THE CAMPUS
In the first chapter is a glimpse of the Scripps Institution in 1936 — the place that would launch a thousand trips. There were then about thirty people at the laboratory by the sea, in three main buildings. Today there are slightly more than a thousand people at Scripps Institution, located — when in port — in a myriad of buildings on the campus and in an assortment of off-campus locations from Sorrento Valley to Point Loma.
The physical changes on the campus were most dramatic during the 1950s, when oceanography was expanding. Prior to that the only extensive building project was the repair of the pier in 1946, when buildings and grounds superintendent Carl Johnson supervised the jacketing of the pier pilings with steel and concrete and the redecking of the structure. In 1950 the Aquarium-Museum was built, as well as the north garage and the west garage in the service yard. The purchasing and storehouse building was added in 1953. The first addition to Ritter Hall followed in 1956, and it turned the face of the campus toward the sea. The
By then, the School of Science and Engineering had been established, and the new general campus was being planned. The “cafeteria” was preempted for the office of the first chancellor, Herbert F. York, plus the Director's office, other administrative offices, and some laboratories. (The lunch stand was added on the northeast corner of New Scripps Building in 1961.)
The peak year for building was 1960, when the second addition to Ritter Hall, and Sverdrup Hall and Sumner Auditorium were all completed. The occasion was acknowledged in a historical ceremony on 18 May 1961, at which the name plaques of each building were appropriately unveiled: Sumner Auditorium by Mrs. Francis B. Sumner, widow of the building's honoree; Sverdrup Hall by Mrs. Harald U. Sverdrup, widow of the building's honoree; New Scripps Building by Mrs. J. G. Johanson, niece of George H. Scripps; and the new wing of Ritter Hall by Mrs. W. W. Hawkins, widow of Robert P. Scripps.
The flat area of the campus was suddenly brimful of buildings. The internal roads were rearranged (which eliminated a particularly attractive planting of succulents on the turn to the library), and most of the old cottages on the south end of the campus were removed. Revelle apologized in May 1960 that “there has been dust, mud, dirt, noise and a general mess caused by construction for a long time,” even as he noted that the institution had to expand “in the national interest,” and predicted that “all the people of La Jolla very shortly will be proud of Scripps Institution.”[1]
Perhaps to avoid the building confusion, more Scripps people than ever before went out to sea in 1960; nine major expeditions that year logged more than 90,000 miles, and
In 1962 a small building was constructed near the landward end of the pier, and later a 60-foot steel tower was added; this facility was used until 1971 by researchers from Berkeley and UCLA on sea-water conversion methods. In the basement of that building were stored the Scripps sea-floor rock samples. When the sea-water conversion project ended, Scripps researchers moved into the building, and in 1973 the Shore Processes Laboratory was built on its roof.
The only other addition on the flat area of the campus during the 1960s was the Physiological Research Laboratory west of the Aquarium-Museum in 1965. That group also built a facility to house dogs, horses, and sheep for research projects, just below radio station WWD in Seaweed Canyon[*]
[*] Also called snake Canyon, or Rattlesnake Canyon, for obvious reasons.
(so named because city trucks dumped seaweed there from La Jolla Shores and Scripps beaches). The building of the “farm” in 1965 put an end to the seaweed dumping, and to other extramural activities in Seaweed Canyon, such as the dumping of garden trimmings by nearby residents, the pistol-practice range of the campus police, and an archery range.The obvious direction for further expansion was up the slope. Walter Munk chose a scenic site there for the Scripps laboratory of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, built in 1963. The Hydraulics Laboratory, slightly uphill from IGPP, followed in 1964. It served first as an echoing setting for a lively farewell party for the Revelles; then the distinctive building with the wave-shaped roof was outfitted with a wave-and-tidal basin, a wind-wave channel, a wave-and-current channel, a granular fluid mechanics test facility, and a fluidizing channel.
During the 1950s and 1960s, various of the campus cottages were removed, and others were converted to offices
[*] The last tenants, George Bien and family, moved out of T-24 in 1969.
In 1951 a group of Scripps staff members purchased the 40 acres of land comprising Scripps Estates Associates on the canyon rim above the institution and developed it into 42 homesites and a privately protected coastal-canyon preserve.The graduate students set up their social center in the late 1960s, when they were given the use of T-8, a one-story house at the south edge of the campus that had been purchased when the land for the south parking lot was acquired. The center at first was under the auspices of the Dean of Student Activities of UCSD, until 1968 when a Scripps Student Committee was formed. Students renovated the building, which they call Surfside, into a recreation center, with a ping-pong room, pool table, change room, and storage rack for surfboards. Volunteer labor, some funds from the office of Student Affairs, and proceeds from vending machines on campus made the renovations and recreation facilities possible. TGIF — the weekly beerbust — began at Surfside in January 1968. As the student committee reported to staff luncheon in September 1969: “The purpose of this party was to provide a friendly atmosphere where the entire SIO community could meet and get better acquainted. This party has been very successful.”
The uphill trend in construction has continued into the 1970s: the Deep Sea Drilling Building was completed in 1970, across La Jolla Shores Drive from the main campus; the Norpax building was completed in 1975, below the Fishery Oceanography Center (which was built by the federal government in 1964 and was renamed Southwest Fishery Center in 1970); the Carl Eckart Building to house the Scripps Library was completed in December 1976; and the Marine Biology Building was nearing completion at the close of 1976.
The library had long outgrown its space, even after extensive remodeling in the mid-1960s provided to it the entire building, which had also contained, at various times, a museum, an auditorium, some non-library offices, the mail room, and the telephone switchboard (a lively social center in its day). From 15,000 volumes in 1936, the library holdings had increased by the end of 1976 to include: 113,608 bound volumes, more than 26,000 maps, 3,843 microforms, 20,611 reprints, 27,312 reports, documents, and translations, 5,753 serial titles, and 120 linear feet of historical archives. Of necessity, during the 1970s some volumes had to be stored in other locations, some in the basement of IGPP and others in buildings at Camp Elliott.
The first full-time professionally trained librarian for Scripps, Roy W. Holleman, began in September 1950, soon after the retirement of longtime librarian Ruth Ragan. Besides extending the oceanographic collections, Holleman in the latter 1950s began assembling an all-subject general library for UCSD. Joseph Gantner succeeded Holleman from 1963 to 1966, when he transferred to the upper campus. William J. Goff, then assistant librarian at Scripps, and holding master's degrees in both geology and library science, succeeded Gantner in 1967.
For many years the Scripps library has been distinguished by its broad coverage of ocean-related literature — and equally distinguished by the cheerful helpfulness of its staff.
One long-discussed construction project that has not come to pass is the “Scripps Island.” The concept of creating a unique replacement for the Scripps pier began in the early 1950s. The “Island” grew in conversation to incorporate a harbor, various underwater laboratories, aquarium facilities for research and holding purposes, data cables for relaying a number of continuous measurements, facilities
In 1964, shortly before leaving Scripps, Roger Revelle appointed a committee to consider the “Island,” which became formalized as first, the Offshore Research Facility, and later, the Experimental Inshore Oceanographic Facility. Early in 1967, through the Foundation for Ocean Research and the city of San Diego, funds were provided for preliminary design studies of a research platform. As William A. Nierenberg pointed out:
Whatever measurements one wants to make, whatever operations one would like to conduct, however one wishes to employ a man in the sea, the greatest fraction of the effort and the greatest source of danger is at the air-sea interface….We visualize an Island connected by causeway to shore sufficiently far out past the surf zone and that much closer to the canyon area, so designed with particular installations and instrumentation, that the problem of inserting a man or his equipment into the sea and retrieving them become relatively trivial operations, thus reserving the maximum of the effort for engineering or scientific work.[2]
In November 1967, Robert H. Oversmith became the project engineer, and, with the engineering firm of Sverdrup and Parcel and Associates,[*]
[*] Headed by Leif J. Sverdrup, brother of Harald U. Sverdrup.
he prepared a preliminary design of a horseshoe-shaped laboratory, 300 feet long and 200 feet wide, to be located adjacent to Scripps submarineSome Scripps researchers were beginning to question the cost involved, especially in relation to the research benefits. A poll in 1972 showed that “only a very small fraction [of the Scripps staff] would make intensive use of the facility, two-thirds would use it only occasionally, if at all.” The “Island” was shelved. Douglas L. Inman, one of the early proponents, commented that “not building the island made us learn how to develop the technology of working in the open ocean, at which we have been very successful.”