Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series

James Mack Gerstley

EXECUTIVE, U.S. BORAX AND CHEMICAL CORPORATION; TRUSTEE, POMONA COLLEGE; CIVIC LEADER, SAN FRANCISCO ASIAN ART MUSEUM

With Introductions by Elizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley and Norman J. Travis

Interviews Conducted by Ruth Teiser and Eleanor Swent in' 1990

Copyright 01991 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and James Mack Gerstley dated 5 April 1990. 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, 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, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, 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 James Gerstley requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

James Mack Gerstley; "Executive, U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation; Trustee, Pomona College; Civic Leader, San Francisco Asian Art Museum," an oral history conducted in 1990 by Ruth Teiser and Eleanor Swent, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1991.

Copy no. Cataloging Information

Gerstley, James Mack (b. 1907) Borax industry executive

Executive. U. S. Borax and Chemical Corvoration: Trustee. Pomona Colle~e;- Civic Leader. San Francisco Asian Art Museum, 1991. xiv, 236 pp.

Childhood in London; Cambridge University; San Francisco social life: Bransten, Fleishhacker, Levison, Lilienthal families in the 1930s; 1937-1961, assistant to the president, acting president, president, Pacific Coast Borax Company, U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation; president, Death Valley Hotel Company Ltd.; 1960s, trustee, Pomona College; 1963-1989, member and chairman, San Francisco Asian Art Commission, Asian Art Museum Foundation, securing Brundage collection for San Francisco Museum; chairman, Western Jewish History Center.

Introductions by Elizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley (Mrs. James Gerstley); and Norman J. Travis, retired chairman, Borax Consolidated Limited and director, U. S. Borax and Chemical Corporation.

Interviewed in 1990 by Eleanor Swent and Ruth Teiser for Western Mining in the Twentieth Century series. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS--JamesGerstley

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION by Elizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley vii

INTRODUCTION by Norman J. Travis ix

INTERVIEW HISTORY xi

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY xiv

JAMES GERSTLEY'S FAMILY AND COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES, Interviewed by Ruth Teiser

EARLY YEARS AND FAMILY The Gerstleys of England World War I Youthful Interests and Schools Cambridge University A Trip Around the World California in 1919 California in the Early 1930s Friends, Relatives, and Social Activities World War I1 Los Angeles in the 1930s

RETIREMENT 28 Return to Northern California, 1962 28 The Lilienthals and the Branstens 2 9 The Asian Art Museum 33 The Western Jewish History Center 42 The Friends of The Bancroft Library and the Atherton Library 43 Adele Mack Gerstley 45 Family Reunions 47

JAMES M. GERSTLEY, BORAX AND CHEMICAL INDUSTRY EXECUTIVE AND POMONA COLLEGE TRUSTEE, Interviewed by Eleanor Swent

I11 PREPARATION FOR THE BORAX YEARS The First Trip to Ryan, 1919 Awareness of Pacific Coast Borax Company History Work for Great Western Electrochemical Company

IV WORKING FOR PACIFIC COAST BORAX Training in the Borax Business Designing a New Package for Boraxo Training in Labor Relations Planning for Postwar Expansion of Production and Research The Antitrust Suit, 1943 Improving Customer Relations Fending Off a Take-Over Forming an American Company The Discovery of Rasorite (Kernite) The Discovery of Potash in New Mexico

V AT THE HELM OF UNITED STATES BORAX AND CHEMICAL CORPORATION Difficulties at the New Boron plant Selection of a General Manager Furnace Creek Inn and Death Valley Hotel Company Ltd. Changing to Modern Accounting Methods Rejecting a Joint Venture with Olin-Mathieson Gerstleyite, a New Mineral

VI COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES Trustee, Pomona College; Fundraising and the Pomona Plan Fundraising for the Chandler Pavilion Cedars of Lebanon Hospital More About U.S. Borax Research Citations from San Francisco Mayors Alioto and Agnos

TAPE GUIDE

APPENDICES Appendix A--James M. Gerstley Autobiography Appendix B--Family Tree Appendix C--U.S. Borax Tribute Appendix D--WesternJewish History Center Invitation Appendix E--Sloss Tribute Appendix F--Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly, April 1980 Review of Borax Years Appendix G--Early History of Violet Terrace, 1981 Appendix H--MayorAgnos Proclaims Gerstley Day, January 1989 Appendix I--SanFrancisco Chamber of Commerce Art Awards Luncheon, 21 March 1989 Appendix J--Letter from James D. Hart, 1 November 1989 Appendix K--Letter from Mary G. Albright, 19 November 1989

INDEX PREFACE

The oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century documents the lives of leaders in mining, metallurgy, geology, education in the earth and materials sciences, mining law, and the pertinent government bodies. The field includes metal, non-metal, and industrial minerals, but not petroleum.

Mining has changed greatly in this century: in the technology and technical education; in the organization of corporations; in the perception of the national strategic importance of minerals; in the labor movement; and in consideration of health and environmental effects of mining.

The idea of an oral history series to document these developments in twentieth century mining had been on the drawing board of the Regional Oral History Office for more than twenty years. The project finally got underway on January 25, 1986, when Mrs. Willa Baum, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Bradley,.Professor and Mrs. Douglas Fuerstenau, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford ~eimbucher,Mrs. Donald McLaughlin, and Mr. and Mrs. Langan Swent met at the Swent home to plan the project, and Professor Fuerstenau agreed to serve as Principal Investigator.

An advisory committee was selected which included representatives from the materials science and mineral engineering faculty and a professor of history of science at the University of California at Berkeley; a professor emeritus of history from the California Institute of Technology; and executives of mining companies.

We note with much regret the death of two members of the original advisory committee, both of whom were very much interested in the project. Rodman Paul, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of Technology, sent a hand-written note of encouragement just a few weeks before.his death from cancer. Charles Meyer, Professor Emeritus of Geology, University of California at Berkeley, was not only an advisor but was also on the list of people to be interviewed, because of the significance of his recognition of the importance of plate tectonics in the genesis of copper deposits. His death in 1987 ended both roles.

Thanks are due to other members of the advisory committee who have helped in selecting interviewees, suggesting research topics, and raising funds. Unfortunately, by the time the project was organized several of the original list of interviewees were no longer available and others were in failing health; therefore, arrangements for interviews were begun even without established funding.

The project was presented to the San Francisco section of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) on "Old-timers Night," March 10, 1986, when Philip Read Bradley, Jr. was the speaker. This section and the Southern California section provided initial funding and organizational sponsorship.

The Northern and Southern California sections of the Woman's Auxiliary to the AIME'(WAAIME), the California Mining Association, and the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America (MMSA) were early supporters. Several alumni of the University of California College of Engineering donated in response to a letter from Professor James Evans, the chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering. Other individual and corporate donors are listed in the volumes. The project is ongoing, and funds continue to be sought.

Some members of the AIME, WAAIME, and MMSA have been particularly helpful: Ray Beebe, Katherine Bradley, Henry Colen, Ward Downey, David Huggins, John Kiely, Noel Kirshenbaum, and Cole McFarland.

The first five interviewees were all born in 1904 or earlier. Horace Albright, mining lawyer and president of United States Potash Company, was ninety-six years old when interviewed. Although brief, this interview will add another dimension to the many publications about a man known primarily as a conservationist.

James Boyd was director of the industry division of the military government of Germany after World War 11, director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, dean of the Colorado School of Mines, vice president of Kennecott Copper Corporation, president of Copper Range, and executive director of the National Commission on Materials Policy. He had reviewed the transcript of his lengthy oral history just before his death in November, 1987. In 1990, he was inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame, Leadville, Colorado.

Philip Bradley, Jr., mining engineer, was a member of the California Mining Board for thirty-two years, most of them as chairman. He also founded the parent organization of the California Mining Association, as well as the Western Governors Mining Advisory Council. His uncle, Frederick Worthen Bradley, who figures in the oral history, was in the first group inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame, Leadville, Colorado, in 1988. Frank McQuiston, metallurgist, vice president of Newmont Mining Corporation, died before his oral history was complete; thirteen hours of taped interviews with him were supplemented by three hours with his friend and associate. Robert Shoemaker.

Gordon Oakeshott, geologist, was president of the National Association of Geology Teachers and chief of the California Division of Mines and Geology.

These oral histories establish the framework for the series; subsequent oral histories amplify the basic themes.

Future researchers will turn to these oral histories to learn how decisions were made which led to changes in mining engineering education, corporate structures, and technology, as well as public policy regarding minerals. In addition, the interviews stimulate the deposit, by interviewees and others, of a number of documents, photographs, memoirs, and other materials related to twentieth century mining in the West. This collection is being added to The Bancroft Library's extensive holdings.

The Regional Oral History Office is under the direction of Willa Baum, division head, and under the administrative direction of The Bancroft Library.

Interviews were conducted by Malca Chall and Eleanor Swent.

Willa K. Baum, Division Head Regional Oral History Office

Eleanor Swent, Project Director Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Series

October 1990 Regional Oral History Office University of California, Berkeley

Western Mining in the Twentieth Century Oral History Series Interviews Completed or in Process, April 1991

Horace Albright, Mining Lawver and Executive. U.S. Potash Comvanv, U.S. Borax. 1933-1962, 1989

James Boyd, Minerals and Critical Materials Management: Militarv and Government Administrator and Minine Executive. 1941-1987, 1988

Philip Read Bradley, Jr., A Minin~Enpineer in Alaska. Canada. the Western United States. Latin America. and Southeast Asia, 1988

Catherine C. Campbell, Ian and Catherine Campbell. Geoloeists: Teaching,- Government Service. edit in^, 1989

James T. Curry, Sr., Metallurgist for Empire Star Mine and Newmont Exploration. 1932-1955: Plant Manager for Calaveras Cement Companv. 1956-1975, 1990

James Mack Gerstley, Executive. U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation; Trustee. Pomona College: Civic Leader, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, 1991

Helen R. Henshaw, Recollections of Life with Paul Henshaw: Latin America. Homestake Mining Comvanv, 1988

Lewis L. Huelsdonk, Manager of Gold and Chrome Mines. Spokesman for Gold Minin~.1935-1974, 1988

Arthur I. Johnson, Mining and Metallur~ical- Engineer in the Black Hills: Pegmatites and Rare Minerals. 1922 to the 1990s, 1990

Evan Just, Geologist: Engineering and Mining Journal. Marshall Plan. Cvvrus Mines Corporation. and Stanford Universitv. 1922-1980. 1989

Plato Malozemoff, A Life in Minin~: Siberia to Chairman of Newmont Mining Corporation, 1909-1985,1990

Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr., Metallurgist for Newmont Mining Corporation and U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 1934-1982, 1989

Gordon B. Oakeshott, The California Division of Mines and Geology, 1948-1974, 1988

Vincent D. Perry, A Half Century as Mining and Exploration Geolopist with the Anaconda Company, 1991

Samuel S. Arentz, Jr. (Escalante Mine), in process Donald Dickey (Oriental Mine), in process H. S. Pete Fowler (Kaiser) ~eor~eHeikes (tungsten, zinc), in process John Livermore (geologist), in process Carl Randolph (U.S. Borax), in process John Reed (rock mechanics) Joseph Rosenblatt (EIMCO), in process Eugene Smith (U.S. Borax), in process Langan Swent (San Luis, Homestake, uranium mining), in process James V. Thompson (Kaiser Engineers), in process ADVISORS TO THE SERIES, WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Professor Douglas Fuerstenau, Principal Investigator Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering University of California, Berkeley

Robert R. Beebe Professor Malcolm McPherson Senior Vice President, Department of Materials Science and Homestake Mining Company Mineral Engineering, University of California, Berkeley Mr. Philip R. Bradley Former Chairman, California State *Professor Emeritus Charles Meyer, Mining and Geology Board Department of Geology, University of California, Berkeley Henry Colen President, San Francisco Mining Professor H.Frank Morrison, Chairman Associates Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, University of Professor Neville G. Cook California, Berkeley Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, University of Professor Joseph A. Pask California, Berkeley Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering, University of J. Ward Downey California, Berkeley Engineering and Industrial Management Consultant *Professor Emeritus Rodman Paul, Department of History, California Professor Roger Hahn, Department of Institute of Technology History, University of California, Berkeley Mr. Langan W. Swent Vice President (retired), Homestake Mr. John Havard Mining Company Senior Vice President (retired), Kaiser Engineers, Inc. * Deceased during the period of the proj ect Mr. Clifford Heimbucher, C.P.A. Consultant, Varian Associates, Inc.

Mr. John R. Kiely Senior Executive consultant (retired), Bechtel, Inc.

Noel Kirshenbaum Manager, Mineral Products Development, Placer Dome U.S.

Plato Malozemoff Chairman Emeritus, Newmont Mining Corporation

Mr. Joseph P. Matoney Vice President - Coal, Kaiser Engineers, Inc.

Mrs. Donald H. McLaughlin Founder, Save San Francisco Bay Association DONORS TO THE WESTERN MINING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ORAL HISTORY SERIES 1986- 1990 Organizations

American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, San Francisco and Southern California Sections Woman's Auxiliary to the AIME, Southern California and Northern California Sections California Mining Association The Jackling Fund of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America

Corporations

Bechtel Group Incorporated Cyprus Minerals Company Freeport-McMoRan Homestake Mining Company Kennecott Corporation Krebs Engineers Newmont Mining Corporation United States Borax & Chemical Corporation

Patrons

James Boyd Barbara and James T. Curry, Jr . Donald Dickey J. Ward Downey James M. Gerstley Mrs. Paul C. Henshaw, in memory of her husband, Paul C. Henshaw Arthur I. Johnson Plato Malozemoff Foundation Public Resource Foundation Dean A. McGee Mrs. Frank W. McQuiston, Jr., in memory of Frank W. McQuiston, Jr. Vincent D. Perry Langan and Eleanor Swent

Claude J. Artero Evan Just Clemence DeGraw Jandrey Boyd James C. Kimble Philip and Katherine Bradley Noel W. Kirshenbaum Catherine C. Campbell Plato Malozemoff Albert T. Chandler Sylvia C. McLaughlin, in memory of Stanley Dempsey Jay Kimpston Swent Louis R. Goldsmith L. Arthur Norman, Jr. Mrs. Bruce S. Howard, in memory of Gordon B. Oakeshott Henry Harland Bradley Richard W. Rees Lewis L. Huelsdonk Richard M. Stewart Howard Janin Simon D. Strauss James H. Jensen John R. Struthers Jack M. Jones William I. Watson William B. Whitton

INTRODUCTION--byElizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley

My husband, though born in England, had strong roots in America. His mother, Adele Mack, born in San Francisco, was the granddaughter of Lewis Gerstle, an early California settler. He married a sister of his business partner, Louis Sloss, who was my great grandfather. The Gerstle and Sloss families had adjoining houses in San Rafael where they usually spent the summer months. My father (whose mother was a.Sloss) and Jim's mother grew up together in this delightful country estate and so they were very pleased with our engagement, as they would not have to meet a lot of new relatives.

Because of Jim's involvement with the Borax Company, we traveled a great deal and met many interesting people, several of whom became close friends. As our circle broadened so did our interests.

Jim worked very hard for the Borax Company, putting in.long hours and bringing work home in the evenings and weekends. I know that among his business associates and those who worked under him he generated both admiration and affection for his leadership, good humor, and fair treatment.

Fortunately, Jim likes to deal with problems and he had many to face over the years, as his position and responsibilities grew in the company. One of his great achievements was in building an "esprit de corps" by his good humor, common sense, sensitivity, and loyalty to those with whom he worked.

Jim felt strongly about playing a useful role in the community, so he made time to go on various boards and play an active role in the operation of various institutions such as the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Pomona College, and the Farmer's and Merchant's Bank.

In the Bay Area, in addition to being a board member, he was instrumental in developing the Haas-Lilienthal House at 2007 Franklin Street as the headquarters of the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage and in founding the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley. He became associated with the Asian Art Museum and its foundation in 1969 and has served, at times, as chairman of each. I know from many of his associates how important his leadership has been to all the many institutions he has served. Fortunately, Jim has a marvelously compartmented mind and even when awakened before 6:00 a.m. by urgent phone calls can draw forth all the stored in£ormation as needed. In addition to his business and financial ability Jim has many other attributes. He has excellent taste, is a very good cook, and has written well on various subjects. He has even shown some talent as an amateur artist.

We are lucky to have many similar tastes as we both enjoy travel, sightseeing, meeting people, trout fishing, not to mention tennis when we were younger, golf even today, and many other sports.

Our family and the happiness of our children and granddaughter are of the greatest importance to us and above all we just enjoy being together.

Elizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley (Mrs. James Gerstley)

December 21, 1990 Atherton, California INTRODUCTION by Norman J. Travis

You may wonder why someone gazing on the autumn colours of a sunlit Hertforshire garden in England, six thousand miles from Jim Gerstley, should be asked to write the introduction to these reminiscences concerned with his life in California.

I first met Jim in 1958, just in time to celebrate his fiftieth birthday at his Beverly Hills home. It was indeed a happy event and for me an instant education in the way Jim and Liz generated friendship and happiness. I was to celebrate Jim's birthday many times in succeeding years. Like our Queen, it was not always on the date of his birth and I think sometimes we celebrated it more than once in the same year. However, it was always a splendid occasion with speeches that showed little respect for anyone, much hilarious present-giving, and torrents of fun and laughter.

The bond which brought us together in the first place was the borax industry. It is nearly a hundred years since Jim Gerstley's great-grandfather introduced the entrepreneur F.M. (Borax) Smith from California on his first visit to London, to Jim's father James Gerstley. This started a new international enterprise, a partnership of British and American interests which has successfully continued through two world wars, the great depression and all other difficulties. The two Gerstleys between them have seen it all.

I approached my first meeting with Jim in 1958 with curiosity and some apprehension. I had joined the London company only a few months previously and was aware of the problems that confronted the management both in London and Los Angeles. It was a time of crisis for the British-American relationship and Jim Gerstley was at the centre of it.

To deal with the need for expansion and the necessary finance, U.S. Borax had been set up as a public corporation and some 25 percent of its stock was now quoted on the New York Stock Exchange. This had been achieved with the aid of Wall Street interests, who had profited handsomely from the flotation. They now saw U.S. Borax as an adolescent and well-endowed bride ready for the marriage market. As potential brokers they were already purring in anticipation of what this might bring to them.

The 75 percent British presence in U.S. Borax was a problem, however. The next step for the Wall Street warriors, headed by the powerful figure of Andre Meyer of Lazards, was to massage the management to their way of thinking, with whatever changes that might be necessary to achieve this. I found Jim Gerstley's personality and outlook reassuring. On the one hand he was determined to see U.S. Borax's problems dealt with in a way satisfactory to the stockholders and employees, but on the other hand he was profoundly loyal to the existing ownership and was not moved by the clamour and inducements of the financial community. I soon saw Jim as a man to be trusted and a man of integrity.

In a way it was fortunate that Jim was not a typical business executive, fired with.ambition to manage an ever larger industrial empire. As became apparent, after more than twenty-five years of service to the company, his ambition was to withdraw from management and to pursue his many other interests with vigor while young enough to do so. For a man with a broad education and cultured background and the necessary financial means--this was a civilised and sensible thing to do. He did not welcome early morning telephone calls from Wall Street that took no account of time zones and although a somewhat shy man and always polite, he knew well when to make his position clear. Wall Street got the message. U.S. Borax dealt with its problems and embarked on a period of sustained growth and prosperity. Ties with Britain are stronger than ever, but U.S. Borax retains its American identity and goes on as a romantic part of California mining history.

Memories of many happy times which I and my wife Betty have spent with Jim and Liz are something we value greatly. Business came first, but there was always time for stimulating talk of people and politics, travel and history, for golf and for laughter. Within the groups of us who gathered each year in the cradle of borax history, Death Valley, many I am sure felt these were among "the happiest days of their lives." It was all part of the Gerstley tradition. I hope it lives on.

Norman J. Travis Former Chairman of the Board U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation

November 1990 Howe Green Hall Hertford Herts, England INTERVIEW HISTORY--JamesM. Gerstley

James Mack Gerstley has connections to two of California's historic institutions: the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco, of which his great-grandfather was one of the founders; and the twenty-mule teams carrying borax from Death Valley for Pacific Coast Borax, the company which he later headed. The Regional Oral History Office has for some years hoped to interview him because of his significant role as chairman of the Asian Art Commission of San Francisco, chairman of the Asian Art Museum Foundation, a board member of the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage, and first chairman of the board of the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah L. Magnes Museum. His importance was attested to by Dr. James Hart, director of The Bancroft Library, a personal friend of many years. With the establishment of the oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century, and the support of U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation, this oral history was realized at last.

James M. Gerstley, born in London to an American mother, was the first president of United States Borax and Chemical Corporation, successor to Pacific Coast Borax Company when it merged in 1956 with U.S Potash Company. The company, under its various names, is distinguished by its corporate sense of history and the longevity of its employees. Nationwide, American employees spend 2.6 years with one employer; U.S. Borax's employees average fifteen years.

U.S. Borax was one of the first corporations to support the oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century with an annual donation. Even before the series was organized, the first interview was with Horace Albright, then ninety-six years old, retired president of U.S. Potash Company. James Boyd, whose oral history was fourth in the series, was the son of "Captain" Julian Boyd, superintendent of the Pacific Coast Borax mines at Ryan. Other oral histories planned in the series will also relate to this historic company, now part of the giant international corporation RTZ [Rio Tinto Zinc], with origins in Spanish mines dating back to Phoenician times.

In the tradition of his time, James M. Gerstley's father, James Gerstley, of London, became acquainted with Francis M. "Borax" Smith as the result of conversations which his uncle had on board a ship going to England. James Gerstley retired as joint managing director after over fifty years with the English company, Borax Consolidated Limited. James M. Gerstley, the narrator of this oral history, was not technically trained; he read history at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was his historical awareness which enabled him as acting president of the company to foresee accurately the changes that would come to the borax business in the postwar period. He became an American citizen and headed the company when it too became American. During critical years, he directed the change from an underground mine to an open-pit mine and refinery using the most modern technology, and he presided over the creation of a research facility which in 1990 is still up to date. He controlled a greatly expanded budget, modernized the corporate accounting, and saw the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. When he retired in 1960, the company profits had reached a historical high.

James M. Gerstley's oral history also tells of his activities in Southern California as trustee of Pomona College, where he learned the fund-raising skills which he put to use later as a key person in securing the Avery Brundage collection of Asian art for San Francisco.

Mrs. Willa Baum, director of the Regional Oral History Office, and Mrs. Eleanor Swent, editor for the oral history series on Western Mining in the Twentieth Century, met with Mr. Gerstley at his Atherton home on 23 January 1990 to discuss arrangements for his oral history. They had the pleasure of looking at volumes of personal memoirs beautifully hand- bound by Mrs. Gerstley, nee Elizabeth Lilienthal, complex genealogies (Mr. and Mrs. Gerstley share some forebears), and mementoes of travels and a rich family life. It was agreed that two staff editors would conduct the interviews: Eleanor Swent would interview him on his career as a mining executive, using funds donated to the mining series by U.S. Borax; and Ruth Teiser, using funds privately subscribed, would document his family recollections and civic activities in the Bay Area. The formal invitation letter was sent to him on 25 January 1990.

The interviews took place in February and March 1990 at the Gerstley home in the book-lined office. Mr. Gerstley wore an L. L. Bean jacket buttoned up against the chill. (Their friends joke that the architecture of the Gerstley homes is Californian, but the temperature is British.) Mr. Gerstley prepared well for his interviews, following the planned outline. He had documents and supplementary materials ready at hand. On some occasions luncheon, including exceptionally delicious brownies, followed the session. The transcripts sent to him for review were returned promptly with a few necessary corrections.

The oral history of James M. Gerstley has two introductions: one by his wife, Elizabeth Lilienthal Gerstley; another by Norman J. Travis, retired chairman of Borax Consolidated Limited and director of U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation and author of The Tincal Trail, a history of borax. xiii

Researchers privileged to use The Bancroft Library will have access to Mr. Gerstley's other writings, Borax Years, The Shack Riders, and Reminiscence of Mv Father, for more details on some of the material in the oral history.

Eleanor Swent, Project Director Western Mining in the Twentieth Century series

Ruth Teiser, Co-interviewer

Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library Berkeley, CA 94720 April 1991

xiv Regional Oral History Office University of California . Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION-

(Please write clearly, Use black ink.)

Your full name

Date of birth V&fbJ lq a7 'Birthplace E U * 1 - Father's full namef

Occupation Birthplace MBIIE .&&9%G&U4*b L.* Mother's full name ad& Mwdt&r&q, - 9

Where did you grow up? &- Y -

present 'community %dbkT m. .- 7 k Education &- Qi&lr SumC*gb&rW Jcor-,cPe- , I Y 8 2<

~ccupat ion (s) QLLAh u + h ~ .re hcr)Le*LR . Areas of expertis h'T-4 FS I k;rAwr

e Other interests or activities b d

Organizations in which you are active ;, -

I EARLY YEARS AND FAMILY

[Interview 1 : February 21, 1990]#/j1

The Gerstlevs of England

Teiser: May I ask you when and where you were born?

Gerstley: Yes. I was born on November 11, 1907, in London, England.

Teiser: And your family home, which you have described very interestingly in your autobiography, was in the West End? Gerstley: I wasn't born there, but we moved there very shortly after I was born, and it was in the West End at One Upper Grosvenor Street, which is quite near Hyde Park.

Teiser: Your family, when you were a child, consisted of yourself, and two sisters, your father, and mother?

Gerstley: That is correct.

Teiser: If you were writing a novel and describing that family, how would you characterize it--socially,economically, however--?

Gerstley: Well, economically, I would say that they were upper middle- class. My father [James Gerstley] had a very good position with the Borax Company [Borax Consolidated], but in those days they didn't pay very huge salaries. On the other hand, the cost of living wasn't anything like as great as today, and they were rather well-off. I mean, they couldn't have lived in the West End unless they had been reasonably well-off.

'This symbol (#/I) indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page129. Mother [Adele Hannah Mack Gerstley] had some money from her father--notan awful lot. It was mostly Dad's earnings, I would say, that they lived on, but they had six or seven in staff in London. But, again, in those days, you could have had, say, seven people in staff, and probably the highest paid would have been the cook, who probably got about fifty pounds a year. Even at that rate of exchange, it was under two hundred and fifty dollars a year. Of course, the staff lived in, and they got all their meals, and they got their uniforms and so forth. But still, with six or seven servants, we certainly didn't suffer.

My father was a good deal older than my mother. She was married at eighteen, and I think Dad was about thirty-seven when he got married. In fact, Mother sometimes rather rudely said that she never saw him with very much hair. They were, I would. say, a good couple.

My father's background was different, in a way, because his parents had been born in Germany. While Dad was born in London after they had moved to England, he was brought up in sort of a rather strict German atmosphere, and he went to school in Germany part of the time. He hadn't learned some of the English sports like cricket, for example. But he was bright. He had a very good sense of humor. While he wasn't a great athlete, he loved athletics. He loved to walk. He loved to play tennis. He loved to golf. And he particularly loved the river.

Mother, on the other hand, had been a very bright student in California, was about to go, I think, to the University of California, and then she got married. They both had wide- ranging interests--Mother,particularly. She loved history, archaeology, anthropology, and she had a wonderful memory. Dad was more interested in history, and material things, and business, and so forth, naturally. But he loved to travel. They both loved to travel. Mother also--well,she was a fair athlete. She played golf and played tennis, and when they went rowing on the river, she took her place rowing the skiff that they used at that time.

Now, as to my sisters--my older sister, I think, even when she was born, she was rather dramatic, and, as she grew older, theater was what interested her, I think, the most. She was very bright--my older sister was--and she went to finishing school in Paris as girls often did in those days. Then she went for a while to the Royal Academy of Arts, which was the dramatic school.

Teiser: What was her name? Gerstley: Margaret. Later on, she married Bill Button, whose picture is over there. [gestures] These are some of the watercolors he did. The two lower ones were on the Metolius River in Oregon when we went there fishing, and they came over and visited us.

Bill was a lawyer at one point, and at one time he was the master of the Broderer's Guild. "Broderer" means "embroidery" in England. In the old days, it was called "broderer." You were a broderer. You weren't an embroiderer; you were a broderer. The Broderer's Guild in London is one of the oldest guilds in England, and Bill was the master of that and very highly thought of.

Bill and my older sister, Margaret--I think they were really very happily married, but they had somewhat different interests. Bill liked the country. Margaret liked to be in town, so she would go to the theater, and she did quite a lot of storytelling, sort of semiprofessionally. But they spent a lot of time together; the two shared a house just outside of London, and Bill had a very nice place in the country, in Sussex near Bosham. We had many good times with them.

My younger sister, who was called Deedie--she was named after Edith, who was my mother's sister (Edith Bransten, who married into the MJB family)--was not as bright. She was a very nice girl, but she had not inherited really the brains of my mother and father and suffered a little bit by comparison. She never married. She liked to live in the country. She had a companion by the name of Phyllis Drage, who had been teaching gymnastics at one point. That's how Deedie met her. Deedie, as I recall, helped run a hospital in the west country. I think it was maybe in Cheltenham, which wasn't too far away. She did it very well. But my older sister, Margaret, during the war worked for the Admiralty, and, in fact, she worked--I don't know whether in London you've ever been to the bunkers not far from Buckingham Palace where Churchill was during some of the bombing period? Anyway, it was in that area underground that she worked for the Admiralty.

Teiser: Your whole family has been Jewish, has it not?

Gers tley : Yes.

Teiser: Were your friends mostly German Jews?

Gerstley: No.

Teiser: Not people with the same inheritance as you? Gerstley: No. In the first place, neither my mother nor my father were really religious at all. I wasn't brought up in the Jewish faith. The school I went to wasn't a Jewish school.

Most of their friends actually were non-Jews, although some of them were Jewish. Obviously, they entertained, particularly when they had this place in the country, a lot of relatives from America. A lot of these relatives were Jewish. But most of their English friends--someof them they met, of course, during the war, when my mother had this hospital in London. Several good friends came out of that connection, like the Rileys, and the Vellacotts, and others. One of their best friends was Jewish, although he, again, wasn't a religious man. That was Gordon Jacobs,'who helped to really bring me up and teach me rowing, and shooting, and horseback riding, and things like that. But the others--HaroldFoster that Dad used to play squash rackets with and go boating with, and so forth--wasn't the least bit--

Teiser: They moved very freely through society and--

Gerstley: Very much so. I wouldn't say that they were particularly high society. Unless you had been born in England for about five hundred years, you didn't necessarily move in those particular circles. But they had a nice group of friends, and they were all very nice to us kids--played tennis with us, and games with us, and so forth.

Teiser: When your American relatives came, did they mix well with your English friends?

Gerstley: Yes. I would say, on the whole, most of them did mix well. In the younger generation, while we knew some families in England, in London, who had children--and,of course, while I made friends in school--a lot of the people I have known in my later life were the children of visitors from America, my mother's family or friends. I've been very fortunate in that respect.

Teiser: I think I put, on the list of subjects that I handed you, the question about what your American friends visiting in England thought of England. Did they express to you any surprises or comments? Was that all taken for granted?

Gerstley: I think it was pretty much taken for granted. Of course, most of the older people were not traveling for the first time to England. They had been there before.

Teiser: I'm thinking of contemporaries. Gerstley: My contemporaries, I think--well,one area that always created great surprise and astonishment was that iced water was not served in the restaurants. This, I might say, astonished the young English people as much that anybody should ask for ice. [chuckles] Or iced tea, for example--we in England had never heard of such a thing. The Americans, I think, were somewhat astonished at the delightful teas that we used to have, which they didn't have over here--and perhaps also, the younger people, that one dressed up more in England. For example, in my early teens, when I got my first what you call "tuxedo" and we call dinner jacket--we used to dress for dinner every night. The young people in America hadn't been used to that. But outside of that, I don't recall anything that struck them as too strange or different.

Teiser: As you say, they were, I suppose, children of parents who had traveled widely and knew English customs.

Gerstley: That's right. They were usually from very comfortably-off families in America.

World War I

Teiser: You were seven when World War I broke out. What was your life at home like during the war? Did you notice any change?

Gerstley: Oh, yes. We noticed change, particularly from the food standpoint. Before the war, it was customary to have bacon and eggs for breakfast. During the war, we hardly saw an egg. I remember one occasion when there was a blackout--I guess a Zeppelin raid--and my mother had been entertaining one or two officers at home. They couldn't get back to the hospital, and so she put them up in the spare room that we had. The next morning, when we came down, we had been expecting eggs. It was, I think, the one day a week when we used to get eggs. No eggs, because they were being saved for the officers. That was quite a shock.

Of course, my mother was in uniform, a nurse's uniform. I do remember that they had a battery of guns in Hyde Park, not too far away, and, of course, searchlights. The raids--I can't say that they bothered us as children, but the raids were by Zeppelins, not by airplanes, particularly in the earlier part of the war. When I was home from school once with--I've forgotten--measles,flu, or something like that--I did happen to be in London, and Mother was home, when there was the first daylight raid on London. A couple of German planes came over. I don't recall whether they dropped any bombs or not, but that was the first daylight raid.

Outside of the fact that food was somewhat different, and I don't think we went away very much for holidays, I don't really recall anything frightfully different--except, of course, London was full of troops on leave, or training, or whatnot.

Teiser: You had still, of course, relatives in Germany, I suppose.

Gerstley: Well, on my father's side, I think there were one or two relatives in Germany, but I really didn't know much about them. I don't think I ever met them.

Teiser: It didn't cause any particular conflicts in people's minds about the war?

Gerstley: [pause] Well, I think it did, perhaps, to some extent. I mean, a lot of people with German names changed their names, like Lord Louis Mountbatten had been a German family. He changed Battenberg to Mountbatten. But I suppose Dad must have felt the situation somewhat, having probably some relatives in Germany.

Teiser: Your father, having been to school there--

Gerstley: Yes, having been to school there, but I don't think any of the German relatives, wherever they were, fought on the German side, either.

Youthful Interests and Schools

Teiser: Iwasparticularlyinterestedinyourchildhoodinterestin sports. Did you have some sedentary interest, also?

Gerstley: Oh, I think I always enjoyed reading. I won't say necessarily frightfully serious books, but the usual run of children's books. And, at an early age, I learned to play, what we call, "draughts," and you call, "checkers," and also learned to play chess when I was at my prep school. I used to play quite a bit of it with my father, if he was home, or Gordon, or some adults as well as younger people. Of course, we loved being taken to the theater--pantomimes and things like Charlev's Aunt, I remember, was always a tremendous success as far as I was concerned. Teiser: Did you like school? Did you enjoy studying?

Gerstley: Yes and no--let's put it that way. I quite enjoyed Mr. Gibbs's school. Mr. Gibb's school in London was where I was during the early part of the war. Later, as the war lasted four years, I went to St. Aubyn's in Rottingdean. I learned to play a little bit of soccer at St. Aubyn's. I was only nine years old. Of course, going away from home to boarding school was a little more traumatic, you might say, for a young boy, and I think maybe the first year or so that I was at boarding school, I liked some of it. I liked learning to shoot, I liked some of the companionship, and so forth. But it was always very nice to look forward to coming home on vacation. As I got older in the school and better established, I enjoyed it more. This was equally true at Cheltenham College, where I went later on.

When you're a new boy, everything is new and somewhat difficult, and some of the older boys do a lot of hazing and so forth. But once you get established after a year or two, quickly if you do anything--and, as I say, I was on the Head of the River Crew at Cheltenham, people begin to look up to you, and you don't feel quite such a stranger or quite so ineffective. That gives you a much greater sense of confidence and poise, I think. But on the whole, I'd say I enjoyed my school pretty much. Of course, Cambridge I enjoyed very, very much. I loved Cambridge.

Teiser: Did you have any particular subject interests in high school?

Gerstley: I don't really think so. I enjoyed certain teachers more than others. My mathematics teacher was very good and really interested me in his subject. My history teacher was very good, and my Scripture teacher was very good. In fact, I think I won a prize in Scripture--New Testament Scripture, too, which is pretty good for somebody who's Jewish.

I suppose the thing that sticks in one's mind the most, or gy mind, the most, is some of the sports--my rowing, and attending cricket matches, and going on military field days, and the officers' training corps. But, as I say, I enjoyed some of my classes very much. The thing that I always found rather a bore was having to go to chapel. We had a chapel at Cheltenham, and, on Sundays, you went twice--the sermon in the morning and then again for a short service in the evening. It was something you had to do, but I can't say that anybody frightfully looked forward to it.

Cheltenham had three sides to it. It was partly a military school, and if you were in the military you didn't have to study things like Latin and Greek, but you studied more mathematics and things of that sort. If you were on the modern side, you had to take Latin, history, and French, and related literature If you were on the classical side, you had to take Greek, and you spent more time with Latin and Greek. I was on the modern side.

Cambridge Universitv

Gerstley: After I left Cheltenham I had spent nine months or so in Germany at Bonn and then nine months in France at Tours, studying the language. At Cambridge, at Peterhouse College, I took modern languages for my first year, for a tripos. A tripos is an honors degree, and it's "tripos," because technically it's supposed to be over three years. Having been to France and Germany, I really found that I knew enough to pass my exams without working very hard. Although I did go to an occasional lecture, and I went to my tutor every couple of weeks or so, I rowed. Rowing took up a lot of time, so I didn't have too much time to go to classes. I did pass my exams--not brilliantly, but also not badly. I was sort of in the middle.

The next year, I decided that I wanted to take up a subject that I liked better, and that was history. So I gave up rowing and I studied history, having as tutor the Regius Professor of History that is appointed by the crown at Cambridge, Harold Temperley.

Gerstley: Harold Temperley, who had written several books, including one on the origins of World War I. I chose modern history, which is from 1492 to the present day, starting from the fall of Constantinople and the spread of books and learning around the world--well, at least around Europe. Part of the course was, of course, history, but part of the course you could specialize in. I specialized in the Elizabethan period, which meant I not only specialized and studied its history, but also poetry, plays, and everything connected with the Elizabethan period. Then you could also specialize in one or two other related subjects.

Harold Temperley was a most interesting man. He did have one unfortunate habit--he used to have a sort of rocking chair back of his desk. Then you went to see him with your thesis or whatever it was he would give you to write. He used to rock back and forth, and, every now and then, he would go over backwards. [laughter] But he was very kind to me, and I got a Class 11-Part I honor in history. The highest you could get is a I-I, which only two or three students, probably, a year ever get. He thought this was very good, considering I'd only been studying for one year. But I enjoyed that very much.

And during that year,.when I did row, I used to spend time--we had bicycles at Cambridge, and I used to visit some of the surrounding country with friends and go and have tea here and there, and we would all go punting on the backs of Cambridge. The other colleges, a lot of them were along the River Cam; they had lawns that ran down to the river. That's what's called "the backs." We used to punt on the backs and so forth.

It was a very pleasant life. We had dinner in hall, where you had to wear your robe. You could entertain in your rooms. You had a servant assigned to so many staircases we lived on. Those of us who lived in college--therewas a staircase and usually two rooms, one down below and one up above. The gyp would serve, maybe, two staircases or something like that--four sets of rooms. Give them enough notice, and if you had the money, which you didn't always have, you could entertain occasionally in your rooms.

I bought a lot of books at Cambridge. I patronized the bookstores quite a bit. I also played a lot of bridge and really had a very stimulating time--met a lot of interesting, nice people, too.

Teiser: How did it happen, then, that you were willing to leave at the end of two years?

Gerstley: Well, the problem was that I couldn't get a degree in under three years. This meant going back to Cambridge and spending so many nights in your rooms. That's what counted. The question was, what was I going to do my third year? I had already passed my tripos in two years, because I took a peculiar combination-- I didn't do it deliberately. It turned out this was a peculiar combination of subjects, each of which was a one-year course. I passed them in two years, so the question was, what was I going to do? I really hadn't made up my mind as to what I was going to do.

It was at that point that my mother's younger brother, Gerstle Mack, a very well-known author, came over on a visit. He came down to visit me at Cambridge and asked me, what was I going to do? It was he who suggested that maybe instead of spending a third year at Cambridge, I could talk my father into giving me the same amount of money it cost him to keep me at Cambridge and see how far around the world I could go. This sounded much more interesting to me.

At one point in my life, while I was studying abroad, I had sort of thought I might like to go into the diplomatic service. But while I was at Cambridge, I had sort of decided, after my first year of modern languages, that I really didn't care that much about languages. If I didn't care that much about languages, I didn't really think that the diplomatic service or something similar would interest me. I began to think that maybe business would interest me. I didn't want to go into Dad's firm in London, because I always felt that if you went into your father's firm you were apt to be either treated too leniently or too harshly. I wanted to make a position for myself somewhere in the world, but I began to think a little bit about business.

A Tri~Around the World

So this idea of a trip around the world where, maybe, thanks to introductions that people like my facher and Gordon and others could give me, I could see something about the copper operations in Rhodesia, the diamond mines in South Africa, things like that--in India, what it was like to run a big estate for somebody, because I had friends there who were doing just that. I thought this would be much more educational as well as exciting, and, fortunately, Dad thought it would be very educational, too--my mother and father both did. So I really didn't have any great regret at leaving Cambridge at that point, because I just didn't know what I was going to do for that third year.

As you know, I ultimately got to San Francisco in 1929 after some nine months--I left England in the beginning of September, 1928, and I got to San Francisco around April or May. Thanks to Hortimer Fleishhacker, Sr., I had been offered a job with a company known as the Great Western Electrochemical Company, whose plant was located in Pittsburg, California. It was a company that made things like chlorine, caustic soda, ammonia, but also some other things like xanthates and hydrosulfites. It had been started really as an outlet for power for the Great Western Power Company, which later became the PGbE [Pacific Gas and Electric]. This was in 1929 before the stock market crash. I thought it would be very educational to learn something about American business methods, although, frankly, I expected to go into business in Europe someplace.

California in 1919

Teiser: Let me take you back from here to an earlier visit to San Francisco that you had made just after World War I, in 1919. Do you mind my interrupting this chronology here?

Gerstley: No, not at all. Please, please.

Teiser: It must have made quite an impression upon you. I asked earlier what your American relatives thought of England. What do you remember of your first sight of the United States?

Gerstley: Well, the thing that struck me the most, particularly at Potter's school1, was the fact that an English boy--let's see, at that time I was about twelve years 'old--atthat time, English boys wore short pants that came above the knee and long socks that came below the knee. The knee was bare. American boys wore pants that came over the knee, and so they all made fun of me. I didn't like it very much. I tried to persuade my mother that I should wear the same as the Americans, since I was an American going to school in America, but she felt, "None of that," and so I continued to wear my short pants and so forth.

Outside of that, and outside of various expressions and spelling--lots of words that we had a "u" in that Americans didn't have a "u" in and things like that--and the fact that I knew so much more Latin than the American boys did, and they knew more mathematics than I did. There were differences, and, of course, when it came to playing games, American football or something, I didn't know anything about it. And they hadn't the foggiest idea what cricket was about. But outside of things like that, I don't know that I noticed anything very different.

One of the things I do remember was my mother's father, Dick Mack, had remarried, because his first wife had died. He had married Charlotte Smith. There's been quite a lot written about Aunt Charlotte, which I won't go into at that moment. But they had an automobile, and it was an electric automobile. Aunt Charlotte drove it; Grandpa never learned to drive. Aunt

%he Potter School was at 1927 Pacific Avenue. It was usually referred to as Potter's School. Charlotte was not the world's best driver, but, nevertheless, we drove in the electric automobile.

Teiser: Did they live on Nob Hill?

Gerstley : Yes. They had an apartment at that time, let's see--they lived at the Stanford Court Apartments.

Teiser: How did they get the electric car up and down that hill? They must have come around.

Gerstley : Yes, they probably did come around. They probably did come around. [chuckles] Yes. They certainly didn't come up that very steep hill. I can remember one of my parents' friends, Harold Foster, of whom I was very fond, too. When he first visited San Francisco some years later, I went to take him on a tour of San Francisco. I got to the bottom of that hill, and I was going to drive up. He said, "You're not going to drive up that, are you?" I said yes. He said, "I'm going to get out and walk," which he did. [laughs]

Teiser: Did you take tours in the electric car, or was it just for the city?

Gerst ley : No. It was pretty much for the city. I think.we drove down to the Peninsula occasionally, to visit maybe the Charles Branstens or the Fleishhackers or somebody like that. But it was mostly for the city, yes. But an electric car was something--whatwas it? A Franklin? I think it was a Franklin. It was something I had never seen or heard of before. Of course, as kids, we loved the streetcars, particularly the California Street Cable Car going up the hill. And we loved going to, I think it was, Maskey's for ice cream sodas.

Teiser: Yes, I've forgotten about it.

Gerstley: Those were great treats. But when they had measles at Potter's school and part of school was closed down, I can't say that I was sorry, because this gave me a chance to do some traveling. And when my father just happened to come out in 1919, I had a chance to travel with my mother and father and her father.

Teiser: What was Potter's school like? Was it a hard school?

Gerstley : Yes. The classes, it seems to me, were fairly big. I found out, since my Asian Art connections, that some of the people whom I have served with--one was Dick Gump--went to Potter's school. He was a year ahead of me. He was a year older than I was. Also, Gwin Follis, who was chairman of the board of Standard Oil. He told me he had been to Potter's school. When I was there, it was with people like Mortie Fleishhacker [Mortimer Fleishhacker, Jr.], George Levison. I would say we had to work quite hard, and we had quite a lot of homework to do. Most of the work was in the morning. The afternoon was usually devoted to football or whatever the season was-- baseball, I guess. I wasn't really there very much for the baseball season.

Teiser: You made your first trip to Death Valley, then?

Gerstley: That is right. When my father came out, I was invited to go along with my mother and father and her father on this trip. First of all we went to Santa Barbara to visit some relatives that Grandpa had down there. Then down to Hollywood, and then we went on to Death Valley, because Dad naturally wanted to see some of the borax operation, and Death Valley was associated with borax in those days. There was a plant at Death Valley Junction, and ore was mined up at the place called Ryan, which is named after one of the former supervisors out there. There was a little railroad, the Death Valley Railroad, which ran from Death Valley Junction up to Ryan. So I got to see Death Valley. And, of course, little did I think that I would ever be associated with it, but I got to meet some people that, later on, I certainly was associated with, like Harry Gower whose daughter married Horace Albright' s son. Horace Albright , was, at one time as you know, the head of the National Park system. He was the second head. [Stephen] Mather was the first head, and Horace was the second. Of course, there are a lot of books which have been written about Horace and what he did for the Park Service. And then I served with him on his U. S. Potash Board, and he came and served on my board when I later became president of U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation after the Borax Company acquired U.S. Potash by merger.

Teiser: There was a resort in Death Valley at that time, wasn't there?

Gerstley: No, The Furnace Creek Inn was built, as I recall, about 1926 or 1927, somewhere around that time. The idea, when it was built, was that it would create passenger traffic for the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, which ran to Death Valley Junction from Mojave. Apparently, R. C. Baker, who was president of the Borax Company and, I guess it was Chris Zabriskie, then General Manager, still--ratherthan Frank Jenifer--hadn't heard of the automobile. [chuckles] After the hotel was built, I would say that practically--Iwon't say no visitors, but hardly any visitors used the railroad. They came by automobile, naturally, particularly as Death Valley Junction was some fifteen miles away from the floor of the valley where the hotel was located.

l~oraceM. Albright , Mining Lawver and Executive, U .S. Potash Com~any, U.S. Borax, 1933-1962, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1989. It was down at Furnace Creek Ranch, which is on the floor of the valley, that there were some workers' huts and things, because in those days they still had some mining operations. So they had some people staying there. But it was not a resort then. It was after Furnace Creek Inn was built, or about the same time, that the company also brought some surplus housing from Boulder Dam and moved it down to the ranch and developed the ranch also as a lower cost resort.

Teiser: When you went there first, where did you stay?

Gerstley: We stayed at the superintendent's house at Ryan--at Fred Corkill's house at Ryan.

Teiser: Then you went back to England?

Gerstley: Then I went back to England--that's right--and got ready to go to Cheltenham College. And, because I had missed out on a lot of Latin and other subjects, I had to take some tutoring.

California in the Early 1930s

Teiser: Then your next trip to San Francisco, as you just mentioned, was in 1929, was it?

Gerstley: That's right, on that trip around the world. And, as I say, that was before the stock market crash. But in those days, in order to work in the United States, you had to get a permit, and this took six months to obtain. So I had to go back to England and apply for my permit, and while I was in England, my father arranged for me to spend some time at the Borax Company, without pay, learning something about accounting, particularly, doing trial balances and things which I didn't understand too well, although I had taken an accounting course. But I did learn quite a bit that way. Also, I shared a desk with my friend, Fred Lesser, who was the son of my father's partner in the borax business and who was then working, and being paid, for the Borax Company. He was in the Spanish department, because the company then had a plant in Spain, making tartaric acid as well as boric acid. So I learned something about tartaric acid and lees and argols of grapes needed to make tartaric acid.

Teiser: When you returned in 1930--

Gerstley: .January 4, 1930. Teiser: Were there things that impressed you about the United States then that hadn't before, that you hadn't noticed?

Gerstley: Well, of course, there were a lot of things new to me, because I went to work, as I think I mentioned, up at Pittsburg, California, in the plant. I spent several months up there, and I went through virtually every department in the plant. I worked in the various manufacturing departments and I worked on the shifts with the other people. Also, I worked in the accounting department in cost accounting, and I worked in the shipping department. I learned what you had to do to get a train laden and what forms you had to fill out to get everything going, and things like that.

I suppose the thing that really sticks in one's mind the most is the Depression. I always felt, in a way, that I was very fortunate to have been here during the Depression. I think an awful lot of young people today could have benefited from living through the Depression and finding that everything isn't always as wonderful as they may think it is. I also learned to live on a very small amount of money.

Teiser: This was something that you really hadn't experienced, of course, before.

Gerstley: That's right. I hadn't worked for money in London. I hadn't had any problems like that. Fortunately, at Pittsburg, things were very inexpensive in those days. The hotel, I think, charged me thirty dollars a month or so, and I got a sandwich lunch to take along to work, and I got breakfast and dinner for that price, so that I really wasn't badly off. I could afford to go to a movie occasionally--quite often, actually. It was sort of a period of transition from silent movies to talkies. I remember seeing A1 Jolson in one of his earliest films. It wasn't the earliest, but it was one of the earliest talkies, I think.

On weekends, one of the men-inthe office who used to go to San Francisco every weekend would drive me down. But coming back, I would come back on Sunday night on the Sacramento Northern Railway, which no longer exists, but with which one of Liz's1 relatives had a great deal to do in the early days-- which, of course, I didn't know until much later.

'~lizabeth Lilienthal, who married James M. Gerstley in 1934. Teiser: In connection with this job, you've said that you got it through Mortimer Fleishhacker, Sr. What sort of man was he?

Gerstley: He was a pretty tough character, I would say. He married Bella, who was the youngest daughter of Lewis Gerstle. She was very nice, rather quiet, shy, and later on she took up painting and became a very good artist and actually, after he died, had an exhibition in San Francisco that was very well received. She was very kind and sort of took me under her wing.

And, I must say, Uncle Mortie was kind to me, too, but he was, as they say, a pretty tough character. I don't think he cared, particularly, about art or literature. He cared about business. Of course, when I knew him, he was fairly advanced in years, and so I couldn't tell you much about his early business life. But the Depression was very tough on his bank, too, the Anglo-California Bank. His brother, Herbert, had the Anglo- London-Paris National Bank. It was also very tough on Herbert. I guess Uncle Mortie had enterprise. After all, he was one of the earlier people to buy a place in Woodside. I don't know whether you've ever been there. It's a beautiful place, which I love, in Woodside.

Teiser: Yes. He had the enterprise to select excellent architects, too.

Gerstley: Yes, he did. He did. Although, whether Bella had something to do with that, I don't really know. It could have been. 1

But, as I say, he was always very kind to me and, I guess, he felt that at least I worked hard and hadn't let him down too badly.

I was a good friend of young Mortie, who then went to work in the bank and who, as I had mentioned, I had gotten to know when he visited England first--notfirst. I guess Potter's School first, and then later on he visited England, and we did, you know, went to theater and did things together.

When I first entered the borax business in 1933, and the Borax Company owned 50 percent of United States Potash Company-- they had undertaken to build the plant and the refinery that was needed to process the potash which had been discovered in New Mexico--I tried to help find the money to fund the expense by going to young Mortie at the bank. But the bank at that time

l~orfurther recollections see Mortimer Fleishhacker, Jr. Family. Business and The San Francisco Communitv, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1975. wasn't doing very well. During the Depression, of course, there were a lot of loans that weren't being paid to the banks, and so the banks really weren't in a position to loan very much money. Fortunately, we got it financed otherwise.

I didn't know Mortie, Sr., intimately. I just knew him, and he was a pleasant host. He was quite a good conversationalist. I knew his children much better. I knew Ellie [Eleanor], who married a Sloss [Leon Sloss]. She, of course, and Mortie had stayed with us in England, and I was very fond of Ellie. She became a great friend of my older sister's, Margaret.

Teiser: I understand that the Levisons and the Mortimer Fleishhackers would alternate Sunday dinners.

Gerstley : That is right, because Alice [Levison] and Bella [Fleishhacker] were sisters and they lived next door to each other.

Teiser : What were the Sunday dinners like at the Mortimer Fleishhackers'?

Gerstley: Well, they were usually kind of fun. There were usually various relatives. You never knew who you were going to run into. But, as I recall, the dinners were usually quite lively. There were a lot of young people, not just old people, and the food was plentiful. I think we played games, sometimes, afterwards, too--cardgames of various sorts. They weren't very late nights, but we probably stuck around until about ten-thirty or something like that.

Teiser: Would you dress for those dinners?

Gerstley : Tuxedo, no. You would wear a necktie and jacket or a suit.

Teiser: I suppose there was no music at the Fleishhacker's, but perhaps there was at the Levisons.

Gerstley : The only music I associate with the Levisons, really, was when they were in the country. That's when Jake [Jacob B. Levison] used to like to play his flute, and he would sometimes get some of the San Francisco Symphony orchestra down to accompany him. They had a two-story house, and he would sit upstairs in the balcony, and the orchestra would be down below. Uncle Jake was quite a character. There has been a lot written about Jake.

We all thought he was rather a bore. [laughter] When he would come over to England and stay with us, he would get my father in a corner and say, "Now, let me tell you, James--" and he would go into some long-winded story. So we rather dreaded his visits. [chuckles]

But he was obviously an able businessman, and the fact that Fireman's Fund did so well and was so well associated with his name, I think, is testimony to his ability to run the company and raise money during a difficult time, you know, after the 1906 earthquake, so that they met all their commitments--while many other insurance companies welshed on their commitments.

We were much fonder of Alice, his wife. And, of course, the boys were all pretty good friends. John, the oldest, we all thought he was a bit sticky. Bob had been over in England. In fact, he went to work for Lloyd's in London, to learn more about the insurance business. Later on, they started an insurance brokerage firm, Levison Brothers, in San Francisco. Charlie--a little later, when we lived in Los Angeles, we used to go over to the Pasadena Playhouse quite often when Charlie acted, and he and I were good friends, and so was his wife'. And George, of course, was the one closest to my age. I had known him at Potter's School, too. We saw a lot of George and also, after he married, Ellie [Eleanor] Heller, his sister-in-la$, and that's how we got to meet many new and interesting people.

Teiser: When you dined at the Levisons' house on Sundays, was it different from the dinners'at the Fleishhackers'?

Gerstley: I wouldn't really say so, not particularly. The food might be a little bit different, but basically, I would say, it was very much the same.

Teiser: I remember Mrs. Jacob B. Levison, Alice, and I thought she was a wonderful woman.

Gerstley: She was a wonderful woman. She wasn't quite as intellectual, I'd say, as Bella. I mean, she did a little painting in her later life, but she really wasn't the artist that Bella proved to be. But she was a very nice person, and we were very fond of her. We admired her very much for having put up with Jake for so long. [laughter]

Teiser: When I interviewed her,3 she was ninety-three. I thought she had a very clear view of life.

'Charles Levison changed his last name to Lane.

'George Levison married Aline Raas, the sister of Eleanor Raas Heller.

l lice Gerstle Levison, Familv Reminiscences, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1967. Gerstley: Yes, I think she did. I think she did. I think Bella did, too. As I say, Bella was shy, and she only came out of her shyness a little bit after Uncle Mortie died. He was always sort of the dominating figure in the family. After his death she built the little studio for herself at that place in the country and really got to painting seriously.

Teiser: In that same period, in the thirties, here, what was your social life with the people of your age?

Gerstley: Well, in the first place, because of the American youngsters I had met in England, a lot of them became friends and took me in hand, and I became a member, maybe even through Bob Levison, of the Beresford Country Club. I used to like to play golf. And through that, I met an awful lot of people like the Sintons, and the Arnsteins, and Guggenheims--mostly Jewish families. They were rather a tight knit community in San Francisco. And many of the older pioneer families in San Francisco were of Jewish origin.

I remember, not to my credit, that when I joined Beresford, I was living on very little money, and I fell way behind in paying my bills. I guess Bob Levison was on the board of Beresford, and I got a letter from Bob one day whether I couldn't do something about paying my bills, which I did over a period of, probably, months.

Friends. Relatives, and Social Activities

Gerstley: But the parents of the young people that I went around with-- the Branstens were very good friends, too, the Charles Branstens. Edith Bransten was my mother's sister, and she had two children, Richard and Clara. Clara is still alive. She's married to John Dinkelspiel, lives in Atherton. Richard, who was my best man at my wedding and one of my best friends--he married, and I went to his first wedding. When I was over here on this trip around the world, he married Louise Rosenberg. Rosenberg Brothers were very well known as one of the major produce broker of the time and she was the daughter of Abraham Rosenberg.

Louise was the daughter and obviously from a very wealthy family. Anyway, he married her. The marriage didn't work out too well, didn't last too long. They did have one child. They got divorced, and then Richard married Ruth McKenney, the writer. Richard, however, was-.-Iwas going to say he may have been a Socialist at one time. I think he became a Communist, which obviously didn't go down too well in the family. Ruth McKenney was, too, at one time--maybe always, for all I know. But Richard--wetraveled in Europe, and I saw a lot of him over here, and he had a marvelous sense of humor, Richard did. Liz loved him, too, and through him we met some very interesting people.

In 1927, in May, I was in Paris with the Bransten family, with Richard Bransten and Clara and Edith. I was there on the day that Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and landed in France, and I remember the enormous crowds and the excitement in Paris itself. Furthermore, Richard Bransten, who didn't really look like Lindbergh, but he had the same sort of head, was--I don't know--ina taxi or got out of the taxi on the street, and all of a sudden, he found himself surrounded by people who thought he was Lindbergh. [chuckles] That was quite a historical occasion, obviously.

But, anyway, to go back to the sort of parties and things in those days, outside of golf, every holiday--well,in the summertime, the parents, the Fleishhackers or the Branstens or the Levisons, one of the families, would give maybe big parties, barbecues, occasionally dances in the country, horseback rides-- you know, things like that. And in the wintertime, dances, or give you enough money to go to the Mark ~o~kinsor the Fairmont for dancing and eating. They really gave us young people a marvelous time and gave you a chance to meet everybody under the sun. I got to know Marjorie [Gunst] Stern, and Marjorie Seller, who was formerly Marjorie Bissinger, and before that, Marjorie Walter, and all the Walter family. People like that. We had wonderful times. That's how I met Liz, too, my wife, and Madeleine [Haas Russell]. I always felt that our children had nothing like as good a time in their youth as we did in this rather small group of wealthy Jewish families in San Francisco-- all of whom knew each other, belonged to the same club, and so forth and so on. They really knocked themselves out to give us a great time, even though some of this was during the Depression. Then a lot of them were not so well-off, but I guess things didn't cost as much in those days. The only thing that was really dangerous was drinking some of the liquor during prohibition because you never knew in those days, moonshine, whether it was good or not.

Teiser: Where did you get it?

Gerstley: Where they got it I don't honestly know. I think I mentioned, when I worked at Great Western Electrochemical, the laboratory spent part of its time analyzing whiskey that somebody got from someplace to make sure that we weren't poisoned. But whether anybody did for any of the other stuff we drank at some of these parties--but,I imagine the older folks were pretty careful.

Teiser: Did any of you young people rebel--exceptby becoming Communist? Was there any social rebellion of the kind that there very often is with young people?

Gerstley: I don't recall any overt rebellions, really. I mean, in my case, I was living a very long way from my parents, but my parents were very understanding people anyway. They weren't tyrannical; they didn't try to drive you in a certain way. I think, for example, Charlie [Charles] Bransten was probably a much more difficult person to get along with. That was Richard's father. He was a funny guy. And Edward Bransten, Sr., Charles's brother, who was the sort of head of MJB--he was a funny guy, too. He married Liz's mother's sister, Florine Haas, who was a wonderful absent-minded lady that we were very fond of. But Edward was kind of a serious individual, and I really don't know whether the children were involved at all. They may have been, but they ended up by going into the business--the boys did, William and Edward. Edward, incidentally, did an oral history, I think, for the Western Jewish History Center, which he sent me, which.1 read, which you might find interesting.1

Teiser : I remember that Janet Fleishhacker, Mortimer, Jr.'s, wife, described, very amusingly, her romance with Mortie and his father's attitude.

Gerstley: I was at their wedding, too. Uncle Mortie, and I think, Aunt Bella, too, were somewhat disapproving, because she was a Choynski, and her uncle or somebody [her father's brother] was "Battling Joe Choynski", the boxer. They didn't think the association was quite right for young Mortie. But I think Mortie and Janet, on the whole, were very happy.

Teiser : Before I interviewed them, someone suggested I talk to an attorney who knew them. He was quite candid about them. He said something like, "Well, what if your name were Fleishhacker, and someone suggested that you were going to marry someone named

l~dwardBransten: Historic Early Twentieth Centurv: San Franciscans, Family and Travels, interview conducted by Elaine Dorfman for the Western Jewish Center, Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, 1989. Choynski?" What he was meaning was, I'm sure, the way the San Francisco Jews of German heritage looked down upon San Francisco Jews of Eastern European heritage.

Gerstley: That's right.

Teiser: I don't know that there were many Eastern European Jews here who were known, at least.

Gerstley: No, I think that's true. They did sort of look down on the Eastern Jewish, the Polish Jewish families--the Germans did. In fact, I'm not sure, and I could be wrong about this, that in the early days of the Concordia Club, I'm not sure that they would allow Eastern European Jewish families to join. But I could be wrong about that. I think I heard that someplace. That was changed later on.

Teiser: Which reminds me that you were a member of the Olympic Club

Gerstley: I was a member of the Olympic Club.

Teiser: Were there many Jewish members of that?

Gerstley: No. It was really quite something, I think, to get in and belong to the Olympic Club, although during the Depression, I think, they were less fussy than later, because not everybody had the money to pay the initiation fee. It was only thanks to the pull of Mortie Fleishhacker, Sr., that I got in. I think Charlie Bransten was also a member. But there were not many, no. But when I moved to Los Angeles, they were associated with the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where I stayed for a while, and also with the Riviera Country Club, which is a golf club. I got to join that and play golf.

Teiser: Living in a club in those days must have been pleasant

Gerstley: Oh, yes, it was. It was pleasant. I mean, the food was pleasant, not expensive. You could use the swimming pool when you wanted to, and it was really very nice. You had a chance to see some other people, meet some other people. I enjoyed it.

Teiser: When you went out with your wife-to-be in San Francisco, what did you do?

'1n the 1928 volume, The New Societv Blue Book, (San Francisco: Marguerite M. Pinchard, publisher) the list of Concordia Club members contains few names that are discernably Eastern European. Gerstley: Well, sometimes we would go to the movies. Sometimes we would go dancing at the Mark Hopkins, which didn't cost very much. Sometimes, on a weekend, we might go on,a picnic up Mount Tamalpais. Often, during the season, we would go to football games, because we both enjoyed Stanford. We would go to the Cal football games, too. I think occasionally we went horseback riding. In the summertime, Madeleine Russell had this place in Atherton, which had been left to her by her parents [Charles W. and Fannie Haas]. Alice Lilienthal, Liz's mother, was a sister of the man who married, I think, one of the Sterns. They had some money. Anyway, this house was built on the estate they owned, and when Madeleine went to live with Alice and Sam [Lilienthal], they built a cottage on the place, so that they could all be down there in the country in the summer, but Madeleine would have the big house. They put in a swimming pool. That was about 1929, something like that, about the time just before I came over--maybeabout 1929 or '30. So, in the summertime, I often used to be invited down to lunch on Sundays and to all the parties that were given down there. I remember they gave wonderful parties. So practically every weekend in 'the summertime I was down there. At first I used to drive down with Edward [Bransten] or somebody, and then later I had my own car.

Teiser : Were the occasions at the Lilienthals' house different from those at the Fleishhackers' and the Levisons'?

Gerstley: Well, it was more relaxed, in a way, because, the weekend, there might just be a couple of us invited down, and we would swim. Usually, they had quite a lot of people come down for swimming. I remember Marjorie Stern used to come, Dick [Richard] Arnstein, and we would have a picnic lunch out by the swimming pool and spend the afternoon swimming, and sometimes stay for dinner or go home before dinner.

Teiser: Were there tennis courts?

Gerstley: Yes. Oh, and Sam loved to play tennis. We would play tennis, too. And there was a big vegetable and fruit garden in the back, which there still is. We played a lot of tennis, and Liz played a lot of tennis, too. And, of course, she went to Stanford for a while, and then she ended up at Smith.

Teiser: The Lilienthals' permanent home was down the Peninsula here? Gerstley: Well, their permanent home was really 2007 Franklin Street in San Francisco--youknow, the Haas-Lilienthal House? That was their home. This was just the summer place.

[Interview 2 : February 26, 19901 ##

World War I1

Teiser: I think we stopped our earlier interview session in the thirties. You went to Los Angeles in '33, didn't you, so that you were there during the war? Since we had talked a little about World War I, let me ask about World War 11. You had no relatives in Germany?

Gerstley: We had no close relatives in Germany. I won't say that there may not have been one or two, because I really never met any of my father's family who may have been living in Germany during World War 11.

Teiser: So you weren't in a position of feeling you had to help relatives get out of Germany during World War II?

Gerstley: No. I think on the American side, the family on my mother's side that lived in San Francisco--Iam sure that they knew one or two relatives who lived in Germany, and I think they did actively try to finance people getting out of Germany. But I think a lot of the smarter people got out before the war, you know, when Hitler came in.

Teiser: You were in England briefly during World War 11, were you?

Gerstley: I was there on Borax business. I got a priority from one of the government departments, I think it was the navy actually, to fly over. I did, and I flew over in a flying boat. I think it was one of the Pacific Clippers that used to fly the Pacific instead of the Atlantic. I flew with several other people who had priorities, and I remember how blacked out London seemed to be when I finally arrived by train from the South Coast, where we had landed in the water. Taxis just had a little, like a flashlight, light. On the trains, they had to tell you which side the platform was when the train stopped, because it was black; you couldn't see. I was in England for about two months.

Teiser: Were you in London?

Gerstley: No, I was in London part of the time. My father, who was the joint managing director of Borax in England at that time, had the wisdom just before the war to rent a place at Oxshott in Surrey, which is only about a twenty, twenty-five minute train ride from London, and had rented a big house for the office. The staff were scattered around in houses in the little village, and Mother and Dad had this place. I was down there, primarily because, as I said, I was over there on some Borax business, partly--butnot entirely. I mean, I was in London part of the time, and I had to see certain government officers in connection with certain arrangements that the United States government had which involved borates. But I also used the occasion to talk to my father and Mr. Lesser, who was also a joint managing director, and who were running the company, because Borax Consolidated at that time--reallyowned Pacific Coast Borax. I talked to them about postwar plans and so forth, and this was very useful. As a result, I think, when the war ended, we got a very large jump on our competitors, which proved to be very prof itable.

But the rationing that you saw in England was such a contrast to America, and even the newspapers--a newspaper was just two sheets of paper, and all four sides, of course, was the news. That was it. I remember, when I got back to New York and found the New York Times, it seemed as though you were carrying a ton instead of a quarter of an ounce. [chuckles] But as far as raids were concerned, yes, we had some bombing raids, but a lot of the activity at that time, because there was the threat of an invasion of the continent, really, not just England--this is 1943--a lot of it was German planes coming over to try to take pictures of various areas and see whether, I guess, boats were gathering, or troops were gathering, or what was going on. But there were usually some raids, and there was a battery of guns stationed not very far from our house, and searchlights, so that very often, if we were playing bridge or something in the evening, we would hear a few bangs go off. You had to be careful about shrapnel, too, if you were out walking in the dark, if you went out for dinner and walked home, because sometimes you could hear shrapnel falling on the road or nearby, and so you were supposed to wear a helmet if you went out at night.

Teiser: I'm sure you were glad to get back here.

Gerstley: Well, it was nice to get back, but I'm glad I went over, too. Very interesting. Los An~eles- in the 1930s

Teiser: You spent most of your time from 1933 until your retirement in Southern California.

Gerstley: You did ask [in an outline preliminary to the interview] whether there was much difference in the early days between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Teiser : Yes.

Gerstley: In the early thirties, I would say very much so. San Francisco seemed like a city. It was, I think, at that time the most important city on the West Coast, and, certainly, from the standpoint of theater and museums and concerts and things, it was considerably ahead of Los Angeles.

When I first went to Los Angeles, for example, Wilshire Boulevard, which today is one high-rise building next to another, had maybe a quarter of a mile, a half-mile stretch where there wasn't anything, just some green or trees or something like that. The only point that you could have called a city was downtown Los Angeles, which, I'm sure, in area was smaller than San Francisco at that time--anyway,in population. It seemed like a small city surrounded by an awful lot of suburbs, Westwood and Brentwood and areas like that. While there was very good theater in Pasadena, there were lots of movie houses in Los Angeles. So it just seemed like a small place where you had to do a lot of driving. And if you went, say, out towards Pomona, you just drove along miles and miles of orange groves, which were beautiful, and a lovely blue sky, and sometimes in the winter with snow on the hills or the mountains as a backdrop. And, of course, there was no smog. But times changed during the war.

Teiser : The social life in the two cities--wasit quite different?

Gerstley: Yes. I wouldn't say--Imean, there weren't a lot of big parties such as the families in San Francisco gave. We got to meet relatives of some of the people in San Francisco. We played tennis with a sister-in-lawof Harry Mack, who was Mother's brother. They had a lovely place, and they invited us to play tennis. I played golf at Riviera. And, later on, when I was in business down there, when I moved up in the world and became general manager and later president, some of my vice presidents used to invite me to play golf at Be1 Air and L.A. Country Club as well as Riviera. But from the social standpoint, it was mostly much smaller groups. We played poker, bridge occasionally, went to movies, and so forth. But as far as big parties were concerned, I think we gave one or two, and maybe we went to one or two, not very many.

Teiser: When you played poker, you played it with men only, I assume?

Gerstley: No.

Teiser: Women played poker, too?

Gerstley: Oh, yes, very much so. My wife even learned to play poker. She didn't know the rules very well, so she had them all carefully written down, that the three-of-a-kind beat two pair, and so forth and so on. So when she bet, we all dropped out. [laughter] Unless we had an awfully good hand. We had a lot of fun. And we used to go out to the beach a lot. Santa Monica in the early days only had, I think, one or two beach clubs at the most, and one could go out. At nighttime, for example, you could build a fire on the beach, and have a barbecue, and go for a swim. We had some friends that lived close :o Santa Monica, and Liz and I often used to go out, oh, on a Saturday or Sunday and go for a swim, ride the waves, and go up to their place maybe for lunch or a drink. It was very nice. They say today it's quite different. There were hardly any freeways in those days, either.'

'For Mr. Gerstley's career in the borax and chemical industry and his Southern California community activites, see pp. 49-125.

I1 RETIREMENT

Return to Northern California. 1962

Teiser: You retired in 1961, I believe?

Gerstley: That's right.

Teiser: And then came to this area again. How did you happen to decide to?

Gerstley: Well, when I retired as president, I was made vice chairman of the board of United States Borax and Chemical, and I just kept my old office. But when you've been very active and busy and seeing people all day long, and telephone ringing and whatnot, I found it very quiet and dull. So my mother, by that time, had moved out from England. My father had died, and she had resumed her American citizenship. Liz's mother also was alive in San Francisco, and Liz had lots of relatives up here, as I did.

So we decided we would look around for another place. While we did look in Southern California--we looked in Santa Barbara and down not too far from San Diego, even--we decided it made much more sense to move up here. We liked it better. We liked the climate, really, better. It was getting smoggy down south, and traffic was getting pretty awful. Even living in Beverly Hills, as we did at that time, it wasn't as attractive as it had been. So we looked around up here, and we looked around over in Marin County quite a bit, because we knew that area quite well, our great-grandfathers [Lewis Gerstle and Louis Sloss] having lived over there.

But then I felt I really ought to be somewhere close to an airport at least, because being vice chairman of the board I often had to fly down to Los Angeles to board meetings when the English chairman couldn't come out. I was really the American chairman. I was still on the board at Pomona College, particularly on its investment committee. So it meant I had to fly to Los Angeles at least once a month and sometimes twice a month, and driving from Marin to an airport was a long way.

So we decided to look down the Peninsula, and I remembered how nice Woodside was from my Fleishhacker experiences, and so did Liz. We found some land that we liked very much. In those days, land in Woodside was not frightfully expensive, and we had sold our house in Beverly Hills at a considerable profit compared with what we had originally bought it for, and if you reinvested in a new house within a certain period of time, you didn't have to pay capital gains taxes. Anyway, that's what we did. We decided to build our own house, because we had most of the furniture which we bought in England years before, and so we could sort of plan a house around the furniture to some extent. This we did, and by looking at one or two other houses when we were looking for a site, we saw a house of which we particularly liked the modules of the windows. We found out who the architect was, and we liked him.

Teiser: Who was the architect?

Gerstley: Leslie Nichols, who's dead now. He had a very'good assistant, and we worked out plans with him. We got bids from various contractors, and our contractor that we chose was a Japanese, actually, a local Japanese. We worried so much about the building of the house that we went to Europe, which shows that we had great faith in our architect! We were in Europe for a while, but actually what we did--we rented a house in Woodside around May or June of that year, so that we could be reasonably on top of things. We moved in, I think, in about November of ' 62.

The Lilienthals and the Branstens

Teiser: Did you immediately, then, become active in the kind of San Francisco affairs that you later took on, like the Brundage collection at the Asian Art Museum?

Gerstley: Well, the first thing that I became active in, I guess, was the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage. The Haas-Lilienthal house at 2007 Franklin Street in San Francisco--whenLiz's mother died, the question was, what to do with the house--whether to sell it or what? Actually, the Society of California Pioneers took a look at the house. They thought they might move in there, but then they decided the parking was really not adequate.

Then along came the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage, and they thought it would make a wonderful headquarters. Since they were interested in presenring architecture in San Francisco, it seemed to make a lot of sense to.have, as their headquarters, something that epitomized early San Francisco. So I negotiated with lawyers on behalf of the' family the sale and what to do about the furniture--what furniture was moved and what furniture was left there and what furniture they might be able to get back over a period of time and also help them raise an initial small endowment. So I was asked to go on the board.

I went on the board, I guess, of the foundation for two or three years. I helped them raise money and formulate policy. I didn't have anything to do with the appearances before, maybe, the Board of Supervisors or the city in trying to prevent a historical house being razed--at least, I didn't usually. I think on one or two occasions, I did try to help them preserve something that seemed very important. But largely, mine was on policy questions, fundraising questions, how to help them plan receptions at the house that would bring in revenue and make the house better known and build up annual support that way for the house.

Teiser: Can you give a description of life in that house as you remember it from before you were married?

Gerstley: Well, my wife could give you a much better description. The original house had had a wing built onto it when Madeleine Russell and her brother, Billy, came to live there after their parents died, her father being the brother of Alice Lilienthal, Liz's mother. They built this wing on so that there would be someplace for them to live in. The house had quite a large staff when I first went there. It was occupied by Liz's parents, by Liz, by her brother, and her sister, and Madeleine, and Billy. So there were really five kids and two adults living there. It was a very gracious place. Alice and Sam did a fair amount of entertaining, partly for their friends, partly for the children.

Teiser: Did they have large parties? Gerstley : Once in a blue moon. The house had a basement, and in the early days, sometimes if it was a very big party, it would be downstairs in the basement. But usually they were dinner parties, quiet parties, and they could seat--Idon't recall the number exactly, but I should think about fifteen or so to the table. In the early days, I often had dinner on Sunday night at Alice and Sam's, and then after we were married, since they used to exchange with the Edward Branstens who lived further down, closer to California Street--butalso on the same street--we would walk over to the Branstens one Sunday, and the other Sunday they often came over to us.

Teiser : Was there much contrast between those dinners and those that the Levisons and the Fleishhackers--

Gerstley: No, I wouldn't say so. Not really.

Teiser: Were they much the same?

Gers tley : Yes, much the same. Very friendly, pleasant dinners, and very good ones, too.

Teiser : What did people talk about? You said the conversation was generally quite good.

Gers tley : Oh, all sorts of things. School, college, politics sometimes, what was going on in the world, football games, who was getting married. I guess the usual sort of things. And books sometimes. They were well-read people. The conversation was usually quite lively.

Teiser: Did they argue sometimes, say, over politics?

Gerstley : Oh, I would think that we had a lot of arguments, maybe, over politics and probably other events also. But I don't think Alice and Sam argued very much. They were both Republicans, but whether Liz in those days was a Republican or a Democrat, I don't know, but I suspect she was leaning towards Democracy, and Madeleine, too. So I'm sure we had quite a few arguments-- discussions. at least.

Teiser: The Lilienthals--Alice and Sam Lilienthal--howwould you characterize them?

Gers tley : Well, Alice was very gracious. She was somewhat shy. Alice never went to college, I think, and I think she felt a little bit, how shall I say, maybe didn't quite compare in education with some of the other people. But actually she was perfectly well-educated, and she was a very good hostess, a wonderful mother and grandmother later on. She was very imaginative. She would give very imaginative parties, particularly down in the country at Atherton, where there was room for more bigger parties.

Teiser: Like what, for instance?

Gerstley: Oh, fancy dress parties and things like that. She would first make up a theme, and everybody would come in appropriate costume and so forth.

Sam was very well-educated, had a fine presence. They both had excellent senses of humor. Sam was a very good businessman. He was on the board of Wells Fargo Bank. He was president of Haas Brothers, which had been founded by some predecessors of Alice's. He was on, I think, a number of committees, and he was generous--they both were--to both Jewish and non-Jewish causes. He really stood for something in the community. So I was very fond of both of them. Sam was always very supportive. When he went to bank meetings, he would collect a fee, and he used to send that to--he may have sent some to the others, too--heused to send it to Liz periodically when we were married. Liz was apparently at one time not very prompt about cashing the check, so he wrote her a note and-saidhe was so glad she was so rich that she didn't need the money. [chuckles] After that, she cashed the checks much more promptly.

Teiser: What were the Edward Branstens like? What sort of people were they?

Gerstley: Well, Florine was rather an absent-minded, charming individual whom we all loved. I guess he [Edward.]had a sense of humor, but he always seemed rather a stern individual to me. The children--Williamwas the oldest, then Edward, Alice, and Frances. There were two boys and two girls. Edward was the one, I guess, that I knew best at that time, because he visited us in England. He was the one, actually, that took me down to Atherton initially and introduced me to his cousins. That's how I got to know the Lilienthals. I might have met them some other way, but that's how, in fact, I did.

Of course, they were in the MJB Coffee business. Ed Bransten was the head of the MJB Coffee--the senior Edward. But the boys went into the business as well. Young Edward actually--hewas quite erudite, and he probably would have made a good school teacher, but I think his father talked him into going into the business. William was a good businessman and had a very good sense of humor. Frances married a Rothmann. We didn't think it was a particularly happy marriage. Maybe she did--she had children, as did Edward and William. Alice married later on. She was bright, too. Frances was a little bit like her mother, sort of absent-minded but very nice. She was a very good friend of Liz's.

The Asian Art Museum

Teiser: I interrupted you. You were about to say, after you had worked on the - - Gerstley: Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage?

Teiser : Yes.

Gerstley: I think the next thing I got involved in was the Asian Art Commission.

Teiser: How did you happen to do that?

Gerstley: Well, that was Marjorie Stern. Marjorie, on some occasion--she was down here. We were having lunch or dinner or something. She had been one of the people who helped to persuade Brundage to give his first collection to San Francisco in 1959. He gave it to the deYoung Museum, and Brundage was very unhappy with the attention that was being paid to his collection by the deYoung Museum trustees. He complained to Marjorie and others who had been involved with the Society for Asian Art, and she was telling me about all these troubles one day. I said, "Maybe one could interpose a committee of people who really cared about Asian art between the deYoung Museum board and the Asian art museum personnel." I said that the then-chairman of the deYoung board, I think, was Ransom Cook. I knew him from business. I went to see him, and I suggested this, and he thought it was worth exploring, but he said it could only be done if the then- mayor of San Francisco, John F. Shelley, would approve it and set up the necessary procedures.

But Shelley wouldn't do anything about it. He wasn't well, anyway, which we hadn't known at the time, but he wouldn't do anything about it. Then, all of a sudden, he went out of office, and Joe [Joseph L.] Alioto was elected mayor. I guess Marjorie and others presented the case to Joe Alioto, and Joe said he thought it was important, because Brundage at that point--thiswas about '68 or so--hadamassed a second collection, which was on loan to San Francisco. He was playing around with Los Angeles about giving them the collection if they would contribute some money for acquisitions and things--you know, build the proper museum, et cetera, et cetera. Joe Alioto saw the importance of trying to keep the entire collection in San Francisco, and so Gwin Follis and Cyril Magnin, as his representatives, I think, went to see Brundage in Chicago. At that point, he said he would set up a separate commission to run the museum of people who cared about Asian art, so Magnin said he would build a jade room, and Gwin Follis helped to carry the day, I think, with the prestige of his position. And Brundage said, "Okay. We'll work out a contract, and if you do what you say, I will give all of my collection to San Francisco."

Well, when they started to put together the members of the new Asian Art Commission who were going to take over--infact, at that point, originally, it was not going to be called the Asian Art Museum. It was called the Center of Asian Art and Culture. We were the board of the Center of Asian Art and Culture. My name, as a board member I guess, was put forward by Marjorie. I think I mentioned that when Joe Alioto first heard my name, he said, "Not the Borax Gerstley?!" We had been on opposing sides in my antitrust suit in Los Angeles. But, anyway, I was put on with Fritz Jewett and all the others, and the contract was signed. One of the conditions of the contract was that we had to raise, as a legal obligation, a million and a half dollars in eighteen months, that Brundage could use for acquisitions. And, as a moral obligation, another million and a half dollars in a further period of eighteen months. The day after the contract was signed, which was signed out at the museum, Fritz Jewett got a telephone call from Avery Brundage, to say that he needed $350,000 by the next afternoon!

Of course, one of the conditions I should have mentioned, besides the formation of the Center of Asian Art and Culture, was the creation of an Asian Art Museum Foundation, so that financial gifts could be made to the foundation, which would be tax-deductible to the donor without having to go through the city. If they had given the money to the Center of Asian Art and Culture, that was a city institution, and you would have to get a resolution from the city that the money went back to the museum, and it was a real headache. So the foundation was established on the same day, I think it was, that the Center of Asian Art and Culture board came into being. I was made the vice chairman and first treasurer of the foundation, and Fritz Jewett was the chairman of the foundation.

Anyway, he got this phone call, and it was--obviously,we hadn't had a chance to raise any money, so Fritz went down to the bank. I've forgotten which bank. I did, too, and Fritz, I think, pledged $300,000 on his own recognizance, and I pledged $50,000 on my recognizance. So we had a great impetus to go out and raise money so that we would get paid back, which we did. Fritz, of course, was quite wealthy. His family, I guess, was Weyerhaeuser family, and he was involved with Potlatch Corporation at that time. He also had a personal family foundation.

Anyway, we went out, and we raised money. We also got some help from Joe Alioto. About that time, Adrian Gruhn had come to Joe Alioto and said he wanted to do something for San Francisco where his name would be recognized. So Joe introduced him to Fritz and to me, and we took Adrian Gruhn and his wife out to the museum, because Brundage had given his permission to name galleries after major donors, which was very smart, because that is how a lot of money is raised. We talked them into naming the main court at the Asian Art Museum the Gruhn Court, in return for an irrevocable pledge of $350,000,which in those days meant quite a lot of money.

But Fritz and I--weboth gave money, and we raised money -from various sources: corporations, banks, individuals. Marjorie Seller--whowas originally Marjorie Walter, and then Marjorie Bissinger until Paul Bissinger died, and later she married Bob Seller. I guess she was Marjorie Bissinger at that particular time. She was one of the early members of the Society of Asian Art that knew Brundage in the early days. She was a major donor. Anyway, we scrambled around between individuals, corporations, and maybe one or two foundations, not too many--individual foundations, usually--weraised the million and a half dollars, including Cyril Magnin's contribution of the jade room, which counted towards it. We raised that well within the eighteen months. And we went on and raised the moral obligation within its time period, too.

Teiser: When you start raising money like that, how do you decide where to go? Does one person suggest another, or you get a list up?

Gerstley: Well. I guess I learned quite a bit about fundraising when I first went on the board at Pomona College. There are three primary sources of fundraising. One is individuals. One is corporations. One is foundations. In fact, if you're a specific entity like a museum there are also potential government funds available, National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the case of Asian Art [Museum], we had a board that had been appointed, which included Evie [Evelyn Danzig] Haas, for example, the wife of Walter Haas, Jr. This is before she went on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and became the chairman of it. Dick [Richard] ~urn~', I think, was on our original board We had a lot of prominent people, and we got some suggestions from them.

[Interview 2: February 26, 19901{/{I

Gerstley: We got some suggestions from them as to individuals, and, of course, we had some ideas of our own on individuals. Likewise, with corporations, we knew certain corporations that did business with the Orient, for example. I think Joe Alioto gave us some suggestions, too. And one thing he did: the city of San Francisco collects a hotel tax fund, which is administered by one of the.departments of the city, which is not under the direct direction, let's say, of the mayor. But, obviously, he is in very close contact with it. In this case, because of the commitment we had made, Joe helped us go to this entity, and we got, for a period of five years or so, a grant of money collected through the hotel tax fund, which was very helpful.

As far as foundations are concerned, foundations don't usually give for building purposes, but they will give for, say, an educational need. They might give for acquisitions in certain cases. You really have to stalk any major donor according to their interests, I found. You sort of sit down, you try to find out what their interests are and then make a case that might appeal to them. If you do your homework properly, it often works.

One of the things you have to learn when you're in the fundraising business is that if you fail in one of your approaches, that doesn't mean it's the end of the world. A lot of people who don't know anything about fundraising or--Iknow people like my friend Marjorie Seller, who is enormously generous herself. She wouldn't think of going to ask anybody for money, because it makes her feel shy. It makes her feel that she's asking for herself. You've got to realize you're asking for a cause that you believe in, not yourself. And, okay--if you get turned down, it doesn't mean a personal insult. It may mean that the person isn't interested, or they haven't got the funds at the time, or they've got too many other things they need to support.

But there's always quite a lot of homework. For example, 1'11 just give you an illustration. [producing book] This is a

'~ichard B. Gump, Comvoser. Artist and Presidents of Gumv's, San Francisco, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1989.' book. It's at , which is published periodically [by Northern California Grantmakers, San Francisco] and which is very useful in giving you a lead towhat foundations might be interested in an educational program or an acquisition or whatever it might be. And there are larger books, even, that specialize in telling you what national corporations, not just local corporations, are interested in. Again, if you go through this--youusually try to get a development officer on your staff who knows something about this and can do the digging so you don't have to spend all your time digging up the information. But there's an awful lot of information available.

I had to call on a lot of people. I remember the first time I met Brundage. This was before, I think, the agreement was finally signed in '69. I was in Southern California, and he was living in Santa Barbara at that time. And I think Marjorie Stern arranged it. I went to call on him and meet him, and so forth. I remember he was showing me some of his great treasures, and he gave me--I've forgotten what it was, it was a Ming jar or a Sung jar or something--tolook at. I was admiring it. Then he said, "You know, it's worth $500,000," or something like that. Scared me so I nearly dropped it. [laughter]

Teiser: What sort of man was he?

Gerstley: Well, he was a funny character. He was a building contractor in the early days in Chicago, a very successful one. And, of course, he was very interested in athletics. That's how he got to be head of the Olympic Committee. He was a good athlete himself. In fact, if you walked down one of the corridors of the museum, you really had to walk fast to keep up with old Avery. His first marriage, I think, ended in a divorce. His second one--he got married to Princess Somebody-or-other-- didn't last. Well, I guess he died before too long.

He could be quite abrasive. I asked him how did he get interested in collecting Asian art? I mention this because I was just reading Dick Gump's memoirs, and Dick Gump mentions that Avery Brundage used to come into his store periodically and admire the jade and stuff like that and, I guess, buy some. Dick Gump was asked whether this got Brundage interested in Asian art, and he said he didn't really know. Well, my recollection of what Brundage told me, when I asked him the question, was--initially,he had the idea he was going to collect the finest ancient art in the world. Then he discovered that there were such things as the British Museum, and the Metropolitan, and the Louvre, and so forth, that had been there before him. How naive he could have been in those days! I think he told me he was in Paris sometime in the thirties when there was a very interesting, I've forgotten whether it was an Asian, Chinese, or Indonesian--itmight have been a Khmer-- exhibition, and this got him really interested in Asian art. He discovered that you could still get art out of Asia and that there was some fine art to be obtained. It was at this point, I guess, that he met Ivon D'Argence, who had graduated in Asian Art at the University of California, or in France. I'm not sure. I think he did something at the University of California. He used Ivon and his knowledge to help in selecting objects, and they did a lot of traveling together. That's how he amassed his first collection. I don't really think that Dick Gump had anything to do with getting him initially interested in Asian art. I think it was his trip to France at the time.

Avery Brundage used to go around to dealers. When he saw something he liked, he would put down, maybe, $1,000 or $5,000--forsomething costing, maybe $150,000--andthen, "1'11 be back with the rest later on." So the first million and a half [dollars] that Fritz and I raised--a lot of it was to pay the balance on many of these commitments that he had made.

Teiser : Did dealers mind that?

Gerstley: I couldn't really tell you. [chuckles] I guess they felt that Brundage was worth a lot of money. And, in those days, I think there wasn't the same interest in Asian art worldwide as perhaps there is today. There wasn't so much competition, and so maybe--anyway,I guess their experience with Brundage had been satisfactory.

When the Center of Asian Art and Culture came into being, Ivon D'Argence became the curator of the deYoung, appointed by Brundage--because the Brundage wing of the deYoung was built by a bond issue that was approved by the voters. Ivon became the director of the Asian Art museum. He was a difficult man, too. He was an egomaniac, I would describe him as. He was knowledgeable as far as Asian art was concerned, but he was very poor at handling staff, made no effort to raise money or cultivate the public, really. Brundage, I think, told me once that he probably wouldn't have made Ivon the director if it had been up to him. But, at that time, he was the person in place, and there was a small staff already, Clarence Shangraw, Terese Bartholomew, Yoshiko Kakudo and a couple of others. Anyway, we finally, after many difficult years got rid of Ivon and he was succeeded by Rand Castile.

I became the second chairman of the commission. Fritz, I think, served for about two and a half years or something like that, and then I was elected the chairman. While I was chairman, we had to prepare an annual budget for the city amongst other things. If Ivon wanted something, he would ring up Brundage and get Brundage to maybe ring me up and see whether he couldn't persuade me to do something that I had already turned Ivon down on. While he and I got along very well, I didn't succumb to some of his orders or blandishments, because, well, you know--youhave to stand up for what you think is right.

But I think Brundage was quite happy with the Center of Asian Art and Culture after it was formed, and when he died he still had a few pieces back in Chicago. They all came to us. I can't say I knew him intimately. He was always perfectly pleasant as far as I was concerned.

Teiser : I imagine that people like that are easier for other business people--other people who are experienced in the business field--

Gerstley: Yes, I would say so. I would say so. Very much so.

Teiser : In gathering funds for the Asian Art Museum, did you ask any Oriental Californians to donate?

Gerstley: Oh, I think so. For example, when we put on special exhibitions, like the Chinese archaeological exhibition, or the Korean exhibition--I remember with the Korean exhibition, we went to the Korean consul. We told him what we were planning to do and so forth, and he said, "I think I can help you." Also, the Korean Chamber of Commerce. And, in due course of time, we got a very substantial grant from Korea. ,Iunderstand that the way they do it in Korea is, some minister calls in a bunch of businessmen and says, "I need $150,000. You give $25,000; you give $50,000. You give $30,000, too." That's it. I wish it was as easy over here. [laughter] But, yes, we did get some help from Chinese--Imean, American-born Chinese--andKoreans, and some Taiwanese.

Teiser: Japanese?

Gerstley : And Japanese likewise.

Teiser : One would have thought that all of those people would have been very enthusiastic about giving.

Gerstley : Well, the Japanese--theyhave given a lot of support to various institutions in America, and we were not the only ones who were clamoring for attention at times. The biggest collection at the Asian Art Museum is Chinese. It's also the oldest, of course.

Fig. 2 SAN FRANCISCO SPONSORS

National Endowment for the Humanities

Asian Art Commission The San Francisco Foundation IBM Corporation Bank of America Foundation Standard Oil Company of California The Chinese-American Committee Asian Art Foundation of San Francisco

Crocker National Bank Fireman's Fund American Foundation Foremost-McKesson Inc. Joseph Magnin Co., Inc. United California Bank Bank of California Banque Nat~onalede Paris- Hughes Airwest French Bank of California United Air Lines Security Pacific National Bank Wilbur Ellis-Connell Bros. Co., Ltd.

The Museum Society The Society for Asian Art

.Mr. and Mrs. Avery Brundage Mr. and Mrs. Albert E. Kern, Jr. h\r. and Mrs. Alexander D. Calhoun, jr. Mr. Cyril Magnin The Christensen Foundation Mr. Edward M. Nagel Mr. and Mrs. Jack M. Dant Mrs. Madeleine H. Russell Mr. and Mrs. George Hopper Fitch Mr. and Mrs. William P. Scott, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. James M. Gerstley Mr. and Mrs. Robert Seller Mrs. Edward T. Harrison Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Shorenstein Jaquelin Hume Foundation Paul and Phyllis Wattis Foundation Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr.

Photographs courtesy of Ornofro Kessel. Srn~thson~rnMrgrzlne. and !Zak*eRmffl!cX*l f -*a* !Z+ffl#& 1 9 7 2. Teiser: Did you have much support from the Chinese community?

Gerstley: Not from mainland China, obviously. They don't have a lot of funds. But we did get some support from the local Chinese community, some of whom have money and some of whom don't. For example, the Chinese archaeological exhibition, which was the greatest success that I guess we ever had in putting on an exhibition, had been to London. I saw it first in London, as a matter of fact, long before it had gotten here. I thought it was a marvelous exhibition. Then, I think, it was in Paris, and then it went to, I think, Toronto, and then ultimately to Washington. We only had it for two months. It was in London for three months, I think, and I think in Paris for three months. But we outdrew London in two months with simply enormous crowds of people. I remember the last day of the exhibition, we had something like 25,000 people go through our museum. The only sad part of it is, in those days we didn't charge admission. Of course, we might never have had quite so big crowds if we had charged admission, but we could have made an awful lot of money for the museum. It was only later on that the city decided we should charge admission to help the city's budget processes.

For the Chinese exhibition, we got quite a lot of help, as I recall, from the National Endowment for the Arts. They gave us a grant, and they gave us a challenge grant as well. We matched the challenge grant, and we made money, of course, selling catalogs and things like that, and also some reproductions . With the Korean exhibition, again, we got support from Washington and Korea, as I had mentioned. But we did charge admission, and we made a lot of money out of it, which helped the programs of the museum. It helped us build the programs-- the educational programs, the exhibition program, acquisition funds, and so forth. But I had felt that we needed an endowment fund. We needed money that we could count on year after year instead of by happenstance. You were never quite sure when you would go to private sources what you were going to get. And so I got the foundation to start an endowment fund. Then we got a challenge grant from Washington to really build it up, and we met the challenge. Today it's a little under five million dollars, which is really peanuts for an endowment fund, but it's better than zero. We're hoping to build it a good deal more. And even with close to five million dollars, your income can be $350,000 to $400,000 a year, which is very helpful. One of the things in the contract that we had signed between the city and Brundage in '69 provided that the city would provide us with a budget adequate to our needs. That's a pretty broad statement, and it is not an agreement that the city has really lived up to. And so we've had some battles with the city over this. When Joe Alioto was mayor and I got to know him well, I did get him to increase our budget and to give us some additional staff that we needed--educationalcurator, administrative assistant and so forth.

But when-Dianne Feinstein was mayor, I had quite a battle with her over.the budget. I went to her administrative assistant one day, and I said, "You know, we're going to have to end up by suing the city. We have an obligation as directors of the museum to see that the contract is lived up to. I don't want to sue the city, but we're going to be left with no alternative unless the city comes through with a much better budget than Dianne Feinstein is planning to give us." Well, he went to Dianne, and, I guess, maybe scared her a little bit, because we got a phone call from Dianne. She wanted to come to our next budget meeting. At that point, she proposed to materially increase our budget over a period of three or four years.

Unfortunately--well,that's sort of bringing you down to today, but, unfortunately, as you know, when she went out of office, she left some very large deficits. So we've been struggling with this situation--then,with the recent earthquake, which hasn't helped the situation. Nonetheless, I think, in presenting our budget for this year, we again are going to emphasize the fact that the city's got a contract. We won't get what we want, but we need it more than ever.

Gerstley : I feel that anybody who retires, if they don't keep their mind fully occupied and busy, that they are apt to go to pieces very quickly. I've seen it happen too often. Anyway, I like to be busy, and I like challenges. I'm one of those crazy people who do. This certainly kept me busy, but it's given me some very happy times, too, and all the different things I've been involved with--you meet more people, and they're brought into your circle, and you meet many interesting people among them. So Liz and I made a lot of good friends through this. Because I lived in Los Angeles so long, these various activities have introduced me to a broader section of San Francisco than I knew before. And learning to deal with City Hall--that's quite an educational process, too.

The Western Jewish Historv Center

Teiser: You also have been active in the Friends of Bancroft Library and the Western Jewish History Center. I don't know which came first. Gerstley: The Western Jewish History Center.

Teiser: How did you happen to get interested in that?

Gerstley: Well, I think it was Jim [James D.] Hart of the Bancroft Library. Jim Hart--heknew I was interested in history and had taken history at Cambridge. We had lunch one day, and he said, "We were thinking of forming a Western Jewish History Center as part of the [Judah L. ] Magnes Museum in Berkeley." I didn' t know anything about the Magnes Museum or Judah Magnes at that time. He said, "Would you be willing to help? One of the places we need the most help is to raise some money to get it started." And I said, yes, I certainly would, being Jewish and interested in history. I went to Walter Haas, Sr., head of Levi Strauss, Dan Koshland, I think, Mick Hellman, and two or three others. I raised a few thousand dollars a year for two or three years. This was enough to get them started.

So I was made the first chairman of the committee. Jim Hart was on the committee, and I think Bobby Sinton was on the committee, and Sissy Geballe was on the committee. Seymour Fromer--he was the head of the Magnes Museum, and he was the one who had the idea of founding the Western Jewish History Center, I think, with Jim Hart. Moses Rischin has been the historian. As I say, I was the first chairman, and helped to raise needed funds. I was on the board for quite a few years, and I was succeeded by Frank Sloss, who died not very long ago. He was the one who wrote that little tribute to me at an anniversary of the Western Jewish History Center. Later, Norman Coliver was the head of it.

'see Appendix. Gerstley: Funds for the library at the Western Jewish History Center I got from my friends Phil and Mona Colman. They were great friends of ours in Los Angeles. Phil Colman was the son of Jesse Colman, who was a very famous San Francisco supervisor and, I guess, chairman of the board of supervisors at one time. He died. Anyway, I got them to donate funds in memory of Jesse Colman to initiate the library.

After a time, I got so involved with the Asian Art [Museum] that I dropped off the board of the History Center, though I stayed on a committee for a number of years. I still get invited to committee meetings, but they always seem to coincide with a board meeting or something of the Asian Art Museum, and I've got to give that priority. But I still follow it and contribute something to it. I think it's been a very good institution, the Western Jewish History Center.

The Friends of the Bancroft Librarv and the Atherton Librarv

The Friends of The Bancroft Library--I think I was only on for a couple of years, and that was mostly in a fundraising capacity.

Teiser: Again through Jim Hart?

Gerstley: Yes. He made me come on to the Friends. I met a number of people that were interesting, too, but, as I say, most of what I did, if anything, for the Friends was in a fundraising capacity.

Teiser: What sort of people did you go to for that?

Gerstley: Well, in that case--ofcourse, they had a history of some supporters that one could go to for renewals or increases or whatnot. And, in some cases, I found there were some people I knew, maybe, that might be interested in the library or corporations that I had gotten to know either through Asian Art [Museum] or some other of my activities--thatmight be interested, and I could approach them. I don't think I greatly increased their contributions, but I don't think I diminished them, either. [chuckles]

I should mention that I served on the board of the Committee for Art at Stanford for a few years and helped them with fund raising. [Stanford University President Donald] Kennedy's first wife was then chairman. 4 3a 9James D. Hart, 740 San Luis Road, Berkeley 7, California*

Again, the Asian Art [Museum], when I was chairman of the commission and then later chairman of the foundation, took an awful lot of time. That, plus our travels, and, of course, most important of all, with our trout fishing, there was a limit to what I could do. I wasn't getting any younger, either. But I've enjoyed all of the associations. Then I became an honorary--because of my age--trusteeof Pomona College, and while I'm still invited to the investment committee meetings and board meetings, I don't go down there nearly as often as I used to.

Teiser: What interest is it that makes you have the directory of California foundations on your desk?

Gerstley: My friend Clara Dinkelspiel, who was Clara Bransten, my cousin, is on the board of the Atherton Library. The Atherton Library wants to build an addition to cater primarily to children. They've got a small space now, but they want to have a much more important and better-equipped place. Apparently her committee doesn't know anything about fundraising, so she asked me whether I would advise them on fundraising, so I went to a meeting with the, I guess, mayor and committee. I told them that the first thing they need to do is make a written case, because unless the case is persuasive, you're not going to get very far. But if the case is persuasive, and if your fundraising goal is reasonable, it ought to be not too difficult to meet it in Atherton. I brought along this foundation book as an example of information available on foundations. One of the places that we support is the Coyote Point Museum. They're doing some building, too. I had a list of all their donors--$1000,$5000, $10,000--forthis particular thing they wanted to build, so I showed them a copy of that, because an awful lot of those people had property on the Peninsula and could be potential supporters. Of course, their committee and the mayor wanted to know who in Atherton had been generous donors to various causes so this was helpful. So what they're doing at the moment is preparing their written case, which they're going to show me. Then they're going to be getting some architectural estimates so that we'll have some financial estimates. Then, after that, I can maybe sit down and help them plan a campaign. As I say, I've got nothing else to do, so I get dragged into another campaign. [chuckles]

Teiser: Do you mind going on a little longer?

Gerstley: No, if not too long. Teiser: There are two more things that I wanted to ask you about. One is your activity in connection with the 1980 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Gerstley: Well, when I heard that it was coming to San Francisco, I thought it would be a great idea if I could get the Alaskan delegation to come to the museum, because of my wife's and my connection, through our great-grandfathers, with the Alaska Commercial Company 1. I talked to the people who were arranging the convention, and they said they were trying to arrange some entertainment for certain groups. They asked me whether we could possibly entertain the New York group out at the museum. I said if I could get the Alaska group as well--find out about how many there would be--I said I would be happy to fund the catering, you know, the drinks and canapes, and organize the staff of Democratic friends to meet and help entertain the group. So we were allotted the New York and the Alaskan group, and, of course, I got to meet, and so did Liz, the governor of Alaska and his committee. I got to meet a lot of New Yorkers, too. It was a very successful function. It didn't cost me an awful lot of money, and I got a very nice letter from Dianne Feinstein thanking me for putting it on. I think they all had a good time at the museum.

Adele Mack Gerstley

Teiser: Since you had written about your father but little about your mother in that very interesting book, I thought I would like to ask you about your mother.

Teiser: She was a San Franciscan, I believe?

Gerstley: Yes. She was born in San Francisco. She was granddaughter of Lewis and Hannah Gerstle. Her mother was the oldest daughter of Lewis and Hannah Gerstle, Clara, but she died somewhere around 1912 or so. She had married Dick Mack, my mother's father. His name was actually Adolph but he was always called Dick. My mother met my father in Egypt when her parents took her to Egypt when she was about seventeen or eighteen years old. She was eighteen when she married, and because Lewis Gerstle was a

l~orfurther information see the.Bancroft Library's manuscript collection regarding Alaska Commercial Company. brother of my father's father, when the American family went to Egypt, Dad, I guess, knew about it, probably from 3 letter from Lewis to his brother, Morris, and he thought he would go down and meet them. Anyway, they got engaged, and they got married in San Francisco. Then, of course, they went to live in England.

Mother was, I would say, a little bit of a frustrated college student, because she never really got to be a college student because she got married first. But she had many interests. She was always interested in history, in architecture, in archaeology, literature. She was a very well- educated person, and because she got married instead of going to college--I'm not sure that she spent a little time at college, but anyway she never got a chance to get through college--she was enormously self-educated,you might say. She was a very intelligent person, a very good conversationalist. I remember when--maybe I told you this before--at our house in London when we were kids, and there was a small dinner party, and we were allowed to attend (I said when we were kids; maybe we were in our early teens--thirteenor fourteen, something like that) there was always the question whether we would rather sit down on our mother's side of the table, because they sat at opposite ends, or my father's, because they were both such fascinating talkers, although the conversation might be more literary or artistic on my mother's end, and my father's end more business and politics or something like that. We enjoyed them both.

My mother was a very good mother, and she loved to take us kids to some of her favorite places--Provenceor Normandy, Brittany or wherever it might be. She would drag me and my sisters through churches and cathedrals and to see dolmens and menhirs and whatnot. When we were very young, we found that a bit of a bore, but something penetrated, and she was very patient about it. So today I love going to old churches, cathedrals, abbeys, and to see dolmens, menhirs, all of those things. I never was as knowledgeable as Mother was about them, but reasonably so, and I think we inculcated some of this into our children, too.

There was something written about my Mother, too. She loved to travel. Even after my father died, she went on many expeditions to the South Seas and places. And we went on a number of trips with Mother, too. And she had an enormous number of friends. When she got back here after Dad died, she sort of picked up the threads again. But in many ways she seemed much more worldly and better educated than a lot of the better-educated people in San Francisco. She was enormously popular, and young people loved her, too. I think she inculcated many interests in young people that maybe they never had before. She was a more complex person to write about, I think, than my father, but she was a very interesting person, too.

Teiser: At the time of her death, a short article in the [San Francisco] Chronicle mentioned that she was "the last of the great salonists."

Gerstley: She knew a lot of people in San Francisco, and people used to very much enjoy coming to see her. She died of cancer on February 13, 1973. Before World War I, ladies didn't smoke in public. I think Mother took up cigarette smoking during World War I. Of course, after World War I, they did smoke in public, but she was always quite a heavy smoker. Her younger brother, Gerstle Mack, the author, he died of cancer, too--same reason. [pause] But she was eighty-seven, so she wasn't any child.

Teiser: I think you've written about her work in the hospital in World War I. Had she other activities like that?

Gerstley: In World War 11, I think she was active on some committee in London that helped Jewish refugees get out of Germany, because I remember at her funeral--therewas a service in San Francisco at the big synagogue in San Francisco, Emanu-El, and the rabbi at that time, in his address, mentioned that it was through my mother's help that he had gotten out of Germany. She apparently helped to take care of him while he was in England, financially, and helped send him on his way, which ended up here. That was Rabbi [Joseph] Asher, I think.

Of course, when she lived in England before World War 11, and she had servants, she never really learned to cook. When World War I1 came along, like other people she had to learn to cook. She became a very good cook.

Family Reunions

Teiser: You mentioned that there were family reunions--

Gerstley: In San Rafael. Yes. I think Alice Levison and Bella Fleishhacker organized the first one, and then--

Teiser : These are reunions of the descendants--? No PlaceToo Far...TooHidden BY CAROLINE DREWES It's net just that she's an "Fossils started me oii:' Intrepid traveler . . . it's she says with a smile, "[ I want in the \yay of Iug- where she goes that sets the read a book on the subject gage." delightful Mrs. J a me s when I was a child and be- She travels with friends. Gerstley apart from her came fascinated. In fact, I or with mein.5ei.s gi :ier septuagenarian contempo- would have b eco me an family, but admits she also raries. archeologist if I hadn't likes to travel by herself. :n the past several years married at the age of 18." Sow. in her comfortable 3::s has left the beaten track Member of an old and Stanford Court apartment. 51r such corners of the prominent San Francisco with its book-lined lvalls. ;vorld as: family (her brother is Col. its chintz-covered furniture Easter Island. .. "one of Harold Mack, now of Peb- and oriental rugs. this , !he loneliest spots on ble Beach; her sistP- -a well-read and kno~vledge- , earth." where the giant the late Mrs. Charles able granddame is organ- monolithic stone head s Bransten), Adele Mack had izing her next trip. Next carved by unknown hands graduated from Miss month., To Europe . . . and mystify scientists. West's school here and was then to Turkey where she The Congo, Justas Rouble traveling abroad with her will study the Hittite civili- was erupting ...but Mrs. parents when she met a zation which flourished in Gentley m o v e d blithely handsome Britisher who 2000 E. C. through Elizabethville, nn- just happened to be a perturbed. cousin of her mother. He Bbinson Cmsoe Ishd proposed to the young Cali- fornian in Kharturn by the . . .and Pitcairn. .. Blue Nile on a moonlight .4nd Rotarua on New Zea- night and she married him land's North Island, where and spent the next fifty the wonders of the Glow years in England. Form Cavern are viewed The Gerstleys had three only if the visitor preserves childrcn and lived through absolute silence. two World Wars. Of the "You go down. down into second conflict, and the the earth and at last you years of bombing the Eng- come to a river as black as lish endured, she remarks the River Styx" Mrs. Gerst- wryly, "After awhile you ley explains. "You climb simply went to bed each into a boat and are rowed night and tried not to think through the darkness until about it. But we DID have suddenly you round a curve a portable bomb shelter and find yourself in an for the maid." enormous cavern lit by rmi- When her husband died lions of glow worms. If you in 1955 she returned to San make a sound, they are ex- Francisco to live, and from tinguished in an instant." here a few years ago she She loves London and began to investigate the Paris but she seeks out worid. places like these . .. And Despite the out-of-the actually, pleasant - voiced, way places she visits, when white-haired Adele Cerst it comes to the mechanics of travel, Mrs. Gerstley is ley didn't start to travel in more sybarite than spar- earnest until after her 70th tan. .. . "I prefer to join a birthday. cruise, leaving the boat for Primarily Y is a deep- short trips and then rejoin- seated, lifetime interest in ing it. It's more comfort- ancient history which has able. and I can take what led her to explore some of the far corners of the world. ....

Gerstley: Descendants of Hannah and Lewis Gerstle and, I think, also Slosses. The second one was organized by Ellie Sloss, who had been Ellie Fleishhacker, and by me, as we were the only two descendants who had married into the Sloss family, because Liz is a descendant of the Slosses, and, of course, Ellie Sloss became a Sloss because she married a Sloss. So we organized the second one, and Gerstle [Mack] came out, as I recall, and made an address. Mortie Fleishhacker spoke. I guess we all spoke. Ann Sawyer, I think, was there. It was a catered party, a lunch affair in the garden. There must have been a couple of hundred people there, I'd say, something like that. They came from all over.

And then we had another one a few years later that, I think, may have been even a little bit larger. I think there was one that Liz and I did not attend; we were either up in Oregon or in Europe or someplace. Then, more recently, there was just a small reunion of the great-grandchildren of Lewis Gerstle, not including the great-great-grandchildrenor anybody like that. That was kind of fun, too.

Teiser: When you say "small," how many were there?

Gerstley: How many? I guess there were about fifty, something like that. We had it at the top of the Bank of America, that club.

Teiser: Interesting. Did they ever have a picture taken?

Gerstley: Oh, there were so many pictures of it. Liz used to make paper tablecloths with the family trees, and she had pictures engraved on them. There were lots of pictures. If Liz was here, she could probably find them. I wouldn't know where they are. There were a lot of pictures.

Teiser: A fascinatingreminiscence.

Gerstley: Well, thank you.

I11 PREPARATION FOR THE BORAX YEARS

[Interview 3: March 12, 1990]##

Swent: Mr. Gerstley, we're continuing an interview, but we have switched interviewers now.

The First Triu to Rvan. 1919

Swent: Ruth Teiser talked to you about your family and your life in San Francisco, and she did ask you about your trip to the United States when you were just a little boy, but I don't think she mentioned that Potter School was closed by a measles epidemic. I thought that was interesting because we don't hear that much about measles any more.

Gerstley: Well it's my recollection; it might have been the German measles; I don't honestly remember. But it was closed because there was an epidemic of some sort.

Swent: Were you ill, yourself?

Gerstley: No, I was fine, fortunately. It just happened that at that time my father came out from England to join my mother, who was here, and me and my two sisters.

Swent: Your father had just been demobbed [demobilized], hadn't he?

Gerstley: He had been demobbed in 1918, and this was in 1919. He wanted to visit some of the Borax [Pacific Coast Borax Company] operations since he was one of the top executives in Borax Consolidated, and it just happened that because of this shutting of the Potter school, I got a chance to go along with him and my mother and her father, first to Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles.

Swent: How did you travel?

Gerstley: I think we traveled by train to Santa Barbara. It was at Santa Barbara where my grandfather and I saw a sea plane and I persuaded him to take me for a ten-minute ride. I think it cost ten dollars or something.

It was an open-cockpit sea plane left over from World War I. Then we went down to Los Angeles and went to visit some of the movie studios and met Sid Chaplin, who was Charlie's brother. Then we went out to Death Valley. I think we went probably by train. And then we hooked up with the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, which was owned by the Borax Consolidated, at Baker and went up to Death Valley Junction and then on the little Death Valley Railroad up to Ryan, which was the mine, and stayed with the superintendent.

Swent: Was this the first time you had ever visited a mine?

Gerstley: Yes, it was the first time I had ever visited a mine.

Swent: Did you visit the mine at that time?

Gerstley: Yes, I had a chance. Actually, the mines were very different from the ones that I knew later on. There was mostly digging into the side of a mountain, and the walls were covered with colemanite, which you can still see in places there. It almost shines like a jewel; it's really quite impressive. Anyway, we were only there for a couple of days or so and I got taken down to visit Death Valley itself and then we went back and finally came back to England.

Swent: I believe you met Harry Gower at that time, didn't you?

Gerstley: Harry Gower was located in the valley, working for the Borax Company, and he was the one who I think drove me down to Death Valley. I don't know whether you've read Harry Gower's book, because he mentions the fact1. I also met Fred Corkill, who later became superintendent at Boron in my day.

l~ower,Harry P., 50 vears in Death Valley- Memoirs of a Borax Man. (San Bernardino, California, 1969) Published by the Death Valley '49ers; introduction by James M. Gerstley. Swent: At this time and even later, what was your perception of this enterprise? Did you think of it as something that you were connected with historically through your family? Did you think of it as a mining enterprise?

Gerstley: I don't know. You know, I was eleven years old, I don't know that I thought very much about it at all. I knew that it was part of my father's business, but I didn't really know how important it might or might not be in the over-all situation. Borax Consolidated, after all, is an English company, and I knew it had operations not just in America, but in Turkey and South America as well. I don't think I really thought about it very deeply.

Swent: Not at that time, I'm sure.

Did you ever visit the enterprises in Spain or Turkey or South America?

Gerstley: No, I never visited any of them, actually.

Swent: - Or Belgium?

Gerstley: Well, there were refineries in places like England, France, Belgium, but I never visited any of them. I've been to the Argentine but only as far as Buenos Aires and from there I flew over to Chile, but I was on a fishing trip; I wasn't on a Borax trip; it was after I'd retired.

The mines were way up in the mountains and I don't think my father ever got to any of the South American ones; he may have gotten to the Turkish ones. And of course he knew the refineries, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, where we had customers, and so forth.

Swent: Did you ever visit the plant in Belvedere?

Gerstley: Yes. Yes, I visited the plant in Belvedere

Swent: As a youngster?

Gerstley: No. I think I probably visited it while I was waiting in England to join my first job with the Great Western Electrochemical Company in San Francisco. I spent a few months, thanks to my father, sitting at a desk in the Borax Consolidated company, learning a little bit about how to put together trial balances--I'd taken an accounting course--andwith my friend Fred Lesser learning a little bit about their operations in Spain. Swent : This was considerably later.

Gerstley: This was in 1929, yes.

Swent : I'm trying to get some sense of your feeling about--maybethis isn't fair, but--when I talked to Allan Lesser [Chairman of Borax Consolidated Limited] in London, he reminded me that the company was incorporated originally as a mining and refining enterprise, and yet I feel that your conception of it was mainly from the business end of it, that you weren't particularly thinking of it as a mining company.

Gerstley: No, I don't think I was particularly thinking of it as a mining company. Of course, in 1929 I was thinking much more about the Great Western Electrochemical Company that I was going to join. I had decided before that I really didn't want to start working for a company in which any member of my family had any interest, because I always felt one was apt to be either too gently or too harshly judged. I wanted to try to make my own way somehow, and going into the Great Western Electrochemical Company was that opportunity.

Swent : You did, however, visit some mines on your trip around the world.

Gerstley: Ah, yes, but those were copper mines and diamond mines in Rhodesia and South Africa.

Swent: Was it just curiosity?

Gerstley: No, I did consider that as a possibility, but I also decided that I really didn't want to live in a place like either Rhodesia or Africa. And whereas, having stopped in America on the way back to Europe on that world trip, and being offered an opportunity to go to work in America--and don't forget that time; this was before the stock market crash in 1929--I thought it would be very important, whatever I did in the future, to learn something about American business methods, and this was a great opportunity.

Swent: Another thing I wondered about was, in your studies both in school and at university at Cambridge, did you feel any interest in American history?

Gerstley: Oh, yes. Don't forget my mother was American too, so I wasn't allowed to forget that Americans had thrown George I11 away. Swent : I was thinking of the importance of the Gold Rush and "Borax" [Francis Marion] Smith and some of the more recent history.

Gerstley: No. I mean, at that time, I didn't know much about Borax history. But American history as part of the world history scene, and particularly in its relation to England and so forth, yes, I was very interested. I used to read a lot of historical books and historical novels and so forth. I like to read.

Swent : Borax! The history just of the mineral borax is--

Gerstley: It's of most interest. But really until I got involved with Borax, I really didn't know much about its history. And it wasn't really until I'd worked for the Borax Company for some time, and had an opportunity to read old files that I got quite immersed in Borax history and started to do some historical research on my own.

But, as you know, a lot of other people have done a lot of research on the Borax Company: Norman Travis, George ~ildebrandl. My contribution is a very minor one; it relates mostly to the time that I worked for the Borax Company.

[the following anecdote was added after the interview]

26 December 1990

I was reminded yesterday of an important incident in Borax history involving an early visit to London by F. M. [Borax] Smith after the formation of Pacific Borax and Redwood's Chemical Works.

My father invited Smith to go to theater and, having obtained seats in the stalls, he persuaded Smith to wear a tuxedo, as no gentleman would in those days ever be seen in the stalls except in a dinner jacket, unless it was opening night of a new play, when many wore white ties and tail coats. Anyway, at the end of the first act, when the lights came on, my father was horrified to see that Smith had kicked off his elastic- sided boots and was only in his socks. Dad told me that this was one of the most embarrassing incidents in his life and he seriously debated whether he should immediately leave the theater. Fortunately Smith was quickly persuaded to put his

l~ravis,N. J. and Cocks, E. J., The Tincal Trail, A Historv of Borax. (Harrap, London, 1984) Hildebrand, George, Borax Pioneer: Frances Marion Smith. (Howell-North Books, San Diego, 1982) boots on again before too many people had noticed this dreadful breach of English good manners, but Dad never invited him to theater again! [end of anecdote]

Awareness of Pacific Coast Borax Com~anvHistorv

Swent: Were you aware of--this also.happened while you were at Cambridge--were you at all aware of the discovery of rasorite and its importance? That was in 1927 or 1928, I think.

Gerstley: No, I don't think I was. What I was aware of was that the company had competition, because the American Potash and Chemical Corporation, which succeeded I think the California Trona Company in the early twenties, developed a very good system for separating the borax from the potash and the other minerals in the brine of Searles Lake.

And the price of borax fell substantially because the kerican Potash and Chemical Company could make a lot of money on potash. Apparently, they had decided that they would try to drive the Borax Company out of business, the English Borax Consolidated, by cutting the price of borax. And I know that because the--I don't say my father fell on straitened circumstances, but we had to watch our P's and Q's a little bit.

Swent: This was discussed in your family?

Gerstley: That's right, it was discussed in the family. And I think it was one of the reasons they had moved from One Upper Grosvenor Street to Sixty-One Great Cumberland Place, which was not quite such a fancy address, although still a very good location.

So I did know. I had heard this discussed and so forth. But as far as the discovery, I may have heard about it; it didn't mean anything to me. The only thing I did hear about that my father was quite excited about was something about the Wilmington refinery.

When the refinery was built at Wilmington, California, they had had a tentative ruling that the waterfront belonged to the land on which the refinery was built. Then I think the city of Wilmington or Long Beach came along--as I say, this is really before my time; I only heard the thing discussed--andbrought a suit to claim that it owned the waterfront, in effect, which meant that the company would have to pay a charge to the city of Wilmington or Long Beach, for every ton that was shipped over the dock. Well, they fought the suit and they won. The Borax Company won, and I remember how pleased my father was over that and, of course, later on I was too.

But those are about the only things I really heard. I met, I think, Chris Zabriskie on one of his trips to England, but I think that really is about all and I can't--I mean, you asked me at one point whether my education had prepared me or not prepared me for work in the Borax Company or any other company. In a sense I would say it was helpful. Studying history, I think is very helpful; it gives you a perspective on things. And I found it at least, not only stimulated my interest, but it did help to put things in perspective for me. But as far as the technical side, the chemical side, it certainly didn't prepare me in the least and as far as that's concerned, I've improved very little. [laughter]

Swent We'll talk later on about some of your contributions which were considerable and they were not, of course, in the technical area but perhaps did stem from your history studies. I think there's certainly a value there.

Was the company at that time called Borax Consolidated?

Gerstley: Yes, Borax Consolidated Limited came into being in 1899, I think it was.

Swent : All right. Borax Holdings was the one that came later, but it was B C L at that time.

Gerstley: Yes, it was Borax Holdings quite a bit later, about 1956.

Swent : Right, and we'll get into some of that.

Somebody told me that U.S. Borax made this very important discovery of flotation of salts, but I think that was the American Potash process at Searles Lake that you were speaking of--.

Gers tley : Flotation?

Swent : Something about flotation of salts? That might have been that Searles Lake process that you were talking about.

Gerst ley: That wasn't a flotation of salts; it was a way to separate first of all the potash and borax and recover it, and then later on they also recovered the sodium carbonate and I think the lithium and other elements. Swent : Did U.S. Borax ever go into that lake processing?

Gerstley: Yes, only a very short time. During World War I, the Germans were the biggest producers of potash. During World War I there wasn't any potash from Germany available in the West. The Borax Company did own a piece of property at Searles Lake and they formed a partnership with the Solvay Process Company. They recovered potash at very high cost, which was much higher than the price that the German potash used to sell at. But of course, during the war when there wasn't any German potash, people would pay anything they had to, to buy the potash. Right after the war, when German potash again came on the market, they closed down because they couldn't possibly compete.

The American Potash--it would have been I think--I've forgotten whether it was American Trona or the California Trona Company. They didn't have any mines, any mineral ore, and so they apparently went to work and did quite a lot of research to see whether there was a more economic way of recovering the potash from the lake. And they finally, after a few years, did evolve this very good process.

Swent : I think we should mention the genealogy of the Gerstley and the Lesser relationship.

Gerstley: My father and R.C. Baker, who was the first head of the English company, in about 1890, I think it was, or maybe a little bit afterwards, bought into a company known as Redwood's and Sons, which was a company that used borax and boric acid to make a food preservative which was known as Preservitas; it was sold as Preservitas.

Those were the days when, if you shipped butter from New Zealand to England--they didn't have refrigeration ships--the only way to keep it edible was to treat it with Preservitas. And they had markets in Europe and so forth.

Anyway, that was the company and in 1896, Borax Smith, when he was looking for new markets, happened to cross over on a boat to England with my great-grandfather on my mother's side, Lewis Gerstle of the Alaska Commercial Company. And they knew each other and apparently they got to talking on the boat.

Smith indicated what he was about to do, and Lewis Gerstle said he could introduce him to my father, who was one of the people using borax for Preservitas, which they did. And Baker' and my father and Smith, my father told me, sat up all night. Early in the morning, they arrived at an agreement to merge their interests and form Pacific Borax and Redwood's Chemical Company, with Smith being the largest stockholder and Smith being responsible for the American enterprises.

And then it was later that they got interested in the idea of becoming a bigger player on the world scene and that if they could obtain interests in Turkey and refineries in Europe and maybe some interests in South America, they would have world- wide sources and world-wide outlets. This led to the formation, in I think it was 1899, of Borax Consolidated Limited. And once again, Smith was the largest stockholder.

Unfortunately, Smith, like his predecessor, William T. Coleman, who is another very famous character and who was an early pioneer in the borax business, got overextended financially; and in 1913, he in effect went broke and Frank Anderson, of the Bank of California, came over to England to try to dispose of some of his assets. And the only quick asset that he had was his shares of Borax. They were not bought by my father and Baker, but they helped Frank Anderson find a market for them in London.. And that's how the company, which had in effect been, you might say predominantly American because Smith was the largest holder, became predominantly British.

Swent : And was that when Lesser came in?

Gerstley: No, Lesser came in earlier. He came in about the time that Borax Consolidated was formed. I think Federico Lesser was born in Germany, and had worked for a company that the company knew something of--I think it was Rosenstern and Company in Hamburg--that the Borax Company had had some dealings with. And they knew that Federico spoke Spanish fluently, so they employed him and sent him down to South America to see whether he could acquire a certain property or two that was apparently very much desired by the Borax Company, which he did. So he came into the Borax Company and after Baker died, which was in the thirties, and my father became managing director, my father made Federico joint managing director.

By that time they had interests in Spain, France, South America and so forth, and Federico, he dealt with operations all over, including--I had a lot of dealings with him on the American side, too. Then his elder son, Fred Lesser, came into the company in, well, he was in the company in 1929.

Swent : So you worked at a desk next to him, didn't you? Gerstley: That's right. We worked at the same desk; I sat across from him; we had a great big desk. And we were old friends because, you know, we'd known each other as youngsters.

But Fred wasn't too happy, and he was offered a different job.

Gerstley: Fred wasn't too happy in the situation and he was offered a different job and he left the company. And it wasn't until Baker died and my father was managing director that he was persuaded to come back. Fortunately, he did, and after his father died or retired, and my dad did, Fred became a managing director with Arthur Reid and then later on, he became the managing director, when I was president of the U.S. Borax over here, or Pacific Coast Borax at least, first of all.

Swent : It's very interesting to have two families so closely continuing through a company.

Gerstley: Yes, it was of course very nice for me, and I think for Fred too, because we got along very well. He had a very good financial head, Fred did, and he had a wonderful personality; customers over here just loved to have him come and call on them and so forth. And he liked what I was doing over here, so we got along fine. He left a lot of matters to me; he was more interested in the financial end than in dealing with people and problems and so forth, and I guess I was interested in the financial end too. I liked all aspects except the highly technical ones.

Work for Great Western Electrochemical Com~anv

Swent : Perhaps you should say just a bit, then, about your work at Great Western.

Gerstley: Well, it was very useful, because I started up at the plant. I went through every manufacturing department; I didn't know anything about manufacturing until then, but when I got through, I knew quite a bit.

Swent : This was in Pittsburg?

Gerstley: This was in Pittsburg, California. And I went through the shipping department, and I went through the accounting department, and so forth. When I got down to San Francisco, I was primarily in the sales department.

Swent: Was this because of a particular aptitude you showed?

Gerstley: No, it was primarily the San Francisco office was the principal sales and management department. Anyway, I was exposed to sales, and this was very important for me too. I guess probably like many newcomers, I was rather shy at first.

The first time you have to go and call on the customer, you worry whether he's going to see you or to give you an order, what's it going'to be like. I found, particularly some of these customers in rather small towns, they usually welcomed you with open arms. And, more often than not, you got an order. And this builds your confidence.

It's the same way, really, when you go out to raise money. The first time you have to call on somebody to ask them for, whether it's five dol-larsor five thousand dollars, you're a little bit scared of what the outcome might be. But again, if you have one or two successes, it helps to build your confidence.

Swent: How did you happen to get the job with Great Western?

Gerstley: My mother's father, Grandpa Mack, when I came 'to San Francisco on my trip around the world, said he thought it would be very useful for me to learn something about American business, and I did too. And one of the--I guess he was a stockholder--anyway, one of the directors of Great Western was Mortimer Fleishhacker, Sr., the banker, who had married my mother's Aunt Bella. And Grandpa Mack spoke to him, and he spoke to Mr. Hagens, who was the President of the Great Western, and they said they'd like very much to have some one or two young people in the company. So that's how I was offered the position.

I stayed with them for about three years and as I say, I learned a lot and I also developed some business for them. I traveled somewhat for them; my first trip to southern California was for Great Western Electrochemical, my first trip in business, because I was down there when I was a kid.

Swent: You were also offered a job at American Metal Company.

Gerstley: Well, that was, again, on this trip around the world. In New York I'd been given an introduction by Federico Lesser to Mr. Vogelstein, who was the head of American Metals. He did offer me a job as well, but really, when I went back to England, well, I felt I'd like to take a job in America; I wasn't quite sure which one.

But then my uncle, Harry Mack, mother's older brother who was a stockbroker, came over to Europe on a visit; his younger brother was over in Europe too. I went to see him in Strasbourg and I told him about these offers and he said, "By all means, go to the small company. There, you'll have a chance of maybe learning a lot of different things in different departments, whereas if you go into a great big company like American Metals, chances are you'd be stuck in one department and you'll get nothing like as'broad an education."

It was extremely good advice, which I followed.

Swent : But then you left Great Western.

Gerstley: Yes, well, Great Western was going to be sold to a much bigger company.

Swent: Were they sold to Dow at that time? Gerstley: Yes, that was the negotiations, and they were going to be sold to Dow Chemical with headquarters in Michigan. I had felt that I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to be absorbed into a great big organization like that. And again, my mother and father were out on a visit and I went back to England with them.

It just happened that apparently the American [Pacific Coast] Borax Company was undergoing some changes. Chris Zabriskie, who had been head of the company for many years, was about to retire, to be succeeded by a man by the name of Frank Jenifer, whose upbringing had been in the railroad business. And he was looking for some young assistants or people in the company.

R.C. Baker took me out to lunch one day and asked whether I would be interested in applying for the job, subject to Frank Jenifer agreeing. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity and I jumped at it. Fortunately, Frank Jenifer did agree, because by that time, as I say, I knew something about chemicals, I knew something about selling, I knew something about bookkeeping; I didn't know anything about mining, but I wasn't entirely green any more.

Swent : Just a little side point here. There was a general strike in San Francisco in 1934. Did that impinge on your life at all?

Gerstley: No, I wasn't here then. Swent : You were in southern California, I guess.

Gerstley : Yes, I was in southern California.

Swent: And I was interested in learning from your interview with Ruth Teiser, that you had a relative who was interested in the Communist party at that time, one of the Branstens.

Gerstley : Richard Bransten. I don't know how interested he was in 1934.

Swent : He was a parlor pink at that time, I suppose.

Gerstley : Yes. He later became interested. He was the son of Charles Bransten of the MJB Company. Edward Bransten, Sr. was I think president of MJB, but Charlie was in the company too. And Richard Bransten had been to Harvard and he was best man at my wedding.

He was a very interesting, very well-read person with a wonderful sense of humor. Later, he married Louise Rosenberg of Rosenberg Brothers; I think they were in dried fruits. That -marriage didn't last forever, and then he married Ruth McKenney, who wrote Mv Sister Eileen, the play, and so forth. And she was very much a communist too, at the time.

Swent : Was there any stress in your family between capitalists and communists?

Gerstley: Well, I'm sure that in Richard's family there may have been some unhappiness. As far as I was concerned or my wife was concerned, I mean, we weren't tempted to become communists at all, but we still kept up our friendship, and we had some very good times. They had a place for a while in Connecticut that we used to visit.

Richard and Ruth wrote a book which you may also have read, called Here's Enaland, which is I think dedicated to my mother because she was the one who inspired them with her love of history and architecture and so forth. It's a wonderful book and it's been reprinted by the University of California Press, and it's in great demand by people who visit England.

Anyway, later on, however, Richard felt that his life was sort of falling apart, that Ruth didn't really need him any more and so forth, and either--hewas over in England at the time and he came to see me on one of my trips, I guess it was in the fifties. I tried to, you know, compose him and so forth, but it didn't work and he committed suicide shortly afterwards. But he was a remarkable person.

Swent One of the things that you mentioned that impressed you in your first work when you came back out to Los Angeles with Borax, was that you were involved in observing labor negotiations, and I wondered whether there was any difficulty.

Gerstley : No, because at that time, I don't think Richard was a Communist. He may have had leanings that way.

Swent: Did you go through a period in England of being sympathetic with the labor movement?

Gerstley : No, not in the least.

Swent : You never identified with the laboring men?

Gerstley : No. I was a poor capitalist. [laughter]

Swent: You never identified with the proletariat?

Gerstley : .No, no, I didn't. Maybe that was because of my English upbringing, although I mean, when I got into labor negotiations over here, I got along pretty well with the people who were working for me and whom I had to negotiate with and so forth. And I made some good friends with them.

Swent : Yes, this was always one of your skills, I think. So when you took this job then, where did you meet Jenifer? Did he come over to England to meet you?

Gerstley : No, I met him in Los Angeles.

Swent : You came out here to meet him?

Gerstley: Yes.

Swent: And I think that was the same time that Death Valley became a national monument, 1933.

Gers tley : Yes, I think it was a little bit before I came out that Death Valley became a national monument.

Swent : This involved some changes?

Gerstley: Well, in a national monument there are strict rules about mining and things like that; it's not quite as strict as a national park, but there are some strict rules. And it became a national monument. In those days, Horace Albright was still head of the national park system. It was while he was head of the national park system, I think, that it was agreed that Death Valley should be made a national monument.

Swent: Was this of any interest or concern to you?

Gerstley: It added to the attraction of Death Valley. The company had built the Furnace Creek Inn in Death Valley before that, but when it became a national monument, you know, it was like a national park and so forth; more people want to come and see it, it gets more publicity, and so forth. From that standpoint, it was helpful. Actually, I think I told Ruth that when they built the Furnace Creek Inn, they expected all the business to come by railroad and build up the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. I guess nobody had heard of the automobile by that time.

Swent: I think there was a big plan to expand it which was squelched by the Second World War, too, wasn't there?

Gerstley: To expand the Furnace Creek Inn? No, I don't really think so.

Swent: I read somewhere that they had a big building program of several hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the whole thing, and then World War I1 changed it, of course.

Gerstley: Well, we enlarged the Furnace Creek Inn from its original site, but that was before World War 11.

Swent: So, you lived at the Los Angeles Athletic Club?

Gerstley: Yes. I'd been living at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, and they were associated, so I lived at the L.A. Athletic Club, which was just around the corner from our office. That was very convenient.

IV WORKING FOR PACIFIC COAST BORAX

Trainine in the Borax Business

Swent: Well, I'm skipping. There was a training period first.

Gerstley: Oh, yes. Jenifer felt I really had to learn something about the Borax business. I mean, there was so much to learn. I had to learn something about package sales and I went East to do that. He wanted me to visit some of the plants such as the Sterling Borax Company, which they had bought, in New Brighton.

Swent: What were their products at this time?

Gerstley: They had Twenty Mule Team Borax, Twenty Mule Team soapchips. Those were the two main package products that we sold in markets.

Swent: And they were shipping to a refinery in the East as well?

Gerstley: I think when I joined, the Bayonne [New Jersey] refinery had been closed by that time. It may have been used as a distribution point, just as the Chicago warehouse was used as a company-owned distribution point. But I think that once the Wilmington refinery was built, they concentrated all the refining at Wilmington.

Swent: But before that time, they had shipped ...

Gerstley: Before that time, they used to ship to Bayonne, usually by ship. But anyway, Jenifer also wanted me to visit the potash operation where the Borax Company had a fifty-percent interest, which was in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which I did. So I had at least a bird's-eye view, at that point, of the company's various interests; what the package business was all about; meeting, you know, some of the customers, with the head of the package department who took me around, and so forth.

Swent: Who was that?

Gerstley: A man by the name of Mr. Haddox. I remember he took me to my first baseball game--he was a great baseball fan--which I found just as dull as watching a good cricket match.

Swent: Now, now, be careful. That's a dangerous thing to say. [laughter] Carlsbad, New Mexico, was a pretty remote place at that time, too, wasn't it?

Gerstley: Yes, it was. The thing that it was famous for were the C~rlsbad Caverns, of course. But it was a very tiny little place in those days.

Swent: A far cry from London.

Gerstley: Oh, yes.

Swent: You must have been more comfortable in Los Angeles, then.

Gerstley: Well, I was. And of course, from Los Angeles, I went out to Boron to see the mine. That was the first American underground mine that I ever went into. That was grand. They had a concentrating plant out there. I also went out to Death Valley on my first trip, with Jenifer's wife and her sister. So I was introduced to the hotel business, too.

design in^ a New Package for Boraxo

Swent: And you helped to design a new package.

Gerstley: Well, one of the things--theyhad had a product called Boraxo, which was a mixture of borax and soap. It hadn't done very well, and Jenifer thought it really could do as well as borax soap chips and borax in the market if it was properly packaged and presented. So he gave me the job, as well as Bill O'Leen, who was head of the package department in the West, the job of trying to come up with a plan, which we did. He liked it, and it proved to be quite successful.

Swent: It already had the name, though. Gerstley: No, I didn't invent the name; I invented just the package. Maybe this is not the time to discuss it, but it was really Boraxo that largely saved our lives during World War 11, because our foreign shipments, which had been a very big part of our business, of course, became very minor during World War I1 because you couldn't ship to most of the markets then. A lot of the markets were enemy markets, and those that weren't, the seas were not very safe, so we had to rely on our own ingenuity to try to meet our payroll and keep the plant going, and everything in proper order. One of the first things that happened after America got involved in the war, was we were not allowed to package Boraxo in tins anymore.

Swent: What sort of tin was it in?

Gerstley: Black and white, with some red on it. The OPA, the Office of Price Administration, had to approve, you know, any pricing. When I went to Washington in connection with this and some other matters, I was told that we would have to repackage our Boraxo, but, so long as we didn't charge any more than we'd charged for it in tins, that would be okay,

Well, putting it into cartons was far cheaper than putting it into tins, so we were able to sell it at the price we had sold Boraxo in tins. We put it in the carton, which was much less costly, and I also had the bright idea--I think at the time, Boraxo was something like thirty percent soap and seventy percent borax. And I said, let's reduce the soap portion, which was the expensive portion, I think to twenty percent. And because people were so hard up for soap, they'd buy anything that looked like soap, and we could sell all the Boraxo in cartons that we could make, limited only by the amount of soap that we could lay our hands on or could make. This is actually what largely kept us going during the war.

True, we did have considerable war business with the government; they used borax for smokeless powders, for example. They contained some borates and a few other things. And we did ship some still to England, but without Boraxo, we'd have been really in a very difficult position.

Swent: Backtracking just a speck about the war: I ran across something in a 1962 issue of the company magazine, the Twenty Mule Team magazine, and it said that "the barter of rasorite for musical instruments was one of the final transactions before the Hitler war."

Gerstley: I have no recollection at all.

Swent: I was mystified by that, myself.

Gerstley: No recollection.

Swent: Some transaction with Germany, I guess.

Gerstley: No recollection at all. I mean, most of our dealings with Germany were with Deutsche Borax Vereinegung and one or two other companies. There were some big refineries in Germany that we used to ship material to. I couldn't tell you.

Training in Labor Relations

Swent: Is there anything that you should say about the labor relations?

Gerstley: Well, before the passage of NRA, the National Recovery Act, in Roosevelt's day, we were not unionized. Whether they had been a hundred years ago, I don't know, but in my time, at least, they were not unionized. But of course, after the passage of NRA, that's when the unions really got going. We had to deal with unions for, as I say, the first time.

Swent : Which union was it? - Gerstley: It was an AFL Borax Workers Union.

Swent: A specific union for borax workers?

Gerstley: Yes. They were part of the AFL. Fortunately, I was in sort of on the beginning of this. I didn't know anything about labor relations, but I learned by attending meetings with Frank Jenifer or with the superintendents and so forth. And it was very useful education.

I can remember one occasion quite a bit later on when I was either president or general manager, and my assistant, Pat O'Brien, was supposed to be running the labor negotiations up at Boron with.the union. We'd been playing poker the night before and he fell asleep,'soI entered the picture instead, and by the time he woke up, we had an agreement. [laughter] That was quite a bit later, though. Swent: One of the things I believe you did after your negotiations with the OPA over the price of Boraxo, you sold the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad?

Gerstley: The army had been interested in the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, yes, and I helped to complete the negotiations in Washington, and the railroad was then moved and served to carry supplies to the Russian front from--I've forgotten what port it was.

Swent: Some place in the Middle East, wasn't it?

Gerstley: Well, yes, it could have been.

Swent: I thought it was someplace on the Persian Gulf. Gerstley: It is some place I think on the Persian Gulf. I've forgotten which port actually they moved it to.

Swent: It may still be there.

Gerstley: It may still be there, yes. Could well be, could well be.

Swent: But this was a good solution for you, wasn't it?

Gerstley: Well, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad actually had been financed originally by Borax Consolidated, by the English company. And it really wasn't serving any useful purpose by that time, as far as we were concerned, because our operations had moved primarily to Boron, and so it really was a happy resolution, yes.

Plannine for Postwar Expansion of Production and Research

Swent: You mentioned to Ruth this trip that you took to England in 1943 and some very important discussions that took place regarding your postwar plans, but you didn't specifically say--whatwere some of the things that you decided at that time that were so important later?

Gerstley: Well, several things. In the first place, there were two methods of concentrating sodium borate ores. One was a calcining method, and one was a magnetic separation method. In Baker's day, there was only one cost, so nobody knew whether it was more expensive or cheaper or the same cost to treat it by calcining or magnetic separation. But when Baker died, which was in 1937, I think, I went into this and developed the data which showed that magnetic separation was much cheaper.

So one of the things that I recommended when I was over there was, a) that the chances are there would be a great pent-up demand for borates; b) that we should be ready to expand our production; and c) that it should be with magnetic separators for shipping the concentrated ore, which is what you get, to the different refineries all over the world. And this was agreed.

The second thing I recommended was that we establish a research department. They never had any research worth talking about, which, for a chemical company, seemed to me ridiculous. And I got authorization to go ahead with--because the English company was still the biggest stockholder--togo ahead with that. Because American Potash was still competitors of ours, I said, if we can expand with magnetic separators when all we have to do is buy more magnetic separators and install them and we can get going, then we can probably get a year or two's head start on American Potash; because they've got to find a way, if they expand borax, they've got to find out what they're going to do with that extra potash. They couldn't separate the two.

And, in fact, this is exactly what happened. At the end of the war, there was an enormous pent-up demand, both overseas and in America, and we got a big head jump on our competitors. And companies such as Owens-Corning-Fiberglas,to whom we'd never sold before, came to us and said, you know, we'd do anything if you can get us some borax. Which we did.

I think before the war, we--I doubt whether we were the biggest source of supply in the United States. I think we were overseas, because we had the concentrates that we could ship. After the war, we became the biggest source of supply in no time at all. So this was one of the things that really contributed to our later growth and dominant position.

Swent: Why did you ship concentrates and not refined products?

Gerstley: Because in Europe, there were duties on refined products, whereas the concentrates went in free of duty. And that's why there were refineries in Europe that would take the concentrates but didn't want the refined, Sure, we had some customers that wanted, say, a special form of refined that maybe the refinery in Europe didn't make. But, by and large, the reason why we did so much refining in Europe and even in Japan, too, was the duty question.

Swent So your freight costs were less than the duties? Gerstley: Yes. The concentrate sold per unit at a much lower price than the refined did. And cost less to produce, too.

The Antitrust Suit. 1943

Swent: So now we come to what Mr. Lesser told me was the pivotal event, the big antitrust suit.

Gerstley: Actually, he wasn't in the business at the time, and in my view, it was not a pivotal event at all.

Swent: That's interesting.

rstley: It was important from my standpoint because I got so immersed I got detached from my regular work by Jenifer to work with the attorneys in building our defense. This was late 1943. And for the next year or so, I really did very little else except work on preparing the I think hundred and twenty loose-leaf binders dealing with the various points that our attorneys brought out .and that we'd been accused here of doing this, that, or the other.

But the Department of Justice and Joe Alioto was in effect the prosecuting attorney for the Department of Justice. He was no friend of mine; he was on the other side of the fence.

Allen Ashburn--of Newlin and Ashburn were our attorneys in Los Angeles. They decided, because the case was set to be tried before Judge St. Sure in San Francisco, that we ought to be associated with San Francisco counsel. And that's why they employed the firm in which Maurice Harrison and Mose Lasky were involved. Brobeck, Phleger, and Harrison are still active. And Harrison became the chief lawyer for us and Moses Lasky was really a fairly young assistant in those days. And they were the ones I worked with the most. But the government's case, as I recall, was a criminal case, largely.

Swent: It was both criminal and civil, wasn't it?

Gerstley: Yes, it was criminal and civil, but one of the key charges was that we had conspired with the American Potash and Chemical Company to divide up the borax business, we taking all the mining and giving them all the lake operation, which was a lot of baloney. If we could have gotten rid of American Potash, we'd have been very happy. They also accused us of all sorts of improper things, discussing prices with our competitors and so forth, and as I say, American Potash most of the time was trying to drive us out of business.

Swent: It must be terribly hard to prove that you have not done something.

Gerstley: Well, it's not always easy. And we'd done certain things. For example, just before I joined the Borax Company, there was a company known as the Western Borax Company under a man by the name of Blumenberg, that had a rasorite-tincal property adjoining ours' at Boron. They were a headache, and they finally, I guess, were running out of ore, and they were willing to sell their mine to us, which we bought, which certainly, in effect you might say, gave us a monopoly position at Boron, which was one of the points that the government made. And in the consent decree one of the things that we had to agree to do was to surrender title to the Western Borax property. Well, as we knew that there was no ore worth talking about in it by that time, we were willing to do so. And Mr. Ickes, that's one of 'the things I guess he was satisfied with. In fact, I think he claimed that this is one of the things that broke our monopoly.

But as far as having a key effect on the Borax Company, I would say it didn't because really, what the consent decree finally made us do was give up the Western Borax Company and there was one other property, a very minor one, which I think was a colemanite property that we had acquired, which I had been involved in, but which was of no great significance. And we had to agree that in future our course of conduct wouldn't conflict with the anti-trust laws.

Well, I won't say that there had never been any conflict, because the anti-trust laws, you know, can be interpreted in various different ways, and after all, I was a young newcomer when I first joined the Borax Company so I can't tell exactly what might have happened in Zabriskie's day or Jenifer's day. But most of the accusations I'd say were about Jenifer's day and my time. I'd say that my going over to England and making these agreements during the war had far more effect on the future of the Borax Company than the anti-trust suit did, much more effect.

As far as I was personally concerned, not only did I, you know, work like a dog on trying to prepare the rebuttal evidence, but I guess I worked so hard that I was told that I'd betterttakesome time off or else I was going to have a nervous breakdown. That's when I was sent home to work at home for a while. I guess I didn't realize, probably, how run down I had allowed myself to get.

Swent : The thing was finally settled when you went East?

Gerstley: Yes, it was finally settled by a consent decree, which was a wonderful relief to have that behind us. The most unpleasant part in a suit that is partly criminal, is in the beginning of the suit, they called our secretaries and so forth to testify to files because you weren't allowed to monkey with files. Then Jenifer and I had to go up to San Francisco with our attorneys and appear before Judge St. Sure and we had to be fingerprinted in a criminal case. So hopefully by now, those fingerprints have been eradicated from the Department of Justice, but I honestly don't know. I may be able to ask Joe Alioto sometime; he might know.

Anyway, as I say, we were watched like hawks; I think I was followed home sometimes, just to make sure that I wasn't carrying a bunch of files to destroy and things like that. It was a great relief when the anti-trust suit came to an end.

When we had to appear in the early days--thiswas in 1943 or 1944--my father came out from England with my mother. This was during the war, which wasn't any great fun for them, you know, with submarines and so forth, but Dad was the sort of person who said if there's trouble, I'm going to stand behind you. My father insisted on coming, and Judge St. Sure was so impressed he wouldn't fingerprint my father. And I remember one of the top people attached to the British embassy also came out to the coast to see whether he could help us in any way.

Swent : You even had to get permission to travel between England and America in those days, didn't you?

Gerstley: Oh yes, I'm sure my father had to get special permission, but under the circumstances, I'm sure he would have been granted all that.

Swent: It must have been extremely difficult to get that.

Gerstley: Yes, it wasn't much fun. And crossing the Atlantic in those days wasn't much fun either.

Swent: Were you using connections that you had in Washington or that Harrison had in Washington?

Gerstley: It was after a change of administration. Who was it? Swent : Well, Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945, and Truman came in. Was it still going then?

Gerstley: Yes, my father and both Lessers were also indicted, along with Jenifer and myself. As I say, my father was the only who came out. And there was Mr. Bathhurst from the British Embassy who was sent to Los Angeles at the same time.

In the spring of 1945, Roosevelt died and was succeeded by Truman, and a new Attorney General, Francis Biddle, was appointed, with whom Harrison was well acquainted. And it was because of that change that Harrison said he thought we ought to go to Washington and see whether we couldn't settle the case. So we all went to Washington. Jenifer and I didn't meet with the attorneys who were negotiating the settlement; our attorneys met with us and reported every day and we'd, you know, plan strategy: yes, we'd agree to this; no, we wouldn't agree to that; and so forth and so on, and they finally hammered out an agreement. This was a little bit before the end of World War 11; it was after the collapse of Germany but before the collapse of Japan.

Swent : So the main effect was that you had to give up these two small properties.

Gerstley: That's right, and promise not to breach the anti-trust rules and so forth. But the main effect was giving up those two small properties. And the settlement was reached.

I think I've mentioned I went back to San Francisco with Maurice Harrison. Liz and I went up to Tahoe to stay with our friends, the Walters. That was when we heard that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. And of course everybody said, what is an atomic bomb?

But I think I also mentioned that sometime before, Horace Albright had rung me up one day and said that the engine driver who drove the engine from the mine to the refinery at Carlsbad had seen this enormous flash in the sky and didn't know what it was. We later found out, after the news that the atomic bomb had been dropped and how it was made and all the rest of it, that that was the day that they had tested the atomic bomb at White Sands, which was about a hundred miles away from our refinery.

And also I recalled that George Connell, who was my technical expert vice president, had been interviewed in Washington or New York and asked about certain properties of borax and so forth. He'd told me at the time it was by some people who seemed to be working on some sort of device; we again also found out later that this was in connection with the atomic bomb, because--I'm no expert on this--but as I understand it, borates are used in inhibiting the action of the atom, the action at least that creates the atomic energy.

I remember one of the newer uses for borates that got us quite excited was for killing certain types of weeds. We got an order one day for several carloads of borates from a place up in the state of Washington. And we were all excited about this when all of a sudden I got an order cancelling the shipment. Again, this shipment actually was to kill a lot of poison oak at the atomic plant in Washington. And then I guess some of their scientists decided that maybe because borax had an inhibiting effect, that they shouldn't be using borax so close to the plant. And that's why they cancelled it.

Swent : So is that all you want to say about the antitrust case, then?

Gerstley: Yes. As I say, it may have loomed very large in young Lesser's mind, but I think--well, I don't suppose there's anybody alive now except myself who really was too active at time. Of course, Mose Lasky is still going strong, but, you know, unless you were running the company, you wouldn't know what effect it might have on you. I would say it had very little effect, really.

Gerstley: But it did teach me an enormous amount of history I had to read. And fortunately the English Borax Company, too, kept marvelous files, and I had a chance to read lots of R.C. Baker's letters in the early days to Chris Zabriskie on policy matters and so forth. And I was very impressed with how smart he was; very good judgment he had.

lm~rovine- Customer Relations

Swent : I think that one of the first things you did after the war, and an extremely important one, was to improve relationships with your customers.

Gerstley: Yes. In Jenifer's day, the head of bulk sales, as opposed to package sales, was a man by name of Frank Winters, Sr., who was a very bright fellow, but rather gruff and socially not very "hep," you might say. And he didn't like calling on customers or anything. When I got involved, I appointed young Corkill, who was the son of the Corkill who had been superintendent out in Death Valley in the early days, as vice president in charge of sales. And he was very good at it. As I say, I felt and Fred Lesser felt, that one ought to call on customers and build relationships. So we did, and we found that we were overwhelmed at the hospitality, really. It was very interesting.

Swent: Who were some of your larger customers then? Gerstley: Well, Owens-Corning-Fiberglaswas one; Corning Glass in New York was one. Ferro-Enamel was a very big one, too, and Chicago Vitreous Enamel was. Enamel and fiberglas were two of our biggest outlets.

Swent: And had they been before as well?

Gerstley: Well, Owens-Corning--onlyreally after the war when we expanded was when they came in. Corning had been a customer of sorts; they got to be a much bigger customer. Ferro-Enamel had been dealing mostly with American Potash, but again, we were able to seize the opportunity and help them out when they needed help and we became their big source of supply. And I think that was partly true of Chicago Vitreous Enamel.

I got to know Boeschenstein at Owens-Corning-Fiberglasand Decker at Corning; he used to put their plane at our disposal to fly us back to New York, you know, because Corning is way up in the sticks. But it's got a marvelous museum with all the Steuben ware and so forth.

And Ferro, Weaver, who was the president, he used to love to play liar's dice or games like that, and so we used to have to spend a lot of time at it. We would have a big lunch and lots of cocktails and so forth and play games with him, then rush over and see our distributor, who was Harshaw and Company. So by the time we were ready for bed, we were pretty tired [laughter.] But it was fun.

Swent: And then you did begin to expand your production?

Gerstley: Yes. Well, in the first place, technique had improved over the years and we had hired one or two people, Lynn Hersey, for example, who was a very capable mining engineer, and who was well experienced with open-pit mining. And he studied our situation at Boron and he concluded, why don't you go to an open pit?

The difference between open-pit mine and underground mine is with an underground mine, you have to leave protective pillars. You know, you go into a room, you dig out the contents and something's got to hold up the wall. So you would recover only about maybe forty-five percent of the ore. With an open- pit mine, you would recover a hundred percent. So it extends your life, reduces your cost, and everything else.

Well, we were in the process of studying that, when along came one day, when Fred was with me, a naval captain who said that the government was interested in a potential use of borates which might be very, very large. And they wanted to make a study of the Borax Company ore reserves in the United States and elsewhere, if they could. We worked it out that the study could be made. We had no idea what it was for; we thought it might be for rockets or something.

We gave them permission, disguising the reason for their people to--in fact, it was the U.S. Geological Survey that did it for them--to visit our mines in Turkey and South America. They concluded that we had ample supplies. This made us think that we really had to go to an open-pit mine to extend our life. And we also decided if we did, it would make some sense to refine at Boron instead of shipping everything down to Wilmington. So we then started visiting our bankers and brokers and so forth.

Swent : And did you do that here? You had that kind of autonomy?

Gerstley: Well, I'd gone over to London and presented the case that we had made as to the financial situation, what the effects would be, what the cost was likely to be, and so forth, and I got their authority to go back to America and see what we could work out.

Swent : And you had people in-house who could develop this kind of finance?

Gerstley: Oh, yes. But then we also used Chase Manhattan Bank and we used Lee Higginson, who were friends of ours from the United States Potash Company days for the financing. And they came out and checked our figures on the spot. That was when Fred Lesser was going to come out to meet with me and sign the necessary agreements so that we'd get the money when we needed it, when instead, we got this cable to say that his trip had been postponed. Gerstley: Then I got a phone call to say that there was a take-over bid, they had received a take-over bid, and that Chase Manhattan were involved with the potential take-over party. And since Chase Manhattan had access to all of our information because they were going to be one of our principal bankers, we figured that they'd sold us out.

That's when I went to see Mr. David Rockefeller. He'd been to Oxford at one time; I didn't know him very well, but we had lunch together once or twice. Anyway, Ransom Skeen, who was our representative with Chase, took me to see David. David sent a message to Mr. McCloy, who was the person who was supposed to be associated with our opponents and who had just become chairman or vice chairman of Chase. He'd been, you know, the man in Germany who had been in charge of everything for the United States.

. Anyway, he was in a duck blind someplace. He came in the next day, and of course I confronted him with this; he was terribly apologetic. He had been asked to join the syndicate; he had no idea that the Chase was involved in'any way with us, so he didn't know a thing about it and he said he'd immediately resign from the syndicate. That's when I went over to England, afterwards, to see what we could do to fight off the rest of the take-over people.

Norman Pearson, who was one of the English vice presidents, and I worked up a letter to be sent to our stockholders so that they would rebuff the attempt. But we couldn't mention anything about the United States government's interest in Borax, we could only mention the fact that we were putting in this open-pit mine and refinery and all the advantages that would accrue and so forth.

Swent: There was also a depletion tax angle to it.

Gerstley: Well, the depletion tax came into the picture a little bit later. I mean, there was a depletion tax. Depletion is not recognized in England as a tax-deductible item, so it did the company no good, whereas, if we'd been solely an American company, it would have reduced our tax base considerably. Forming an American Com~any

Gerstley: So, later on, when the take-over people had retired from the scene--I guess they hadn't realized that they were getting into such a big fight and they didn't want to proceed any further-- that was when we had a visit from Lazard Freres, who'd heard about the take-over bid. They thought maybe they could help us. After various discussions, we appointed them to make a study of our situation and see what they would recommend.

They recommended, partly because of the depletion allowance, that instead of being a British compgny, Borax should spin off Pacific Coast Borax, sell some of the stock in U.S. Borax to Americans, keep some of the stock as stockholders themselves--aconsiderable amount, as stockholders themselves-- and this was what originated our becoming an American company. Pacific Coast Borax became an American company. And they recommended that we take over the United States Potash Company by merger, in which we had a fifty percent interest, and which by that time, was a going and profitable concern. This we managed to do, and it led to our becoming an American company.

Some of the stock was bought by Lazard, some by the Rockefellers, some by Ferd Eberstadt, who was F. Eberstadt & Company. The Chemical Fund, which his company ran, was one of the larger mutual funds. Later, when the American three decided they'd like to have a market for their stock, they helped us get on the New York Stock Exchange.

I was in the middle of all of these negotiations and dealings and had to work with all the lawyers, you know, preparing all the papers and documents and disclosures and it was an endless proposition. But we finally got on the New York Stock Exchange.

Before that, the United States Potash Company's stock had been listed on the NASDAQ, I think, over the counter. And the English stock, of course, had been listed on the London Stock Exchange, the Borax Consolidated stock. And Borax Consolidated stock, for many years, had been the sort of stock that widows and orphans would buy. They paid a regular dividend, nothing exciting. It never moved very far, but when the take-over bid came, it moved up very rapidly. And then, later on, when I was in Europe, the United States Air Force disclosed that its interest in borates was to give bombers a much greater range than they had before, and they'd be using a great deal. This was the time, I think, when the entire number of shares of the American company that was listed turned over five times or something in one week and the stock went from about thirty dollars a share to seventy-five dollars a share. Pretty exciting days.

Swent: I looked up the Times of London accounts of this take-over period; it was making headlines in the paper. On February 3, 1955, there was an article that says that when the offer was withdrawn--the syndicate withdrew their offer--the companies believed that it was withdrawn because of your effectiveness in reaching your stockholders. This is what was in the papers: "...giving their reasons for withdrawing, that they could only have offered a fair price for the stock if certain relevant information had been made available by the Borax board."

And then also, "the difference between United States and United Kingdom taxation was regarded as one of the factors which would enable us to make an attractive offer."

Gerstley: I know that the company probably volunteered as little helpful information as they could, naturally. As a matter of fact, later when we were getting ready to go on the New YorkStock Exchange, I had to appear before various.investment groups and talk about the Borax Company and so forth and so on. And one.of the first luncheons where I had to appear, who should be there but Coleman Morton, who had been the leader of the take-over group.

I made my talk fairly long, I guess, and he came up to me afterwards, and he said if I'd known what you have just told us about and had understood that things seemed to be in reasonably good hands, I would never have made the offer to begin with. - Swent: The aftermath of that was also interesting because apparently the company in England used this as a threat to try to get a depletion tax allowance there. They have a lot of headlines about threatening to migrate to America if they didn't get better tax treatment.

Gerstley: That I didn't know.

Swent: Of course it made some sense.

Mr. Abel-Smith on illogical taxation policy: "If taxation relief were denied, they might have to consider a scheme of reorganization involving migration to the United States" which, of course, they did do. Those things have lots of ramifications, don't they? Then on July 11, 1955, here's a big headline: "Borax Statement: No Move Yet. Any lingering ideas that Borax Consolidated may shortly move to the United States are finally dispelled by Abel-Smith." [laughter] So it all settled down.

[Interview 4: March 22, 1990]##

The Discoverv of Rasorite (Kernitel

Swent: I think you wanted to backtrack just a little bit.

Gerstley: I thought I'd like to explain something because at our last meeting I mentioned that the American Potash and Chemical Company, before I joined the Borax Company, apparently was trying to drive us out of business because they had developed a process to produce potash very economically at Searles Lake from the brine; the borax that they also produced was virtually a by- product. I think I mentioned that my father was concerned about this when I was still a young man. The reason we were not driven out of business I think is something that should be explained.

Back in 1913, a certain Dr. John Suckow, who was born in Germany, came to the United States, studied medicine a little bit, and, according to Norman Travis, who wrote a book, Tincal Trail, on the history of Borax Consolidated, he was particularly working on arthritis and rheumatism; he needed a warm place for patients and so forth. And he went out to Kern County to the Kramer District. Of course, he had to get.some water and he drilled for water, and by golly, he hit some ulexite and colemanite. He didn't know what it was, of course, at the time. And he got the USGS [United States Geological Survey], I think, to identify it, and we heard about it. This alerted Clarence Rasor, who was our mining engineer, to the fact that maybe borates existed in that area.

Swent: This was a totally different area in geography, wasn't it?

Gerstley: A totally different area, and there were no surface indications at all. Strangely enough, although I wasn't going to mention

.. this, but strangely enough, in the old days, the twenty mule teams coming out of Death Valley to Mojave passed, I think, within a few hundred yards of where one of the edges of these deposits was. And you could, in the early days, still see the marks in the sand of the wagon of where the wagons passed, at least that's what I was told. Anyway, to return to the facts, in 1924, somebody else drilled there.

By that time, our company had acquired some land in that area, just in case something of interest might turn up. Some holes had been drilled, but only some relatively poor forms of ulexite and colemanite had been encountered, nothing like as good as what we had elsewhere. But in 1925, I think it was, a Mr. Widdess on section 18, reported to Rasor that, at a depth of a little under five hundred feet, he had run into some blue shale and run into some soft mineral which was not colemanite or ulexite; it was determined that it was tincal. Tincal is a form of sodium borate.

I might explain that with ulexite or colemanite, they contain lime; borax is a pure sodium borate. In order to convert the ulexite or colemanite to borax, you had to get rid of the lime and replace it with soda, which was quite a costly process. With tincal, all you have to do is concentrate it and get rid of a few impurities. It's much cheaper, and this was the first discovery, I think, of tincal in the Western world.

Anyway, with Baker's permission, the Borax Company bought that section, and additional drilling turned up another form of borate which we called, originally, rasorite after Clarence Rasor; and Kern County called it kernite, so officially it's called kernite. It was not as easy to process as tincal; it had different water content, but we ultimately learned how to treat it by calcining and there was quite a demand for the calcined rasorite.

Anyway, this discovery enabled us to transfer all operations from the Death Valley and other desert regions to Boron, and starting to make borax out of kernite. Even with this discovery, which enabled us at least to survive, as far as the Borax Company was concerned, BCL had to deplete their reserves of money so much because of the lower prices caused by the competition and also the cost of transferring all these operations and so forth, that it had to suspend the payment of dividends from 1929 to 1933. But it did survive.

The Discoverv of Potash in New Mexico

Gerstley: The other very fortunate event for the Borax Company which really helped to restore the company to financial health, was the discovery in 1925 of potash near Carlsbad, New Mexico, by the firm of Snowden-McSweeney. They were drilling for oil and while they didn't find any oil, they hit potash. They didn't know what it was, but they were drilling on federal land, and cores of any mineral found on federal land had to be sent to the U.S. Geological Survey for analysis. Clarence Rasor, who had some very good friends there, heard about this and investigated and recommended to Baker that we ought to acquire an interest in the company if we could. The American Cyanamid Company also heard about this and tried to obtain a controlling interest, but Snowden-McSweeney wouldn't part with a controlling interest but they would part with a fifty percent interest and Borax bought it on condition that Borax would find the money to develop the mine and build the refinery and staff it.

While the potash development didn't really come to full fruition for a few years because it took time to raise the money, build the plant, install the railroad between the mine and the refinery because they were quite distant--nevertheless, it did really come to fruition in the fairly early 1930s and it was a very profitable undertaking and started to pay dividends very quickly and this helped to restore BCL to financial health.

Furthermore, once American Potash saw that we were making money on potash because, I mean, the reports were public, they knew they couldn't drive us out of business anymore because you either made money on potash or you made money on borax or you made money on both or you lost money on both. So the borax market stabilized as a result, and by 1934, BCL was able to resume the payment of dividends. I'm not sure whether it was at the same level initially as before, but anyway, it was at some level.

Swent: Are these complementary markets, the borax and potash? Are they related at all?

Gerstley: Well, not really related. Potash is primarily used in agriculture.

Swent: Fertilizer.

Gerstley: That's right. I mean, the three elements are nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. Borax is primarily used in industry, although there is a small amount of boron in the soil and there are certain plants that don't do well unless there is a little borate in the soil. So we did actually sell some borax for agricultural purposes. But this was just a very, very small part of the business. But really they're not related at all; it's merely the fact that at Searles Lake, they were both found in the brine; that's really where the association came in. I think again, in Norman Travis's history, around 1926 when American Potash greatly expanded operation at Searles Lake, Baker was even considering trying to operate the old borax property at Searles Lake, which had been operated during World War I with Solvay Process Company. He didn't want to do it and he always had the thought that sooner or later potash would be found in the United States because I believe before Snowden- McSweeney made their discovery in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which was the first commercial mining discovery, that some potash had been found I believe somewhere in the Middle West but at tremendous depth and I guess it wasn't a terribly rich source of ore.

So that's what I wanted to explain, why the Borax Company didn't go out of business with all that competition.

Swent: There was another little thing that I wanted to clear up a bit We had spoken in regard to this consent decree only of the one Western Borax mining property that you were forced to give up, but there were a couple of others, weren't there?

Gerstley: Yes, well, there was. There was the Thompson property, which was a colemanite property. After I joined the Borax Company, in 1934 or 1935 a man by the name of Thompson had gotten hold of an old property and was selling some stuff to China or Japan, I believe, a little bit. And this upset Baker somewhat so he said to Jenifer, see whether we 'couldn't buy it. And Clarence Rasor and I went out to see Mr. Thompson and we negotiated and we finally made a deal and bought it.

Of course, when the anti-trust came along and sort of accused us of monopolizing the mining end of the borate business with American Potash at Searles Lake, monopolizing the lake end of the borate business, one of the things that we had to stop doing was to acquire competitor properties and give up some of the ones we had acquired. The two principal ones were the Western Borax and this particular one.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that even though the Borax Company recovered from the severe reduction in borax prices caused by American Potash, it also, after these discoveries, the discovery of boron, of tincal and rasorite, met some competition in the Boron area, from Suckow himself, who still had some property, and from Blumenberg, who was the Western Borax Company.

Swent: You had not bought all of Suckow's property then? Gerstley: No, not at that point. We did later buy the Suckow property because Suckow didn't have enough money to develop it really, and we did buy it. It actually was a very good property which adjoined I think what we called the Baker mine, which was named obviously after R.C. Baker. And then the Western Borax Mine, Blumenberg Mine, we acquired that after the ore reserves had been very much depleted by Blumenberg during his period of operation. One of the things we acquired, however, with acquiring the Western Borax, were certain customers that Blumenberg had. One was Stauffer Chemical that used borates, and one was a big German group known as the Deutsche Borax Vereinegung.

The other day, I said that I didn't really feel that the anti-trust suit was as important in our lives as I guess Allan Lesser had said to you. I was thinking about what I said further afterwards, and I will say this, that because of the competitive fight with American Potash and Chemical in particular, we were sort of warned not to try to antagonize them unduly by going after customers that they were serving because this might result in a further cut in price and, as I say, BCL had virtually used up all of its reserves and suspended the payment of dividends.

Swent: That was much earlier than the anti-trust suit, however.

Gerstley: Yes, the anti-trust suit was ten years later.

Swent: But you think maybe that was what gave them the idea?

Gerstley: Well, I think there was certain sensitivity, let us say, and the anti-trust people wouldn't accept as a reasonable excuse the fact that you didn't want to drive the price down further. But I really feel that far and away the most important thing was our ability right after the end of the war to expand production rapidly, whereas the American Potash, they couldn't expand their borax operation rapidly unless they could expand their potash and some of the other things they were then doing, soda ash and what not. And it took them two or three years to expand at all, whereas we did it in a matter of weeks, really. So I feel that with that ability and also with the money we were making on potash ourselves and so forth, we wouldn't have been hesitant about going after all the American potash customers we could; we weren't worried anymore. But nevertheless, in the prior period, it was a delicate situation, and we didn't want to rock the boat unduly.

Swent: The American Potash Company had some suspect German connections, didn't they? Gerstley: Yes, they did. In fact, the dominating factor in the potash and the world potash industry were the Germans.

Swent: And you also had German markets.

Gerstley: We did, but not in potash.

Swent : In borax.

Gerstley: That's right. But the Germans, I mean the Alsace-Lorraine and so forth, were the big dominating factor in the potash and the world potash business. And it was only because of World War I, as I think I mentioned before, that we started to produce some potash at Searles Lake and American Trona did.

There was a discovery by the Spanish in about the middle 1930s of potash, quite good potash, and there was a brief price war between the Spanish and the Germans as a result and then it stabilized; I suspect there was an agreement. But the Germans greatly resented the American Potash production of potash and ultimately I think they acquired the American Potash and Chemical secretly. And this wasn't really discovered until the Alien Property Custodian uncovered the fact that the Germans had acquired American Potash; of course they insisted that it be disacquired, which it subsequently was, and American Potash became an independent company again. We had some suspicion about this, at least my father told me that they did in England, they had some suspicion that something like this had taken place. I don't know exactly what triggered that suspicion, but there was that suspicion. But anyway, it did take place and then it was undone, as I say, by the Alien Property Custodian.

Swent: You--that is, BCL--had a refinery in Germany, didn't you?

Gerstley: No, we had one in Austria. We had one in France, we had one in Spain, we had one in Belgium, and we had one in Austria. In Germany, there was this Deutsche Borax Vereinegung, and then there were one or two other very big companies.

Swent: But these were customers?

Gerstley: They were customers; we didn't own the refineries. I remember one in Austria. We had a meeting in Vienna and Liz and I happened to be there so we attended a lunch, and the superintendent--duringWorld War 11, of course they couldn't get any raw material, any ore--he used to walk I think it was a round trip of twenty miles to twenty-five miles a day out to the refinery just to see that it was still in good shape and that nobody had damaged it. And it was great; he was an old employee of ours.

Swent : And this was long after the war that you met him?

Gerstley: Yes; this must have been probably about 1954 or 1955, something like that.

Well, I think you probably want to get on to the Pat O'Brien period.

V AT THE HELM OF UNITED STATES BORAX AND CHEMICAL CORPORATION

Difficulties at the New Boron Plant

Swent: Well, let's do begin, then, with the expansion and we also want to get into your research facility, but let's do the mine part first. Gerstley: Okay. And the refinery.

Swent : Right. So in 1946, you were made vice president.

Gerstley: I was made general manager. Let me go back a little bit because this leads into problems that we had when we started to build our new refinery at Boron.

When I first joined the company in 1933, the company was not only small, it was poor. Why was it poor? It was poor for the reasons I've already explained. The principal one was the intense competition, which had driven prices to the lowest point ever. But also, you must remember that the Depression was on, and this reduced the demand for borates all through the United States and other parts of the world, too. So in effect, I can remember that if we wanted to spend more than a very small amount, fifty dollars or something, you had to get permission from Frank Jenifer, who was the general manager. And if the American company wanted to spend more than a relatively small amount, let's say five thousand dollars, he had to get permission from Baker.

Swent: Which took a long time.

Gerstley: Well, by cable, but you know, he had to give a very full explanation and so forth. But because the company was small and poor, it had a very limited technical staff. At the Wilmington refinery, for example, Mr. Newman, who was the superintendent, was a chemical engineer and he had a young chemical engineer by the name of Pat O'Brien. And Frank Jenifer had on his staff a man by the name of Fred Beik, who was a chemical engineer, and we had one or two mining engineers. But that was all and we had no research facility whatsoever. On top of this, it transpired that R.C. Baker for some reason was rather wary of engineers. Whether he thought he was being maneuvered into positions by them or what I don't honestly know; I wasn't obviously close to Baker. But this is also mentioned by Norman Travis; it was a fact. And I'm mentioning this because all of these things could have had some bearing on what happened later.

Well, until the World War I1 was over and we really could start to expand in 1946, while we were in better financial shape than we had been before the discoveries of potash in Carlsbad, we didn't really come into our own until starting in 1946. In 1946, when I was made general manager, the first thing I felt I needed to do was to get a technical assistant. And by that time, I'd been impressed by Pat O'Brien at Wilmington as somebody who seemed to-bea livewire, as somebody who seemed to be technically able--I know that Newman thought highly of him-- and I thought he had possibilities of becoming an executive.

Swent: How well did you know him?

Gerstley: Well, I'd, you know, sat in on labor meetings with him; I'd had problems that Jenifer wanted me to discuss about making some new product and so forth, so I'd had quite a lot of contacts with him. Jenifer agreed that it would make sense and Pat jumped at the opportunity and when I got him up, I not only used him for technical matters, but I gradually indoctrinated him into other facets of an executive.

Swent: He had been jumped up over Newman, then.

Gerstley: Well, Newman was getting to be an old man; he was the superintendent, and--yes,in effect I suppose you might say he had been, but Newman wouldn't have been any good at this anyway. Newman was strictly a plant superintendent; he was not a potential executive and Pat was young and promising. And Pat did extremely well both in the technical end and as a potential executive. bkt Decticafm -Vast- -- Open-Pit'~ow~-- 4 Mine

Larg at Deposit of F% WO~I~'SVitat 1 sideration"The results may ofwell such be sub-con- I "This occasion clearly il- Chemical to Be v vet oped in DcwH : 'Stantial boosts in the range ,lustrates the fruitfulness oi Our sound resource development 'yStems and and consenation The Re.r, BY MARVIN MILES. Times Aviation Editor substantially contribute to :more emcient mining our posture of strength in and - BORON, Nov. 13 - -4 jar- Althou jh there are today the maintenance of pace.'# P"essing techniques relect- r!ng dynamite blast in anlmore than 100 different uses ed at Boron mill minimize carthen cobseum idaydedi-/f0r borate, the most dramatic Used by Bab~~0nia.s 1',waste in mining and allo~v use of the chemical current- Legend has it that the &-.'the fullest utilization of the i:ated a vast 'pen-@ borax'ly in its application to high- cient Babylonians used b&limineral deposits, thereb y mine that will theienergy aircraft and missile, rax in working and welding meeting the needs of toclay ire world's largest deposit fuels. I gold and the Egyptians in!with a minimum of impact of the vita and versatile PerfDrmanCe0eered mummifying their d e a d.i on the needs of tomorrow. Since its discovery in ~mer-! "There were times in the' chemical. Capt. W. C. The huge pit and its rep-'iica about 100 years ago, how-. history of the domestic boron resenting the Sary's Bureau' ever, it has come into in-indurtr)r lvhen k ciated c~ncentrationand re- of -le,o,,utics, told !ile dedi- ,,v re- creasing use and industrial serves of borax neared ex- fining planfa, in which the ration that boron hydrides command, particularly dur-ihaustion and when men United States Borax & oder gains of Chemical Gorp. has Or ing the past decade. paused to ask, 'Is it \vise to in performance of airplanes ; production in this country mine this resource so rapid- SZO1wWO* illustnta the and missiles. These greater 'has grown from 12 tons in dnmatic rise bOraU ly?' household cleaner to impo?;; energies, he said, will extend '1864 to more than ~*,Mx] "The hci[ities are dedicate tant ingredient in "exotics, I,~ airframe /tons a year today. and the growing pressure high-energy fuels for air- h t, increase payloads Currently, there are morenow being placed on the na- craft and missiles. and impmve pedomances :than 100 different uses of bo-Itionvs resource base. Replica of ~ ~Team1 in~ . and ron in the manufacture of1 ..The mounting demands "In addition," he went on, many familiar products- Bridging this time gap for pharmaceuticals, porcelain,f~rraw materials are of vital several thousand s~ec~t~~l"~~~~~mmpounds a be enamel, plastics, steel, glas, concern to all of us and at the dedication on the rim/used effickntb at altitudes ceramic aacultural when they in- of the pit was a replica of'where ordinary air - W g c hem ica lr. the famed 20-mu1e borax flameprmfing, volve minerals and the min- fuels will not bum Thug We fire extinguishing, canning fuels which are non- team that lor two decades-lhope to continue to effective- and gasoline additives, into the early 1900s-hauled'ly maintain our mobile sea- renewable in character,Once ore from Death Valley to going forces." Interior Official Speaks taken from the earth they Mojave across this Very Spot - Speaking for the ~irForce One of the principal speak- be rep1aced-The need where the world's richest de-, a a Brig. Gens M- F. ers at today's dedications measures which as- posit is now being mined. Cooper, commander of thelwas Undersecretary of the sure future generations sup- Fourteen hundred f e i~ t nearby US^ Flight ~estInterior Hatfield Chilson, plies these is across and 175 feet deep, tile Center, Edwarb AFB. who spoke of America's great.readily apparent and we are great hole gouged into the herihga and natural wealthlstri.iving Constantly to devel- desert earth 130 miles north- New Decland Nwded:itoday i~ ample prmf that !op realistic policies to make east of Los Angeles repre- "The development of jetlja policy of hoarding wou~,djthi~possible. sents the first time t h a t a v i a t i 0 n," he said, "has::have been wrong. Today, borax has ever been mined thrust upon us the necessity despite nearly a century of by the open-pit m e t h 0 d. for finding and developing !intensive production, the which allows a virtual 100%;fuels that can Operate with borax industry faces a more recovery of ore which is higreater effectiveness than promising mure than ever itself about 70% pure. those we have used in the ,before." Enough for 100 Year8 I past-u~~ produce higher speeds I Hailed as Joint Venture James Gerstley* presi- ranges This $20,000,000 refinery the ad- and longer we need' new fuels and one of there/~vaS1 design, engineering dressed the dedication and now receiving consideration and construction job of the, earlier at a news conference is a h i g h -energy fuel in!louthwetem Enmeeringi that at the which boron is an important CO. and Twait-Whittmberg! rate of mining--800,m tons ingredient. Because- of the CO. a joint venture. a year - the company can There were 500 engineer- meet the needs of the free'~~~";:e~~~~~~fis~,"~iing-construction penomel world for defense and indus-1 on the job during the peak trial purposes for 100 years./sidering their use in 'oth California, said, pm,m~s~desand aircraft and inlof Const~-~ctionand an esti-1 duces 95% of the freeworldlslliquid and solid propellentlmated llOOOtOOO man-hours 10f work went into the proj- borate and of this total the'applications. 'ect, whlch was completed U.S.Borax & Chemical ~orp.' 'in two years. Some 600 em- produces 70% at this Wacre ployees comprise the pres- facility. :ent personnel of the facility, excluding construction workers.

Swent: What sort of things make the difference between a potential executive and somebody who's just a plant manager?

Gerstley: Well, you've got to turn your mind to all sorts of things as an executive: sales, accounting, competition, dealing with customers; you know, there's a wide range of things you have to be willing to do, dealing with foreign companies in certain respects, dealing with the Potash Company because of our relationship there. So it really takes somebody who's got a flexible mind and one that can be easily wrapped around a host of different problems. Maybe Newman as a young man might have had this potential--Iwouldn't know--but as I say, he retired as I recall shortly after that and we brought in some other young engineer.

Anyway, Pat did very well and so in 1950, Frank Jenifer died, I was made the president, and I had no hesitancy in making Pat general manager at that time. He had demonstrated so much ability. Don't forget--well,we'd grown, obviously. This was before the take-over bid and when we had grown a good deal more. But he did very well and London were very pleased with him too, Fred Lesser and so forth. Okay.

However, when the take-over situation arose, and it was decided that we would become an American company with BCL as our largest stockholder, and that we should take over the United States Potash Company by merger, and we should, subsequent to that, change our previous underground mining operation to an open-pit operation and build a continuous process borax refinery at Boron instead of the batch process, which was much more expensive, which was used at Wilmington and which had been used at Bayonne before--all of these things added a great deal to our work load, as you can imagine.

As far as the new plant and mine were concerned, Fred Lesser, with whom I'd discussed the matter, agreed with me that we should put Pat in charge of planning for the new refinery and the conversion to a continuous process instead of a batch process. And we gave Pat a free hand in picking what staff he needed and so forth. He also employed the Southwestern Engineering Company, who later were one of the principal contractors in building the plant and with whom we'd had some previous very favorable experiences.

Swent: He used them as consultants?

Gerstley: He used them as consultants along with chemical engineers on our staff. By that time we had quite a few. And as far as the mine conversion was concerned, we went outside and hired an expert in this field by name of Lynn Hersey, who, with our mining engineers, developed the plan for the conversion to the open-pit mine. As far as the open-pit mine was concerned, everything worked reasonably swimmingly and it was ready to open and operate effectively virtually on time.

As far as the plant was concerned, it also was completed approximately on time, but it didn't work. The result of it not working was that for many months--itmay have been a year or so--wehad to buy borax from our competition in order to keep our customers going.

Swent: When you say it didn't work, what exactly happened?

Gerstley: It didn't produce the amount of borax at the cost of borax that was--it produced a very minimum amount of borax, nothing like enough to satisfy our needs and nothing like at the cost that had been anticipated.

Swent: Was this because the process was wrong, or the machinery didn't work?

rstley: The process didn't work partly as a matter of machinery, partly a matter of design and so forth. Anyway, as soon as we found out that it didn't work, we went to investigate why not. It then came out--youknow, people hide things from you. It then transpired, because Southwestern Engineering couldn't hide things any more either, that a great deal of the planning was done not only in daytime, but in the evening, after our office hours . Pat used to get Southwestern Engineering people and some of our engineers together and they'd sit down; you know, they'd discuss this phase and that phase and what not, and what happened was that Pat had been drinking very heavily, and also that he very often refused to listen to very important suggestions, apparently, that some of the other chemical engineers had made. Now, why didn't he? I think this may have been due to two or three causes.

One, I think that the great increase in work that we had as a result of becoming an American company, the merger, going onto the stock exchange, planning to build a refinery, planning to build a research laboratory which we did at Anaheim, that Pat didn't grow with the job. That while he was excellent while the company was smaller, the additional load and additional demands got him down. I think that was one reason. I think that second, he may have underestimated the difficulty in converting from a batch process to a continuous process. It's nothing you can sort of sit down and write out a formula in five minutes. You've got to work out a process. And if he was drinking and not listening to people, you could make mistakes.

And perhaps the third goes back to the situation I referred to earlier, that when we all started out, the company was not only small, it was very poor. And we were used to trying to get along with an absolute minimum of engineers and with Baker's peculiar reluctance, apparently, to trust engineers, all these things may have contributed in some way to Pat's problem.

Anyway, I concluded, you know, after full investigation and after discussing with London, that we had to relieve Pat of his job. This was one of the most unpleasant tasks I ever had to face, but you know, if you accept the presidency of any organization, I don't care whether it's a company or a private charity or what have you, you've got to face the unpleasant things as well as the pleasant. So I sent for Pat and Pat tried to avoid me for a few days. I don't know whether he was or he pretended to be at home sick.

Swent: Was he working in the Los Angeles office then?

Gerstley: Yes. Once I'd moved him from Wilmington, he was always at an office near me.

But anyway, he finally came in and I told him and I don't recall that he tried to defend himself very strongly; he did ask whether we sort of could give him a little face saving and I know that we said that for a very short time we'd give him a title of vice president of production instead of just throwing him out. This was in 1958. For a few months he stayed on as vice president of production and then he left with a pension. We gave him a pension in recognition of his good prior service.

And of course, during all this time, we got other technical people to put together a team and get some outside experts to rectify the problem and the problems were rectified I think within a year or so.

One of the embarrassing things to me was the fact that in 1957 we'd gone on the New York Stock Exchange. Of course our shares were publicly held in the United States as well as by the Borax Company, and I had to explain our troubles to the stockholders and we had to suspend the payment of dividends so as to meet the extra expenses involved in getting the plant to work.

Swent: That was in 1958?

Gerstley: That was in 1958. Well, it was pretty embarrassing to me, having to do this having just become an American company, you know, and with all the hoopla that goes with becoming an American company and the high expectations that all of us had and underwriters had and stockholders had and whatnot. Not that startup problems are entirely unusual; other companies do have them.

Swent: The open pit was dedicated in November, 1957, and the first dividend that you omitted was November, 1958, so you crippled along for a year.

Gerstley: Yes, we crippled along, I guess, for a year, or the best part of a year.

Swent : But as you say, you wouldn't expect immediate surging profits from a new operation; you'd expect a lag of perhaps a year.

Gerstley: That's right.

Swent: I don't know how long the dividend was omitted there, but by 1960, the headlines were that U.S. Borax made the largest profit in its history.

Gerstley: It did, it did. So it may have been just for about one year I think that we suspended dividends and then we had got our problems worked out and we did make the largest profit in our history.

Selection of a General Manager

Swent: It must have left a gap in your organization, though, when you take somebody out.

Gerstley: Well, it did, and of course that's something I want to touch on. I felt and everybody agreed with me, including our New York stockholders--I'm talking about Lazard, Eberstadt, Rockefellers, Lee Higginson, that were on our board by that time--that I needed a general manager with proper qualifications. So the question was, did we have anybody on our staff who could be promoted to that position? And I concluded that we did not; that while I had two excellent vice presidents in Fred Corkill and Dave Parker--FredCorkill was in charge of bulk sales, Dave Parker package sales--thatthey just didn't have the financial ability or the types of minds, or I thought probably the interest of trying to become general managers, and that I really needed somebody who one wouldn't have to take five years to train. I needed somebody who could really step in because as I say, one had all these new problems to deal with.

So we enlisted the help of our New York directors because, for example, Ferd Eberstadt--I don't know whether you know this--his firm ran the I think it was the Chemical Fund, which was a mutual fund dealing only with chemical stocks. And so he had a lot of contacts in the chemical field. And of course Lazard and Lee Higginson, with all the underwriting they did, had a lot of contacts too.

One day I got a phone call--I've forgotten whether it was from Ferd or whether it was from Andre Meyer of Lazard--to say that they thought they'd found somebody, a man by the name of Hugo Riemer, who was a lawyer and had a lot of technical experience and background with the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, which in the past was the company that, you know, was sort of the rival to DuPont. It was a very big corporation--itowned the Solvay Process Company and so forth and so on.

Anyway, we agreed that Hugo should come out and be interviewed in California, which he did; I thought he seemed to have the qualifications. And we sent him over to London to be interviewed by our people over there and they agreed that they thought he had enough qualifications to be given an opportunity. So he was employed in 1958.

I was going to say that Hugo didn't turn out to be the success I think that everybody had hoped. I suspect that Carl Randolph maybe could tell you more about this. Norman Travis could also tell you, because Norman Travis succeeded Fred Lesser as head of the English Borax Company and he had a lot of technical background, Norman did. He and Hugo didn't get along too well.

-- 'See oral history of Carl Randolph, in process and untitled in 1990, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley. Hugo had considerable ability in many respects; he had a good financial head. He could also be pigheaded about some things. I guess we can all be pigheaded about some things.

Swent: Oh surely not! [laughter]

Gerstley: But finally, we let Hugo go.

Swent: Did it fall on you to do that also?

Gerstley: No, no. I had retired by that time. You see, Hugo succeeded me as president, as I had told Lord Clitheroe--this may be jumping ahead a little bit.

But in 1960, when we were making the biggest profit in our history, I told Clitheroe I wanted to retire. Actually, I had planned to retire in I think it was around 1956, something like that. But when this take-over bid came along and they said they wanted me to head the new company to take over Potash, the challenge was too attractive to resist, and I'm not at all sorry that I did. I'm only sorry that everything didn't go quite as fluently as one would have liked, but at least when I did retire, it was on a high note because the company had grown by that time from a very small company where we made maybe a few thousand dollars a year, PCB did, to where we were making millions of dollars a year. So, anyway, ~ord.Clitheroe asked me to stay on until the end of the fiscal year, which I did, and I guess I retired in 1961.

Swent: And Riemer succeeded you.

Gerstley: Hugo succeeded me, and he lasted--I was made vice chairman of the board; in effect I was the American chairman because the other chairman was English and when he wasn't over here I had to run the meetings and so forth. But Hugo must have lasted, oh, it was a number of years.

One of the problems that we had to deal with at that time was potash. The best body of potash ore at Carlsbad was beginning to run out, and while there were lower grade in the mine, they of course would be more expensive to produce and so forth. And besides which, there had been some discoveries in Canada. I had persuaded our people to acquire at least an interest in Canada because it looked as though the ore body was extremely rich.

Swent : This was in Saskatchewan?

Gerstley: Yes, this was in Saskatchewan. Well, I mean, after I had retired and the question arose whether to continue at Carlsbad, how soon to move to Saskatchewan, what sort of a plant to build, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, these were things that Hugo had to deal with and I think it was over some of these questions that he and Norman maybe didn't see eye to eye.

But as I say, being on the board, I sat in on the final session when Hugo was let go with, you know, a very good pension and settlement and so forth, but I really couldn't tell you all the ins and outs of what happened or what Norman Travis was upset about and so forth.

Swent : Well, as you say, I'm sure this is one of the hardest things an executive goes through.

Gerstley: Yes, it's very difficult.

Swent : Choosing successors and training successors.

rstley: It is, it is. And as I say, if we hadn't gone through the take- over bid and all the things that flowed from that, and we had stayed the sort of company we had been before that, I suspect Pat would have continued until he retired with a pension.

Swent : As a result of the take-over bid, the company had to be restructured and U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation was established as an American company.

Gerstley: That's right. Well, before that we had of course been Pacific Coast Borax Company and we were in effect a division of Borax Consolidated. When we took over U.S. Potash and were going on the stock exchange and so forth, the question came up, what should our name be?

And I remember sitting down and discussing this with Ferd eberstadt, and Ferd Eberstadt said, you know, the first thing that every English company that takes over some American operation and changes its name is somehow to intrude the words 'United States'. So he said, why don't you call it something to do with the United States?

So we decided that while 'Borax' was most important, since we were also in potash, that we wouldn't say United States Borax and Potash Company, we'd say United States Borax and Chemical Company and that's really how the name arose.

Swent : So you and Ferd Eberstadt selected it. Gerstley: Yes, we sort of concocted the name between us. Well, it survived for a long time.

Swent: It certainly has. We haven't said anything either about your new building.

Gerstley: Ah. You mean our office building in Los Angeles on Shatto Place. I was trying to think what year, whether that was 1955--

Swent: It was 1950.

Gerstley: 1950. Oh, yes.

Swent: A new one in London and another one in Los Angeles.

Gerstley: Yes, the English company wanted to build their own building in London. And I guess we'd been talking about this when Frank Jenifer was still alive, and when he died, we continued with it, Fred Lesser and I.

Gerstley: We were looking, of course, for possible sites for the building and we knew approximately where we wanted to be; we felt we didn't want to be right in downtown Los Angeles, but we wanted to be within easy reach of downtown Los Angeles and hopefully not too far from hotels so that when we had directors or other visitors coming from different parts of the world, they'd have some place convenient to stay.

The property at Shatto Place became available. I was trying to remember who drew it to our attention--hewas somebody that had something to do with the Santa Anita racetrack. I would have to do a little research on this to tell you. He represented sort of the buyer and the seller because we, in--I think the property was owned by the Santa Anita racetrack or it had some connection somewhere down the line. Anyway, they were asking a certain price and we, you know, made counter offers and so forth and he represented both of us. But anyway, we finally arrived at a satisfactory price and for the architect who designed the building, we employed the Martins.

The Martins had--Jeniferhad known the father; I knew the boys. Anyway, the father had been instrumental in designing Furnace Creek Inn; that's where we first came across them and we'd kept in touch with them because we had other small projects to deal with. And the boys were very bright; when I say boys, they were qualified architects by this time. Anyway, we used them to design the building, with us because we knew what we wanted. And we used I think it was Herbert Baruch as the contractor to build the building.

He was head of the Baruch Corporation, which was a well- known contractor, and happened to be married to some friends of ours. But he had a very good reputation and he did a very good job. And then, to furnish the building, we used Maria Bergson.

Swent: She was not from Los Angeles, was she?

Gers tley : No, she was from the East somewhere I think. But some company in Chicago had used her services and had been written up, you know. And I went to see some of the work that she had done and I liked it so I employed Maria Bergson to do the inside planning and furnishing. And I think she did very well, on top of which she and her husband took me to the opening night of "My Fair Lady," I think it was. Or the second night--I've forgotten whether it was the opening night or the second night, which was a great treat.

Swent: '~ndwhere, in New York?

Gerstley: In New York.

Swent: I was wondering why you had chosen a New York designer when there must have been so many in Los Angeles.

Gers tley : Yes, but to find office designers, good ones, is not so easy. And I suppose it's because I'd read about her and maybe some of my business friends had said, you ought to come and see this in Chicago and elsewhere. Yes, I suppose there were local designers. Anyway, I'm not sorry I did.

Swent: It's a nice building

Gerstley: Yes, it is a nice building.

Swent: But the address now is Wilshire.

Gerstley : Ah, well, that's a different office.

Swent: Oh, that's a different building.

Gers tley : Oh, absolutely. About the time I was ready to give up the presidency and Hugo was coming in, by that time we'd grown a great deal, and we'd really outgrown Shatto Place, so the question was, could we find another office building. And this required acquiring property and building a building. It was decided to build a building which would have floors that could be occupied by other tenants, maybe on varying lease periods, so that if we grew some more or if we acquired another company or something like that, one could have room to expand in. And that's what led to this second building. But the one that I was really ,involved with was on Shatto Place.

Swent : Where is Shatto Place?

Gerstley: It's just around the corner, really. You know where Bullocks- Wilshire is?

Swent : Yes.

Gerstley: Well, our present office building is almost opposite Bullocks- Wilshire, and I'd say Shatto Place was about three blocks away.

Swent : I see, so you didn't move far.

Gerstley: No.

Furnace Creek Inn and Death Vallev Hotel Company

Swent : We're jumping around in time a little bit here, but that doesn't matter. You started having annual staff parties in Death Valley about 1950 also.

Gerstley: That's right.

Swent : That was one of the things you initiated?

Gerstley: Yes. When I became president and Fred Lesser was head of the English company, we thought it would be very good for morale and everything to invite some of the English directors and the top echelon of the American borax company, to Death Valley, with their wives, before the season really officially opened. The Death Valley season opens officially actually on November the first, or it did in those days, but really doesn't get underway very much before Thanksgiving.

Swent : This is the Furnace Creek Inn.

Gerstley: That's at the Furnace Creek Inn, yes. So we used to go out either late October or the very beginning of November. And I think we used to get out there on a Sunday, usually, and leave on a Wednesday or Thursday. And we'd go out with the wives and have a very good time. We'd play golf, those of us who played golf, swim, have dance parties or breakfast in one of the canyons with a square-dance caller, do some horseback riding, go out and play tennis. And it was very pleasant and I think everybody enjoyed it and I think it did build great esprit de corps.

Swent: You were also president of the Death Valley Hotel Company.

Gerstley: Oh yes. Unpaid, unsung, but I was president. While I was president of the hotel, the hotel never made an awful lot of money. We were lucky, pretty much, if it broke even, but we usually managed to break even and sometimes made a little bit of money.

Swent : And this also belonged to BCL, did it, or to USB?

Gerstley: Well, it had a rather amusing history, as a matter of fact. It was built originally I guess with funds that were supplied by BCL. I mean, it was built before my time. It was built on land which the company didn't own, and which it turned out the federal government owned. And when they discovered this, I guess they'd thought in those days that, Death Valley, who would care about Death Valley, and you could build a hotel any place in Death.Valley and it would obviously be on company land. But it wasn't.

And I think they had to get Horace Albright, when he was head of the National Park Service, to help them get the land transferred to the Borax Company in exchange for some other land that the Borax Company had there. So anyway, in my day, it was on land that we did own.

But when we became an American company and had all these other problems to deal with, I said I have enough to do and so did all of us in the company without having to fuss with a hotel company. And Horace Albright, who was on my board, said, why don't you talk to Fred Harvey and see whether they wouldn't take it over.

So I went to see Fred Harvey and we worked out a deal and they did take it over.

Swent: Many years later, though, wasn't it?

Gerstley: This was about 1958 or 1959, somewhere around there. Swent : It was quite a while.

Gerstley: But it was before I left as president.

Swent : Well, let's just check, because I was surprised how late it was. I thought that it had been earlier. "Death Valley hotel sold to Fred Harvey, largely through efforts of James Gerstley." This is from the Twentv Mule Team Magazine, Autumn 1969, volume 13, number 3.

Gerstley: No, I'm sure it was 1959. I know I worked out the deal and I gave up the presidency in 1960.

Swent : That was a satisfactory arrangement, then, with Fred Harvey.

Gerstley: Yes, I think they still operate it.

Swent : And you were not sorry to get out of the hotel business?

Gerstley: No, no. It really, as I say--I mean, I learned something about hotel business because Frank Jenifer made me in the early days and so forth, but it really contributed nothing to our--it took more work than it was worth, except for goodwill, I'd say.

We loved going out there, though, in the early days. And we used to, as I recall, some of us, before we went to our get- together in Death Valley, used to spend the night before in Las Vegas, doing a little gambling, which was always fun too.

Swent : Did you entertain customers out there at Furnace Creek also?

Gerstley: We did when we dedicated the open-pit mine and so forth.

Swent : You had some big events, then.

Gerstley: That's right. We had the, you know, the British ambassador, and a lot of important customers out there.

Chanein~to Modern Accounting Methods

Swent : Another thing that you had initiated, and this is going way back, when you first became general manager, you initiated monthly profit-and-loss statements.

Gerstley: That is correct Swent : Formerly they'd only done this twice a year?

Gerstley: Yes. When I became general manager in 1946, before that, I had been concerned because Borax Consolidated used to only have a pro forma accounting at the end of six months of each fiscal year, and then the audited account at the end of the fiscal year. And with this of course, how do you know that you're making a profit or a loss, or what you're doing? And then Jenifer and I would try to work out some sort of a system to have some idea of where we were going, but it wasn't really satisfactory, so when I became general manager in 1946 and we started really making some money, I said, I'm going to get a qualified accountant to head up a department that is going to give us monthly profit-and-lossstatements.

And my friend Dave Parker, when he came back from the war, said, I had a man in my regiment that we used to play poker with and he was the smartest fellow I've ever met. And it turned out his name was Dick Steel, and he worked for an auditing company. He was one of the I guess--I don't know whether he was a partner or what, in a very well-known auditing company. So I interviewed him and he impressed me very favorably and I employed him to head it up. And under him a man by name of Brown as chief accountant. And they built a department, and pretty soon we were getting monthly profit-and-loss statements. And BCL was so envious that they went to work and pretty soon they were getting monthly profit-and-loss statements too.

I can't live without monthly profit-and-loss statements, but the previous custom probably partly goes back to the fact that the company was pretty old-fashioned in the old days under Baker, and the financial stringencies probably had some effect also.

Swent: You were still riding a private railroad car there for a few years.

Gerstley: Yes, the Santa Fe. That was thanks to Jenifer. Jenifer used to be a railroad man before he joined the Borax Company. In fact, I think when he came into the Borax environs, it was as head of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. Anyway, from there he graduated into the borax business. But because of this acquaintance with the Santa Fe, when we acquired the interest in Potash, and Fred Lesser became head of the English borax company--thiswas sort of in the 1946-47 period before I became president--Jeniferwas on the board of the Potash Company. And Fred would want to go down and visit the Potash Company, so Jenifer arranged to have the Santa Fe put a private car at their disposal attached to the Chief or the Superchief to a certain point and then divert it down to Carlsbad or to El Paso, and I inherited this when I became president. And it was a lot of fun, too. We used to play poker on it and we had wonderful meals on it.

Swent : It must have been a lovely way to travel.

Gerstley: It was a great way to travel. Our wives came along with us, and we had a lot of fun. We had our own little observation car in the back where you could sit and sit out. You know, that was one of the luxuries we enjoyed. We also had stayed up at Ryan in Death Valley, as I mentioned, when I was a kid traveling with my parents and grandfather. But in later days, when there wasn't any Borax operation up there, there was still the "baby gauge" railroad, which used to run through those mountains. And it was wonderful to ride on the baby gauge railroad and visit the old mines and so forth. And people used to love to do this until Jenifer found out that if there was an accident on a railroad, the president went to jail. And he was president, so he called me in one day and said, how would you like to be president. [laughter] When I found out what was going on, I didn't want to either. But anyway, we finally had to close the baby gauge.

Swent : That was thirty-six inches, I think?

Gerstley: Yes, it was very small. When we would go through a tunnel, if you put your hand out, it would come off, you'd be so close to the side of the wall. But it was a lot of fun and it was very popular in the early days.

[Interview 5: March 29, 1990]##

Swent : It's been a couple of weeks, but when we stopped, in time we were getting up to the late fifties.

Gerstley: Yes, we were in '58-'59, just before I retired. But you were asking me about Olin-Mathieson.

Swent : Yes. That was one of the things I thought we should talk about.

Gerstley: Well, after we became U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation, and we knew that the navy and possibly some other government operatic. - were interested in borates for some form to fuel, apparently, planes for long-distance travel--theborate fuel is supposed to increase their range tremendously--welearned that Olin-Mathieson was a leading company in the potential production of this fuel.

Swent: Let me just ask one other question. The navy, as I understand it, had come to you.

Gerstley: Oh, yes.

Swent: You had not gone out seeking these kind of things

Gerstley: No, no. No, no. The navy had come to us, and that is covered in my hist0ry.l The navy had come to us, and we had agreed to allow them to make a survey of borax reserves that we controlled in different parts of the world, which they had done. They came to the conclusion that there were enough reserves to go ahead with the project . It was after that that we became U.S. Borax, expanded our production, and so forth. But one of the reasons we became U.S. Borax was that the project was secret. The details of the secret research could not be disclosed to an English company, but it could be disclosed to an American company. Once we set up the American company, we established, really, a research organization which was staffed only by Americans and reporting only to Americans. We didn't disclose anything to our principal English stockholder.

I met with Olin-Mathieson.

Swent: Where are they headquartered?

Gerstley: I think they were headquartered in New York at the time; they were an electrochemical company, very well known. Andre Meyer, head of Lazard Freres, and Ferd Eberstadt both urged me to agree to form a joint venture with Olin-Mathieson so that we could move ahead with them, not only in this particular area but maybe in other areas. But when I had my meetings with Olin-Mathieson to pursue this, the only basis on which they were willing to form a joint venture was if we agreed that after the joint venture was formed, all borate research would be handled by this joint venture company in which they would have a 50 percent interest.

'~ames M. Gerstley, Borax Years : Some Recollections. 1933-1961: The Storv of Pacific Coast Borax Com~anvand United States Borax and Chemical Corvoration. (Los Angeles, 1979) I talked this over with my research people, and we all felt--we didn't know how far this secret development was going to go, and why should we give up, in perpetuity, the entire right to certain borate discoveries that we might make? Because they were not experts in borate; they were only experts in making this fuel. I talked this over also--the joint venture idea--with our London people, too, and they agreed. We told Andre Meyer that no, we thought this was not a good idea. Well, he and Ferd were not at all pleased with our decision, and they brought a lot of pressure on me to change our mind.

Swent : In what way did they bring the pressure?

Gerstley: Oh, telephone calls, and sending people out to talk it over, and, "You know, you're missing a great opportunity," and so forth and so on. Anyway, we refused.

Swent : This is a decision that your board made, or could you make it on your own?

Gerstley: It was a decision, I guess, that I got a majority of our board to make, and our principal stockholder voting with us--I mean, we could outvote the other side.

But, later on, when the navy and the air force concluded that they could really get the long range out of the planes by refueling in the air at a much cheaper cost than by developing this more expensive borate fuel, our stock dropped considerably, because people had bought it on the expectation that this was going to cause a tremendous demand for borates. The first person to ring me up, I think, was Ferd Eberstadt, and he said, "You were absolutely right, because, obviously, Olin-Mathieson--we're through as far as they are concerned--and it would have been stupid of us to have given up our interest in anything that we might develop in our research labs through a joint venture." So that was the end of that story.

Swent : It must have made you feel very pleased.

Gerstley: Oh, yes. It's nice to be right sometimes. [laughter]

I might mention this, because I think this might be of some interest in the history. I spoke to you the last time about the problems that we had with the startup and the embarrassment with having to explaining all this to our new stockholders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, before we got into this trouble and were in our early days of being an American company, I guess1 and some of my colleagues were Andre Meyer's fair- haired boys for a while. He used to entertain us in New York and made a big fuss over us. Obviously, when we got into trouble, then he was very displeased, and we were no longer his fair-haired boys. I always sort of had the feeling--Idon't know whether I'm right--that if he could have, he would have changed the management of the company. I'm not sure whether he had some discussions with Lord Clitheroe, who was chairman of Borax Holdings, on this subject, but, in any event, I know that Lord Clitheroe and Fred Lesser both felt that they were just as responsible as I was for putting Pat in charge of the new plant. Consequently, if the management was going to be changed, all of us were going to' be changed. Knowing Lord Clitheroe, I'm sure he told Andre'Meyer that, okay, anybody was entitled to make one mistake.

But I do know that when I was about to retire, Dick Mansfield, who was on our board and representing the Rockefellers--hecame out to Los Angeles, and he asked me to have lunch with him at Perino's. He got to talking about our difficult days and also the fact that at this point we were making more money than we had ever made in the history of the whole company. And he said that he just wanted to let me know that he admired how much I had taken the blame, taken the heat, and so forth, and seen it through, and he was just delighted that things had turned out happily.

Anyway, as I told you the last time, I had really planned to retire much earlier, and it was only the challenge of the U.S. Borax and the American company and all the new problems that kept me going as long as I did.

Swent: Perhaps this is the time to mention this. I don't know whether you want to talk about it or not, but I thought you might have something to say about the changing point of view as your job title changed. I'm sure that you probably always saw things, in a sense, from the point of view of the managing director and the board, because as the son of the managing director you would always have his point of view in mind also. But did you find that your point of view changed?

Gerstley: My father had retired from BCL when I was the head of U.S. Borax. It had nothing to do with being the son of the managing director.

Swent: But I would assume you would have more sensitivity to that point of view.

Gerstley: No. Sensitive? No, not at all. Sensitivity--whenwe were Pacific Coast Borax, obviously, we had to be sensitive to Borax Consolidated, because we were, first, a subsidiary, and, secondly, a division of Borax Consolidated. They had, in effect, the final say. I used to have to write very long and detailed reports as to what we were doing, why we were doing it, and so for-thand so on. While we didn't have many differences of opinion, obviously, sometimes there are differences of opinion, because you view things from different angles. They view things, maybe, from a worldwide angle. We might be viewing it from an American angle.

Swent: Would there be competition between the Chilean division and the California division, then?

Gerstley: No, no. Not as far as--you see, California had sodium borate with our discoveries of boron. Chile did not--at least, they didn't in the early days--andnor did Turkey. They had colemanite, or pandermite, I think they called it in Turkey. It was a borate of lime.

But as far as European markets were concerned, we sold to European markets through Borax Consolidated. They had the sales force. There's no use having duplicate sales force. If they had-some client who wanted borate of lime for some reason, they got it from one of their other properties. But since, in most cases, sodium borate had the economic edge, we were able to develop very rapidly.

Once we became an American company, U.S. Borax, and no longer a division or a subsidiary, then we--naturally,I had to consult on many things with my board of directors, which included not just London but Lazard, Rockefellers, Eberstadt, and Lee Higginson. But they didn't interfere materially, I would say, except on this Olin-Mathieson affair. They had a different point of view, although they finally agreed that ours was the correct one. On the whole, I would say, I had a very cooperative board.

Of course, our English stockholders, or Borax Holdings Limited--we were the jewel in their crown, basically. We were the ones that made most of the money for them. And once we became an American company, we didn't have to ask them to raise money to do something we needed. We did it for ourselves. Actually, it was, I think, from some of the money that our activities earned--for example, they had enough money to build an office building in London and pay their stockholders and so forth. I mean, once we really got going, their stockholders were very well off. Swent : Yes, I was very pleased, when I was there in the London building, to see that a huge aerial photo of Boron dominates the lobby. I commented on this to Mr. Lesser, and he said, "We know where our money comes from."

Gerstley: That's right. Actually--this isn't in my time, but when RTZ [Rio Tinto Zinc] took over Borax--

Swent: This is in 1968, I believe.

Gerstley: That's right. When they first took over Borax, because RTZ had uranium operations and copper operations and different operations all around the world, the Borax contribution to the overall profits, while significant, was a very small part of the total. Later on, it became the most important part of the total. I don't think that's true today. I just saw that RTZ made more money last year, I think, than they've ever made in their history. This is partly because of certain acquisitions they've made which had nothing to do with Borax. But there was a time when Borax was the biggest earner of the various interests that RTZ had. That was after my day. Probably Carl Randolph can tell you something about that. Or Ian White- Thompson, the present president.

Gerstlevite. a New Mineral

Swent : We have not mentioned gerstleyite, and we mustn't leave that out. [Gerstley looks through documents]

I don't know whether U.S. Borax is unique in having so many personal names in its story, but they certainly do. All their mines are named for friends and relations. And, they've got colemanite, rasorite, and gerstleyite.

Gerstley: Well, gerstleyite actually was a mineral that was discovered when I was president, and I was trying to remember who it was-- I've forgotten whether it was one of the mining engineers at Boron or one of the research chemists at Boron--anyway,he said, "Would you object if we named the mineral after you?"

I said, "No, I'd be very flattered." And I said, "What's in it?" "Well," he said, "there's some arsenic in it, amongst a lot of other things!" But anyway, I said I'd be very flattered, and I was.

Then it was actually through gerstleyite--therewas a mineral exhibition somewhere in New York, Philadelphia, I've forgotten where, a number of years ago, but it was after the discovery of gerstleyite, and I received a letter from a Gerstley of Philadelphia who said he had been to a mineral collection. He had seen some gerstleyite. He had found out who it was named after, and he was wondering whether we were related in any way. And we figured there was no close relationship, but there might have been something in the dim and distant past.

Gerstleyite actually has no value--at least, no known value--in any enterprise that I know of.

The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco--they have a section devoted to the minerals of California, and they had gerstleyite in it. They revolve the exhibition periodically, because the last time I was there, they didn't have it. I was asking them where it was. They had it in storage at that point, but they have it on display periodically.

What else could I tell you?

Swent: Well, you might want to mention the letter from the Pomona professor about gerstleyite.

Gerstley: Well, again, I mentioned that in my autobiography.

Swent: All right. This is a jump, then. I don't know whether you want to make this jump. I did want to ask you about labor relations. I don't believe we've touched on that at all.

Gerstley: No, except I think I mentioned that when the National Recovery Act was passed, this was when companies had to seriously recognize labor unions if labor unions were formed. We had a borax workers' union formed, and that's when we started negotiating with the union. brer the years, we negotiated with the unions at Wilmington and also at Boron. There was only one time when we got into any serious labor difficulties. It was at a time when we thought the union's demands were out of order-- wage demands, I think they were, primarily. We had to get in a--what do you call those fellows?

Swent: An arbitrator? Gerstley: Well, no, not an arbitrator, really. It's somebody who tries to bring the sides together.

Swent : A mediator?

Gerstley: A mediator, yes. We met with the mediator, and we worked out a mutually satisfactory compromise, so that what looked as though it might be a serious strike, which would have seriously affected our customers if we had been shut down, was averted. As I say, we worked out a mutually satisfactory compromise. So, in my day, we never had a strike.

Swent: Was this a craft union?

Gerstley: This was a borax workers' union. It covered the mining and the refining end of the operations.

Swent: Was it different from the one in the potash operations?

Gerstley: Oh, yes.

Swent: They had more labor troubles there, I guess--perhapsin earlier times.

Gerstley: Yes, in earlier times, they had had a strike. That's quite a different union. That was in Horace Albright's day. It wasn't in my day when we owned the potash company.

Swent : No lingering effects from that?

Gerstley: No.

Swent: You did always take long vacations. Of course, in order to go to England in those days, you had to take a long time. You weren't dashing off for a weekend.

Gerstley: Yes, it wasn't all vacation.

Swent: But you did take some awfully nice vacations.

Gerstley: Oh, yes. Usually, when Liz and I were over in England on business, once the business was concluded, we could take some vacations in England or on the Continent, sometimes with our kids.

Swent: How did you manage running the shop with these vacations?

Gerstley: Well, you see, I had Pat O'Brien as general manager. In those days, he was very good. While they always knew where to get hold of me if there was some emergency, I always told my number two, "If you have to call me every day, you're no number two, as far as I'm concerned. I have faith in you, and you have to be willing to accept responsibility. But if there is a real need to get in touch with me, you'll always be able to do so." That was really always the case. If you think you've got the right people, you've got to be willing to delegate authority.

I think one of the--I've probably got it someplace, though I probably can't find it--one of the nicest compliments I ever received was from Fred Lesser when he first came over here. He wrote me from the steamer on his way back to England and said he had been so impressed by the fact that I gave my top subordinates a great deal of authority, and I delegated authority, and they all seemed to respect me for it. Of course, if you don't have the good subordinates, you can't do that.

In those earlier days and before we became an American company and assumed an awful lot of additional problems, Pat was really excellent. He had a lot of good support--DickSteel on all the financial end, Freddie Corkill on bulk sales, Dave Parker on package sales. We had a very good team. The people running Wilmington and the mine were also very good--PeteGrim up at the mine and Walt Diffley down at Wilmington. So we really had a very effective group. As I pointed out, I think, in my farewell speech, the company's sales grew from $6.5 million a year to $67 million a year. That's a ten times growth in a relatively short time.

Swent: The company changed dramatically during your years.

Gerstley: Yes, it did. It has changed even more, I think, since I left. Well, maybe not proportionately, but it has grown--verymuch.

Swent: Is there anything more that you wanted to say about your years then? After you were president, then you became vice chairman?

Gerstley: When I retired as president, I was asked to become vice chairman of U.S. Borax and Chemical. Being the vice chairman meant, in effect, because an Englishman was the chairman, that I sometimes had to preside at meetings when the English chairman couldn't come over. Did that mean a dramatic change? Yes. I found, when you're president and you have people coming in to see you all day long, and you have matters to decide all day long, and all of a sudden you find you're vice chairman, and nobody comes in to see you anymore-- Swent : Nobody comes in to see you when you're vice chairman?

Gerstley: Well, hardly. I mean, sure, the president might occasionally come in, or visitors might occasionally come in. I found it very dull, frankly.

I talked it over with my wife, and at that time my father had died, but my mother had moved to San Francisco. My wife's father had died, but her mother was still living in San Francisco, and she had all. sorts of relatives in San Francisco. I had quite a few myself, because of my mother being a San Franciscan. We decided to look around, really, to see whether there was some other place we would rather live.

As vice chairman, I only had to actually be at the Borax company when there was a board meeting. Ordinarily, there might be a board meeting once a month or once every two months, or something like that, unless there was some emergency, which there usually was not.

So we looked around Southern California quite a bit. We looked around Santa Barbara, and various other places, and Camel. We finally decided, why not settle in the San Francisco area? We didn't want to be in San Francisco. We wanted to be outside. I suppose--maybe it was going back to my earlier days, when I had spent a good deal of time in Woodside at the Fleishhacker place, and I loved Woodside, that Liz and I decided to concentrate on looking around Woodside. We found a place which, when we first moved into it, was called Portola Valley, but later on they decided it was a section of Woodside, and so they changed the name of the area that we lived in to Woodside from Portola Valley. February 20, 1961

TO ALL EMPLOYEES:

After serving U.S.BORAX in the capacity of Chief Executive for some fifteen of my twenty-eight years with the Company, I concluded that the time had come when I could ask the Board of Directors for a less demanding assignment. The Board of Directors has agreed to this proposal and Hugo Riemer, presently Executive Vice Resident, has today been elected your new Resident, while I have been elected Vice Chairman of the Board.

The years I have spent with the Company have been very stirring ones, full of opportunity and of problems. The Company's greatest growth has taken place in this period, sales rising from some $%-million a year in 1933 to $67-million in 1960. Much of this growth occurred in the postwar period of international financial stress, which added materially to the burdens of our small management team. .. The decision to become an American company in 1956, and the later merger with U. S. Potash, necessitated postponing my growing desire to take things easier. But today those major tasks are behind us; the Company has just completed its most successful year in history, and it is staffed at aLl levels with able and responsible experts in the many fields in which it operates.

Uy decision to suggest for myself a less arduous assignment was, as you can perhaps imagine, not an easy one. It has been a matter of the greatest personal pride and satisfaction to have had the oppor- tunity of serving this historic company as Chief Executive. It has been a most happy and stimulating experience, shared with people at all levels in the Company to whom I have been, and am, deeply devoted. But the affairs of a growing compauy demand full-time effort and I would like to have more time for other activitier, some of which should be of benefit to the Company. So, I hope you will under8 tand my reasons for now taking this step.

Hugo Riemer is your new Resident and Chief Executive Officer. Since 1958, when he joined us, he has not only demonstrated his superior

UNITED STATES BORAX 6 CHEMICAL CORPORATION . 030 SHATTO PLACE . LOS ANGELES 5. CALIFORNIA. DUNnIRn 7-5151

MAIL ADDRESS: P. 0.BOX 75128. SANFORD STATION, LOS ANGELES 5, CALIFORNIA intelligence, organizing ability and capacity for constructive work but he has had time to become well acquainted with the Company's problems and to take a real hand in shaping its future.

I shall continue to be active in the Company, with special responsi- bilities in the field of long-range planning, and also continue to serve on various boards and committees.

In closing, I would like to thank each of you most sincerely for the great help and encouragement you have generously given to me over the many, and sometimes difficult years. If 41 of us support Hugo Riemer with wholehearted teamwork and intelligent effort in the years ahead, the Company's future will be assured.

Very sincerely yours,

J. M. Gerstley I Vice Chairman of the Board

VI COMMUNITY'ACTIVITIES

Swent : So your other activities in L.A. weren't enough to keep you down there?

Gerstley: No. If you want me to touch on my activities in Los Angeles--

Trustee. Pomona College:- Fundraising and the Pomona Plan

Swent : We do need to get into them, yes.

Gerstley: Well, I was going to really talk about my principal activities in Los Angeles. But when you're on a college board--it depends, of course, what your focus of interest is particularly. I was on the Pomona College board, as you know. Pomona is the oldest institution of the Claremont Colleges. One of the reasons I was willing to go on the Pomona board was, a) our daughter was at Pomona, and b) the Claremont Colleges were formed a little bit along the line of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Each college had its own board. Each one had its own financial arrangements. So I knew something about it because of the Oxford and Cambridge background. And Wilson Lyon, who was the president at the time I joined, I think, had been an Oxford man. I mean, he was an American, but I think he had also spent some time at Oxford. And David Alexander, who succeeded him, had some connection with the Fthodes scholarships.

Anyway, when I went on the board, I was interested in investments, and so I was invited to join the investment committee. I served on the investment committee for a couple of years or so, and then I was asked to be chairman of the investment committee. Swent: I think 1956 was when you went on the board?

Gerstley : Whatever year it was. It might have been about '56.

Swent : Your daughter was a junior at the time.

Gerstley: It was somewhere around '57, I think. As I say, I was on the investment committee, then I was chairman of the investment committee, and then, later, in 1964, I was asked to be chairman of, at that time, I think, the biggest fundraising campaign up to that date that they had had.

Swent: Or that very many colleges had had, wasn't it?

Gers tley : No, I don't know about that. Yes, it was fairly large. It was over twelve million dollars. By today's standards for colleges. In those days, I guess, it was fairly large.

One of the great things I learned in fundraising was--we had a man who was, I guess, head of the financial department at .Pomona at the time, by the name of Allan Hawley. He was supposed to have been the father of the deferred gift program, where a donor can make a deferred gift to a college, let us say, receiving the income from whatever money he proposed to give during his lifetime, through unitrust, or annuity trust, or one of those sorts of trusts. Only on the donor's death, or if the donor had a wife and provided that his wife should get the income after he died--onlyafter they were both dead, did the principal go to the college.

Swent: This is sometimes known as the Pomona Plan

Gerstley : It is. That's right. It became known as the Pomona Plan. But this is where I first learned about it. Of course, it's been, I think, enormously important in the fundraising efforts of most colleges. In Pomona's case, for example, they used to figure that the average life of a potential donor or of a donor--of a deferred gift--wasusually seven or eight years after the commitment had been made, that the donor would die and Pomona would get the benefits. Today, Pomona is getting something like close to two million dollars a year from deferred gifts that matured, which is a tremendous amount.

Swent : And are they reaching younger donors?

Gerstley : Oh, yes. They have an advertising campaign. They've got a very good fundraising organization, and I learned a lot from this fundraising organization. This is really where I learned more about fundraising, I think, than any other place, which, of course, has stood me in good stead later on when I got involved very heavily in fundraising.

Fundraising for the Chandler Pavilion

Gerstley: But I was in fundraising not only with Pomona. When the music center was being planned in Los Angeles, I got a visit from Mrs. [Dorothy] Chandler, whom I had never met up to that time. She came to my office.

Swent: Were you already on the Pomona board at that time?

Gerstley: Yes. She came to my office, and she asked whether, a) our company could help produce some money for the project, and b) would I go on one of her committees? So I said yes to both. We did contribute, and my wife and I personally contributed. In fact, I don't know whether you can find it, but years ago they used to have the names of some of the donors on the backs of the chairs in certain rows of the music center, and I know ours was on one.. Whether..it still is, or whether it's changed--becauseI haven't been there in a long time.

One of the amusing things was, I had just gone on one of Mrs. Chandler's committees, and then I had to go to Europe on business. When I came back, I saw that there was another meeting called for a certain date, so I turned up at that meeting. Various resolutions passed, and I moved two or three of them, and then it struck me that I was on the wrong committee. [laughter]

Swent: Which committee were you on?

Gerstley: I tried to remember. I think it was one of the fundraising committees. I think it was also helping to plan certain things in connection with the music center. But it was not a very onerous job. The money was raised in two or three years, or something like that, and that was it. But I met some nice people through it, and when I went on the board of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, her husband was on the board also. She was very nice, Mrs. Chandler, and a very good fundraiser.

I do remember there was some other activity I got into also. Cedars of Lebanon Hospital

Swent: Well, there's Cedars of Lebanon.

Gerstley: No, there's another one. Cedars of Lebanon--Iwas on that board for a couple of years. That was earlier on. That was the first, I think, public activity I got on. But hospitals depress me, and I didn't like it very much. So, again, what was my role in it? I attended some meetings. I helped them raise a little money--notvery much, because I didn't know too much about fundraising in those days, though I did help them raise some. Then I got off the board.

Swent: It sounds as if the Pomona activity was the one that was the most gratifying?

Gerstley: Yes. It was, and I'm an honorary trustee at the moment. I still go down occasionally to meetings.

One of the nice things and the most interesting things about being a trustee is, every couple of years they had a retreat at someplace. It might be Santa Barbara or San Diego or some other place, where the trustees, and their wives or husbands, and senior faculty, and their wives or husbands, were invited. There was a structured program discussing various college affairs and problems. But you got a chance to meet the professors. You also got a chance, if you were a golfer, to play golf with them or to go birdwatching or whatever other activities that were going on. It was usually started on a Friday zvening and went until the Sunday afternoon. Liz and I met a lot of nice professors that way and had some very interesting times. I think this is one of the first years that we did not go to a retreat. They had it someplace that didn't interest us very much. I've forgotten where it was--Palm Springs, I think. Anyway, I was too busy up here with Asian Art [Museum] to get away. But that was one of the very nice things that we enjoyed. So we met a lot of nice people. I used to attend all the board meetings as well as the investment committee meetings.

Swent: When you were chairman of this large fund drive that they did, how did you go about organizing that? Did you hire a professional staff that you directed?

Gerstley: We had some professional staff as well as our own, but we also nominated certain key people--differentclasses--people who had influence with foundations, people who had influence with corporations. We divided up the responsibilities-- Gerstley $12.9 Million Souaht In Pomona College Names Fund Fund Drive I CLAREMONT. March 14 - Campaign Chairma* 1 James M. Qerstlcytoday waa appointed national regfonal support for the fund pro chairman of the $12936,000! Centley and his P o m o n a College Advance abeth, live in Portola V ment Program. ! near Sa n Francisco. oustley, vice chalrman of' have two ch !Id ren a the bard of directors of the James G0d-t and a U n 1t ed States Borax and ter*Ann, who a Chemical Corp., will be in ate of Pornom College charge of this, the first major fund campaign in 40 years and the largest in the college's 77-year history. ea, increase scholarship The fund drive is designed ta "strengthen Pomona's posi- tlon of leadership among the very best liberal arts colleges Gerstley tRin sekct a in the nation,"-.according to Robert Q. Coons, chairman of the t r u st e e advancement comm!ttec directing the pre gram, who announced Oer. stley's appointment. Specifically the funds raised will be used to im- prove faculty salaries, sche la r ship and student loan funds, and to build four new academic buildings on the campus

Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Pomona Progress-Bulletin 15 March 1964 13 March 1964

Swent : Did you have an adviser who suggested that you do these this way?

Gerstley: Oh, yes, yes. Because the drive was not limited to Southern California--obviously,we have Pomona graduates all over the United States--we tried to organize this on a national basis, with the greatest emphasis, of course, on the West Coast. The drive was successful, I'm happy to say.

One of the nice things about getting mixed up in different affairs is you meet so many interesting people. It's stimulating as well as being enjoyable. So it's opened the world much wider for my wife and myself, and maybe if we had lived a narrower life--

Swent : You gave a speech out at Boron, which we might refer to here, about the corporate responsibility to be involved.

Gerstley: Yes, to communities.

Swent: Was this another reason why you did this?

Gerstley: Oh, I certainly felt that people who had been fortunate enough, maybe, to make a little money and who cared about politics and perhaps had some social conscience, ought to do something in the community.

I think I've mentioned before that I'm one of these crazy people that rather likes problems, because of the lesson I was taught when I was trying to come to the United States to work, the first time--Iwas interviewed by Mr. Dodge of the Dodge brothers, who said that he had been studying the problem. It was going to take me another five months to get into the United States under the quota, and he was the one that said he had found the possible solution, and that was if I would become an Egyptian citizen. There were two Egyptians a year allowed into the United States, and the quota hadn't been used. I could become an Egyptian citizen in about three weeks, and I could be on my way to the United States in another three weeks. While, happily, I didn't take the opportunity to do this, it really taught me--I was a very law-abiding young man at that time--if you really put your mind to something, maybe there's an answer. So, from that time on, when somebody told me something was impossible, I felt, well, let's wait and take a look at it. That was one of the most important lessons, I think, I ever learned. Swent: We haven't mentioned your own citizenship, when you became a naturalized American. Was this a momentous occasion?

Gerstley : No, not really. I mean, by the time I decided to become a citizen, I knew I was going to live here. I was married. My children were born here, and I wanted to be able to vote. I knew I was not going to go back to England. I had been offered the opportunity of doing so. I decided I didn' t want to. So the only difficult part was you have to study for your examination. But it really wasn't that difficult. And then you take the oath, and that's it. No, it really wasn't a momentous occasion. Perhaps if my mother hadn't been an American, it might have been more of a wrench, in a way. I loved England, I'm happy I was brought up there and went to school there, and college, and so forth, but I love this part of the world, too.

Swent: You already had one foot in the camp.

Gerstley : That's right.

Swent: Well, let's see. Your daughter and son--you really haven't mentioned them. I don't know if there's anything you'd like to say or not.

Gerstley : Again, I've covered it.

Swent: You've covered that in your autobiography.

Jumping around a bit here, do you want to say anything about the actual opening--I don't recall whether we talked about--didwe talk about the opening festivities when Boron was opened? Was that when you gave the speech about community relations?

Gerstley : No, that was at the chamber of commerce at Boron. Again, I've covered all that.

Swent: You have--adequately,you think.

Gers tley : Yes. And that newspaper article covers quite a bit of the--

Swent: Yes, the newspapers, of course, were very much involved in covering that. It was a big event.

How long did you stay on the board, then, as vice chairman?

Gers tley : They had a rule that at the age of, I think, seventy-five you retired from being an officer of the corporation. So, at seventy-five, I had to retire. Swent: It seems to me the company is quite amazing in the number of people that have stayed for a long, long time. Lesser retired after forty-four years and your father after forty-some also, wasn't it?

Gerstley: Dad, much longer. Dad was associated with the early company in 1890, and he didn't retire until, what, 1940-something. So it was over fifty years. Dad retired, I think, right after the war, so about 1946, something like that. I was associated with them from 1933 to 1961, which is only twenty-eight years.

Allan Lesser--he is the third generation. When he was a young man, he spent some time out in California, and I helped to give him his training in Borax and so forth. But Fred Lesser, as you know--his father--he started in with the Borax Company. He left the Borax Company after a number of years and went into another business where he felt he had greater opportunities. He only came back, really, when my father was going to retire and he had a chance to be managing director himself. I think he was a joint managing director originally with Arthur Reid, and then Reid retired, and Fred was the sole managing director.

/!/I

Swent: Well, I think, Mr. Gerstley, I've asked you the major questions that I had in my mind. Are there other things that you would like to say?

Gerstley: I don't really think so. I think we've covered--as I say, I've got so much covered in here [refers to document]--

Swent: You've written a great deal.

Gerstley: That's right.

Swent: And very well.

Gerstley: And while I haven't written everything that's in my book as well, but I think this covers a great deal.

More About U. S. Borax Research

Swent: The research division of the company you--

Gerstley: Yes, I haven't talked about that too much. Swent : Do you want to say anything about it?

Gerstley: Well, when I went over to England during the war, and I got our English friends to agree that we ought to have a research laboratory here, and build one, I think, initially, we had a little laboratory over in Pasadena before we built our own. I think Dr. [Donald] Taylor was one of the key figures over at that laboratory. It was after the war, I think, that we started this laboratory, and we hired some employees. London had a Dr. Edgar Fajans, who they had indoctrinated into research, to some extent. He came over, and he may have been the first head of the labor at or.^, and Don Taylor was one of the people working under him. ~utI felt before too long that Dr. Taylor knew more than Dr. Fajans did, and I was able to promote Dr. Taylor. When we built our new laboratory, our own laboratory, in Anaheim, I made Dr. Taylor the head of research. One of the people he employed was Carl Randolph, who later succeeded Hugo Riemer as president of the Borax Company.

Swent : When you first talked of expanding the research facility, were you thinking in terms of product research--the things to produce--or research on your ores?

Gerstley: We really were thinking of both--new forms of borate that might be used or applicable in some of the things that seemed to be opening up, or such as a fire retardant. There were quite a lot of new things coming along, or improved methods of refining the ore or concentrating the ores. I think we had certain priorities but we were also looking--if we could find it--for anything that would enlarge the market for one or other form of borates.

Swent : Why did you choose Anaheim as the location for this?

Gerstley: [pause] I can't honestly recall. There was a reason, but I can't honestly recall.

Swent : Had you given responsibility to a committee or to a person?

Gerstley: Yes, I think Dr. Taylor--but why we particularly chose Anaheim, I don't honestly remember. I'm sure there was a reason, but I don't honestly remember.

Swent : I'm sure there must have been, because you had your plant at Wilmington, which you closed down.

Gerstley: Yes, but we were transferring operations to Boron, and we didn't want our people to be stuck up in the desert. We wanted it to be someplace where if you're going to hire research staff, you've got to have places for them to live. You've got to have places that they think are reasonable to live in. Lots of people don't want to live out in the desert. So the desert was obviously out of the question. We didn't have room in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was, I think, a good deal more expensive in those days. We were building a building. We weren't renting a room or anything like that. I guess we could buy the land fairly inexpensively and get what we wanted. It wasn't too far away.

Swent: Were you thinking of contacts with universities or schools?

Gers tley : I suspect that they had some contacts. I remember that the laboratory over in Pasadena area that we had before--I think it was part of Arnold Beckman's property. I'm not sure that Dr. Taylor didn't work for Arnold Beckman, at one point. But, as they say, I'm sure our people looked around, what seemed like a sensible place and where there was reasonable housing as well as reasonable freeways and reasonable costs for land, and decided on Anaheim. But Carl Randolph might have a better idea.

Swent: Another question that I had: has U.S. Borax--or Pacific Coast Borax before--have you ever had any close relationships with any of the universities or the colleges, in the sense that you asked them to help you with research or that you had any input into their curriculum?

Gers tley : Well, I'm not the proper person to ask about the research department, really. I think you have to ask the research people.

Swent: This is U.S. Borax--it's been a powerful presence in Southern California.

Gerstley: Yes, but as far as U.S. Borax is concerned, I wouldn't say so. Sure, some of our engineers came from universities, obviously, but--

Swent: You hadn't had any particular alliance with--

Gerstley: No. Or we didn't, at least, in my day.

Swent: As I understand, the product borax became very significant in the whole space program, and your work with Corning Glass was-- they were developing the tiles for the shuttles and all those things. Gerstley : That's right. Long before that, though--Imean, Corningware has a great deal of borates in it. We had been dealing with Corning for a long, long time. When they got into the shuttle and they needed these tiles to protect the sides of the shuttle, sure, that was Corning, and that again involved borates, just as from a prevention or inhibiting standpoint, borates are used in the atomic process. I mean, that's not a big use of borates, but they do happen to be used in that respect.

I don't think we've mentioned the Gerstley Mine.

Swent: I don't think you did.

Gers tley : That was named after my father, and that was in the not-too- far-from-Death-Valleyregion, near Shoshone, actually. But, at one point, when they were trying to extinguish forest fires by flying over them, they discovered that Gerstley borate was an excellent thing to put out fires. So that after being dormant for many years--afterwe moved all the operations to Boron-- Gerstley borate, all of a sudden, for a while, became quite important again as a source of Gerstley borate to be used in putting out fires. Since then, I think, they've developed something else, but this was true for quite a few years.

Swent : I think it's still used as a fire retardant in England, isn't it?

Gerst ley : Yes.

Swent: Another question that I had--we've spoken about your relationships with your customers, how you initiated good customer relationships. Were you ever on the other end? Did you ever have people who were trying to sell you something, who were cultivating you. Perhaps when you were building your big plant?

Gerstley: I suppose we did when we were building our plant, but we had pretty much selected our engineering firms that we wanted to work with. I don't recall being specially wined and dined by any people who were after our business. One of the things we bought most, for example, was sulfuric acid to make boric acid Who made the sulfuric acid? Stauffer Chemical Company.

Swent: Your next-door neighbor.

Gerstley: Well, they weren't necessarily our next-door neighbor, but they had a competing operation at West End Chemical Company at Searles Lake. They had been working with Blumenberg when he made the discovery near Boron. But we did a lot of business with Stauffer, and I got to know John Stauffer and Ferd Wieder and Walter very well.

In fact, I think maybe I mentioned this in some document-- I remember when I was still fairly young in the Borax Company, [Frank] Jenifer and I took some of the Stauffers out to Death Valley. We were trying to negotiate a new contract, and Jenifer thought if we took them out to Death Valley, maybe we would get a better deal. I remember that they played a lot of poker, and Jenifer wouldn't let me play with them. He thought I was too young and innocent, I guess. I remember sitting around the swimming pool at Furnace Creek Inn, and John or Walter would throw twenty-five cents into the deep end, and you would see them all plunge in to see who could get it first. You would think it was a million dollars they were after. They were great characters.

Swent : Were you ever involved in any political relations at all?

Gerstley : Not any close one. I mean, I've mentioned that I helped entertain the Democratic convention when they came to San .Francisco, and Liz and I have supported a number of political figures. She has always been a pretty staunch Democrat, and, most of the time, I've been a Democrat, too. But, you know, if you're born in England, you can never be president of the United States, so I had no ambitions in that.

Swent: I vas wondering more in connection with U.S. Borax, whether you--tariffsfor example--

Gerstley: Well, no. You see, where we did have relations was through Horace Albright, because where you deal on federal lands, you do need to have some connections with the government and so forth and so on. Horace Albright was the person who could advise us and help us in that respect. And then when we had our antitrust suit, it was Maurice Harrison of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison who had the contact in Washington that led us to make a settlement.

Swent: But after that--after those years--were there any connections with government contracts?

Gerstley : No.

Swent: Were tariffs--havethey still been a threat in more recent times?

Gerstley : Most of the tariffs that we had to deal with were in Europe. They would allow crude materials into England, France, Spain, and whatnot, but they wouldn't allow refined in without paying a duty. That is why we shipped crude or concentrates to Europe and why they were refined in Europe, because it was cheaper to bring in the concentrates and refine them than it was to bring in the refined and pay the duty on them, I guess, for those countries. So it wasn't any tariff, really, here. It was the tariffs overseas.

Swent: And I guess the venture with the Canadian mines was after your time also.

Gers tley : Well, we were just heading into it. I mentioned it in this address that I gave at Carlsbad--asa matter of fact, when it was first suggested that we become an American company and merge with U. S. Potash, I had several meetings with Andre Meyer and his people and Ferd. I was hesitant a little bit. I knew that the high-grade potash ore was running out. The lower grade, while there was plenty of it, would be more expensive to produce. We had heard that there had been some discoveries in Canada, and I wasn't at all sure whether we should take over the potash company or whether we should invest in Canada. I think the thing that persuaded me to go ahead with the potash was, first of all, that they had an awful lot of established customers--good customer relations. And, secondly, they had a lot of people who knew an awful lot about mining for potash and how to treat potash, and so forth and so on, all of which should be a plus if we ultimately went into Canada. But I think we arrived at an agreement, that while we would take over the potash company, we would also see whether we could establish a foothold in Saskatchewan, so that if later we wanted to produce up there, we would have a starting point.

Swent: Were you the one that selected Homestake as a partner?

Gerstley : No. Homestake were never in it with us.

Swent: Maybe that was later. Allan Potash Company.

Gers tley : That was much later, I think.

Swent: You went in alone at first?

Gerstley : As I recall, we were in alone. When we actively got mining in Saskatchewan, I visited the property, but by that time I was vice chairman. I had retired. So I wasn't active in planning that, but I do think that we got the land before I retired, or were negotiating for it or something like that. I think Hugo Riemer had a big hand in that, too. Swent Did you ever have to maintain any presence, as the saying goes, in Sacramento?

Gerstley: Never, that I can recall.

Swent : No concern with Sacramento.

Gerstley: No. [pause] No, I don't think we ever did.

Of course, our big political relationship was hiring Ronald Reagan as the Old Ranger in "Death Valley Days." I remember--I think I was at a dinner once with Ronald, and I think Nancy was there, too, when he was working as the Old Ranger. Outside of that, I had no contacts with him.

Swent : Was that done by your company directly, or did you have an advertising agency?

Gerstley : Oh, we had an advertising agency--McCann-Ericksonwere our advertising agent.

Swent : That was vastly successful.

Gerstley: Yes. I always tell people, if you want to get ahead, you work for the Borax Company, and then you can become governor of California and president of the United States. [laughter] My wife doesn't like me to talk about it, though, because she doesn't like Ronald Reagan. I'm no great admirer of his, either.

Swent : I noticed that in 1974, the house organ, which had been called the Twentv Mule Team for I-don't-know-how-manyyears, changed its name to just Team.

Gerstley : Well, the house organ was the Pioneer.

Swent : I guess it was the BCL magazine that was called the Twentv Mules.

Gerstley: Oh, yes. Yes. It was the BCL magazine, which we had nothing to do with.

Swent : But they kept the Twentv Mule Team all those years until 1974. By then, they were--

Gerstley: They were RTZ, that's right. So it wasn't just Borax.

Swent: That was the end of the long tradition. Gerstley: Yes, it was. It was.

Swent : Yes, your magazine is the Pioneer, the local USB magazine.

I do want to bring in one little anecdote that I was talking to Marion Albright Schenck not too long ago, and she was saying that U.S. Borax was such a close group of people. And when her brother, Robert Albright, told her father that he was going to marry Harry Gower's daughter, Horace said, "Well, that's practically incestuous!" [laughter]

Gerstley: Yes. Well, as I told you the last time, we were a very small company in the early days. Yes, her husband didn't live terribly long.

Swent : No. He died as a young man.

Gerstley: I remember that.

Swent : There were very close friendships formed.

Gerstley: Yes, very.

Swent: Well, I think I've asked all the questions that I have in my mind, Mr. Gerstley.

Gerstley: Yes, I don't really think of any more. Well, I guess it's [checking the time] ten past- -

Swent: You've been very, very generous with your time.

Gerstley: Well, not at all. It's been a pleasure for me. I just hope some of this is going to be of use. I think some of the stuff I gave you today, though, will be really constructive. And if I come across anything else that I think you might like, I can always mail it to you, and, if you don't want it, you can just mail it back. If you do, you can always make copies or keep it. I think you now have all the books, because you've got Tincal Trail, which is very important. And you have Borax Pioneer, about Borax Smith. I think you've got that. And you've got Harry Gower's book. You've got my book.

Swent : And your autobiography and the memoir of your father.

Gerstley: That's right. I don't think you've got the history of The Shack Riders, though.

Swent: It's in The Bancroft Library, yes. I've read that. Gerstley: Oh, it is?

Swent : Yes, Borax Years and The Shack Riders are both at The Bancroft.

Gerstley: You've probably--no,you don't have it. I gave it to the Western Jewish History Center. My grandfather--mymother's father, Dick Mack--whenhe went around the world, somebody kept all of his letters and headed it, Mack's Ziezae Tour. But Grandpa's letters are not frightfully interesting, because he would write, "Dear So-and-so,"and then he would open a reference book and say, "I've just seen--"

Swent: And copy that?

Gerstley: I've left it with them. You don't have, because it's the only one in existence, my letters, when I traveled around the world.

Swent : The ones that your wife bound. That's a beautiful thing.

Gerstley: Yes. And these-- [going to framed citations hanging on the wall]

Citations from San Francisco Mavors Alioto and Aenos

Swent: This is a letter to you from Joseph Alioto. Let's just have you read that.

Gerstley: When he was mayor of San Francisco, dated July 5, 1973

Dear Jim, Your letter resigning from the chairmanship of the Asian Art Commission simply confirms what we had previously discussed, and I want to repeat what I've said to you. San Francisco owes you an enormous debt of gratitude. In my opinion, the effort made by you and Fritz was decisive in ensuring the success of this project. In historical perspective, I suspect that the universal opinion will be that the acquisition of this collection on a permanent basis is the single best artistic achievement in San Francisco's history. Without you, it wouldn't have happened. With my warm thanks, together with my kindest regards, and all best wishes- - Sincerely, Joe Signed, Joseph L. Alioto, Mayor. Swent: That is very significant. And who is Fritz?

Gerstley: Fritz Jewett.

Swent: Fritz Jewett, and he's talking about the acquisition of the Brundage Collection, isn't he?

Gerstley: Yes, that is right, of the entire Brundage, because in order for us to get the second half of the collection, we had to raise this amount of moqey under the agreement which we made.

Gerstley: This other proclamation is when I resigned. That's quite a long proclamation. Do you want me to read it?

Swent: Surely, if you don't mind.

Gers tley : "A proclamation, whereas, San Francisco is proud to recognize and honor the outstanding accomplishments and dedicated public service which James M. Gerstley has provided to the people of the city and county of San Francisco as a member of the city's Asian Art Commission since its inception in 1969, and, whereas, James M. Gerstley played a key role in civic affairs to persuade Avery Brundage to donate his unmatched collection of Asian art objects to San Francisco, and, whereas, James M. Gerstley has resigned as chairman of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum Foundation, after decades of distinguished service, throughout which he worked tirelessly and very successfully to advance the growth and development of the Asian Art Museum and its foundation, earning him the regard and admiration of his colleagues; now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Art Agnos, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, do hereby, in recognition of his leadership in the arts and achievements on behalf of San Francisco, recognize, commend, and honor James M. Gerstley and proclaim January the loth, 1989, as James M. Gerstley Day in San Francisco. In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the City and County of San Francisco to be affixed. Signed, Art Agnos, Mayor." Swent : That's very good, very special. Thank you very much.

///I

Transcribers: Pelly Fan, Noreen Yamada Final Typist: Sandra Tantalo

TAPE GUIDE--James Gerstley

Interview 1: February 21, 1990 (R. Teiser) Tape 1, side A Tape 1, side B Tape 2, side A

Interview 2: February 26, 1990 Tape 3, side A Tape 3, side B Tape 4, side A Tape 4, side B Tape 5, side A

Interview 3: March 12, 1990 (E. Swent) Tape 1, side A Tape 1, side B Tape 2, side A Tape 2, side B

Interview 4: March 22, 1990 Tape 3, side A Tape 3, side B Tape 4, side A

Interview 5: March 29, 1990 Tape 5, side A Tape 5, side B Tape 6, side A Tape 6, side B

APPENDICES

Appendix A--James M. Gerstley Autobiography

Appendix B--Family Tree

Appendix C--U.S. Borax Tribute

Appendix D--Western Jewish History Center Invitation

Appendix E--Sloss Tribute

Appendix F--WesternStates Jewish Historical Ouarterlv, April 1980 Review of Borax Years

Appendix G--Early History of Violet Terrace, 1981

Appendix H--Mayor Agnos Proclaims Gerstley Day, January 1989

Appendix I--SanFrancisco Chamber of Commerce Art Awards Luncheon, 21 March 1989

Appendix J--Letter from James D. Hart, 1 November 1989

Appendix K--Letter from Mary G. Albright, 19 November 1989

Autobiography

of

James Mack Gerstley

Over the years, James Gerstley has done considerable writing. His books, A Reminiscence of Mv Father, Borax Years, and The Shack Riders, are available in The Bancroft Library. He has given permission for this autobiography to be included as an appendix to his oral history.

Table of Contents

Autobiography of James M. Gerstley

I Early Years

I1 Family and Friends in America and England

I11 Education: Travel and Study

IV A Trip Around the World; Preparing to Work in America

V Training with Great Western Electro-Chemical Company

VI Pacific Coast Borax Company: Training in Various Departments; Assistant to the President

VII Assistant General Manager of Pacific Coast Borax

VIII Pacific Coast Borax: Vice-President and General Manager; President

IX President of United States Borax and Chemical Company, Director of Farmers and Merchants National Bank, Civic Worker in Southern California

X Vice Chairman of United States Borax, Trustee of the Asian Art Museum Foundation, Chairman of the Asian Art Commission

XI Retirement: Travel, Civic Activities in Northern California

XI1 More About Family

Earlv Years I was born on November 11, 1907 and most of my early recollections center about our home in London at One Upper Grosvenor Street near Hyde Park and very close to Grosvenor Square, which during World War I1 was often known as Eisenhower Platz after General Eisenhower because of the Americans working in buildings located on that square. The dominating building on Upper Grosvenor Street was the London home of the Duke of Westminster whose estate embraced much of that part of London. Our house, like others, was leased from his estate and my parents had purchased part of a lease from the former tenant in 1910. Our house had a basement where the kitchen, pantry and servants quarters were situated, as well as storage for the coal used to fuel the fires. There was a flight of steps leading from the street to the basement entrance used by the men from the delivery vans of the grocers, vintners, and other such establishments. There was a cover over the coal storage area in the street which was lifted when coal was delivered and poured down the chute. The front door to the house opened onto a hall on the ground floor. On the right of the hall as you entered was a fair-sized dining room, in back of it my father's study, and further along the hall the housing for the dumbwaiter from the kitchen, which was worked by a pulley and which brought the hot dishes up and returned the empty dishes, glassware, etc. to the kitchen area. Still further in back was the men's downstairs lavatory. A carpeted staircase led from the hall to the upper floors. On the first floor was a large living room which overlooked the street and ran to the back of the house with a well positioned fireplace. On the second floor, my mother and father had their bedroom and bathroom; the third floor contained our nursery, my bedroom as the only son, a bedroom shared by my two sisters, and our bathroom; and on the fourth floor were the servants' bedrooms and a bathroom. The seven servants consisted of a cook; a kitchen maid who washed the dishes; a parlor maid who helped serve the meals and did much of the housework; a butler who also took care of my father; a lady's maid for my mother; an upstairs maid who kept, the upper rooms in order, made the beds, etc.; and a Nanny for the children. From the living room one could look down at the horse-drawn carriages of the wealthier citizens, many with coats of arms on the carriage doors indicating the peerage of their owners; the horse- drawn hansom cabs which were for hire and which preceded motor driventaxis; the horse-drawn delivery vans; the postman making his rounds and deliveries by bicycle; the lamplighters who came in the evening to light the gas streetlights and to snuff them out early in the morning; and, of course, pedestrians. Every seasonally fine day, Nanny would take us children into Hyde Park where we played, my older sister and I walking and our younger sister in a pram until she too was old enough to walk. Sometimes we would go to a body of water called the Round Pond and watch the children sail their boats...often we would pass Rotten Row (originally the Route du Roi which the British quickly mispronounced) and watch men and women horseback riding, the latter usually riding sidesaddle. On Sundays, we often walked in the park with our parents and on Sundays there seemed to be a constant procession of elegant carriages out for a drive, some even drawn by four horses with a coachman in front and one or more footmen in the rear. Men usually wore high hats or bowlers, ladies wore long dresses and hats. While London had its underground and motor driven buses and the occasional private automobile, it also had horse-drawn trams in some parts of the city. In the summertime, my parents used to rent a house in the country. My father who loved the river leased a house at a place called Datchet on the River Thames in some of those early years. However, in the year that World War I broke out, in August 1914, we were at a farm called Manor Farm. I still remember seeing the large headlines of a newspaper announcing that war on Germany had been declared. On Sundays, Nanny often took us to visit Dad's parents who lived on Primrose Hill Road in Hampstead. We would take the underground to Golders Green, the station closest to Hampstead, which is in the northern part of London and our grandparents, who still spoke with a rather German accent, would have toys for us to play with and usually chocolate cake for tea. I remember their living room as having some red plush furnishings and antimacassars and while these visits were not very exciting, they were always very kind to us. When our grandfather died during the war, I remember that my Mother took us children and our grandmother to see Charlie Chaplin in "Shoulder Arms8', a movie which we thought hilarious but our Germanic grandmother was not at all amused. I think the first movie we ever saw was "The Birth of a NationM by Cecil B. deMille. Of course, in those days the pictures were silent. There would be a small orchestra to play appropriate background music and the main feature was first preceded by a newsreel and then by a short comedy. I started to go to a dayschool for boys in London situated near Cadogan Square around that time and soon after war was declared my Mother financed and ran with a matron and staff a hospital for wounded officers located in Cadogan Square itself. She sometimes took me in to visit officers who were well on the way to recovery. At examination time at the school, the mothers of the seven year old boys would come to the school and write the answers to the written questions as they were dictated by their sons. My mother used to tell of the time when sitting in her lap at my desk, I answered a biblical question by dictating that, I1God came to a river and put his feet in the river and then there was mud." I still remember how astonished and amazed I was that she laughed but she wrote down my version nonetheless! King George and Queen Mary, accompanied by Princess Beatrice and Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, visited my mother's hospital during the war and signed her visitors book which I still have. Dad was nearing 50 when World War I broke out but he decided to enlist as a junior officer and I have written of his experiences in my booklet, "Reminiscences of my Father." I still remember when I was home with some child's illness that he came into my room in his full-dress uniform wearing a sword and how impressed I was.

During the war when I was around 9 years old, I went to my first boarding school, St. Aubynls, at Rottingdean in sussex. Rottingdean lay not far from Brighton on the south coast and on some days one could hear the booming of guns across the channel in France. At St. Aubynls, besides my lessons, I learned to play soccer and to shoot at a range and became quite good at shooting. I also learned something about carpentry and made a few not very useful things for my father. The Sussex Downs were nearby and we often went for runs in the hills. The village had a charming old church to which we all went on Sundays and the standard of teaching was good. Just before I went to boarding school, I had my first horseback riding lessons. A Herr Stuck1 who was of German origin was my teacher and led my horse on a lead rein into Hyde Park where I learned to trot and finally to canter. However, once I lost my balance and fell off my horse much to Herr Stucklls embarrassment. When we lived in London, men like my father and Gordon used to wear bowler hats to go to the city and on most other daytime occasions. At night if wearing a dinner jacket to a restaurant or theater, men wore opera hats which looked like a high silk hat but were collapsible so that at the theater they could be placed under one's seat during the performance; however, if one wore full-dress, i.e., white tie and tails to a party, men wore silk hats. I think I got my first opera hat when I was about 17. We nearly always dressed for dinner at home, i.e., we wore dinner jackets or what Americans call tuxedos and I got my first tuxedo when I was sixteen. If we went to the theater, we always had seats in the stalls and also wore our dinner jackets unless it was an opening night of a new show when we would wear white tie and tails. CHAPTER I1 When the war finally ended on my birthday, November 11, 1918, I was in bed with the flu at school so I missed the celebrations. ~utmy father came home and during the Christmas holidays my Mother and Father decided that she should visit her father in California, whom she had not seen for several years, and that we children should accompany her with Nanny. We left in the summer after school and I remember how hot it was in New York. The train trip to San Francisco was wonderful though, particularly when we would sit outside in the observation car. In San Francisco, Grandpa Mack, Mother's father who had married Charlotte Smith following the death of Mother's mother some years before, was always great with children. We stayed with Grandpa Mack at the Stanford Court Apartments and met many of Mother's relatives--her sister, Edith Bransten, and husband, Charlie, and their children, Richard and Clara; the Levisons and Fleischhacker families, Alice Levison and Bella F. being sisters of Mother's late mother. We were invited to their country houses and Grandpa and Aunt Charlotte also took us to Lake Tahoe where we stayed at Tahoe Tavern and met Indian Ben who sold delicious pine nuts. Uncle Charlie (Bransten) took his wife, Edith, my mother, Richard, .his son, and me on my first camping trip from Lake Tahoe over the mountains to an area called Hell Hole. We rode on horseback and I remember a wide stream near the camp and that we slept in the open in sleeping bags but the ladies had a tent. I also recall that early one morning I was awakened by a considerable commotion to hear Aunt Edith scream, '81t's a bear--I know it's a bear!" But, in fact, it was only one of the horses that had decided to wander through our camp. We also visited Mother's brother, Harold Mack, and his first wife, Aunt Lizzie, and their children and we had seen Mother's bachelor brother, Gerstle, in New York. Both men had served in the U.S. Army during World War I and we had seen them briefly in London. Mother's family was a particularly interesting family. Her late mother, Clara Gerstle, was one of the five children of Lewis and Hannah Gerstle. The early history of the Gerstle family and its association with the famous Alaska Commercial Co. has been fully recorded in Gerstle Mack's book, "Lewis and Hannah Gerstle." Her father, always known as Dick Mack, though his real name was Adolph Mack, was born in New York in the 1850's and I recall his telling me that he had seen Abraham Lincoln's funeral train when still a boy. He and his two brothers came to California in 1875 and Grandpa who was a pharmacist worked as such in Visalia. He told me that in those days when doctors were called out at night to visit patients, he often rode with them on whatever horsedrawn vehicle they had. In 1880 he and his brother established a wholesale drug firm in San Francisco, first on Front Street and later on Mission Street. When the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 occurred followed by the fire which destroyed much of downtown San Francisco, some thought that the fire which started on Mission Street might have resulted from the spontaneous combustion of chemicals falling from shelves in Mack's store though this was never proven. The Gerstle and Sloss families had established summer homes in San Rafael where the families gathered and Grandpa Mack used to take the children on weekend walks and entertain them with stories particularly built around his two fictitious characters, Frankie and Louise. On one of these walks he led them through a railroad tunnel and was appalled to find a train approaching before they exited but, fortunately, they got through safely. Grandpa was quite well off when we visited San Francisco in 1919 but like many other wealthy people the stock market crash of 1929 reduced his assets though he survived the crash better than most people. In later life, while he had an office in the Mills building on Montgomery Street, he merely attended to his investments and whenever I was available, he would take me to lunch and he was always interested in my business career and my family. His eldest son, Harold Mack, became a stock broker with McDonnell & Co., in San Franciso. Grandpa told me that in his early years, Harry often gambled on the stock market and Grandpa had to bail him out. But before long, he became both a successful broker and investor. He foresaw the 1929 stockmarket crash and advised all of his clients to get out of the market which he did himself and he sold his seat on the New York stock exchange in 1929 for either the highest or second highest price ever realized up to that time. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Harry was one of the first to enlist and to be commissioned an officer. On the troop transport which carried his regiment to England, he was bitten by fleas and his arm itched so much he tried to stop the itching by cutting the lumps with a razor blade, and this got so infected that on arrival in England he was transferred to Mother's hospital for a few days as her first American casualty! When his regiment went to France, Harry distinguished himself greatly as a soldier and won many medals including some French and Belgian citations. His father often used to read me excerpts from Harry's letters home from the front which Grandpa had had bound in a book and kept in his office in the Mills building. After the war Harry was divorced from his first wife and later married Alyse Schloh. He settled in Carmel when he left the stock exchange and built his first house in Carmel, rather along the lines of an early mission. He had acquired some beautiful early Spanish furniture on a trip to Spain with his brother, Gerstle, who was writing a book on spanish art and architecture at that time. Harry was a great sportsman--a fine and enthusiastic fisherman and a low handicap golfer, a member of Cypress Point. He had great charm and was very popular in all social circles. When he was a boy living in the summer in San Rafael, he was a good friend of Samuel Lilienthal who was a member of the neighboring Sloss family and they used to take the ferry together to San Francisco to go to school and, of course, my mother as a girl also knew and played with the Sloss children and relatives. This was a great advantage later when Liz and I got engaged as both families had been friends for many years. Harry, the oldest of Grandpa Mack's children, outlived both his sister and brother and died in Carmel at the age of 100. Gerstle, the youngest child, was trained as an architect and worked for a time for Willis Polk, a famous architect in San Francisco early in the 20th century. But after some years, Gerstle went to Paris to help his famous friend, Norman Be1 Geddes stage ''The MiracleH with Eva la Gallienne as the star. Gerstle designed the scenery and helped in other ways and was in such demand that his name was called whenever something went wrong. One of the French people even asked the meaning of what he thought was an American swear word--Gerstle! During World War I Gerstle also served in the army in France and we saw him in uniform in England on his way to France. After the war Gerstle went to Spain to write a book on the art and architecture of Spain which became and still is one of the great reference books on those subjects, particularly as many famous objects and buildings were destroyed or damaged during the Civil War which rocked Spain in the 1930 Is. Gerstle then took up writing seriously at his apartment in New York. One of his earlier books was on the building of the Panama Canal called, "The Land Divided," which was successful as were his later books on French artists-- Cezanne, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. These were very highly regarded. He also wrote the book, "Lewis and Hannah Gerstle," the product of much research and a most interesting and informative history of the background, life and times of the Gerstle family and of the Alaska Commercial Co. Since our son's second name is Gordon, I would like to explain why this came about. Gordon L. Jacobs was a stock broker in London with his own firm and my father had used his firm to make invest- ments even before he married my mother. Gordon was younger than my father and a fine athlete; had a love of music and exuded a wonderful warmth. His sense of humor and his real devotion to our family were outstanding. He was fond of both my parents and added particularly to Mother's life as my father was not musical and Gordon would take my mother to concerts and the opera. As a young man, Gordon rowed for the London Boat Club and he really taught me more about rowing than did Dad, as my father used the short arm and shoulder driven stroke that seamen use while Gordon used the long leg driven stroke of crewmen. Gordon was also a good horseman and for a time had his own horse in London which he stabled in a mews not far from his apartment during the winter and moved to his country place in summer. He was also quite a good golfer and tennis player and he liked to shoot pheasants and partridge in season. During World War I he served as an infantry officer in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign but suffered a heart attack and was invalided home and spent sometime in Mother's hospital. Fortunate- ly, he recovered his health but had to be careful not to overdo things thereafter. As Dad when a boy and young man had not had the opportunity to learn many of these outdoor pursuits, and as Gordon was not married during my youth, he took me in hand treating me almost as a son. He helped me pick out my very first 12-bore shotgun which Dad gave me; gave me lessons at a clay pigeon school; and during my late summer vacation from school took me as a guest to his wshootsw which he and friends rented each year. A "shootM was a considerable tract of land usually including some forests where keepers would raise pheasants with chicken hens hatching pheasant eggs as the female pheasant is not a good mother. On September 1st of each year, the partridge season would commence. Partridges liked moors and ground cover and the members of Gordon's shoot-- usually five or six--would walk through the likely area accompanied by keepers with hunting dogs and when the partridges rose in flight we would try to shoot them when in range and, if successful, a retriever would find and bring the bird back in its mouth. On October lst, pheasant season began. Pheasants were hunted differently as the head keeper and so called beaters with sticks would start from the end of the property and walk towards the shooters who were often stationed beyond a forest of high trees. The beaters would make a noise by beating on bushes and trees and in due course they would alert the pheasants. The pheasants would take to the air and often on windy English days would come flying at considerable speed over the forest and when aiming one's gun one had to lead them quite a bit to have a chance of hitting one. It was exciting and great fun for me. A picnic lunch was always served--rain or shine--sometimes with wine or whiskey and, of course, I was not allowed to partake of whiskey though, occasional- ly, I was given a sip of wine if the weather was wet and blustery. I think I was about 14 when Gordon first took me on a shoot. Sometimes we would see rabbits or hares and have a chance to shoot at them. At the end of the day, the bag was divided up and Gordon usually gave me a brace of pheasants or partridge to take home to our family. On one of my Easter vacations in London from Cheltenham College, Gordon asked me to exercise his horse as he had to leave on a trip. The mews was not far from where we were then living at 61 Gr. Cumberland Place just above Hyde Park. In fact, if you went down Gr. Cumberland Place to the park you immediately came to Marble Arch in the center of one of the busiest areas of London with Oxford Street running one way and Park Lane at right angles. I remember vividly riding down Gr. Cumberland Place on Gordon's hunter and when I arrived at Oxford Street, I had to go around Marble Arch to get into Hyde Park. Buses, taxis, vans, and cars of all sorts were whizzing by in both directions, but there were three policemen on duty. When they saw me, one stopped the traffic coming up Oxford Street from the right, one halted the traffic coming down from the left, and one stopped the Park lane traffic from entering Oxford Street until I was safely in the Park. I felt I had indeed been treated like royalty! My mother and father, Adele Mack and James Gerstley, were somewhat distantly related. The surname of my father's family was originally Gerstle and Gerstles had lived in Bavaria, Germany for many generations. Dad's father, Maurice Gerstle, moved to London about 1850 and because the English pronounced the name as though there were a llyllat the end instead of an "eN, he added a "yN and became Gerstley. One of his German brothers, Lewis, had emigrated to the United States as a young man and came to California by ship in 1850. Lewis married Hannah Greenebaum and they had five children of which my mother's mother, Clara, was the eldest. So my mother and father were in fact cousins but of a different generation. They first met in Egypt when Mother was there with her parents and Dad went to visit his relatives and they soon became engaged. They were married in San Francisco and on the way back to England they spent a few days in New York at the then newly opened St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street near Fifth Avenue where much later I stayed on several business and pleasure trips. Both of my parents were well-read and intelligent and had excellent senses of humor. Mother had married before she could graduate from college but she was an intensive reader with an exceptional memory and soon more than made up for missing a full college education. She loved art, history, architecture and would have enjoyed being an archaeologist. Dad was an able businessman but he was also well-read and both my parents had outstanding taste. Dad could even buy a dress for Mother when on business in France or America when she was unable to accompany him and it was always most attractive. It was thanks to my Mother that I finally acquired some interest in art and architecture and to both of them that I acquired some taste and also a love of history. It was Mother who introduced us to architecture taking us to famous churches, cathedrals, Roman remains and also to archaeology when we visited the dolmens and menhirs in Brittany. While I did not always find these visits of great interest in my teens, as I grew older I appreciated more and more Mother's patience and persistence in introducing us to a world she loved. With a father who loved exercise, I was taught early on to enjoy walking, tennis and rowing. I was even introduced to golf before my parents bought the Malt House at Hurley. Sometimes in the winter he would play golf with Mother or a friend at the Stoke Poges Golf Club not far from London, and I would go along and often carry his clubs or my mother's. and act as caddie. The little church at Stoke Poges was famous because of Thomas Gray, the poet, and early on I knew the lines, "The lowing herd winds slowly oer the lea and leaves the world to darkness and to rne,l1 which he wrote for "An Elegy on a Country Churchyardw and he was buried at Stoke Poges. While we were still in our early teens, Mother would take us on summer holidays to France--Provence one year, Brittany and Normandy on another occasion--and Dad would join us when he could at some resort such as Dinard in France. I remember in Provence after lunch at some restaurant we all excused ourselves to go to the bathroom--men going down one corridor and the ladies another. But the men jogged to the right, the ladies to the left and we all met roaring with laughter in front of the one and only W.C. On another occasion when we booked into some inn for the night, we found the bathtub situated in the center of the living room surrounded by posts on which hung curtains which could discreetly hide the bather! My younger sister, Deedie, (named Edith after Mother's sister) was a very nice person but she suffered somewhat by comparison with my parents and my older sister as she was not as bright and well- educated as they were. She never married and she lived much of her adolescent life in the country with a delightful campanion, Phyllis Drage, who in earlier years had taught physical training. Deedie served very effectively in a hospital during the war and ended her days after a short illness in the village of Kemerton in Gloucestershire, where she owned an attractive home and where she had many good friends. We enjoyed our visits with Deedie and Phyllis very much. Margaret on the other hand was as bright as our parents and had a dramatic flair even as a young girl. Later she became very interested in the theater after she had been to finishing school on the outskirts of Paris and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts for a time. She married Bill Button in 1954 and they were very happy, although in some ways their interests differed. Bill, who was a barrister, had served in the war and later became Master of the Broderers Guild, one of the oldest and most famous Guilds in England. He had many hobbies and was a delightful artist and we particularly liked the water colors he painted on the Metolius River when he and Margaret visited us. But he preferred to live in the country where he owned a home near Bosham in Sussex, while Margaret, with her interest and involvement in theatrical affairs, preferred to live in the home they owned on the outskirts of London. However, they always were able to spend a good deal of time together. Bill died in 1984 but Margaret has shown great courage in continuing her very popular story-telling activities and seems quite indefatigable. She has many friends on both sides of the Atlantic who love her dearly. She is always willing and anxious to help people and serves on some helpful Boards in England. She is a most energetic and considerate person whom we both admire. My parents had many friends in London. The Sutro family was related to Dad through marriage and Dad sometimes took me as a boy to call on Julius Sutro who was related to the famous American Sutro of the Comstock Silver Mines. Another good friend was Harold Foster, a fine athlete, a partner in one of the Lloyd's insurance syndicates who loved to row, punt, and play tennis or golf and was Dad' s opponent at squash rackets virtually every Tuesday evening for many years when both were in London. The game was played at the famous and exclusive Bath Club to which the Prince of Wales belonged. It had several squash courts and a swimming pool and when I was home from boarding school I was sometimes invited to watch them and go for a swim afterwards. It became almost a routine on Tuesday evenings when I was 16 or so for Dad's valet to pack a small suitcase with my dinner jacket so that after our swim at the Bath Club we could change into dinner jackets and meet Mother in the Grill Room of the nearby Berkeley Hotel for dinner. After our swim at the club while we were dressing, Harold would order a drink for Dad and himself and a weak cocktail for me and his favorite phrase when the drink was furnished was, "Be a horse- -have another!" The Aspreys--he owned the well-known Asprey jewelry and furniture shop on Bond Street which still exists--were among their friends as were the Abenhams with two attractive daughters, the Politzers with two sons, and the Rileys. Some of these friends such as the Rileys were friends from the days of Mother's hospital. Colonel Riley who was a regular army officer was credited as being one of the developers of the tank which was first used and played such an important role in ending the stagnant years of trench war- fare. Paul Vellacott, a professor, was also a friend made during hospital days and played an important role in my life as did several of the above or their children. The family closest to us in England from the standpoint of friendship was the Lesser family. Federico Lesser, the father, had joined Dad's firm BCL in 1898 and had married Leonore, a beautiful Peruvian girl whom he met on a business trip to Peru. They had five children--Cita, Fred, Fito, Anita, and Elsa--the first three somewhat older than we were and the two youngest girls close to my age and that of my oldest sister. Federico was one of the bridge playing companions of our parents and Leonore, who spoke rather a broken English, used,to'read to us at times when as youngsters we were in bed with a cold or flu and I well remember covering my head with my bedclothes on more than one occasion because I was convulsed with laughter at something she had incorrectly read. We all loved her. As we grew older and when our parents had acquired the Malt House at Hurley, the Lesser family would often spend part of the summer at the nearby Bell Inn and we would play golf and tennis together. Christmas was another occasion when the Lessers came down en masse and we had wonderful times together. Fred and Fito gave me my first shave with much laughter and when Cita married Dr. Max Chance and Fred married Isabel Yrreberry and Anita married l*Pillf'(so-called as his name was really Ball), their husbands and wives all became great friends. Elsa was a beautiful girl and I used to date her on occasion. She was one of my guests at Cambridge for the May Week balls and festivities. Fred Lesser first went to work for BCL but soon joined another company in London. However, he rejoined BCL in the 19401s, joined the Board in 1943 and after the retirement of Dad and Fred's father, Fred became managing director of BCL, when I was President of PCB following Jenifer's death. It was a wonderful and happy business association and Fred and Isabel were two of the best friends Elizabeth and I ever had. Fito's first marriage was not a happy one but took him back to Chile and his second has been extremely happy. When Fito was in his twenties, he was a very handsome young man and a beautiful dancer and was popular in society circles. He was even invited to dinner by the then Prince of Wales. CHAPTER I11 In the spring of 1919, Dad came out to California and he wanted to visit some of the Borax properties in Death Valley and planned a trip with Mother and Grandpa. Luckily for me, a measles epidemic at Potters School closed the school for a time and I was allowed to accompany my parents and Grandpa on this trip. We first went by train to Santa Barbara to visit Grandpa's brother Jules and his wife who were then living there. While on a walk with Grandpa near the bay we saw a seaplane next to a dock with a sign advertis- ing rides of 10 minutes for $10. I wanted to try this and Grandpa who was a great sport made the arrangements and he and I had our first plane ride in a World War I seaplane with an open cockpit. From Santa Barbara we took the train to Los Angeles where we spent a few days. On one of these we visited a movie studio and met Sid Chaplin who was charlie chaplints brother. There we took another train to a little place called Baker not far from the Nevada border--Baker was named in honor of R. C. Baker, then managing director of Dad's firm, Borax Consolidated Ltd. of London. At Baker there was a railroad which was a subsidiary of The Borax Company named the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. This had been built to bring borax to the transcontinental Santa Fe Railway from the Death Valley area and also in the hope that it would transport ore from the gold and silver mines found near Tonopah. However, these mines dried up before the railroad was completed so the line never went to Tonopah and Tidewater. The T&T railroad as it was commonly called was also somewhat rudely referred to as the "Tired and Tardy Railroad!" In any event, Wash Cahill, then superinten- dent of the railroad, met us at Baker and escorted us to Death Valley junction. There, after Dad had inspected the works at the junction, we boarded the Death Valley RR, also owned by the company, which carried borate from the then mines at Ryan in the Funeral Mountains to the junction. We spent two nights at Ryan being housed and entertained by Fred Corkill and his wife who were in charge of the Ryan operations. While Dad and the others visited the mines I was turned over to an assistant, Harry Gower, who drove me in an old Ford down into Death Valley itself. I little knew at the time that someday I would be working with and superintending these fine people. After returning to San Francisco school was virtually over and we soon returned to England. By that time I was 13 years old and was due to go to some public school the next year. Because I had lost some time in America and in order to pass an entrance examination to get into a public school, it was decided that I should have a tutor to coach me in certain subjects over the summer, and a young Cambridge graduate who was due to become a master at Cheltenham college was employed as my tutor. About this time my parents had decided to buy their own place in the country to spend summers and other vacations. They found a house they liked about 40 minutes by train from London in the little village of Hurley in Berkshire. The house, named the Malt House, faced the village road but on the garden side it had about 7 acres of land with a view towards the hills. The garden included a tennis court, a walled flower garden, and a large kitchen or vegetable garden. There was also a garage and a gardener's cottage on the premises. The village of Hurley contained the Bell Inn, an attractive old inn and Ladye Place which had been a nunnery. The house lay about 1/2 mile from the river Thames and there was a lock on the river and nearby the lockkeeper kept some rowing boats and punts in a backwater. The river branches above Hurley and the branch that did not go through the lock went under a weir and below the weir Dad got permission to install a diving board. The house which had been considerably remodeled by Mother had three floors. On the first there was a large entry hall running back to the garden, a lovely yellow painted living room overlooking the garden, a dining room which also gave on the garden, a wine cellar, and a billiard room. On the second floor were Mother and Dadas bedrooms and bath, bedrooms for each of my sisters all overlooking the garden and my bedroom which looked over the street. There were also two guest rooms and one bedroom and on the third floor the maidsa rooms. We spent most summers at Hurley and Christmases and often Easter holidays as well. My parents would entertain and guests either stayed in the house or, if too many, at the nearby Bell Inn. Our friends, the Lessers, often rented rooms in the Bell Inn for much of the summer and for Christmas which we used to celebrate together. We played tennis on the lawn tennis court, went swimming in the Thames, went rowing or punting, played golf at the Temple Golf Club which was only a couple of miles away by car. Whenever American friends or relatives of my mother came to England, they were usually entertained at Hurley and if they had a son, he usually roomed with me and I thereby made friends with Edward and Richard Bransten, Mortie Fleischhacker and others. When John Gurney in our first summer at Hurley became my tutor, we used to work at Latin, math, etc., in the morning and in the afternoon play golf, tennis, or go on the river. On one day when John Gurney was punting and I was in the front of the punt, he got too close to some trees and a branch pushed me off into the river. While I could swim, John jumped in after me and helped me get ashore and back into the punt and my parents gave him a fine wristwatch in appreciation for his care of me. When I returned to school, I took the college entrance examinations, passed, and applied to enter Cheltenham College in Gloucester where John Gurney was starting as a teacher and as an assistant housemaster and I was accepted. Cheltenham College was in part a military college but it also had a modern and a classical side. The modern side which I chose concentrated on history, literature, math and some Latin, while the classical side included Greek and less math. The military side concentrated on math and history and preparation for graduation to either Sandhurst or Woolwich which were the training institutions for future officers of the regular army. However, all students had to join the so-called OTC (Officers Training Corps) for drill once a week and periodically to go on so-called field days. These last involved taking a train to some country destination and acting out a planned engagement against an assumed enemy. We wore khaki uniforms and carried rifles and when advancing against the assumed enemy, we would often take cover behind some ridge, fire some blank cartridges, get up when ordered, run forward to the next ridge or hedge and resume firing--repeating something of this nature until the exercise was over. Then we would march back to the train at the end of the day and the older boys would offer to carry the rifle of any younger boy who was obviously tired. There were several houses at Cheltenham, all with names, where boys were lodged. The various houses played each other at games such as football or cricket. Those who rowed raced each other to find the fastest crew. All boys attended classes and on Sundays went to the College chapel for the services and sermon. The various houses were located around an extensive playing field where we also drilled. To get to the classrooms, we walked from our house named Christowe across the field. At the top of the field was the Tuck Shop where, if one had any pocket money, one could buy candy or cakes while watching a major cricket or football match between the first Cheltenham team and some other school. Behind the major classrooms there was a quadrangle where at 11:OO A.M. on a weekday morning, one's class did some physical training exercise and where one could also buy a bun if one wished. While I played football I did not like cricket and opted for rowing instead. As there was no river at Cheltenham, those who rowed took the train to Tewkesbury, about a 45 minute ride, where the rivers Avon and Severn met. There was a boathouse on the Severn where we changed and we rowed in four's, there being no eight oared boats for the college at the time. I was fortunate in having been trained by Dad and Gordon how to row and I soon made Christowegs first four and we won the head of the river race since ours was the fastest boat on the river. If a Christowe team won at cricket, football or rowing, when that team entered the dining room for the evening meal, the whole house rose and clapped and cheered and that team had it names inscribed on a plaque. The walls of the dining room were covered with plaques going back many years. ~esidesthe usual sports, we also had a shooting range up in the Cotswold hills not too far away. On shooting days, I and others would ride our bicycles to the range and practice target shooting. On Sundays when we went to chapel, we dressed in black coats and dark grey trousers and we wore mortar boards with a red tassle. It was the custom for two or three friends to link arms while walking. As a new boy one was given a desk in a room with other youngsters at Christowe but as one got older one was given a small private room called a study on the second floor with a desk and a couple of chairs. Besides the housemasters there were prefects, three or four of the oldest and most responsible boys usually around 17 years of age. The prefects helped to enforce discipline and had the right, as did the housemasters, of caning a student who flagrantly disobeyed the rules. At the end of the summer term, there was a so-called Speech Day when some distinguished officer or politician or even a member of the royal family would come down to Cheltenham. There would be a march past by those in the OTC, then we would all repair to one of the largest classrooms where parents were also gathered, prizes were handed out to students who had done particularly well in their subjects and speeches would be made. In my last year when I was sixteen, I was not only in the head of the river boat but I was the first student in khaki to receive the prize of a special book from the Duke of Gloucester, a member of the royal family, in the presence of my mother and Gordon who had come down for the occasion. It was on one of the brief holidays like Speech Day that Mother and Dad discovered and took me to lunch at the Lygon Arms in Broadway, long before the Lygon and Broadway became a major tourist attraction. I learned a great deal at Cheltenham. We had some excellent teachers who made their subjects really interesting. MY mathematics teacher taught me things of value in later life such as how to find an easy answer to what seemed like a difficult problem by dividing instead of multiplying and applying a decimal point in the right place. For example, if one had to multiply 2412 by 25, one could find the answer quickly and in one's head by dividing 2412 by 4 as 25 was one-fourth of 100 in the percentage world. Such shortcuts were immensely helpful to me when I went into business and had to deal with accountants and engineers. In addition to what I learned in class, I also learned to become a good team player on the crew and on our winning physical training team and I also learned something about soldiering too. By the time I was in my sixteenth year, my parents decided I should go to some sort of school in Germany and in France to become reasonably proficient in both languages as this was likely to be important when I entered the business world. The school picked out for me in Germany was Herr Weberls small but fairly intensive training school for boys likely to enter on a consular, diplomatic or business career. It was located in Bonn on the Rhine and accommodated some six boys of about my age or a little older. The Rhineland at that time--1923--was still occupied by Allied troops following the end of World War I--the French in Bonn, the British in Cologne, and the Americans in Coblenz. My father made arrangements for me to travel to Bonn and obtained my visa to enter Germany but forgot to obtain the special visa necessary to enter a zone still occupied by the Allied troops. Consequently, when I and another boy who was going to Herr Weber's arrived by train at the border of Holland and Germany, we were refused permission to enter and had to return to Amsterdam to get the necessary visa from a consul. Fortunately, I knew a little German and had made many trips to the continent with my parents, so I knew how to get along which was fortunate as the boy with me had never been to the continent before. So after spending the night in Amsterdam and obtaining the visa, we arrived in Bonn a day late and reported to Herr Weber. While he was an Englishman his teachers were naturally German. He occupied a nice house with plenty of rooms and the cooking while German was good and the food substantial. Every morning we met--usually two of us at a time--with one or other of the German teachers to read, write, translate or discuss some important subject in German. The afternoons were free to walk, explore the countryside or to learn fencing at a nearby fencing school. I took some lessons as Dad loved to fence and while I was never very good, it was good exercise. Young Germans learned to use sabers and it was considered quite an honor for a German youth to have a sword scar on his face. Instead of spending every afternoon exploring the hilly and interesting country around Bonn, four of us discovered a wonderful teashop which served cherry pie (kirschtorte) mit schlagzammer (whipped cream) and coffee and we whiled away many pleasant afternoons at this tea shop--much to the disgust of Herr Weber! I was still at Herr Weber's when the Allies finally left the Rhineland. I watched the French troops--many of them colored recruited from French colonies--march out on foot and on horseback and the next night the German population held a torchlight parade and the famous German General Von Hindenburg made a public address. We also went on some cruises on the Rhine to Wiedsbaden and on the way passed the rock which prompted Heine to write about the Lorelei and there we all recited, "Ich weisz nicht was sol1 es bedeuten das ich so traurig bin, ein madchen von uralten zeiten es kommt mir nicht auf dem sinn." by Heinrich Heine After some nine months at Herr Weber's, it was time to go to France so after a summer vacation at Hurley, I set out for Mme de la Rive's School at St. Avertin, a village near Tours in France. By the time I left Bonn I could speak and understand German moderately well and had read some Schiller, Goethe and other classics. There were three other boys of about my age studying French at Mme de la Rive's. She had quite an attractive house not far from Tours and the purest French was reputedly spoken in the Touraine. At Mme de la Rive's we spoke French at meals and had lessons in the morning, learning not only something of the literature of France by reading Racine and Corneille but also learning conversational phrases. To encourage us to read French Mme de la Rive lent us novels--some rather sexy like "The Madonna des Sleepingsn which was the story of an American girl who made a name for herself in the theatrical world and had a number of affairs. In the afternoon we were free to go sightseeing at some of the nearby beautiful and historic chateaux or to play golf at a nearby course or do whatever we wanted until around 5:00 P.M. when we did some homework--reading or writing--until dinner was announced. I and a couple of the boys often played golf and we met a couple of American girls who were attending a lady's school and who also played golf. After golf we often had tea at a local Rumpelmeyers. One of my friends--Mason by name--fell for one of the American girls and wanted to write in French and tell her how he felt, but as his French was not very good, asked me to compose the letter for him. As there were some love letters in "La Madonna des Sleepingsn I copied one of these even though I wasn't sure of the meaning of one of the more passionate sentences. A couple of days after this letter was mailed my friend, Mason, met the young lady outside of Rumpelmeyers and she immediately went up to him and slapped him hard on the face saying, "How dare you write me such a letter?'! Of course, my friend was very upset and asked me what I'd written and I had to ask Mme de la Rive to translate the passionate sentence for me. She immediately started laughing as apparently, the sentence was more or less an invitation to a girl to go to bed with a lover! So I had to write a letter of apology to the girl to get my friend off the hook and, fortunately, the incident was soon treated as a joke and all was forgiven, though I was never invited to write any more love letters for my friend! In the fall of 1926 I went up to Cambridge University having been accepted by Peterhouse--the oldest college at Cambridge--where Paul Vellacott who had been in Mother's hospital during World War I and who had become a good family friend was head tutor. I was assigned a room on the second floor overlooking the quadrangle. Our rooms in those days consisted of a small bedroom, a small pantry and a nice sitting room which had a fireplace. The entrance to the room was an oak door usually left open but when closed there was a Cambridge phrase used to describe the closing, namely, "Sporting the Oak." There was no bathroom as such--a bedside chamber pot and a hip bath were the accessories supplied. A college servant known as the gyp emptied the chamber pot each day and left a can of hot water for the hip bath. He would also bring any meals ordered. However, most of one's meals were eaten in hall--the college dining room which had several long tables for students who had to wear gowns for dinner and a table on a raised section of the hall for the master, tutors and their guests. In my first year I took an honors course in French and German and I used to go to an occasional lecture and also translate or write something for the tutor I saw every week or so. However, I was also interested in rowing and was given a trial by one of the college crew and was assigned to one of Peterhouse's trial eights for freshmen. We rowed on the River Cam which was a relatively small winding stream and the college had a boathouse where we not only changed into rowing attire but it also had showers and toilets. Because the Cam was so narrow Cambridge had instituted bumping races as had Oxford on the equally narrow and winding Isis. In a Bumping Race one boat started 1-1/2 boat lengths behind the boat in front. If it could catch and touch any part of the boat in front over a 1-1/2 mile course, this was considered a bump and the next day or night (as most of the races were in the late afternoon) the boats would change places. The bumping races occurred on four consecutive days and if a boat bumped four boats during that period the members of the crew were given their oars as a souvenir of their success with their names, positions and weights enscribed thereon. We used to practice rowing every afternoon rain or shine so I spent much more time on the Cam than I did studying French or German as I found that my stays in Germany and France had really enabled me to pass an honors course without much additional effort. An honors course differed from an ordinary course or degree in that one only took an honors examination at the end of the scholastic year instead of at the end of each term. Peterhouse had a club room rudely called the "Sex Clubl1 the name of which was really !'The sexcentenary Clubf' as it had been built to mark the 600th anniver- sary of the founding of the college. I and some of my crew mates often spent the morning playing bridge in the Sex Club until it was time to bicycle down to our rowing club house instead going to class. Our freshmen's trial eights proved to be the fastest in our grouping and I was then promoted to Peterhouse's first boat, rowing in the No. 5 position. Peterhouse rowed in the second division and in my year we started in the fifth place. During the special training period prior to the races, our crew had to go for a 1-1/2 mile run before breakfast and were often served steak for breakfast. Whether due to this regimen or in spite of same, we made four bumps in four nights during the May races, moved up to second place in our division and we each won our oars. Following the last race, there was a special supper served us called a Bump Supper when we all broke training and drank more beer than was good for us and, of course, we received a great ovation in Hall when we appeared. Our coach thought we were good enough to row in the Henley regatta and we were entered in the Thames Cup to race against many other college and rowing club crews. However, before we went to Henley we celebrated May Week--a week of parties and college balls at the end of the college year, usually around the first week of June. It happened that in that year, 1927, my cousins Richard and Clara Bransten were in England with their mother, my Aunt Edith, and I invited them as guests for May Week and also Elsa Lesser. And I got tickets to the biggest ball at Trinit Zollege the first night and to the Peterhouse ball the next night All the men wore white ties and tails and with fine evenings the settings were most attractive--dancing in tents and on the lawns by the river and even taking one's guests for a short paddle in a punt. The dance orchestra at Trinity was that of the famous Paul Whiteman and we stayed up until around 7:00 A.M. and had our pictures taken at that time. After a brief rest we then went on the river with Mother and her sister, Edith, as well as the other guests. Richard was not used to such long hours without sleep and was .ther disagreeable, so we let him off to walk back to his hotel 2 parting said that we hoped we'd let him off on an island! An, it was! But he managed to get a lift to the mainland from some passing boat. Following May Week, our crew and our coach repaired to our home at Hurley as Mother and Dad had generously offered the house to our crew while practicing for Henley which was only about four miles away from Hurley. The 1-1/4 mile course at Henley was marked by wooden booms set in the river and the crews raced between these booms from the starting point at Monkey Island to the finishing point near the spectator grandstands. There was a gap of about 50 yards in the booms near the top of the course to enable the crews to enter the booms and paddle down to the starting point. The first day we decided to practice on the course, we wanted to make a good impression on various spectators and other practicing crews and entered the gap at high speed. Our cox misjudged our speed and the opening and as a result our stroke side oars all hit the booms and sheared off all four blades! Somewhat chagrined, we had to turn around and make our way with much difficulty as we only had bow side oars, to our boat house where, fortunately, there were spare oars! The opening day of the Henley Regatta finally arrived and my parents, Gordon and the Branstens were all in the grandstand to watch the races. Fortunately, we won our first two races but got beaten in the third by one of the crews which were finalists in the Thames Cup that year. It was a great experience. That summer I was invited to join the Charles Branstens, Edward Bransten, Billy Koshland, and some of the other Koshland family in Munich for the Wagnerian Opera Festival. As I knew little about either Wagner or the opera, Gordon Jacobs gave me Bernard Shawls "The Perfect Wagnerite1I to read so that when I went to the opera I could recognize and understand some of the themes. In due course, I crossed the Channel on the ferry, changed trains in Paris, and traveled with the Branstens, who had been in Paris, to Munich. There we stayed at a nice hotel and met Edith Koshland and her husband, nicknamed Cheez-it, their two attractive daughters, Deedie and Ruth, and Billy. We had a wonderful time together. We visited the art gallery, the wonderful Deutsches Museum, watched the figures emerge from the clock in the clock tower in the main square and had lunch at a beer parlor with large steins of lager and went to the opera, The Ring Cycle, which required four nights of opera. Actually, we went in the late afternoon, had an internal for supper, and continued afterwards. I must admit that after drinking a lot of beer for lunch, I sometimes had a short sleep at the opera but, for the most part, enjoyed it. One day when we were having lunch at one beer parlor, some rather sinister looking men came in wearing some kind of uniforms and sat at a table talking but they seemed to be rather furtive and almost like conspirators. In later years some of us wondered whether Hitler had been in that group as he used to frequent beer parlors in Munich in those earlier days. The famous Lotte Lehmann was one of the singers and the equally famous Bruno Walther was the orchestra conductor. I had been advised to take an air cushion to sit on as the seats were rather hard and it was amusing to watch the Germans in nearby rows look with envy as I blew up my air cushion before sitting down. After the opera and before we went to bed, Mr, Koshland would treat us to a Pfirsich Bowle at the hotel. This was a brandy glass half- filled with champagne into which a peach pierced in many places by a fork had been introduced. It was a marvelous drink. After the Ring Cycle was over, one of Richard Bransten's young masters from Harvard University arrived by the name of Gale Noyes and he, Richard, Edward, Billy, and I decided to go for a walking trip in the nearby Bavarian Alps. Our destination was Berchtesgar- ten--long before Hitler made it famous--but we actually got lost in the mountains, found our way to a railroad track and ended up in a train to Berchtesgarten which in those days was an attractive little village. We ended up by taking a train back to Munich. Richard, Gale, and I decided to fly to Prague en route to Budapest where we would again meet the Branstens and Koshlands. Flying in 1927 was still quite an adventure. We flew in an open cockpit German Fokker and had to wear goggles and a helmet for the flight which only took about an hour. In Prague we visited the oldest synagogue in Europe. As it was my first visit to a synagogue and having previously gone to church or chapel at school where you took your hat off, I remember that I was rather shocked to find that I had to put something on my head to enter a synagogue! From there we flew on to Budapest in a similar plane and met the rest of our group. We spent a few very pleasant days in Budapest seeing the sights, eating, and attending a concert. Then I returned to England while the others continued on to Rumania. My next year at Cambridge differed from the first in that I decided to give up rowing and instead of modern languages I took an honors course in Modern European History. This dated from 1453- -the fall of Constantinople--when the library at Alexandria had been sacked and knowledge became more widespread in western Europe. My tutor was Harold Temperley who was the distinguished Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and the author of a history of the great war of 1914-1918. He lived in Peterhouse and was a wonderfully interesting teacher. He helped me plan my course which included not only the history of the world from 1453 to the then present day, but specialized studies--my choice was the Elizabethan period which embraced not only the history but the literature and art of the period and political science. His advice to me was not to waste time going to lectures except his and instead he would give me the run of his very extensive library, help guide my reading and require me to do a paper on some subject he would dictate every two weeks. I would then meet with him and we would discuss my paper and he would criticize any shortcomings and open my eyes to any factor I might have missed. I enjoyed these sessions and my reading.greatly and he was quite pleased with my work and interest and gave me one or two of his books. He was also very pleased when I took the honors examination at the end of the year and was awarded a Class 2 Division 1 honors rating which was only surpassed by a Class 1 Division 1 which only two or three Cambridge undergraduates achieved. For exercise I used to take fencing lessons from Monsieur Dapp who many years earlier had taught my father to fence when Dapp was in London. I also used to go on bicycle rides into the country with friends, sometimes to visit the famous cathedral at Ely, sometimes to have tea at a country inn. I also used to enjoy punting on the so-called "backsw at Cambridge where the river Cam flowed gently past the college with college lawns running down to its banks. There were many low bridges across the Cam where college paths crossed the river and it was quite a challenge to steer one's punt under the bridges without having the pole hit the bridge. During the late spring my Uncle Gerstle Mack who was in Europe came down one day to visit me at Cambridge. In the course of conversation, I mentioned that if I passed my upcoming honors examination in History, having already passed the Modern Language examination, I still could not graduate with a degree unless I spent a third year at cambridge as that was the rule. Gerstle asked me what I was going to do for that year and I said I did not really know. He then suggested that I might ask my father whether he would give me the same amount of money it would cost him to keep me at Cambridge and let me see how far around the world I could get, which would probably be more educational than spending a third year at Cambridge. This sounded like a wonderful idea and in due course I talked to my father and mother about it and they both endorsed the idea. So when I left Cambridge early in June, I started to make plans investigating transportation and other costs, booking my initial boat trip on the Llanstephan Castle of the Union Castle Line to proceed to Kenya in East Africa which was about a three week voyage from England, with stops in Marseilles and Port Said en route. Dad and Gordon helped me get various letters of introduction in some of the countries I hoped to visit. I planned to sail in September when the climate was better and cooler below the equator and the rest of the summer we spent as usual at Hurley. One of those weekends we had a house party of friends who had played some cricket in their lives as Dad had challenged the village to a cricket match. The match took place on a bumpy pitch on the village green and most of the village turned out to watch. Dad, having been brought up largely in German schools, had never played cricket but as captain of our team had to bat first and take the first over. The bowler for the village was a man named Batt who used to drive the taxi which took Dad to the railroad station at Maidenhead in the morning and brought him back in the evening before I learned to drive. With the first ball, Batt bowled my father out and was terribly upset and invited Dad, ''Have another go, Sir,'' but Dad wouldn't as that would have been unsportsmanlike. Anyway, it was all a lot of fun and afterwards Dad treated all to beer and other refreshments. In August, Mother and Dad decided to spend a few days at Deauville to do a little sightseeing and gambling at night in the casino. We stayed at a nice hotel called appropriately "Guillaume le Conquerant'' and I went with them. The sightseeing was very interesting. However, at night I was still too young to gamble being under 21, so I used to watch the dancing at the casino while Mother and Dad were in the gambling rooms and, occasionally, I would get up enough courage to ask a girl to dance. And one evening I asked a very pretty young lady to dance whose family were also in the gambling rooms and she turned out to be Nancy Mitford who was later to become famous as a writer. After returning to England my time was spent in preparation for my great adventure which we calculated might last about nine months including a stay of a month or so in San Francisco with Grandpa and Aunt Charlotte. The day of departure finally arrived and I took the train to Tilbury, the port of London, to board my boat. My travels and experiences are covered by the letters I wrote to my parents which they kept and which Liz had typed and then bound herself after we were married in a book entitled, ItLetters of JMG." In brief, I visited much of Kenya where nearly all the animals roamed free such as elephants, lions, cheetah, rhino and all sorts of buck and birds; Rhodesia where I visited copper mines thanks to Gordon's introductions and also Zimbabwe which was supposed to have been one of the Queen of Shebats homes; South Africa where I visited gold and diamond mines, again thanks to introductions, and also Victoria Falls and the Zambesi River. Then by boat from Durban to Bombay and across India by train to Benares, Jaipur, Udaipur, and Agra and to see the Taj Mahal and then to Calcutta at Christmastime. That was the time of year when the Anglo-Indian regiments competed in polo matches which I attended with some New Zealand friends I had met and I spent New Years at a camp with a childhood friend, Hazel Abenham, and her husband, -who was in charge of a big estate in India. I also visited Darjeeling and had my first view of Mount Everest at a distance of somewhat over one hundred miles. Then to Rangoon in Burma, on to Mandalay and by river boat to the Chinese-Burma border; next to Singapore and the famous Raffles7Hotel; by boat to Bangkok in Siam. On the boat I met two very nice American girls with whom I made the trip from Bangkok to Angkor in Cambodia which was particularly fascinating. The only hotel in Angkor held about ten guests and we could visit Angkor Watt, Angkor Thom and other ruins by foot, walking through jungles literally littered with wonderful artifacts. In the evening we would sit up in one of the towers of Angkor Watt and watch the bats stream out into the sky as it became dark; and when some high dignitary came to visit Angkor, the natives staged wonderful dances in the courtyard in back of the causeway in front of little native boys sitting around holding lighted flambeaux, with the Temple itself as a background and an almost full moon helping to light up the scene. Then I traveled with an American missionary back to Bangkok and we boarded a small boat for Canton. As there were pirates in the seas we had to traverse, the boat was protected by two Indian guards with machine guns, but we had no trouble except running into a monsoon which caused us to lie at anchor for some six hours. In Canton my friend showed me the mission and something of the sights. Then I proceeded by boat to Hong Kong which in those days was quite a small town and on to shanghai, where I took a train to Nanking and on to ~eking. There I was met by Walter Weinberg, a friend of my family, an expert in Chinese art who was in China to collect art for a Greek by the name of Eumophopolos. Walter was in his thirties and a good friend. He got me nice but inexpensive accommodations and, during the week I was in Peking, he was kind enough to devote much of his time to showing me the sights. In those days Peking was a city of one or two-story houses, each block enclosed by a wall, and one could see temples--such as the Temple of Heaven--looming in the distance over the roofs of the houses. The British, French and Americans all had some troops stationed near the city and at the local club of which Walter made me a member and where we usually had lunch, we met all sorts of officers and ministers and often played "Liars Dicetu for drinks. Each player had a dice box and sat on opposite sides of a wooden partition and called out the number of the dice they had shaken. If challenged by the other player and it was found that the true total differed from what had been announced, the lying announcer had to buy the drinks and vice-versa. Walter took me to see Temples, Palaces and the Great Wall of China as well as the Ming Tombs and my stay in Peking was one of the highlights of my entire trip. Then I had to leave and catch a boat for Japan, landing at Osaka, visiting Kyoto which was quite charming in those days. And visiting Nara and taking the train to Yokohama where I stayed in the YMCA and made a short trip to Tokyo. Aside from Kyoto, I liked China better. Then I traveled third class on a. Japanese boat to San Francisco with a short stop in Honolulu. Grandpa, Aunt Charlotte, Aunt Edith and my younger sister, Deedie, were at the dock to greet me and I was soon ensconced in Grandpa's comfortable apartment at 1800 Gough Street. There I was royally entertained by various relatives and made many new friends and attended my cousin Richard's wedding to Louise. The cost of my travels from September 1928 to April 1929 when I landed in San Francisco was some 1,200 pounds or less than $5,000 at the then rate of exchange. Of most importance to my future, Grandpa suggested that it might be useful for me to learn something of American business methods. America was riding high in 1929 before the crash and my father agreed. Grandpa spoke to Mortimer Fleischhacker who had married my great Aunt Bella and who was a banker for the Great Western Electro-Chemical Company which had a plant in Pittsburg, California making chlorine, caustic soda and other chemicals using electric power from the Great Western Power Company (today PG&E). Uncle Mortie offered 1r.2 a job with the Electro-Chemical Company and on the way back to England with Deedie I was offered another job with the American Metal Company, a big producer of copper, of which a Mr. Vogelstein was President. Vogelstein was a friend of Federico Lesser who gave me the introduction. Deedie and I got back to England in June 1929 and shortly after I went to Strasbourg with Gerstle Mack to meet his brother, Harold Mack, who had made a great success on Wall Street. Harry strongly advised me to go to work for the Electro-Chemical Company which was small while American Metal Company was very large. His advice was that in a small company, I would learn much more as I would have the opportunity to work in many different departments while in a large company, the chances were that I would be stuck in one department. This was excellent advice which I am delighted I followed. With us in Strasbourg was the artist Teddy Wolfe, a friend of my parents and of Gerstle. I remember at one outdoor restaurant Teddy took a plate and decorated it with some of the street scenes while we enjoyed Strasbourgls wonderful pate de foie gras and some beer. To go to work in the United States at that time as a British citizen, one had to obtain a work permit which usually took about six months. When Uncle Mortie heard of this he wrote me that an influential friend of his was coming to England and might be able to accelerate the process. The friend turned out to be one of the Dodge family which produced Dodge automobiles. I went to see him at the Savoy Hotel at his invitation and he told me he had been looking into the matter and that if I went to Egypt, I could become an Egyptian citizen in a month, and then be on my way to the United States in about three weeks more, as there was a quota allowing the entry of two Egyptians a year into the United States which had not yet been used! While I did not pursue this ingenious plan, it taught me, as I was a rather unimaginative young man who lived by the rules, that if one put one's mind to a problem, there often was an answer whether practical or not. This was one of the most important lessons in my life as from then on if someone told me something could not be done, I did not just accept the fact but analyzed the problem, often to find a solution. As a result I came to enjoy problems and this has stood me in good stead all through my life. During the six months I waited in England, my father made arrangements for me to take some lessons in accounting and also gave me the opportunity to learn something of business by working without pay in the offices of BCL. There I shared a desk with my old friend, Fred Lesser, who at that time was working in the Spanish department, BCL having acquired a company in Spain making tartaric acid as well as operating a factory making borax and boric acid. Amongst other things, I was assigned the task of preparing trial balances for the department's accountant. I also learned a good deal about handling orders and shipments and attended to some of the correspondence. *9rtunately, as I did not speak Spanish though Fred did, the se~-tary available could transcribe letters dictated in English into Spanish without difficulty. Among many performances of theatre and ballet I saw in England, a few stand out in my memory. I recall seeing Anna Pavlova in one of the earliest ballets I ever saw, and much later I saw Nijinsky dance in Debussyls I1Afternoon of a Faun" (L1Apres- midi dlun Faune). Each of course was the most famous dancer of their day and perhaps of all time. I also saw Adele Astaire, the sister of the famous Fred Astaire in a London revue staged by the renowned C. B. Cochran and in that review Fred and Adele were dancing together. On one of my early trips to Paris--I believe after I had left Mme de la Rive--I met Mother and Gordon in Paris and Gordon took us to the theatre to see a comedy with the famous Sacha Guitry and his wife, the equally famous Yvonne Printemps. And afterwards, Gordon took us to a charming night club called Scherazade where it was reported that all the waiters were Russian princes, dukes or other high ranking officials who had fled Russia at the time of the Revolution. It was very Russian, including the caviar and vodka, and most enjoyable. Isadora Duncan, another famous dancer, had at one time given dancing lessons and among her pupils was my mother when young. CHAPTER V MY permit to go and work in the United States finally came through in December 1929--a few months after the great stock market crash on Wall Street--and I sailed for the United States on January 4, 1930. My train from New York to San Francisco was met by Uncle Mortie and Aunt Bella Fleischhaker and the next day Uncle Mortie, who had obtained the opening for me, introduced me to Mr. Schedler who was the manager of the manufacturing plant of the Great Western Electro-Chemical Company located at Pittsburg, CA. Mr. Schedler kindly drove me to Pittsburg and had arranged for me to live at the Los Medanos Hotel where I had a nice room and bath and three meals a day for $30 per month! My salary was $150 per month so I was left with some spending money. I started work in the warehouse supply room doling out all sorts of equipment to representatives of the different departments who came in with requisitions and I soon learned the names of the enormous number of items in stock. My English accent sounded strange to the workers I met but they were all kind and helpful. From the warehouse I graduated to various manufacturing departments such as the chlorine, ammonia, xanthate departments and later to the laboratory, shipping, and office departments. In those days, prohibition was still in force, and one of the assignments for the laboratory was to test any liquor acquired by the management to make sure it was safe to drink. For exercise I used to walk each morning from the hotel to the plant, a distance of about 1-1/2 miles, but if it was raining, one of my fellow workers would stop his car and offer me a lift and after work I usually got a ride back to town. Some weekends, I went to San Francisco, being driven by another employee who had relatives there, but I usually returned on Sunday night by taking the ferry to Oakland and boarding a Sacramento Northern Train to Pittsburg. Pittsburg itself was a very small town in those days. Besides our plant, there was also a branch of U.S. Steel at Pittsburg and one or two other small manufacturing plants. The town boasted one movie house, which I frequently patronized, as there was not much else to do in the evenings. In the late summer I was to be transferred to the office in San Francisco to the sales department. Before I left Pittsburg, Grandpa Mack felt I would need an automobile when I got to San Francisco and offered to buy me a car which offer I gratefully accepted. I bought a Buick roadster with a rumble seat from a dealer in Pittsburg for some $950 and drove it to San Francisco. While I stayed a few days with Grandpa and Aunt Charlotte, I soon moved to the Chancellor Hotel on Powell Street and later to the olympic Club where Uncle Mortie had proposed me for membership. The first summer I was in San Francisco after leaving Pittsburg, my friend Edward Bransten took me to Atherton and introduced me to his cousins Ernest, Elizabeth, and Frances Lilienthal and their parents, Alice and Sam, and Madeleine Haas. I soon learned that my mother and Sam used to take the ferry from Marin County to San Francisco to go to school when both were living in San Rafael. I soon became friends with Elizabeth and Ernest and Madeleine Haas, whose parents had died while she was still a girl, and she had then gone to live with Alice and Sam, Alice being her aunt. The offices of my company were located on Main Street in San Francisco, not far fromthe Ferry Building. There I was introduced to Mr. Hagens, the president, Jeff Smith, sales manager, Dr. Hirschkind, head of the very inventive laboratory, and Mr. Clark, who handled shipping and other details. I was placed in the sales department, initially handling shipping details, and later I was given selling responsibilities, making calls on customers in nort3ern California to begin with and finally in southern Caliiornia. Among the products developed by Dr. Hirschkind were the xanthates used for flotation in copper mines and, because of my contacts in England through Gordon Jacobs, I was instrumental in developing some new business. Fertilizer in the form of ammonium phosphate was also manufactured at Pittsburg and was the reason for my first trip to Los Angeles to try to sell some to the large orange cooperative known as Fruit Growers'Supply Company and great was my excitement when they ordered two carloads. It was on this trip that pa;sing through innumerable orange orchards in my car one day, I stopped and stole an orange from a tree! The country was so beautiful in those days--snow on the mountains, deep blue clear skies and miles of citrus groves. Another product introduced by Dr. Hirshkind was a form of hypochlorite to kill algae. The distributor we decided to use wanted us to devise a tradename and I suggested I1AU;ENEm which was enthusiastically adopted. While the depression was in full swing between 1929 and 1933, with many out of work and food lines and beggars on the streets, my various relatives and friends still had enough to give my generation a wonderful time. There were lots of parties often with dancing, swimming, and lunch parties in the summer in Atherton or Woodside and horseback riding in the hills where as yet there was little development. As a result, I was given the opportunity of meeting a large number of boys and girls around my age. Even on my relatively small salary I could afford to take a girl to dinner and dancing at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Saturday nights where the total cost was around $5.00 apiece. I could also join the Beresford Country Club and play golf with my friends Stanley Sinton, Dick Guggenhime, and Dick Arnstein. Dick Arnstein was in the carpet business and sometimes had a new speakeasy as a customer and he would then invite me to accompany him and have a drink of some sort. One would first have to ring a bell or knock on the door and someone would come and peer through an opening to identify the visitor before one was admitted, as a speakeasy was unlawful in prohibition days. Sometimes one would bring a flask of whiskey to parties and since its manufacturing source was usually unknown, we were lucky not to be poisoned by any. While I took out many girls, Elizabeth Lilienthal was a particular favorite. She went to Stanford when she was 18 but came home on most weekends. It was quite an ordeal to reach her on the phone at Franklin Street. The phone was usually answered by the cook or a maid who did not speak very good English. Then Liz's mother came on the line as Liz was taking a bath and, finally, Liz either called me back or her mother found out if she was free to go to a movie or dancing. When I lived in San Francisco, one of the standing invitations I had was to dine on Sunday nights with the Fleischhacker and Levison families. Since Alice Levison and Bella Fleischhacker were originally Gerstles and sisters of my maternal grandmother, they had next door houses. The families exchanged dinners every other Sunday. Jake Levison was the president of Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and that insurance company, which he helped to create, made a reputation for itself at the time of the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906. Before that time French and German insurance companies controlled most of the Bay Area's insurance business, but several of them defaulted at the time of the 1906 disaster. Fireman's Fund, however, paid all legitimate claims in full. Jake was also somewhat of a musician and played the flute and for a time was president of the San Francisco Symphony organization. I remember one night when at dinner at the Fleischhackers, the front door bell rang and there stood an English guest symphony conductor who by mistake had gotten off his train in Sacramento and taken a taxi to San Francisco and, of course, lacked the hundred and fifty dollars or so for the fare! But Uncles Mortie and Jake came to the rescue. Sometimes in the summer Jake would invite us to the Levison house in Atherton and we would find him on the second floor balcony playing his flute while some of the symphony sat down below to accompany him. The Levisons had four sons--John, Robert, Charles and George- -and they started an insurance brokerage firm known as Levison Brothers. John was a great golfer. Robert, or Bob as he was called, was a great fund-raiser for Stanford, Charles became an actor, and George, of my age, was a good friend. They were all married--George marrying the sister of Ellie Heller who was a great book collector and later Chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California. During the depression while I was still in San Francisco, the country's financial situation became so bad that Roosevelt declared a Bank Holiday. It just happened that the night before the holiday was to take effect, I played poker with some friends and unfor- tunately lost about $10.00. While I was very low in funds at that time, I wrote a check for this amount, feeling sure that it would not be cashed before the banks closed. But much to my chagrin, the person to whom I had given the check got up early the next morning, went to the bank and cashed it before the hour set for all banks to close! On one of my summer vacations Ernest Lilienthal, Edward Bransten, Jim Hart (today Director of the Bancroft Library) and I went on a camping trip in the High Sierras, starting from Mineral King on the west side of the mountains. We had a very good time in lovely unspoiled country and in those days one could spend two or three weeks in the Sierras without seeing another person other than those in one's own party. I remember that at various camps we made, when Ernest, Edward and I would go fishing or hiking, that Jim would often stay in camp to study Latin, as some knowledge of Latin was an essential rquirement for admission to Harvard, which college Jim wished to enter. Towards the end of the trip we climbed Mount Whitney, then the highest mountain in the United States. However, we did not start from the base of the mountain but from a camp we had reached on horseback at an elevation of some 10,000 feet. It was still a fairly strenuous exercise as one felt the rareness of the atmosphere as one climbed up to over the 14,000 foot level. In addition, there was snow on the trail and as it was summertime the snow was soft and every few steps, as one climbed higher, one was apt to sink into the snow, which made the hike more tiring. But we got a fine view from the summit in all directions, including a distant view of the Funeral Mountains which shielded Death Valley from the west and which was to play a later role in my life. CHAPTER VI In 1933 the Dow Chemical Company made an offer to purchase the Great Western Electro-Chemical Company and the offer was in due course accepted. When I heard of the offer, I decided that I did not particularly want to take a chance on whatever changes the acquisition might bring. It happened that just at that time, Mother and Dad made a visit to San Francisco and I returned to England with them, after visiting the Chicago Fair en route. It also happened that the Pacific Coast Borax Company, which was the American subsidiary of BCL, was undergoing some changes. Chris ~abriskie,who had been the general manager, had retired and Frank Jenifer, who had taken his place, needed some assistance. Mr. Baker, the head of BCL invited me to lunch one day and offered me the chance of going to work for Frank Jenifer if he approved of my rather limited credentials and experience. This sounded like a wonderful opportunity to me and would also keep me in the United States where I now had many friends. While I decided to return to the United States and travel to Los Angeles where Frank Jenifer had PCB's headquarters, I had a few weeks vacation in England and on the continent. I recall that while in England, I took Elsa Lesser to see the famous Schneider Cup seaplane races off the south of England. In those days these seaplanes were the fastest planes in the world and I remember how impressed I was by their speed which was such that they always seemed to be way ahead of the noise made by their engines. In fact, they were traveling at around 400 miles per hour, but in those days that was very fast. In August 1933 I returned to the United States and was interviewed by Mr. Jenifer whom I liked from the beginning and he decided that my limited experience would still be helpful to him. He decided that I should first be exposed to all the company's activities, starting with the New York office, then bulk and package sales off ices, the U. S. Potash Co. , in which BCL had a 50% investment and, finally, the factory at Wilmington, the mines at Boron and the hotel properties in Death Valley as well as the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad in the vicinity of Death Valley.

By 1933 Liz had transferred from Stanford to Smith College and on one of my weekends in New York I visited her in Northampton and we spent the day together including rowing on the nearby river. By the time I left we had sort of an understanding that we might get married though no formal proposal had yet been made. While I was in New York, I watched the procession which took place one day up Fifth Avenue to mark the passage of Franklin Rooseveltls famous National Recovery Act. Mayor La Guardia took the salute and the Avenue was lined with thousands and thousands of spectators. After a time in New York, I accompanied Mr. Haddox, then manager of the package department, on a visit to various distributors in the South and Middle West. In Chicago I visited the company's warehouse and near Pittsburgh I visited and wrote a report on the sterling Borax Company, a small manufacturer which our company had recently acquired. I still remember how bleak Pittsburgh looked with nearly all the steel mills closed for lack of business during the depths of the depression. Then I traveled to Carlsbad, New Mexico, to learn something about potash, as our company had acquired a 50% interest in the United States Potash Company, and finally back to Los Angeles where I lived at the Los Angeles Athletic Club which was affiliated with the San Francisco Olympic Club. The PCB office was then on Main Street, but Jenifer soon rented larger quarters on Olive Street within easy walking distance of my club. There I had a small private office close to Jenifer's. I was taken to the factory at Wilmington and to the underground mine and concentrating plant at Boron, California near Edwards Air Force Base. Under Mr. Jenifer's direction I was rapidly exposed to manufacturing, shipping, sales and accounting matters to assist him in the management of the company. He was a wonderful teacher as he required one to come up with answers to the various problems and if he thought your solution was incorrect, he would take the time to analyze one's reasoning and show where it was faulty. I had a number of friends living in Los Angeles whom I had first met in San Francisco. Among these were Charles and Mildred Lawler, Mildred being a sister of our great friend Rosalie Wolf, and Charles the son of Oscar Lawler, a lawyer who was also a well- known director of Standard Oil of California. George Behrendt was another good friend, then married to Mary, as were Marty (Mary's brother) and Dixie Weil. The Milton Baruchs who lived in Holmby Hills were most kind to me--Joe Baruch being the sister of Harry Mack's first wife. They had a tennis court and invited me to play there on weekends and usually we had a drink and sometimes lunch afterwards. Frank Jenifer and his wife, Jules, were also very kind to me and invited me to a weekend at their home in San Fernando Valley quite often. Jenifer owned a Packard limousine which the company had given him and in November 1933 he asked me to drive his wife and her sister, Kathryn Ronan, in his car to Death Valley where Kathryn was then the manager of the Furnace Creek Inn. In those days, the best road into the Valley was via the town of Baker-- named after Richard C. Baker, the managing director of BCL and president of PCB, Jenifer being the vice president and general manager. The road to Baker was well-paved but from Baker to Death Valley Junction, it was all very corrugated and 30 miles per hour was about the comfortable speed. Even so, I had a puncture on this first trip and had to change tires and we did not arrive at the inn until late in the evening, about a nine hour trip. I was soon introduced to the inn and the Furnace Creek Ranch as well as the Amargosa Hotel at Death Valley Junction and started to learn something of hotel management. One of the problems facing the Borax Company in 1933 was how to finance construction of a potash refinery at Carlsbad, New Mexico since in exchange for the 50% interest in potash it had acquired from the discoverers of the potash--Snowden and McSweeney- -the Borax Company had agreed to finance the development. This was no easy task during the depression. I tried to help by going to see Mortimer Fleischhacker who was president of the Anglo-Califor- nia National Bank in San Francisco. His son, Mortie, about my age and a good friend, tried to help me but the bank itself was not in very good shape due to various defaults on loans made. However, Jenifer also knew Vic Rossetti, President of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank in Los Angeles, which was one of the very few banks in the United States that was in such good financial shape it had tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid having to close during the National Bank Holiday but had been ordered by the authorities to do so.. Finally, the necessary financing was achieved through loans from the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York where one of the English Directors had some acquaintance and the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles. Liz came home from Smith College in the summer of 1934 and on August 6th of that year we became engaged and a wedding date was set for September 7th. This did not allow her poor mother much time to make arrangements for the wedding which was to take place in the garden at Atherton, nor did it allow too much time for my mother to make the trip from England, my father being unable to get away at that time. Jenifer very kindly gave me extra time off for our honeymoon in Honolulu. We had a beautiful wedding in Atherton- -Richard Bransten being my best man and Madeleine being Liz's maid of honor. Our bridesmaids were Ann Rosener and Marjorie Gunst, both of whom were to play an important role in my life; Liz's young sister Frances and Liz's cousins Frances Bransten and Ann Lilienthal; and her friend Sue Ward from school and Stanford days. Afterwards we were driven to the steamer, on which I had reserved our cabin, by Morton in the family Pierce Arrow and found that some other guests who had been at the wedding were also on board. However, they did not bother us. In Honolulu we were greeted by one of Liz's friends with leis and then we repaired to the Halekulani Hotel outside of Honolulu proper and near the Royal Hawaiian Hotel which was the main hotel on the island. In those days there were only three hotels on the island, the third being the Moana, the oldest. The Halekulani was on the beach--four cottages and an office--a slight contrast to the 75-story hotel which is now situated on the same property! Besides taking some lessons in surf-boarding and riding some huge breakers in a canoe, we usually had dinner at night outdoors at the nearby Royal Hawaiian Hotel and danced under the stars to the sound of the sea. There were miles of sandy beach to walk on before one would reach the then relatively small town of Honolulu. In all we had a wonderful time. Before we left on our honeymoon Joe Baruch had helped us find a small house on Del Valle Drive, owned by a Baruch relative which we leased for $125 per month. She also found us an excellent cook/maid for $50 per month. My salary which had been $375 per month was raised by Jenifer on my marriage to $500 per month and as Liz had a modest allowance too, we felt we were quite well off for those days. Back at the office, I was exposed to some new problems. The National Recovery Act included a provision which encouraged unionization and, for the first time, our employees at Wilmington and at the mine joined a union. As a result labor negotiations had to be faced and I sat in on some of these sessions which were very educational. I was also sent on trips to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver to negotiate arrangements with new dis- tributors. The Package Department had an old product called Boraxo--a hand soap made of borax mixed with soap for use by mechanics, gardeners, etc., but it was poorly packaged and demand was very light. I was given the task of trying to develop an attractive package for it and a marketing plan and Bill Oleen, the manager of the Package Department on the coast, and I successfully met this challenge. At home Liz and I developed some new friends and continued to play tennis at the Baruchs. We went to a lot of movies as well. On one or two occasions in connection with the opening of a new film at the nearby Carthay Circle Theatre, movie stars would attend and draw big crowds outside the theatre to watch the limousines drive up and the stars go in. Because Liz was not very tall, we used to take a wooden box for her to stand on and view the stars over the heads of the watching crowd. Soon after we were married we were invited to spend part of our summer holidays at Walter Lodge on the Truckee River not far from Lake Tahoe. Florence Walter's husband had been President of the carpet firm of D. N. and E. Walter and I had become friends with her eldest daughter, Nell, and her husband, Stanley Sinton, and also her second daughter, Marjorie, and Liz had been a friend of the family for many years. Walter Lodge was a lovely summer home with a tennis court and the nearby Truckee River. Florence was most hospitable and we were usually at the lodge with other guests. Among these were Maisie and Leon Levy--Maisie being a very long-time friend of my mothers while Leon was one of the heads of Gladding McBean. Leon was also a trout fisherman and he took me in hand, teaching me how to wade the Truckee where fish lay, and improved my casting ability. Rosalie and Paul Wolf were often there as guests and Paul and I would go fishing in different directions to see who could catch the most fish, usually two or three, if any. We used to swim in the Truckee before lunch and when you first got in the river seemed almost as cold as Lake Tahoe but swimming soon warmed one up a little. Shortly after Liz and I were married and we had moved to Los Angeles, I invited Alice and Sam, Florence Walter, and Nell and Stanley to a few days in Death Valley at Furnace Creek Inn. By that time the company had made arrangements with a small airline to fly guests into the rather bumpy landing field in Death Valley, and I persuaded the owner to provide two planes to fly all of us to Las Vegas, where we took a chartered bus to view Hoover Dam then under construction. Sam was a good friend of Felix Kahn who was then chairman of the six companies which had the contract to build the dam. We were royally treated, viewed the interesting construc- tion and were entertained at lunch. In the rather late afternoon, we headed back to Los Angeles, most of our group going in the larger of the two planes, while Stanley Sinton and I flew in the small plane. The weather began to deteriorate as we found we were flying into a rainstorm and soon it was hard to see. Fortunately, our plane found the highway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and by flying on our side much of the time, we were able to follow the lights of the cars and other traffic into Los Angeles. There we happily found the rest of the party and had dinner in Glendale before driving home. Nell did have a miscarriage following this event but she always said that this rather exciting trip had nothing to do with it. On another occasion Liz and I were invited to fly in a Richfield Oil Company plane--the Richfield Oil Company having the gasoline franchise in Death Valley--to set a record for flying from the highest point then in the United States, Mt. Whitney, to the lowest point, Death Valley. The plane stopped at Visalia where we had to put on parachutes and then we gradually climbed over Mt. Whitney and sped down to the landing field in Death Valley below Furnace Creek Inn. This was in the month of November after a heavy snowfall in the mountains and if Liz and I had had to bail out in our parachutes, we would undoubtedly have been in serious trouble. But all went well and the Richfield Oil Company, which had a radio program called The Richfield Reporter, announced the record- breaking flight on its program that evening--probably the only time that any plane had flown this particular route! In 1936 Liz and I traveled back to England with my mother who had come over on a visit and Liz met my father and Gordon, my sisters, and all the Lesser family for the first time. We also toured much of the western and southwestern parts of England particularly enjoying the Abbeys such as Tintern and Tewkesbury and old towns such as Bradford-on-Avon which had an ancient bridge with a chapel still on it. When we went to England in 1936, Mother, Liz and I flew across the United States for the first time in a DC 3. In those days one left Los Angeles around 4:00 P.M. and arrived in New York the next day around noon New York time. Meals on board were mostly of the sandwich variety and in first class we had bunks to sleep in. Since the plane came down about every two hours to refuel, one did not get too much sleep. I remember when we got off the plane at our first stop in Arizona to stretch our legs, that there were considerable crowds of people drawn to the airport to watch the landings and takeoffs, as transcontinental flights of passenger planes were still quite novel. On this trip to England, I took Liz to Hurley to see the Malt House and the village. When we called at the Malt House to see one of our former gardeners, we learned that the house was then occupied by the well-known movie star, Boris Karloff, although he was away at that time. Some years later, Liz and I were having lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles with her parents, when in walked Boris Karloff and sat down at a table across the room. So I wrote a note saying that there were two people in the restaurant who had lived in the Malt House in Hurley, and gave it to our waiter to take to Boris Karloff. He immediately asked that our table be identified and came right over and we had a very friendly visit. On our return to Los Angeles we decided to move to a larger home as Liz was expecting our first child and we rented a house north of Sunset Boulevard owned by the movie star, Mary Boland, at 1249 North Wetherly Drive. It was of two stories and had quite a large garden. In April 1937 our son James Gordon (Jimmy) was born and we employed our first nurse. By this time I had advanced in the company to the position of assistant to the general manager and I had received some advances in salary. Social Security was established in that year and a deduction from our salary checks was made towards its cost. Liz and I both loved dogs and we had a Newfoundland--soon I bought a Great Dane. We used to take the dogs with us when we went swimming at a beach in Santa Monica and the dogs loved the ocean too. In those days there were only one or two private beach clubs, few crowds and in summer we and friends often built a fire on the beach and had picnics at night and went swimming too. Liz and I even went swimming in winter time and it was fun to try to ride the waves, although we often got rolled by big breakers when body surfing. Los Angeles was still a relatively small town compared to today's city with no smog, reasonable traffic and few freeways. Much of Wilshire Boulevard still lay vacant.

In the summer of 1937 we and our friends, John and Clara Dinkelspiel (nee Clara Bransten), embarked on the Annie Johnson in San Francisco with their automobile for Vancouver. Clara, who was my first cousin, and John became two of our closest friends after they were married. John was a lawyer who, with his brother Martin, served in and managed the well-known legal firm of Dinkelspiel and Dinkelspiel after their father died. John served with distinction as an officer in the Navy during World War I1 and later became politically involved with Richard Nixon and his campaigns for office. Still later he became Mayor of Atherton for a number of years and was highly regarded in the community. Clara was also active in various causes and both were keen trout fishermen. We have spent many delightful times with them socially, on fishing trips and when traveling together. On the ship Liz and I occupied a cabin reportedly once used by the famous Greta Garbo and we had a good time on board, although at times the sea was quite rough. Upon disembarking in Vancouver John discovered the battery of his car was quite dead so we had to get that fixed. Later we took the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and stayed at a resort at Sproat Lake. John was an avid fisherman and I was just getting started, though Liz was very good as her father had trained her in early youth. We all tried fishing for salmon one day in the nearby ocean, going out in a boat with a guide at around 4:30 A.M., but had no luck. The next day the girls refused to go again but John and I went, again with no success. However, another boat caught a 65 pound King Salmon so when we got ashore we borrowed the fish, took John's picture alongside it, and then dragged it into the girls bedroom and laid it on a bed to show how successful we had been. We were not popular! Later we went on a camping trip on the Forbidden Plateau and on the way back to the U.S. visited the famous Butchard's Gardens. In 1937 R. C. Baker, managing director of BCL since its formation in 1899, died. During his lifetime he held the title of president of PCB following the departure of F. M. (Borax) Smith in 1913. Baker was succeeded by my father, James Gerstley, as managing director of BCL but my father believed that an American should be president of PCB and he made Frank Jenifer the first American president of the American Company. Jenifer appointed me assistant to the president. Sometime in the following year, my uncle Harry Mack invited Liz and me to stay at a house he owned on the McKenzie River in Oregon to fish for trout in the nearby river and we accepted. This was our first introduction to Oregon and my introduction to the chance of catching big and exciting fish in a major and fairly dangerous river. While I was still a poor caster and fisherman, I learned a lot from our boatman as did Liz and this was the start of what became one of the great pleasures of our lives. The scenery was beautiful--forested hills and a river with many rapids, and the fishing was exciting. We did wonder a little about our first boatman who seemed to have to go ashore every half hour or so, though we found out later that he was quite a drinker and apparently had bottles hidden on shore at various intervals. In 1939 Liz and I t to England again in July. I had been naturalized as an Ameri, citizen by that time as I had decided I wanted to stay in the Unated States and, therefore, I wanted to be able to vote in elections. While the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had earlier returned from a meeting with Hitler declaring that he had achieved peace, in fact most people, including us, felt that war was virtually inevitable. However, Dad wanted to go to a resort in Sweden for a summer holiday and we and my parents took a boat to Gothenburg and were driven to the resort where we played some tennis and danced at night. Dad then had to go home but we and Mother went on to Stockholm where we met Madeleine who had been at school in France and Ann Rosener. We stayed at the Grand Hot:., near the waterfront and one day a German boat with a host of German tourists on board tied up nearby which we did not welcome. But we enjoyed Stockholm and did a lot of sightseeing and some shopping and later we also visited Copenhagen, Denmark, and Hamlet's castle. From Stockholm Mother went home but we and Madeleine and Ann decided to fly to the island of Visby which in former days had been the headquarters of the famous Hanseatic League founded at least by the 13th century among certain maritime towns for political and economic reasons. Visby had lovely old ruins and was worth the visit. However, the plane we were flying in made Ann nervous as the engines looked as though they were held together by strings of wire. When we four returned to England, we still had a couple of weeks before Liz and I were due to sail back to the United States, so with Mother's help we planned a visit to Corsica, the birthplace of Napoleon. To get there we first took the ferry from Dover to Calais, then by train to Paris and on by another train to Nice where one caught a ferry to Calvi on the north coast of Corsica. In Paris we decided to have tea at the Ritz thinking we had lots of time to catch our train, but for the first and only time in our lives we had a slow taxi driver--taxis usually drove so fast and we thought dangerously, that this had never occurred to us. So we kept yelling "Plus vitel1 at the driver and finally made the train with only a few minutes to spare. After an overnight trip we reached Nice and finally got to Calvi. There we decided to hire a taxi to take us to Ajaccio where we were going to stay. We made the trip allright even though our taxi lacked a floorboard so you could see the road through the floor of the cab. We had a wonderful time at Ajaccio--perhaps because we felt this might be our last time together because of the threat of war. Our hotel was old-fashioned and the toilet had an overhead pull-chain and when you pulled it you would get a shower of water unless you ran away at the same time. There was a casino nearby where Madeleine and I used to go sometimes at night since Liz and Ann did not like to gamble and there were miles of sandy beaches which could be reached by a short ride in a motorboat which we hired and went swimming off the beach every day. We even at the end decided to spend a night on the beach cooking dinner and sleeping on the sand. But our boatman who was smarter decided to sleep on the boat and I must say that sand is very hard to sleep on. But even in Corsica we found the people beginning to erect bomb shelters--a grim reminder that war might be at hand. Liz and I flew back to London while Madeleine and Ann flew back to Paris, and Germany invaded Poland on September 1st and on September 3rd, Great Britain declared war on Germany. My parents could not wait for us to leave the country but our boat, the Champlain of the French Line, was not due to sail until September 4th. When we finally boarded her in Southhampton we were told that she had left her port in such a hurry that there was little ballast on board and so the trip was likely to be rough. Because of the declaration of war, many Americans who had not booked in advance, tried to get on and if they succeeded were crammed together in whatever cabins were available and we found Louise Stahl, my mother's cousin and a former visitor to Hurley, among these. We were blacked out when we sailed so that no lights could show through the portholes. It was so rough for a couple of days that Liz and I were two of very few people in the dining room at meal times. And on our third day out news was received of the first sinking of a liner--the Athenia--off the Irish Coast with much loss of life.. But we reached New York safely and were soon back in Los Angeles.

In 1939 Jenifer gave me the title of Assistant General Manager of PCB. The outbreak of the war in Europe changed many things in our business world. Before that time we had used codes to transmit cables to England and vice versa, but the British government immediately banned all codes. Europe was by far the largest market for many of our borate products but the advent of the war halted all shipments to the axis countries and severely limited the demand from England and France, as the peacetime demand had been to manufacture mostly industrial and household goods which were displaced in wartime due to the necessity of converting factories to wartime production. Also before the war BCL, which collected for tts borates we shipped to European customers, used to reroute most of these proceeds to us to help pay for our production and shipping costs, but this ceased with the reduction in European demand caused by the war. Before war actually broke out but appeared inevitable, my father had arranged to move the London offices and staff to Oxshott in Surrey--about a 40-minute train ride from London--as it was anticipated that London would be heavily bombed. It was fortunate that he did so as the London office, which lay not far from the Thames River, was virtually destroyed during one of the earlier raids but by that time all had moved to the vicinity of Oxshott where homes had been rented as well as a large manor house for the off ice itself. During the battle of Britain, one of the English fighter planes was donated to the English government by the Borax Company, paid for by funds raised by BCL and by me from American associates. We received a warm thank you letter signed by Winston Churchill. CHAPTER VII In 1940 Liz was again pregnant and we decided to look for a house in Beverly Hills where the schools were excellent. We finally found a house at 717 North Crescent Drive in early 1941 which was owned by Arthur Freed, a movie producer, and which we purchased for some $18,500. While it had about 2/3 of an acre of grounds including a swimming pool, a bathhouse and a barbecue in back, the house needed structural alterations. An architect friend of ours took care of these and I borrowed the necessary money from the Security First National Bank in Beverly Hills. By that time I had been made assistant general manager of PCB and my salary had improved considerably although it was small by today's standards.

Our daughter, Anne, was born on June 25 and we moved into our new home late that year. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941--a Sunday--Liz and I were in our garden. Next door lived the movie star Doris Day and sometimes on Sunday her radio would be tuned to the New York Symphony Orchestra. All of a sudden, it stopped playing and an announcer came on the air to report the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. And the next day Roosevelt and the Congress declared war on Japan and the Axis countries which supported gapan. By that time the Lend-Lease Act had been passed, the United States had established a War Production Board to help support the Allies with needed arms and a Price Control Board had been established in Washington. Because of the curtailment of our foreign sales, we had just announced a small price increase to try to offset our higher costs due to decreased production and the inability of BCL to transfer any funds to us, Jenifer received a call from the Office of Price Administration (the OPA) in Washington challenging our price increase, so a couple of days after war was declared, I found myself on a plane bound for New York and Washington to try to convince the authorities of our need for a price increase. Since it was obvious that the United States demand for borates was also likely to decrease markedly as plants turned to war production, I was able to present a convincing case. Since this was my first visit to Washington, I remember how thrilled I was to see the Potomac River, the White House, the government buildings and places such as Arlington about which until then I had only read in my history books, I made several more trips to Washington in the next few months. On one of these I made arrangements at its request for the Army to take over and remove the old Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad which was no longer in use and which the United States planned to install to transport war material and supplies from the Persian ~ulfto our new ally, ~ussia. On another trip, when we had been advised that the cans we used for packaging Boraxo would no longer be available and that we had to use some sort of fibreboard, I had to see the OPA to determine what price we could charge for the newly packaged Boraxo. To my surprise, we were not only allowed to charge our former price for the product in cans, but I ran into my old friend, Dr. Hirschkind, from my Great Western Electro- Chemical days, who had gone to work for OPA. As soap was in very short supply during the war, Boraxo which contained 85% borax and 15% soap was in great demand and its sale in cartons earned us enough to offset the lost industrial business. As I was 34 years old when war broke out, I had been classified lower in the draft than younger men, but I wanted to serve in the Army if I could. I made application to do so when I was in Washington and I did undergo and pass the usual medical examination. However, while the peacetime demand for borates had declined, there were several important wartime uses and our industry had received an essential classification, which meant that our key personnel were deferred from military service, and I learned later that Jenifer, with the help of Horace Albright who still had many influential friends in Washington, managed to persuade the authorities to turn me down as he felt I was essential to the company at home. Admittedly, Jenifer by that time, was getting on in years and had been leaving more and more respon- sibility to me. For a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, there was the fear on the West Coast that the Japanese might attempt a landing or might try to bomb the country or that local Japanese sympathizers might try to attack or blow up key installations such as water supplies, arsenals, etc. The Beverly Hills police force called for volunteers to man certain key points in the area such as reser- voirs. I volunteered, had to acquire a revolver and a badge, was given some revolver practice and assigned to guard a reservoir in the nearby hills. My four-hour shift ran from 2:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M. a couple of times a week, after which I would go home, have breakfast, and go to the office. Fortunately, these long days did not last too long. In the late summer of 1943, some matters arose involving the War Production Board in Washington which necessitated some discussions with our people in England and I received the necessary priority clearance enabling me to fly to England. I flew with other men who also had priority from a seaplane base near Long Island. We were not too comfortable though--the plane lacked some peacetime amenities and I slept on the floor wearing my life jacket. We first came down in Shediak, New Brunswick, where several of us got out and were able to buy some cold, fresh lobster nearby. Then on to Newfoundland for another refueling stop and off to Ireland. As we flew over the Atlantic, we were blacked out so could see nothing outside the plane. We landed in Ireland to refuel and finally landed near Southhampton in England. Just before we landed, all of us on board signed our names on dollar bills, it being a wartime custom for transAtlantic fliers to keep such so-called "short snortersm as a souvenir of their trip. My parents of course knew I was coming over but did not know exactly when, but I had their phone number in Oxshott and was able to reach them and get instructions as to how to reach Oxshott. I first took a blacked out train to London, managed to find my way out of the very dimly lit arrival station, find a taxi which seemed to have minimum candlelight for headlights, and drove to Waterloo Station. There I again phoned my parents to let them know what train I was catching, as Dad was going to meet me, and I finally arrived sometime at night at Oxshott. Because everything was blacked out, the train conductor would announce over a speaker at each station on which side of the train was the platform as otherwise it would have been easy to get out on the wrong side and fall on to the track. It was wonderful to see my parents again as well as my sisters and many old friends such as the Lessers who had a fairly nearby house. My older sister, Margaret, was working for the Admiralty in London while my younger sister and her friend, Phyllis Drage, were working for the Red Cross near her home in Gloucestershire. As soon as I had arrived, Federico Lesser, who had become a joint managing director of BCL with my father, kindly sent a cable to our office in New York to say that I had arrived safely and requesting the office to advise Liz immediately. Unfortunately, Mr. Lesser did not know that any messages containing references to arrivals and departures were delayed by the censor for several days and so poor Liz underwent some concern as Ann Rosener, who was then living in New York and with whom I dined the evening I was to fly, had telephoned Liz of my imminent departure. By the time I got to England, there were no longer any German daylight raids on England, butthere were periodic night raids and scouting flights as an invasion of the continent was known to be in the planning stages and might even be imminent. There was an aircraft battery and a searchlight not too far away and our card games at home in the evening were sometimes interrupted by these. Once or twice walking home from dinner at the Lessers, I could hear shrapnel dropping and I was supposed to wear a helmet when I went out at night. Some days one could see some of our bombers returning from raids on the continent flying in formation but with some planes apparently missing as there were gaps in the formation. My time in England not only enabled me to discharge the assignments given me by the WPB in Washington, but enabled me to discuss postwar ideas and plans with my father, Federico Lesser and Fred Lesser. These proved to be of great importance to our company when the war finally ended. After somewhat over a month in England, the time came for me to return home. I received my transportation orders--which were secret--to travel by a certain train to Greenock in Scotland, but my sister in the Admiralty told me that the Queen Mary of the Cunard Line was there and that undoubtedly that would be my boat to New York. So I cabled Liz as this was already November that I should be home on my birthday which revealed no date to the censor. I knew the Queen Mary only took about 6 days to cross the Atlantic and I was to board the boat on November 5th. Our train to Greenock was delayed for a time by a bombing raid near the railway but we finally arrived. I was directed to a small ferry boat and we headed out into the harbor, but instead of arriving at the great Queen Mary, I found myself going aboard a small 10,000-ton ship called the Mexico. As soon as we boarded, an officer told us we were now on board a convoy and would be incommunicado until we arrived at our destination! So I had no way to advise Liz of this change of plans and, as a result when I did not turn up, she was exposed to all sorts of rumors and naturally was concerned that my ship might have been torpedoed. Fortunately for her, as she had come to New York to meet me, a family friend, Mrs. Schuman, had been very kind and supportive and helped her through a rather trying time. I found myself in a small cabin with five other men and we each had a sort of metal hammock on which to sleep strung in three lines, each of which had a lower and upper cot. After a day or so, we sailed in convoy escorted by destroyers on either side and a couple of battleships in the rear. We sailed around the north of Ireland, then headed south towards the Azores where we picked up some occasional air cover and thence west to New York. Shortly after leaving the vicinity of the Azores while we were at lunch, the alarm rang and we heard explosions as some of our destroyer escorts dropped some depth bombs. It was a submarine alert but whether a submarine or a whale had been detected, we never knew. Because there were occasional alerts some of us used to play poker until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., as we found it easier to sleep for a time during the day than at night. There were some interesting people on board including the well-known author, Margaret Meade. It took us about thirteen days to reach New York and just before we arrived we decided we should each have a memento of the trip. So I invented the "Long Snorterv1which was a $2.00 bill, always considered somewhat unlucky, as while we were safe we would have preferred a much shorter trip on the Queen Mary. This we all signed. When we came into New York harbor, it was crowded with vessels of all sorts and I was convinced that the invasion of the European continent could not take place for some time. I also remember how shocked I was buying a newspaper from a newsboy at the dock to see how big it was compared to the four-sided newspapers which were all that was allowed in wartime England. After a very happy reunion with Liz and various friends in New York, I learned of some less pleasant news at the office. Apparently, the Department of Justice had concluded that there was a conspiracy between our company and our principal competition to monopolize the borax industry in the United States. While this was quite untrue, the Department had filed an anti-t,rust suit including both criminal and civil charges and, of course, this was a very serious matter which had to be dealt with. Upon our return to California, I found that various files had been subpoenaed, that Jenifer and I and some of our staff had to appear in an Francisco before Judge St. Sure for arraignment, that a certain Joseph Alioto was in charge of the investigation for the Department of Justice, and that we had to prepare for our attorneys detailed rebuttals to each and every charge made against us. Because our case, if it went to trial, would eventually be tried in San Francisco, our Los Angeles lawyers decided they should be associated with San Francisco counsel and employed the distin- guished firm of Brobeck Phleger and Harrison as associates. Jenifer asked me to take charge of preparing all the data necessary for our defense which meant assembling an enormous amount of facts and background materials for our attorneys. Over the next year and a half, I prepared with my secretary over 100 loose-leaf binders for our attorneys, mostly dictated by me. I also had an assistant but our attorneys would only entrust him to deal with minor matters. By the spring of 1945, I was so tired that Jenifer and our attorneys ordered me to take a leave of absence from the office and my final work was done at home. This allowed me to get some exercise and relaxation. I remember vividly on one of my daily walks in the hills, I heard a radio broadcast through an open window of a house I was passing, announcing the death of Franklin Roosevelt. I felt very sad and that the end of a vital era had suddenly arrived. With the death of Roosevelt and the advent of President Truman, some cabinet changes took place including the office of Attorney-General where Francis Biddle was installed. Maurice Harrison, who was a Democrat, had some acquaintance with him and felt we would get a fair hearing from him. So he recommended that Jenifer, I and our Los Angeles Attorney, Allen Ashburn, as well as Harrison and his assistant, Moses Laski, with whom I had been working, go to Washington to see if we could get our case settled. We agreed and on our first evening in the dining car on the train we passed through a rainstorm in the desert and saw a beautiful double rainbow which we hoped was a good sign! In Washington we stayed at the relatively new Statler Hotel, which had air conditioning. As it was August and exceedingly hot this was most welcome. While our attorneys met with the Attorney- General and his staff, Jenifer and I stayed indoors only going out for a walk in the cooler evening. Gradually, the outlines of a settlement were reached whereunder we admitted to no wrong-doing but agreed to turn over to the Interior Department a small mine we had purchased some years before and had not used and to refrain from any actions that could be construed as in violation of anti- trust laws. This was finally agreed and signed by all relevant parties. I then returned to San Francisco with Maurice Harrison where Liz met me and. she and I proceeded with our friends, Nell and Stanley i in ton, to Walter Lodge to which we had been invited to enjoy, for me, a much needed vacation. Stanley Sinton who held a commission in the Navy told us of the news he had received that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. None of us knew what an atomic bomb was, though some months before I had been aware that some strange things were going on. I had received a phone call from one of our chief chemists who had been called to New York to say that he had been quizzed by some experts working on a secret project about certain properties of various borates. Somewhat later, Horace Albright had phoned me to advise that the engineer of the early morning train which hauled potash ore from the mine at Carlsbad to the refinery had reported seeing a tremendous flash of light in the distance but did not know what it was. We only found out later that this was the test of the atomic bomb at White Sands in New Mexico--about 100 miles distant from our potash operations and that borates had a role in the atomic process. The war with Japan came to an end while we were at Tahoe, the war in Europe having ended the previous May. CHAPTER VIII I became vice president and general manager early in 1946 and I immediately employed Pat OvBrien as my technical assistant as I was a novice on technical matters and Pat had the necessary education and had proved himself at the Wilmington Refinery as a very able production manager. I also initiated monthly profit and loss statements as the practice until then had been to rely on semi-annual statements which I had found very unsatisfactory. A little later in 1946 Jenifer was in a serious automobile accident so I had full responsibility while he was recuperating and, in fact, until his death in 1950, he left almost all decisions and the operation of the company to me. Also in 1946 Federico Lesser died and he was succeeded by his son, my old and good friend, Fred Lesser, my father having retired from management although he continued on the board of BCL. Fred and his wife, Isabel, made annual or bi-annual business trips to the United States and we had wonderful times together as well as enjoying working together. In 1946 I had occasion to travel to London on a business matter and Fred's brother Fito, who was then in charge in South America for The Borax Company, met me in New York. We took a train to Baltimore and flew in a seaplane to England--a much more comfortable trip than my wartime experience. We first flew to Newfoundland where we spent the night at the airport hotel and the next day flew across the Atlantic to England. While my parents still lived at Oxshott, temporary London offices again housed the company. After a short stay in England, Fito and I flew back to New York, but this time in a land plane--a DC-4--which landed in Ireland and Newfoundland on the way. While the years between 1946 and 1950 when Jenifer died were busy, our vacations were very pleasant, sometimes camping trips in the Sierras with our children and friends, sometimes fishing on the McKenzie River and Lizvs parents always had the children for a protracted visit in the summer time at Atherton. Later in 1946, my mother and father decided to come over for a visit and as my father enjoyed a sea trip, they took a steamer which carried both passengers and cargo from Europe through the Panama Canal to the West Coast of the United States. Unfortunately, on a somewhat rough day, my father had a fall and injured himself rather seriously. By that time, the steamer was approaching San Salvador and my mother arranged for him to be put into a hospital in San Salvador. She immediately telephoned me and as we had no idea as to how experienced the doctors there might be, I arranged to take our good friend and my doctor, Bob Stern, with me when I flew to San Salvador. Fortunately, the hospital was quite well equipped and the doctor in charge quite capable so Bob did not have too much to do. The doctor introduced us to his brother who had a plantation outside of the city and we rode with the brother on his fine horses through the plantation and over some lovely countryside. When my father was sufficiently recovered, I arranged to fly all of us to New Orleans where we could take a train to Los Angeles. Dad had never been in an airplane before and he was carried on board on a stretcher. We spent the night in New Orleans and the next day Dad's stretcher was lifted through a window of our railroad car and placed on his bed and he did not like that experience at all. However, he was able to walk enough with help when we reached Los Angeles so that he could dispense with the stretcher. Bob was able to secure the. services of an excellent male nurse and after a few weeks Dad had fully recovered and he and Mother then returned to England. When Jenifer died in 1950 Liz and I were asked to go to London and we sailed on one of the Queens, either the Elizabeth or the Mary. In those days it was both pleasant and fun to take the Chief or the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, spend part of the day at the Chicago Art Museum or at lunch with friends, and then catch the 20th Century train to New York. Usually after a few days staying at the St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street, working at the office and often going to the theatre at night, we would board one of the Queens and often have a farewell party on board when some of our friends would come to see us off. The only drawback was that the male secretary from our office, who went down to the boat first to organize the drinks and food for the party in our cabin, smoked cigars and it took us a day or two of open portholes to get rid of the smell of cigars! The first thing one did when on board was to see the deck steward and arrange for deck chairs and the next thing was to see the chief steward in the dining room and arrange for a good table. Breakfast was brought to our cabin but after we were dressed we sometimes went for a walk on deck and even on occasion played squash in the ship's squash court, which was sometimes rather difficult if the ship was rolling at all. Liz and I even did a little fencing in the gym in those early days. The food on board was usually very good and we learned fairly early that the best caviar was served on the last night, so I used to bribe a steward to serve this to us on other nights as well. Because the Borax Company were big shippers to England, Liz and I were always invited by the captain to a cocktail party in his cabin. On one of our trips, this time on the Ile de France of the French Line, when we were at the captain's party the captain invited Liz to sail the ship for a few minutes which she did, though I suspect we were on automatic pilot. At least we did not hit anything. On another occasion we were on the Normandie which was the flagship of the French fleet and the captain invited us to a most sumptuous dinner. One of the nice features of these trips in those days was that there was no telephone communication with either the United States or the continent so one had a five or six-day vacation which was most welcome. On one of our early transatlantic crossings Elizabeth Taylor- -then newly married to her first husband, young Hilton--was on board with her husband. However, he seemed to spend most of his time playing cards in a smoking-room, while in the evening when there was dancing, she would sit at a table with a lady friend just watching the dancers. She was a beatiful girl not yet 20 years old and we found it hard to understand how her husband could treat her with such apparent neglect. In any event when we arrived in London in 1950 I was formally appointed President of PCB and on my return to the United States, I appointed Pat O'Brien general manager, Fred Corkill as vice president of bulk sales and Dave Parker as vice president of package sales. I was also elected a Director of the U.S. Potash Company in place of Jenifer and also became President of the Death Valley Hotel Co. which owned and ran the Furnace Creek Inn in Death Valley. Sometime after I became President of the company, a new mineral was discovered in the mine at Boron and our geologist named the mineral after me--namely, Gerstleyite. I was very flattered although, when I discovered that Gerstleyite contained some arsenic as well as several other trace elements, I wondered whether that might have been the real reason for its name! Later I was sent an article which appeared in Southern California's Automobile Club's magazine, WESTWAYS, by Norman Corwin, who mentioned that he had met only two men whose names were borne by minerals--me and the famous Harold Urey. As the head of the Biology Department at Pomona wrote, when he sent me the article, I was in excellent company! Amongst other things, Liz and I organized a few days trip at the beginning of each winter season to Death Valley for our English associates and their wives and my vice presidents and their wives as a means of becoming better acquainted. These three-day affairs when we stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn were filled with early morning golf, swimming and sometimes horseback riding as well as sightseeing. And on one evening each trip, we would repair to Golden Canyon by car or by horse for drinks, a barbecue dinner and square-dancing. It was all great fun and helped to build great morale among my staff and others present. We sometimes invited friends such as the Behrendts--George's firm handling the company's insurance--and on one occasion Olive, who was very active with the Los Angeles Symphony, invited the famous violinist Jascha Heifetz as a guest. It was quite a sight to see him one evening sitting on the floor of our sitting room rolling dice and shooting craps with some of us. In the fall of 1950, we had decided to build our own office building following the example of BCL which had recently completed its own building not far from Victoria Station in London. We selected a piece of property on Shatto Place, just off Wilshire Boulevard, and within easy driving distance of downtown Los Angeles and the building was completed just before the middle of 1951. To help us plan the interior and furnish it attractively, I employed Maria Bergson, who h?d a fine reputation and I liked the renovations she had made which visited in the Chicago area. The new office was functional and a -ractive and very popular with the staff. Before Jeniferls death in 1950, we had decided to develop a new section of the ore deposit at Boron and I suggested to Fred Lesser that we name it the "Jenifer Mine." While Frank Jenifer, who was very modest, suggested some other name, my suggestion was approved and I think Frank was at heart very pleased. While operations did not start until 1951 we decided to mark the occasion by inviting representatives from our principal customers to California to visit our new offices and the refinery at Wilmington, the mine at Boron and our resorts in Death Valley. About sixteen major customers accepted and I and Fred Lesser and Horace Albright were the hosts, supported by our various vice presidents. The event was a great success and everyone seemed to have a very good time. At Boron where our chef had prepared a fine dinner for us and all our visitors to the new mine, I decided to introduce him and to persuade him to come out of the kitchen to be introduced. However, he had already celebrated the occasion by having too many drinks, passed out as I was making the introduction and some of us had to carry him outside to recover. Fortunately, John Hunt, son- in-law of Vic Rossetti, Chairman of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank in Los Angeles, was one of our guests and a great story-teller and entertained our visitors until I returned. We ended the trip by driving to Las Vegas for a little gambling and entertainment and our visitors flew back to their various cities from there. The Chairman of the Board of BCL, Desmond Abel Smith, and his wife began to make annual visits to the United States with the Lessers. The Abel Smiths could trace their family origin back to Edward the Confessor. Desmond was also on the boards of several other companies in England. We all became good friends. On one of our trips to England, the Abel Smiths invited Liz and me to visit them at their house in Scotland and to try some salmon fishing in the nearby river. While the fishing was no good in August, the heather on the moors was in full bloom and changed the rather grim aspect of these moors completely and quite beautifully. Despite a good deal of rain, we still had picnics by the river, sheltered however by umbrellas. Ralph Assheton, who had been Under-Secretary of the Treasury in Churchill's wartime cabinet, became deputy-chairman of BCL. The Assheton forebears first came to England with William the Conqueror and as a reward for their service were granted several hundred acres of land near the little town of Clitheroe in Lancashire, not far from the Yorkshire border. Ralph and his wife, Sylvia, were both very kind and hospitable and entertained Liz and me at Downham Hall on several occasions. On our first visit Ralph's father who was a baronet and the lord of the manor, occupied Downham Hall while Ralph and Sylvia lived in a smaller house on the estate. The father invited all of us to a dinner party one night and sat all the men on one side of the table and all the women opposite them! On a rainy day, he would put on his hat, take his walking-stick, and march around the downstairs hall. Then on his death Ralph and Sylvia moved into the big house. The house had an interesting muniment room, where some antique coins and other valuables were displayed which had been dug up on the estate apparently buried hundreds of years before by the Danes who may have been fleeing from early Saxons. Treasure troves such as this in England belong to the Crown but Queen Victoria was so pleased she returned half to the Asshetons. The little village of Downham comprised houses belonging to the estate and villagers would doff their hats or touch their caps if they met the Asshetons, so it still seemed rather feudal to us. The country was hilly and beautiful and there was a trout stream that ran through the property where I caught some fish. During the reign of King George V and Queen Mary, the Queen came to visit Downham on one of her trips to that part of England. Since it was the custom, if the Queen admired some article of furniture, china, glass or other treasure, to immediately give it to the Queen, the Asshetons being forewarned of the visit, wisely hid all the beautiful things they wished to keep. In due course, Ralph was granted a peerage in recognition of his invaluable wartime services and took the title of Lord Clitheroe. A baronet does not have a hereditary title but a Baron does, so the eldest son will always inherit the title on the death of his father. The family also had some black labrador dogs. One of these they named Chelsea after the district in London where their town house was located. Chel, as he was usually called, sired pup- piesand they gave us one which we also called Chel when we moved to the woodside area. Lord Clitheroe had a good sense of humor as the following example will indicate. On one occasion when Lord Clitheroe was in Los Angeles, my secretary asked him what was meant by the word, Barony, and by the expression, Droit de Seigneur. His written explanation was, "An Honor is a feudal territorial Barony comprising number of manors (such as Downham Manor) over which the existing rights are chiefly sporting rights and the ownership of minerals under the land. The Droit de Seigneur (ask Mr. Gerstley) has become obsolete through lack of iniative on the part of decadent lords. In addition to becoming President of the company, I was also elected a Director of U.S. Potash. In Jeniferls day while he was a Director he had arranged as a former railroad man and because both PCB and USP were big shippers to travel to Carlsbad in a private railroad car. I inherited this privilege and Liz and I and Fred and Isabel Lesser used to travel this way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas attached to the Santa Fe "Chiefm or "Superchief ." At Las Vegas we were then attached to another train which went to El Paso, Texas, where we were met by Potash people and driven to Carlsbad, New Mexico. On one occasion our son, who loved trains, and George Behrendt came with us to Las Vegas and were allowed to ride in the engine. In the private car we had excellent food and we often played poker in the evening before going to bed. At Carlsbad, besides attending various business meetings, all of us were usually taken on a visit to the famous Carlsbad Caverns which we got to know very well. CHAPTER. IX In early 1950 we received a visit from a Navy captain who told me and Pat OIBrien in great confidence that the Navy was engaged in a secret research project which if successful would use a tremendous amount of borates. Accordingly, the Navy wanted to make a study of our and BCL1s known deposits to determine if there was a sufficient supply of borates to support the project. This reminded us that in the late 1940's we had been asked by a Washington source to quote a price on supplying 600 tons of boric acid per day which was far more than our plant could produce. But after locating a surplus World War I1 plant near Las Vegas which we could adapt, we quoted a price and never heard anything more until the Navy captain gave us a possible clue as to what this was all about. Anyway, I obtained permission to share this secret with Fred Lesser and together we arranged that a qualified engineer from the U.S. Geological Survey would make a survey of our U.S. properties and BCL1s properties in Turkey and South America. It also happened that we were making a study of the possibility of converting our underground mine to an open pit mine with the help of some experienced consultants. With an underground mine only about 50-60% of the ore is recoverable because of the necessity of leaving support pillars, while virtually 100% of the ore can be recovered with an open pit mine. And we had concluded that if we made this conversion, it would be much cheaper to manufacture borax at the minesite than to ship 'ore to Wilmington, provided we could finance the large cost involved. The USGS reported favorably to the Navy as to the extent of ore reserves and we completed our conversion and cost studies in early 1954 and I was called to London to discuss the matters involved including financing the project. It was decided.that we should proceed with the project if I could obtain financing on my return to the United States. However, before I returned Liz and I, who had taken our children on their first trip to Europe, visited Italy starting in Rome and first going south by car to Naples, the Blue Grotto and the Roman ruins at Paestum and then north to Siena, Assisi, Florence, and Venice. Then we drove across northern Italy into France, visiting the Milan cathedral enroute. In the south of France we visited the lovely walled town of St. Paul de Vence which Mother and Gerstle used to love to visit and proceeded on to Nimes and finally met her parents, Alice and Sam and Dr. Bob Stern at Les Beaux where we stayed for a couple of days, and finally on to Paris via the Dordogne where we were able to see the prehistoric caves at Lascaux with the wonderful wall paintings of animals and people. Upon returning to the United States, I spent several days in New York with Fred Schroeder, a director of Lee-Higginson, the brokerage house which had helped us find financing for U.S. Potash Company. I reviewed our plans for Boron and I also spent time at Chase Manhattan Bank with their officials to review the same matter. It was agreed that representatives of Chase and Farmers National Bank and Fred Schroeder would come out to California and visit Boron and talk to our engineers to get a better understanding of the project which they did and they obviously liked what they saw. Fred Lesser was due to make his fall visit shortly after this when we expected to finalize loan agreements- However, a few days before Fred was due to leave England, 1. received his cable postponing his trip indefinitely and soon was informed of the reason. A group of Americans headed by Coleman Morton, a well- known financial figure in Los Angeles, had made a takeover offer along with the New York financial house of Model Roland and Stone. It further transpired that one of their associates was John J. McLoy who had been High Commissioner for Germany after the war and who had recently become Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. We naturally thought that Chase had leaked our plans to the syndicate. I immediately contacted Ransom Skeen of Chase with whom we were dealing and he got hold of Nelson Rockefeller who managed to get word to McLoy, who was duck hunting, to return to New York immediately which he did. When I confronted him with the data I had he was most apologetic, having no idea of our negotiations with Chase and he immediately withdrew from the syndicate. I then sailed to England to review these unwanted developments and to discuss strategy to defeat the takeover bid. We decided to issue a statement to stockholders disclosing our plans for the open pit mine and new refinery at Boron and all the benefits that would result, but we could not disclose our secret dealings with the Navy Department. Norman Pearson, one of BCL8s directors and I drafted the statement and it was also agreed that I should return to New York and San Francisco to see if I could organize a friendly group to outbid the adverse syndicate. In New York, Fred Schroeder asked me to prepare a prospectus of BCL and PCB which I did with some help from Los Angeles within a week by working about 15 hours a day. This was to be used to interest friendly financial houses. I also contacted my Navy captain friend and advised him of all the developments. He reported same to his superiors and I was asked to go to Washington to report to a number of Admirals in charge of the project which I did. One of the Admirals was a friend of Laurence Rockefeller, who was then very interested in exotic fuels for which our borates were to be used as a means of greatly extending the distances military planes could travel without refueling. A day or so later I received a call from Horace Albright who knew all the Rockefellers as a result of his national park activities that Laurence wanted to talk to me, which he did. He asked me to go and see the Rockefeller business managers in New York and review our needs. I recall how impressed I was when the elevator stopped at the correct floor in the Rockefeller Center building to walk into a small lobby where there was only a colored receptionist and a couple of chairs. However, I was soon escorted into the offices which were full of modern pictures of which David was a collector. I left with assurance of their participation if I could obtain additional support on the West Coast. Just at this time, I received a telephone call from my Mother in England to say that my father was dying and that I would have to fly over that day if I wanted any chance of seeing him alive. But torn as I was, I felt that under the circumstances Dad would have wanted me to continue my efforts to save the company to which he had devoted most 'of his life, so I decided not to go over at that time. Dad died the next day while I was enroute to San Francisco. I then flew to San Francisco to see Walter Haas, then President of Levi Strauss, through arrangements made by Sam Lilienthal. Walter was a substantial investor in many areas and was most interested in our project so I went home to Alice and Sam's that night exhausted but encouraged. And there was a cable for me from London to say that with the publication of our statement to stockholders the syndicate had decided to withdraw their takeover bid as they did not want a fight on their hands. So I returned to Los Angeles and Liz and we decided to leave for London as soon as we could to be with Mother. I went to the office where I was warmly and happily greeted by a relieved staff and Fred Corkill and Dave Parker persuaded me to take a rest and play golf for a change. This we did but probably because of the tension and strain I had been under, I threw my back out which was very painful. However, our good friend and doctor, Fred Ilfeld, gave me some manipulation and exercises so that the next day Liz and I flew to New York enroute to London. Fred's instruction to me was to take a flask of bourbon on the plane and take a nip to offset back pain, so I arrived in New York in a very relaxed state! In London we suggested to Mother that she should regain her American citizenship and come and live in San Francisco where she had so many friends and relatives and she agreed that this made sense and soon took steps to regain her citizenship. Liz and I soon returned to the United States. However, the end of the takeover bid did not, in our view, end other possible attempts on BCL. Fred Lesser and I were discussing this in my Los Angeles office early in 1955 when we received a visit from a representative of Lazard Freres, the most prestigious financial house in New York. They had heard of our situation both through Model Roland and Stone and the Rockef ellers, and thought they could be of constructive assistance to us. After discussing this with Fred Schroeder who agreed, Fred and I and Abel Smith met with Andre Meyer, the head of Lazard in New York, and Ferdinand Eberstadt of F. Eberstadt & Co., as well as Fred Schoeder, to review the situation. There was also present Dick Mansfield who ran the Rockefeller operations. We subsequently met again in Lazardls Wall Street office where Fred Lesser and Abel Smith worked out an agreement to employ Lazard as consultant while I gave the Lazardls financial staff a review of all the company's operations. While we were on the way to the Lazard office having a few minutes to spare, we paid a visit to the nearby cemetery and Abel Smith recognized the tombstone of an ancestor who had fought and died in the Revolutionary War. Following this, Lazard made a careful review of all the Borax operations and in due course rendered a report to the board in London which I attended. They recommended that PCB, which had been first a subsidiary and later a division of BCL, become a separate American Company and take over U.S. Potash by merger; BCL should sell shares in the new American company to Lazard, the Rockefellers and Eberstadt; we should proceed with our plan for an open pit mine and refinery at Boron; and we should build a new and larger research laboratory as I recommended. All of these recommendations were approved in principle with BCL to receive stock in the new American company. In due course, all the details were worked out, the Potash shareholders agreeing to the merger, and the Chase and Farmers banks to the necessary loans, and I was appointed President of the new company, which was given the name United States Borax and Chemical Corporation. After all of this had been arranged when Fred and Isabel and Liz and I were in New York, Andre Meyer invited us to dinner and the theatre with his wife and the Eberstadts, dinner being at the famous Colony Restaurant. It just happened that a year or so before this, Fred and I had to do some entertaining in New York and after trying various restaurants had selected the Colony where the maitre d' was named Louis whom we tipped liberally on our quite frequent trips. Because of the importance of Andre Meyer, we were given the best table at the Colony the night of his invitation, but when Louis came to the table he said, "Good evening Mr. Gerstley and good evening Mr. Lesser," ignoring Andre and Ferd, much to our amusement. The Colony was a lovely restaurant in those days with excellent food and service. It was even patronized by Prince Edward who had vacated the British throne when he was King Edward VIII to marry Mrs. Simpson. We were lunching in the Colony one day when he, Mrs. Simpson, and their dog came in and the dog was allowed to lie under their table. When we first lived in Los Angeles, Liz and I had been introduced to the then well-known Perinols restaurant when it was still located downtown. Later Perino's moved to Wilshire Boulevard not too far from our office building on Shatto Place. After I became General Manager and later President of my company, Fred Corkill, Dave Parker and I often had lunch there to discuss business affairs. We were always given the same table and Alex Perino would often come and sit with us for a while, telling us stories about his early days. It was a delightful restaurant with excellent food and we sometimes gave dinner parties there in the private upstairs room for our directors and others. The new American company finally came into being by July of 1956 and my board of directors included not only Fred Lesser and Horace Albright, but representatives from Lazards, Dick Mansfield for the Rockefellers, Ferd Eberstadt, and Fred Schroeder, plus my senior vice presidents. Our new American company received security clearance from Washington and we learned that Olin-Mathieson Chemical Company was the company working on the exotic fuel for the Air Force.. Andre Meyer and Ferd Eberstadt proposed that we should form a joint venture with Olin-Mathieson to pool our knowledge and all future products but despite intense pressure to do so, we declined as we felt we would be surrendering more than we would ever receive in return. Late in 1956 Lazard and Eberstadt advised that they would like to sell the shares they had received from us. To accomplish this, the shares had to be registered on an Exchange and we arranged listing on the New York Stock Exchange. This involved much additional work but finally the shares were listed for trading on May 20, 1957. It was then the custom on the day the shares were first open to trading for representatives of the company to be admitted to the floor of the Exchange and for the President to buy the first 100 shares traded. So I bought the first 100 shares and after the opening we were congratulated by our friends and traders on the floor and entertained at lunch by Keith Funston, then head of the New York Stock Exchange. When I became President of the new U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation after the merger with U.S. Potash, I found we had inherited a house organ and decided we should continue the "Pioneerw as it was called to report matters of interest to our combined employees. I asked Ann Rosener to take over this task which she did most ably. Ann had many talents and over several years helped us prepare our annual reports, publish a brief history of the company, and plan and organize a most interesting Borax museum in Death Valley. Her creative talents were invaluable to our company. The conversion to an open pit mine, construction of the new refinery at Boron and the new research laboratory at Anaheim were all completed in 1957 which was an exhausting year. Andre Meyer had the habit of ringing up around 9:30 A.M. New York time which was 6:30 A.M. California time to discuss something, which annoyed Liz very much. 1957 was also a sad year for all of our family as Liz Is father, Sam, died. He had always been wonderful to me and he was greatly loved by his family and friends. We decided to take a holiday abroad that summer with Jimmy, Anne, and Liz's mother, Alice. As I badly needed rest more than anything, I spent part of the time at a little lodge in Austria with a nearby stream where I could fish while Liz, her mother, and the children drove around parts of Italy and Austria before joining me. Then we all drove to Vienna where we met Fred, Isabel and Norman Pearson and had a very happy few days together. However, while I was at my fishing lodge I obtained a copy of the Herald- Tribune at a nearby town and found that the stock of our company had risen from around $35 to some $75 a share and later learned that the Navy and Air Force had announced their plan to use a boron fuel to extend the range of their aircraft and there had been a tremendous public demand for the shares of our company. On our return to the United States, we made plans to dedicate the opening of the open pit mine and the completion of the new refinery at Boron by inviting a lot of guests--customers, bankers and friends--to Boron for the occasion, after they had first visited our new research laboratory at Anaheim. To mark the occasion at Boron, we assembled the famous Twenty Mule Team to haul the first load of ore from the pit to the refinery and at the same time we arranged for three military planes from nearby Edwards Air Force Base to fly over as a salute. It was quite an impressive occasion and amongst the guests were the British Ambassador, Sir Harold Caccia, and his wife. I had to make a short speech and we gave our guests lunch. The next day Fred Lesser and I and our wives took Sir Harold Caccia and his wife and Lord Clitheroe and his wife to Death Valley with some of my vice presidents and their wives. Although there was already snow on Telescope Peak--the highest mountain in the Funeral Range--the two Peers decided to try to climb the mountain the next morning, but they returned in the afternoon rather tired after getting stopped about 3/4 of the way up by the snow. However, by evening they had recovered and joined all of us in one of our best square dance sessions. As I was 50 years old on November 11, Liz planned a wonderful party for me at our home to which the Lessers and Clitheroes came along with a multitude of other friends. She had a huge tent erected in the garden and an orchestra for dancing and it was a lot of fun. Though we got to bed late, we were up the next day to go to the horse races at Santa Anita where our bankers had placed their private box at our disposal. Unfortunately, our new refinery at Boron had serious start-up problems--not an uncommon occurrence with new plants--but this adversely affected the profits of our relatively new company and as President I felt this very keenly as, of course, everything pertinent had to be published and explained to our shareholders. While part of the problem was due to some careless planning by Pat OIBrien, my general manager, as President I took the blame. It appeared that the new responsibility which had devolved on Pat had been too much for him.and he started to drink very heavily to the detriment of his work. So, much as I hated to do so, as he had done yeoman service when the company was much smaller, I arranged for his early retirement, which was almost tantamount to firing him except that he received a modest pension.

In 1958 the Air Force announced that they had perfected a quick method to refuel planes in the air which was much cheaper than the plan to use a boron fuel. We were really relieved as if they had gone ahead with this plan, our reserves of ore would have been used up in a few years. Naturally with the news, the price of our shares dropped on the New York Stock Exchange. That summer Liz and I went on a camping trip with our friends Mona and Phil Colman and Jane and Bill Lyons and later spent a short time in Europe staying with Fred and Isabel at their country place in Berkshire. This was on the Lambourn River which contained trout. I introduced Fred to fishing and bought him his first rod and saw him catch his first fish to his great excitement. The fishing on the Lambourn had been leased by previous owners to the Piscatorial Society--one of the oldest fishing clubs in England-- and Fred and I had to wait until two members died or retired before we could become members and fish the stream. Liz and I also flew over to Brussels for a few days to see the World's Fair and we also had time to visit the charming old towns of Bruges and Ghent and the famous battle site of Waterloo. By that time Jimmy was an engineering student at Stanford and Ann had entered Pomona College. I was invited to become a trustee of Pomona and since Pomona was one of the Claremont Colleges, each of which had its own Board of Trustees and its own finances and were modeled on the lines of Oxford and Cambridge, I accepted with pleasure. I was soon invited to become a member of Pomona's Investment Committee where I learned a great deal and later became Chairman of that committee for several years. I also became a Director of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank. However, within a year the bank was sold to Security Pacific National Bank and I was made a member of its Executive Committee. I was also for a time a Trustee of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and appointed by Mrs. Chandler--the wife of the owner of the Los Angeles Times--to one of the committees involved with the construction of the then new Music Center in Los Angeles. My mother in due course had regained her American citizenship and was settled in San Francisco and both Mother and Alice would visit us in Los Angeles and we, Jimmy and Ann would spend time with them in San Francisco. Liz and I often visited our friends Jane and Bill Lyons at Laguna Beach and went sailing with them on their sloop which would sleep the four of us. Sometimes we would sail over to Catalina for the weekend and anchor in the harbor and swim in the ocean off the boat and on more than one occasion we would celebrate New Year's Eve with them. Since we both enjoyed fishing, we not only spent time on the McKenzie River in Oregon but also the Metolius River at a resort which had a beautiful view of Mt. Jefferson and where we made many friends. I had also taken up oil painting for fun and relaxation and found that both trout fishing and oil painting provided a wonderful change for me from my business responsibilities.

In 1959 Liz I visited New England in the fall of that year to see the lovely fall coloring and visited Old Sturbridge as well as many other interesting and historical places. CHAPTER X By 1960 all of our problems at Boron had not only been corrected but our company made the largest profit in its history. I had in fact thought about retiring when I was 50 years old but when I was asked to become the President of the new U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation, I would not resist that challenge; and when the startup problems occurred I could not leave until these were solved and remedied. But by 1960 it seemed to me that I could make plans to retire with a successor--Hugo Riemer, formerly with Allied Chemical in place in lieu of Pat OVBrien--and with the company in the best shape in its history. When I was in England later that year, I advised Lord Clitheroe of my desire to retire and he agreed that it should be at the end of our financial year and after the stockholders meeting in 1961 and that Hugo Riemer should succeed me. Anne and Jimmy arrived on the Rotterdam and we flew with them to Ireland to do some sightseeing and to spend a night at the home of Molly Pearson's mother, Mrs. Harper. Then on to Ashford Castle where we spent a few days and enjoyed the beautiful grounds but where I had poor fishing. I also played billiards with Jimmy for the first time and he was so good that I knew he must have played at college or elsewhere! Next to Ballynahinch Castle where I fished for sea trout with some luck. Liz, Jimmy and Anne made a side trip by boat to the Isle of Aran which they found most interesting. We also found a golf course and I gave Jimmy his first--and I believe only--golf lessons, though he was a promising tennis player. We also drove north to Rosapenna where we stayed a few days and golfed and had quite a lot of rain. We spent a few days in Dublin on the way back going to the theatre to see the famous Abbey Players, sightseeing and shopping for Waterford glass. Then we flew home via London and New York. I retired officially on February 20, 1961 and was presented by the Board with a resolution of appreciation and two lovely silver trays, one English Georgian from Borax Holdings Ltd. and one American, and on the latter there were inscribed the signatures of all my good friends and business associates on both sides of the Atlantic. I was also made Vice Chairman of the USB Board, the Chairman being British since BCL was our largest stockholder. This meant in effect that I became the American Chairman as I had to preside at meetings when the British Chairman was unable to attend. While I still had my office, I found office hours pretty dull without the many day-to-day problems I had been accustomed to as Chief Executive and I began to think about leaving Los Angeles. But before Liz and I had reached any decision we went on vacation first to Paris where we met our friends Rosalie and Paul Wolf for a few days and then we took a train to the south of France, picked up a rental car and drove into northern Spain which we greatly enjoyed--Laredo, Santander, Santillana and the prehistoric caves at Puente Viesgo and Alta Mira, with their early drawings of animals and people on the stone walls of the caves. Then on to Burgos and to Las Huelgas, both of which we liked very much, particularly the cathedral at Burgos. Finally, we drove back into France over the mountains and through beautiful scenery to Oleron- Ste-Marie. From there we visited Pau and over a mountain pass to Lourdes where we saw the Son et Lumiere at the chateau. We did a little fishing in the rivers near Oleron and also near St. Jean Pied de Port near the Pyrenees. Then back to Paris where we spent a few pleasant days with Alice and Katie Simon before returning to the United States. Liz and I deci3ed to investigate various areas to see if we liked any of them enough to move. We finally decided to move to the San Francisco area where our respective mothers lived and where we had many friends and relatives. As we preferred living in the country and not too far from an airport, we finally found property we liked in what was then called Portola Valley, but later our area was called Woodside, though it actually lay in Portola Valley. Initially, we purchased two adjoining lots in 1962 and later a third. We also found an architect whose work we liked and a contractor and commenced construction in the spring of 1963. We also made arrangements to sell our house in Beverly Hills and to store our furniture until our new house was ready. In the summer of 1963 we moved to a rented house in Woodside so that we could be on top of the construction activities and we finally moved into our new home at 160 Farm Road late that year. Later we added a cottage for Clay and Viola who had moved with us. However, while our house was still in the planning stages in 1962, we took a summer vacation in Europe. This time we first visited Holland--Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague and the Kroller-Muller Museum in a forest near the German border where the Van Gogh collection of paintings was then housed. We also visited the church near Rotterdam where the Pilgrim Fathers worshiped before sailing to America. Then to Copenhagen in Denmark and across to Oslo in Norway. We drove up the east coast via Lilliehammer, which had a beautiful early stave church, with our friends Mona and Phil Colman to a fishing lodge which the head of the Norwegian-American Shipping Lines had arranged for me. There we had a lovely house with cook and maid, some miles of river and two ghillies to help us with our fishing which was for sea trout and Atlantic salmon. We had a lovely week, caught some fish and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in the very pleasant countryside. We stopped at Bergen on the way back and then visited London and the west country including Devonshire where we fished and saw some friends, finally sailing back to New York on the Queen Elizabeth. On both the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, besides dancing and movies at night, an auctioneer in the smoking room would auction off chances on the daily ship's run which the captain would estimate each day. Besides the numbers included in the estimate such as 480-510 knots, there was also the low field where one bet that the actual would be less than the estimate and the high field where one bet that it would exceed the estimate. On one Queen Elizabeth trip I decided to bet, much to Liz's disgust, as a number or one of the fields might be bid up to 25 to 50 pounds. The ship's run was posted shortly after noon each day so the next day I went to see what was posted and to my amazement-- and Liz's--I'd won and got paid some 368 pounds in all sorts of currencies. So I had this award and the calculations involved framed as proof that a man can't always be wrong! To some extent we planned part of our house around some of our antique furniture we had bought in England over the years, much of it from Kiel's in Broadway. There was an old barn on our place and riding trails outside our fences and as we both enjoyed riding, we soon acquired two horses. In the early years we could ride over some of the lands owned by Stanford University, but later this was largely prohibited. But there were still many pleasant rides and some friends introduced us to the Shack Club which we joined, where we met and' enjoyed their company. In our first years at Woodside I decided to write a sort of history of the American Borax operations which was published by USB in due course. I also became interested in the history of the Shack Club and after some fairly extensive research this was published by Sunset Books under the title, "The Shack Riders,'' as Bill Lane who was President of Sunset was also a Shack Rider and liked my history. I also wrote a reminiscence of my father based on funny incidents in his life and stories which he would tell on himself and I had this privately printed by someone who used to run the famous Grabhorn Press in the Bay Area. I did this mainly for the enjoyment of our children and any descendants they might have. Then a friend of ours and one of our bridesmaids, Marjorie Stern, who was interested in Asian art and had been instrumental in persuading the late Avery Brundage to give his collection of Asian art to San Francisco in 1959, got me interested in problems he was having. His gift was to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco but he felt the Trustees paid little attention to his famous collection. Since 1959 he had amassed an additional collection which was on loan to the Museum, but he was threatening to give same to Los Angeles. I tried to persuade the Chairman of the DeYoung, whom I knew, to interpose a committee of people who really cared about Asian art between the Museum Trustees and the curators of the Brundage collection, but the then Mayor would do nothing. But when he was succeeded by Joe Alioto--the same Alioto who had been in charge of our anti-trust case some twenty-five years earlier--he moved to establish a separate Board of Commissioners to govern the Brundage collection and I was named to the first Commission and also became one of the first Trustees of the Asian Art Museum Foundation which was established at the same time. I became the second Chairman of both the Commission and the Founda- tion. Joe Alioto and I became good friends and I also worked closely with his successor, Diane Feinstein. Besides frequent trips to San Francisco on museum business, I also made monthly trips to Los Angeles to attend Borax and/or Pomona College Investment Committee or Board meetings. In addition, every two years Pomona College would hold a retreat at some resort such as Ojai to which Trustees and their spouses and top faculty and their spouses were invited. These meetings, where important subjects pertinent to Pomona were discussed, were stimulating and enjoyable, allowing time for golf or other recreation as well as work and giving one an opportunity to get to know the faculty. When Alice died in 1972 the Victorian house at 2007 Franklin Street became vacant but since it had become almost a San Francisco landmark, the family and others wanted to try to preserve it. I was able to negotiate its gift to the Foundation for San Francisco Architectural Heritage on behalf of the family. The house now known as the Haas-Lilienthal House was used by the Foundation as its headquarters and I served on its Board for several years. I also served on the Board of the Friends of the Bancroft Library for a few years and I was instrumental in founding the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, as I raised the funds it initially needed and served on its Board for a number of years, initially as Chairman. I was also elected to the Board of Haas Brothers when Liz's brother Ernest became President. However, Liz and I took time to play golf and fish, usually staying on the Metolius or the McKenzie River in Oregon and to travel overseas. CHAPTER XI Liz and I traveled extensively after I retired, sometimes with her mother and/or mine or with other relatives and friends. In 1965 we spent some weeks in England fishing in Somerset, visiting the Lessers and the Clitheroes at their country places, and we also stayed in Derbyshire, enjoying the lovely scenery and the historic estates of Haddon Hall and that of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. Then we flew to Greece visiting Athens, Nauplia and Olympia and, of course, paid a visit to the Delphic oracle! After a few days in Venice with Liz's mother, I returned home while Liz and her mother proceeded east to India and Hong Kong before coming home. After I reached home Anne became engaged to Rene Pieper and I telephoned Liz in Hong Kong to tell her of this happy news. Anne was married in a nearby church in Portola Valley and the reception afterwards'was at our house and well-attended by family and friends, including several from Los Angeles. Anne had graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Philosophy and was an excellent student. In fact she had won a scholarship at another of the Claremont Colleges--Scripps--but had decided to go to Pomona and in any event we would have allowed the scholarship money to go to a qualified but needy applicant. After she left Pomona she studied Counseling Psychology at Cal-State, Hayward, and later became a licensed Marriage, Family and Child Counselor of the State of California. She also obtained a degree in Library Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Jimmy, who was also an excellent student, had graduated from Stanford Univerity where he obtained a degree in Engineering. After being interviewed by several firms, each of which would have employed him, he decided to take a good position with North American Aviation in San Fernando Valley and rented an apartment not far away from his place of employment. With the approach of my 60th birthday in 1967, Liz and I decided to visit the Orient. We flew via Hong Kong to India, flying over the then Vietnam war zone at night enroute to New Delhi and after a few days there proceeded by air to Kashmir where we stayed at Dal Lake on a houseboat. The houseboat, while comfortable, had certain peculiarities. On the roof was a boiler to heat the water for baths and one of the servants the first evening started to fill the bathtub with water which only trickled in very slowly. After about an hour and a half, another servant came in while we were out, thought we had bathed and emptied the tub! So it was very late when we finally got a bath. And we found that when the lights were on in the sitting room and one sat back in an armchair all the lights would go off! But it was a lot of fun. We rented one of the very few taxis in the area to go and fish different streams with ghillies to help us fish and to carry us piggyback when necessary across the streams. The roadside scenes were almost biblical with peasants sometimes carrying loads of hay on their heads, donkeys and their riders, shepherds with their flocks, and the costumes that were worn by the populace. The scenery was often majestic and when fishing one might look up and see a fifteen thousand foot peak looming overhead. After about a week of this and a little shopping in nearby Srinagar, we returned one day in our taxi to Srinagar on our way to the lake, when we suddenly saw a huge mob coming towards us down the road. Our driver told us to lock our doors as apparently there had been trouble between the Kashmiris who were Moslems and some Indian troops who were Hindus. As the mob passed us our car was rocked a couple of times but then the crowd passed on. Back at the lake a worried Mr. Butt who owned the houseboats told us it was too dangerous for us to go fishing any more and that we should leave. So in a day or so we left for the airport in a bus with a couple of armed guards to protect us in case of trouble, but there was none. So we flew to Delhi and then took another plane to Kathmandu in Nepal and had a good view of the Himalayan foothills enroute and of the Himalayas themselves as we got closer. On one of our first mornings in Kathmandu we rose about 4:00 A.M. so that we could be taken to a nearby viewpoint to watch the sun rise over Mount Everest and it was indeed a lovely and thrilling sight. I did not much care for the temples we visited as they still sacrificed animals. But through Mortie and Janet Fleishhacker, who were connected with the Asia Foundation, we made contact with one of their representatives and found out where we could buy a Tonka, one of the religious banners that had been smuggled out of Tibet and we purchased a very nice one. We had a little difficulty finding a plane to take us back to Delhi but finally found one which went to the sacred city of Benares where we saw much misery and poverty in the streets. We took a boat on the river and it was not pleasant as we saw many funeral pyres, dead bodies floating and even an alligator probably attracted by the bodies. Fortunately, we were able to get on a plane soon afterwards and flew to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, to Jaipur where I bought some unset emeralds for Madeleine who had commissioned me to do so and a beautiful old Indian necklace for Liz. Then to Udaipur where we stayed in what had been an old palace situated on an island in the middle of a lake and on to Bombay via the interesting caves of Ajanta and Ellora. From Bombay we flew to Bangkok in Thailand staying at the attractive Oriental Hotel which contained many beautiful things. From Bangkok we flew to Phnom-Penh in Cambodia and then to Angkor. Things had changed a lot since I was there in 1929. The hotel-- the Grand Hotel--was much larger than our 1929 lodge; there were more things to see but no more wonderful relics to be seen lying by the forest trails; and while there were Cambodian dancers performing at night on the causeway in front of Angkor Watt, the music was canned and the lights were electric, so much of the earlier charm was lost. However, we were fortunate to get to see Angkor at all, as for several years Americans had not been welcome to Cambodia but just at this time the situation had improved as Jackie Kennedy was due to visit Cambodia shortly after we left. We then spent a few days at our favorite Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong doing a little shopping before flying to Taiwan to spend a few days in ~aipeito visit the wonderful museum to which Chiang Kai Shek had transferred many of China's greatest pieces of art when he fled from China some years before. Our friends, the Mitaus, were also there and we had dinner together. Next we flew to Japan to stay first at Kyoto which had been much modernized since my 1929 visit but still contained some attractive old areas and many lovely gardens. There we met our friends, Rosalie and Paul Wolf, and at a restaurant ran into Jane Pettit who was also on the Asian Art Commission and was on a visit with her husband. From there the Wolfs and we took the famous "bullet trainw to Matsusaka where we visited the Mikimoto pearl fisheries and also the place.where the Japanese raised beef, feeding the steers with beer and rubbing them with saki. Then we went on to the very comfortable Fujiya Hotel located in a national park where to my great surprise my mother, Alice, the Wolfs and the Mitaus, had all gathered for my birthday. While we were dressing there was a knock on the door, we opened it and there stood two Japanese who turned out to be Anne and Rene disguised in kimonos! It was a wonderful and happy surprise and I had a very gay birthday party. After a few days in Tokyo which I did not like very much, Mother and I flew back to San Francisco followed by Liz and her mother. In 1970 we made our first visit to Israel and found it most interesting. In Jerusalem we saw all the sights such as the Via Dolorosa, the Wailing Wall, the Knesset, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Chagall paintings and much more. We also visited Bethlehem, Jericho, the Golan Heights, the Dead Sea, Haifa, Gaza, Caesarea and its reminders of the Crusades and Tel Aviv. We also visited a Kibbutz, attended a concert given by Piatagorsky and saw some, wonderful glassware dating from Roman times in a museum near Tel Aviv. Israel was relatively peaceful at that time but we did see a tank or two and some armored vehicles near the borders and there was a rocket attack on an Israeli village in the north while we were in Israel. From Israel we flew to Athens to meet our friends, Bob and Delphine Koshland, who had invited us to join them on our first Greek island cruise on the chartered yacht wIllyrism along with the Wolfs, Carol and Henry Sinton and Marjorie whose husband, Paul Bissinger, had recently died. While we were later on four other cruises visiting various Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, this being our first was the most exciting for Liz and me. On this trip we visited many of the islands east and south of Greece such as Delos, Mykonos, Cos where the famous physician Hippocrates was born, and Santorini which some have identified as the lost Atlantis and which erupted hundreds of years ago causing a tidal wave which may have destroyed Knossos on Crete. We also visited some famous places on the west coast of Turkey such as Ephesus and Bodrum and at the end of our voyage visited the island of Aegina which has a lovely old temple at its highest point with a wonderful view all around. The boat itself was very comfortable and every fine day the captain would find us a nice cove or beach to swim. In 1973 we made another trip on the Illyris with Bob and Delphine and the Wolfs, but this time Ernest and Clare and Fred and Isabel Lesser were the other passengers. This time we cruised north and east and we could even see the shore near Salonika where the British and Australian troops were finally driven off by the Turks in World War I and where the poet Rupert Brooke died. We particularly liked the island of Lesbos where we visited the old town of Methymna in the center of the island. In 1974 Liz and I went to Iran and particularly enjoyed seeing Persepolis where we attended a good son et lumiere and we were amazed at the fabulous jewels displayed in a bank in Teheran which the Persians had amassed in the campaigns of Darius and later leaders. Then we flew to Ankara in Turkey and traveled to Izmir to see the temple of Artemis, to Troy to envisage Homer's Odyssey before proceeding to Istanbul. I had developed some eye trouble but fortunately found an excellent eye doctor in Istanbul who had been trained in the United States and he soon took care of my problem. In 1975 Liz and I, with Clare and Ernest, went to Sicily traveling by car from Palermo to Taormina, enjoying the many relics of Greek and Roman Times, to the volcano Mount Etna and many attractive little towns. From Sicily we flew to England and with our friend Bill Lyon made our first visit to the north of England spending several days in Cumberland. There was a lot to see besides scenery--homes of famous writers and poets, Stonehenge on a much smaller scale and some excellent hotels including Sharrow Bay, famous for its food and hospitality. We ended up this trip by driving down the west of England to our favorite Broadway in ~loucestershire where we stayed at the Lygon Arms Hotel and entertained our friends, the Hiles, Joan and Victor Evans and Phyllis Drage. A visit and fishing with Fred and Isabel completed this trip. On this or one of our other trips to London we were invited by Bill Button, the husband of my sister Margaret, to dinner at the Broderers Guild in London. Bill was the Chairman of this guild, one of the oldest in London, which was originally a guild dedicated to textiles and embroidery. There by chance I met one of my crew from my Cambridge days who was also a Broderer. It was quite an interesting evening from the standpoint of the observance of rituals. Among other rituals it was necessary, when a person on one's left stood up to propose a toast, for the person on the right to rise at the same time to protect the speaker--as apparently in olden days there had been occasions when an enemy had chosen the moment to reach over and stab the toastmaker, while his right arm was raised while proposing and drinking the toast. I had been Chairman of the Asian Art Commission for some two years ending in late 1973 and had been succeeded by Bill Goetze. Unfortunately he suffered a mild heart attack in 1974 and I had to take over the chairmanship again. It was a busy period as the Museum was preparing to host the great Chinese Archaeological Exhibition which had previously attracted huge crowds in London, Paris, and Toronto. Cyril Magnin who was on our Commission persuaded the Chinese Ambassador in Washington to come out for the opening events and I helped to raise the funds to stage the exhibition. Herb Caen even gave credit to Cyril and me in his column for bringing this wonderful exhibition to San Francisco. It was a tremendous success drawing even larger crowds than had come to view it in any of the prior cities it had visited. The Chinese Ambassador was so pleased that at Cyril Magnin's urging I was given permission to lead a group of some fifteen people to China to see some of the sights. This was a special privilege as very few such permits were then given. Our visit was arranged for March 1976 and we were allowed to go to Peking; Sian where in a recent excavation had been found prehistoric six-foot pottery warriors and reproductions of horses and horsemen; Loyang with its caves decorated by earliest Buddhists; Nanking the southern capitol; Wusih and Soochow to see the famous gardens and silk factories; Shanghai and Canton. On the way to China we spent a couple of days in Kyoto, Japan visiting some lovely gardens and viewing a tea ceremony and then left from Tokyo in a Chinese plane for Peking. Besides the two of us and several people from the Asian Art Commission and their wives or husbands including the Sellers, Jewetts, Shorensteins and Calhouns, I had invited Madeleine as a major supporter of the Museum and Christine, her younger daughter. My account of this trip is contained in my "China Diaryw which was typed on our return to San Francisco. It was a fascinating experience and well-organized by the Chinese with national guides accompanying us on the entire trip and local guides being added at each place visited. Later that year Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation (RTZ) which by then had acquired all the shares of BCL, invited the American Board of USB to visit their holdings in Spain where RTZ first operated. We flew to the south of Spain to stay at a relatively new parador in Carmona near Seville. The parador was an old castle converted into a hotel and most attractive. We were taken to see the Rio Tinto area where the Romans used to mine copper long before RTZ, the copper discoloring the river, hence the name Rio Tinto. Then we visited the old monastery at La Rabida where Christopher Columbus spent much time awaiting permission from Ferdinand and Isabella to sail the Atlantic. We also saw the nearby little town of Palos from which Columbus~three vessels eventually sailed. And we spent some time visiting interesting places in Seville. After this Liz and I went on to Salamanca for a few days and particularly enjoyed its lovely Plaza Mayor and many fine old buildings. We also managed a visit to Yugoslavia and greatly enjoyed the countryside and the villages and towns we visited along the Adriatic. We particularly liked Split with its old Venetian houses and Diocletian's Palace; Dubrovnik which had much charm with its ancient walls on which one could walk and the many sights to be seen in the old town; and Kotor which was a lovely place. In 1977 we were again in England visiting the north country with Clare and Ernest. The cathedral at Durham and the visit to the Roman Wall at Housesteads were the highlights of this trip to England. Then Liz and I flew to northwest Spain to visit Santiago de Compostella and Leon, two of the many historical and attractive cities of Spain. It was to Santiago where the pilgrims came to worship at the supposed burial place of the Apostle St. James. There we were fortunate enough, when visiting the cathedral, to see the monks swinging the huge censer as was done in the days of the pilgrims in the hope that the incense would neutralize the smell of the unwashed visitors. We also visited the Channel Islands with other Directors of USB as the guests of the English Borax Company. We stayed in Jersey for a few days where many of the streets still bear French names. From there we visited Guernsey and the famous island of Sark which was made famous when the Dame of Sark defied the Germans in World War 11. There we met and were entertained by the Seigneur of Sark whom Lord Clitheroe knew. And before we left for home we once again visited Fred and Isabel and did some fishing in the Lambourn River. In 1978 we went to Wales for a holiday, spending time at an attractive resort near the town of Glyffaes on a fishing stream. We met some very nice people there and the food, especially wonderful teas, was excellent. In 1979 Liz and I were invited by Maggie Sloss to go on a cruise from Piraeus to Corfu with her son, Louis Sloss, and his wife, Billy Koshland, Jim Hart and some other friends on the yacht Daphne. The yacht was commanded by a Captain Zezos and had a fine crew and was considered the finest of the Greek yachts available for charter. This time we went around the southwest coast of Greece to Pylos, the home of wise King Nestor of Homer's Iliad, where the ruins of Nestor1s Palace were most interesting to see. Then we went on, stopping at Ithaca, one of the many islands which claim to be the birthplace of Homer, and then to Corfu. On our way back to Piraeus, we visited the battleground of Actium, where Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian in 31 B.C. And, finally, back to the Port of Athens through the Corinth Canal-- altogether a delightful trip. In 1980 our friends, the Dinkelspiels, were going to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by taking a cruise on the Santa Mercedes of the Delta Line around South America and suggested we join them which we did for part of the trip. We sailed late in February, enjoying the passage some days later through the Panama Canal and Liz and I left the boat at Rio de Janeiro. After a few days sightseeing there, we flew to Santiago in Chile via Buenos Aires and had a lovely view of the Andes as we crossed into Chile. Our old friend, Fito Lesser, met us at the airport and we spent some pleasant days in his company. Then Liz and I headed south to do some fishing ending up at a fishing resort in the foothills called Cumilhave where we met some other fishermen. Our best fishing was from a boat on the Calcurrupe River. On one day Liz caught a 7 or 8 pound trout on a wet fly which took her one-half hour to land and on another I caught the biggest trout caught that season on that river, over 30 inches and weighing around 11 pounds. Then back to Santiago and on to Lima in Peru and a flight up to Cuzco located at nearly 11,000 feet. Some friends had advised us to take some pills so that the altitude would not bother us and we also broke the trip at Arequipa at about 7,000 feet. We greatly enjoyed Cuzco and the fascinating villages, lovely scenery and the wildlife in the vicinity. Then we took a train to Macchu Pichu through more lovely scenery and we both enjoyed the ruins at Macchu Pichu immensely. From Peru we flew to Mexico City to visit the magnificent museum before returning to San Francisco. In 1981 we again went to Europe, this time visiting Portugal for the first time. While not all the towns are as interesting as many in Spain, there is much of charm and interest in Portugal in and around Lisbon and further north where we visited Obidos, Bucacao, before turning east into the mountains and south again to Lisbon. As a historian, I was particularly interested to see the lines at Torres Vedras where Wellington turned back the French during the Napoleonic Wars and also to see the Tagus River down which some of the earliest explorers sailed. In 1982 we joined a Linblad cruise starting from Cairo to go up the Nile. This was another fascinating trip led by an excellent lady guide and a couple of Liz's Burke's school friends who were on board added to the trip. We visited pyramids, temples, the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, Luxor, Aswan, fine museums and for a time were immersed in ancient Egyptian history. The scenes along the Nile did not seem to have changed very much from the days of Ptolemy. We ended up by flying from Aswan to Abu Simbel to visit the temple of Rameses which was very worthwhile. We went on another cruise in 1983, this time on the Danube, organized and led by Stanford University personnel. Liz and I spent a few days beforehand in Vienna which we had not visited for a long time and found the central part of Vienna as attractive as ever. The local Borax manager and his wife took us to dinner one night and to see the "Merry Widoww--most enjoyable. Our cruise boat was very comfortable and our fellow passengers good company. We were able to visit not only Austria but Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Rumania--the first time we had ever been behind the Iron Curtain. The scenes along the Danube were also interesting, particularly going through the Iron Gates. And the trip was so organized that often at night, when tied up at a wharf in some town, we would be taken to a restaurant with music and dancing. We went on another cruise in 1984 with Maggie Sloss and her son and his wife, two of their friends and Deedie Ehrman who was Deedie Koshland when we first met in Munich in 1927. This time we went first to the island of Rhodes which holds many interesting antiquities. An excellent son et lumiere is staged every night in season dealing largely with the exploits of the Knights of St. John--also known as The Knights of Rhodes--who conquered Rhodes in 1309. Our yacht, the Illyris, as the Daphne was not available at that time, met us in Rhodes and we boarded her to sail along the south coast of Turkey before returning to Piraeus, the port of Athens, some two weeks later. We visited many interesting sites and also had some wonderful swimming. However, the Illyris crew was not as good as the crew we had when we first sailed with Bob and Delphine Koshland and we missed the Daphne. While I had been Vice Chairman and Treasurer of the Asian Art Museum Foundation almost since its inception, Fritz Jewett asked me to take over as Chairman in 1984 since, as he pointed out, I had done most of the work of Chairman for several years. I was duly elected Chairman in September 1984 but this did not really add to my duties. I did initiate a campaign to create an Endowment Fund which was badly needed as the support the Museum received from the City was both inadequate and unsure and I succeeded in obtaining an Endowment Challenge Grant from NEA which we had to match on a three for one basis, and this was accomplished in good time. While work on the Asian Art Commission and Foundation occupied a good deal of my time, I did not let this interfere with our vacations. The Democratic National Convention was held in San Francisco in 1984 and I organized a reception for the Alaskan, New York and some other state delegates at the Asian Art Museum and I underwrote most of the cost. It was extremely well-attended and Liz and I had the opportunity of meeting and talking with the Governor of Alaska and some of his staff. He knew quite a lot about the old Alaska Commercial Company and we all had a good time. Afterwards I received a very nice letter from then Mayor Feinstein thanking me for arranging and hosting this event. In 1985 we planned a fishing expedition to New Zealand with our good friends whom we had first met on the Metolius River--Edie and Jack Jungmeyer, who lived in the Los Angeles area. I was able to book good fishing guides in advance whose names I obtained from knowledgeable friends. As it's a long flight to New Zealand, we agreed to break the trip with a visit to Tahiti and Papeete. Liz and I flew Air New Zealand from Los Angeles and in due course met Edie and Jack on Papeete and we spent a couple of days there and on Tahiti enjoying the swimming. Then on to New Zealand to the South Island. We then flew to Christchurch where we were met by Don Baruch, the son of Herbert Baruch and the nephew of the Milton Baruchs whom we had known in our Los Angeles days. Don and his wife were most hospitable and we enjoyed our few days in Auckland. Next we flew down to Christchurch where we met our first fishing guides, drove to our fishing lodge, and the next day started fishing. However, while New Zealand is supposed to have wonderful fishing, we discovered that no streams had been restocked for some fifty years and that if one wanted the best fishing, one had to take a helicopter and fly into the otherwise rather inaccessible high country and fish those distant streams. While we caught a lot of fish at most of our stops, we could do as well on our Oregon streams. Some years earlier, Liz and I and some friends had flown to Alaska and spent a week fishing in early September. There we had a float plane and guides and flew to a different river almost every day and had some marvelous fishing for big trout. We also saw lots of bears, deer, elk and even swans nesting and once we flew along the ocean and saw whales. But although the fishing in New Zealand was disappointing, we enjoyed it and the country was lovely and the people most friendly and helpful. Among other places visited we went to Milford Sound and cruised along that beautiful shore. We also flew to Mt. Cook and were taken in a small Cessna plane for a ride over the mountains which were quite spectacular. On some of the 'streams where we fished, the water was very clear and our guide would go ahead until he spotted a fish in the water and then signal one of us to try to catch it. That only emphasized to us how few fish there were in the accessible rivers. On the way back to the United States Liz and I stopped in Honolulu which we had not visited since our honeymoon some fifty years earlier. To us it almost looked like New York with all of its crowded high-rise buildings. We stayed at the Halekulani Hotel, now about 75 stories high, where we were given a very nice room with a balcony overlooking the ocean and we enjoyed our few days there before flying back to San Francisco. In 1987 after a short stay in England, we flew to Greece to join Maggie Sloss and friends for another cruise on the Daphne. While we had been in England in 1986, I was in a bad automobile accident while driving in Kent and spent several weeks in the hospital. The accident occurred on a nearly blind road as we were on a side road and the main road was hidden by walls and fences. Fortunately, Liz was not badly hurt but I had to undergo two operations, the major one being to mend my broken right hip. I was fortunate in being near an excellent hospital with an excellent bone specialist who operated on me successfully, but I was bed- ridden for a time and then had to learn to walk first with a walker and later on crutches. Poor Liz had to stay in a nearby hotel and besides spending most of the day with me, had to answer all the phone calls and letter received from our many friends and relatives. When I was finally allowed to go home, I communicated in advance with Mayor Feinstein to see if she could arrange for people to meet me at the plane instead of beyond the customs area and so help Liz with the luggage, which she most kindly did. It was heaven to me to get out of the hospital and start for home and wheelchairs were ready for me both at the departure and arrival airports. And as soon as I got home, I put aside my crutches and progressed to one walking-stick and before too long had recovered my strength. This last trip on the Daphne with our old friend Captain Zezos and his excellent crew was one of the nicest. While we had previously visited most of the islands we now touched on, they all had a great deal of appeal and this time we deliberately spent more time on Crete than we ever had before and explored it quite thoroughly. The swimming was delightful as usual and the chief steward on the boat was so used to my habits that when we swam off the boat and I finally got out and climbed up the ladder to the deck, he had a gin and tonic on a tray awaiting me! On our last night on board the Captain organized a wonderful farewell dinner. Few things in our lives have been more fun and more luxurious than our cruises on a private yacht, though Liz and I did enjoy a barge trip we had taken on one of the French canals a few years earlier. For the barge trip we were met by car not too far from Paris and driven to our barge with Liz's sister Frances and her husband Larry and three other Americans. Our crew was mostly English and the captain's wife was a "cordon bleuggchef. The barge was very comfortable and there were some bicyles on board for anyone who wanted to ride along the towpath and a mini-bus followed the barge to take us to visit any walled town or chateau that could not be reached on foot. Since a barge does not travel very quickly and there are locks to pass through every couple of miles or so, one could get off the barge and walk or bicycle on the towpath and rejoin the barge in a lock anytime one wished. Being in effect on the backroads of France, we got to see several chateaux and at least one walled town we never would have visited ordinarily and these were both attractive and interesting. We also did some wine tasting at various vineyards along our route. And we even learned to play "B~ule~~which is the same as the game of ~Bowls~~though when played on a rough stone dock it presents many more hazards than the usual nice green lawns. The whole trip was most enjoyable and a lot of fun too. CELAPTER XI1 To return to family and other matters, Anne and Rene had their first child, a son, in 1968. There should have been twins but things went wrong and only one child was born alive and unfor- tunately his brain was affected by the difficulties and he was not destined to live a normal nor a long life. In 1971 a daughter Debbie was born and over the years she paid us many visits, often staying a few days with one of her friends and we both became very attached to her. When she was young I used to make up Frankie and Louise stories to tell her and any young friend with her at night, thereby following in Grandpa Mack's footsteps. Jimmy continued to do very well at North American Aviation. He had become quite an adventurous traveler, making trips to countries like Africa and Nepal, and was and is an excellent photographer. In November 1986 he married Caroline Tanovic and we attended their lovely wedding in Beverly Hills. They are very happy and their marriage makes us very happy too. Anne and Rene were not so fortunate as they decided to get a divorce in 1974, though they remained friends as did we with Rene. While the death of her son was a very sad occasion for her, Anne has shown'courage in facing this tragic event and she has been and is a wonderful mother to Debbie. She has also found a position as Counseling Supervisor at the Mt. Diablo Medical Center in Concord. She obtained this position in competition with others and it will give her the opportunity to make full and productive use of her special training in this field. We are proud of both our children and of Caroline who has and is working hard in the nursing home field and of Debbie who has done very well at school and is now at Pomona . My mother died in 1973 and Liz's Mother died in 1972. Following my accident in England, Liz and I started to think about the future in case one or the other died and we both decided we would rather live in Atherton, where we would be closer to family and friends, than to stay in Woodside and that we should seek a smaller home than the one we had built in Woodside. We had made the acquaintance of Winnie Wilcoxson, a real estate broker with Grubb and Ellis, and her associate, Barbara Lowell, and with their help we put the Woodside property on the market early in 1988. We had hoped to sell the house and the entire 13 acres as one piece but we found that it was more practical to sell the house and pool and its four plus acres as one parcel and two vacant lots of four plus acres each as additional parcels. We finally negotiated the sale of all three parcels to three different buyers and after looking at various houses in Atherton we found one we liked at 111 Almendral Avenue. We made an offer for it almost immediately as there were many other people inspecting it and we were able to purchase it. We moved in on August 8, 1988 and Clay and Viola Simms, who worked for us and who had lived in the cottage we had built on our Woodside property, were able to move into the cottage on our new property. In 1989 we installed a swimming pool and Liz helped to plan the garden which had been largely demolished while the pool was being installed. With regard to my Asian Art activities, I decided in 1988 that it was time to retire as Chairman of the Asian Art Museum Foundation. Judy Wilbur, who had been Chairman of the Asian Art Commission for several years, retired as that Chairman and was available to replace me as Chairman of the Foundation and was elected unanimously by the Trustees. I remained as a Vice Chairman. Judy, fellow Commissioners, Trustees, and staff organized a lovely lunch party for me on my retirement to which Liz and many family members were invited as well as my old friends Fritz Jewett and former Mayor Joe Alioto. Judy, Joe and Fritz made very warm and complimentary speeches as did Alex Phillips, then Chairman of the Fine Arts Museums with whom I had served many years earlier when she was President of The Museum Society. Subsequently, in 1989 I was named Business Leader of the year for the Arts by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. I attended the sixth annual San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Business/Arts Awards lunch at the Meridien Hotel and sat at the head table with the other award winners. We all had to make short speeches and Mayor Agnos and certain business leaders spoke as well. Liz and many friends attended the lunch including Joe Alioto, Fritz Jewett, Judy Wilbur, Alice Lowe, then Chairman of the Asian Art Commission, the Chaitins, Madeleine, and the Dinkelspiels, and those at their table stood up and applauded when I concluded my brief remarks. I was presented with a handsome glass cigarette box by the Chamber of Commerce to mark the occasion. This record would not be complete without more information about Liz and her family. Her mother Alice was a delightful, kind and rather shy person with a very imaginative mind. The wonderful parties she gave both before and after our marriage gave ample proof of her creative ability. She was a devoted mother and grandmother and our children greatly enjoyed their stays with their grandparents. She was also a good sport, playing tennis and going on fishing trips with her husband and children though she hated to touch any fish she caught and someone else would have to take them off her hook. She outlived her husband by some 15 years, dying in 1972, and both Liz and I both enjoyed our travels with her after Sam died. Sam was a man of fine presence and character. He was both an able businessman and sportsman. Besides being President of Haas Brothers which had been founded as a wholesale grocery firm, he was also a Director of the Wells Fargo Bank and after we were married he used to send Liz some of the Director's fees he earned when attending bank meetings. He was also active in the San Francisco Community, supporting both Jewish and non-Jewish causes. Sam was quite athletic and enjoyed tennis, golf, and fly-fishing and was good at all these pursuits. Sam's mother was one of the daughters of Louis Sloss, one of the principal founders of the Alaska Commercial Co. Louis Sloss did so much for San Francisco and was so much admired that when he died, the flags in San Francisco were lowered to half-mast. He was also one of the early Presidents of the Society of California Pioneers. Liz's brother Ernest married Sue Hyman and had three children- -Joan, Nancy and Kate--but unfortunately Sue died at an early age. Ernest later remarried, this time to an old friend Claire Blumlein, who had also lost her first husband, but sadly she too passed away after many years. Once again Ernest was fortunate to marry another old friend, this time Connie Bly whose hxsband had died. Ernest was a good businessman, served as an officer in the Army in World War 11, and when his father died succeeded him as President of Haas Brothers. Ernest is active in various community affairs and especially enjoys music and trout fishing. Liz and I have spent many happy camping and overseas trips with Ernest and his wives and I served on the Board of Haas Brothers after Sam died. Frances also married Larry Stein who had been a Seabee in World War 11; they had one child, Judy. Larry worked for a number of years in the real estate field for Walter Shorenstein but he became subject to fits of depression and finally took his own life. Frances has many friends and continues to lead an active life and is a very good mother and grandmother. Madeleine, who was brought up by Alice and Sam after her parents died, graduated with honors from Smith College and then studied for a time in France. She married Leon Russell and they had three children--Alice, Charles and Christine. Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce. Madeleine, who had inherited stock in Levi Strauss, established the Columbia Foundation, which generously supported many worthy causes. Madeleine became a very active person in the community serving at one time as the Director of the Hospitality Center of the United States State Department in the Bay area. She has also served on many Boards such as the Asia Foundation, KQED, and Brandeis University, among others. She is a strong supporter of liberal causes and indefatigable in her attendance at meetings, whether local or national. She is also an outstanding hostess both in San Francisco and at the Atherton estate she had inherited from her parents and she is a wonderful mother and grandmother. She had had a younger brother Billy but he died when still young. Liz has a strong character like her parents with a charm of her own and the same fine sense of humor with which her parents were likewise endowed. She is a good athlete, played tennis well when younger, is still excellent at fly-fishing and although she played hardly any golf until late in life, she can hit some very good shots. Liz has many talents. She studied bookbinding and did a beautiful job of binding the letters I had written to my parents on my travels around the world in 1928-29; she also studied how hook-rugs were made and made some herself; she has used a loom most effectively; and she arranges flowers most attractively. While she does not like to cook, she makes wonderful cookies and brownies. She holds strong and generally liberal views and does not hesitate to write to the President or Congressmen about matters that concern her. She has courage which she has demonstrated by attending rallies for pro-choice groups as in many parts of the United States anti-abortionists have subjected such groups to unpleasant and sometimes physical harrassment. During the war she served on the local Red Cross and is generously supportive of many causes, particularly those involving the environment, domestic animals and wildlife and the needy. She has also become an enthusiastic gardener and works as a volunteer at Filoli. She also serves on local election boards at election time. She is also a good mother and is a most modest and unselfish person. She is an excellent hostess and this was of great help to me in my Borax days when we were frequently visited by Directors and their wives, all of whom were devoted to her as are all of her many friends. She is and always has been a wonderful wife, supporter and companion to me whether at home or on our many travels abroad.

Appendix B Lilienthal and James Mack Gerstlev. Courtesy of Elizabeth Gers t ley, 1991.

Appendix C

UNITED STATES BORAX & CHEMICAL CORPORATION

RESOLUTION OF APPRECIATION to JAMES M. GERSTLEY

Adopted by the Board of Directors February 20, 1961

WHEREAS, James M. Gerstley has on this date relinquished the office of President after twenty-eight years of service to the company and its predecessors$ and

WHEREAS, during the past fifteen years, under the leader- ship of James M. Gerstley as Chief Executive, the company and its predecessors experienced their greatest development, growth and prosperity; and

. WHEREAS, all those who have been associated with James M. Gerstley have felt the warmth of his personality, the strength of his character and have been inspired by the example of his untiring devotion to the company and his dynamic vitality; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the Board of Directors of United States Borax & Chemical Corporation, on behalf of the Board, on behalf of those who are part of the company, and on behalf of those who are served by the company, hereby gives formal expression of appreciation to James M. Gcrstley for the distinguished leadership, the great wisdom, the constructive vitality, and the human kindness and understanding he has given so fully and so devotedly to the company and its predecessors during the past twenty-eight years; and for the growth, success and stature of the company thereby achieved.

I, the undersigned, Secretary of United States Borax & Chemical Corporation, do hereby certify that the foregoing resolution wasadopted at the meeting of the Board of Directors of the Corporation held on February 20, 1961.

WITNESS my hand and the seal of the Corporation this 14th day of March, 1961.

Secretary

Appendix D

THE WESTERX JEWISH HISTORY CENTER of the Judah hlagnes 3luseum Invites You to the Dinner of The Conference on Western Jewish History

. co-sponsored with The American Jewish Hisrorical Sociery , Bancroft Library of the C-niversiry of California and honoring James hl. Gerstley, First Chairman of the \Vestern Jewish History Center

Sunday, November 13, 1777

Sheri th Israel Temple House 2266 California Street San Francisco

Speaker Professor Arthur A. Goren Hebrew Lniversiry, Jerusalem Judah L. hfagnes: Son of the West

S I?. 30 per person So-host C~xktnils

Appendix E

Presentation to +James M. Gerstley k, by Frank H. Sloss

Western Jewish History Center November 7,1980 My pan in this progran is to make a pres- entation to Jim Gentley. I shdnot, how- ever, attempt a formal tribute to hun;that has already been done at a former meeting of this organization by my colleague and partner Louis Heilbron, a speaker with more eloquence and wit than Ican muster. I admit that I have tried to compete with Louis on occasion, but never successfdy. I do not intend, then, to catalogueJim's many accomplishments and activities. I wdl mention some of them, but only to cast light on the qualities of the man him- self. In the first place,Jim is my second cousin once removed; obviously, then, he was well born. In the second place, his wife is my first cousin once removed; equally obviously, he married well. While still a young man, he changed his residence fiom England to Cahfornia; here is proof of goodjudgment. More recently he moved again, this time &.om Southern to North- em California, proving that this good who respects and treasures the best tradi- judgment continued to improve as it ma- tions of the communities, both Jewish and tured. As to his business career, I shall say general, from which he sprang. In addi- only that there is a persistent legend that tion, I must tell you that Jim and Liz once with his own hands he used to drive teams rescued a lost dog that is now the most im- of twenty mules out of Death Valley, but portant, or at least the most pampered, personally I do not believe it. member of my own household. A kindly Let us now look at some of the organ- man as well. izations that Jim has served as a trustee, Although it has been spoken of earlier, director, or officer. Take Pomona College, I cannot omit mention of his service as the the Friends of the Bancrofi Library, and first chairman of the Advisory Board of the Asian Art Foundation; that is to say: this History Center. It was Jim who set the higher education, books, and art-the Center on the path that has led to its pres- marks of a man of cultivation. To all of ent position of scholastic distinction and these causes and many more he has de- chronic insolvency. voted his exceptional talents as a fund- The book that I am about to present is raiser. Now as you all know, a man cannot this Center's newest publication-a bib successfully raise money on a large scale liography of the Jews of Los Angeles. The without himself participating with the predecessor of that publication, a bibli- same open-handedness that he is askmg of ography oftheJews of San Francisco, bore others. The mark, then, of a generous man. on its fly-leaf the words, "In honor of Consider the Heritage Foundation, as well Daniel E. Koshland." This one says, "In as this History Center-the mark ofa man honor ofJames M. Gerstley." In each case, the choice of the man to be so honored was unanimous. In each case, there was discus- sion of whether anythg further should appear with the name-some words of tribute, some identification, some list of achievements. Both times it was decided, wisely I think, to omit any additional verbiage. Surely today, in this commun- ity, there will be few readers who do not already know who Daniel E. Koshland was and who James M. Gentley is, and what their names signify. Of course we realizethat this will not always be true!, for these volumes will remain tools of schol- arship for funue generations to whom the names may not be fidar. But the simple inscription says all that needs to 'be said: that this was a man whose contemporaries deemed him worthy to be so honored. Let that much be remembered. . Jim, on behalf'of your contemporaries, and in token of the honor in which they . .ou, I present this volume. Appendix F

WESTERN STATES JEWISH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

BOMYEARS: Some RecoUections 1933-1961. by James M. Centley (Los Angeles, privately published, 1979). Introduction, illustrations, index, 7" x 10". 93 pp.

This book is subtitled "The Story of The public knows of the borax Pacific Coast Borax Company and firm because of its famed productc. United States Borax & Chemical Cor- 20 Mule Team Borw and 20 Mule por;~tion," and is an example of in- Team soap chips, and the "Death dustrial history at its best. The author, Valley Days" radio programs which James M. Cerstley, is a great grand- advertised them. Pacific Coast Borax son of the famed Lewis Cerstle of also operated the Fumace Creek Inn, San Francisco, one of those men who in Death Valley. "Death Valley Days" built the American West and who shifted from radio to television in helped develop Alaska. 1941. The author's father. James Cerstley, On his retirement in 1961 the was one of a number of British inves- author was named vice chairman of tors who Lec;c~~~eirivolvcd in 1896 the board of United States Borax 6r when the American head of the borxx Chemical Corporation. He has been fim~came to England to seek new involved in many civic and cultural outlets for his ore. The company then activities, one of which is the ad- developed factories in France, Aus- visory committee of the Western Jew- tria. England and the U.S.A.. and ish History Center. Berkeley. Cerstley mines in Turkey, California and in lives in Woodside, south of San South America. Francisco. His book reminds us of the Jnllles hl. Cendey was born and important role which English inves- educated (Cnnlbridge) in England. ton have played in developing the but spent his business career in the mineral resources of the Western United States. He came to this coun- United States. See our July. 1979 is- try in 1930, and was naturalized in sue. pages 293ff. for another example. 1939. In 1946 he became the general This volume is an excellent exam- 1ll;ln;lper of Pacific Coast Borax, and ple of the art of bookmaking. It was in 1950 was elected president of the !designed and produced by Crant conlpnny. He also sewed as the presi- Dahlshom of Pasadena. The well- dent of the Death Valley Hotel Com- captioned photographs add a great pany. In 1958 Cerstley becanle the deal to the story, and many are of firit president of the United States historic interest, including some good Borax & Chemical Corporation. shots of the borax refinery at Wil-

, In Lor Angeles. Pncific Coast Borax mington, California. The book's end erected its headquarters building at papers feature the various letterheads 630 Shatto Phce. Centley sewed on of the company from the 1880s to the the board of the Farmen & hferchants 1970s. It is printed in a very limited National Bank of Lor Angeles. which edition and undoubtedly will only be had its beginnings with Isaias W. available in a few reference libraries. Hellman in 1868. =editor.

Appendix G 1 2 2 2 ' * Ti[E ;.L~LY sIjTC3Y CF VICLET TZZRACE AND 1TS.NEXGHBORS I' I Today we are celebratinq the 100th anniversary of Lewis GePstle8s purchase of what is now Gerstle Park in San Rafael. It seevs to be an appropriate occasion to recall the early history of this property and of the adjacent estates for~erlyowned by Louis Sloss and Louisa Greenewald. In 1391 Lewis Gerstle proposed to take his fa~ilyto the country for the sul-.er. Ye wrote to a hotel near Santa Cruz for rooms, but his a??lication was rejected on the ?round that the ~anagementdid not accept Jdwish zuests. Such eviderces of racial discrimination were rare in California at that time; this was the first rebuff of the kind that Lewi: had ever been subjected to, and he deterpined that it would be the last. ne promptly decided to zcquire a country place of his own, but befilre buying one he thgl~ghtit advisable to experinent with a re~tedhcuse. He found a s!lltz.zle dwe1lir.g on the southern fringe of San 3afael and s~entthe su-~erthere with Xannah and all of his children except Sophie, who was alrezdl: ~iarried2nd living in Iiew York. It was not altogether a happy surner, for his daughters Clara, Alice, and Zella an5 several servants were stricken by an ailxent which was diagnosed as diphtheria but was probably a severe streptococcus'thraa~ infection. This wzs zttriyuted to defective pluabing and in particular to the presence of a cesspool under the stable, at that tirne.located-close to the house. In spite of tnis drawback Lewis found the place ideal, and in August 1381 he bought it. It was to be the summer home of four generations of the Gerstle fzaily for fifty years. . The property ha,d once for~edpart of a large Mexican land grant, Rancho Punta de auentln, which pfobably extended as far as what is now called San Quentin Point and included the site of the present state penit- entiary, After the .cession of'Cakifornia':to the United States in 1848, this afea, or a portion of it, was acquired at some unknown date by the 3oss fa~ily,and a suSdi.vision of this was subsequently purchased by John Sirnms. Gn i:overnSer 19, 1864:part of the Ilirnms propertjz was bought for $144.20 by john C. 5. Short and Jacob Short, who also purchased additionzl acreage fro? Si-.ms on Jz~uary14, 1865 for $523.50. The two parcels included the lot afterwards acquired by Lewis Gerstle, but the exact boundaries of this lznd, defined by such vague lznd~arksas conspicu~us trees and c::ricl~sly shzpea stones, can no longer be identified. The 3horts, who were dealers in rezl estate, laid out the first street lines in this section of the town, knowr as Short's Addition, a~d e-~loyed surveyors to delinit the pfoperties nore precisely. On Kay 16, 1870 the Shorts sold to james i-iunter for $2000 a strip ~eas?~ring5CO feet in a north-stiuth direction with an east-west frontage of 200 feet along the sol~thside of Szn Zafael Avenue; and on Auqust 3, 1870 they sold a strip of the saTe aiaensions zdjoining 2nd .just west of the Hunter lot, for the same price, to Alexander Suthrie, a member of the Eritish firm of Salfour, futhrie & Co., L.td., importers, exporters, steanship agents, and insurance ?rakers in San 7rancisco. On Januzry 27, 1873 Guthrie bou.; liunter's property for $2200, thus acquiring for $4200 land ~easuring400 by 500 feet or about 4.6 acres. Guthrie corstructed a hcuse and stable, which so incroased the value of the property that when he sold it to Asa C. !;ichols on April 4, 1377 he obtained $18,000 for it. It was tnis Dro .erty that Lewis C-erstl? pirchased fro? TJichols on August 11, 1381 fcP~15,CCO. The name of Violet Terrace had been given to the place by either Gethrie or Nichols, ar.d Lewis saw no reason to change it; bet he changed aiTosteverything else. After that sumer of 1581 a nunber of inprove- nents were xadea the pluxbing was ~odernized,the offending cesspool filled in, the stable torn down and replaced Sy a greenhouse, a new stable erected at the bottsm of the nil1 near San Safael Avenue, and a separate. house for the servants, containing a laundry and storerooms as well as seven or eight snall bedroons, bl~iltacross the yard south of the ~ain house. This yain house, karely large enough to accomodate the fa~.ily, contai~edon the grguna flzor a living roo?, dining rooT, kitchen, pantry, servznts' dining rcoT, prches on tFLe front and one side, a s~allden next to the dinin? roo?, 2nd two very s-all single bedrooms; on the .jpper floor four tedroo~s,a lizen room, and at first oniy one bath. Consiaerir the standards of architectur?-1 t~steprevziling in the 1570's the hguse was not without charn. Y5 fitted srzsly into t3e hillside, and its irre~ularplzn ard low-?itche.5 cables bleneed har~oniouslywith the lard- scape, especially after -ost of .the exterior was covered by masses of ell-kip? roses. When Clara ar.d Eertha ~arrieda~d started to produce fa~iliesthe capacity of the hcuse 'zec~-.~ealt~sether inaaeq~~ate, and about 1990 Lewis built a second dwelling on his property. This edifice, always called the Cottage thollah it was a.s lsrqe zs, nzd looked -1lch laraer than, the older resldence,.contained cnly Sedrooas, 2s the occupants ate all their ~eals , ix the other house. i..eny yezrs. . lzter a dining roon and kitchen were a5ded to the Cottage. .-~rll::e the quair-tly erch this yew house on top of a hill, where it was reached by forty-two steps disn0sc.d in short fli~hts sexrated 'cy ceTeEt ra-ps. The ,..zck house, Suilt cf wood sta.ir.ea Src7,vn (a'terwzrds shi..r.zlea) and sur-~o~lnteahv a ,c2-?'r,re1 roof, had its owr. ;if,cher 2nd cininr ~orch. - - Cn >.pril 17, 1W5, zf+er Lewis 2erstle's 5czth, c.a-r.ah gurchzsec 23 L-sha?ed lot ad.ioi~ir,gthe originzl ?rgperty or.- thz ;t:est, wlth a ~axi-u~ dc~thof 500 feet znS 2C0 feet of frsnt2.s~sri Lap. 7.zfeel Avenue, extencir,~' the corner of Clark Strse;. .-L,he ~'3~lewzs shlftec ~ ~ the~ ~ewt olot, and dlrrir.~t?.e winter of IPCS-I~C~the Mack house was 13vei from, its hilltop, tur2ec r:irety "egrses so ths: the griginzl zgrtn frolt now facei east, and slo~,vl:r rolled d8wn the els~eta +',.... e site fcr-er!v occs;.nied 'cy the stzble. .T~eq ..-.ovi-~-..- of +:?is l?._rze:?.cuze wzs 2 difficult fz?.t, 2s the hillside was s stee? thr,: for a tiye cllrir.z the trarsit 0r.e erc. zf the h6:se res+ed 9r. tr. ;round while tIC-e ?:her wzs rzisee on s2Llts 35 feet high. . . Fro- tir.;e to ti-P v~r'~2~~st?l~~ldil?.~ of ~iror --ortance were erected: c:?lc1rer? coops, doveco:es , a l3f+ice-, s.;-L-erhouse/G?aznir.- one 3f t:r.e - r~voled ynti-s, and a l~~rge?.?ly,onai ~e~tlikestr-.ict:jre kr.owr! 2s tne Favilior., with . . 2 .t~node: fl?or, -yre-:~c?l rs?f, 1c5 ozer. si?&esscree-ed with wire -esh 2s a ?rotec tic? az?-iyst tke -..;s-,.-~,Ltces t;:zt 3u.r zed, s..var-ed, and kit curl?.^ the Lorrie : Mr. Gerstley had a letter from his uncle. He left out a section on page 3 between the paragraph ending "corner of the lot of the San Rafael Avenue side" and the paragraph beginning "On March 5, 1883 Louis Sloss purchased . . . .I) Please insert the following: On January 16, 1911 a private corporation, the Gerstle Company, was organized to handle investments by Eouis Gerstlelswidow to set aside an appropriate C~i;'r"fraction of her income for her own use, and to distribute the surplus income among her children. To this company Hannah deeded Violet Ter,race without compensation on May 15, 1916. The change of owner- ship was merely technical, for she continued to spend her summers there with some of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the rest of her life. But when she died in 1930 no member of the family wanted to live on or maintain the estate. By that time motor cars and improved roads had made summer resorts on the Peninsula much more accessible and desirable than Marin County with its complicated system of ferry boats and trains, and the Golden Gate Bridge, which was to shorten the traveling time between San Rafael and San Francisco, eliminate both trains and ferries, revive the popularity of Xarin County and greatly increase property values, was still some years in the future. Accordingly, by unanimous consent of the heirs, the entire property was offered as a gift to the City of San Rafael on October 16, 1930 for use as a public park to be called Gerstle Memorial Park. The offer was accepted on November 5, and on December 31, 1930 the deed was signed. One after another the old-fashioned buildings were demolished. In 1946 Alice and Jacob Levison marked their golden wedding anniversary by donating a fully equiped children's playground to the park. suTmer months *~ntil,~uch later, systemtic draining and oiling of marshy areas in the vicinity al-ost exter-inated the pests. Two fa~ilywedding: t30!< pl~cein the F-vilionr that of Alice Serstle to Jacob Bertha Levisor op july 29, 1396, and tb.at of Eella G~rstleto Korti~erFleishhacker on Ccto7cer 12, 1904. The Pavilion was situated in a clearing in the redwood :rove, which has charged very little in the past hundred years. The grove crigirally cont?ir-ed half a dozen huge sequoias ;vith trunks six to Pizht feet in dla-eter, *cut these h~d5ee~. crit dcwn lonz before Lewis Serstle 2cq7~ired+he r\roycrty, and. only their shaqyy stu-.ps remair-, sca'ter2d s-..:?~ t% as-sller ?.EC younger trees. South of the redwood zrc ,&as q. ten~is ":urt, still in l;.se, ar?d k.eyo~dthat an orchzrd extepfed ur tb.e hill to t?.e propert:q line. Another orchard occupied the northezst corcer of the lot or- the :an 3zfael .4ve~.ue sice. .. _.--- -... " / -. /, Crz !.arc:". 5, 1'83 Lo:.~is -loss purchased for S65CO fronl Ansorz P. .- r;talir.~ the l-ind ?.i!3i:n.ir.z 7b.e Gerstle property on the east, ~e2surir.g 231 feet OR ar, ?,?fsel ~ve.?.;e ky 500 feet north to south. On this Lo~;is and Sarah 3-~ilta larze rr:5 u::ly .::st co--.fortable wooden house and a stayEle botn'paihted zr2.y.. ALGL~1560 their son Leon, who h2d -..arried Zertha 3reer.ewald1 erecte? 2.r?.et;kLcr hzuse, ar. attrzctive one-storey shi?gled str1:ct?lre1 or: t?.e ;;loss estz2e. Across Srove 3treet, a ciezd-end lane that ran up the hill fro- San 3zfzel .,vsn7~ea:? for--ec the ezatern Sur-dary of the 5loss property, z yicca 2f 12.r.d -ees3irir< ?LC7 5y 423 feet, rot fro~tingc?n the Avenue, . - was -3qught fro- ,-.otzlin? cr J2r1.:a.r:r 12, 1391 3y Louisa Zreenewald, widow of :i-or! .;rsere;::a!.!i :vko ?.ad 3een a pzrtr-er i.n the Alaska Cor?~.ercial S o-?a~-;r. -zq.:.rs~.7 . 1zl;:lt. a house for herself, her un~.arriedson Citto, her 7 . . dzug'r.ter zxle -r:?n ::i?.s -a.rr~-ecto Lewis Zerstle's nephew A~J~:Ls~ F;eil'?ron~.er, ar-d her y.mcrer 2zu2hter *lice. After Alice's -?arrizge to . .. Lo~~iz~r~er.k.-7.~lm (la*?? c:nl?.r.:e< to Gree~e)i~ 19c9, the couple ~ovedirto a s-.~.11white cotta..?~.17~st below +h.le 2reer.e:uald house, fronting OP Srove -2treet.

...... o fer.ce 3r :rleC;,.reor js~rierof z'_r.y <:rid ciiviteri the Gerstle 2.nd Sloss properties, and. ir&deed-. ~o'cody ICPPW or cared nrecisely svhere the line of de-zrcatio~.ran. Ll.e;r.?ers cf tl?e two fc?.-.ilies wnaered freely frc- c-e :..arresslon u?on t?.e ierstle z,?r?dchildrer? was the fro2t door contziri7~9ar.els of colored

,.---- - . . L;L;'L L'L2 ...r;.C?.: San ?..afa.el, 251 -i.:~::i~st, 1991 226

8 August 1981

Cear Jimr When I typed the HISTGAY GF VIGLZT T"c3,SACZ, etc. which' I ailed to you yesterday, I inadvertently left out one whole paragraph. Cn p. 3, between the pzragrzph ending "corner of the lot on the 323 3afaei Avenue side" and the ?aragraph beginning "On Idarch 5, 1383 Lo-;is Sloss purchased", please insert the following8

Cn Jar-uary 16, 1911 a private corporation, the Gerstle Co-zary, was ~r~anizedto hzndle invest~.entsfor Lewis Gerstle's widow, to set aside an approcrlaSe fraction of her lncoae for her own use, and to distribute the sur?1zs ir.co-e aTor,g her children., To this co-rpar,y Xannah deeded Violet Terrace without corr.pensation on ;i!ay 15, 1916. The change of owpership was yerely technical, for Sannah continued to s?end her suT;?ers there with so-e of her children, grandchildren, and great- ~randchildrenfor the rest of her life. But when she died in 1030 no ne~berof the family xantea to live on or ~aintainthe estate. Ey that tine ~otorcars and i~provedroads had ~aaesurvcier resorts on the Peninsula ~uchyore accessible and desirable than Marin County with its corplicatea syste~of ferryboats and trains, and the Golden Gate Bridge which was to shorten the traveling tine between San Rafael and San Fyan- cisco, eli~inate5o:h trains and ferries, revive the popularity of Karin County, and greatly increase property valxes was still soae years in the future. Accordingly, by unani~ousconsent of the heirs; the entire property was offered as a gift to the city of San Xafael on October 15, 1930 for use as a aublic park to be called the Gerstle Nemorial Park. The offer was accepted on !;ove.nber 5, and on Dece~ber31, 1330 the ~eed was sig~.ed. Cze after anotkier the old-fashioned buildings were de~ol- ished. In 1946 -;lice and Jacob Levison ~arkedtheir golden weddi-g anniversary 'sy do2atFng a fully equi9~edchildren's playground to the pzr

Appendix H

January 10, 1989

WHEREAS: San Francisco is proud to RECOGNIZE and HONOR the outstanding accomplishments and dedicated public service which JAMES M. GERSTLEY has provided to the people of San Francisco and the Bay Area as a member of the Asian Art Commission since its inception in 1969, and

WBERgAS: JAMES M. GERSTLEY played a key role in civic efforts to persuade Avery Brundage to donate his superb collection of Asian art objects to the City of San Francisco, and

WHEREAS: JAMES M. GERSTLEY has resigned as Chairman of the Asian Art Museum Foundation after many years of distinguished service during which he worked tirelessly and successfully to advance the broad causes of the Asian Art Museum and the Foundation, earning the respect and admiration of his colleagues, now,

-RE, BB IT RBSOLVED TEAT I, Art Agnos, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, do hereby on behalf of the people of San Francisco, RECOGNIZE and COMMEND JAMES M. GERSTLEY for his decades of dedicated service as a leader in the field of the arts, and proclaim January 10, 1989 as

JAMES M. GERSTLEY DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO

Appendix I Business Leader James M. Gerstlay James M. Gerstley retired to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960's,alter 28 years with Pacific Coast Borax Company and its successor United States Borax and Chemical Corporalion. In 1969, respondingto the call of his good friend Mayor Joe Alioto, Mr. Gerstley, along with George F. Jewett, Jr., was instrumental in raising $3. million to secure the Avery Brundage Collectionof Asian Art for San Francisco. For 20 years Jim Gerstley has been actively associated with the Asian Art Museum ", contributing his considerable business skills, many hours each week, and his personal resources to raise and manage funds for the Museum. He served as Chairman of the Asian Art Commission and as Chairmanof the Asian Art Foundation. During those 20 years, he also found time to serve as a director for the Foundationfor San Francisco's Architectural Heritage, and for the Friends of the Bancroft Library. In addition, he helped raise funds to launch the history center of the Judas L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Several years ago, Mr. Gerstley initiatedan endowment fund drive to supplement the funds that the Museum receives from the City. He helped prepare the first application for a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge grant and, when it was awarded, helped raise the matchingfunds. 'The Museum's relatively young endowment fund is now approaching $5 million. The community which benefits from the presenceof a lively and successful Asian Art Museum expresses its appreciation for Jim Gerstley's contributions by honoring him as a Business Leader in the arts. "The collections of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco represent the greatest effort in the Westernworld to collect, display,and study the fine arts of the more than fofty countries of Asia. Home of the Avery Brundage Collection for nearly a quarter of a centug the Museum is the largest outsideAsia devoted exclusively to Asian art. TheAsian Art Museum's lectures, demonstrations,school tours, film and concert series, free docent tours of the galleries, and other civic activitiesprovide increasingpublic awareness of the Museum's resources as an impotfant culturalbridge beMn the East and the West.

Sixth Annual San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Business Arts Awards Luncheon 'Ibesdav, March 21, 1989 Le Meridien

LTSIi'EliSITY OF CALIFORSIA, 13El\KElXY . , .., Appendix J

"EI~KELEI.. D.+I.IS In\'ISE . LOS AsCELES . IIIVEIISIDE ' SAX DIECO . SAX FIIASCISCO SA>T;\ DAlIUAIlA ' SAXTA CllL7

November 1, 1989

Mr. James M. Gerstley 111 Almendral Avenue Atherton, CA 94025

Dear Jiin :

Your memoir came to Bancroft in association with its collection of documenting such materials and that gave me the opportunity to read it.

It is really delightful. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I was flattered to be remembered on our camping trip when I did indeed bone up my at in. I remember a lot of other things, ranging from the wedding you and Liz had to the Greek islands trip under Maggie's handling, but whether I remember or not I find it all fascinating. . It is a fine addition.

You're rather modest about the Western Jewish Historical Center of the Magnes Museum, the Friends of The Bancroft Library, the Trusteeship of Pomona College, and your ongoing major assistance to the Asian Art Museum. Perhaps you will add a word on some of these. #?aan.~4 We are delighted to have Gerstlefs book on Lewis and m r Gerstle as well as your own memoir of Borax Years and would love it if an extra still survives on the memoir of your father.

Once again, my congratulations on a fine addition and my warm good wishes to you (and to Liz),

Sincerely,

James D. Hart Director

JDH:sec

Mary Gower Albright is retired vice-president of Appendix K personnel for CBS. Her great-uncle, Frank Jenifer; her father, Harry Gower; her father-in-law, Horace Albright; and her husband, Robert Albright, were all employees of Pacific Coast Borax or U.S. Borax. * [When James M. Gerstley first visited Death Valley, he was twelve years old.]

INDEX--JamesM. Gerstley

Alaska Commercial Company, 45 Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Los Albright, Horace, 13, 63, 73, 99, Angeles, 115 122 Center of Asian Art and Culture, Alioto, Joseph, 33-36, 41, 126 34, 38, 39 American Cyanamid Company, 82 Chandler, Dorothy, 114 American potash and Chemical Chase Manhattan Bank, 76-77 Corporation., 54, 69-71, 80-83 Chemical Fund, 93 Anderson, Frank, 57 Chinese archaeological exhibition, Asian Art Commission, 33-39, 126 San Francisco, 40 Asian Art Museum, 33-44 Clitheroe, Lord [Ralph Assheton], Atherton, California, Library, 44 94, 105 atomic bomb test, White Sands, New Colman, Jesse, 43 Mexico, 73 Connell, George, 73 Corkill, Fred, 14, 50, 75, 93, 110 Baker, R. C., 13, 56-57, 68-69, 74, Corning Glass Company, 75, 120-121 83, 84, 87-88, 91, 101 Baruch Company, 97 D'Argence, Ivon, 38, 39 Bergson, Maria, 97 Death Valley, 13, 14, 50, 62-65, Bissinger, Marjorie Walter Seller, 80, 81, 98, 99, 122 35-36 Democratic national convention of Blumenberg Mine, 71, 83, 84 1980, 45 borax and borates depletion tax allowance, 77-79 as fertilizer, 82 Deutsche Borax Vereinegung, 67, 84, as food preservative, 56 85 as fuel, 76, 78, 102-104 Diffley, Walter, 110 as weed killer, 74 in ceramics, 120-121 Eberstadt, Ferdinand, 78, 93, 95, sales, 54, 56, 66, 74-75, 82, 103, 104, 123 85, 106 Borax Consolidated Limited, 14, 16, Feinstein, Dianne, 41 25, 49-58, 78-80, 85-86, 105-106 Fleishhacker family, 16-21, 31, 48 Borax Workers Union, AFL, 67 Fleishhacker, Mortimer, Jr., 13, Boraxo, 65-66 16, 17, 21 Brandt, Edward, 32 Fleishhacker, Mortimer, Sr., 10, Bransten, Charles, 19-22, 61 16, 19, 21, 22, 59 Bransten, Clara [Mrs. John Follis, Gwin, 34 Dinkelspiel], 44 Foster, Harold, 4, 12 Bransten, Edith, 3, 19 Foundation for San Francisco's Bransten family, 19-21, 31-33, 61 Architectural Heritage, 29-30 Bransten, Richard, 19-20, 61, 62 Friends of The Bancroft Library, 43 Brundage, Avery, 33-34, 37-41 Fromer, Seymour, 42 Button, Bill, 3 fund raising, 34-37, 43-44, 113-115 Furnace Creek Inn, Death Valley, Castile, Rand, 38 13-14, 63, 98-100, 122 Gensler family, 48 Jewish community, 3-4, 19-22 Gerstle, Bella [Mrs. Mortimer Fleishhacker, Sr.], 16-19, 47 kernite, 80-81 Gerstle, Lewis, 15, 28, 45, 56 Korean art exhibition, San Gerstley, Adele Hannah Mack Francisco, 39, 40 (mother), 1-5, 10-13, 25, 28, 45 -47 Lasky, Moses, 70, 74 Gerstley, Edith (sister), 3 Lazard Freres, 78, 92, 93, 103, 106 Gerstley, Elizabeth Lilienthal Lee Higginson, 76, 93, 106 (wife), vii-viii, 15, 22, 23, Lesser, Allan, 52, 70, 107, 118 27-29, 31, 33, 48, 111 Lesser, Fererico, 57-58, 73 Gerstley, James (father), 1-6, Lesser, Fred, 14, 51, 57-58, 73-76, 10-13, 17, 24, 25, 28, 46, 56, 89, 96, 105, 110, 118 57, 58, 72, 73, 118 Levison family, 17-21, 31, 47 Gerstley, James Mack Levison, Jacob, 17, 18 career in the borax and potash Lilienthal, Alice, 23, 30, 31, 32 industry, 49-110, 119-124 Lilienthal, Elizabeth. See community activities in the Bay Gerstley, Elizabeth Lilienthal Area, 29-45, 126-127 Lilienthal family, 23, 30-32 community activities in Southern Lilienthal, Samuel, 23, 30, 31, 32 California, 112-117 early years and family, 1-27, Mack, Dick [Adolph], 11, 12, 45, 59 45-48 Mack, Gerstle, 9, 47, 48 Gerstley, Margaret (sister), 2, 3, Mack, Harry, 26, 60 Magnes Museum [Judah L . ] , 42 gerstleyite, 107, 108 Magnin, Cyril, 34, 35 Gower, Harry, 13, 50 Mansfield, Dick, 105 Great Western Electrochemical Martin family (architects), 96 Company, 10, 15, 52, 58-60 McCloy, John J., 77 Grimm, Peter, 110 McKenney, Ruth, 19, 20, 61 Gruhn, Adrian, 35 Meyer, Andre, 103-105, 123 Gump, Richard B., 36, 37 Morton, Coleman, 79

Haas, Evelyn, 35, 36 National Endowment for the Arts, 40 Haas family, 23, 30 Haas-Lilienthal House, 24, 29, 30 O'Brien, Patrick, 67, 88-91, 109, Harrison, Maurice, 70, 73, 122 110 Hart, James, D., 42 Olin-Mathieson Company, 102-104 Harvey, Fred, 99, 100 Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company, 75 Hawley, Alfred, 113 Heller, Eleanor, 18 Pacific Coast Borax Company, 25, Here's Eneland, 61 49-50, 60, 64-78, 87-88 Hersey, Lynn, 75, 90 antitrust suit, 70-72, 84 Hildebrand, George, 53 labor relations, 67, 108-109 Parker, David, 93, 101, 110 Jacobs, Gordon, 4, 6 Pearson, Norman, 77 Jenifer, Frank, 60, 62, 64, 72-73, Pomona College, 35, 112-116 87-102, 122 Potter School, the, 11-13, 49 Jewett, Fritz, 34-35, 39, 126, 127 Preservitas, 56 Prohibition, 20-21 U.S. Potash Company, 16-17, 64, 78, 81-82, 89, 94-95, 123 Randolph, Carl, 93, 119 Rasor, Clarence, 80-83 Western Borax Company, 71, 83 Reagan, Ronald, 124 Western Jewish History Center, 42, Redwood's and Sons, 56 43 Riemer, Hugo, 93-95, 123 Winters, Frank, Sr., 74 Rio Tinto Zinc, 107 World War I, 5, 56 Rockefeller, David, 77 World War 11, 24, 66 Rockefeller interests, 78, 105, 106 Russell, Madeleine Haas, 23, 30 Zabriskie, Chris, 13, 60

Santa Fe Railroad private car, 101- 102 Searles Lake, 54-56, 80-83, 121 Skeen, Ransom, 77 Sloss, Eleanor Fleishhacker, 17, 48 Sloss, Frank, 42 Smith, "Borax" Francis Marion, 53, 54, 56-57, 125 Smith, Charlotte [Mrs. Adolph Mack], 11, 12 Snowden-McSweeney, 81, 82 Solvay Process Company. 56, 93 Southwestern Engineering Company, 89, 90 Stanford [University] Committee for Art, 43 Stauffer Chemical Company, 121, 122 Steel, Dick, 101, 110 Stern, Marjorie, 33 Suckow, John, 80, 83, 84

Taylor, Donald, 119, 120 Temperley, Harold, 8, 9 tincal, 81 T-, T-, 53, 80, 83, 125 Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, 13, 68, 88, 101, 102 Travis, Norman J., ix-x, 53, 80, 93, 95 Twentv Mule Team magazine, 66, 124 Twenty Mule Team soap, 64

U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation, 28-29, 78-79, 87-107, 110 open-pit mining, 75-76 research department, 69, 118- 121

Ruth Teiser

Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever since. Stanford University, B.A., M.A. in English; further graduate work in Western history. Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since 1943, writing on local history and business and social life of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the San Francisco chronicle, 1943-1974. Co-author of Winemaking in California, a history, 1982. An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1965.

Eleanor Herz Swent

Born in Lead, South Dakota, where her father became chief metallurgist for the Homestake Mining Company. Her mother was a high school geology teacher before marriage .

Attended schools in Lead, South Dakota. Dana Hall School, and Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massa- chusetts. Phi Beta Kappa. M.A. in English, University of Denver. Assistant to the President, Elmira College, New York. Married to Langan Waterman Swent, mining engineer.

Since marriage has lived in Tayoltita, Durango, Mexico; Lead, South Dakota; Grants, New Mexico; Piedmont, California.

Teacher of English as a Second Language to adults in the Oakland, California public schools. Author of an independent oral history project, Newcomers to the East Bay, interviews with Asian refugees and immigrants. Oral historian for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project.

Interviewer, Regional Oral History Office since 1985, specializing in mining history.