100 Years of Making Dreams Come Through
San Mateo County History Museum exhibits a century of CSM memories
A colorful new exhibition at the San Mateo County History Museum in Redwood City gathers a century of CSM mementos, media, images, and bygone teaching tools to inspire community members to honor their past and to support CSM for its next 100 years.
The exhibition, College of San Mateo: 100 Years of Making Dreams Come Through, is titled to reflect CSM’s mission of quality education for all. It highlights CSM’s changes throughout its history to reflect advances in teaching and learning and in how best to serve everyone in its diverse community.
The exhibition was created by CSM Librarian Elnora Kelly Tayag and Associate Professor of History Tatiana Irwin, and by SMC History Museum Curator Dana Neitzel. It is supported by CSM and by the San Mateo County Community College District Foundation.
It opens with the splashy centennial logo by student Ryan Kelley into a vibrant space full of objects chosen to spark memories and conversation.
Items on display include mammoth bones and teeth excavated by history Professor Dr. Frank Stanger in the future Millbrae Highlands housing development in 1943; a vintage TV camera from KCSM-TV, the 1960s “College of the Air”; bulky computers from the 1980s; and cosmetology mementos including a farewell hankie inscribed by the donor’s sister graduates. A robust athletics corner includes lockers stuffed with Bulldog gear from the 1930s onward. The women’s athletic letters, including a Block S awarded to Catherine McLaren in 1932, illustrate CSM’s regard for women’s sports decades ahead of nearby universities.
The objects come from the CSM Library and Archives; from the history museum’s own collections; and from donations from alumni and other friends of CSM. They include dozens of documentarian Isago Isao Tanaka’s photos of activist youth and campus life.
The museum itself is a piece of CSM history, having opened on the College’s Baldwin Avenue campus in 1941. Its great impetus came from Dr. Frank Stanger (1887–1980), a history professor at what was then San Mateo Junior College. Stanger believed that good history teaching requires primary sources. Many of the museum’s first pieces were family heirlooms donated by students. In 1998, the museum moved to its present home in the county’s 1908 Old Courthouse. Its current director, Mitch Postel, is a graduate of CSM’s Class of 1972.
Several parts of the exhibition have sturdy facsimiles of vintage College publications that visitors can sit in vintage desks to read.
“I felt it was important for visitors, especially students of today, to engage as thoroughly as possible with this student material from the past,” Irwin said.
These include humor magazines; 1960s material from CSM’s renowned College Readiness Program for learners of color; the sharp-tongued Monday Morning Blues of the 1980s and 1990s, and entries to the Kirkbride Essay Contest, founded in 1939 to encourage students to develop research skills. From roughly 1939 into the early 1970s, the College gave cash prizes each year to students who submitted the best research papers, using primary sources, on some aspect of San Mateo County life.
A rainbow of graduation stoles from CSM’s learning communities – for interest groups, honor students, athletes and communities of color – talks back spatially to images from the College Readiness Program (CRP), itself a pioneering support community founded in 1966 that inspired countless individuals and programs to better serve all students holistically and with respect.
A video loop plays nearby of CRP director Robert Hoover and student Warren Furutani, calling during a 1968 protest for educational equity and the preservation of the CRP program. Hoover and Furutani both devoted the rest of their careers to educational justice: Hoover as community activist and leader of Nairobi College in East Palo Alto, and Furutani as a trustee of the Los Angeles Unified School District and Community College District.
College of San Mateo: 100 Years of Making Dreams Come Through is open through August 27, 2023, at the San Mateo County History Museum, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City, Calif. To learn more, go to historysmc.org.
