Frederick Sheridan Stripp

Fred Sheridan Stripp
California
Berkeley
University of California Berkeley
1931

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Fred S. Stripp, Rhetoric: Berkeley

1910-1989
Senior Lecturer
Activist, orator, minister, debate coach, honored Berkeley civic leader, and senior lecturer in Rhetoric, Fred Stripp began his association with the University of California, Berkeley, over 60 years ago. A native of Laurel, Montana, and graduate of Berkeley High School in 1928, Stripp received his A.B. at Berkeley in 1932, serving as the President of the ASUC that year. His classmates further recognized his standing among his peers by electing him Permanent President of the Class of 1932. He went on to further studies at the Pacific School of Religion, where he received the M.A., B.D., and Th.D. His professional association with the University began in 1941, in the Department of Speech, and culminated in his retirement as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric some 37 years later.

Apart from his long and distinguished service in the Department of Rhetoric he consistently contributed in many ways to the University community. He organized class reunions every five years, the last being the 55th reunion in 1987. He received the Trustees Citation Award from the Alumni Association for his leadership in raising funds for an endowed chair. He was the Baccalaureate Speaker for the UC Class of 1950, served as a Faculty Orientations Speaker from 1962-1978, and hosted the annual banquets for the UC Basketball Team from 1946 to 1952. In 1948, he chaired the committee which produced the book “Students at Berkeley,” a report on student needs that was instrumental in providing support for erecting the student dorms. The list of such contributions goes on and on. Their great value was recognized in May, 1989, with the conferring of the Berkeley Citation, one of the highest honors awarded by the Berkeley campus.

His contributions were not confined to the University. In the community he served as Berkeley Recreation Commissioner from 1943-49 (President in 1947), Director of Community Counseling from 1944-46, President and Chaplain of the Berkeley Kiwanis Club, President of the

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Corinthian Awards promoting scholarship in Northern California High Schools, 1970-72, President of the American Federation of Teachers, Member of the Board of Directors of the Berkeley YMCA, 1949-50, a founder and President of the Berkeley Breakfast Club, and member of the Board of Directors of the Berkeley High Alumni Association, 1982-83. In a different vein of commitment to the community he was the first President of the Berkeley Branch of the NAACP, an NAACP National Convention Delegate (1954), and President of HOME (Housing Opportunities Made Equal), 1955-57. On a platform calling for fair housing, Stripp almost won the Mayoralty of Berkeley in 1963. A former student, now a local attorney, wrote about Fred that “he has always been, in a very real and immensely significant way, the conscience of this community. And yet, despite his very strong and deeply rooted feelings in matters involving human rights, human dignity, basic fairness and justice, his style [was] never... one of conflict or confrontation, but rather one of reason, conciliation, and rational discourse.” In October 1989 he was honored with the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Award as Berkeley's “most useful citizen.”
Two further fields of extramural endeavor benefited from his seemingly boundless energy and commitment to public life. First, from 1934-1963 he served as pastor or minister of various local churches, most recently in the Chinese Community Congregational Church in 1962-63. According to a close friend and colleague, Stripp estimated that in the course of his religious activities he had performed 3,200 marriages and presided at 15,000 funerals. His wife noted that Stripp kept records of the couples he married, and in some instances he officiated at the marriages of their children and even grandchildren years later. Second, he carried on the venerable but increasingly rare activity of public oratory, by some 50 major public addresses from the Kennedy Memorial Address at UCB in 1963 to the Centennial Speech for the Red Cross in 1980. He was particularly famed, both locally and nationally, for his orations on U.S. presidents, especially Lincoln.

Within the academic community he provided vital resources to the Department of Speech, later Department of Rhetoric, from 1941 to 1978. During this period he established himself as an exceptional teacher, the author of nine scholarly articles, and the heart and soul of the Berkeley Debate Team. Indeed, his contributions to Debate have been amply recognized, most recently by the award of the McGuckin-Stripp Plaque in 1986 on the 20th anniversary of the founding by Henry McGuckin and Fred Stripp of the Meiklejohn Debate between Berkeley and San Francisco State. In 1988 the Cal Debate Team honored him by establishing the Dr. Fred Stripp Award, and presented him with a plaque in honor of his

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23 years of service as Director of Forensics. In considering Stripp's career as a teacher, a former chair of the Department stated, “In 30 years I've never known a college instructor who inspired more devotion in his students.” A former student noted that Fred Stripp never had “ex-students,” only “friends who graduated in different years and all of whom owe him a debt of gratitude for not only what he provided in the classroom, but, more important, for the life-time support, guidance and counsel that was never mentioned in the college catalogue but came as an unexpected `perk from taking the course from Dr. Stripp.'”
His death on Monday, January 29, 1990, ended a life but it could not end either the devotion of his former students, associates, and colleagues or the very deep influence Stripp had on their lives and careers.

Family survivors include his wife Dorrie, sons Jonathan and Steve, two sisters, a brother, and one grandchild.

Thomas O. Sloane Watson M. Laetsch Arthur Quinn