A Brief Reflection on My Offices at USC

When I arrived at USC in the fall of 1975 as an assistant professor in what was then called the School of Public Administration (SPA), I was assigned an office on the third floor of the Washington Building (below) at 311 South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles.  (If you watch N.C.I.S., you may have seen this building in

the background near the end of the October 21, 2008, Season 6 episode titled "Nine Lives" when Gibbs and Fornell drive to the courthouse [actually the Ronald Reagan State Office Building across the street at 300 South Spring] to try to prevent Sgt. Jack Kale from killing mobster Rick Azari.  This was SPA's Civic Center Campus at the time from which it offered Master's-level courses to people working in local government and law enforcement (the latter pursuing advanced degrees with funds provided under the Law Enforcement Education Program, or LEEP.  In addition to teaching duties, technically I was the "Research Director" of USC's Institute for Disaster Preparedness (IDP) that offered graduate courses to local emergency services coordinators receiving tuition from the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency and that provided workshops and training for professionals in the emergency services field.  The institute itself did not conduct sponsored research, but the graduate course format (once-a-week evening classes and "intensives," meaning all-day sessions that ran Thursday through Sunday twice each semester) made it possible for me to write and publish my own research.  One of the nicer aspects of being on South Spring Street was being just around the corner from the famous Bradbury Building in the 300 block of South Broadway.

At that time there was a small restaurant on the second floor of the Bradbury Building that served excellent chili for lunch. Across the street from the Bradbury Building is Grand Central Market, not only an open-air market but an early food court as well.

I was only at the Civic Center Campus for one academic year.  A colleague whom I did not know at the time named Lou Weschler persuaded the acting dean, John Kirlin, that an untenured assistant professor should not be so isolated from his colleagues.  So, despite the objections of the IDP Director, Larry Snell, I was relocated to what we used to call the "main campus" for Fall Semester 1976.  (Over the years, our colleagues at what is now the Keck School of Medicine of USC had long complained about the terms "main campus" and "medical campus," so, to reduce the connotation of second tier status, the terms "University Park Campus" [or UPC] and "Health Sciences Campus" [shortened to HSC] were introduced and have been used ever since.)  The office that I moved into was a single-person, windowless office in the Von Kleinsmid Center (VKC; below) that I shared with

another new faculty arrival, the economist John Schunhoff.  After a year or so, John and I were relocated to a larger office—with windows—in the southeast corner of the third floor overlooking what is now called McCarthy Quad (then called Fagg Park named for USC's sixth president, Fred D. Fagg, Jr.).  When John tired of the "publish or perish" pressures of a research university and resigned to take a top administrative position with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, I was moved into another large office in the northeast corner of the third floor that I shared with Wesley Bjur.

After a few years, expansion of the dean's office in VKC claimed the office that Wes and I shared.  He and his wife, Dottie, decided to relocate to the school's Sacramento Public Affairs Center (SPAC), and I was offered the chance to have a private office in a strange pie-shaped structure on the corner of South Flower Street and Exposition Boulevard called the Tyler Building (below).  (This triangular building was actually surrounded on all sides by streets, including Figueroa Street on the west and 37th Street on the south with an unused [at the time] railroad track on the other side of the outer wall of my office between the building and Exposition Boulevard.)  The economist Don Winkler, now retired and making wine in South Africa, was instrumental in persuading me to make the move.  [The Tyler Building was named after Farmers Insurance Group co-founder John C. Tyler who also gave money to USC to establish the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.]

My Tyler Building office, which lacked windows, was spacious, the largest private office I had at the university.  My five faculty colleagues and I became very close as we shared space in this just off-campus, slightly out-of-the-way office building.  The main downside was having to cross both Exposition Boulevard and Figueroa Street several times a day going to and from class, lunch at the Faculty Center (now University Club), the bus stop on Figueroa, etc.  (During the time I had an office in the Tyler Building, a USC female staff member was struck and killed in the crosswalk at the intersection of Exposition Boulevard and Flower Street just outside the building.)  Also housed in the Tyler Building were the Delinquency Control Institute (DCI), which provided training for law enforcement officers newly assigned to juvenile divisions, and L. A. Semester, a program for undergraduates that gave them hands-on experience in public agencies.  The L. A. Semester offices were down the hall from my office, and passing my open door every day was one of the administrators of the program, David Raksin.  Raksin was a composer who wrote for film and television and is probably best known for having written the theme song for the 1944 movie, Laura, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.  David was a nice guy; it wasn't until much later that I learned about his "real" job.

Over time, as people left for new positions (Winkler to the World Bank where he would recruit Gary Reid shortly afterward; Joan Krueger, who followed her husband, Brian Betker, when he finished his Ph.D. at UCLA and took a faculty position in the Midwest; Rich Sundeen, who became Assistant Dean in charge of the school's undergraduate programs and thus had to move back to "headquarters"), I was persuaded by then dean Ross Clayton that the Tyler faculty were too remote from students and agreed to move back to VKC.  This time, I was given a private office (with windows) in a newly constructed suite with four faculty colleagues once again on the third floor.  This office was about one-fourth the size of the one that I gave up in the Tyler Building, but it was near the center of campus and its west-facing windows overlooked the (sunken) VKC courtyard (below) and carillon tower with the distinctive finial on top.  (In those days, the carillon sounded on the quarter hour and actually played music at noon as classes changed.)  Only recently did I discover some of the history behind the tower and its finial.

My final stop was the newly-constructed Ralph and Goldy Lewis Hall (RGL; below), home for the equally new School of Policy, Planning, and Development, an unhappy "merger" of sorts between the SPA, the School of Urban and Regional Planning, and the Lusk Center for Real Estate (from what is now the Marshall School of Business) as well as a few other smaller entities.  I was assigned a nice

corner office (RGL 200) with a north-facing window looking out on Childs Way and the rear of Doheny Memorial Library.  I later found out that the former dean of the planning school, Ed Blakely, had wanted this office because it was next to the stairway at the south end of the hall. He told me he had wanted that office so that he could come and go without being noticed.  I was given the office instead since it was well known that Ed was leaving USC to return to the Bay Area in order to run (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for mayor of Oakland.  When the school's development staff spilled out of the suite across the hall to claim my office, I was moved to the opposite end of the hallway.  This would be my final office as a USC faculty member.  It was notable for two things: its north-facing window looked out onto Widney Alumni House, and it was adjacent to the office assigned to Kevin Starr, who never used it because he was in Sacramento serving as the California State Librarian and continuing to write about the history of California.  I never had a chance to meet Kevin, but, through a mutual friend and colleague, James Moore II, I was able to secure his autograph on one of his books which I was reading at the time.

ADDENDUM:  Walking down the second floor corridor in RGL Monday morning (10 December 2012), I spotted this sign on the wall across from my second and final office.  Apparently the Schwarzenegger Institute is being housed in RGL until its permanent home in the new Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall (under construction next door on the former sites of the RGL patio and the University Club) is completed.