CSM Celebrities

Though College of San Mateo is known for its activists and athletes, hugely influential and hardworking entertainers have also passed through its doors.

Television impresario Merv Griffin attended CSM briefly in 1943.The creator of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, Griffin helped define the TV game show and talk show as we know them today. He put on his first public program as a freshman at then-San Mateo Junior College, an evening featuring exotic dancer Jean Aloise, whom he claimed he picked up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Miss Aloise and her “Spanish hula” shocked Carlena “Ma” Morris, wife of SMJC’s president, and, according to Griffin, he was promptly asked to leave. Still, Griffin was always very gracious to CSM and helped support its acclaimed broadcasting program. In 1965, he broadcast his New York-based Merv Griffin Show live from CSM’s Theatre to coincide with the closing of his guest Carol Channing’s Hello Dolly in San Francisco. In 1978, Griffin returned to CSM to tape a program to benefit telecommunications students.

Prolific TV and film actor Joe Costa, a staple of Hallmark movies, was an early member of CSM’s College Readiness Program (CRP). Known then as Carlos Costa, he met his longtime partner, Margarita Aguirre, in CRP. He most recently appeared on a 2023 episode of ABC’s A Million Little Things and in the 2022 TV movies A Maple Valley Christmas and Greed: A Seven Deadly Sins Story.

San Mateo-bornDennis Haysbertis best known as the President of the United States in the Fox TV series 24 and the deep baritone voice of Allstate insurance ads. The son of a sheriff’s deputy, Haysbert attended CSM in 1973–74 until his elder brother Charles Jr., on his deathbed with terminal bone cancer, urged Dennis to follow his acting dreams. Dennis Haysbert is proudest of portraying 24’s President David Palmerfrom 2001 to 2006, a role for which he received a Golden Globe nomination. He believes his work helped acclimate Americans to the idea of a Black president as realized in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama.

“If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people,” Haysbert told the Associated Press. “And I mean American people from across the board—from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base—to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first.”

Actor/comedian Dana Carvey grew up in Belmont, attended Carlmont High and studied at CSM before graduating from San Francisco State in the mid-1970s. As a young stand-up comic in San Francisco, Carvey modeled his infamous “Church Lady” on gossipy parishioners his Lutheran churchgoing parents encountered on the Peninsula. He brought the Church Lady to full realization upon joining the cast of Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992. He also originated the character of Garth Algar of Wayne’s World, two nerdy teens’ public-access cable TV show as featured on SNL and two hit films. In 1993, he won an Emmy for his work on Saturday Night Live.

Character actorKurtwood Smith studied theater at CSM before he, too, transferred to San Francisco State and ultimately earned an MFA at Stanford. From 1998 to 2006, Smith played Red Forman, a hawkish war veteran and killjoy dad on Fox TV’s That ’70s Show. He reprises the role, this time as a killjoy grandfather, on Netflix’s 2023 sequel That ’90s Show.

Specializing in stern authority figures, Smith has played two members of the U.S. Cabinet (transportation secretary in The Teddy Bears’ Picnic and Secretary of Defense in Broken Arrow); scary doctors in Girl, Interrupted and Boxing Helena; and both U.S. and Nazi leaders (Gen. William Westmoreland in A Bright Shining Lie and Dr. Josef Goebbels in The Nightmare Years). 

CSM’s Grateful Dead connection

A very clean-cut Phil Lesh ran for CSM student body vice-president as a freshman in December 1958, losing to Ralph “Robbie” Robinson. A talented jazz trumpet player since middle school, Lesh wrote charts and played first trumpet for CSM’s jazz band. He stayed at CSM for only one year before setting off on the path that would lead him to bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia and, eventually, a transformational role as the bassist of the Grateful Dead.

In 1964, Garcia, Bob Weir and others persuaded Lesh to learn electric bass for their new band called the Warlocks. Lesh’s jazz background inspired his uniquely improvisational and melodic approach to rock bass, making him one of the 1960s’ most influential musicians and a driver of the so-called San Francisco Sound.

It was with another CSM alumnus that Lesh co-wrote one of the very first songs he and the Warlocks performed as the Grateful Dead (there was already a band named the Warlocks, so promoter Bill Graham told them to find another name). “New Potato Caboose,” with lyrics by Robert Peterson ’58, debuted at Palo Alto’s Big Beat on San Antonio Road on December 18, 1965. The band had renamed itself only three weeks earlier. One of three songs Peterson, later an esteemed poet, contributed to the Dead, it was released on their Anthem of the Sun album in 1968.

The Dead became fabled not just for their sound but for the community of fans they created. Before disbanding in 1995, the group sold an estimated $293 million in tickets during their 30-year run. Lesh continues to perform Dead tunes and more with Phil Lesh and Friends. He and the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.

Fleetwood Mac’s CSM history

Most reporting about the band Fleetwood Mac places the creative meetup of key members Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks at San Jose State, which they both attended in the early 1970s after a few semesters at CSM.

However, according to CSM alumnus Javier B. Pacheco, later a UCLA-trained ethnomusicologist, Nicks’ and Buckingham’s musical partnership actually dates from their CSM years, when they both performed with Pacheco in a student band called Fritz.

Says Pacheco: “The origins of Fritz, originally named the Fritz Rabyne Memorial Band, began when Bob Aguirre, the drummer of the Castiles, invited [me] to play with the band for a [Menlo-Atherton] High School talent assembly alongside Cal Roper (bass), Lindsey Buckingham (guitar) and Jody Moreing (vocals and guitar).”

Buckingham had followed his elder brother Greg’s path to College Heights. All three Buckingham boys excelled at water sports, especially Greg, a top-ranked swimmer for the Bulldogs and Stanford, and the 1968 Olympic silver medalist in the 200 individual medley. Lindsey, however, was already set on music.

In 1967, Fritz’s members, all enrolled by then at CSM, needed a new female singer.

“Aguirre’s classmate Bob Fogel told him about a female singer he knew named Stevie Nicks,” Pacheco continues. “Stevie had graduated from M-A in 1966. Stevie had never been in a band, had never played anything other than country music on an acoustic guitar. But on stage, she quickly learned to fit right in.”

Fritz met up often in the CSM cafeteria, rehearsed at Buckingham’s parents’ Atherton home, played Top 40 covers around the Peninsula, and recorded a 10-inch acetate demo at Action Recorders in San Mateo during the band’s 3½-year life.  

Nicks herself pays ample tribute to her College of San Mateo years. Performing at San Jose’s SAP Center in 2018, she dedicated the song “Landslide” to a friend who drove her to CSM every day “for two solid years, back and forth” while she earned her associate degree.

Not until January 1975 did Buckingham and Nicks, by then a couple, join Fleetwood Mac. The band’s Rumors reached No. 1 on the U.S. charts (as did their 1982 album Mirage) and won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 1978. In 1998, Buckingham and Nicks were inducted with Fleetwood Mac into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nicks and Buckingham’s romantic partnership ended but their creative alliance did not. Buckingham performed and recorded off and on with the band until 2018.

Listen to a TikTok clip of Stevie Nicks and Fritz.

Learn more about the Peninsula’s rich rock history in Bo Crane’s bookTicket to Rock.