Merv Griffin (1943)

Entertainment mogul got his start staging a spicy San Mateo Junior College assembly

“In truth, I didn’t ... have any ambition to be on center stage myself. I just wanted to make things happen.”

 -- Merv Griffin, 2003

Merv Griffin (1925-2007) changed television in many ways. He developed key features of the TV game show and talk show as we know them today. He created Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy—a talented musician, he wrote the theme music for the latter—then branched into real estate, buying hotels and casinos and successfully going head-to-head with Donald Trump.

Yet Griffin never forgot that he was a son of San Mateo Junior College, which he attended briefly in 1943. He supported CSM, particularly its broadcasting programs and KCSM-TV, throughout his eventful life.

Mervyn Edward Griffin, Jr. was born in San Mateo, the son of a stockbroker who was also a nationally ranked tennis player for San Francisco’s Olympic Club. Four uncles were also tennis greats, including Clarence “Peck” Griffin, a three-time U.S. men’s doubles champion. Merv Jr., to these men’s chagrin, was pudgy and unathletic.

During the Depression, Merv Griffin Sr. lost his job and then the family home. When Griffin was 5, the family moved in with his maternal grandmother and her sisters near Coyote Point.

“I still remember crying when we finally left our house,” Griffin wrote in his 2003 memoir, Making the Good Life Last. “And believe me, those early childhood experiences stick with you in a powerful way. ...

“Probably as a result of my family's financial worries, I became a very entrepreneurial child,” Griffin recalled. He sold magazines and Christmas wreaths door to door.

There was a bright side, however: The new home had a piano, and Griffin’s Aunt Claudia taught him to play. He soon channeled all his energies into music and entrepreneurship.

“Since early childhood,” he wrote, “my fantasy had been to do what Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland did in the movies, which was to clear out a barn and have it become the stage set of a Broadway musical.”

America was at war when Griffin graduated from San Mateo High in 1942, but Griffin’s weight and a heart murmur rendered him 4-F, unfit for service. He enrolled at San Mateo Junior College the following year.

On Sept. 17, 1943, Griffin organized and presented the first assembly of the San Mateo Junior College school year. It featured an exotic dancer named Jean Aloise, whom Griffin had found on San Francisco’s Tenderloin and who, according to the campus San Matean, was “enthusiastically received and applauded” for her work in “Spanish, hula and tap.”

Less enthused was Carlena “Ma” Morris, wife of college President Charles S. Morris and a key figure in student affairs. Griffin left the college soon afterward. He claimed he was asked to leave, but he was always very gracious to CSM and helped support its broadcasting program.