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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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This was, like, April of that year and we were supposed to open in the fall and we didn't have a home. We couldn't even tell the first thirty-five fellows where they were going to be. So Tyler was having his difficulties and the board just wasn't able to come up with a location.

We met in Palo Alto or at Stanford, as I recall, on a Sunday morning to talk about the situation -- this is my board committee, not the full board -- because we wanted to look at what Stanford had to offer. When Stanford was organized, the family, the Leland Stanford estate, I think, gave a lot of acreage and on some of the acreage there were some beautiful old homes. And this was high on -- one of the clusters was high on a hill outside of Palo Alto, but you could look from -- it was a beautiful sight -- you could see the bell tower at Berkeley from there, and you could look right down on the Stanford campus. It was a dream location. The houses were really museum pieces from the 1890s and the turn of the century. And we looked at them and while they were relics of a past era, and could have been rehabilitated, they just didn't lend themselves to what we needed. Or at least it wasn't my dream of what I wanted the Center to be. And I think I asked Clark Kerr if he could bring his dean of architecture, a man I only knew by reputation, who had been at MIT, down to sit with us and look at the properties and advise us about the opportunities we had to alter them. Wurster was his name -- W.U.R.S.T.E.R -- Dean [William W.] Wurster said that he thought they could be changed. And either he or I raised the question about using the site and removing the houses. Huddleson and Sears thought this would require, obviously, some consultation with Stanford, and took that on. In the meantime, we adjourned the meeting from where we were at Palo Alto, I believe, to Clark Kerr's residence in Berkeley, and talked more with Wurster about what the opportunity afforded us, and got into deeper discussions about building. And I raised the question as to whether we had enough time to build something that would be adequate. Wurster said that if we made the decision immediately, he thought he could do it.





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