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To help give Cal's commuters a campus spirit, Sproul sponsors monthly "University Meetings" in the gym or the Greek Theater. He invites V.I.P.s in education, sport, politics and military affairs to headline the bill (top drawing cards: Philosopher John Dewey, the late football coach Knute Rockne). Introducing a student leader who had just been disciplined for raiding the Stanford campus to steal the traditional "Axe" before the Big Game, Sproul remarked at one meeting: "You all know Don McNary, who has represented this university officially many times and unofficially at least once." That sort of indulgent presidential view of their conduct makes a hit with Cal students, even more than Sproul's occasional all-out efforts to be one of the boys. (At U.C.L.A., Sproul once sang the Three Little Fishies with the Tri Delts.)
Sproul had a painful time last season when Cal won only two football games, and lost seven. A good many of the alumni blamed the bad record not only on the coach (who was fired) but on Sproul, who insists that he wants "students playing at athletics, not atheletes playing at studies."
Four-Check Visitors. Bob Sproul, a Californian both by birth and inclination, is the first native son and first alumnus ever elected president of the university. He has spent 37 of his 56 years on the campus, 17 as president. Bluff and extraverted, he personifies the confidence and optimism, the booming voice and outsized gesture, that marked California of the '20s. A large man (6 ft., 200 lbs.), he diets and exercises to keep trim.
Every morning at 8:30 his secretary brings him a list of people who want to see him. Sproul ranks them in order of importance, from four checks down to one. He clips appointments to a 2O-minute maximum, allows himself three minutes in between to dictate a digest of the conversation. These digests are kept in bound volumes; callers are often astonished when Sproul picks up where he left off a year before.
The president lives with his wife, his mother and a fidgety Irish setter, in a twelve-room stone mansion overlooking the Berkeley campus. They do a lot of entertaining (a September house guest: Harvard's President James Bryant Conant), have occasionally fed a whole varsity team. All three of the Sproul children, two sons and a daughter, are Cal grads. So is sobersided brother Allan, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Sproul's father was an accountant for the Southern Pacific and hated it. Recalls Bob: "He told me never to get mixed up in a job I didn't enjoy, no matter what rewards it offered." Bob was born & raised in San Francisco, a geographical accident that he tries to minimize in ruling California's northern and southern branches with an impartial hand.
As an engineering student at Berkeley, Bob made Tau Beta Pi (the engineers' version of Phi Beta Kappa), a feat which he has attributed more to his photographic memory than to any scholarly gifts. He was also a Big Man on Campus: a star two-miler, class president, Y.M.C.A. president, manager of the "Big C Sirkus" carnival, R.O.T.C. regimental captain, drum major of the band.