stern taskmaster but an excellent teacher. There were several others that were outstanding.

FRY:Do you remember whether Mrs. Morton, your English teacher, inspired you in your writing, or primarily in understanding others' writings and literature?

DRURY: I think primarily the latter. Her forte was literature. We had another teacher, a Miss Maude Green, in composition. I learned a few things from her. One of them was how to spell the word, "buses." I always spelled it b-u-double s-e-s. She corrected that, saying that that was the plural of the old English word, "buss," meaning a kiss.

FRY:That squelched that. [Laughter] Did Miss Herrick start an interest in Latin for you?

DRURY: Well, I took four years of Latin and it must have been because she more or less inspired me to do it. I've always found it stood me in good stead.

In the fall of 1906 we moved to San Francisco because my father was asked to come down to be city editor on the Examiner; at that time I went to Lowell High School in San Francisco. Then in the fall of 1906 we moved to Berkeley, where my father was secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and I spent my last year and a half of public school in Berkeley High School. I suppose that's the reason I headed toward the University of

[41]

California.

FRY:But you really think that Sacramento High School had a superior faculty. I was wondering if there were some factors in Sacramento that might be responsible for this at that time.

DRURY: Oh, they just happened to be good teachers. They had a very fine principal, Frank Tate, a very able administrator and scholar. I think he was a graduate of the University of California. He later quit teaching and practiced law until he died.

One of my classmates in Sacramento High School was Herman Phleger, who was to become so notable as the chief legal counsel for five years for the U.S. State Department and a member of the World Court, and just recently has conducted a hearing as chairman of the American delegation in the meeting on Antarctica. They had this session in Washington for some months and, as a result, drafted a treaty which outlined the rights and privileges of the different nations who laid claim to portions of Antarctica.

FRY:Did you know him very well in high school?

DRURY: Oh, yes. In fact, I knew him in grammar school. His mother, who was a widow, was one of my grammar school teachers in the Sacramento grammar school and was herself a wonderful teacher.

FRY:Did you notice any intimations of his future in grammar school and high school?

DRURY: He was always very aggressive. I go to meetings now occasionally where the old boys reminisce and one of the stories I tell about Herman Phleger

[42]

was when we were small boys at the Sacramento grammar school. We ran a little printing office and got out a school newspaper. We had very elementary and inferior type; it had been there a great many years. One day when we were getting out the Washington's birthday edition we found that we were running out of commas. Herman simply took out a chisel and cut off the dot in the semicolons and we had plenty of commas. [Laughter]

FRY:In high school was he active in extra-curricular affairs, or debating?

DRURY: Quite active in both athletics and debating.

FRY:You were, too, weren't you?

DRURY: I took part in some debating--more after I got to Berkeley High School and then in college. But while I played quite a little baseball, I was never in the class that made varsity teams or anything of that sort.

Newspaper Work

FRY:You began working on newspapers while still in high school?

DRURY: I started rather early up in Sacramento. I was an occasional writer under my father's guidance for the Sacramento Union when he was the managing editor. Once in a while he'd send me out to cover some affair.

FRY:How old were you then?

DRURY: I was about sixteen or seventeen. But when I was even younger I remember that a local resident, Colonel Harris Weinstock, gave a talk to the

[43]

Sacramento grammar school on the subject of the George Junior Republic. I wrote an article for the paper (which was about as good as I can write now, for that matter), and Mr. Weinstock, who was a prominent merchant there, was very much pleased with it and he sent me a check for five dollars-- probably the largest honorarium I ever received, relatively speaking. [Laughter]

FRY:What is the George Junior Republic?

DRURY: It was a sort of reform colony where they had self-government and so forth for teen-agers who were a little hard to manage. It was a new idea then and Weinstock, who was a very benevolent man, had gone there to study it.

In my high school days one way I eked out my income was by writing music and drama criticisms. I used to do that for some of the Berkeley papers and for the San Francisco Examiner. When their chief critic, Ashton Stevens, was otherwise engaged or incapacitated, they used to send me up to the Greek Theater now and then to write up the concerts and plays.

FRY:When you went to Lowell High School, did you work on a newspaper?

DRURY: Not when I was at Lowell High School. After I came over to Berkeley I worked on various news papers. One of the things I did for the Examiner was to act as an automobile reporter. I used to get paid by the line, a cent a line or something like that. I reported automobile news; the automobile was more of a novelty in those days than

[44]

it is now. They had a page, as part of the sports section, that had to do with exhibitions and races and things relating to automobiles.

FRY:You did other sports reporting too, didn't you?

DRURY: Yes. One of my adventures was reporting the baseball games with the Sacramento team in the state league. I had to get there on time because I was official scorekeeper, too, so my father always gave me a note to the principal of the grammar school asking that I be excused fifteen minutes early on Friday afternoons because I "had an important engagement." For about a year I got away with it; they didn't know that I had been going to the baseball game until the truth finally leaked out when one of my schoolmates complained to the principal. So they canceled my fifteen minutes leave on Friday afternoons.

Issues and Youthful Politics

DRURY: I remember that in my senior year I spent a summer as the Alameda reporter for the Oakland Tribune. It was on that job that I first met Mr. Joseph H. Knowland. I've had an association with him for over forty years in park and historical matters. The Oakland Tribune was then owned by a Mr. Dargie. Mr. Knowland was a relatively young man who had spent his first session in Congress. Alameda was his district. My first meeting with him was when I interviewed him for the Oakland Tribune, neither of us dreaming that

[45]

one day he would be the proprietor of the Oakland Tribune and would build it up as he has. I have always told J. R. that it was lucky for me that I gave him a good send-off because otherwise we might not have had as pleasant relationships in later years. [Laughter]

FRY:Do you remember what you interviewed him about?

DRURY: One of the issues that he was particularly interested in was free tolls for American shipping in the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal had only recently been constructed, and he introduced legislation that would allow American shipping to pass through without tolls, on the grounds that the United States had built the canal and there was no reason why they should pay tolls. However, his legislation failed to pass.

FRY:I wonder if this also fell in line with his feelings about the tariff at that time. Do you know?

DRURY: I don't remember his feelings about the tariff, but although I think J. R. was a very liberal man in his general outlook, throughout his political career he was what you might classify as a conservative.

FRY:What do you mean?

DRURY: Well, he was just whatever a conservative is--one who believes in holding to what's good in the present and changing only when it can be demonstrated that we can improve our lot by doing so. I'm sure he was not a free trader.

FRY:Was he a Theodore Roosevelt man?

DRURY: No. He was a conservative Republican. Later he

[46]

ran for the Senate on the regular Republican ticket after several terms in Congress, when Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson were at the head of the Progressive Party. And some Progressive -- I think it was Francis J. Heney -- ran on the Progressive ticket. The Republican vote was split and James D. Phelan, a Democrat, was elected United States Senator.

FRY:So he was a victim of the Progressive movement then.

DRURY: Yes. At the time, I was a young Progressive, president of the student's Progressive Party Club on the campus. We did some campaigning for Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson.

FRY:Were you old enough to be aware at all of the Ruef and Schmitz debacle in San Francisco?

DRURY: Oh, yes. I didn't do any reporting on it, but I remember very well the day that Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who was under indictment, came back from Europe. For a long time I had among my memorabilia a printed card that the people who met him at the Ferry Building stuck in their hats which said, "Welcome home, Mayor Schmitz." I think I probably have that around and if I find it I'll give it to the California Historical Society.

Yes, I remember Abe Ruef quite well, too. When I was a small boy in Sacramento I used to go to the capitol building occasionally with my father when he was on his newspaper rounds. One day he introduced me to this little smiling gentleman with the diamond stick pin--a very dapper, pleasant sort of person, Abe Ruef. That's when

[47]

Abe Ruef was in his prime and more or less controlled things. I remember, of course, the Calhoun trial and the conviction of Abe Ruef. Eugene Schmitz was acquitted, some thought, because the trial came around Christmastime and juries are notoriously more charitable at that season.

FRY:Did you have any personal feelings about the trial?

DRURY: Not especially. I think it was an open and shut case of attempted bribery or extortion.

FRY:What about the few other people? For instance, Patrick Calhoun, the railroad man. Did you know him?

DRURY: No, I was just a boy then, but I knew what I read in the papers and what was told me by my father out of his experience.

FRY:I was just wondering if you knew any of the newspaper representatives on the San Francisco Republican League. They tried to get a representative from each newspaper in San Francisco. Did you know anything about that?

DRURY: No, I don't even remember one by that name.

FRY:It lasted just a couple of elections, but I thought maybe you knew it. You mentioned Phelan. Did you know Mr. Phelan?

DRURY: Yes, I met him.

FRY: If you have any pertinent comment to make about these men we would like to have it.

DRURY: Phelan was a very dramatic orator--somewhat of the old school. One of the episodes that I remember was the time Herman Phleger and I went to the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco when William Jennings Bryan was making his last stand in 1912. That was

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the election with Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. We were both Republicans, but we wanted to hear Bryan, so we worked our way in and the only place we could sit was among the delegates on the platform. So there we sat. That's the only time I ever heard William Jennings Bryan. He could charm a bird down off its perch. There's no question about his supreme oratorical ability. James D. Phelan presided at the meeting and I remember one embarrassing episode. This was an audience ostensibly of Democrats, but inadvertently James D. Phelan mentioned Theodore Roosevelt and there was uproarious applause, which he had great difficulty in quelling. He tried to do it by telling the story of U.S. Grant who was refused a third term. He tried to apply a parallel to Theodore Roosevelt. And his audience just wasn't going along with him.

FRY:Do you remember the California campaigns for women's suffrage?

DRURY: I don't remember what year it became a fact, but I do remember that in my high school at graduation I made a few remarks, and in order to get on the good side of the girls in the audience I predicted that woman suffrage would come about in a few years. But in college I was on an intercollegiate debating team where the assigned topic was the subject of women suffrage. We were assigned the negative but nevertheless we won the debate.

FRY: Was your victory attributable to your own personal feelings? [Laughter]

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DRURY: Not at all, no. It was just a job to do.

FRY:What were some of the other subjects of debates that you had in high school?

DRURY: At the Friends of the Bancroft Library the other day I told about my earliest debate. Little thinking that in later years I would have some thing to do with the conservation of scenic resources, I was in the Senate Debating Society at the University and we were assigned the topic of the Hetch Hetchy Dam, which was quite a live controversy at that time. It, as you know, invaded Yosemite National Park. There was a great deal of argument pro and con; it was all Greek to me, frankly. But having been assigned the side in favor of building the dam in the park, I'm ashamed to confess that we won the debate.

FRY:I guess you lived to rue that.

DRURY: Well, I think it was a grave mistake to have built the Hetch Hetchy Dam because it took them a long, long time and it cost more money than some of the alternatives proposed. I made up for that lapse of my youth in later years when I was in the midst of many controversies where we were successful in the National Park Service in fending off the building of dams in Glacier National Park and several other national areas.

FRY:Were you old enough at the time of the Hetch Hetchy controversy to know what it was that finally made the dam materialize?

DRURY: It was purely academic to me then. If the truth

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were known I rather thought the argument about spoiling the beauty of Yosemite was sentimental nonsense. And I think I so stated in the debate. (Laughter) Of course I hadn't been to Yosemite; I hadn't gotten religion then.

Alameda and Berkeley, Quiet Villages

FRY:To move on to Alameda and Berkeley, could you indicate how the community of Alameda differed at that time from what its character is now?

DRURY: Yes; there were more open spaces. In fact, one of the pleasant features of Alameda was that they had great fields of what they called Alameda sweet corn; it was quite famous in those days, growing in among the scattered houses. Gradually all of that land has been taken up and improved. The beaches of Alameda were much more pleasant than they are today; one summer my family took a home in Alameda just to be near the beaches and we had a very pleasant time there. But I was not particularly familiar with Alameda; it was a quiet lazy village just as Berkeley was more or less.

Berkeley at that time was really a series of stations on the Southern Pacific line. What's now Alcatraz was called Lorin, and there was also the main Berkeley station. Then there was one up at Berryman Street which was the end of the line. That was in the steam car days.

FRY:These were relatively disconnected communities?

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DRURY: Yes. They were little groups of homes that developed almost like little villages and there was a good deal of undeveloped land, as there has been until recently between Ashby and Alcatraz. Berkeley was a rather attractive settlement; I remember the main street with its old-fashioned stores. Being a wide street it was more impressive than most main thoroughfares. Alongside the Southern Pacific station there was quite a little park which, as you know, has disappeared. They now have a building and loan association office where the park used to be. The old-timers all felt that it was a mistake that they let the charm of downtown Berkeley disappear before so-called "improvement."

Early Growth of Berkeley

FRY:Was your father working for the Examiner while you lived in Berkeley?

DRURY: For quite a while, yes.

FRY:He had something to do with the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce didn't he?

DRURY: Yes, he later became manager of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. That was about the time I was in college.

FRY:It seems that all of a sudden something made Berkeley wake up and decide to make itself a city. I was wondering if you were aware of what might have caused this. Or do you think it's true?

DRURY: It's just natural growth. Of course the steady growth of the University unquestionably has

[52]

contributed to it. I think the splendid location of Berkeley as a place of residence, the Berkeley hills and the panorama of the bay and all that sort of thing made for it.

While my father, representing the Chamber of Commerce, was more or less instrumental in bringing new industries into Berkeley, I must confess that my sympathies were more with the people who wanted to keep Berkeley a simple residential town. But observation of almost every city in the United States shows that for various reasons, one of which is to increase their tax base, they all try to encourage industry.

FRY:I've often wondered why the industries were put down by the bay front. Is that basically the most desirable place for them?

DRURY: Oh, I think so. It was level land and land that was not particularly desirable for residences; it was close to transportation.

FRY:Recreation?

DRURY: Well, nobody worried much about recreation in those days because all the Berkeley hills were open and beaches were not fenced in and weren't polluted the way they are now. I never was much of a swimmer, but my wife tells about how they used to swim off the Berkeley wharf. I guess nobody would dream of doing that today. During the years I was with the state parks every so often a move would be started to establish a recreational beach on the waterfront

[53]

of Berkeley, but there were insurmountable obstacles, not the least of which was the fact that the Santa Fe Railroad owns quite a strip of land immediately east of the shoreline in Berkeley, which made it very difficult. The other obstacle was the presence of industry already there. I think the Berkeley master plan, which calls for dredging and building of islands and residential areas and parks on the tidelands owned by the city of Berkeley beyond this Santa Fe strip, is a wonderful plan. As I understand it, Berkeley owns the tidelands by grant of legislation almost halfway out to Angel Island. It is a very wide strip of frontage there. That master plan was issued four or five years ago. Mr. Frederick B. Confer was chairman then, I think, of the planning commission that issued it. It's like a great many other things that have been evolved, a counsel of perfection, but it calls for the development of open spaces--both parks and playground--in various parts of the hill community, and the creation of islands and lagoons and the allocation of a certain amount of that land to residential and apartment purposes.

FRY:Were you aware of the campaign to move the state capital from Sacramento to Berkeley about 1907?

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DRURY: I have a recollection of that. I was in high school then, and my father was in the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. He had quite a lot to do with the campaign; he was hand in glove with Duncan McDuffie, who was then a young realtor who had bought out Mr. Mason and organized the Mason-McDuffie company. That was one of their campaigns. I never was sure whether it was a publicity stunt or a genuine desire to move the capital down to the Bay. Anyhow, my recollection of it is rather dim but I know there was a lot of excitement. And when we got the first returns on the vote from right around here it was thought that the capital was going to be moved here. But when we got the vote from Southern California and the Sacramento Valley it was quite another story. Duncan McDuffie once told me that the site his firm had offered to give to the state for this capital is out there in the Thousand Oaks District. My home is on Mendocino Avenue; he said that was right in the center of this block of view lots they were going to give to the state of California for the capital. [Laughter] I think that the capital is just as well in Sacramento.

One of the interesting controversies of that day, speaking of capitals, was the movement toward the division of the state of California. I remember as a boy in college there was a great deal of debate and at least one prominent state

[55]

DRURY: senator--I think his name was Work or Works--who was an out-and-out advocate of separating Southern California from Northern California.

FRY: He was a Southern Californian, I presume.

DRURY: He came from Los Angeles, yes. Only recently there's been a slight revival of that thought, the idea being, I suppose, that there are really two centers in California, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles. I think somebody said that the state of California was like an egg with two yolks. The resultant competition between the north and the south many people felt made against the best interests of either community. Of course in the old days there used to be a lot of rivalry, some of it rather bitter, between the north and south. That's when Southern California was relatively unimportant in affairs of the state.

That, as you know, is where the institution of the cafeteria, which is commonplace today, originated. When they talked rather scornfully of dividing the state, some of the northerners said, "Well, if they do, they should call the northern portion of it California and the southern portion Cafeteria." [Laughter]

FRY: Do you think the division of the state had anything to do with the move to put a branch of the University in Los Angeles?

DRURY: I think there's no question about it. Benjamin Ide Wheeler was an advocate of one strong, central University he tried to fend off as long as he could

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the establishment of branches of the University. That was something that came later.

College Days in Berkeley. 1908-1912

Academic Life

FRY: What year did you enter the University of California?

DRURY: August, 1908.

FRY: Could you give a description of what your academic interests were at that time?

DRURY: I was enrolled in the College of Letters and Science and at graduation took a B. L. degree, which I think has been supplanted by the A. B. degree; it was a general cultural course pointing towards the study of law. In my junior year I took some law courses, and in my senior year I practically completed the law course. I was within about three units of taking the Doctor of Law's degree, but about that time I got diverted into teaching because of my correlative interest in English. Because of the persuasiveness of Professor Charles Mills Gayley, who was the head of the English department, I never did practice law. However, in the administrative work that I've done and in business, also, I have found that the grounding in law was a great advantage to me. At least I could always ask the lawyers questions which they couldn't answer. In my bouts with the Attorney General of California

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it was a definite advantage.

FRY: It seems to me that with your background in English, and your considerable debating experience, you might have eyed a field more closely related to writing,

DRURY: Yes. Well, that is why I veered away from the practice of law to teaching English. Writing was a matter of considerable interest to me. I used to think that I wrote with some facility. I know better now, but as I went through my course I came under the influence of two very wonderful teachers, Chairman Charles Mills Gayley of the department of English and Professor Martin C. Flaherty of the same department, later of the department of Public Speaking. I taught for both of them. I started as a teaching fellow in my senior year in the department of English, and I also eked out my income by giving a few commencement addresses at high schools and Extension lectures. (University Extension was formed about that time.)

FRY: In English or Speech?

DRURY: In English. Being young and bold, I had no hesitation about giving a course covering the whole sweep of English literature. [Laughter]I was just a jump ahead of my class each time.

FRY: You probably learned more that year you taught than--

DRURY: Oh, yes. Of course, that's the great advantage of teaching. You do learn more. Yes, I had the advantage of the Oxford History of English Literature.

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At each session of this Extension course that I gave on literature--it was up in Stockton, once a week --as I say I'd be just a little ahead of the class. It was a wonderful experience for me, if not for the class.

Then I did teach courses in public speaking and argumentation, both in the University Extension in the night school and the YMCA in Oakland. In fact I did that when I was a sophomore in college. Down at the YMCA one night they had an announcement that the teacher for salesmanship was not going to appear. He was ill or something or other, and without any ceremony they hustled me in to give his class. They handed me the text and I finished up the whole course in salesmanship. That was one thing which quickened my interest in advertising and public relations.

FRY: Was this your first exposure to salesmanship as a serious field?

DRURY: No. In my sophomore year I made a little vacation money by going up into Siskiyou County representing a magazine called Success, which shortly afterwards failed. It obtained subscriptions by offering various books at a very moderate price. I cut my teeth as a book agent also, and had some very interesting, if not very profitable, adventures.

FRY: You did find a certain modicum of success in actual selling?

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DRURY: Oh, I was able to keep on eating and traveling. It was not highly profitable, though highly educational. All of those activities, it seemed to me later on when I went into administrative work, gave me a certain amount of background, particularly as to the techniques of presenting ideas to people.

I give great credit to Martin C. Flaherty, who was the debating coach, for the very splendid training that I got under him.

FRY: How did you think that your experience in debating at U. C. helped you later on?

DRURY: Oh, I think it is invaluable to anyone who is going to have to compile data and work out the special issues. I feel sure that anyone-- and a great many men in public life have had debating experience--profits from that kind of training. Anybody who's been in business or politics or any other kind of activity where there's competition knows it's just as important to know how your competitors are thinking as it is to work out your own line of thought. And debating is the best training I know of in examining both sides of a question, particularly since most debates are won on rebuttal, in your ability to put a hole into the other side's argument.

I don't know of any phase of public administration where all those processes aren't absolutely essential: the weighing of evidence, the determination of the time to be spent on different phases of the subject, the use of

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the twin elements of persuasion and conviction. One is intellectual and the other is emotional, but both have to be used in order to get the decision.

Whenever you're weighing a cause you use all the principles that are involved in both expository writing and in argumentation. I have over the years recommended to a great many of my colleagues a book that we used when I taught argumentation by Professor Baker of Harvard University. He had a particularly fine chapter on "finding the special issues" with three or four key questions which have to be answered before you get a decision, which I think a great many men both in business and in public service could very well study quite effectively. There are a great many people now who don't know a fact when they see one. They don't know how to test the validity of evidence.

Student Activities of the Drury Brothers

FRY: Could you give us some idea of how cognizant the students seemed to be of outside issues, or were they pretty well insulated?

DRURY: We were pretty well insulated as far as I was concerned, and I think that applies to most of them. I was rather with Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson. They were Progressives and we formed a Progressive club. It didn't go very deep.

FRY: The students were trying their political wings, I guess.

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DRURY: Yes. But it seems to me we developed campus politics to as fine a point as the national conventions have done today. I think we were way ahead of the national parties at that time as far as organization was concerned.

FRY: What were the two main groups? Or were there more than two on campus to put up candidates?

DRURY: There were a lot of splinter groups, I'd say. There weren't any right-wingers or left-wingers in those days.

FRY: I wasn't thinking so much in terms of that as perhaps divisions based on independents and fraternities or pro-athletics and anti-athletics.

DRURY: Well, I know that between the fraternities and non-fraternities there was no competition to speak of, especially in college politics. I did not belong to a fraternity. I lived in Berkeley and didn't see the need of it. Yet when I ran for President of the Associated Students of the University of California most of my supporters were fraternity men.

FRY: Was there any common element in your supporters?

DRURY: No, just the fellows who were my friends and not my enemies. I don't know how I drifted into it. It was an interesting experience, too. In that position I had some very valuable association with the key men on the faculty, particularly of course President Benjamin Ide Wheeler. I remember Dean Thomas Putnam and James Button, the recorder of faculties, a very wonderful gentleman.

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FRY: As President of the ASUC did you have to deal with the question of regulating the role of each class, such as freshmen and sophomores?

DRURY: Well, there was a distinct class consciousness. In fact, it was expressed in my day by the wearing of the junior plug and the senior plug, which were old top hats which had been battered down. The junior plug was a gray plug hat which was painted in lurid colors and various designs. The senior plug was a black beaver hat which had been crushed down. I never wore either of them but most of my friends did. The custom went out about my time.

FRY: When you wrote the foreword for Blue and Gold, the yearbook --

DRURY: Did I write a foreword to the Blue and Gold?

FRY: Yes, you did, and it's residing majestically there.

DRURY: You'll have to give some of the testimony. I've forgotten.

FRY: It gave me a clue to the class distinctions because you made an appeal for the seniors to live up to their responsibilities of helping the whole student body.

DRURY: In fact, I remember that with my class I had no great part in the Blue and Gold. But the editor, my good friend and classmate, Robert H. Clark, got pretty well submerged in it. It was a terrible, terrible job.

FRY: I was wondering about other campus publications.

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There seemed to be a rash of them: Razzberry Press, Mystic Istic, Dill Pickle, and Squaliyellofornian. Did everybody suddenly turn literary?

DRURY: There was quite a literary group, and in that group my brother Aubrey Drury was much more active than I was. Of course Sidney Coe Howard, who was later a Pulitzer Prize playwright and who did a great many things for the movies--I think he wrote some of the dialogues for the Dr. Kildare stories--was perhaps the leading one.

FRY: Did you know Sidney Howard with Aubrey?

DRURY: Oh yes. I knew Sidney Howard very well.

FRY: Did you ever visit his home in Oakland?

DRURY: I don't think I did, no. Of course I knew his sister, Mrs. Duncan McDuffie, very well.

FRY: I was wondering if you could tell anything about Mr. Howard--anything future biographers might be interested in.

DRURY: He was a wonderful fellow. Some people thought he was a little cold and abrupt, and some even went so far as to accuse him of snobbishness. But the real truth of the matter apparently was that he was very near-sighted. Many times unless a person was right up next to him he wouldn't recognize him. He was quick to form opinions; he had a very incisive mind, quite quick in his speech and action. He showed great promise even in his undergraduate days

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as far as reading and writing were concerned.

FRY: Did you see his plays here, the extravaganzas?

DRURY: I think I did but they didn't make any deep impression on me.

FRY: Some of his themes, such as the overbearing, oppressive mother, came out in later years. I wondered if you detected any while you knew him?

DRURY: No, I didn't. I think "They Knew What They Wanted," which was a story of pastoral life up in Napa Valley, was probably his most celebrated work.

FRY: Yes, he got the Pulitzer for that one. I believe Fred Faust was on the campus about that time, too.

DRURY: Yes. Frederick Schiller Faust wrote his paperback novels under the name of Max Brand. He and Howard and another man, John L. Schoolcraft, who was quite a writer, were great friends of my brother Aubrey. Kenneth T. Perkins, who later had a successful career as writer and dramatist, was in the same class.

They got their start, really, under a wonderful teacher of creative writing whose name was Frederick Thomas Blanchard. I took some courses from him and I learned a good deal from him about things like the use of connotative detail and the technique of short story writing and that kind of thing. In fact I later on lectured for Extension on the

[65]

writing of the short story. It was part of the broad net that I carried over the years.

FRY: Have you published short stories?

DRURY: Nothing of any kind. My brother Aubrey has done more of that than I have. I just lectured on them, told the other people how to. Blanchard later transferred to UCLA.

Then there was a very interesting teacher named George A. Smithson who also encouraged this group. There were quite a few other writers. There were one or two women. Mary Carolyn Davies became quite a poetess. She wrote some fine verse. Seemingly in Aubrey's class of 1914 there was more activity in writing than in most classes. I know there was more in my brother's class than there was in my class of 1912.

FRY: Could you give us a rundown of what Aubrey did in school and the things that he found here which he was able to use in later life?

DRURY: Aubrey did about as much debating as I did, both in high school and in college. His course was primarily literary from the beginning. He took every course in English that he could get admitted to. The story was that when the names came up for Phi Beta Kappa he was way up on the list in high grades but they felt that he had so much English that he didn't have a balanced course. So they didn't elect him to Phi Beta Kappa.

FRY: What were his extra-curricular activities besides debating?

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DRURY: He was on the staff of the Occident and wrote quite a few essays and stories for them. Neither of us did much in athletics in college. He was quite a ballplayer in high school. He played some baseball in college.

FRY: I was wondering if you could give us a picture of Aubrey as a budding literary man here?

DRURY: Well, he just worked for the fun of it, the way most of them did. I can't recollect any particular thing that Aubrey wrote but I know that he was quite prolific in those days, as he was later on.

FRY: This was during a time of increasing social consciousness among established writers, but this wasn't the sort of thing he wrote, was it? Was he interested in just seeing how he could develop his ideas at this point, or writing for the sake of writing?

DRURY: I think that was it. He enjoyed creative effort. That was true of all those men. And you have to give credit to men like Gayley and Blanchard and Flaherty for being able to in spire these lads to want to create.

FRY: Did these professors ever entertain groups of students in their homes?

DRURY: Yes, particularly Gayley. Gayley's home on Sunday night was a place where a great many of the students gathered for discussion and coffee and perhaps a glass of beer. He had a very wonderful household.

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FRY: Was he married?

DRURY: Yes. He had two daughters. Mrs. Gayley was a very charming lady.

The Illustrious Class of 1912

FRY: Morse Cartwright was a classmate of yours, wasn't he?

DRURY: Yes, he was. He was editor of the Daily Californian, and he was quite prominent in the student body, a member of the Golden Bear and the Winged Helmet. He was a student of law. Later he managed the University Press and was Secretary to the President.

We had quite an aggressive group there in my class in law: Herman Phleger, later a chief counsel for the State Department, who's now one of the leading attorneys in San Francisco in the firm of Brobeck, Phleger, and Harrison; the present Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren.

FRY: Could you tell us something about these men? What sort of people they were as students?

DRURY: The Chief Justice was a good student; he matured a little later, I think, than some of them did.

FRY: What were Warren's interests when he was here on campus?

DRURY: He was a hail-fellow-well-met. Earl Warren, my brother Aubrey, and I belonged to an organization known as the Gun Club which used to meet

[68]

in the Rathskeller down in Oakland once a week. We drank beer and read poetry. It was called the Gun Club because it had been formed some twenty years before by a group of fellows thinking that if they went to a tavern there on the edge of the city they could borrow some guns and shoot some ducks in the Berkeley marshes. But they never got any farther than the tavern, so instead of the hunting expedition they decided to form the Gun Club. It would be submerged now on this campus. But the old one is still in existence, in name, anyhow. I remember just before Earl Warren went to the 1952 National Convention, I was working in Sacramento, and some of my classmates who also belong to the Gun Club decided to have a meeting at the Sutter Club. But I had to miss it because my home was still in Berkeley so I came down that night. When I returned the next week they told me that Governor Warren and quite a few of the boys had gathered at the Sutter Club and had a Gun Club reunion. When we were in college we'd have beer and poetry, and we'd get a big porterhouse steak for 50 cents.

FRY: Who read the poetry?

DRURY: Oh, we took turns. Each man had his own stein. I imagine it was patterned after the German student clubs. But it seemed a good idea at the time.

FRY: You said Earl Warren was very hail-fellow-well-met--

[69]

DRURY: Well, I'm really thinking of the Gun Club. And he was very popular, of course, and he had the same wonderful personal traits that later carried him to success.

FRY: Was he with you in the student Progressive club?

DRURY: I don't think he was much interested at that time. No. One thing I remember was that he had a part-time job handing out law books in the law library. He was just as robust then as he is today.

FRY: But he didn't make a splash in student politics or debating?

DRURY: No, he didn't seem to take part in those things especially, just because he wasn't interested.

FRY: Do you know what his social life was like?

DRURY: Oh, I think about normal. He married somewhat later in life.

FRY: You said that he matured later. He really began to reflect seriously on major issues after he got out of college?

DRURY: I don't think he bothered himself much about the issues of the day when he was a student, although I may be mistaken on that. I didn't know Earl as well then as I got to know him later on.

FRY: I see.

And Herman Phleger was interested in law from the very beginning?

DRURY: Yes. He was a very brilliant student, even in

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grade school and on up through college, with an aggressive personality. You could have predicted for him that he would be a great success in practicing law and civic affairs generally.

His brother Carl was also a very strong character. Carl was about a year and a half older than Herm but he was in the same class. In fact, as a football player he was more prominent on the campus than Herm was during his senior year. Both of them were good athletes but "Cap" was a little better known. We played rugby in those days.

FRY: When you said that Herman Phleger was aggressive I'm not sure I know what you mean.

DRURY: I mean he was equal to any occasion that arose and he took initiative when necessary. He wasn't inclined to hold back. Both of the Phlegers were very popular, but Herm probably made more enemies than Carl because he was a little more definite in his ideas on some of the controversial things.

FRY: Was he aware of issues in politics around him?

DRURY: Oh, I'm sure he was, yes. He was very thoughtful and mature as a student.

FRY: Was he in the Progressives with you?

DRURY: I'm not sure that he was. I think he always was a little more conservative than some of us.

FRY: I talked to Mr. Farquhar on the telephone before he left on his last trip, and he said to be sure to ask you about the time you and Herman Phleger went to the Napa Valley.

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DRURY: Oh, that was right after we graduated from college. He was a young lawyer and I was a young college instructor and neither of us was particularly well to do. We traveled by train and stage and on foot.

He and I decided to go on a trip to the Napa Valley and stay at the old Toll House, which was a celebrated landmark in the old days. It was on the toll road that led from Napa Valley to Sonoma County. We were going through the town of Napa, and passing a school we heard applause and voices, so we decided to go in. While we sat there, just as a joke Herman sent a note up to the principal who was presiding, saying that there was a professor from the University of California in the audience. I was only an instructor, or maybe only a teaching fellow; but anyhow they stopped the proceedings and invited us up on the platform, and it ended up with each of us making a commencement speech. [Laughing]

Then we went on to the Toll House, which was operated by Molly Patten, who was quite a character, stayed overnight, and the next morning very early we climbed Mt. St. Helena.

FRY: What can you tell us about James Black?

DRURY: Yes, James Byers Black, who later became president and then chairman of the board in the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, one of the largest utility corporations in the United

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States, was also a member of that class. He was a mechanical engineer. He was an athlete, a football and baseball player. I remember that he had a leg injury that gave him a lot of trouble and kept him out of athletics for quite a while.

FRY: Did you know him very well?

DRURY: Yes, quite well. He was a member of the Students' Affairs Committee of which I, as president of the Associated Students, was chairman. The committee was a group of five students which passed on disciplinary questions referred to it by the President of the University.

One thing that should be noted about Benjamin Ide Wheeler is that he was given credit, and I think justly, for having introduced the concept of student self-government in which the students themselves, whenever it was feasible to do so, would pass upon matters of discipline.

FRY: I wanted to ask you if you thought that Wheeler supported this whole-heartedly.

DRURY: Well, it surely was an accepted thing. Of course, in our time we had pretty sensible fellows in the student positions. I think probably the policies of the University administration were more carefully heeded by students in those days than they are today. There wasn't the spirit of rebellion abroad that there is now.

FRY: No sharp dichotomy between the administration and the students?

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DRURY: No. In fact, I'd say in general that we were inclined to be conformists, well satisfied with things as they were.

FRY: I wondered if there were as many rules under Wheeler as there were later on for students to rebel against.

DRURY: I don't think so. I think, from my experience in government, the longer it continues the more complicated it gets. You first have to have somebody to watch you, then you have to have watchers to watch the watchers, and so on ad infinitum.

FRY: There was another promising classmate of yours, Ray Sidney, who is Controller of the Currency--this is in the Treasury Department?

DRURY: Yes.

FRY: What were his interests in his student days?

DRURY: I think he majored in economics. I'm not sure whether he was in law school.

FRY: Was he active in student politics at all?

DRURY: No, not particularly. Oh, all of those fellows had a healthy interest in student government but they didn't take it too seriously.

FRY: Would you like to give a run-down on Victor Cooley?

DRURY: I didn't know him quite so well as the others then. I think he was rather passive in campus affairs. He became an executive in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and it was from there that he went into the Department of Commerce. He has just retired as Assistant

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Secretary of Commerce.

There were several very successful attorneys in San Francisco who were in my class. C. S. Wheeler, Jr., whose father was a regent of the University, and I think "Tod," as we called him, was also a regent when he was president of the Alumni Association. He was quite successful in the practice of law. There was Archibald Tinning, who was the District Attorney of Contra Costa County; Joe Sweet, who was practicing attorney for many years; and several superior Judges today: Judge Ralph McGee in Jackson, Amador County; Judge Chris Fox, who is just retiring, in Oakland; Judge Tom Ledwich. They were all in the law school in my time. And Horace M. Albright, who is one of my predecessors as director of the National Park Service, was a member. He was also in the law school.

There are several whose names I don't mention, who are undoubtedly the ones who made the most money. My friend Amos Elliott, who was the varsity football captain and who spent his years after graduation as a play ground director, finally got into the oil business and made a fortune in California. He became a wealthy man. There were others.

Aubrey Drury 1914-1917

FRY: What did your brother do after he got out of college?

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DRURY: After he graduated he took an extra year in graduate work in English. He did a lot of writing at that time.

Then he went into the advertising department of the Southern Pacific Company. He did a great deal of their early writing, their travel booklets and that kind of thing. One of his tasks was to travel the so-called Apache Trail from Globe to Phoenix in Arizona, and he found that practically all of the outstanding landmarks were unnamed, so that from his store of knowledge of the history of that region he proposed names for a great many of the peaks and valleys and streams, and the National Board of Geographic Names later adopted them. That was incidental to his advertising writing for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Then he was for a while associate editor of the Journal of Electricity under Robert Sibley, who was then the editor. Sibley later became, as you know, alumni secretary and made a great success of that job.

I think it was from there that Aubrey went to war, went into the army in 1917. He was in the first wave of recruits.

After he came back he very soon got into the advertising business.

FRY: I was wondering if he had to stand much gaff from your Progressive acquaintances for going

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to work for Southern Pacific?

DRURY: Oh no. By that time Hiram Johnson, as he promised, had kicked Southern Pacific out of politics, and I think the Southern Pacific was probably more satisfied than anyone else. I can't remember any animosity toward the Southern Pacific by that time.

FRY: Well, I'll admit I looked through the literature to see what Southern Pacific was doing, and apparently they were just running a railroad.

DRURY: That's right. And I think they were relieved not to have to try to run the state in addition to the railroad.

FRY: Since he was in their public relations office did he publish anything in Sunset magazine?

DRURY: I don't doubt that he did. I don't remember anything specific. There may be some things there. A good many of his things probably weren't signed, but he wrote most of their so-called travel literature.

FRY: Was it about this time that he and your father put out a book on California?

DRURY: Yes, the early guidebook that he and my father got out, patterned after the Baedeker guides of Europe. Then later, considerably later, he produced this book: "California: An Intimate Guide" which still has quite a hold. It went through several editions, published by Harper Brothers. I'm prejudiced, but I think it's one of the best guides of California

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DRURY: that's been written. It's more than a guide. It's really a series of essays on the regions of California.

FRY: He started this interest while working with your father?

DRURY: Oh yes, very definitely.

FRY: Your father was still in chamber of commerce work here in Berkeley at the time they wrote the earlier book, wasn't he?

DRURY: Yes. After he left the newspaper business he went into chamber of commerce work for a few years, but he always had a hankering to go back into the newspaper business even when he was in his eighties. He had a lot more yen to do battle than either of his sons had. He liked to live dangerously.

The University 1912-1918
Formation of the College of Letters and Science

FRY: It was after your graduation and while you were teaching at the University that the faculty went through a shake-up to combine some of the departments here on campus into one big school of liberal arts and sciences.

DRURY: Well, for the degree of bachelor of arts.

FRY: Apparently the faculty wanted separate degrees.

DRURY: Yes, the classicists like Charles Mills Gayley and the professors of Latin and Greek, like

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William P. Merrill, the head of the Latin department, deplored the decline of classical learning and the cheapening of the bachelor of arts degree "by giving it to almost anyone who could read and write English. I remember I had five years of Latin, one year of Greek, one year of French and four years of German. But for some reason or other I wasn't eligible for the bachelor of arts degree.

FRY: I don't think they gave the general B.A. degree until 1916 or so.

DRURY: They gave the bachelor of arts degree, but only to the students in the purely classical course --Latin, Greek, Sanskrit.

FRY: As I understand it, the regents were the ones who favored the bachelor of arts degree for graduates of any of these liberal arts science schools.

DRURY: Frankly, I think that happened after my time. Oh, I remember the disputes in the Academic Senate. I was a young instructor when it first came out and I attended meetings of the Academic Senate, where the embattled classicists tried to prevent what they considered the cheapening of the B.A. degree.

FRY: At the same time the modern languages were getting more of their requirements into the curriculum.

DRURY: Yes.

FRY: President Wheeler, as a professor of Greek, okayed this and seemed to be in favor of the broader degree. Was he really in favor of this or was he pushed into it?

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DRURY: I don't remember. In fact I don't recollect that President Wheeler ever gave any aid to the movement proposing the degree. I think this happened later. It was sort of an unsettled question, I remember, when I left the University to go to the war.

Drama and Lectures

FRY: When you were working for President Wheeler before World War I do you remember anything about the Committee on Music, Drama and Lectures?

DRURY: I remember very well Billy Armes, as we called him Professor--William Dallam Armes--who was a very charming person, a bachelor; he lived at the Faculty Club and prided himself on first-name acquaintance with all the great people of the theater and the world of music. He was the Music and Drama Committee. I imagine there was a committee, but he was the chairman and no one ever paid any attention to the rest of the committee. He was a professor of English Literature, but he devoted most of his time and his considerable talent to his duties as a sort of impresario for the University. He had charge of the Greek Theater, and he was the one who brought a great succession of outstanding productions to the Greek Theater. He had Margaret Anglin, who played some Greek drama;

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he put on several of the plays of Euripides and Sophocles, in the original Greek, in which Professor James Allen of the Greek Department took one leading role. He brought to the University the Ben Greet Players from England, and the Constance Crawley Players also. It was from one of those companies that the University got Garnet Holme, who for twenty years was the drama coach for the Associated Students and for the University generally. Holme, when he came here, played the role of Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

FRY: Now, this was while you were in the President's Office, wasn't it?

DRURY: No. Some of it was and some of it wasn't. Professor Armes was chairman of the committee when I was in the President's Office, but some of what I'm talking about occurred before that, and was part of the career of William Dallam Armes.

FRY: There's been a great gap in the information we can get on this and we couldn't find anything before World War I.

DRURY: What I'm speaking of is way before World War I. The Greek Theater was much smaller than it is now, but it was used, I think, much more intensively than it is today. For instance, I think under the inspiration of William Dallam Armes, they had a half hour of music every Sunday, which was free to the public. It was part of the public relations program of the University.

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FRY: Were these invited guest soloists or were they from on campus?

DRURY: The half-hours of music were invited soloists from around the Bay region, visiting musicians. They seemed to welcome the opportunity to introduce themselves to the public. Then there were other concerts and plays, for which admission was charged.

One of the figures in the University who was quite prominent for a while and who, I believe, was brought here by Professor Armes was Dr. J. Frederick Wolle, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who for eight or ten years was professor of music, and who organized the Bach Choir. For several years they had an annual Bach Festival similar to the festivals that he had conducted in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The public apparently finally got a little tired of Bach -- pretty strong meat for the average person -- and in any event Dr. Wolle finally went back to Bethlehem. Succeeding him was Professor Charles Louis Seeger, a tall, rather interesting personage, who had his term in not getting along with all of the faculty.

FRY: Did Seeger have a special interest, like Wolle?

DRURY: He composed some, I think, but he was generally a teacher of music. Then, following him, my long time friend Edward Stricklen. We used to call him Rouge, because he had red hair like Eric the Red, that is such hair as he had. He had a

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fringe of red hair; a very interesting, burly sort of a fellow. He didn't look or act like a musician, but he was for perhaps ten years head of the Department of Music, following Seeger. That was not during my time, however. I knew him when he was an instructor in harmony.

FRY: When these concerts weren't in the Greek Theater, did they go to the gymnasium?

DRURY: Sometimes when the weather was inclement they went to the gymnasium, yes. One institution I remember when I was secretary to the president was the Berkeley Musical Society. Professor -- not professor, well, I suppose he called himself professor -- Weber, who was the father of my classmate Robert Weber, was the manager of the Berkeley Musical Society, which was a subscription group who put on very high class concerts in the Harmon Gymnasium. I remember Mr. Weber particularly because I, as secretary to the president, had a running feud with him because in good weather or bad he would insist that they should not open the doors of the gymnasium until fifteen minutes before the concert started, and I took the very lofty ground that he should abide by the good American principle of first come, first served. If people wanted to come in at seven o'clock and sit themselves down, there didn't seem to be any good reason why they shouldn't. Professor Weber, however, felt that that was unfair to the people who lingered over their after dinner coffee and got

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there only a few minutes before the concert. My reply to that was that the other people would be piled outside the doors anyhow, and there was no way of getting in ahead of them. [Laughing] But we never did settle that issue, except that he had his way with Benjamin Ide Wheeler and we kept on opening the doors at a quarter to eight which was then the time of the concerts and people would pile up sometimes by the hundreds, rain or shine.

FRY: Was Weber a professor of music?

DRURY: He was a piano teacher. He wasn't on the faculty of the University. He and his family during World War I felt that it was patriotic to change the spelling of their name, if not the pronunciation to W-A-Y-B-U-R, where it was originally W-E-B-E-R. That was a time of strong anti-German sentiment,

I'll see what I have in my voluminous files on the Music and Drama Committee. I can't understand how all those University records got lost, I wonder whether some of the San Francisco libraries wouldn't have some of the material, or the San Francisco newspapers.

FRY: We might get records of concerts given, but actually knowing who did what to bring them here is what we need.

DRURY: Well, William Armes was a bit vain about his acquaintanceship and friendship with the great stars of music and drama, but it was justified

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in that he was able to bring people with big names to the University when no one else could have accomplished it. After my time a contemporary of mine, Samuel J. Hume, had charge of that phase of University activity for a long period.

FRY: Can you tell anything about him?

DRURY: Yes, I knew Sam Hume very well, of course. We were members of the same societies.

FRY: When did he come and what did he do?

DRURY: He still lives in Berkeley. He has the advantage of most of us in that he is now adorned with great bushy reddish-white whiskers, and he really goes over big when he lectures to women's clubs. He's quite a fine figure of a man, and was in his own right a very able student actor. He was somewhat older than I am. I think he was about 1907 or '08 in the University. He took a prominent part in all the University plays and he did dramatic work on the outside for quite a while and finally came back as the University drama coach. I think he succeeded William Dallam Armes in charge of the Music and Drama Committee after World War I. He put on a great many pageants and things of that sort. He had done some of that kind of work in the East, but as I say that was during the period when I was not on the campus and I don't know at first hand just what his activities were. He is in Berkeley, however, and you could locate him. He'd be a very interesting person to talk to

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about music and drama at the University of California.

Bob Sproul, Assistant Comptroller

FRY: What do you know about Robert G. Sproul’s career as a student?

DRURY: Well, to begin with I know he was a good student and highly popular and quite active in student civic affairs. But there again, I became better acquainted with him after graduation than I was before.

I remember one day Ralph Merritt, the comptroller, came across the hall into the president's office. (I was in with the president.) Merritt said he thought he had a good candidate for the position of, I think, cashier of the University. They felt that as an alumnus of the University Sproul would be loyal to its interests; we had just had an embezzlement by a cashier who left in something of a hurry. The upshot of that conversation was that Bob Sproul was engaged as assistant comptroller and for a short while; he stood back of the cage and took in the students' fees. I remember him very well sitting at a double desk opposite Comptroller Ralph P. Merritt taking on more and more responsibility. When Merritt left he went in as comptroller. This ultimately led to his brilliant career as President of the University. I think the public relations of the University were more highly developed by

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Robert G. Sproul, both as assistant comptroller and finally as comptroller and as president than in any previous regime.

FRY: Was Merritt not conscious of this aspect?

DRURY: Oh, he was very conscious of it and he was very effective, but I think that Bob Sproul worked at it more assiduously. I know that in his very early days with the University, right after the war, he made a fine impression on the legislature; he spent a good portion of his time up there. As a consequence both he and I have agreed between us that lobbying is not necessarily an ignoble profession. I've done a lot of it myself, as he has.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President

FRY: Of course, Wheeler himself was the biggest issue around that time. Could you give us a description of the Wheeler administration from the point of view of an assistant to the president?

DRURY: I sort of gravitated into it during World War I, or even before, when I was a public speaking instructor at Cal. Clare M. Torrey was the secretary to the president. When the Hoover Food Administration in Europe was established, there was another classmate of mine, Tracy Kittredge, who went to Belgium very early in the administration. One day he sent back word to President Wheeler that he wanted somebody to come there and help out with the Food Administration.

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DRURY: Knowing that I was more or less footloose, just a young instructor and a bachelor, he mentioned me, and Clare Torrey. Both of us were eager to go. President Wheeler called Torrey and me into his office and said, "One or the other of you fellows can go, but not both of you. If Torrey goes Drury will have to take his place while he is away," which is what finally happened.

Torrey never came back; he went into the investment business in New York and has done very well there. That's how I happened to drift into this administrative position, which I held for two or 2 1/2 years. That happened about 1916. I continued to carry some teaching, too, thereby augmenting my income a little bit. It was an experience I wouldn't take anything for--the association with Benjamin Ide Wheeler and the touch with his administration. In those days the secretary to the president did most of the administrative work; there weren't all the assistant deans and the supernumeraries that there are now.

FRY: What were you doing for Wheeler?

DRURY: I acted as executive secretary for the University. A great many of the things that the multifarious deans do now was done by the secretary to the president, and I tried to represent him in many different ways. I remember one of the things I used to have to do was run off the physical arrangements for the Charter Day exercises. I also had to sign permits for people

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to come on the campus, and meet all comers.

FRY: How many clerks did he have in his office to help him?

DRURY: There were not many people in the office in those days. We had Frank Stevens who was called the chief clerk and later was called secretary to the president. We had two, maybe three stenographers and clerks.

I was just thinking as I passed Wheeler Hall today, one of the most confusing tasks I ever had was after they completed that building. They turned over, to me, as secretary to the president, the job of numbering the rooms. It seems to be a very simple thing, but it wasn't. You have to make all kinds of decisions: At what corner of the building will you start? In which direction will you go, clockwise or counter-clockwise? Then it fell to me to assign the offices to the different departments, and I had the head office of the departments of French and German and English and mathematics and two or three others, none of which was satisfied with their assignment. [Laughter]

FRY: What about letter writing? I should think President Wheeler would exploit your ability there.

DRURY: Well, I got fine training from Benjamin Ide Wheeler, of course, and I think about the time I left I was getting to be very useful to him. He was not the kind of man who used any ghost writers, but routine letters many

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times were prepared by the secretary. I got so that I could reproduce his very distinctive idiom to some degree. He had a classical phraseology. You've read a great many of these inscriptions that he wrote, like the one on the Agriculture Building: "To rescue for human society the native values of rural life." I remember the day when Benjamin Ide Wheeler sat down with a piece of yellow paper and wrote that out. And of course you've read his inscription on the Doe Library. It starts, "A man of simple tastes and orderly life"... and it ends up, "Now that he has yielded the stewardship of his goods, his last wish opens up the companionships he loved to all the recurring generations of the young." There have been dozens of inscriptions written by Benjamin Ide Wheeler. He had a mastery of the grand phrase. Of course he was a classical student; he taught Hebrew and Sanskrit. He represented an era that isn't with us anymore.

But on top of that he was a good administrator and a much misunderstood but really very warm human being. A lot of people thought he was a little aloof and cold, but having been his secretary for over two years and having known him for twenty, I can testify to the contrary.

FRY: In his internal administration of the office, did he delegate things to you well?

DRURY: Yes, but he was inclined, of course, to do more of his own work than a modern executive

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does. He could then because affairs were simpler,

I remember his speech-making. Sometimes he would write out his speeches. Usually he would do that at home in his study. He always used a yellow lined foolscap paper. In the morning he would bring them to the office. His speeches were usually pretty short, just like the inscriptions and his very eloquent language in conferring honorary degrees. He had a sort of disdain for some of the newspaper reporters who misrepresented him. At one time he held up one of his manuscripts and said, "Now, I don't know what this will be like when the reporters have passed it through their muddy minds." [Laughter]

FRY: It seems he would have made a very able leader in public service of any kind.

DRURY: Well, he took a very active interest in public affairs at the top level. Although I remember one case where he intervened locally when what he considered a cheap politician was about to be appointed postmaster in Berkeley. It was during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, and because of his close association with Theodore Roosevelt he was able to get the Postmaster General to block the appointment. They appointed a less spectacular man who hadn't done as much for the party, but he was a much better postmaster. That's the only case I know of where he took any part in what you might call local politics. On the national scale he was a great supporter

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of Theodore Roosevelt. In fact he was the Theodore Roosevelt Professor at the University of Berlin. He gave a series of lectures there about 1910 while I was in college, but before my tour of duty with him. And from that arose the unfortunate and mistaken conception that too many people had in those days of hysteria; that Benjamin Ide Wheeler was a so-called "pro-German." Of course nothing was farther from the truth. And at the very time people were saying things of that sort; in fact before we had a war, President Taft had appointed him the head of a committee for the Pacific Coast on the League to Enforce Peace, which ultimately developed into a defense organization.

There was much greater hysteria in those days than during World War II. They changed the name of the Hofbrau restaurant in San Francisco to The States. They called hamburger steak liberty steak.

I will never forget a wonderful musician, Professor Paul Steindorff. He was a large, typically German gentleman with bristling moustaches. He had conducted orchestras and concerts for many, many years in the Bay region. He was finally appointed by President Wheeler a position called the University Choragus, which is director of the singing societies. I'm not sure that he ever conducted the Glee Club but in any event he conducted the University Chorus. He was, like some of his sons who served in World War I,

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a very loyal American. However, anyone who had a German name, and especially as he had a German accent, was subjected to what I always thought was very unreasonable persecution. But Steindorff stuck by his guns and he weathered it all right. I remember one social gathering during the height of the emotional stress that people were under, and in something of the spirit of bravado, I suppose, when Paul Steindorff was introduced to make the rounds, he extended his hand and said, "Undt, my name is shtill Shteindorf." [Laughter] You wouldn't completely understand the hysteria of those days; they even stopped teaching German in the high schools.

FRY: And German professors left the University, didn't they?

DRURY: Well, the German professors didn't leave the University, but they had a hard time, some of them. And all of them to my knowledge were loyal Americans and very good citizens, and fine gentlemen. Of course the tensions of war were strange to the American people and they didn't understand. During World War II, it seemed to me there was very little of that kind of hysteria. Obviously our top generals and admirals couldn't change their German names: Eisenhower, Spaatz, Nimitz, and half a dozen others. But in World War I anybody with a German name or who had any German associations was a target for a lot of rather malicious people--some of them not even American

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citizens. There were some on the faculty, for instance, one of whom I think was a British subject who was quite bitter against Benjamin Ide Wheeler. Some of the controversy occurred after I'd gone off to war but I saw the beginning of it. It was a very unfortunate series of circumstances that unquestionably saddened him a good deal and lessened his influence. But I think the record that Wheeler established is recognized as really the foundation of the great University of California. I know that Dr. Sproul feels that way. He was in the class after mine, the class of 1913. Those two regimes, Sproul's and Wheeler's, made the University the great institution that it is now.

FRY: Under Wheeler the University changed from a small college to a complex institution.

DRURY: In the beginning, it had had a very unenviable history so far as tenure of presidents was concerned.

FRY: How did Wheeler, who was accused of being cool and aloof, manage to take care of the public relations aspects required in such a job?

DRURY: For one thing, he commanded respect as a man and as a scholar. He was very successful with large contributors like Mrs. Phoebe Apperson Hearst and the donor of the Doe Library and Mrs. Alexander and the Floods and the Mackays and a great many others. I wouldn't say that he really was cold and

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aloof. It's just that there were some people who were inclined to criticize him on that score.

FRY: Yes. I was thinking more in terms of his relationship to legislators, investigating committees and the like which didn't seem to rankle quite as much under Wheeler's regime. Previous to his time they had really wreaked havoc on the University.

DRURY: Well, he was quite a figure of a man, you know. He had a commanding presence and a marvelous grasp of the mother tongue, and his ideas were clear. He presented them forcefully, almost dramatically at times, so that very early when he came here they were very proud of him. He symbolized the University and its growing greatness.

FRY: Was he a hero figure?

DRURY: I would think so, yes. He never sought the limelight that way; he stood on his merits. I would say that he was not politically minded and yet he was pretty shrewd in dealing with key people.

FRY: When you were working in his office did you notice much direct contact between him and the legislature?

DRURY: No. I don't think there was the same consciousness of the legislature in those days as there is now. In fact, from my observation the interposition of the legislative branch of government into administrative matters is a fairly recent development, in the last twenty years.

FRY: I was thinking of the budget.

DRURY: Budget, of course, and the growing power of fiscal authorities, probably has come of necessity. That had its place to some extent in those days,

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but nothing like the present. In the early days the University of California was entirely a law unto itself. It’s still, under the constitution, more or less an autonomous agency but it's dependent upon the legislature, of course, for appropriations.

FRY: You were in Wheeler’s office about the time Hiram Johnson had to intervene to keep the State Board of Equalization from wanting to take over the University budget.

DRURY: They tried to change the whole pattern of taxation in California. That was when California levied the corporation tax. Benjamin Ide Wheeler was very much against it and tried to maintain the status quo because it was feared that it would impair the resources of the university. But it has not done so.

I think you can credit a great deal of the financial advance of the University to Dr. Sproul, as comptroller, then vice-president, and then his long tenure as President of the University.

But the close touch of the University with the legislature, as far as I know, was not in existence in those days--although I’ll say this: Ralph P. Merritt, Bob Sproul’s predecessor as Comptroller of the University, was a very strong and powerful man, and undoubtedly he played an important part in the relationship with the legislature.

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FRY: You and Merritt were there together, weren't you?

DRURY: Yes. Merritt was comptroller before and after I was secretary to the president.

FRY: Could you explain in simple words what the relationship was between the regents and Merritt and Wheeler? What was the power set-up there?

DRURY: No relationships of that sort can be explained in simple words. They are very complex, and of course there were currents and counter-currents. One of the strong men on the Board of Regents was Guy C. Earl. He made his mark on the regents. Largely through Earl and some of his associates on the board, I think, Merritt went in as comptroller, and he was a very successful comptroller for the University. Some of the most important phases of fiscal policy for the University were worked out under Merritt.

Guy C. Earl and Benjamin Wheeler did not always see eye to eye, but Ralph Merritt, so far as I know, was devoted to Benjamin Ide. He had a great affection for him and was very helpful to him. In fact he had once been secretary to the president. Merritt was, in some ways, a more practical man than the scholarly Benjamin Ide Wheeler. And of course that's what Merritt was supposed to be, as the fiscal man.

FRY: I was interested in knowing the role that Earl played, for instance, in getting the Gayley-Jones-Stephens triumvirate to conduct the affairs of the University there for a while.

DRURY: That occurred when I was at war. I wouldn't

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want to exaggerate and I might do so if I gave my full opinion of the episode of Wheeler and the triumvirate.

When I went to the army, Benjamin Ide Wheeler asked my friend and classmate Morse A. Cartwright to act as secretary to the president, and Cartwright was the man who was here during most of that turmoil. I saw Morse not long ago down in Carmel. He's retired. I said, "Morse, you really ought to testify on that period." He said, "Newton, I couldn't do it and keep my temper." He felt strongly, as I did, that Benjamin Ide Wheeler was very unfairly treated.

World War I and the Balloon Corps

FRY: About when did you go to war?

Drury; I left in February, 1918, to join the army--somewhat reluctantly because I had applied for the first two officers’ training camps and had been rejected because I didn't come up to the army's standard of weight in those days. When the draft came along my number was drawn fairly high but I was again rejected from the draft purely on grounds of weight. I resented that, so naturally, being a young man of some enterprise, with my father's help I got the congressman from our district to get a waiver from the Surgeon General of the United States Army, and I was allowed to be inducted into the Air Service of the U.S. Army.

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FRY: Was this your choice?

DRURY: Not particularly. That was the only thing that was open to me. I was in line for a commission after three months as a cadet.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler always looked at me reproachfully for leaving and I think he was probably right, because what I was doing to help him in wartime was more important than any thing I ever did in the army, although I got a lot of interesting experience out of it. Many a time during the gloomy hours of the training period I'd sit in the barracks and regret that I'd had enough political influence to get that waiver from the Surgeon General.

FRY: Was this yours or your father's political influence?

DRURY: My father's, through the congressman from the San Francisco district, Julius Kahn. Oh, well. I was obviously fit for military duty, so...You feel differently about those things in war time.

FRY: My notes say that you were in the Balloon Corps. That sounds almost innocuous.

DRURY: It wasn't innocuous. You were up two or three thousand feet in the air swinging sometimes for four hours in that open gondola under the balloon. It was anything but innocuous on the western front where the balloon observers were being shot down all the time.

I missed getting shipped across to the

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front by only about a week, which was all right with me.

FRY: I think it would be interesting to get some stories on the Army Balloon School. Would you give us an idea of what you went through in training?

DRURY: We were trained for observation, primarily for the regulation of our artillery fire on enemy batteries. They used balloons because airplanes were too elementary in those days; they had no radios for communication. We had telephones in the balloons, and wires which extended sometimes two or three thousand feet down, and we telephoned to the ground the observations that we made from the balloon.

FRY: What if you were to float over by the enemy?

DRURY: These were captive balloons; they were held on cable which was attached to a winch.

FRY: You had to be high enough to see the enemy with your own eyes.

DRURY: Yes, and of course they could see us, too. Many of the boys that I trained with who went over there--even if they weren't killed in action--never fully recovered from the nervous shock of being shot down sometimes two or three times in a day and having to jump out of the basket of the balloons in a parachute. Many times the enemy planes circled around them and machine-gunned them as they came down.

The purpose of this type of observation

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was partly to detect the disposition and movement of troops, but mostly to locate batteries of the enemy through their flashing, spot them on the map and telephone down the coordinates so that they could be located. Then our own batteries would be trained on them to try to silence them, and the purpose of the observer then was to call the shots as to how far over or short or right or left they were, to regulate the artillery fire. It was a very fascinating game and a very expensive one.

FRY: In human lives, you mean?

DRURY: No, I mean in cost to the government of training these observers. I think the government spent $30,000 to $40,000 on my training, and I never got to take part in any activity on the front because the war ended about that time.

FRY: What did Aubrey go into?

DRURY: Aubrey went into the Air Force also. He went into the army much earlier than I did. He went to the first training camp in San Antonio, Texas, for air service officers. And while he did quite a little flight training he didn't become a pilot. He became an administrative officer, a ground officer.

He spent quite a bit of time at various posts in the United States, at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas, and some field in Oklahoma for a while. He ended up in the personnel department of the Air Service in Washington, D.C.

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FRY: Did he do any writing? I was thinking in terms of writing for the Air Force, perhaps for public relations or information.

DRURY: No; and he wasn't in the historical section of the Air Force. That wasn't so well developed during World War I.

In World War II, of course, they had a battery of historians. They had several of our historians from the National Park Service writing the history of the war. I imagine they have simply tons of material; they must have from what these men told me. My classmate Tracy Kittredge was the head of the naval historical project in Washington while I was there.

In World War I both Aubrey and I ended up as second lieutenants. They weren't promoting them in those days the way they did in the next war. Afterwards we both were first lieutenants in the reserve for four or five years and there our military careers ended.

Well, I finished the war at Arcadia, California, at the Army Balloon School. Benjamin Ide Wheeler sent me word asking if I wouldn't come back, and he brought me back as an assistant professor in oral English, or argumentation. I stayed about a year.

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