Above: Al and Carole Kelley in front of the UC Santa Cruz sign at the main campus entrance, 1967. (Photo courtesy the Kelley family)When Carole Kelley arrived at the brand-new University of California campus at Santa Cruz in 1965, there wasn’t a lot to see.
There was no permanent student housing, so she and the other five graduate students had to live in temporary trailers set up on the East Field.
Al and Carole Kelley on campus, spring 1967 (photo courtesy the Kelley family)
There were no undergraduate residential support services established yet, so they also served as resident assistants. The departments didn’t have separate buildings, so all the faculty, no matter the field, were in the Natural Sciences 1 building.
But, said Kelley, the novelty, the beauty of the expansive campus, and the feeling of being part of something extraordinary were intoxicating.
“It was very exciting because it was all new,” said Kelley, who ended up receiving the university’s first doctoral degree in biology (’70) and going on to teach at Cabrillo College. “We were definitely pioneers.”
The university has played an important role in her life ever since. It was where she met her husband, Al Kelley (now UCSC math professor emeritus); where their three children spent time roaming and exploring; and where their daughter, Joanna Kelley, and her husband, Omar Cornejo, are professor and associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, respectively.
As part of the 60th anniversary of UC Santa Cruz, the three Kelleys shared some of their memories of the campus and of university life.
A big change
Carole Kelley working in the lab, 1966 (photo courtesy UCSC Special Collections)
Coming from Chicago, Santa Cruz was a big change for Carole Kelley, but she loved it.
“It was California in the 1960s,” she said.
She made the big move at the encouragement of her mentor, the late Bill Doyle. She and Doyle met at Northwestern University, where she attended graduate school.
Doyle, a graduate of Watsonville High School, was eager to return to the Santa Cruz area and become a founding faculty member. Carole Kelley was one of three Northwestern graduate students who followed Doyle to UC Santa Cruz.
That first year, she recalls being enrolled as a UC Berkeley student because there wasn’t yet a graduate program at Santa Cruz. She was assigned to be a teaching assistant in chemistry even though that wasn’t her field, which was plant biology.
“Those first years were an adjustment with a new campus and everything new and getting set up,” Kelley said.
In those days, founding Crown College provost, the late Kenneth Thimann, hosted teas every afternoon. Thimann was a former Harvard faculty member and world-renowned plant physiologist. The events attracted graduate students, postdocs, and faculty.
It was at one of those teas that Carole met her future husband, Al. The couple met in August and married in late December.
Planting seeds of community
Al Kelley arrived at the university in 1966 as the second mathematician hired at the new campus. Raised in New England, he attended Montana State University (now University of Montana, Missoula) to study forestry, and worked as a forester and as a smokejumper for a time before enrolling at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in mathematics.
He was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, did postdoctoral studies in Moscow in the former U.S.S.R., and attended the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before he came to UC Santa Cruz. He remembers driving with a friend in the early 1960s to check out the location of the future campus.
“There was just a big field and redwoods up at the top,” he said. “But I was very taken with the location.”
Al and Carole Kelley at their UC Santa Cruz graduation, June 1970 (photo courtesy the Kelley family)
He arrived in the second year of the new university and quickly made several friends.
“The community was very small and you got to know almost everybody,” he said.
One good friend was the pioneering plant scientist the late Jean Langenheim, a groundbreaking field scientist. Because of his forestry background, Al Kelley enjoyed talking with Langenheim about plants. When the Applied Science building (now the Jack Baskin Engineering Building) was under construction, they collaborated on research involving a sinkhole in limestone. They had noticed that there was a root about the diameter of a thumb close to the edge and they wondered where it was from. The question came up about how to collect samples from roots far down at the edge of the sinkhole.
One Saturday, the pair drove up there and Al Kelley tied a rope from the bumper of the car and decided to rappel down 30 feet to investigate.
“Even at the bottom of the hole, that root was still the diameter of my thumb,” he said. “The root was going down, down, down and not decreasing in diameter. It was obviously following a crack in the limestone right there. Since the tree was gone, I cut off a piece of the root and brought it back up to Jean Langenheim.”
She sent a piece of the root to Berkeley, and her contacts there identified it as redwood.
“We thought we would write a paper about all of this,” Al Kelley said. “There is not too much literature about redwood roots. Jean and I wanted to write a paper about it but we never did. It is one of the things I regret not doing.”
Academic family
Al and Carole Kelley shared their love of UC Santa Cruz as well as plants and math with their kids. Joanna Kelley recalls spending lots of time at her father’s office and having conversations about biology and math at dinner. The family had no TV and visited a lot of national parks.
“My father read every interpretive sign at national parks,” Joanna Kelley said. “It would be a many-hour commitment.”
Joanna Kelley said she earned her Ph.D. because of her mother, who showed her it was possible to have an academic career and raise a family. Joanna Kelley and Cornejo have three of Carole and Al Kelley’s seven grandchildren.
After years of living elsewhere around the country, Joanna Kelley said she was glad to return to UC Santa Cruz a few years ago. Her parents, who retired in 1994 (Al) and 2004 (Carole), still live in Santa Cruz.
“I’m close to my parents, and in many ways UC Santa Cruz was a home to me,” Joanna said. “It’s wonderful to be able to carry on the legacy my parents started.”