Letter from the President

UNCOMMON MEN

By Gerhard Casper

ix years ago, immediately following the news conference announcing my appointment as president of Stanford, I was first introduced to Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett. I had, of course, heard of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and of the Packard Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation. However, I knew of Bill and Dave only as fabulous mythical figures. Clearly they were of great importance to Stanford; otherwise, I would not have been taken straight to Dave's office at HP to meet them. But that was about all I understood when I first set eyes on these, at the occasion, fairly reticent, kindly gentlemen, one pretty tall and the other (dressed in shorts) not so.

In the years that followed, I came to appreciate that it is no exaggeration to say they are uncommon men, part of a small pool of people in a class by themselves in their support of, and loyalty to, our university.

In 1930, the second year of the Hoover administration in Washington, Bill and Dave entered Stanford. The autobiography of Frederick Seitz, a Stanford alumnus and former president of the Rockefeller University, contains an account of fellow students taking courses in physics: "Others in the department included William R. Hewlett, usually to be found in the library. . . . Hewlett's future partner in business, David Packard, was a major football hero on campus."

Bill majored in electrical engineering, stayed on for some graduate work with Associate Professor Fred Terman and, in 1935, went east to MIT. There exists a

President’s Letter (Plain text)

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