She is the first woman to have a building named after her in SanDiego State’s 105-year history.

She is one of the first women to take part in the first moderngeography graduate program in the western United States and one ofonly five professors ever to be awarded an honorary doctoral degreeat SDSU.

It is fair to say this woman took the university by storm.

Alvena S. Storm, emerita professor of geography, celebrated her100th birthday March 10 by attending a luncheon with professors andformer students. She taught for 40 years, from 1926-1966.

The campus buzz at the time was that she was a dedicatedprofessional who had a warm personality, and had a reputation forbeing a “tough act” and giving few “good” grades, wrote ElizabethGalligan in a 1994 alumni letter.

“At more than 6 feet tall, she was a very imposing figure,” BrucePorteous, former student from the class of 1949, said. “She was agood speaker, well-organized and very demanding; we worked reallyhard.”

In those days, women had to be twice as good as men to get ahead,Porteous said.

Storm, who now resides in a retirement home near her family in SanFrancisco, is remembered in the SDSU geography department as beingthe only woman who had a long-term influence on the academiccharacter of the social sciences.

“Many people felt I was foolish and a little off the beam becauseI was going into a field where there weren’t many jobs, and certainlynot for women,” Storm said in an interview in 1986.

If you know what you want to do, you should do it, she said. Thereis nothing sadder than when people drift into something they don’treally enjoy; it leads into bitter old age.

The building was named after Storm in 1986.

When she began teaching in 1926 — with a beginning salary ofabout $38 per week — the university was then called San Diego NormalSchool and was located on the corner of Park Boulevard, Normal Streetand El Cajon Boulevard.

She is the last surviving faculty member to have taught therebefore the university relocated to its current site in 1931.

She said that during the depression, many fine students who couldnot afford more costly, private universities came to San Diego StateCollege.

“I often refer to the period of the ’30s as what I think of as thegolden years,” she said in the interview. “We had moved the collegeout to the new site. We had a new beginning, new curriculum.”

She said teachers in those days knew the students very wellbecause it was a small school, and because students had to havechaperones at social functions and faculty advisers to clubs.

A lot of personal touch was lost with the influx of studentsfollowing World War II, she said. There were temporary buildings andstudents standing in the aisles and sitting on the floor.

When the veterans came back, there was more competition forcollege instructors and students, she said.

In those years, Storm was lucky as a woman to have the opportunityto go on field work seminars with geographers.

With the aid of the International Geographical Congress, Storm wasable to go to Germany in 1931 while visiting universities in Europe.She also visited South America, Hawaii, the Netherlands, France,Austria and Switzerland.

Storm was known to take her classes on field trips to the BorregoDesert to point out principles of geography and native vegetation.

Her field work recordings were never published.

“All of my records were for the benefit of my classes,” she said.

The last person to receive an honorary doctoral degree at SDSU wasJohn F. Kennedy in 1963.