Bovard Administration Building and Kenneth
Norris Jr. Auditorium with famed Tommy Trojan statue (left) and viewed
from flowers at Alumni Park (right)
USC is a beautiful campus with historic buildings. You
will be charged $6 parking but it's worth stopping by to take a tour and
have a gourmet coffee and rolls in one of the campus shops. It is
located near the Harbor Freeway- 110 not far from the Coliseum and downtown
Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was a frontier town in the 1870s, when members
of the Methodist Episcopal Conference first sought to establish a university
in the region. The city lacked paved streets, electric lights and telephones.
Founders could not have foreseen that Southern California would rapidly
grow into one of the most dynamic and influential regions in the world,
or that the University of Southern California would one day be a world-class
research university.
Today, USC enrolls more than 28,000 students and ranks
in the top 10 among private research universities in the United States
in federal research and voluntary support. It is also only one of four
private research universities in the western United States elected to membership
in the Association of American Universities, a group that represents the
top one percent of the nations accredited universities which account for
nearly two-thirds of all federally sponsored research.
"Tommy Trojan," a life-size bronze statue of a Trojan
warrior, stands on the campus of University of Southern California (USC)
in Los Angeles. It was first unveiled on June 6, 1930.
In 1929, when the university was making plans for its
50th birthday celebration, James McCoy, president of the General Alumni
Association, conceived the idea of the Trojan Shrine.
Commissioned at a cost of $10,000
as the alumni association's semi-centennial gift, sculptor
Roger Noble Burnham was selected to do the work.
Russ Saunders, star fullback on the Howard Jones teams
of 1927, '28 and '29, was one of the football players who
modeled for the statue. Ernie Pinckert (who played in '29, '30 and '31)
was another.
On the bronze statue's granite pedestal are inscribed
the qualities of the ideal Trojan: faithful, scholarly, skillful, courageous and ambitious. On one of the granite faces of
the pedestal there is a metal copy of the university seal. Over
the years, Tommy has gained nationwide fame as a collegiate symbol.
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