The 1939 World's Fair in New York inspired a rival project on a much smaller scale in San Francisco Bay. There were other incentives for this project too.

The newly constructed Bay Bridge was anchored at the west end of the Oakland section on Yerba Buena (formerly Goat) Island, with a tunnel through the island connecting with the suspension spans crossing to San Francisco. This made Yerba Buena Island easily accessible by car or by the trains which ran on the lower deck of the bridge.

Pan American Airways was also looking for an anchorage for their new fleet of seaplanes used in crossing the Pacific, and the Navy was looking for additional facilities in the area.

With all of these incentives, Yerba Buena was enlarged by dredging mud out of the Bay and filling in the shallow area adjoining it. Although the artificial part was connected with the existing island, the new area was given the glamorous name of Treasure Island, after the fictional island in the novel of that name by Robert Louis Stevenson. He had lived in Alameda before going to the South Seas, and local legend claimed he was inspired to write the novel by some local scenery.

To protect visitors to the Fair from the cold wind which blew across the Bay during a major part of the time, high walls were constructed around the exhibit area. To ease the problem of covering the Fair on foot, which proved to be a serious handicap to the success of the New York Fair, a system of shuttle trains was devised, called Elephant Trains to carry out the Asiatic theme of much of the Treasure Island Fair. These open cars were pulled by electric mules like those used to haul dock cargo and warehouse materials.

While checking with the Bureau of Occupations at U. C. for part time work, I learned that Coca Cola was looking for a warehouse clerk and other help for their operations at the Fair. When I applied for the clerk's job, I learned that the fellow just ahead of me had gotten it. But I was hired as one of the crew to operate the soft drink stands on the island. The company had paid for the right to be the exclusive distributor of soft drinks during the Fair, and they saw this as a big advertising project.

Taking the job meant that I would not graduate with my class in June, 1939. But I was short on money, and the glamour of working at the Fair seemed appealing, so I quit school and went to work.

The Fair opened in February. This proved to be a financial disaster for many operators, because it was cold and unusually rainy most of the time. There were other problems which cut down on attendance, too.

So the Coca Cola management started laying off stand operators, and I worried for awhile that I would find myself out of work and out of school. Then I was offered a white collar job as a bookkeeper in the office, at less money than I would have earned as a full time stand operator but with more security and a higher level of opportunity.

The office area was out of sight of the visitors, at the sides and below the exhibit area, with no windows. My job was to correct and summarize the sales and inventory reports coming in from the stands. Having had an accounting course at U. C. helped me to some extent, but it was essentially a routine job. The main problem was that every day's activities had to be summarized by the end of the next day, or I would have kept falling behind. After a busy day when the weather was warm and attendance was good, my work was compounded because of the greater number of deliveries and sales, and because the operators tended to make more mistakes which had to be found and corrected.

One of the major headaches for me resulted from the company policy to omit the usual bottle deposit on their Fair sales. But they wanted to have a record of the number of bottles lost in the process, from people carrying them off to the mainland to get the penny or two deposit that was usually charged, or from other causes. Crews hired by the company as well as the Fair employees picked up the empty bottles but there was still much attrition.

From my standpoint, the total amount of empty bottles lost or on hand in the stands at the end of a day didn't matter; but the grand total had to match the individual stand inventories. So I spent many an hour during my 16 months on the job, looking for empty bottles in the inventory sheets that seemed to be missing because of simple mistakes in addition or subtraction which I hadn't caught. I also became adept at converting individual units to and from case units, with 24 bottles per case, using an adding machine that was built on the decimal system.

The day after a particularly busy day, I sometimes put in as many as 16 hours before staggering off to the ferry and thence to the apartment where I was living in Berkeley. But my compensa tion was that after being cooped up for hours in a windowless office, I came out to see the marvelous floodlights of many soft hues which lighted the buildings and grounds, and I heard the high fidelity music of the sound system which was the best available in those days.

The ferry ride was also a soothing cushion at the beginning and end of the day. The ferries, abandoned when the Bay Bridge was completed, were revived for the Fair. They were particularly convenient for employees because they ran more often than the trains which were scheduled for visitors. Here too the music was superior in tone to what was available on the radio. A popular favorite of the times was "Deep Purple", and I always think of the ferry ride when I hear that tune. The ferry I took ran from the end of the 16th St. pier in Oakland to the east side of the island, and I took the Key System train to and from the ferry slip.

Television was demonstrated as an engineering marvel in the RCA exhibit, but of course it was several years more before it was perfected for general home use.

The first year of the Fair closed in time for me to register for the Spring semester of 1940 at Cal, so I completed my under graduate work and graduated with the 1940 class. However, the second year of the Fair officially opened on Commencement day, and I had been working a couple of weeks before that, following finals. So I missed the ceremony, and finally got my sheepskin several months later by going up to the Administration Building where a clerk fished it out of a drawer.

I realized later that it must have been a disappointment to my parents that they could not see me get my diploma from my father's classmate, President Robert Gordon Sproul (or his surrogate), especially since I was the first of their sons to graduate. But at the time I shared the youthful disdain many students had for ceremonies of this kind, especially when it was on such a vast scale as Berkeley commencements were at the time. I was also concerned about my job. It didn't occur to me to ask my bosses for the day off, which they probably would have given me even though it was the opening day of the Fair.

The second year was much more successful for the Fair in general, and for the Coca Cola operations too. When it officially ended at the end of summer, I stayed on to help with winding up the book work and allied chores. One of my jobs was to help with counting (by hand) the nickels which were collected from the machines scattered around the island. This job had been covered by a special crew during the official run. After they were counted, I carried them off to the bank which was located on the island. There seemed to be no fear that anyone would want to steal them from me or from other employees on the way to the bank. How times have changed! Of course, a thief would have had to be strong and fleet of foot to run off with such a heavy load.

The last few weeks I worked at the Fair were tinged with sadness, as the place became emptier and emptier. The beautiful flower gardens were left to die or were cleared away to make room for other buildings. The plaster on the exhibit halls began to crumble, exposing the boards underneath and underscoring the temporary nature of their construction.

A few years later, when Carol and I were invited to the Navy Officers' Club by a chaplain friend, it was hard to recognize the place. Whatever may be left of the Pan American seaplane base is now a Navy installation, along with the buildings which were constructed at the time to be permanent when the Fair ended. But even for the workers on the island, and in some ways especially for us, it was a magical experience!