By various accounts, Leon B. “Pop” Reynolds had something of a fatherly flavor to his professorial persona. The civil engineering professor maintained a directory of his students and would visit them when he traveled. As the following anecdotes relates, he also was eager to provide opportunities to his students, but also to mete out a little discipline when they didn’t quite do as they were supposed to. Alumnus Earl Hagadorn shared the above photo from 1950, as well as the recollection that follows:
“On one occasion, the student chapter was invited to a dinner meeting of the ASCE San Francisco Section, and several of us rode with Pop Reynolds. Bayshore Highway was under construction in the area past Brisbane, and the interim travel lanes felt like a roller coaster, prompting him to a discussion of the energy-absorbing necessity of shocks and leaf springs—without which the car would have still been bouncing when we reached our destination. Neither he (nor Professor Clarkson Oglesby) would let an opportunity pass to engage students in chance encounters about entropy and other arcane topics.
“Professor Reynolds had arranged for me to help in the civil engineering office and augment my earnings from ‘hashing’ in the Cellar [working for food at a campus restaurant by that name]. One of the first requests was that I type the stencils and print a pending examination for one of his classes. Pop Reynolds was a perfectionist who graded the test papers on every part from the core engineering problems to correct spelling and English syntax, and he liked to say that almost no one had ever received a perfect score.
“To say that I messed up his test paper would be an understatement. I had typos, I split tables midway from one page to the next and the result was a boon to his students. He had not reviewed the handout in advance, and as soon as the test was distributed, hands shot up all over the room and Professor Reynolds was peppered with ‘got'chas’ and ‘What is this?’.
“Within the hour I was told that ‘Pop Reynolds is looking for you!’ By the time we talked a day or two later, he had cooled down and was his customary courteous, cheerful self —but my job as an administrative assistant was over.”
We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you’d like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein, Manager, Communications and P.R.