Dana Lynn Craig Founders' Celebration essay
BY DANA LYNN CRAIG
To me, it seems like only yesterday.
I marveled at our Stanford tour guide's uncanny ability to walk backward, regaling us with fascinating bits of university lore while expertly avoiding every pothole and signpost in her path. I had visited the campus many times before. However, I wanted to see it again through the eyes of an anxious applicant.
Our guide had efficiently begun her discourse on the history of the university when she suddenly asked, "Anybody know why we call Stanford 'the Farm'?" She was rewarded with blank looks all around, except from my mother and me. The two of us exchanged small, knowing smiles, as the guide launched into the fabled story of the Stanford family, its immense wealth and holdings, and the tragic death abroad of their teenage son, Leland, in whose memory the university was built and dedicated. How ironic, I thought, that the Stanford family's loss of a son so dear, in a place so far from home, would so positively influence the lives of thousands of young people for decades to come.
Yet, at the same time my thoughts could not help but drift to another young boy named Juan, my grandfather, and his father, Aurelio, and why I knew the answer to the tour guide's query. When my grandfather was a child, he, too, would often visit the Stanford campus, accompanied by his father and eight brothers and sisters. While emerging as one of the world's great universities, in those days it was also a real farm, with vast tracts of land dedicated to agriculture. Aurelio would contract to plant and harvest the Stanford tomato and strawberry fields, and my grandfather and his siblings would help tend endless rows of the cardinal-red crops. When recounting this story, my grandfather always chuckled as he told of sleeping at night in the old Stanford barn, never dreaming that it would still exist today as a chic collection of shops and offices. It was a family "legend" I never tired of hearing. As our tour group paused on that hot August afternoon under the welcoming shade of those unmistakable Stanford arches, I reflected on how the ironies and vagaries of time and circumstance influence the people we become.
Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, could have retreated from the world into the depths of their grief at the loss of their son. Instead, they chose to immortalize their child's memory with this university. Their courage and generosity have enabled thousands of young people they would never know to live the kind of life they would have wanted for their own child. And so it is that every year on Founders' Day we gather together to recognize and thank the Stanford family for the profound influence they have had on each of our lives.
It is also appropriate, and a further honor to the Stanford family, that we take this opportunity to think about the many other people in our lives who have contributed to bringing each of us to this time and place. The Stanford family deserves our deepest gratitude for clearing the path that has led us all inexplicably and yet somehow inexorably to this community of scholars. Yet, there are others, too, who deserve our recognition and thanks. We all have our own personal "founders" who, through care and sacrifice, have helped set our feet along the many roads that lead to Stanford. I confess that chief among mine was great-grandfather Aurelio. He toiled unselfishly to create a life and legacy for the great-granddaughter he would never know, just as the Stanford family built this university to benefit generations of students they would never meet.
However, the privilege of having reached this place carries with it the responsibility and challenge of contributing to the lives of others. We can honor the Stanford family best by continuing their tradition of giving, and giving the world the very best of ourselves.