RICHARD DYER:  This interview is with Donald S. Brady, Tuolumne County’s representative to the Yosemite Junior College Board of Trustees.

TAPE SPLICE – CONT. FROM CC_hist_2_0

DYER:  What was the attitude of the Board of Trustees on establishing a separate campus at Columbia?

BRADY: I think the attitude of the Board of Trustees, once it was decided – and of course there were a great many things that went into whether we were going to have a campus up here or not – you just do not decide to establish a college without a great deal of thought, a great deal of preparation, the hiring of firms to have a feasibility study on just the site alone. There was a feasibility study done, a very through feasibility study done on the student population within the whole district and neighboring counties such as Calaveras and Mariposa which are what we would call free areas ??? not in any junior college district. But all of these things had to, going into this – was there enough of a population, could enough [students] be generated to create a campus – you don’t put something in unless it could be generated.

BRADY: The trustees as a whole, I think that throughout all the major votes that went on concerning this campus – there’s seven members on the board and I don’t think that on all major decisions regarding the beginning of this campus that I ever heard a negative vote on any from the trustees – on any important decision involving the beginning of this campus. It was not just myself. There were seven people involved. I happened to be the one that lives up here – the other six all live in the Valley. But it takes a majority to put anything in, and I think all major decisions were unanimous votes.

DYER:  What about the administrators? Did you sense any major opposition?

BRADY: No. I at least was not aware of any that I came in contact with. There – obviously I guess could have been, since I am the trustee up here and living somewhat in isolation, when I go to a board meeting there was no major opposition or even minor that came up in front of myself. Somebody else may have heard something from somebody down there at a dinner meeting or some get-together or something that I was not involved in, but there was no real opposition among any staff member that I knew of.

DYER:  Did you detect any in the local newspaper, the Democrat or in the Modesto Bee?

BRADY: No. No, I don’t remember any. Do you, Millie?

MRS. BRADY: No. They were really very fine.

BRADY: Everything was very good. I mean, I think we had gone about this as thoroughly as we could through all the discussion, throughout all the various studies that we had as I’d mentioned before, and it was an evolution, it was thought through quite thoroughly and a great deal of this of course hinged on the ten-year master plan or the override tax of ten years to build within the whole district, including our campus here.

DYER:  Acquiring land for a college is almost always a problem. Don, what do you remember – some of the factors that conditioned the Board’s decision in acquiring a site for Columbia Junior College?

BRADY: Well I think number one is that we had to keep – if we were going to have a college up here, is not to have the determination made that we wanted it in this area because it’s my supervisorial district or we wanted it in this area because of my businesses. But what was the best school site we could get as reasonable as possible with the things that are basically needed or at least close by, such as the water and electricity, the various things that are necessary, roads, county roads. And there was - This particular site probably had the lead in the whole thing, or in the whole aspect of where to locate because the district already had fifty-four acres of Bureau of Land Management property which was acquired when the – particularly I think under Stan ??? and the Science Department at Modesto Junior College wanted an outdoor facility. And they had acquired this land – fifty-four acres, which was - only twenty acres of private land separated it from this other large piece of property.

DYER:  Now this is what brought out the idea of a satellite campus.

BRADY: Yes.

DYER:  The initial stages.

BRADY: M-hrmm. This is what it was initially, and it was even thought at one time too that we might be able to have the small campus, satellite campus on this 54 acres. Nothing has ever been done on this 54 acres, though, in our plans now. Eventually there will be a road down through it and then that will open it up to building, et cetera. But – So this was the beginning. Upon – I guess right at the beginning when we – I used to crawl through the property on my hands and knees through the very heavy growth of manzanita – having one time or another lost or gotten stuck with a U.S. Congressman in my car – and another time having gotten lost myself in the property with a reporter from the Turlock newspaper. It was very heavily brushed land, a lot of beautiful trees. The sugar pine I think are probably the most westerly and the lowest elevation sugar pines in the Sierra Nevada. On the edge of the lake I can remember the days when Millie had been out there with me, when right on the edge of the lake the snow plants were coming out in the spring. Unfortunately during the construction two snow plants we knew were there were obliterated. But it was a very wilderness area. The young people from Columbia used to go up there and swim through the swimming hole, even before Columbia had a swimming pool.

DYER:  I understand that one of the local residents maintained that they used to even ice-skate on the reservoir during a cold winter.

BRADY: It could well be. I had never heard that, Dave. It could well be some local fishermen used to go up there, because there were some bass and trout in the lake, but it was just a natural setting. We did look at other properties Bureau of Land Management had down in the Red Hills area, which is pretty forsaken and dry, barren, very few even oak trees down there. Lack of water, lack of everything. They do own property down there. There was another site we looked at about an equal distance over towards the Groveland area. But trying to find a piece of property that was within the area of major population, which would be the Sonora area, adjacent to let those students from Calaveras County come over if they wanted to come this way. This was just somewhat of a natural setting. Beautiful trees, both the oak and the pines and a few cedar. It was just probably the most beautiful area we could have picked in the county. Unless we got maybe clear above the snowline, where we would have had some very severe problems. The first action that the board ever took on this occurred back in February of 1965 in Board Action #40, which you can see was one of our first board actions after we had become a district. It was a report on the acquisition of this property in Tuolumne County or which ones of the areas we could arrive at. I had known about this area. Millie had, because we were surprisingly clear back in November of 1963, along with Bob and Jean Stall had four mining claims primarily for ornamental limestone, which we called the Shinbone #1, #2, #3 and #4. This encompassed all that area from the lake over to bordering the state park, Columbia State Park land. From the corner of the lake, which would encompass the art building and shooting out in that fan from that general direction down towards the Sawmill Flat road. So we had known and we had walked the property long before we ever thought of being a part of the junior district or junior college district. But we readily relinquished our claims, as did most of the people that had claims in there. There were two people involved that did not relinquish them. One of them, Mr. Davis who is now a resident of the campus had every legal right, he was very nice because he had legal claim under the Johnson Church Act to 7 acres of land which encompassed right where the majority of the campus is now, his cabin being nearly underneath or close to the faculty lounge at this time. And we worked an arrangement with him – very graciously he consented, we built him a small cabin over where he is at this time, near the tennis-court area and physical education facility, and he has a life tenancy on this cabin that he’s in now, and he relinquished his land to us. The other one was a typical squatter that came and built a little summer cabin, a weekend cabin right on the lake, about where, just roughly where the little cafeteria is now, or the food services area. And this was put up illegally, the Bureau of Land Management knew nothing about these people being in there, and when we first started thinking about the junior college here, the woman sold the claim on the quick-claim deed to somebody else from the Bay Area, they paid a thousand dollars down or a promissory note of a thousand dollars, and when the Bureau of Land Management finished with them, tried to make them prove that there was gold present and they were doing the improvements. They found that their cabin was not even on their claim. So their cabin wasn’t even on their own claim and when it came time to show where’s the gold that you’re theoretically mining, and their commercial mount as the law now says, they couldn’t find any gold and the Bureau of Land Management people came up. Their engineers or geologists tried to mine gold in the same spot and they didn’t come up with anything for a meter. So everybody, at least the squatters in this particular case, came out kind of on the losing end. The Bureau of Land Management cleaned the property off afterwards, then threw off. After the claims were cleaned off then they went back to Washington D.C. This did hold us up for a while because the – about six months, in fact, it must have to sit back there on every secretary’s desk several weeks before they acted on it so they could all prove they needed the job or the job is wanted for them, and finally Dr. Rhodes had to call Congressman ??? Johnson, our local Congressman back there and he pushed it through and then came out and gave us the deed at a small luncheon meeting at the Elks Club here in Sonora one time. But the overall – it was a beautiful site, and then we did acquire the Schoettgen property which was 20 acres at a later time, acquired that from the Schoettgen estate and then that connected the original 54 acres with the rest of the campus.

DYER:  Where is that located, Don?

BRADY: The Schoettgen property would be about due west of the campus proper that you are now. There was a 20-acre strip in there that had no access to the property except one old horse trail which I think on some of the very early maps is recorded as a deeded right-of-way for horses or mules going from the Springfield mine area up through part of the campus and down to Sawmill Flat. This was originally used when they had no water available up there to transport the ore down from the Springfield Mines where it was then washed. But that was the only way into this particular piece of property that the Schoettgens had and we acquired this piece from then, it made the original 54 acres and the 200 and some acres contiguous, or all within the same boundary.

MRS. BRADY: Don, I think Kurt Hammond’s name should be mentioned in this because I think you always felt as though, as a BLM man, he was quite helpful and I think history should have his name.

DYER:  Who was?

MRS. BRADY: Kurt Hammond.

BRADY: Yes. This was Kurt Hammond, I think one of the finest men that I have known. Probably did towards the acquiring an amount of work that the Bureau of Land Management had to clear this piece of property. A very fine gentleman. I heard that he has since moved on in the Bureau of Land Management, is no longer in Sacramento, his whereabouts I do not know. But he came up with some of his assistants, and alone, and we’d go over and over this property and I do know that probably as far as getting this piece cleaned off and turned over to us, he’s spent a great deal of time and effort so that we might get the total advantage for educational purposes out of this piece.

DYER:  Well, Millie, you were involved in a lot of this too, I suppose as a sympathetic housewife as well as a interested resident. What was your impression of the site?

MRS. BRADY: Oh, Dick, you know that’s the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world – that this is just, oh. Oh, it’s beautiful.

DYER:  Did you walk around with Don?

MRS. BRADY: Yes. We took many visitors out there too before there was anything other than pathways. Yeah, it’s lovely.

DYER:  With your boots and your wool shirt and inclement weather?

MRS. BRADY: Dust, in the summertime.

DYER:  Well, there must have been many additional problems in developing an new college. Did you fear any organized opposition from landowners in the area?

BRADY: No, I – to the best of my knowledge. Of course when we first planned this we did know that there was no doubt going to be opposition, as time went on, towards any higher education. Higher education in the Mother Lode was unknown. So we did know that there would be, and believe me, being a retail registrar, there has been and there still is. And whether I or anybody else is on the board, there always is going to be. Some people who will be objecting to one thing or another. This unfortunately maybe is human nature. I’ve had all kinds of criticism voiced about the college. When I was on the elementary board of trustees, I heard things voiced against the elementary school, and I guess if you’re a member of the board of supervisors or anywhere else you’re always gonna hear some objections. Initially on the landowners around – no. It was quite interesting. The price of land, the way that the value is all of a sudden increased – I guess if I had been a promoter and a speculator and everything, I would have grabbed. I first knew that we were going to build a college up there ahead of the majority of people in the county. If I’d grabbed a lot of the property I could have retired by now. But I didn’t and –

MRS. BRADY: You couldn’t have morally done it.

BRADY: Morally. I guess morally I couldn’t. Legally I could have. Morally I couldn’t. But the property values increased. The one road that we did put in, access road was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hobby, of Columbia. Their property also had been a part of the Bureau of Land Management and I think was one of the last recorded sales in the state of California of Bureau of Land Management property to private individuals. I think the land cost them around two and a half dollars an acre. We did have a considerable amount of problems there, and I think that the price that was paid was well in excess of the appraised value of the property. So I don’t feel that anybody was hurt. I think that they received a sufficient amount of money out of it, and the pieces sold after that that they had left bored us out, and they still have one small piece. I imagine when they see the sale of that piece it’ll further wear out. But they have received quite a bit of money for a piece of property that they paid two and a half dollars an acre for.

DYER:  Was there any support from the Board of Supervisors or various service clubs?

BRADY: No. We had initially no support from anybody. Board of Supervisors, nothing – in fact, at one time towards the beginning of the campus, when we decided we were going to put the campus in, we tried to find out if the area was zoned or if we could get it zoned so that any undesirable thing would not – such as a dump or a hog farm or something that was undesirable - be located there. There was no zoning at that time. There is still no zoning. The difference being. we’ve since acquired another site in Modesto called Modesto West Campus at this point, which we’re starting to develop. We acquired the property, and within a week the area around the campus was zoned to protect the campus site. Up here we’re still under a general agricultural zoning bill. Anytime anybody has wanted to put anything in around it, they have had the courtesy and have asked the planning commission if we had any objections, or the staff out there had any objections. I have never had any – as the trustee up here representing all of the county, I have never had a member of the Board of Trustees say they were in favor of it or opposed to it or kiss my… something.

MRS. BRADY: You mean Board of Supervisors.

BRADY: I mean Board – not the Board of Trustees but the Board of Supervisors. - say anything about the campus. I think we’ve had meetings out there, we’ve attempted at times to get members of the Board of Supervisors out there with no avail. Chamber of Commerce – I never heard anything there at the beginning, pro or con, nor did I hear anything from any other organization pro or con as far as the junior college was concerned. It was just an apathetic state that existed, and I think still exists in a great number of things involving Tuolumne County.

DYER:  Then would you say it’s really only at a later date that there was concern about the college becoming a haven for hippies?

BRADY: Yes, I’d say probably it was at a later date that this came up, though we and the Board of Trustees had discussed this earlier – that when the hippie type of movement started, that this was a possibility. We were concerned with this possibility up here - the same as Monterey Junior College had been concerned earlier when it used to be the surfers. Everybody wanted to go to Monterey because it was by the ocean and so we had the same general concern up here, that this is what we might attract. But if – I think – you look around and you say hippies, of course “what is a hippie” is a hard one to answer. Because a person or a man has long hair, a boy has long hair, does not necessarily mean that they’re automatically a hippie. The connotation is there but this is not always true. We do have some hippies. Modesto has some hippies. I think we have less of this true population of the hippie population, much less than most of the other junior colleges, state colleges and universities in California in proportion to the amount of enrollment that we have. We have some, surely.

DYER:  Don, thank you very much. You certainly, more than anyone else deserve credit for the establishment of Columbia Junior College and we thank you and Millie for your candid and very perceptive thoughts about the establishment of this institution.

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard

Interviewee: Brady, Donald S. (member of the Board of Trustees from Sonora)

Name of Tape: (a section of) History of Columbia Junior College (CC_hist_2_1)

When: Late 60’s early 70’s

Transcriber: Alden (3/12/08)

Transcriber’s Note: This is a continuation from the previous tape (CC_hist_2_0)

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