I moved to Williams College (the large manor house was also known as Spring Mansion) on the No. 7 Arlington bus with my impedimentia, a large pullman suitcase and a tasteless small duffle bag. Later in the afternoon the move was completed with the assistance of a friend and his pickup truck to carry those heavier boxes filled with records and books. All accomplished on a warm summer's day in June of 1969. I made my entrance up the stairs directly from Arlington Avenue, the walkway and stairs separating into two near identical parts a tall stucco wall that could at casual glance because of the overgrowth of greenery appear to be contiguous and so the stairs between completely remain unnoticed, despite one wall bearing a brass plaque announcing the general location to be Williams College. Before I write so much as another line, I feel obliged to make two emphatic points here.

The first, that I believe when assembling the "missing years" of Williams College, those fuzzy around the edges and near indefinable years when the college found itself under the tutelage of Dr. John W. Hopkins, a history which must be filled out and completed because the official history thus far stops abruptly with Cora Williams as if not knowing what to say about any of this that followed and so leaves a huge blank for all those intervening decades until such time as 1975 arrives when a rich real estate mogul appears and buys the place and is fawned over as the new very wealthy owner, for the time that Dr. John W. Hopkins was in residence as President of Williams College, the responsible historian must and should rightly assume the respectful and highflown tone of Ms. Daniela Thompson, Berkeley historian, as she has here outlined the breathtaking history of the original immensely wealthy inhabitants, John Hopkins Spring and his wife, Celina, whose predilection for the opulent made the Spring Mansion physically what it is to this very day.

I will remind historians here of their duty to the future reader and with some firm but gentle insistence because the college as it functioned under the benign auspices of Dr. John W. Hopkins, then President of Williams College, did continue to flourish despite all outward appearance in the genuine spirit and tradition of Miss Cora Williams herself. What came to be known as Williams College, founded shortly after her purchase of the estate in 1917, as you might know, was originally the Institute of Creative Development and was dedicated to the study of languages, poetry, music, and literature. In reality, this is the first college that devised a course of study and became dedicated to what has become known since as the New Age.

Dr. John W. Hopkins and his associates as devotees themselves often acknowledged that concept as the philosophical underpinning of their continued research and often employed the phrase "New Age" in their own writings.

When reading or researching any history of this time encompassed under the name Williams College, please feel free to allow your mind to wander and perhaps try to imagine what these times and people may have been like and feel free to make your own associations.

When I was there at Williams College, also assembled in cottages and living spaces scattered throughout the grounds of the estate having been selected or drawn to the college in some mysterious way and now residing there as a direct result of Dr. Hopkins's benevolence, were musicians, artists, dancers, theatrical troupes, respected men of science, scholars, devotees of physical regemines, and even a young person or two who by sheer accident of birth had themselves been descended from families of greater than usual inherited wealth. All brave, courageous, and sturdy types in their own ways and naturally possessing or acquiring as they grew into life the fiber and character required to assume the challenge of moving into a completely unknown and as yet unexplored New Age of being. And so, I argue here, the types of persons on the estate had essentially remain unchanged from the founding of the college by Miss Cora Williams and again in the time I am writing of, when Williams College was administered by Dr. John W. Hopkins.

The second point I need to remind the reader of is this: Williams College under the auspices of Dr. John W. Hopkins glittered like a rare and occult gem, often unnoticed and unrecognized, tucked away as it was among other mansions in the Berkeley hills, much in the same way the metaphysical or paranormal sometimes is veiled from public view. As such, the Spirituality of the place, with its attendant occultism, or ethereal metaphysical, or downright paranormal, and most certainly the more common every day garden variety versions of the unique, startling, or strange were nearly diurnal in occurrence there, and that is true to this day for almost every person who resided there at that time in 1969, as the place appears in memory and dream to this day for those who resided there. Williams College also, importantly to me at least, was a place of what could be regarded as eerie coincidence, sometimes an immediate collision of events, and others with the beginning of the coincidence occuring far in the remote past and concluding at some point in time far in the distant future. But eerie coincidence.