UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 1996 We of the University of California Academic Senate have produced this volume of In Memoriam in memory of our deceased colleagues. It is our hope that these memorials will serve as fitting tributes to these departed friends, who served the University so well.
Harold A. Stump Harold Stump, one of the most dedicated teachers of the University of California at Berkeley, died of Alzheimer's disease on September 7, 1996. He was born on March 3, 1905, on a farm outside Bodega Bay, the third child of Minnie (Ruth W. Haub) and John A. Stump. Christened Harold Andrew Stump, he was known as "Tine"—for tiny—to family and friends—a name given because he was small as a baby and remained small throughout childhood and later life. After the death of her husband, Minnie Stump moved with her young children, Vera, John, and Harold, to Santa Rosa, where she reared them, and supported them by giving piano lessons. About 1922 the family moved to 50 Harrison Avenue, Sausalito. None of the children married and it remained the family home even after the death of their mother. Harold had bachelor quarters in Berkeley while teaching at the university, but always considered Sausalito his home. Harold graduated from Santa Rosa High School in 1922. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he participated in student dramatic productions by constructing sets and by acting. He graduated in 1926 with an A.B. in architecture. For the next four years he worked as a draftsman in the San Francisco architectural office of Kent and Haas. In 1931 he traveled to Europe to study the works of ancient and modern architects and painters. He returned in 1932 to work for various architects, while studying French, mathematics, and education at UC Extension where he earned a secondary teaching credential. In 1933 he began teaching at Fremont Union High School in Sunnyvale, and during the summers worked as a draftsman in the office of William Wilson Wurster. In 1939 Harold was appointed a lecturer in architecture at Berkeley. In 1941 he enrolled for a master of arts degree in art and French at Mills College. There he was appointed assistant to the French abstractionist painter Fernand Leger, acting as his interpreter for the summer program. He entered the academic ladder at Berkeley as an instructor in 1942 and rose through the ranks, reaching that of a professor in 1968, in 1969, as a Fulbright scholar, he taught at the Black Sea Technical University in Trabzon, Turkey, and later conducted seminars at the American University of Beirut. In 1972 he joined the ranks of professors emeriti. After his retirement he taught again at the American University at Beirut. The eruption of civil disorder in Lebanon, at the close of 1976, ended his teaching career. Growing out of his interest in aesthetics, art, and architecture, Stump began a research program. In 1944, on the interrelation of painting, sculpture, and building by initiating correspondence with painters Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Amedee Ozenfant, and architects Eric Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. Their responses were rich and varied, but unfortunately, Stump neither summarized the data he had gathered nor published his conclusions. Research meant to him enrichment of his teaching. Some summers, and on sabbatical leaves, Harold traveled extensively. He visited Mexico and Central America, toured Europe, including Russia, crossed into Northern Africa, took trips to Egypt, and Nubia, explored Ethiopia, and traveled untrodden paths in Greece, Turkey, and the Near East. Whether climbing mountainous paths to reach isolated monasteries or riding donkeys to explore rock-cut temples, Harold carried a camera, and added thousands of documentary photographs to his outstanding collection of western European, African, and Near Eastern architectural monuments, ancient and modern. This collection of over 30,000 well-documented Kodachrome slides is now part of the Harold Stump Architectural Foundation of Berkeley, which has made them available for use by architects and scholars. Architectural historians have drawn on the collection to illustrate their scholarly publications. Stump was first and foremost a teacher. He was an excellent one, and his teaching was consistent with his belief in the need to marry theory with physical design. To paraphrase one of his students: "In all my years at Berkeley, Harold Stump [was] the most learned and talented teacher that I encountered. His grasp of the subject, his range of knowledge, and his manner of transmitting information [were] talents rare enough, but his ability to infect a student with his singular curiosity and spirit [was] an absolute gift. His joy of life and fearless style [bridged] the gap of more than one generation. While most of the teachers at Berkeley were involved with design solutions, Mr. Stump developed in his students a point of view. . . others were teaching technique and fashion, he was teaching the approach of logic and reason." In 1972 former students, many now architects in Northern and Southern California, gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to pay respect to their teacher and to celebrate his retirement. Harold was noted for his exceptional memory. At the beginning of the second week of a class, often numbering more than one hundred students, he would address each student by name. His concern for, and interest in, student problems carried outside of the classroom and led to his appointment as assistant dean for student affairs in the College of His students remember him as an instructor who always challenged them on the solution of their studio design projects, and insisted that they have a reason and purpose for their proposals. Alumni who returned to visit were always impressed that Stump not only recalled their names, but knew of the progress that they had made professionally. He also used his exceptional memory of the architectural monuments he had visited, and his meetings with the leading architects of the modern movement, to illustrate design principles in his studio teaching. As a designer, Stump specialized in the planning and design of magnificently proportioned wood frame houses in contemporary style. His work, made particularly striking by high ceilings and use of a bold scale, includes a rambling house on a knoll overlooking portions of Pope Valley, Napa County, and an elegant hillside house in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Santa Cruz County. He also created a superb interior renovation of the library and study of the Mortimer Leventritt house in San Francisco. Colleagues, students, and friends remember Harold Stump as a person who prized individual integrity and a person who gave unstintingly of himself to the university. And they remember his cars. As a native Californian, Harold had a passion for cars and driving. He owned a 1931 Ford Model A Roadster with a dashing rumble seat. He kept it in Concours d'Elegance condition. When it was stripped by vandals, he replaced it with a flashy red Alfa Romeo. He enjoyed driving at top speeds along the freeways of California. Stump traveled thousands of miles in the state, in Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor visiting out of the way places, forever exploring. His reported observations transcended time and place, and imparted to his students and colleagues a fresh understanding of cultures, old and new.
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