Berkeley, a Look Back: Students show up for Cal’s 1923 summer session

A century ago, on June 23, 1923, students were arriving in town for UC Berkeley’s summer session. They included “thousands of high and grammar school teachers, business and professional men and woman, recent high school graduates and university students,” all taking summer classes or enrolled in special programs, the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported.

Some 6,000 students were expected, an increase over the 1922 summer session. The summer scholars included several hundred teachers from Southeastern states, as well as people attending a “demonstration school of physical training for children between the ages of 6 to 16, conducted by the department of physical education. … The element of competition will be introduced by dividing the children into tribes or clans each tribe competing against the other tribes in its own division.”

Many visitors were planning to stay for the convention of the National Education Association, which would convene at Berkeley in early July. Also, “five modern plays” were scheduled for presentation in Wheeler Auditorium during the summer, directed by Everett Glass. They were “all comedies — American, English, Irish, Russian.” In addition, “on July 7, the Chinese students of the university will present a modern Chinese play, ‘Rejuvenescence’ (sic), in Wheeler Auditorium.”

Presidential request: Berkeley’s incoming mayor, Frank Stringham, and his predecessor, Louis Bartlett, sent a joint telegram to President Harding on June 22, 1923, saying “The City of Berkeley extends a most cordial invitation to you to visit us and the East Bay cities on or about July 31.” The invitation was in response to news of Harding’s schedule for a late-July visit to San Francisco.

“The East Bay district was entirely omitted in the program of cities in which the president would visit while on his present tour. It is not known whether or not this was an oversight or mistake on the part of the ones who compiled the program,” the Gazette noted.

Having a president visit Berkeley was not a far-fetched idea. In the two decades before 1923, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson had all visited Berkeley and spoken on the UC campus.

Student dies: Foo Chow Gee, a “21-year-old Chinese senior at the university, was found lying at the bottom of the pool at the Berkeley YMCA late this afternoon,” the Gazette reported June 22, 1923. Another swimmer entering the pool discovered him, and the Fire Department was trying to resuscitate Gee, “but it was considered improbable they will be able to revive him.”

He was found unconscious with a cut on his head, and speculation was he dove into the pool and hit his head on the bottom. There was no mention of any lifeguard on duty. Gee lived at 2600 Etna, the residential Chinese Students Club.

The next day the paper reported he had died and gave further biographical details. Originally from Canton, he had recently arrived in Berkeley with two other Chinese students from Reed College in Oregon and had been planning to take summer classes, then enroll for his senior year in the fall’s regular university session.

Shooting: Residents west of Downtown Berkeley were alarmed June 22, 1923, when “several revolver shots” were heard along the 2400 block of McKinley Avenue. A police investigation revealed “there had been a party at a house on McKinley Avenue, and one of the guests contributed a noise number by firing six shots.”

“When the police arrived, the party was over. Guests were warned that there are better ways to have a good time than reviving the old days of the ‘unsafe and insane Fourth of July.’ ”

Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.