"Your knowledge is your power. To obtain knowledge you must either follow winding paths through the long, hard school of experience or benefit by the experience of others."
—— University of California Extension Division, 1920. "Transportation and Traffic Management: The Field of Unlimited Opportunities."
The People's University
The prestigious educational institution known today as the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business began in the late 19th century as the College of Commerce, a democratic outgrowth of the land-grant "people's university." As University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler articulated in a stirring address to the Merchants Association in San Francisco in 1899:
The day has passed when the university existed to train men solely in a certain narrow list of vocations, either for lives of leisure as gentlemen's sons, or to professions such as the ministry, the law, medicine, and teachers. ... The modern university has to do with all that concerns life and the interests of life. ... A college of commerce does not represent any new departure on the part of our university. It is a natural output of the university.
Further widening this public educational mission, the University founded the UC Berkeley Extension, which served to provide accessible education to Californians through numerous locations outside of the Berkeley campus. While the College of Commerce focused on a rigorous, multi-year academic degree for traditional undergraduate students, the more accessible Extension Division provided targeted, practical training for working professionals who could not attend full-time university. It was in the classes in one of these extension courses, among a group of professionals, both men and women, of various ages and experience, that the Pacific Transportation Association would first arise as a social club in 1920.
A New Regulatory Framework
The First World War (1914–1918) had transformed American transportation. To meet wartime demands, the federal government seized direct control of the railroads in 1917, coordinating traffic and standardizing operations across the nation. Wartime practices had altered rate structures, routing priorities, and administrative authority, while new federal legislation expanded the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the predecessor of today's Surface Transportation Board (STB). A key outcome of this governmental regulatory intervention was that transportation became professionalized, its operations now governed by a strict and complex system of rules.
Tariff complexity multiplied and disputes over classification and claims became more frequent. For those working in shipping and traffic departments, advancement increasingly depended on understanding a complex body of regulations and procedures that had grown rapidly during the war and now governed the movement of commerce in peacetime. Industrious individuals who managed to study and comprehend these new structures now had an unprecedented opening to professional opportunity.
It was in this uncertain environment that the University of California Extension Division introduced its course in "Transportation and Traffic Management," offering practical instruction designed for professionals navigating the industry's new realities. Under the direction of Walker L. Trammell of the Southern Pacific Railroad, classes met at 1337 Sutter Street in San Francisco beginning February 20, 1920. Evenings in the course were spent listening to industry lectures and working directly with freight tariffs, ICC rulings, and classification manuals. The course's Freight Tariff Library, stocked with materials from major railroads and federal agencies, was opened to the entire public as a resource for interpreting the documents that governed commerce. (On a terminology note, "tariffs" in this context referred not to the term's modern usage of taxes imposed on goods and services, but rather to a carrier's published pricing rules.)
The Students
The "serious-minded students" who enrolled in the Transportation and Traffic Management course came from many career stages. Most were already employed in railroads, steamship companies, warehouses, wholesale houses, and manufacturing firms, working as clerks, rate assistants, freight agents, or junior traffic workers. They hailed from across the Bay Area and beyond, attending evening classes after long workdays in offices, docks, and yards. Some were sponsored by the Federal Board for Vocational Education, reflecting the government's effort to place First World War veterans into stable civilian occupations. What united the students was a shared recognition that the post-war transportation industry had become more technical and more regulated, and that advancement now depended on mastering the rules, documents, and practices that governed the movement of freight.
The classroom brought together those at various stages of their careers, but once inside, distinctions of rank mattered less than shared effort. Night after night, they worked through tariffs and ICC rulings side by side, forming relationships that extended beyond the lectures. By the end of the term, the class had become a group bound by common labor, ambition, and the recognition that they were navigating a changing industry together.
The course's influence was most clearly seen in the careers that followed. Writing in 1923, Keith W. Coplin, then Assistant General Freight Agent for the McCormick Steamship Company, reflected on his experience under Trammell's instruction. Before taking the course, he recalled, he "would undoubtedly have still been down the dock." (In 1920, the 19-year-old Australian merchant seaman Harry Bridges had only just arrived in San Francisco, and being "down on the dock" still meant low pay and little protections.) The training Coplin received in rates and traffic practice opened a different path, leading first to work as a rate clerk and eventually to greater responsibility.
For women seeking professional advancement, this new rules-based transportation system created clearer standards for demonstrating the value of their work. The traffic management course, established in February 1920, preceded the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, which guaranteed women the right to vote. Although workplace discrimination persisted, often through informal barriers, the new operating environment was generally seen as fairer than before. As Zulu Clements, traffic manager for Leslie-California Salt Co. and nicknamed the "Woman Salt Baron" and "Dollar Sign" by her contemporaries, declared in a 1926 speech titled "Lessons in Traffic":
I am profoundly thankful to have entered the traffic game after the passing of the Act to Regulate Commerce. Checking my experience with carriers governed by conference or gentleman's agreements, against those governed by the Act to Regulate Commerce, satisfied me that government control of rates is a consummation greatly to be desired.
The Teacher: Walker L. Trammell
The Transportation and Traffic Management course was led by Walker L. Trammell, a freight official of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He had more than fifteen years of experience in railroad and industrial traffic work. At the time the course was organized, Trammell was employed in the Southern Pacific's freight department in San Francisco, allowing him to draw directly on current railroad practice in his instruction.
Rather than lectures, classroom instruction was organized around practical experience. Students were expected to handle actual tariffs, classifications, and rate schedules drawn from railroads across the United States, consulting files maintained in the Freight Tariff Library that Trammell helped assemble and supervise. He pressed the University to acquire sufficient copies of current and cancelled tariffs so that each student could work directly with the material during class sessions. Curriculum moved systematically through railway organization, tariff construction, rate making, freight classification, claims, and procedures before the Interstate Commerce Commission, often following the sequence in which a traffic department would encounter problems in practice.
Trammell also managed the day-to-day conduct of the course with close attention. He kept attendance records, graded students on both participation and performance, and corresponded regularly with the Extension Division regarding enrollment, withdrawals, refunds, and instructional progress. When the original eighty-session schedule proved insufficient to cover the material to his satisfaction, he extended the course beyond its planned end date to complete the subject matter. Trammell's correspondence shows a man deeply invested in the success of the course, often at personal cost; he pushed for more materials, better facilities, and longer instruction, even agreeing to teach additional sessions without compensation when he felt the subject matter demanded it.
Although his work with the Southern Pacific Railroad and four years of teaching the Traffic Management course had been successful, by 1923 Trammell decided to move to New York for professional advancement. He joined the American Smelting and Refining Company, where he soon became a vice president by 1927. Writing to the University from New York in the summer of 1923, Trammell described the personal dislocation of the move, noting that he felt "somewhat like a 'fish out of water'" after leaving San Francisco, where he had known nearly everyone, for a city where he knew no one at all, even as he expressed confidence that the feeling would pass. In time, he became fully established in East Coast professional and civic life, including serving as president of the Metropolitan Golf Association (MGA), where his name remains attached to the Walker L. Trammell Trophy awarded at the Metropolitan Open Championship.
The university course, unfortunately, proved dependent on the sustained presence of its founding instructor, and its conclusion in 1923 marked the end of a program shaped by Trammell's personal involvement. From New York, Trammell remained engaged in discussions to seek a successor, transferring his accumulated course materials and offering detailed assessments of the relative qualifications, availability, and practical limitations of potential candidates. Despite these efforts, no replacement emerged with the same commitment that Trammell had brought to the program, and the course did not continue in its original form.
Association Nights
Bringing our story back to 1920, somewhere between the tariff cases and the late-evening lectures, the Transportation and Traffic Management class had become more than a class. Students began to linger after sessions, continuing discussions that ranged from rate disputes to career prospects. Informal gatherings followed, and soon the idea emerged, encouraged by Trammell, that the cohort should organize itself as a club. The motivations were both practical and social: networking, mutual assistance, continued education, and access to the Freight Tariff Library beyond class hours. By late 1920, the group was meeting with enough regularity that it was referred to in university correspondence as an "association."
Administrative letters from the Extension Division indicate that the Association began holding organized meetings in the same rooms used for instruction. University officials adjusted classroom schedules to accommodate these gatherings, referring explicitly to "association nights" when rooms were needed for purposes other than formal lectures. The Extension Division also addressed practical issues arising from this expanded use of space. In one exchange, administrators relayed concerns from building management that members of the Association had smoked in the rooms and discarded lighted cigarette stubs on the carpet, behavior that was said to be rendering the University's position in the building "almost untenable." Trammell was asked to help ensure that Association meetings observed the same standards as regular classes.
The first public reference to the "University of California Traffic Association" appeared in an October 1920 article in the San Francisco Call, announcing that officers had been elected to the Association: Merten B. Baker of United States Rubber Company as President, Roscoe C. Bray of California Powder Company as vice president, Rose Hillman as secretary, and C.J. Bandman of Pioneer Rubber Company as director. Of this new club, the Call declared: "Its meetings will be devoted to discussions of traffic problems arising in the class. Prominent traffic men and representative business men will be invited to address the association."
The Christening of Steamship Night
By November of 1920, the first Transportation and Traffic Management class was approaching its conclusion and the "association" officers had just begun their first term. After nine months of evening lectures and tariff work, Walker L. Trammell began planning how the first course would come to a close. On November 11, he wrote to the University of California Extension Division director Professor Leon J. Richardson in Berkeley to outline his intentions.
Trammell explained that he expected to finish the class "on or about December 14th" and asked whether it might be appropriate to mark the end of the course by holding "the closing exercises in some suitable place with a class banquet." "The students are heartily in favor of it," he wrote, adding that he believed such an event "would add considerably to the occasion." Two days later, Richardson replied, agreeing that bringing the course to a close with a banquet was appropriate, writing, "You have a good idea in closing your course on or about December 15, with a class banquet." He confirmed that the plan had "the entire approval of the Extension Division," again noting that expenses would be paid by the attendees themselves.
With that exchange, the arrangements moved forward. What had begun as a night course in freight rates and railway organization would end not simply with a final exam, but with a gathering of its members, students and instructor, marking the close of the first class in Transportation and Traffic Management and the beginning of the Pacific Transportation Association.
In subsequent years, the club's banquet evolved into the annual tradition of "Steamship Night." In American professional culture, banquets served as markers of professional identity, recognition, and continuity. From this single evening of celebration emerged something more lasting than a gathering of students and professionals: a community of men and women connected by a shared commitment to the transportation industry.