Marjorie Brace Landrum (CSM Class of 1924)
First student to register at then-San Mateo Junior College
Longtime secretary at Mills Memorial Hospital
“The junior college came along at just the right time. I really don’t know exactly what I would have done otherwise.”
The first student to register when San Mateo Junior College opened its doors in August 1922 was a Burlingame teenager, Marjorie Brace. She had hoped to go to Stanford, but couldn’t afford it. Her father was a clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Stanford’s $225 tuition was a large chunk of his salary.
Higher education for everyday Americans was relatively new in 1922 and growing popular fast. San Mateo Junior College — today’s CSM — was founded to expand access to learning by offering high-quality lower-division courses that students could attend for free while living at home. The junior college initially shared quarters with San Mateo High School, then on Baldwin Avenue.
“It really didn’t seem like we had left high school,” Brace remembered. In fact, she had attended high school in that very same building. But to Brace, the arrangement represented hope.
“The junior college came along at just the right time,” she wrote. “I really don’t know exactly what I would have done otherwise.”
Students flocked to the new college not just from the Peninsula, but also from San Francisco and the East Bay, which had no community colleges of their own.
“From the day the college opened, the small student body was like a family, with everybody having a hand in sports, drama and student government,” Brace wrote.
After Brace’s — and the college’s — first year, San Mateo Junior College outgrew the high school and moved into a dilapidated mansion built decades earlier by city founder Charles Polhemus in what is now San Mateo Central Park.
Women students took gym class in the mansion’s kitchen. English classes were held in an upstairs bedroom hung with satin tapestries. The veranda was walled in and used as library stacks, and the wine cellar became the student store.
By Brace’s graduation in 1924, there were 137 students. By 1926, there were 430. In 1927, San Mateo High opened a new campus and the junior college moved back to Baldwin Avenue. Though much loved by the community, not until 1963 would College of San Mateo occupy a single, purpose-built campus.
Marjorie Brace went on to help support her family during the Depression, working as a stenographer for a real estate firm and then as the longtime secretary at Mills Memorial Hospital in Burlingame. She was 39 when she married R. Rex Landrum, a naval ordnance-man in World War II who returned to duty in the South Pacific just days after their July 1944 wedding. After the war, the couple moved to Menlo Park. Marjorie Brace Landrum died in 1996 at the age of 95.
