Memories Of Maybeck

I have just read your beautiful article on Bernard Maybeck. However, Mr. Reinhardt’s description of Mr. Maybeck is very funny! He really did not have an “odd, gnomelike little figure.” He was five feet five inches tall. He did not wear bib overalls. He had one knitted tam-o’-shanter among the French berets he wore since Paris days. I did not think the “Mickey Mouse” description of the Berkeley hills was valid and it certainly was not dignified—or true.

When Maybeck worked, he wore work clothes. When he was in the city he wore custom-tailored suits—expensive ones from Brooks Brothers! He always gave an impression of dignity—no one ever thought him cute or a gnome or leprechaun. The Bohemian and Commonwealth clubs did not give membership to leprechauns.

Where are the “gunny-sack cloisters,” I wonder, and what makes University of California professors and students “weird”? I was there as a student and became Maybeck’s daughter-in-law in 1927 and I live in that “great redwood timbered house”—not so big, just nice. He would have liked the eighteen-cent stamp of the Palace issued Sept. 29.