School Days at Cal

Ruth Oppenheimer in the 20s

I went to California University in mid-session. Uncle Max and Aunt Millie knew the president of the school intimately. Dean Deutsch became the head of California University shortly after I got there and he said that there was no reason why I shouldn’t enter the school.

“Our school is right for you, “ he said. “Your credentials prove that you belong here. Let’s try it.”

And Aunt Millie said, “When you grow up, you can have an Alex. At your age you don’t need an Alex.”

“But this is so practical,” I said. “Let me have Alex. He’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

I tortured her so much that she finally let me have Alex. And Alex used to take me down. And I used to pick up kids on the way. Alex didn’t tell anybody and I didn’t tell anybody but that’s what I used to do.

Then, Uncle Max decided that if I was going to go to college, I should be part of what went on on the college campus. “I know we’ll both be sad without Ruth being at the table,” he told Aunt Millie. “But it’s right for her to live among her own generation.”

So Uncle Max rented an apartment that was so luxurious that you had to be embarrassed about inviting anybody to it. I had a good friend, Claire Blum, whose family were also in the dried fruit and nut business and I asked Claire if she would ask her parents if she could share the apartment with me. Uncle Max was paying for it all but I didn’t want to be in this big mansion of an apartment on my own. Downstairs was a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. We had to walk up a flight of stairs and the balcony overlooked all of this, which was our bedroom and our bathroom. So Claire and I had two beds and a bathroom, and we entertained like we were royalty- two snot-noses in the big city.

At Berkeley, I was as bad as I could be. There were probably about only 10-15% of the student body that were female at the time. I played tennis night and day. I was on the tennis team. I played with Helen Wills, a fine tennis player and a champion. There were frequently times when there were not enough women to play on the team. That’s why we had intramural matches with the men. I played with a lot of guys on the tennis team, because we used to play doubles, and I was in every game that was ever played.

I was there in the end of the 1920s and there was much unrest in Berkeley at the time. There were people who were in the I Won’t Work Society parading and doing things of that sort all around Berkeley. I was not involved in any of that but I was certainly aware of what was going on. They were very frightening times. There were curfews and we had to get off campus at certain hours. The students had to be in dorms at certain hours and we were checked on it.

I loved everything I did at Berkeley. I studied with some remarkable professors, and I could do these things only because Dean Deutsch knew my family. I was in the Psychology department, that was my major. In the psychology department, they were starting a workup of the children who were attending high school and going through to get a diploma. And one of the professors in Stanford University said he needed people to do some research on high school children- to determine how many of them are inspired to go to college, how many of them are capable of going to college, and what we can do to improve the enrollment in college in California. And Dean Deutsch said “I have just the person that you can use for that purpose. And I will see that you can come up and interview her or she can go down and be seen by your staff.”