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Florence Wyckoff's three-volume oral history documents her remarkable, lifelong work as a social activist, during which she has become nationally recognized as an advocate of migrant families and children. From the depression years through the 1970s, she pursued grassroots, democratic, community-building efforts in the service of improving public health standards and providing health care, education, and housing for migrant families. Major legislative milestones in her career of advocacy were the passage of the California Migrant Health Act and, in 1962, the Federal Migrant Health Act, which established family health clinics for the families who follow the crops along both the eastern and western migrant agricultural streams. This volume continues Wyckoff's story of the arduous political struggle for federal and state legislation providing for health services for migrants, the California and Federal Migrant Health Acts. Once this legislation was in place, Wyckoff was involved in a new battle to insure continuing budget appropriations for the migrant health programs. In her narration, Wyckoff provides additional chapters on her fifteen-year tenure on the Governor's Advisory Committee on Children and Youth, including the involvement of the Rosenberg Foundation in funding pioneering migrant public health services in the San Joaquin Valley; the changing living and social conditions of migrant workers during the period 1948-58; and the organizing of farmworker communities through citizen education and political action. Wyckoff also discusses many individuals who were significant in different areas of the struggle-- Anthony Rios and the CSO; notable growers, labor contractors, and public-spirited physicians, politicians and congressional staff members. The culmination of her varied work on the Governor's Committee was the organizing of the five Conferences on Families Who Follow the Crops, held in California between 1959 and 1967. The remaining two sections in this volume focus on Wyckoff's national and local work addressing and linking the issues of poverty and citizen participation. She chronicles her membership during the Kennedy Administration on the Study Committee charged with conceptualizing policy initiatives for what later came to be known as the War on Poverty. Some of the topics in this section include the concept of mainstreaming the poor; the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth; working with urban youth and the Watts Riots; the origin of the Headstart Program; and the function of the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty. In the volume's final section, Wyckoff discusses her philosophy of citizen participation; describes how the War on Poverty emerged in Santa Cruz County; outlines some of its political and social consequences; and indicates how the Watsonville community defined and attempted to meet the housing, educational, and health needs of the migrant families so crucial to the region's agricultural economy.

On January 23, 1976, UC Santa Cruz's second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned from office. He had served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. This second of two oral history volumes devoted to the Christensen era, is comprised of two interviews with Professor George Von der Muhll. The first was conducted by former Regional History Project director Randall Jarrell in 1976; the second by current Project director Irene Reti in 2014. Both set Christensen's resignation within the broader context of a tumultuous and transitional moment in the campus's history and Von der Muhll's incisive reflections on UC Santa Cruz as a "noble experiment" in public higher education. George Von der Muhll is now an emeritus professor of politics at UCSC. He arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1969, affiliated with College Five (Porter College), where he was acting provost at the time of the interview conducted by Randall Jarrell in 1976. Von der Muhll earned a BA from Oberlin College; MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Harvard University. He retired in 1994. Von der Muhll shares his thoughts, not only on the Christensen administration, but also on the reaggregation and reorganization programs of the late 1970s, in which he played a central role. He also contemplates UC Santa Cruz as an experiment in public higher education, from the perspective of fifty years after the campus was founded.

Michael Nauenberg, Professor of Physics: Recollections of UCSC, 1966-1996, is the edited transcript of a single interview conducted by Randall Jarrell on July 12, 1994. Nauenberg received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960. Prior to his appointment as a professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz in 1966, he was an assistant professor at Columbia University and a visiting associate professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Stanford University. At UCSC, Nauenberg served as department chairman of physics from 1970 to 1972, and again from 1983 to 1985. He was instrumental in developing both Stevenson and Crown Colleges, but in 1973 shifted his focus to building a graduate program in physics. He also founded and served as the director of the Institute of Nonlinear Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Nauenberg's primary research interests are in particle physics, condensed matter physics, and nonlinear dynamics, and he is the author of numerous publications in these areas. His most recent work is on a new quantum mechanical treatment of neutrino and neutral meson oscillations and on the dynamics of wave packets in weak external fields. He has had a long standing interest in the history of physics and mathematics, particularly during the seventeenth century, and published about a dozen articles on the works of Hooke, Newton and Huygens, and several reviews of recent books on Newton's Principia. He has a particular interest in the history of physics and has helped to bring historians of science and physicists together. In this oral history narration, Nauenberg shares his impressions and critical evaluation of UCSC as an experiment in public higher education, particularly the tensions between the college-based model and the pressures of the faculty tenure system within the large research University of California system. He points out that the founders of UCSC appear to have overlooked or underestimated the demands building graduate programs would make on faculty members' time. He discusses faculty appointments in the physics department, as well as other key faculty members on campus. He provides a sweeping and cogent assessment of the strengths and achievements of the physics department, and describes the struggle to establish the very successful Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, as well as his frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful political battle to attract the Institute for Theoretical Physics to UC Santa Cruz. This oral history is an invaluable and insightful historical contribution by a senior faculty member with an extensive and distinguished history on the Santa Cruz campus.

In an article summarizing his career, one newspaper characterized him as the "great graying grizzly bear of California politics," an old-style moderate Democrat whose career was animated by his dedication to his local district and his tireless efforts in behalf of its economic welfare. GOP legislator Bill Campbell once described Mello as "the only Democrat in the Senate with any experience as an entrepreneur," and one of the last of a dying breed of citizen legislators. Mello claims his approach to politics was derived partly from his mother--an openhearted, socially liberal Democrat, and partly from his father--a fiscally conservative Republican. The volume is divided into four sections, including Mello's early family life; his experiences in local politics as a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors; his election to the State Assembly; and his tenure as state senator from the 15th District. He begins the narration with anecdotes about the local Portuguese community in Watsonville, his high school years, and work in his family's apple-farming and cold-storage business. His initial foray into politics began in 1950 when he was a Democratic volunteer during the senate campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. His local public service career began when he served as a member of the California Agricultural Advisory Board and as a fire commissioner. His discussion of his early political career covers his tenure on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and the issues that faced that body, including the preservation of agricultural land and related environmental issues; the founding of the UC Santa Cruz campus; town-gown relations; and his relationship with UCSC's founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry. Mello's progressive agenda has included such issues as land preservation, gay rights, an assault-weapons ban, senior citizens rights, and the environment. His reputation for "bringing home the bacon" to his district has engendered both praise and condemnation; notwithstanding the criticism, he discusses how he paid scrupulous attention to his constituents' needs, never took anything (or any election) for granted, and in a Republican district, never faced a serious election challenge. Mello served two terms in the State Assembly, where he began his long involvement in senior issues as chairman of the standing Committee on Aging and also became an influential member of the Ways and Means Committee. During his tenure as state senator, Mello had a distinctive legislative record, frequently having more bills signed into law than any other senator. His legislative legacy includes a remarkable record of initiating senior citizen programs. He authored over 120 bills dealing with seniors, including the establishment of the California Senior Legislature; the first programs focusing on Alzheimer's, including respite care, adult day health care, and multipurpose senior service programs; important changes in laws affecting conservatorship and elder abuse; funding for senior meals programs; and nursing-home reform. Seniors throughout the state hold him in high regard for his work in their behalf. He describes his role in obtaining assistance for his district after the l989 Loma Prieta earthquake, in creating a visionary plan for the conversion of Fort Ord, and his efforts in behalf of UCSC--all of which demonstrate his consensus-building skills and his great imagination in crafting bills. During his tenure, Mello carried 727 bills and resolutions, 456 of which the governor signed; many of the others were integrated into other bills. The volume also includes Mello's thoughts on the legislative process; the role of lobbyists; the use of media in campaigns; the culture of the State Senate; and his reflections on the governors with whom he worked, from Edmund G. Brown to Pete Wilson. Mello also discusses his relationship with United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, Chavez's historical legacy, and his own views on relations between growers and migrant farmworkers.

The Regional History Project conducted six interviews with UCSC Chancellor Robert B. Stevens during June and July, 1991. Stevens was appointed the campus's fifth chancellor by UC President David P. Gardner in July 1987, and served until July 1991. He was the second UCSC chancellor (following Chancellor Emeritus Robert L. Sinsheimer) recruited from a private institution. Stevens was born in England in 1933 and first came to the United States when he was 23. He was educated at Oxford University (B.A., M.A., B.C.L., and D.C.L.) and at Yale University (L.L.M.) and became an American citizen in 1971. An English barrister, Stevens has strong research interests in legal history and education in the United States and England. He served as chairman of the Research Advisory Committee of the American Bar Foundation, has written a half dozen books on legal history and social legislation, and numerous papers on American legal scholarship and comparative Anglo-American legal history. Prior to his appointment at UCSC he served for almost a decade as president of Haverford College from 1978 until 1987. From 1959 to 1976 he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as provost and as professor of law and history at Tulane University from 1976 to 1978. He also taught at Oxford University, the London School of Economics, Stanford University, and the University of East Africa. Stevens begins his narrative by describing the circumstances surrounding his appointment, and his reasons for joining a public institution. His commitment to access-- that students from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds have an opportunity to attend a UC campus-- and to the undergraduate college system which characterizes this campus, were major motives in his decision to become chancellor. In these interviews he comments on the major policy areas which he addressed during his tenure, provides a critique of the institution as he found it, and explains the numerous changes he initiated. He describes the context for the strained nature of town-gown relations he faced upon his arrival and his efforts to establish a more harmonious relationship between the University and the city of Santa Cruz. His dilemma was to meet the obligations of the UC system in providing education for its students, while mitigating the impacts-- most notably, traffic congestion and housing-- which the growing campus student population had on the city. He describes the negotiations between city and campus officials which resulted in limiting the rate of growth and the size of the campus to 15,000 students, a precedent-setting agreement for a UC campus. He also discusses in detail the history of the Long Range Development Plan and the Report to the Committee on the Year 2005. Stevens speaks about the steps he took to decentralize the campus administration, to reinvigorate and reorganize the workings of the college system, and to establish a comprehensive budget process. These reforms stood the campus in good stead in light of the severe budget cuts which affected UCSC and the entire UC system during the state's recession. He discusses the many issues which engaged him during his tenure, including multiculturalism and the undergraduate curriculum, faculty teaching loads, his evaluation of the various academic disciplines and their faculties, his administrative appointments, and his efforts at fundraising and development. He also describes his relations with students, his thoughts on student activism, the development of the performing arts complex, and how his official social life was an opportunity for outreach to constituencies on the campus and in the community. Stevens recounts how he and his staff followed the campus emergency plan during the Loma Prieta Earthquake of October 17, 1989, when the campus suffered some $7 million dollars in damage, but fortunately no loss of life. When UCLA sent police and medical personnel to assist UCSC, Stevens saw that these resources were directed to the city and county of Santa Cruz in his efforts to be a good neighbor during this devastating period for the community. He described these interviews, held several weeks before he retired from the chancellorship, as a sort of de-briefing opportunity to reflect on his tenure. Stevens was unusually candid in assessing his chancellorship, freely acknowledging what he perceived as several missteps on his part as he came to better understand the culture of UCSC as a public institution.

The Regional History Project conducted three interviews with former Chancellor Angus E. Taylor on January 28-30, 1997. Taylor was appointed the campus's third chancellor in February, 1976, by UC President David S. Saxon during a difficult period in UCSC's history, when the campus's second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, resigned amidst controversy after a tenure of barely 18 months. Saxon asked Taylor to assume the chancellorship and to stabilize the young campus while a permanent chancellor was selected. Prior to his appointment, Taylor was a professor of mathematics at UCLA from 1938 to 1966; and served in the UC systemwide administration as vice president for academic affairs from 1965 to 1970, and as University Provost from 1970 to 1975. He was a seasoned veteran of the University and its unique system of shared governance; he knew the workings of the academic senate and University policies inside out and was well acquainted with the key figures in the University's administration, all of which stood him in good stead when he became chancellor at UCSC. Taylor begins his narration with the story of his early life and family history, and his years at Harvard College. He then describes the background leading to his appointment as chancellor of UCSC in 1976. Interspersed throughout his narration are comments on many aspects of his experiences as both teacher and administrator in the UC system (his participation in avoiding a confrontation between the UC Regents and the faculty during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and his comments on the history of affirmative action in the University) which influenced his approach to UCSC. He discusses the campus's most pressing problems and how he addressed them-the management and organization of the chancellor's office; interaction with divisional deans and college provosts; faculty recruitment; budget allocations and the budget process; and a serious decline in enrollment. Applications to the campus were down by over 22% in 1975, and had been declining for five years. Addressing declining enrollment was his first order of business and in his opinion proved to be the most significant and difficult problem of his tenure. He made a careful analysis of the admissions office situation, aided by the Stanford committee (appointed by President Saxon), which resulted in the difficult political decision to dismiss the controversial director of enrollment, Roberto Rubalcava. He then reorganized the admissions office and created a new position, vice chancellor of student affairs, to oversee this important campus function. Taylor addresses the major issues he faced in his efforts to stabilize the campus, including the relationship of colleges and boards of studies, the campus budget, reorganizing the chancellor's office and setting up various committees which improved communication among campus administrators, fundraising, town/gown relations, the role of the colleges, and completing the campus's academic plan. During his tenure he faced two major student political demonstrations-- the first protesting his handling of the Rubalcava affair and then protests over South African apartheid and the University-wide divestiture movement, which pressured the University to sell off its stock holdings in companies doing business with South Africa. He discusses his approach to student trespassing and law-breaking and how his solution (he declined to encourage prosecution) met with some disapproval from administrators at other universities who thought Taylor was setting a poor precedent. He also reflects on the mission of the University of California, his thoughts on affirmative action, the search for a new UCSC chancellor, and his relations with University Hall and with President Saxon.

Helen Hosmer was a writer, activist, and historian of California agribusiness. Her knowledge of California's agriculture dated back to the 1930s when, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked at the Poultry Division, College of Agriculture. Later she worked for the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which established camps for migrant workers in California. During this period Hosmer came to know FSA photographer Dorothea Lange, agricultural economist Paul S. Taylor, and many important figures in the labor movement in San Francisco. Because of her conviction that labor organizing was essential among agricultural workers, Hosmer resigned her government position at Farm Security in 1935 in order to have the freedom to work on behalf of her political beliefs. She co-founded the Simon J. Lubin Society, an organization that promoted unity between family farmers and migrant labor and exposed the anti-progressive political activities of California agribusiness. From 1935 to 1941 she published and edited the Lubin Society's "Rural Observer". The Society also issued special publications, such as Who Are the Associated Farmers? (reproduced in this volume) and John Steinbeck's Their Blood is Strong. Hosmer's memoirs also discuss California intellectual, cultural, and political life in the 1920s, and 1930s, red-baiting, the San Francisco General Strike and the Criminal Syndicalism trial, and the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee. After World War II, Hosmer temporarily put aside her political activism and spent over 25 years living in Mill Valley as a housewife, mother, pianist, and gardener. In the early 1960s she resumed her research and writing. She again turned her attention to California agriculture, writing articles for American West magazine, and serving as director for the research committee for the California Farm Reporter.

As President of the University of California during the period 1958-67, Kerr initiated, lobbied for, and oversaw UC's greatest era of expansion. In this volume of memoirs, Kerr discusses UCSC's origins in the context of the UC system's overall growth and evolution. He addresses three aspects of the campus's history. First, he reviews the thinking and planning which led up to the establishing of three new UC campuses (UCSC, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego) and their integration into the system as equal and autonomous campuses. He explains the demographics which gave the impetus to UC's growth; the role of the UC Regents; and his own lobbying efforts within both UC and the state legislature to gain political support for this major undertaking. Second, Kerr outlines in considerable detail his own contributions to the shaping of UCSC. Two important influences were his own undergraduate experience at Swarthmore College, and his tenure as Chancellor of UC Berkeley from 1952-58, which influenced his departure from conventional thinking in the creation of UCSC as an "alternative campus" within the UC system. Conceiving of a research university built around small residential colleges, with an emphasis on undergraduate education, close faculty-student interaction, and human-scale community life, was Kerr's contribution to the UC system and not incidentally, imaginative institutional response to the contemporary student movement's critique of the multiversity as a sort of dehumanizing intellectual factory system. Kerr discusses the selection of Dean E. McHenry as UCSC's founding Chancellor and their close collaboration in campus planning and design, indicating the specifics of their shared vision as well as their differences. He describes the site selection process, the eventual selection of the old Cowell Ranch, and how decisions on campus land-use, architecture, and landscape design were integral to their overall vision. In the final portion of the memoir Kerr provides an assessment of UCSC as it has come of age, detailing its strengths and weaknesses; touching on the campus's organizational, academic, and cultural status as it continues the process of self-definition towards a mature identity. He also comments on the evolution of student activism here and how it has influenced perceptions of the campus.

UC Santa Cruz's second chancellor, Mark N. Christensen, served the campus from July 1974 to January 1976. Christensen arrived at UCSC during a tumultuous point in the campus's history. Founding Chancellor Dean McHenry had brought to fruition his singular vision for UC Santa Cruz as an innovative institution of higher education which emphasized undergraduate teaching centered in residential colleges, each with a specific intellectual theme and architectural design. McHenry oversaw the planning and building of UCSC from 1961 until his retirement in June 1974. In the early years, UCSC drew high caliber students and earned a reputation as a prestigious and unique university. But by the mid-1970s, enrollments were falling. Internally, the campus was fracturing along fault lines between the colleges and the boards of studies (now called departments), as UCSC experienced the political and economic pressures of trying to establish a decentralized, innovative campus within the traditional University of California. Christensen's tenure as chancellor rather tragically ended in controversy after only eighteen months. Although most of the faculty liked Christensen as a person, they lost confidence in his ability to govern the campus. The Regional History Project never conducted an oral history with Mark Christensen, and he passed away in 2003. But in 1980, former director Randall Jarrell interviewed Christensen's special assistant, Daniel McFadden, about the Christensen era. McFadden's oral history is a perceptive and balanced reflection on the political climate of UCSC in 1976, just as what McFadden characterizes as a "Bicentennial Rebellion" was taking place. The Regional History Project published this transcript in 2012, nearly forty years after the interview was recorded (on May 20, 1976), because McFadden was only able to turn his attention to editing and approving the transcript after his retirement. Dan McFadden holds a BA and MA in intellectual history and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to UCSC, McFadden served as assistant chancellor for public affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. After leaving UCSC, McFadden held a variety of administrative positions, including deputy city manager for the city of San Jose, California.

Families Who Follow the Crops is divided into four sections. In the opening section Wyckoff discusses her participation in the New Deal gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Culbert L. Olson and her participation in the Olson "crusade", where she became an ardent advocate in behalf of the dispossessed migrant agricultural population in California. In the second section Wyckoff chronicles her political and social life in Washington, D.C., during World War II, where she continued to lobby for migrants at the national level by fighting to maintain the existence of the Farm Security Administration and to educate congress on agricultural issues. She worked with a number of organizations including the National Consumers League, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, the Office of Price Administration, and Food for Freedom on public education and legislative lobbying on agricultural issues. The third section begins with Wyckoff's settling in Watsonville after the war, where she became a key figure in developing health and social services in Santa Cruz County, including the establishment of the Pajaro Valley Health Council and the Visiting Nurses Association, and in influencing grassroots, community-based health and social service planning. She discusses a number of significant developments in the evolution of local social services. In the final section of the volume, Wyckoff discusses her work on the Governor's Advisory Committee on Children and Youth, to which she was first appointed by Governor Earl Warren in 1948. Her tenure on this advisory committee continued under four governors during which she continued to pursue her investigations of the needs of migrant families and children. One of the most significant developments which grew out of her work on the Children and Youth's subcommittee on Children of Seasonal Farmworkers was the organizing of the five Conferences on Families Who Follow the Crops during the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a major organizer of these events, Wyckoff and her colleagues brought together growers and migrant workers, and convened as well social workers, migrant ministers, teachers, public health workers, labor officials, and members of rural county governments, all of whom were working in different ways to address the living conditions and well-being of migrant families. Wyckoff's interdisciplinary approach in the organizing of the conferences was in itself pioneering and laid the groundwork for legislation addressing migrant health needs. This legislation established public health clinics for farm workers nationwide-- along both the eastern and western migrant streams. The volume concludes with Wyckoff's commentary on the first Conference on Families Who Follow the Crops.

Glenn Willson addresses campus developments from January 1965, when he joined the early faculty, until his resignation in 1975, when he returned home to England. During this period he held a number of campus appointments, including the provostship at Stevenson College from 1967 to 1975, and service as the chair of the Academic Senate; as Vice-Chancellor, College and Student Affairs; and as acting chair of the Theater Arts Committee. Willson focuses on three aspects of UCSC history in this volume. First, he provides his recollections of the complexities in building a public, residential, college-based university campus. A second major focus is the establishment and evolution of Stevenson College. Thirdly, he frames the development of UC Santa Cruz in the cultural and political context of the 1960s.

Florence Wyckoff's three-volume oral history documents her remarkable, lifelong work as a social activist, during which she has become nationally recognized as an advocate of migrant families and children. From the depression years through the 1970s, she pursued grassroots, democratic, community-building efforts in the service of improving public health standards and providing health care, education, and housing for migrant families. Major legislative milestones in her career of advocacy were the passage of the California Migrant Health Act and, in 1962, the Federal Migrant Health Act, which established family health clinics for the families who follow the crops along both the eastern and western migrant agricultural streams. This volume includes a discussion of Mrs. Wyckoff's childhood in Berkeley; education and development as an artist; foreign travel; the origins and early evolution of Mrs. Wyckoff's social concerns during the depression years; her activities in the Theater Union; the 1934 General Strike in San Francisco; activities in labor organizing in YWCA Industrial Department and workers' education efforts; the individuals who inspired and influenced her course as an activist in social and economic legislative activities.

In an article summarizing his career, one newspaper characterized him as the "great graying grizzly bear of California politics," an old-style moderate Democrat whose career was animated by his dedication to his local district and his tireless efforts in behalf of its economic welfare. GOP legislator Bill Campbell once described Mello as "the only Democrat in the Senate with any experience as an entrepreneur," and one of the last of a dying breed of citizen legislators. Mello claims his approach to politics was derived partly from his mother--an openhearted, socially liberal Democrat, and partly from his father--a fiscally conservative Republican.The volume is divided into four sections, including Mello's early family life; his experiences in local politics as a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors; his election to the State Assembly; and his tenure as state senator from the 15th District.He begins the narration with anecdotes about the local Portuguese community in Watsonville, his high school years, and work in his family's apple-farming and cold-storage business. His initial foray into politics began in 1950 when he was a Democratic volunteer during the senate campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. His local public service career began when he served as a member of the California Agricultural Advisory Board and as a fire commissioner.His discussion of his early political career covers his tenure on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and the issues that faced that body, including the preservation of agricultural land and related environmental issues; the founding of the UC Santa Cruz campus; town-gown relations; and his relationship with UCSC's founding Chancellor Dean E. McHenry.Mello's progressive agenda has included such issues as land preservation, gay rights, an assault-weapons ban, senior citizens rights, and the environment. His reputation for "bringing home the bacon" to his district has engendered both praise and condemnation; notwithstanding the criticism, he discusses how he paid scrupulous attention to his constituents' needs, never took anything (or any election) for granted, and in a Republican district, never faced a serious election challenge.Mello served two terms in the State Assembly, where he began his long involvement in senior issues as chairman of the standing Committee on Aging and also became an influential member of the Ways and Means Committee. During his tenure as state senator, Mello had a distinctive legislative record, frequently having more bills signed into law than any other senator. His legislative legacy includes a remarkable record of initiating senior citizen programs. He authored over 120 bills dealing with seniors, including the establishment of the California Senior Legislature; the first programs focusing on Alzheimer's, including respite care, adult day health care, and multipurpose senior service programs; important changes in laws affecting conservatorship and elder abuse; funding for senior meals programs; and nursing-home reform. Seniors throughout the state hold him in high regard for his work in their behalf.He describes his role in obtaining assistance for his district after the l989 Loma Prieta earthquake, in creating a visionary plan for the conversion of Fort Ord, and his efforts in behalf of UCSC--all of which demonstrate his consensus-building skills and his great imagination in crafting bills. During his tenure, Mello carried 727 bills and resolutions, 456 of which the governor signed; many of the others were integrated into other bills.The volume also includes Mello's thoughts on the legislative process; the role of lobbyists; the use of media in campaigns; the culture of the State Senate; and his reflections on the governors with whom he worked, from Edmund G. Brown to Pete Wilson. Mello also discusses his relationship with United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, Chavez's historical legacy, and his own views on relations between growers and migrant farmworkers.