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Professor Kenneth H. Cardwell
Kenneth H. Cardwell retired from a career as a Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley and moved on to an active role with the Berkeley Historical Society becoming the organizations President in due course.
We encountered Professor Cardwell when he emailed us an announcement for one of A. C.'s speaking engagements which took place in Berkeley at the Wheeler Auditorium, located in Wheeler Hall on the UC Campus.
The event was scheduled for October 16, 1928 at 8:00PM.
AC was to speak on “Explorations of Plant Life,” and also show 7,000 feet of his own footage on plant and microscopic subjects. The announcement appeared in Berkeley Voice.
Professor Cardwell commented in his email that this sounded like Berkeley's first Green meeting, and it well could have been AC being a preservationist on the model of John Muir. Unfortunately, the world was headed in a very different direction.
Hearing from the Professor was much appreciated.
Professor Cardwell was younger than AC, having been born on February 15, 1920 in Los Angeles to Kenneth Harvey Cardwell and Beatrice Viola Duperrault Cardwell. Ken was a fifth generation Californian. AC was born in Medford, Massachusetts where his father, Dr. Harlin Henry Pillsbury was then practicing medicine.
The Pillsbury family, AC, his older brother and sister and their parents, Drs. Harlin Henry and Harriet Foster Pillsbury, came to California via ship, first down the East Coast to Panama, crossing the Isthmus by wagons, and then back up the West Coast in 1884.
AC was raised in Auburn, attending college at Stanford beginning in 1892. His son, Arthur, followed him there in 1924.
Brought up in Manhattan Beach Ken attended local schools, graduating in 1937. He went on to a two year degree at Occidental College two years later, transferring to the then small School of Architecture at UC Berkeley.
AC's daughter in law, the wife of his youngest son, Dr. Arthur Francis Pillsbury, attended UC Berkeley majoring in Math from 1928 – 1932 when they met and married. Dad, Arthur Francis, was born in Hollywood in 1904 so was sixteen years older than Professor Cardwell.
When AC died in Berkeley on March 3, 1946 the future professor was working for Thomson and Wilson Architects in San Francisco having served as a second lieutenant during World War II in the 35th Fighter Squadron as a pilot.
Dad was then a professor at UCLA in Engineering and would go on to be associate director for the University of California's associate direction, acting director and then director of the Water Resource Center from 1968 until his retirement in 1972. Obituary, UC Archive, CaliSphere More on AFP
