** All Text on these chapter pages has been copied verbatim – with permission – from this book: “Shurtleff Family Genealogy & History – Second Edition 2005” by William Roy Shurtleff & his dad, Lawton Lothrop Shurtleff ** Text in pdf convert to word doc – any spelling errors from the book may or may not have been fixed. **
Roy entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1908, at age 21. Since he had stayed out of school to work after high school, he was several years older than most of his classmates. There were still no cars on campus.
During his freshman year Roy visited Jack McClellan, then business manager of the Daily Californian. McClellan, who had brought the paper back onto campus and into the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California), offered Roy a job soliciting ads for the paper, on the understanding that Roy would get a 20 percent commission on all monies collected. Roy approached the job with determination and soon began to make “a fair amount of money.” The selling and his studies must have kept Roy busy his first year at Cal, for he apparently had no other outside activities.
Roy had hoped for an invitation to join the Delta Upsilon (DU) fraternity, and had decided that if he didn’t get one, he wouldn’t join any fraternity. His one close DU friend was Eugene Hallett, a young man Roy greatly admired. Harry Lawton, also a close friend, was in the Fiji (Phi Gamma Delta) house. But Roy failed to get a DU bid (Don Lawton thinks Roy was too busy working and couldn’t afford a fraternity), so throughout his college years, he lived at home on Hearst Avenue, only 300 yards west of the north gate of campus, and hence a short walk from classes. (Ironically both of Roy’s sons, Lawton and Gene, pledged DU many years later.)
As a freshman Roy recalls taking a course in hygiene from Dr. Frederick Reinhardt, who later founded the Cowell Clinic, and whose family later joined with the Shurtleffs when Barbara Reinhardt married Lawton Shurtleff. Roy also took courses in the School of Commerce (predecessor of the present School of Business) in business and economics, as well as Spanish.
During his sophomore year at Cal (1909-10), Roy was admitted to the Economics Honor Society, in which he continued until graduation. It was probably at this time that he joined the Commerce Club. Thus, Roy already seemed to have a strong interest in business matters.
Roy founded UNX, a drinking society, with Earl Warren, Charles Wheeler, and some other Cal students. The name was taken from a song, the last line of which was “And the eunuchs were all there.” An article in the Daily Cal in 1926 states that the organization was suspended from campus due to disruptive initiation activities. They were a ribald group. So a hint of curiosity in his social life was beginning to show.
Roy was also on the Soph Hop Committee. Infact, courting now became one of his major activities.
He and Hazle had been seeing each other informally for about three years, but in 1910 their courtship began in earnest. For much of the next three years until they were married, their courtship centered around the town of Monte Rio on the Russian River, where the Lawton family/gang had a summer cottage, and a rowboat and many good times. Hazle’s pictures from July 1910 show her and Roy in Roy’s canoe (named Boola, after the Yale Fight Song, “Boola Boola”). The summers were times for swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, the Water Carnivals at Monte Rio on the fourth of July, watching her two brothers, Harry and Don Lawton, dive off of high places, and relaxing in rocking chairs on the Lawtons’ cottage porch. Don Lawton recalls:
Roy had this canoe named Boola, which he kept at the Cal Crew house on the Oakland estuary. On weekends he would put it on a freight train, get off at Monte Rio, and canoe down the Russian River several hundred yards to Sandy Beach to pick up Hazle. He would also play his mandolin for her. Roy worked like a devil. He was all business, down to brass tacks, no monkey business, always working. To everyone’s dismay, Roy would call Hazle right after dinner (when she was supposed to be working washing the dishes) and they would talk for hours.
Don also has clear memories of his sister from her early college years: “She was a good pal and very friendly, even tempered, and fair. A rock of Gibraltar, she was very dependable. She had lots of friends. A good everyday person, but with no particular talents or interests.”
Photographs from 1909 and 1911 show Roy and Hazle sailing together on San Francisco Bay in the Yankee, a big sailboat owned by friends (Roy Miller and his father).
Lil Haven (in 1986) recalled Hazle from her days at Cal: “We met at Cal and were classmates, or perhaps she was a class ahead; she was a Pi Phi and I was a Kappa. Our paths did not meet often in those days but we liked each other. Hazle had a divine disposition, a sense of merriment and humor, and a beautiful speaking voice. I envied the quality of her voice; it was sort of low and rich and bubbly, sort of rolling from the throat and with substance to it. It was different from anybody else’s.” Roy, Lil recalled, was “very diligent, capable, and beloved.”
One boyish episode from the period 1910-12 has Roy and a friend sneaking into the Bohemian Grove to watch the famous ceremony, the “High Jinks.” When he struck a match to light his pipe, he was caught by a nearby guard and kicked out. The expelled kid came back years later as a man to become a member of this most exclusive men’s club.
At the start of his junior year (1910-11), after Jack McClellan retired as business manager of the Daily Californian, Milton Farmer (manager of the ASUC, which owned the school newspaper), who was two years out of college, asked Roy if he would like the job. Roy accepted and served as business manager for the next two years (see Daily Californian 16 August 1912, p. 2). His diligence and skill allowed him to save the large sum of a couple of thousand dollars by the time he graduated from Cal. Some of his earnings went to pay for his expenses during college, and some to support his mother.
Also in his junior year Roy joined the Cal Mandolin Club. When he was a young boy, his mother had him take lessons on the family’s organ but he didn’t like it. Then she bought an upright piano but Roy didn’t like that either. Finally he asked her if he could take mandolin lessons. He loved the mandolin, and he recalls sitting alone in the parlor at the Hearst Avenue house just playing songs on the mandolin over and over.
The 1912 and 1913 editions of the Blue and Gold (the Cal yearbook covering Roy’s junior and senior years), show him in the Mandolin Club group photograph and list him as one of eight “first mandolins” but not as an officer.
The story goes that Roy was manager of the Mandolin Club until Kenneth Monteagle, a fellow first mandolin player of the class of 1914, who had a wealthy father, made him a deal: “If you will resign as manager of the Mandolin Club and let me be the manager, my father will send us all to Hawaii.” Roy agreed and the whole 20-member club traveled by ship to Hawaii (a photo shows them in Honolulu in December 1911), played all over the islands, and earned commissions to boot. Interestingly, Monteagle remained Roy’s lifelong friend and later became president of the San Francisco Opera Board, (1942-51). In 1912 and 1913 the Santa Fe Railroad took the Mandolin Club and the Glee Club on all-expenses-paid tours to Chicago. They played together for railroad employees and their friends at many points along the way. Roy continued on to Detroit to attend a stammering school for two months.
In the 1912 Blue and Gold, there is a good photograph of Roy with the junior class. He is listed as a member of the Winged Helmet Junior Honor Society (for juniors and seniors). He was also on the Junior Informal Committee (apparently planning a school dance).
During his senior year at Cal (1911-12), Roy was extremely active. In addition to being business manager of the school paper and playing first mandolin in the Mandolin Club, he is shown in the 1913 Blue and Gold yearbook as second vice-president of the senior class for the second term, and a member of the Senior Assembly Committee, the Committee for Senior Week, and the Golden Bear Senior Honor Society. A photo on page 495 gives his name as “Shurt” Shurtleff; he is sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper, and smoking a pipe. Roy smoked a straight-stem pipe during college and until 1940.
On 15 May 1912, at age 24, Roy graduated from Cal, with a major in commerce, in what became a famous class. Classmates included Earl Warren, Nelson Hackett, Jim Black, Farnum Griffiths, Joe Sweet, and Harry Lawton, most of whom became his lifelong friends. Men at Cal in those days all wore hats on campus and their summer swimsuits were one-piece affairs with shoulder straps.
A look at Roy’s report card for his four years at Cal shows that he took a large number of economics classes (13), followed by jurisprudence (law, 4), with a smattering of political science, Spanish, geography, history, mathematics, etc. His grades averaged about a B.
Shurtleff & Lawton Families Genealogy & History - Second Edition (2005) 