Setting the Stage
During World War II, the Santa Barbara airport and what is now
the UCSB Main Campus were a Marine Air Base. At the end of one
of John Wayne's WW II movies, he says that he is returning from
the Pacific arena to the Marine base at Goleta. During the war,
a Japanese submarine actually torpedoed the coastline just west
of Isla Vista, the only strike against U.S. soil during the
war. It appears, however, that this was not an intentional strike
against the U.S. mainland, but an attempt by one submarine commander
to gain some revenge for an insult he received while laboring
here as a farmworker some years earlier.
After the war, the Marines sold the portion of the Isla Vista
mesa they owned to the Regents of the University of California
for the nominal amount of $10. In 1953, the 1,725-student campus
of Santa Barbara College moved from its columned-campus in the
foothills above Santa Barbara (now the site of Brooks Institute
of Photography) to what is now the UCSB Main Campus. Santa Barbara
College, a teachers college formed initially in the Twenties,
became a campus in the UC system a few years later.
Besides the bargain price for the Main Campus property, there
were probably other reasons why UCSB was built on this particular
site. Because oil production in Isla Vista never paid off, Signal
Oil was stuck with nearly worthless land. But Samuel Mosher,
the president of Signal Oil, was on the UC Board of Regents.
As was Thomas Storke, owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press,
the region's major newspaper. Storke owned 89 acres north of
the Marine base, stretching to Hollister Avenue and what would
become Storke Road. Both of these men knew a good deal when
they saw one.
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