SRI campus (Menlo Park, California)

USA / California / Atherton / Menlo Park, California / Ravenswood Avenue, 333
 campus, Second World War 1939-1945, United States Geological Survey (USGS)
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SRI International Campus
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493
(650) 859-2000
sri.com/
www.sri.com/contact/documents/campusmap_print_0509.pdf

History:
Dibble General Hospital (site)
Dibble General Hospital was used as a 2,700 bed veterans hospital. There were 115 buildings constructed on the site by the end of 1943. The site is currently occupied by the following:

* Stanford Research Institute
* City of Menlo Park
* United States Geological Survey
* West Bay Sanitary District
* First Church of Christ Scientist
* California Department of Fish and Game
* Several private owners

Anticipating a wave of wounded soldiers from the Pacific operations during World War II, the U.S. Army bought the estate of Mark Hopkins, of California railroad and hotel fame, including the mansion formerly known as Thurlow Lodge, to care for the thousands of soldiers injured in the South Pacific in World War II. Originally, the post was named Palo Alto General Hospital but was soon renamed, "Dibble Army Hospital" to honor Colonel John Dibble who was killed in an aircraft crash in 1943.

Menlo Park's wartime population suddenly soared when the U.S. Army chose to build Dibble General Hospital on the site of the where the Stanford Research Institute and the Menlo Park Civic Center stand today. Between 1943 and 1946 Dibble specialized in plastic surgery, blind care, neuro-psychiatry and orthopedics and at its peak it had 2,400 beds, about two-thirds the population of the entire town. Dr. Bernard Silber was working at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco when he was transferred to the new Dibble hospital. But first, he had to ask four or five people where Menlo Park was. "It was a quiet, pleasant place," he recalled, noting that there weren't any stores yet on Santa Cruz Avenue except at the corner of El Camino Real.

In June 1946 the hospital was transferred to the Federal Public Housing Authority.

www.militarymuseum.org/DibbleGH.html
www.corpsfuds.com/php/siteindex.php?site=J09CA0791&stat...
menlocampus.wr.usgs.gov/50years/history/briefhistory/wa...
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   37°27'25"N   122°10'30"W

Comments

  • In the 1970's I worked as a temp laborer during my summer off from school in the SRI facility. There was lots of government/defense contract work going on with radar tracking and radio dish technology back then. Brilliant people worked there, but socially many of them were a bunch of kooks! LOL
  • I lived in Stanford Village from 1946 - 1950 while my Dad attended Stanford U. It was a great place for a young kid back then--tons of other children to play with...long unobstructed hallways to roller skate through, etc., etc. I was sorry to leave after 4 years...I guess the Village must've closed up for good a few years after that.
  • I was born in 1940. After boot camp, my father was stationed at Dibble Hospital, and we lived very near, on Middlefield Rd. My dad was a dental technician and ran the dental lab there. His lifelong desire had been to attend dental school, but, you know, war and kids and so forth. Anyway, the men my dad worked with were those who had had their mandibles either blown away or heavily damaged, usually by faulty hand granades. I remember some of these men well, as they often gathered at our home to play music and celebrate a bit of freedom and possible relief from their awful injuries. My dad developed the first artificial TMJ joint, of plastic, while there at Dibble. It was a real passion for him. The saddest men were those whose tongues were missing, as there was just no way to replace a tongue very successfully; their efforts at speech were not good. Of course, I was very young, knew them only for a short time, and do not know their subsequent history. I visited the hospital only a couple of times; seeing all those suffering men was a terrible experience. It was overcrowded, so the halls were lined with men on gurneys, most of them covered in sheets because of the way open flesh wounds had to be treated in those days.
This article was last modified 13 years ago