centennial history project interview: gail...

LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

Centennial History Project Interview: Gail Lammersen Belt, 1960

January 19, 2011

Ubiqus/Nation-Wide Reporting & Convention Coverage 2222 Martin Street, Suite 212 – Irvine, CA 92612

Phone: 949-477-4972 Fax: 949-553-1302


Centennial History Project Interview: Gail Belt 1

Gail Belt Interview

[START Gail__1_.mp3]

MS. LIN SAKAMOTO: Thanks for calling back first of all. Can we start with your background before attending Marymount, what high school did you attend?

MS. GAIL BELT: I’m a graduate of Marymount High School on Sunset Boulevard, class of ’56.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Why did you decide to attend Marymount?

MS. BELT: Well, I was in elementary school, which was St. Francis de Sales Elementary School in Sherman Oaks in the Valley. That school is staffed by the RSHM and I received a scholarship after eighth grade to Marymount High School, so that’s why I went to Marymount. When I graduated I basically had a choice of UCLA and Marymount and was accepted at both and actually began at UCLA, but I frankly got a little bit overwhelmed and I transferred to Marymount immediately.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Do you think it was mostly the size and the environment rather than anything else that made you make that decision?

MS. BELT: I think it was just a combination of things. I wanted to live on campus and if I stayed at UCLA I would have been a commuter and I wanted the experience of living on campus, so that basically drove me quickly to change my mind and attend Marymount.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Was the fact that Marymount was a Catholic institution important to you?

MS. BELT: It was of significance, but I would not say it was a major factor at that time. I felt very comfortable with the Catholic education I had received through high school.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Loyola has three specific core principles, a commitment to social justice, academic excellence and the education of the whole person. Did Marymount have similar core principles?

MS. BELT: You said that there are three specifics, social justice, education for the whole person and what was the other one?

MS. SAKAMOTO: The academic excellence.



MS. BELT: What was your question?

MS. SAKAMOTO: Did Marymount have similar core principles?

MS. BELT: They did have core principles. They were certainly a factor in my pride in being there. I really considered Marymount, again, a school that educated the entire person and basically prepared you way beyond your classes for life in the real world.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Do you believe it’s similar to what Loyola upholds, their core principles? Do you believe that they’re similar?

MS. BELT: I believe they were very similar. At the time that I was at Marymount College, we were very, very close to Loyola University. There was a lot of interaction between the schools.

MS. SAKAMOTO: I noted from your bio that you were the last class to graduate from Marymount College when it was located on Sunset Boulevard. Can you tell me about that location and the physical campus?

MS. BELT: Obviously, that campus is the campus that I have very, very fond memories of. I did spend a lot of time at Loyola. I spent more time at Loyola than I ever spent on the interim Marymount campus in Palos Verdes, that’s the one that I have the least connection with. I was never on that campus, other than I was student body president and I did speak at the dedication and the groundbreaking, the year before they opened, but I, myself, never attended school there, so I have no relationship with that at all. On the other hand, the Marymount College campus, while it was a separate building, it did share a physical—they didn’t share the physical plan, but they directly adjoined each other in the sense of the high school and the college. We did share, at that time, an auditorium. That’s basically the only building that we shared, but the classes were actually in different buildings and we didn’t have a great deal of interaction with the high school students when we were—

[END Gail__1_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --in the college, but the physical plant was very similar.

MS. SAKAMOTO: I have heard from other interviews that the rules



were quite strict at Marymount, can you describe the rules that you had to follow?

MS. BELT: It was a whole different world. You can’t possibly - - , well I didn’t mean that to sound condescending, but it’s just really kind of funny, because I look back on it now and it’s really funny, except that we took it for granted of course. The rules were very strict. You had lockouts, you had to be in by I think it might have been as early as 10:00 p.m. on weeknights, you had to be in by midnight on weekends unless you had gotten permission to come in at 1:00 and nobody ever got permission to be out past 1:00. So you made a point of becoming friendly with some of the students who lived off campus and who commuted, the ones who lived around the Valley or L.A., so that you had a place to go on weekends if you were going to be out on a date that was going to be more than past midnight. I’m laughing about it because I had really kind of forgotten about it, but looking at it today, it was extremely strict. One of the funny things that I’ve got somewhere in my scrapbook, The Los Angeles Times did an interview at that time and I was interviewed from Marymount and there were a couple of guys from Loyola that were also interviewed and I believe there might have been people from other campuses as well. The gist of it was “morals and social manners” and so forth. Reading it today, I came across it maybe six months ago, and it was what guys were looking for to please girls, and what girls expect from guys. Things like if they didn’t open the door for you, you wouldn’t have a second date. It was into politeness and it was into consideration and those really weren’t bad things, but it was a very different world.

MS. SAKAMOTO: It sounds very different. Do you have any specific day-to-day recollections regarding life at LMU, other than the dorm situation that you described? Maybe the food and the classes that you had while you were attending?

MS. BELT: At Loyola Marymount or at Marymount College?

MS. SAKAMOTO: At Marymount.

MS. BELT: At Marymount, absolutely. As I said, our first classes were usually, I can’t remember now frankly whether they were 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m., but basically you were up early and most of us walked over to the dining hall and it was interesting, because this was different too. There was no such thing at that time at the dining hall, as a cafeteria.



The Religious of The Sacred Heart of Mary order was a very unique order. They were founded in France and they kind of went with French ways of doing things or perceptions. In the Marymount order at that time, if you were a professor in the college or a teacher in the high school for that matter, you were addressed by Madame. If you had a religious vocation but you were not educated, or if you were educated and chose to serve in a different way and not be in the teaching, education profession, that meant that you were one of the people in the order who prepared the food, who did the housekeeping, who did the laundry, who did all these things that are necessary to make life pleasant. Those particular members were addressed as “Sisters”. Now they were certainly equal in the eyes of the Lord, and they were equal with each other within the convent, but we knew “the sisters” as the ones who prepared our food, etc. So we were served breakfast every single morning by the sisters and we were served dinner every single night by the sisters. The only time we went to the cafeteria, there was a cafeteria, was at lunch. Actually one of my fondest memories of that, is of one of my favorite professors. We knew her at one point as Madame and then that got changed to “Mother”, so the professor began being addressed as Mother David or Mother whatever. My favorite was Mother Martin who LMU knew as Sister Martin Byrne. By then all the nuns were called “sister” and they, by then, also used their own birth last name.

[END Gail__2_.mp3]


MS. BELT: Sister Martin taught for many years at Loyola Marymount as well. She was a brilliant woman. She was the first woman PhD from UCLA in business many years ago. She was absolutely brilliant as well as a very fine person. She started at Marymount College as I said, and she taught until her death at Loyola Marymount. I knew her first at Marymount College, she taught calculus, she taught business, she taught all those sorts of things, but she very much wanted to be involved with the students. She volunteered and was the cashier in the cafeteria at lunchtime just because that was a way for her to interact with the students. That’s the way meals went. A typical day you’d be up by 8:00 or 9:00 and if you weren’t, this is different too. If you came back from your first class at 10:00 or any time and you hadn’t made the bed before you left, your room was locked. You had to go find the Dean of Students to get into your room.



MS. SAKAMOTO: What? Because you didn’t make your bed, you were locked out of your room?

MS. BELT: That’s right, yes absolutely. You were supposed to be an adult and not be sloppy. If your room was left a mess you didn’t get back into it when you came back from your first class. You had to track down the Dean of Students. It was definitely different. Most of our classes, well obviously we had classes like any college, you might have an 8:00 and a 9:00 and then maybe not have anything until 2:00 or you might go straight through.. We were like all kids, so we tried to get all our classes in the morning, so we could head for the beach in the afternoon. That depended on your major and your interest in different courses that you wanted to take and all the rest of it. It was probably in that sense pretty much like any school. You were up, you got something to eat and you headed for classes. In those days at Marymount College, smoking was not permitted except in The Smoker. I never smoked, so that didn’t really bother me, except that all my friends smoked, so if I wanted to see anybody, basically the hangout at Marymount, like The Lair at Loyola was The Smoker. So whether you smoked or didn’t smoke, that’s really where everybody hung out between classes, or after classes, or in the evening. If you wanted to see the friends that did smoke you had no choice but to be there, because that was the only place they could be.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Was this a designated smoking room or was it just like an area outside?

MS. BELT: No, it was an inside area in the lower level of the building where all the dorms were. The lower level of that building had a number of rooms. One of them was a lounge area, very nice and very nicely appointed with televisions and piano and carpeting and good furniture and that sort of stuff, but next to the lounge area was what they called The Smoker. It was a big room, it had lots of sofas, lots of chairs, had a coffee machine, had a Coke machine and then you had the ability there to smoke. You could also smoke outside, but that was the only place inside that you could smoke.

MS. SAKAMOTO: So you spent most of your leisure time with your friends in that area?

MS. BELT: If it was a weeknight that was probably where you would spend time. Since we were so close to Westwood Village, we



often would go down to Westwood. There was a very, very popular delicatessen called “The Village Delicatessen” or the VD and there were several popular coffeehouse type restaurants. There was also a drive-in where you—I don’t think they have drive-ins anymore, where somebody came to your car and took your order and there was a “Will Wright”, there was all that kind of stuff. Westwood Village was about six blocks away so you could walk or you could drive.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Very close by.

MS. BELT: Very close by. Well, UCLA was across the street and we were on one side of Sunset Boulevard and UCLA was on the other side of Sunset Boulevard and there was a road that veered off of Sunset Boulevard called Westwood Drive basically that divided

[END Gail__3_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --the two schools and took you down to the Village and that was really where all the UCLA people hung out as well.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Because it was such a close proximity to UCLA, do you think you had many friends that went to UCLA as well?

MS. BELT: A ton. My Marymount High School class, there were probably about six of us that went to Marymount College, there were probably about 10 or more that went to UCLA and another 10 that went to USC and then after that it was Stanford and Berkley and some of the other places and maybe two or three went East. In those days, if you were in California most people tended to stay in California for college. Yes, I had many friends at UCLA. My mother and father both graduated from UCLA and my brother went to UCLA and I actually married somebody from UCLA, so that definitely was part of our lives.

MS. SAKAMOTO: So it must have been really significant for you to stray and go to Marymount instead of UCLA then or to change your mind.

MS. BELT: Well, it was a fairly big thing at the time. I didn’t look back, although I’m sure my life might have been very different had I chose UCLA. I still have friends that are from my Marymount days and from my Loyola days for that matter. I’m sure I would have had equally good friends if I had chosen UCLA, but I didn’t and I’m very happy with how



things turned out.

MS. SAKAMOTO: I’m very happy to hear that. Can you tell me about the students at Marymount; were they ethnically or racially diverse? What about their socioeconomic background?

MS. BELT: It was probably a mix, but there again, it’s interesting. I think today if I were a student I could probably give you a very definitive answer, probably within accuracy of 10% one way or the other. Again, that was, I think, not part of the world that we lived in then. I don’t think we really thought much about socioeconomic. My assumption, and it’s strictly assumption, is that there were probably more students from fairly affluent families than otherwise simply because tuition was high, room and board was high. There were a few scholarship students and I was among those on a partial scholarship, but in general, it was not an era as it is today. I still contribute to both the LMU and Marymount scholarship funds, my high school Marymount High School and at LMU and it’s significant. It’s wonderful. It obviously reflects, I’m assuming, socioeconomic status. I don’t really know, but I’m assuming the scholarships are based on need, more than they are on academic, although in my day they were based on academics, they weren’t based on need. Or possibly they were a combination. But the background again, probably a good number of the students, my fellow students were also from parts of California, they weren’t all from L.A., they were San Francisco, San Diego, and there were a fair number from the inland areas, Castroville, Bakersfield, etc. I remember I met one student and asked what her family background was and she said “My father’s the artichoke king of California”. Well, I happen to love artichokes, so I was like “oh wow”. I never visited her, but we were up on San Francisco last year and we were driving from San Francisco down to Monterey and then from Monterey south from there. We passed through the area that her father, I’m sure he’s passed away at this point, but you go through fields of artichokes the way you might go through fields of corn or something. I’ve never seen anything like it. There were people from the agricultural parts of California, there were people from Washington state, there were people from Oregon state, there were a fair number from the Midwest. I think what happens in a small college, because Marymount was a small college, is that if one—

[END Gail__4_.mp3]




MS. BELT: --person has a positive experience, their friends in the lower classes hear about it, so there were certain schools in the Midwest, in places like St. Louis and Omaha where you would find every class, freshman class, sophomore class, junior class, there would be two or three girls who had all graduated from the same private girl’s school that was probably very similar to the Marymount High School that I graduated from. Then you had a couple of transferees where they would start at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York and they would want the experience of living in California and they would come, intending to be for a year and many times they stayed and completed. So we had two or three New Yorkers and a few like that. One year, there was a very lovely friend of mine; her name was Stella Marquez. Stella was a year behind me, but it was a small school so you knew everybody. Stella’s father was the Ambassador, from Columbia to the United Nations at that time. I still remember how excited we were because the Latin American countries, unlike in the United States at that time anyway, it was a great honor to be elected or chosen from contestants to represent your country in the “Miss World” and “Miss Universe” contest. Stella was chosen to be “Miss Columbia”. Now we realize she was very beautiful, but her father was also the ambassador and that was kind of how it was done. It wasn’t the “bathing beauty” pageant atmosphere, that you associate with beauty contests in this country. That particular year she had left Marymount College in Los Angeles for one year to go to New York, because he was in the UN and Marymount Tarrytown told her she had to go back to Marymount Los Angeles. They would not allow a beauty queen on their campus.

MS. SAKAMOTO: How strange.

MS. BELT: It was a different world. We were happy to have Stella; we liked her a great deal.

MS. SAKAMOTO: So it wasn’t that bad. Would you say there was a big racial or ethnic diversity while you were attending Marymount?

MS. BELT: No, there wasn’t. There was some. I don’t recall anything particular—there certainly weren’t clubs for different backgrounds or anything like that. We always—I’m guessing and I’d have to think about it, but it seemed to me that we always had girls from Latin backgrounds, whether it



was Mexico or whether it was Ecuador or Columbia, Cuba, etc. One of my good friends was from Cuba. I don’t think we didn’t really get into that a lot. I believe there were one or two girls that were from Asian backgrounds. There were several who were from Latin backgrounds, but it was not anything to remark on. I don’t recall any discrimination or affiliation either way. Meaning that there might be two black girls in the class and if they happened to really like each other they were also good friends, but not because they were black, but because they were good friends. Otherwise they’d just be friends with whoever they hung out with and vice versa. It wasn’t anything structured. I don’t recall much in the way of cliques, maybe because we were so small. We all had friends that we were closer with than others, we all had people we were more apt to go out with on the weekends or double date with or go down to the Village together and have a turkey sandwich with, but I don’t remember it ever being based upon whether you were or weren’t of a particular ethnic or socioeconomic background, either one. Probably more to do—there was probably a group, if I were going to quantify it all, I’d say there was probably a group that were kind of the social pretty ones that had 20 dates every weekend and the ones who were planning on graduate schools and had their nose in the book every weekend and then there were many who were “smart and pretty” both. It wasn’t anything to do with socioeconomic or ethnic, at least as I recall it.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well—

[END Gail__5_.mp3]


MS. SAKAMOTO: This was all amidst the time of the Civil Rights Movement and you still say there wasn’t too much any—

MS. BELT: [interposing] It was really a little bit before that I think. I could be wrong on that. What I associate more than anything during the years I was in school was when Sputnik reached—when the Russia guy - - on the space program. I can still remember driving down Sunset Boulevard with my date and listening to the radio and they broke into whatever radio program we were listening to, to announce “Sputnik.” Of course immediately after that or not very far after, that is when the United States announced their Man on the Moon program. But the Civil Rights, ERA, at least my—I do not—



wasn’t that more like ’61, ’62, ’63, ’64?

MS. SAKAMOTO: It was the beginnings of it and we were just wondering if maybe there was any impact you felt by attending Marymount.

MS. BELT: I guess you can tell by my answer that I didn’t relate to it at all at that time. I do remember years later, my sister who also went to Marymount,moved to DC afterwards in 1965, I remember when Watts burned and I remember the march on Washington and both those events occurred after I was out of college.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well, in a way I guess that’s a good thing that there wasn’t too much that you didn’t really experience too much tension while attending Marymount then, racially at least.

MS. BELT: I don’t recall any at all. I’m just curious. Is there tension on the LMU campus?

MS. SAKAMOTO: No, no, no, it’s one of the topics we’re exploring in terms of racial diversity throughout Loyola and Marymount before the merger. So it was one of the questions that we had to ask.

MS. BELT: That’s really interesting, I had no ide; maybe because of where I went to high school because that particular high school was a popular school for wealthy people from other countries to send their children. So we always had people from other cultures. It was just part of the way we grew up. I just don’t remember it being—and there were - - , don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like 50% of the class was Asian or black or something, in that sense I guess today they would say it was token. It wasn’t intended to be token, it was just the way it was. You’re talking about a very, very small school at that time. The enrollment at Marymount College during my years was well under 150 students total.

MS. SAKAMOTO: One hundred and fifty students.

MS. BELT: Total. I must be the first one you’re interviewing from Marymount College because—my graduating class was around 30 people.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s a really small class.

MS. BELT: Well, that’s exactly right, but you remember Loyola wasn’t very big in those days either.



MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s true.

MS. BELT: Frankly, I felt like I knew everybody on the campus of Loyola. I’m sure I didn’t, but I knew all the ADG’s, I knew all the Sigma Rho’s, I knew all the Aristonians, I’m sure half of those fraternities aren’t even around anymore. Loyola was also a small campus. When we were over at Loyola, even though we didn’t go to school there, if I were walking down any pathway I’d see somebody I knew. I’m sure that has changed as well. Of course, a lot of the Jesuits were over at Marymount a lot. The two schools were very, very friendly in our era and part of that was because Dick Aldrich, Loyola student body presiden,t was a very, very good friend of mine. Not that we ever dated, but I think between us, we engineered a lot of romances between Loyola and Marymount.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well naturally, between a guy’s school and a girl’s school, it happens. I’ll ask the next question. During the 1950’s, the cultural tradition was for women to marry very young and start families very early, why did you decide to attend college? Was this unusual among your friends and peers?

MS. BELT: Those two questions in my opinion are totally unrelated. Back to the first question, it was traditional in the early ‘50s to marry early and have children early. I think that was very, very true, but that did not mean marry early before graduating from college—going to college was expected and not at all unusual.

[END Gail__6_.mp3]


MS. BELT: However, getting married right after college, at least in my opinion, was also not unusual. Because of the school that I graduated from, Marymount High School, I don’t think it ever occurred to me not to go to college. I think my entire class went to college. From my viewpoint, I’m the child of two parents who went to college, so that was just a given. It wasn’t even a decision any more than when you get out of eighth grade you don’t decide if you’re going to high school. Well, in those days for me, when you got out of high school, you didn’t decide if you were going to college, you just decided where you were going to college. Then you did make a decision as to whether you were going to go on to graduate school or not. Some of us did go onto graduate school; there were also those, like myself, who met the



person they were supposed to meet and we did marry. I graduated in June, he graduated the year before, and we got married in November. Until we got married, we probably attended at least three weddings a month between June and November because so many of both his UCLA friends and my Marymount friends and Loyola friends were all getting married. You’re very right that the culture was such, and the expectations were such, that it was not at all uncommon to get married immediately out of college. We were Catholic and birth control was not an issue in those days or it was just becoming one, so most of us did have children very quickly.

I had one or two friends, one name you may know, the Von der Ahe’s [phonetic] my mother and father were friends with Chuck Von der Ahe’s parent’s, Will and Mary Jane. So I’ve known the Von der Ahe family my entire life. They lived in the Valley, we lived in the Valley, he went to St. Charles, I went to St. Francis. Chuck married a friend of mine at Marymount, Jane Vollstedt Von der Ahe. She was from Oregon. They got married. When Chuck graduated from Notre Dame University, he was two years olde, they got married at the end of Jane’s sophomore year of college. She stayed in school and she came back and graduated, but by the time she graduated, she had a baby.

Another one of my good friends was Sonia Leaan Ike. In my yearbook, she’s listed that way because she married in her junior year and she also had a baby before she graduated. But it wasn’t drop out and get married in those particular cases, it was get married and juggle a baby and a family and your grades. Both of them were bright, they both got good grades.

One of my best friends got married that same way, Sheila Hart to Bob McGuire, Loyola VP ’58, and I was in her wedding. So I had at least three good friends who got married while they were still in college, but the norm was to not marry until after you graduated. At the same time, the norm was definitely to go to college. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t go to college. I really can’t think of anybody, even at other high schools that I knew from elementary school that didn’t go to college. The culture at least at that time in Los Angeles, I guess was just a college-based culture. You went to college, that’s all there was to it.

MS. SAKAMOTO: But it must have been very difficult for your



friends to have been in school as well as being married and have babies at the same time.

MS. BELT: Believe me I would never have made it. I have nothing but admiration for them.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well, do you feel that Marymount prepared these young women for careers also, while they were juggling their families or do you think that many of them chose either family or career?

MS. BELT: I think Marymount, in terms of the faculty and also their fellow students, was probably about as supportive an atmosphere as you can get. I don’t think they were given any slack, they were certainly expected to do the work, but I also don’t think they were looked down upon in any way or made to feel that they had made an improper choice. I had admiration because I knew that I could not have done that. I also know, among the friends of mine who did do that, that they were successful outside the home and were successful wives. They went on afterwards, Sonya was one of the founders of the women’s bank in Inglewood. She was on the board of directors of a number of companies. She was a very accomplished—

[END Gail__7_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --business person. She never worked full-time 9-5 in the sense of how we think of full-time today, but in terms of being professionally involved in her community in a business capacity, she certainly was. Jane Von der Ahe did not work in that capacity either, but she was an incredible volunteer organizer and had her hand in many, many organizations that did nothing but good for Los Angeles and on and on like that. Myself, I really was very, very traditional. I did not in any way intend to work after college. I had a very bright mind, I was offered a scholarship, the Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to come back to the east coast and take a two-year course, in those days Woodrow Wilson was in more than one school, I think it might just be at Harvard today, but in those days it was at Harvard and what’s the one that’s right across the street that was also a woman’s college in those days? Not Holyoke, but they are all changed now because they’re all blended like Loyola Marymount.

But I did have a full scholarship to go onto graduate work,



so I would have had to pay transportation to get back there and I would have to pay room and board, but I had a full tuition offer. So had I not been engaged to be married, I definitely would have accepted it. I didn’t regret necessarily, I was very pleased at the idea of marrying the person I wanted to marry. I did not really think I would have a career in that sense. I did think I would be a writer. I enjoyed writing.

When I got out of college I took a job at The Wall Street Journal in downtown L.A. writing, if you want to call it that, writing ad copy for their Friday edition, which was the Real Estate Corner, never dreaming at that time that I would actually end up with a very successful real estate career. I didn’t take it for that reason. I took it for the fact that it was The Wall Street Journal and my fiancee was a stockbroker and I just thought working for The Wall Street Journal made sense. But as it turned out, and I do remember, and this would never happen today, it would be a huge discriminatory lawsuit if it did, but I can remember answering the ad for The Wall Street Journal, which was a classified ad in The Los Angeles Times and it simply had a phone number. It did say Wall Street Journal, it was a blind ad, it just said “Looking for somebody with telephone skills” or something like that, and it gave a phone number.

Well, I called the phone number and I spoke to the person in charge. When I called the phone number they answered “Wall Street Journal” and put me through to the manager. At the end of the conversation the person that I was speaking with, who it turned out was the manager of that particular office at The Wall Street Journal, invited me in for an interview. I found out later that the reason that they did it that way in terms of the telephone call, and not a resume or anything, was because they were screening people for telephone skills, because the job required the person to communicate via telephone constantly with all the advertisers. So I guess if you passed the telephone interview, then they called you in for the “on the spot” interview. When I attended the on the spot interview, I could tell that we hit it off. I could tell that he thought I would be a good fit and I liked what I saw of their organization. He said, “I need to ask you some questions” and I said, fine. Now, I didn’t even think of them as being discriminatory questions, but the questions were, “I see that you have an engagement ring on your finger” He said, “Are you planning to be married soon?” and I said,



yes in November, and this was in June. He said—he cleared his throat and I realize now he was probably—I was 21, I’m guessing he was maybe 32, but at the time he seemed like he was me today. He cleared his throat and I could tell he was uncomfortable and he said, “I also see that you graduated from Marymount College” and I said yes.

[END Gail__8_.mp3]


MS. BELT: Then he said, “Well that’s a Catholic school” and he said, “Are you going to have babies right away and quit the job?” Now, you see, if that question were asked today he would have been, if you were the kind of person to choose to, which I probably would not have, but with that question first of all, no potential employer would ask an employee that question today because they know it would be a violation of literally several laws. But that was the mindset back then and it was considered that women were only going to work until they had babies and would then leave the workforce. I did answer in the negative, that I didn’t know if we’d have children right away or not, that’s something that might happen, might not happen, but at this point I was not planning to leave my position.

As it turned out, my husband and I did make the decision that I would not be a “working wife” at that point in our life and I had the uncomfortable job of going to my boss about a month before our wedding, five months into the job to tell him that we had had a change of heart. It was nothing to do with having a baby, we weren’t even married yet, and nothing to do with a baby—I mean I could have worked for another year even if we had gotten married. But we made a decision that I was going to be a full-time homemaker. He still came to my wedding, which was at Lake Arrowhead, so he had to drive 2.5 hours to get there, but he came to the wedding. We stayed friends. Then I never worked again for seven years.

When I did go back to work it was in real estate and at that time it was not a job, it was a gift from heaven and it was a career. I am now ranked in the top 100 Realtors out of the United States, that’s 1.1 million and the BELT Team is ranked in number four among the 83,000 agents in our own company, so clearly it’s been a career and not a job. It’s been something I’ve loved doing, but I never could have predicted that back when I was editing Real Estate ad copy at The Wall



Street Journal.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well, congratulations, that’s quite a feat. It’s amazing. Can you tell me if your current professional career is related back to your years at Marymount?

MS. BELT: IN some ways it is. I always was a people person and I enjoyed a great deal of—I had very positive experiences at Marymount, one of the advantages of a small school. I think I might have mentioned it in that Vista article years ago that you certainly do have the opportunity to assume leadership positions if you have any interest in that. You have the opportunity get involved in a lot of variety, more perhaps than today. I think the whole world today is a little more intense, so if you’re really involved with whatever it is, whether it’s Sister Peg Dolan’s outreach or whether it’s the Latin American Club or Model United Nations, you probably would have difficulty juggling more than one or two outside of class commitments.

In my day, we really overlapped a lot. I was involved behind the scenes of the drama club. I never acted, but I was very much involved with being one of the people to play the music at the proper time or get the lights turned off and on or whatever, I was very involved with Model United Nations and that was a marvelous leadership building experience and marvelous to meet people from all campuses, not just Marymount. I was involved in, of course, the student government, I was involved with editing our paper and our yearbook. I think those skills with the career that I accidentally ended up in were very, very helpful, because the one thing that’s really important in real estate is the ability to relate to all sorts of different people coming from all sorts of walks of life, coming from all sorts of background and with all sorts of different needs. The ability to relate to them, but also to take charge

[END Gail __9_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --because you really do need to sometimes take charge. The ability to organize what’s going to come next, I think those were skills that I learned. Since I was a liberal arts major, I also got a smattering of a lot of different things, which has also been nice my whole life. I am not particularly musically inclined, but I still remember the course I took on opera. I remember the only bad thing I ever



did was in my senior year. I had pretty well completed all mandatory requirements and I was looking for just things to expand my horizon and again, this shows the era that you’re talking about, I didn’t know how to type. I was an English major who did every term paper “two fingered”. I still am two fingered, but I never—now I actually could close my eyes and I could type with all 10 fingers, but I was so slow at it. I was much, much faster with my two fingers because I had a photographic memory. So I could look at a page and then just look at the typewriter with my two fingers and type whatever I was planning to type easier than looking at the page or looking away from the typewriter and trying to remember which of my 10 fingers was supposed to go where.Same today. I’m a “2 fingered speed demon” on a computer keyboard.

So senior year I decide, all right I’m going to learn some skills that I don’t have. So I thought I would learn to type and I would learn to sew because I didn’t know how to sew either. So I signed up for the two electives, there were people that were merchandise majors, in fact my college roommate was a merchandise major, and they took a lot of stuff like that, dress design and all that. I was just looking for basics. And the same thing on typing, I thought, well worse comes to worse, if I don’t get a job I can run a switchboard if I knew how to operate a keyboard.

So I signed up for the courses and about six weeks, the first grading period whenever, I get a call to the Dean’s office and the Dean of Students sits me down and says, “Gail, we have to have a heart to heart talk”. I said, what’s the matter? She said, “You’re on scholarship and one of the terms of your scholarship is that you maintain” I forget what average it was in those days, but basically you had to have all A’s and B’s. She said, “I’m going to give you a C in each of these courses”. She said, “You should be getting an F, but if I give you C’s, since you have A’s in everything else, it will stay a B+ average and you’ll keep your grade point and maintain your scholarship. But there are conditions attached to this”. I said what? And I was scared because I really needed the scholarship money. She said, “You are to drop out of the courses, you are not to take them second semester and you are not to sign up for anything that requires finger dexterity”. So that was how I did and didn’t fit the prototype profile of my day.

But I was a good writer, so I won a lot of essay contests. I



knew by the second half of my senior year that I would be getting married that year. So I entered every essay contest that was around, and got enough winnings to buy myself a wedding gown, so that was nice.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s so amazing, all strictly off of your writing, that’s so cool. You majored in English?

MS. BELT: I was an English major and a philosophy minor.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Can you tell me how that degree was constructed?

MS. BELT: I don’t even understand the question. What do you mean “constructed”?

MS. SAKAMOTO: Well, just the major focus of your writing.

MS. BELT: Well, the major focus was not what I really wanted it to be, but it was the way it was. The major focus was literature, whereas what I was most interested in was writing, but there was no major for journalism in those days.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Even today there is none, unfortunately.

MS. BELT: You’re kidding?

MS. SAKAMOTO: I’m serious.

MS. BELT: You can’t major in journalism today?

MS. SAKAMOTO: No, I really enjoy creative writing as well and when I came here and I found out—

MS. BELT: [interposing] You’ve got creative writing, that’s another thing.

MS. SAKAMOTO: It’s strange isn’t it, but oh well.

MS. BELT: You mean—

[END Gail__10_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --today you cannot major—I just assumed today you could that.

MS. SAKAMOTO: There’s maybe an associates type degree or something here, but it’s not a full-on Bachelor’s degree in journalism.

MS. BELT: Not sure, because there was one college at the time



that had it and I believe it was Stevens College in Missouri and that was known as the school for journalists. I don’t really know whether it was actually a major or whether just the professors leaned that way and so people who were interested, who could afford to go there, went there. Creative writing, I really did put my way through, I wrote poetry and I wrote essays. I was not good at fiction, but I did do well in the other two. When I graduated, I got this crazy job writing ads for The Wall Street Journal, but what I really wanted to do was go into advertising. If I had not been engaged to be married, I probably would have looked for a career in advertising. In that time, I don’t know if it’s still that way, in Virginia, there are no billboards, you cannot do billboard advertising, the state does not permit it in northern Virginia.

But in my time in California, it was “billboard city.” I don’t know if it still is, but billboards were everywhere. I literally in my head collected what I considered really clever, good billboards. My desire was to be a really snappy billboard ad person.

MS. SAKAMOTO: You go to Virginia and there’s none of that over there, that’s so strange.

MS. BELT: Well, by then I was into real estate, so it didn’t matter and I found out that I loved real estate even more. The difference between the creative writing or the writing I guess I should say, that I thought I wanted to do, and the career I ended up with, which I realized later, is that writing is primarily, unless you are a journalist, writing is a solitary career. Today I keep thinking I’m going to put down my experiences, not at Marymount, but in real estate, because I get asked to do this all the time. When I present at seminars or even in conversation, people will say, “Well haven’t you written a book about this or haven’t you done—“ and I keep saying that I’m going to, but I don’t know that I ever will. Because I don’t find that I would choose to spend six, eight hours a day by myself putting it all down on paper, but at the time that’s what I thought I wanted to do.

MS. SAKAMOTO: It’s interesting how that can change. Life is so interesting.

MS. BELT: Well, it sounds like you like the idea of writing also.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Yes I do. Being a history major myself, it kind of goes hand-in-hand.



MS. BELT: Well, history in a way, at least in my day, was a little bit like English, Liberal Arts. My two kids, my son went to Georgetown and he was a finance major and my daughter went to the College of William and Mary and she was a business major, entirely—well, she minored in French and she would have majored in French except she didn’t think it would prepare her in the business world. Ironically I think that would have prepared her just fine. In our day, it wasn’t so much majoring—you majored out of interest more than you did out of what’s going to make the best career path. Today, I think most people are looking at their career path and choosing accordingly. They’re going for accounting or they’re going for geology or maybe biology if they want to go into medicine. My sister was an English major, but she ended up going into law. We looked at it more casually—and I never regretted it. I enjoyed getting a liberal arts education as opposed to a focus on one thing only.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Let’s go back to when you were attending Marymount. It says that you were student body president. Can you discuss the key issues that you faced while you were student body president?

MS. BELT: In terms of items of major importance, probably very minor compared to today.

[END Gail__11_.mp3]


MS. BELT: One of the big issues actually was paving the way for what is now Loyola Marymount. We did have something called the Intercollegiate Publicity Committee and it evolved because at that time Loyola was an all men’s college and there were four Catholic all women’s colleges in Los Angeles. There was Marymount, there was Mount St. Mary’s which still exists, there was Immaculate Heart College, and a nursing college, Queen of Angels. Loyola was in a fortunate position, because this was an era when parents wanted their children to marry within the Catholic faith if they were Catholic. Most of us wanted that too. I don’t think we felt quite as strongly about it as our parents, but we did. It was a comfort level. So obviously it was encouraged to socialize with the guys at Loyola as opposed to the guys at - - or SC or UCLA or whatever.

So that evolved both out of desire and pushed along by philosophy of that day. Loyola was a popular campus and the



guys at Loyola certainly had lots of opportunities to date. The women’s college students, all of us, including me of course, dated people other than Loyola, but we also did feel that we had a special relationship with Loyola. As a result of that we soon began running into conflicts during the time that I was student body president and even before that, where there was no coordination between the campuses. So you’d get a call from your favorite guy at Loyola inviting you to the homecoming dance and then find out that your junior prom had been scheduled the same date. So we came up with what we called the Intercollegiate Publicity Committee. There were 10 of us on the committee, the five Student Body Presidents from the five colleges and the five Social Chairmen from the five colleges. I don’t know that the campuses even have a Social Chairman today, but in those days every campus had a Social Chairman and it was a pretty important job.

The whole point of it was simply to coordinate major campus events to avoid conflicts. We met usually once a quarter and brought our calendars and we would literally go through the calendars and pick dates for major social functions so that nobody’s major functions overlapped on the same day as one of the other campus’ main function. That was, I would say, where we first began getting very involved with Loyola, because then we got involved with the campus more and more. For whatever reason, our campus and the Loyola campus ended up kind of the leaders. I really think that was the early stages, along with Father Alfred Kilp [phonetic], whom you would not know, but Father Alfred Kilp was a revered figure at Loyola and he was the Dean of Students there for probably at least 20 years. I know there is a scholarship to this day for children of alumni that is named in his honor. He probably spent as much time at Marymount as he did at Loyola. A lot of this, when the time came for the merger, I think it weighed a lot toward the final decision being Marymount and not Immaculate Heart, which I think at the time were the two big ones. I don’t think Mount St. Mary’s wanted to do it. But that was a big issue was relationships between the schools was a big issue at the time.

Another issue that just happened to happen at that time and that wasn’t as big of an issue, but it just happened to come up, we were very involved with Model United Nations, but we were a very small school. Model United Nations, when you were assigned a country to represent for the convention, which is always held on one of the big campuses, Stanford,



Cal, UCLA, USC, those kind of campuses, is where the actual mock United Nations or Model UN would take place. Your country was assigned to you basically by the level of recognition of size of your school. So for instance, UCLA would almost always be representing the United States or Russia or the United Kingdom and whoever wasn’t representing one of those would be representing the others, Stanford etc. would be representing the other and you’d go from there. [END Gail__12_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --the major universities represented the major countries, then the smaller colleges and universities were given the rest. In those days this was a different political world you have to understand, you might be assigned to Tibet or Ghana or to one of the Latin American countries, none of which were major players on the world scene, unlike today or even China.

As a result of that we were involved with Model United Nations and our school, Marymount, was assigned Cuba, which was this tiny little island where people would go for a winter vacation. No one realized when they gave us the assignment we were assigned that, what would soon happen. We were assigned a year ahead of time because you really are supposed to become imbued with the politics and the culture of whatever country you’re assigned. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Model United Nations, but it was very much patterned after the UN and you really did represent your country. So it didn’t make any difference if you were pro abortion or anti-abortion. If your country was China and they believe in killing babies, then you had to advocate that position, hence the Model United Nations and you had to study it.

When we got assigned Cuba, one of my friends who was also involved with the ModelUN, her uncle actually was in Batista’s [phonetic] government and at that time Batista was head of Cuba. She and her family had only recently moved to the United States, they had lived in Cuba for many, many years. Her father had the largest car dealership there, but they had migrated and they lived in Glendale at the time that I knew her. She was one of the ones who was what we called the day-hop. Anyway, her name was Margarita Alexander [phonetic], but we called her Margie. So Margie kind of took charge because she said, “We’re going to know more about Cuba



than anybody’s going to know about any of their countries”.

Within months of being assigned Cuba, shortly before we were going to be going to MUN, is when Castro’s revolution 26th of July occurred. All of a sudden Cuba was the limelight country in the entire world. Here was Marymount College with 150 students representing the biggest talked about country anywhere. We got more coverage and more press and more everything at that MUN because there everybody including the press wanted to talk to the Cuba delegation, everybody wanted to hear what the Cuba delegation had to say. The hardest thing, this is the part that I - - when you talked about tough, the toughest thing Margie ever had to do I think in her life, was make an impassioned speech praising Castro because she knew well before the rest of us what he was really like, because she had lived there, and her uncle was among those who was killed. I’m not saying Batista was a saint, he wasn’t. But Castro was not the savior that at that time the whole world thought he was, including me. Margie had to stand up there as head of our delegation and basically tow the new Cuba party line. It was quite an experience.

MS. SAKAMOTO: It sounds very emotional.

MS. BELT: But there were not a lot of tensions on the campuses the way you might have today, in terms of challenges. There were always a little bit of challenge and tension between faculty and students, we wanted more privileges and they were more protective, but I don’t recall—it was not a confrontational time in American life in genera,l and it was certainly not a confrontational time in my college experience.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s good. It is my understanding that you were instrumental in founding the Loyola Belles. What was the purpose of that organization and why did you become involved with it?

MS. BELT: Well, it’s interesting. In fact, I pulled out my college yearbook and there’s a couple of pictures in there of the Loyola Belles surrounded by Dick Aldrich [phonetic] who at that time was Student Body President at Loyola. That evolved kind of around the same time as the Intercollegiate Publicity Committee, the one that was the five social chairmen and the five student body presidents. What happened is, Loyola was getting frustrated. Loyola had a number of sports



[END Gail __13_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --programs. They were never big in football, but they were good in basketball and they had other sports as well, but basketball was really the big sport at Loyola. I’m guessing it still is, although I think baseball’s pretty big today too. Loyola was frustrated because they’d go to play games off campus or even on campus for that matter, and I don’t remember what league they were in, but they would travel up and down the coast or maybe even they played UCLA and SC, The other co-ed universities would have these great cheering sections and these cheerleaders and Loyola didn’t have anything. The guys just came and played and went home.

A bunch of us got talking about it, Dick Aldrich and Bill Dolan [phonetic] who was social chairman at that time for Loyola and Bill said, “You know, do you think that maybe some of the women on the women’s college campuses would be interested in acting as our cheerleaders?” From that, we did a lot of brainstorming. I was a senior by the time this all happened and I don’t think seniors were even allowed to be Belles. We were encouraging the younger women, the Freshmen and Sophomores, and the idea evolved into more than just being cheerleaders. In fact, I don’t know that they ever were cheerleaders. It evolved into a morale support group. They were I guess you might call them, “meeters and greeters” and there was from the beginning also a service element.

The picture in my college yearbook for instance shows a group shot of the Loyola Belles, and I recognize a lot of them, so I know they were Marymount, but they were also from Mount St. Mary’s and Immaculate Heart. It shows them meeting the team, at L.A. airport, getting off the plane, coming back from a game. They would see them off, whether they were on a bus or whether they were at the airport and they would greet them when they came back. They got involved in service and I know it’s still on campus, so it’s obviously been one of the organizations that has grown and evolved. My guess is today it’s probably a service organization.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Yes it is. It’s developed and it’s quite big on campus.

MS. BELT: It was even then. From the very beginning it was considered prestigious and you had to go through an interview process. You couldn’t just join and say you wanted to be a



Loyola Belle. I was on the committee that had to do the interviewing, the committee that interviewed the first candidates was comprised, that’s why I said I think it might have even been the five social chairmen and the five student body presidents, we might have been the ones who made the decision, I can’t recall for sure. I know I was on it, but I don’t remember how the makeup of the interview committee was formed. But the idea was that they were to not only represent their women’s college well, but they were to represent Loyola well. It was considered a definite honor to be named a Loyola Belle.

I remember my younger sister was a Loyola Belle, but I wasn’t. She followed me —she’s class of ’64, so we never overlapped in school. She was a freshman the year after I graduated. The Loyola Belles were—it was considered an honor to be one and it was also considered a responsibility.

MS. SAKAMOTO: I can imagine. Although the merger occurred after you graduated from Marymount, what are your views on the merger, do you think it was a positive or a negative thing and why?

MS. BELT: I was so excited I wanted to send up rockets. I was absolutely thrilled. I was only sorry that it didn’t happen when I was still in school. I always had nothing but great experiences at Loyola. I did not marry a Loyola guy, but I have nothing but good memories of everybody that I knew at Loyola, faculty, students, everything. I also believed in the concept of coed universities and I thought Loyola and Marymount were both going to come out winners.

I do know that there were Marymount people who were very opposed to it, who wanted the single education. I know there were a lot of Loyola people who felt the same way. I’m well aware that it was not universally popular.

[END Gail__14_.mp3]


MS. BELT: --and I think probably some of the first couple of years, the Marymount girls who were there for the first couple of years, might have experienced some uncomfortableness, like maybe they weren’t welcome. I’m sure there had to have been that aspect of it, but as an alum, partly because I was very close to Loyola, they were not a foreign school to me, I was absolutely—as I said, I would



have sent up sky rockets and sparklers if I had them when I heard the news. I knew it was being discussed, but I wasn’t sure it would happen. I knew at the time that Imaculate Heart was very much wanting to do the same thing and I was frankly a little concerned that Loyola might end up with Imaculate Heart because they were a much larger school.

But there’s where I think the unique friendship between Loyola and Marymount—that occurred starting in my era helped and it did continue on. There was a very strong sense of respect between the faculties of these schools. In fact, there were several faculty who taught at both schools, even when I was in school. Ken Cooreino [phonetic] was the chairman of the English department at Loyola in those days and his wife was director—she wasn’t Director of Admissions, but she was the secretary in the Director of Admissions office, so she knew everybody. He was a very popular professor. They were a amazing. I realize now, that I don’t know how they did it, I didn’t think a thing about it at the time, I was 19-years-old, what did I know, but they had seven kids. I look back on it now and think, how did he raise seven kids on a professor’s salary in those days. Every Friday night he invited his favorite students at Loyola and I happened at that time to be dating one of those undergrads, and he’d have like an open house for students every Friday night at their house near campus. We’d go over there on Friday nights and sit on the living room floor and drink beer and crack crabs with our crab crackers and sit around and discuss philosophy and he loved Shakespeare, so we’d discuss Shakespeare and all that. He was the primary English professor at Loyola, but he also taught English at Marymount.

Then there were two or three others like that that taught at both campuses. So there were people at Loyola who already knew us as a campus and as individuals. There were many of us who knew Loyola the same way. I think that paved the way. Father Kilp I think was instrumental in it. Father Merrifield [phonetic], Father Markey [phonetic], there were a lot of them that had a very positive interrelationship with Marymount. So when it did happen, I know that had to have helped it to be dealt with, there’s no question. That part of it I was never involved with, but the fact that it happened, I couldn’t have been more delighted.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s great. I know, I can tell especially from your experiences.



MS. BELT: But I think I was—looking back on it, since Imaculate Heart isn’t even there anymore, I do remember that the one biggest fight. I’m very, very glad that Marymount was kind of in that sense, Marymount was David and Loyola was Goliath and my recollection is of the final sticking point that almost torpedoed the entire merger and finally Loyola blinked. Specifically, Loyola wanted to make it “Marymount College at Loyola University” and the faculty and the nuns of the RSHM at Marymount were adamant. It’s either “Loyola Marymount University” or this doesn’t happen, we are not going to be an afterthought on the campus. That to me was significant because our name remains. I mentioned Harvard and you heard me, I can’t even remember the name of the very well known women’s college, I can’t even think of their name today. It will always be “Loyola Marymount” and I will always have our name or our college’s name as part of it. Today we are “LMU” and actually I think it rolls off the tongue better than LU.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s true. What changes, besides the merger, did you notice most at LMU?

MS. BELT: From an evolutionary standpoint and most of this is what I notice simply from my years of reading Vista and also for many, many years Loyola and the president, whoever was the president at the time, mainly the Father Merrifield years, but also Father Thomas O’Malley

[END Gail__15_.mp3]


MS. BELT: the one who was the poet, he was a portly gentleman and he died before his time a year or two ago, a very, very intellectual person, but he looked like Santa Claus For at least the first 25 years after I graduated, either Father Merrifield or after Father Merrifield, Father O’Malley, who was marvelous, he was an excellent, an excellent, president of the university, and Father Kilp, who at that time was still Dean of Students. They would come back to the east coast where we lived every single year. There were three or four of us that they would call upon to host gatherings that all alums within 100 miles were invited to. They were private home gatherings, usually around Christmastime, but it depended. They would come back and give a “State of the University” talk and sometimes they’d bring one or two undergraduates along and sometimes they wouldn’t.



They’ve done versions of that in the recent years, but it’s much more impersonal now than it was in the early years. Back then you did continue to feel connected number one and you could certainly see the growth. When you couple that with the fact that Vista in general I think over the years had been a very good publication, I at least have felt a continued connection and I’ve certainly seen the growth. I’m not sure I’m happy with everything in terms of the growth that I’ve seen, I’m not sure that I’m happy with all of the directions the university is going, but that’s a personal thing. That would be, I’m sure my reaction no matter what college I was an alum of.

But I feel that Marymount grew, and Loyola grew by the infusion of Marymount, and that the academic standards grew and their overall presence as a university in the United States grew.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s great. I can completely understand especially after our interview. What are your best memories of Marymount while you were attending?

MS. BELT: I would have to say number one, I have a very strong sense of the camaraderie that was part of our experience. I have a very strong sense of the affirmation and growth in confidence that I gained simply by the opportunities that were opened to me. I have not remained in close contact with a lot of my fellow graduates, although at the time it was, as I said, so small that you knew everybody and I certainly still know everybody by name and am interested when I see what’s going on in their lives. Certainly I would like, as I’m sure is true of anybody of Loyola Marymount, I am still closely involved with several of my good friends. We became friends then and we will be friends for life. I also think that the value system was very, very important and provided a very strong foundation for my future.

The memories were probably the funny memories that everybody has, decorating a Homecoming float at Loyola, going down to the beach at 2:00 a.m. in the morning after a basketball game party, being over at Sigma Rho fraternity. At our campus, just having fun times in the lounge at The Smoker or going down to the Village or whatever was going on. That’s just ordinary social life memories, but they’re fun.

MS. SAKAMOTO: Yeah and college, people say it’s the best time of your life, so remember good memories.



MS. BELT: Well, and sometimes just ordinary memories are the fun ones. It’s not necessarily the day you got awarded this or the day you got awarded that, it’s just all—and some of them are. I remember the day I was at Model United Nations the week that all the on campus, campaigning was going on for student body elections my junior year. I was off campus that entire week, which actually was great. I had no ability the campaign and my friends who were backing me said, “We’ll campaign don’t worry about it”. And one of the other candidates who was running,—

[END Gail__16_.mp3]


MS. BELT: was also at Model United Nations with me. I remember when we came back and the election was the very next day because we were off campus for the entire week of MUN. It’s a small school so you find out the results right away. I do remember the girl who was the current student body vice president who was a close friend of mine, Luki Styskal, she was a year ahead of me, but she was a good friend and she ended up marrying a Loyola guy, Tom O’Keefe, in fact the O’Keefe family is pretty active in Loyola still. But I can remember Luki [phonetic] running down the dormitory hall saying, “Guess what, guess what, get in my car, you did it” and I remember about 20 of us piled in to cars and went down a bar called “Tom Bergin’s House of Irish Coffee”, which may or may not still be there, down by USC. So there were some fun things when you remember a specific, I mostly just remember a lot of good times.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That’s so great. Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?

MS. BELT: I think Loyola Marymount has a vital role in Los Angeles. I’m being a little more serious for a minute. And I hope they will recognize and step up to that role and I hope that their passion, I don’t know how to word this. I hope their passion for social justice and for the world we live in today, doesn’t blind side them from some of the basics. I do get troubled a little bit by some of what I see. I don’t sense it’s quite as much of a Catholic university as I personally would like it to be, That doesn’t mean that I don’t want the arms to be spread wide for everyone, but I hope they don’t depart from their total original mission. To be honest, this is something I feel in



general about Jesuit universities, I’m also appalled at some of the things that have been going on at Notre Dame and I really don’t want LMU to follow that path. I’m not trying to end on a negative note, I’m really not, you can tell I love the university. But I am troubled that we are trying too hard to be “good guys” in the secular sense, when we don’t have to be. We’re a cut above and we just need to keep our feet on the ground, but keep our head in the clouds. Let’s not descend to the level of just being another secular university. Let’s keep God and morals and ethics part of the equation.

MS. SAKAMOTO: That sounds good. Well, thank you very much. That was really great.

[END Gail__17_.mp3]


MS. BELT: You’re more than welcome. I wish they had done this sort of thing years ago; I would have enjoyed interviewing the people who went before me in those days. I think what you’re doing is great. I am a little curious as to how this is all being put together.

[END Gail__18_.mp3]

centennial history project interview: gail...

Documents