Alongside that Germany topic, I just finished reading Brit author Julia Boyd's Travelers in the Third Reich, a very impressively researched collection of diaries and letters and memoirs from diverse people making diverse visits to Germany in 1930s (politicians, actors, authors, journalists, tourists). In 2018, the book was a London Times non fiction bestseller.
In the 'Travelers" chapter on the 1936 Olympics, we have some paragraphs on "Californian Mary Tresidder's" and visit to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the February 1936 winter Olympics.
Tresidder? Related to Stanford Student Union???
Quick to Wikipedia.
Mary Curry (1893-1970) was the daughter of the Curry's who owned Camp Curry at Yosemite.
Web sources vary, but Mary Curry married Donald Tresidder around 1920. She was in her early 40s in 1936 in Germany. She wrote a book, Trees of Yosemite in 1932.
Donald Tresidder (1894-1948, here, here, here) was a kid from rural Indiana - Tipton, pop. 5000, about 50 miles north of Indianapolis. He taught school for a year before matriculating premed at University of Chicago.
After that freshman year at U Chicago, Tresidder ended up with his sister on a trip to Yosemite because the railroad to their original goal, Southern California, was washed out.
At Yosemite, Tresidder met a professor who invited him to come to college at Stanford. He had service in WW1, then finished both college and med school at Stanford. He continued to work summers at Yosemite, and never practiced medicine, becoming instead president of the Yosemite Company. He was involved in the 1920s buildout, such as Ahwanee Hotel. He met Mary Curry during his Yosemite summers.
Tresidder ended up back at Stanford in 1943 as President, was a success at fund raising, and supervised the founding of SRI /Stanford Research Institute. He died at age 53 of a heart attack in NYC in 1948. Tresidder Union is named after him.
Mary Tresidder outlived her husband by many years and died in 1970 in her permanent suite at the Ahwanee Hotel at Yosemite.
How Did Tresidder Get Into Boyd's Book on the 1930s?
Boyd quotes a couple paragraphs from Mary Tresidder's diaries of her 1936 trip to the Winter Olympics. Growing up around Yosemite, the Bavarian Alps must have felt familiar. The quotations in Boyd's book are sourced to the Tresidder diaries online at the Stanford Digital Archive.
In the book, the next section is on journalist William Shirer's notes on the same February 1936 Olympics.
More Biographic Details
According to Stanford Daily (here), Mary Curry graduated Stanford in 1915 in English (Donald graduated in 1919). Mary also got a Stanford M.A. in English in 1916, and she started work on a PhD at Yale, which was broken off based on Donald's marriage proposal. They married in 1920. The Stanford Daily obit says Donald did med school "1922-1925" and "graduated in 1927." He may have been doing med school part time while working as a researcher on botulism and public health.
In 1939, Tresidder had an illness that required him to come down from Yosemite, and he became a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, then the Board's President, then the University's president.
Tresidder was a private pilot (pic):
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