Alumni Recall When UCLA Was in the Middle of Nowhere

Some things never change, old-timers discovered Thursday when they returned to UCLA to help mark the school’s 75th anniversary in Westwood: Parking on campus can be a mess.

“There was mud everywhere back then when it rained,” recalled 91-year-old Sherman Grancell of Beverly Hills. “There was plenty of room to park. But it was muddy.”

Grancell was a 16-year-old freshman on Oct. 25, 1926, when he borrowed his father’s Model T Ford, crammed three classmates from the University of California’s “Southern Branch” campus inside and rumbled to the western edge of Los Angeles to watch dedication ceremonies for the new school.

A few hundred people gathered that day around a boulder about the size of Grancell’s flivver to hear to dignitaries pledge they were going to turn the overgrown, ravine-laced site into a world-class university.

Grancell was among a crowd of more than 600 who assembled Thursday near what is now called “Founders’ Rock” to attest that UCLA’s creators kept their promise (even if that success has brought such a parking crunch that visitors’ cars had to be stack parked Thursday).

“All there was here then were gullies and fields of brush. There were no houses or stores or anything. We were way out here,” Grancell said.

Grancell is president of the alumni group Pioneer Bruins, all of whom attended UCLA before it moved from its original campus on North Vermont Avenue, where Los Angeles City College is now located.

By the time UCLA’s 5,500 students settled into the Westwood campus in 1929, workers had built Royce Hall and three other buildings. Alumnus Richard Ibanez, in fact, helped build the hall.

“I got a summer job before we opened carrying cement. One day I was working on the west tower and they let me lay a few bricks,” said Ibanez, also 91, of Bunker Hill.

Today’s campus, crowded with 291 classroom buildings and parking structures scattered over its landscaped 419-acre campus, is far different from when he graduated in 1932, he said.

“When it rained we had to wear boots because it was so muddy. When it was dry, the wind blew and the dust would settle on everything.”

Goldie Jacobson Moss, a 97-year-old Westwood resident who graduated in 1929, remembers “there was nothing here. The surrounding area was empty, there were no houses, no place to live.”

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale acknowledged that university founders took a chance when they picked the isolated site.

But the city grew around the campus just as fast as the school itself grew. There are 36,890 students today.