Pacific Index

Issue date: 5/14/09 Section: Student Life

Marketing Expert and Pacific Alumni Harry Beckwith

Good afternoon,

Congratulations, President Hallick, and welcome again to this special day, for me and you.

My path to this podium actually started here at Pacific, 42 years ago. On September 3rd, 1967, I arrived at Pacific with the distinction of being the freshman who least belonged.

I'd graduated from little NeahKahNie High School-- 80 miles due West on the Ocean--with a 2.16 g.p.a.--or, as I often spin it, the top 97 percent of the 1967 graduating class.

Fortunately, the summer before I graduated, Pacific had hired as its admissions directors two recent Pacific graduates, Jim Sumner and Cal Mosley. One of their first acts in their new jobs was to split for the Beach. To get reimbursed for their trip, they stopped at the first school they found, Neah-Kah-Nie, right on Coast Highway 101, and asked to meet with some prospective students.

Being a prospective student and not a real one, I was an obvious choice. I remember Cal and Jim staring at my transcript, and Cal smiling--although looking back now, I realize that smile was actually a smirk.

Three months later, Cal and Jim wrote a note saying "You're admitted, Harry," no doubt suppressing their laughter as they typed. That's the first of my great debts to Pacific. Perhaps because of my laughable high school transcript, however, I was sentenced to live in Herrick Hall, which also had a special distinction: It was America's least habitable living space.

To this day, I immediately associate free-associate the words "Herrick Hall", with Norman Bates's house in the movie Psycho,

The floors squeaked like piglets. My second-floor hallway had just two lights. Actually, they were not lights; they were 60-watt bulbs.

Six years after I left, filled with compassion for Pacific students, an arsonist torched Herrick. Ghosts were heard chortling as they fled the burning hulk-- They were free! They were free! A student told me that Herrick had not been destroyed; it had been relieved of its misery.

Fortunately, near the end of that first semester, I met another freshman named Jeff Greendorfer. Jeff owned what seemed by contrast a penthouse-- a posh twin room on the third floor on the back of McCormack-- and he invited me to move there in January.

But I had to endure Herrick until then, and, perhaps handicapped by living in a building that I was terrified to enter in the dark, I ended up the semester stumbling to three C's, two B's and an A: a 2.6 g.p.a.

Continued...

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