Here is a sample of anecdotes from UCLA’s past:

• The Wolfskill Ranch and the surveyor’s choice
• ‘Something in a Name’
• The student press
• The wrong end of Jumbo
• The USS Seid

The Wolfskill Ranch and the surveyor’s choice
The first developer of the land that Westwood and UCLA now occupy was Don Maximo Alanis, a Spanish soldier who obtained title to 4,438 acres under a Mexican land grant in 1843. He called it San Jose de Buenos Ayres.

After his death, it changed hands several times. Then in 1884, it came into the possession of John Wolfskill, a forty-niner who had come to California to seek his fortune and paid $10 an acre for the land on which UCLA now stands. He built a ranch house near the present Mormon Temple.

Several years later when he decided to have his holdings surveyed, he hired an engineer named Fremont Ackerman. When the job was finished, Wolfskill offered Ackerman part of the land in exchange for his work. The surveyor shook his head and said he preferred cash instead.

Fifty years later, Ackerman’s survey tracings and blueprints made in Southern California between 1898 and 1939 were presented to the UCLA Library by his son, ASUCLA Executive Director William C. Ackerman (the namesake of Ackerman Union).

“Now if dad had only accepted a few choice acres of the Wolfskill Ranch …” he mused.

Story adapted from UCLA on the Move, by Andrew Hamilton ’35 and John B. Jackson ’27.