Steve Evans, Revelle '93, came back to work on campus events a year after his graduation, but didn’t plan to stay.

"I got about 30 days' notice (that President Clinton would give a major policy speech as the 1997 commencement speaker). Don Chadwick, who is the director of sports facilities, mentioned he'd heard a rumor that the president was coming to UCSD for a campus commencement. We didn’t have any all-campus commencement at the time, so I wondered which campus, Revelle, Muir, which? It didn’t occur to me that the next day we would start turning a grass field into a venue for 25,000 people.

"About a week later we learned that the political system doesn’t disseminate information like we thought it would. Sometimes it was hard to get information on what they wanted. We worked with four separate groups, the Secret Service, the White House Communications Office, the University and local officials like the SDPD. The Secret Service was pretty inflexible on some things. For example, we had to have what they call a "bike rack" in front of the stage, which is a barred fence with a buffer zone around it. They brought certain things themselves, like the podium. They call it the Blue Goose, and it’s bulletproof. Then there was a low bulletproof barrier that we had to cover with plants.

"One of my fondest memories is of Carolyn Horowitz (retired chief of campus special events and protocol), her husband and my roommate, at 10 the night before, frantically spraying hairspray on the banners that hung from the roof over the platform. They were too shiny, so there we were running to Thrifty for hairspray.

"President Clinton was a lot more fun and interesting than Newt Gingrich (the next year’s commencement speaker). The president was my first, of course, but there was much less local interest in Newt."