UC Santa Cruz Other Recent Work Title Harold A. Hyde: Recollections of Santa Cruz County Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rq98388 Authors Hyde, Harold A. Jarrell, Randall Regional History Project, UCSC Library Publication Date 2002 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5rq98388#supplemental eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Early Life 1 Berkeley, California 6 World War II 13 Japanese-American Internment 15 World War II 18 Harvard Business School 23 Ford’s Department Store, Watsonville, California 26 Watsonville in the 1950s 28 Agriculture in the Pajaro Valley 31 H.A. Hyde Company Growers and Nurserymen 34 North and South Santa Cruz County 36 The Founding of Cabrillo Community College 48 Founding the University of California, Santa Cruz 70 Early Appointments 80 Campus Organization 88 Boards of Studies 89 Francis H. Clauser 92 Lick Observatory 92 Affirmative Action 95 Academic Planning 103 The Demise of Professional Schools 109 Business School 111 Dean E. McHenry’s Retirement 112 Student Activism 117 Campus Infrastructure Planning 122 The Legacy of Dean E. McHenry 128 UC Santa Cruz Foundation 129 Other UCSC Chancellors 131 The Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 17, 1989 135 Cultural Life in Santa Cruz County 139 Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County 142 Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts 144 Persis Horner Hyde 150 The University Library 158 UCSC Arboretum 162 Alan Chadwick and the UCSC Farm and Garden Project 164 Harold A. Hyde: Early Life page 1 Early Life Jarrell: To start, where and when were you born? Hyde: I was born in Watsonville Hospital, in Watsonville, California, on Third Street downtown, on May 5, 1923. Jarrell: Tell me something about your origins, your family, your mother and father. Hyde: I really am fortunate that all my forebears came to live in the Santa Cruz area in the 19th century. I am the product of that. What I’d like to do is to talk about how these all influenced me, but also eventually influenced a part of the University of California here. They arrived here before California was a state and Santa Cruz was a county. My Bennett and Anthony forebears arrived and settled here in 1848, and were among the first twenty or so American families to live in the area. Niobe Bennett, my great- grandmother, left Illinois with her family and siblings by covered wagon, walking from Missouri, and she lived into my father’s era. Those trail hardships that she had influenced the family all the way down. Jarrell: What year did they leave Illinois? Hyde: 1847. In 1850, her father, Silas Bennett, and fellow pioneer Adna Hecox in Santa Cruz donated seven acres of downtown Santa Cruz, it’s on the heights area, for a Methodist Church school and cemetery. Another great-grandfather, Charles Volney Anthony, arrived from Fort Wayne, Indiana, via the Isthmus [of Panama] in 1851, to join his uncle, Elihu Anthony, who had arrived here in 1848, and he became perhaps the first full-time schoolteacher in Santa Cruz. He returned east to become a Methodist minister, and came back and was deeply involved in a lot of California history throughout the area, but was based here for many, many years. My grandfather, Henry Alton Hyde, arrived in Berkeley from Maine in the 1870s as a child. He lived two blocks from the Berkeley campus. The site is now on Channing Way, where the high-rise dorms are. He came later to Santa Cruz County to join his uncle, Calvin Hyde, who had settled in Soquel in the 1850s. And he married Charles Volney Anthony, and Niobe’s daughter, Harold A. Hyde: Early Life page 2 Bertha. They established their first home on King Street, just south of Bay Street, below the UC Santa Cruz campus. Jarrell: This is so fascinating, because I have always associated your family mostly with south county. Hyde: That was before we moved to south county. Jarrell: So you have these predecessors in Santa Cruz and Berkeley. Hyde: Yes, in the direct area here. Henry Alton Hyde moved to Watsonville, and became a pioneer nurseryman and horticulturist. Jarrell: And there was the Hyde Nursery. Hyde: Yes. Jarrell: And where was that located? Hyde: Henry Alton was originally a millwright and worked for the Loma Prieta Lumber Company. The Loma Prieta Lumber Company established a shook plant to make box parts in Santa Cruz, and so he was working here. When they re-established the plant in Watsonville in the early 1890s, he moved there. He had a large acreage and home, and on the back of his acreage he started growing things. Pretty soon the avocation and hobby through his green thumb became his major activity. So he was better known as a nurseryman than for his craftsmanship and his carpentry skills. Jarrell: I’ve never heard that word, shook. Hyde: They are the little thin parts of wooden boxes that are bound and tacked together. In those days vegetables or fruit were packed in them, long before cardboard became our method of packing. Because of that background, he was deeply involved later in Big Basin and the formation of that park. Harold A. Hyde: Early Life page 3 So much for the Hydes. I will talk about my father a little later. My Bliss forebearers arrived in Santa Cruz just after the Civil War. George Hyde Bliss, who was my great-grandfather, constructed Ocean Villa on the south side of the San Lorenzo River, on the bluff overlooking what is now the beach and boardwalk. His brother, Moses Bliss, built just below UC Santa Cruz here, on Highland. Moses’s house is still there. My grandmother would row across the San Lorenzo River to go to school. One of her childhood friends was Maria Willey, the daughter of Reverend Samuel Willey, who lived on Mission Street. And Samuel Willey was one of the founders of the College of California in Oakland, which became the University of California in 1868. My Treat forebearers were involved in the clipper ship trade from New England to California, and my grandfather, Fred Kilburn, took one trip, got violently seasick is the family story, and crossed the Isthmus to join his uncle, who lived in San Francisco, and had a farm and a racetrack near the present “Hospital Curve” in San Francisco. George Treat had a built-in University of California tie, at that time because his daughter, May Treat, was going to Berkeley, one of the first women to do so. That would have been about 1872. And she and her later husband were involved with the Cowell family of Santa Cruz, because Samuel Cowell was at Berkeley. And the family story was how May’s husband, Alexander Morrison, involved Ernest in the first money for the Cowell Health Center, which became a trademark of Cowell support for the University of California. The common threads of this family history are these: all these branches had arrived in New England from England in the 17th century, seeking a new life and religious freedom. The Treat branch descends from Stephen Hopkins, a merchant planter who arrived on the Mayflower. They all participated in settling and continually moving on in our nation and were active in various colonial militias and town management. The Blisses moved from Western Massachusetts to Illinois, the Anthonys to Upper New York state and Indiana. The Hydes, Kilburns, and Treats went to Maine before coming to California. Almost all these various people had embraced the Methodist Protestant Christian faith, a self-reliant faith of individual commitment and social justice, which Harold A. Hyde: Early Life page 4 valued education and was compatible with the American frontier. They were ardent abolitionists. There’s also a common thread of education. Education institutionalized as our nation developed from its English colonial roots. The Bliss family was involved in founding Wilbraham Wesleyan Academy in Western Massachusetts. George Bliss, who came to Santa Cruz, graduated from Wesleyan University, Connecticut, in 1842, and was an original sponsor of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, while his wife, Mary, had been a classmate of Emily Dickinson’s at Mount Holyoke female seminary in the class of 1850. These were not complacent Victorian women. The Anthonys always prided in their distant cousin, Susan B., and encouraged her in her suffrage work. And the Treat daughters, May, who has been mentioned before, and her sister Sarah, who was in the class of 1885 at Berkeley, were instrumental in founding the American Association of University Women. Jarrell: What an incredible number of strands. The abolitionists. The suffragists, or early champions of women’s rights. Social justice. Hyde: And in this small territory of California, these people all obviously knew each other. In politics, all of them believed in active participation. Most were Republicans, although cousin Jennie F. Bliss, married the cashier of County Bank, William [T.] Jeter, who became a Democratic legislator from this area, and lieutenant governor of California. As a child I can remember visiting my mother and grandmother, where they were precinct workers for the county clerk in Watsonville in the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, and being explained some of the issues. My grandmother also insisted I meet and know many veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. One veteran in particular told me when he was shaking hands with me, with pride, how he had personally shaken hands with President Lincoln. My father, Harold Anthony Hyde, Sr. was born in Santa Cruz in 1893. He graduated from Watsonville High School in the class of 1912.