Bridge over happy memories of UCI

UC Irvine is throwing a year-long party to celebrate its 40th birthday, and since I was practically there for the birthing, I have more than a passing interest in the goings-on.

So I was pleased last week to be invited to one of the highlights of the anniversary year: the dedication of the bridge that connects the campus to the adjacent shopping center.

The bridge has been there since 1985. It just took uncommonly long for the people who make such decisions to recognize that it should be named for Ray Watson. That oversight was taken care of Oct. 27.

Watson, who is 79 and lives in Newport Beach, has been building bridges all his professional life -- as planner, president, CEO and director of the Irvine Co., director of the Walt Disney Co. and the Public Policy Institute of California, and Regent’s Professor at UCI’s Graduate School of Management.

In all of these roles, he has specialized in building negotiable passages between politicians and educators, companies and communities, public agencies and corporations, environmentalists and developers. That sort of bridges.

One of the few times he couldn’t offer a viable bridge design was when the issue was a commercial airport in El Toro and the adversaries were his hometown of Newport Beach and his most precocious child, the city of Irvine.

The way he handled this question whenever it came up -- as it did inevitably when he was speaking before local audiences -- was quintessential Watson.

He would ask how many members of his audience lived in Newport Beach. Hands were raised. Then, how many of those people favored an airport at El Toro. The same hands came up. Then he would ask South County residents to raise their hands. How many favored El Toro? All the hands went down. Then he would point out the obvious: that an objective look at this issue is probably impossible, so let’s get on to something else.

The bridge-naming at UCI was the idea of his old friend, Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Co., who made a rare public appearance -- including two warm and laudatory speeches -- and picked up the bridge party tab. Watson said he went along with the idea because “it so perfectly symbolized a bridge between town and gown, between city and university, which is where it all started.”

When it all started, Watson was a young Northern California architect who joined the Irvine Co. in 1960 as a key planner and who found that his new employer had just convinced the University of California to build a campus on company land. In return, the company promised to develop a companion city, then under study by architect William Pereira.

That’s where Watson came in. What came out a few years later was a first-class university and the city of Irvine -- where Watson had the rare opportunity to “start out with an idea and actually see it come alive.”

He says that his greatest satisfaction today comes from people who tell him how much they enjoy living in Irvine.

Among the 200 people at the bridge party were a good many of us with similar warm recollections about the university that grew alongside the city of Irvine -- from early movers and shakers like Jack Peltason, who would become chancellor when Dan Aldrich died, to lecturers like me -- the only non-PhD when I joined the English faculty in 1968.

We liked to call ourselves the “Harvard of the West” in those early years when UCI was seeking an identity that was seriously complicated by the Vietnam unrest and the arrival of a cadre of Eastern academics in this deeply conservative community that was totally unprepared for our peculiar mores.

Our greatest gift in those early years was Dan Aldrich, who came out of a distinguished career in agriculture to put his straight-arrow mark on a new university -- from picking up refuse around the campus to defending a broad range of free speech at UCI when other UC campuses were running scared. I don’t think he was fully appreciated until he was gone.

I look around at UCI now, and I can scarcely remember the small-town, interactive feeling of 35 years ago. There were an uncommon number of jocks in the English department then, where skill at softball and tennis seemed to be weighed along with academic achievement. Where the chancellor could be found on the tennis court or prowling the campus almost as often as in the executive quarters. And where adoption of the anteater as the campus mascot precisely caught the level of irreverence.

Other fragments of memory come back. The weeks we had to deal with primates peering in our office windows because the producers of “Planet of the Apes” -- attracted by the surrealistic campus architecture -- were allowed to film at UCI. The embracing of a startled Jim March, UCI’s first social science dean, by the John Birch Society because he flew the American flag at his home on national holidays. Dan Aldrich’s cooling down of a potential campus riot during the Vietnam protest years. And so many more.

So for a few hours last week, the recognition of Ray Watson as “a modern Renaissance man: Gifted architect, planner, teacher, astute businessman and inclusive, persuasive leader” on the plaque that was unveiled provided yet another bridge: this one between past and present. Watson put that into perspective when he told me, “When they start naming bridges after you, there’s a suggestion that it might be time to go. I prefer a note I got from a good friend who said that this can be a place to bring up good memories.”

Indeed it can.

You can hear some of those memories offered in person today at 4 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theater, where Ray Watson will join an impressive group of university administrators and faculty to review UCI’s development over four decades. The symposium will be followed by a reception and opening of an exhibit on UCI history at Langson Library. All this is free, but reservations are recommended; call (949) 824-4658.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

20051103gzs0vnke(LA)