By Carole Long
Assistant City itor
J. Robert Fluor is the chairman of the Board of Trustees. J. Robert Fluor is the chief executive officer of Fluor Corporation. J. Robert Fluor is an alumnus. V J. Robert Fluor is^he chairman of the Board of Trustees. J. Robert Fluor is the chief executive officer of Fluor Corporation. J. Fluor is an alumnus.
At 57, Fluor has a track record of success of which few men can boast. Since he became chief executive of Fluor Corporation in March 1962 sales have grown to a whopping $2.9 billion in 1978 and the roster of permanent employees has reached 22,000.
From his early affiliations with the university's Trojan Club in the 1950s to his election to the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees in 1972, Fluor has had an evident impact on the university. In 1966, Fluor Corporation built the Von KleinSmid Center. He endorsed Heritage Hall and endowed the first chair under the Toward Century II program, the Fluor Chair in Chemical Engineering.
Huor attended the university from 1939 to 1942 and from 1945 to 1946, serving in between in the United States Air Force where he won the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal. He started out majoring in chemical engineering, but finished with a major in industrial management.
Fluor's life has not been all work and no play. While at the university he lettered in golf, a sport which he has not abandoned and he confesses to a healthy interest in horse racing. In 1965, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr. appointed Fluor to the California Horse Racing Board. Fluor and his wife have their own stable of thoroughbreds.
"Ever since I was a young boy dad used to take me to USC football games. He was an avid USC sports fan and he gave me a good indoctrination in the university's major sports programs," Fluor said.
In his seven years serving as chairman of the Board of Trustees, this past year has been perhaps the most eventful for Fluor.
His name appeared often in the media regarding his involvement with the university's proposed Middle East Center.
In a recent interview with Fluor — the man, the corporation executive and the university Board of Trustees chairman — at his 105-acre gleaming glass complex in Irvine, he discussed his views on a variety of topics ranging from the Middle East Center to the qualifications for a new president.
THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARCH
The selection of a president who will take over the reins in 1980 should be final within six months to a year. As chairman of the Presidential Search Committee, Fluor oversees the proceedings of the committee and makes sure the search moves on schedule.
Q: There have been rumors that some university leaders have been actively campaigning for the job of president of USC. What are their prospects for
success?
A: I think the new president will be someone that's not really looking seriously for the job. Someone who's really looking for the job probably won't get it. If someone is chosen from outside the university there will be a learning period before anything happens, but I don't think the university will suffer in that time frame.
Q: What qualifications do you think the next president should have?
A: I'd like to see th§ man from upstairs take the position but I don't think we'll get him. No really, whoever it is he has to be a good administrator and
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trojan
Volume LXXVI, Number 59
University of Southern California
Monday, May 14, 1979
Community undergoing ethnic, financial changes
By Mark Thompson
o,
'vergrown old trees shade most of the neighborhood, except where they have been tom out to make way for weed and trash-filled vacant lots. Cracked sidewalks lead down to curbs that are sometimes graced by the small iron rings once used for tethering horses. Now, though, battered cars clog the streets and leave oil stains everywhere, even in front yards where nonexistent lawns once grew. Cheap apartments squeeze themselves between three story Victorian mansions, their stuccoed walls a sharp contrast to the gingerbread and cupolas of the mellowed estate houses. A few birds chirp in the trees as they forage for what few bugs can be found in vacant lots. Everything else is quiet. . .
But there is another sound, almost inaudible. It is the sound of a few people working away inside dilapidated Victorians, in the foyers of Queen Anne cottages and in the kitchens of Craftsman bungalows. The sound is small, but a steadily growing number of people are following an ever-increasing national trend of movement back to the city. Like die residents of South Boston, Seattle and Cincinnati, they are coming into old, run down inner city areas and buying, at low prices, formerly elegant mansions and restoring them. What is unusual about these people is that they are not in some place like Boston or New York, where the Gentrification movement is common, but in the-heart of Los Angeles, in one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, ^University Park.
Mark Thompson, Daily Trojan design director, is a senior in urban and regional planning.
University Park, as the community near the campus is known, was once Los Angeles' most fashionable neighborhood. J.P. Widney, one of the
founders of the university, subdivided the area during the land boom of the 1880s, plotting out luxurious estates and wide streets. Both the new money and old money moved into the area, among them the Dockweilers, Dohenys and Sea vers. Just north of the campus, along Adams Boulevard, lies Chester Place, now the home of Mount Saint Mary's College. The college campus is the best example of preserved architecture in the area and typifies the atmosphere of the entire area before World War I.
1-iarge estate houses lined wide boulevards, giving way closer to the campus to smaller houses, some stores and occasional rooming houses and fraternity houses.
But between world wars, the neighborhood began to change. Other areas of Los Angeles became fashionable and the newly wealthy went elsewhere. Large houses became impractical; the lots were sold, with smaller houses being built upon them. What had been a small, isolated colony of blacks and Native Americans to the east of the campus grew, increasing the population of the area. By the time of World War n, the area was still considered fashionable, but going downhill.
Soldiers returning from the war crowded the area, as well as all of Los Angeles, creating a dramatic
housing shortage. The area became a temporary one for many people on their way to the suburbs. As they left for tract houses in the San Fernando Valley, what was left behind — chopped up mansions, worn-out bungalows, hurriedly built cheap apartments — were abandoned to a new arrival to Southern California, the blacks. In an area that had once been subject to covenants and regulations against blacks (theentire city at one time had restricted blacks to an area known as ''The Island,” a few miles south east of University Park) blacks were slowly gaining in numbers until, by the late 1950s, they were the largest group in the area.
In the meantime, absentee ownership increased dramatically. Few residents in the area today own their own home; a majority of the people rent the small apartments or rooms in the subdivided mansions. The look of the community deteriorated; few residences had gardens that grew more than weeds. During the 1960s, developers went on a building spree in the area, tearing down hundreds of Victorian and eclectic houses, replacing them with two-story stucco apartments that seemed to spread across Los Angeles like a rash. The city nearly allowed the neighborhood to die, or as in New York City's South Bronx, to rot away until nothing was left. The sidewalks cracked, the streets became pitted with chuckholes and trash piled up in the many vacant lots.
xVs middle class whites fled the area, the University of Southern California turned its eyes elsewhere. Pepperdine, already in what was considered a "better" neighborhood, shifted most of its activity to a luxurious new Malibu campus almost an hour away. Whatever plans USC had for a move were cast aside in the rush to catch up to the huge influx of postwar veterans. Immediately after the war, the admissions office was swamped with more than 1,000 requests for admission per week.
The university embarked on an expansion program that was unprecedented, growing from a confined, six-block tightly knit campus into one that would stretch over 100 acres and look more like a suburban campus than one in the heart of a city. There was almost no chance, no choice left, for the university to move away to the places that had been discussed — Malibu or Palos Verdes.
The Watts Riots took place in the mid-60s a few miles south of the university, and the shock waves of curfews and tight security were enacted in University Park. In response to what was felt to be a need for upgrading the community—for the benefit or both the campus and the resident* — the city and university joined together and sponsored the Hoover Redevelopment Project It basically cleared away a wide band of lots and streets surrounding the campus, bulldozing, as in a typical redevelopment, everything that stood in the way of the planned community envisioned around the school. The university moved on to a majority of the land, giving it room for new classroom buildings, athletic facilities and residence hails.
In the surrounding community, apartment- were built along the northern edges of the campus to house both displaced locals and students. For the most part, however, these new units were occupied by students. A new shopping center, University Village, provided a'fdcal point for the new growth.
The redevelopment project has ended but the university continues to expand. New apartment complexes for students are being built along Adams Boulevard, once considered the border of the student community. Campus Security patrols reach out further into the community each year, as students continue to move further away from the
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