Chapter 2 The 1970s: Early Discoveries

In June 1971, Joanne and I left Manhattan in our yellow VW Beetle and made the 2,800-mile trip to Irvine, stopping along the way for visits with our parents in Illinois and Indiana. An early memory of our arrival in southern California was the absence of the mountains that I had told Joanne were visible from UC Irvine. We quickly learned that the San Gabriel Mountains above the Los Angeles area are typically obscured in summer by smog, which was bad in the 1970s. The early permanent buildings of UCI surrounded a large central park. At the time, the 1,000 acres the central campus would eventually occupy was predominantly open prairie, some of which had been leased back to the Irvine Company for grazing cattle. We rented an apartment in Costa Mesa, a city adjacent to the resort city of Newport Beach, which abutted the southwest side of the UCI central campus. The city of Irvine, which surrounds much of the UCI campus, had just been incorporated when we arrived. My memory is that none of the chemistry department faculty at the time lived in Irvine. [...]