WILLIAMS JUNIOR COLLEGE
BERKELEY
ENROLL NOW
Spring term opens January 9
High school graduates, regardless of previous scholastic record, may attend WILLIAMS JUNIOR COLLEGE and transfer to University of California or Stanford, without examination, as sophomores or juniors.
Faculty of High Attainment
One-Year Pre-Nursing Course Now Offered
Courses in JOURNALISM and
CREATIVE WRITING
Ask for Catalog
Williams Junior College
Arlington Avenue, Berkeley
Phone Ashberry 1994
(Berkeley Daily Gazette, December 26, 1932, p. 4)
Retrieved 11.30.11
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gSExAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MeMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4251%2C6282335
(Just an aside. "Faculty of high attainment" is certainly an apt description of Vassar's own Maud Makemson , who taught astronomy and physical geography at Williams Junior College simultaneously while working at UC as a research assistant and taking graduate courses in astronomy.
Retrieved 11.30.11
http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/faculty/prominent-faculty/maud-w-makemson.html)
Maud took her 11 astronomy students from Berkeley on an overnight expedition to view a total eclipse of the sun on April 28, 1930.
(Popular Astronomy, Vol. 38, p. 537)
Retrieved 11.30.11
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1930PA.....38..537M/0000537.000.html
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
1937, Partial Scholarships for Writers
The Williams Institute School of Authorship began offering partial scholarships for writers, according to The Berkeley Daily Gazette, January 11, 1937
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RZkuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vaMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4802%2C1118155
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RZkuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vaMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4802%2C1118155
1936, Mind Training
In 1936, the Williams College Institute of Authorship was beginning its fourth year of operation, according to this article in the Berkeley Daily Gazette, August 21, 1936.
"The Williams College faculty has been given the benefit of the most advanced psychological findings in mind training through summer courses at the Institute by such world authorities Count Alfred Korzybski and Dr. Alfred Adler."
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1970&dat=19360821&id=NpcoAAAAIBAJ&sjid=IgYGAAAAIBAJ&pg=4529,4569875
"The Williams College faculty has been given the benefit of the most advanced psychological findings in mind training through summer courses at the Institute by such world authorities Count Alfred Korzybski and Dr. Alfred Adler."
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1970&dat=19360821&id=NpcoAAAAIBAJ&sjid=IgYGAAAAIBAJ&pg=4529,4569875
Curtis Zahn, student at Williams School of Authorship
I'm not sure why people always mention Irving Wallace when namedropping esteemed participants of the Williams school of authorship. Curtis Zahn attended as well. He seemed pretty interesting.
"Poet and playwright Curtis Zahn (1912 – 1990) may not be a well-known name, but his legacy lives on through the work of the Pacificus Foundation, a literary arts group he founded in 1959 that not only preserves his work but offers financial support to emerging talent in the fields of poetry, short fiction and drama.
Born on November 12, 1912, he was the son of Oswald and Edith Zahn. His paternal grandfather had been a doctor serving Southern California prior to the Civil War, and his father was a businessman. Raised in Los Angeles and Coronado, Zahn briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State College (now University) and the Williams Institute and School of Authorship in Berkeley. Inheriting his father’s love for sailing, he served as an able-bodied seaman on an oceanography expedition in 1938 and parlayed that experience into writing a fish and game column for the San Diego Tribune-Sun . He served at that paper throughout World War II, except for one year during which he was incarcerated in a federal penitentiary for declaring himself a conscientious objector to the war.
Zahn began his literary career concurrent to his journalistic work, founding a group of short story writers in San Diego. In the mid-1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, and began contributing poems and plays to various publications like Cross Section, 1945 (L.B. Fischer, 1945) and Experiment Theatre Anthology (University of Washington Press, 1950). By 1951, he had acquired oceanfront property in Malibu, California, on which he built a villa-like home of his own design along with adjacent studios that served as a venue for writers’ workshops attended by such notables as Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and Christopher Isherwood. Around the same time, Zahn became a professional painter and collagist and served as chairman of the Malibu Art Association. In 1959, he founded the Pacificus Foundation and he dispensed typewriters or small amounts of cash to assist new writers.
By the 60s, Zahn was earning attention for his stage plays, many of which were first produced in Los Angeles. His one-act satire, Conditioned Reflex, was produced Off-Broadway in 1967. Like many, Zahn lost his home in the Malibu fires of 1969, but undeterred he found a new location for his writers colony, designing and building a redwood home in a hillside near Los Angeles. That dwelling, which contains Zahn’s original furnishing, framed family pictures and his art work, serves as the headquarters for the Pacificus Foundation, which annually presents the Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize in its founder’s honor."
Curtis Zahn died at age 78 on September 24, 1990.
(Retreived 11.20.11
http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/archives-cc/app/details.php?id=8844&return=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Fphpbin%2Farchives-cc%2Fapp%2Fbrowse.php%3Fletter%3DZ)
"The Reactivated Man" is but one of his plays. "A nightmarish black comedy about a man being operated on by two possibly insane doctors for the removal of his guilt complexes. Originally produced at the Edward Ludlum Theater, Los Angeles."
Alfred Adler, 1937
Flyer for August, 1937 Seminar
Scheduled for the Williams Institute in Berkeley, California
Proposed Western Headquarters for Adler in the U.S.
(Retrieved 11.30.11 http://www.adlerian.us/Page1b.htm
(Alfred Adler was important to Williams College for a number of reasons. But he also had famously and locally published his reminiscences of World War I. In a second S.F. Chronicle article, dated February 10, 1929, Adler is quoted extensively describing the suffering in post World War I Austria. He speaks of the 100,000 Viennese who are unemployed; of the psychologists, medical doctors, social workers, and teachers who are staffing the clinics for the children of poor families; and of the lack of money to pay these professionals. He is quoted as having said," I felt throughout the War as a prisoner feels. The only solution to the problem of future wars is for science to organize the world so as to make war unnecessary, and to educate mankind to become more socially adjusted and more interested in each other." (2)
from: http://pws.cablespeed.com/~htstein/adler-sf.htm
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Spring Mansion
(The Spring Mansion as it appeared in the Spiral, yearbook of the Williams Institute, 1927 [BAHA Archives, gift of Larry Leon]
http://www.berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_landmarks/spring_mansion.html
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Darryl Henriques was the instigator behind bringing "It Can't Happen Here" back to stages across the US recently.
Nation-Wide Reading of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/)
| November 2, 2011
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (CAN IT?): Fascism in America? Nah, it can’t happen here, people said. But Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Prize–winning author (and a Nation contributor), challenged that shibboleth in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian fantasy in which a folksy, Huey Long–style demagogue is elected president and soon becomes an American Hitler. In 1936 the WPA Federal Theater Project mounted twenty-two simultaneous nationwide productions of the novel, which Lewis and John C. Moffitt adapted for the stage. In October, in commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of those productions, about twenty-two theater companies and universities across the country staged readings of Lewis’s play.
The instigator was California actor and comedian Darryl Henriques, who calls the Federal Theater Project “the greatest flowering of theatrical talent the country has ever witnessed” and says his idea for the revival “had everything to do with what’s going on in America.”
“We have a form of fascism that hides behind the illusion of elections, a government that is wholly owned by the corporations and consistently ignores the well-being of its citizens in order to enrich the rich.”
Most of the readings took place on October 24—the date of Black Thursday, the 1929 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In Seattle Arne Zaslove mounted a lavish reading with the Endangered Species Project, dedicated to putting on “the great plays you seldom see.” Producing director Mark Seldis of the Ghost Road Company in Baldwin Hills, California, says of its performance, “It was clear from audience reactions that It Can’t Happen Here certainly resonates today.” Mike Smith Rivera of Burning Clown Productions, who held a reading in New York with the WorkShop Theater Company, says “much of the discussion was centered around” Lewis’s prescience “in foreseeing many of society’s present-day problems”—problems currently dramatized by Occupy Wall Street.
As Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flanagan once put it, dictatorship comes in “an apparently harmless guise with parades and promises…[but] the promises are not kept and the parade grounds become encampments.” RICHARD LINGEMAN
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nation-Wide-Reading-of-It-Cant-Happen-Here-by-Sinclair-Lewis/152921454785776
Nation-Wide Reading of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/)
| November 2, 2011
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (CAN IT?): Fascism in America? Nah, it can’t happen here, people said. But Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Prize–winning author (and a Nation contributor), challenged that shibboleth in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian fantasy in which a folksy, Huey Long–style demagogue is elected president and soon becomes an American Hitler. In 1936 the WPA Federal Theater Project mounted twenty-two simultaneous nationwide productions of the novel, which Lewis and John C. Moffitt adapted for the stage. In October, in commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of those productions, about twenty-two theater companies and universities across the country staged readings of Lewis’s play.
The instigator was California actor and comedian Darryl Henriques, who calls the Federal Theater Project “the greatest flowering of theatrical talent the country has ever witnessed” and says his idea for the revival “had everything to do with what’s going on in America.”
“We have a form of fascism that hides behind the illusion of elections, a government that is wholly owned by the corporations and consistently ignores the well-being of its citizens in order to enrich the rich.”
Most of the readings took place on October 24—the date of Black Thursday, the 1929 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In Seattle Arne Zaslove mounted a lavish reading with the Endangered Species Project, dedicated to putting on “the great plays you seldom see.” Producing director Mark Seldis of the Ghost Road Company in Baldwin Hills, California, says of its performance, “It was clear from audience reactions that It Can’t Happen Here certainly resonates today.” Mike Smith Rivera of Burning Clown Productions, who held a reading in New York with the WorkShop Theater Company, says “much of the discussion was centered around” Lewis’s prescience “in foreseeing many of society’s present-day problems”—problems currently dramatized by Occupy Wall Street.
As Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flanagan once put it, dictatorship comes in “an apparently harmless guise with parades and promises…[but] the promises are not kept and the parade grounds become encampments.” RICHARD LINGEMAN
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nation-Wide-Reading-of-It-Cant-Happen-Here-by-Sinclair-Lewis/152921454785776