Leslie Theodore Sharp

While he was a student at the University of California in Berkeley, Leslie was a member of the Abracadabra Club, a fraternity-like organization founded in 1895 on the UC campus (one of his club brothers was Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California from 1930 to 1958).

In his early years here, Leslie lived in the Abracadabra house at 2635 Hillegass Avenue, on the Southside. In 1910, Abracadabra bought the house of Prof. Jacques Loeb, who was moving to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York. Designed by John Galen Howard, Loeb’s large brown-shingle house was located at 2616 Virginia Street. Leslie lived there until graduation.

The house burned in the 1923 Berkeley Fire, and now there’s a 1960s condo building on that lot. By sheer coincidence, it’s located almost directly behind our house.