Alum Profile

Wildcat Highlight

Distinguished Alumni

Wildcats on the Move

Bill Krider
1953-1995 B.A., Economics, ’77
From his passion for music to his dedication to his work with Southeast Asian refugees, Chico State alum Bill Krider was full of lifeand strong opinions. A traveller’s most essential tool? Chapstick, absolutely. Baseball’s all-time best? No contestWillie Mays.The most fun any uncle can have? Taking his nephews for sushi in San Francisco, of course. Music’s greatest composer? Are you kidding? John Lennon or nobody!

Krider’s passion extended to his work with refugees in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. As the director of Indochinese Housing Development Corporation (IHDC) for ten years, Krider worked tirelessly to increase the availability and improve the quality of housing for Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.
Krider taught English classes and job training workshops for the adults in his building, and hired residents to perform many of the maintenance and managerial duties around the building. He also tutored the children with their homeworkand their understanding of American culture. One Vietnamese student struggled during her first two years in high school and seriously considered dropping out several times. Each time, Krider talked her into staying in school. He helped her with her school work, and he helped her concerned parents understand how difficult it was for her to negotiate her traditional culture and the new American culture she faced every day in school. But, with Krider’s help, by the time she graduated from high school, she had earned a scholarship to Brown University.

When Krider noticed that the kids in IHDC housing in the Tenderloin had been forced out of the neighborhood playground by drug dealers, he raised the funds and supervised the construction of a fenced playground next to the IHDC building. In the mid-1980s, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein twice presented Krider with awards for outstanding public service for his work with the housing project and the neighborhood.

Krider travelled in the Mediterranean (living in a cave on Rhodes for a couple months), the Middle East, and Asia after his first year in college. That experience, and a Radical Economics course at Chico State, sparked his curiosity in Asian cultures. After graduation, Krider took a job with ARAMCO, a Saudia Arabian oil company, managing a large housing complex for international workers. After a year there, he again travelled through the Middle East and Asia, teaching English in Thailand for six months before returning home. Two years later he enrolled in the M.B.A. program at St. Mary’s College and graduated in two more years.

Krider’s interest in cultural diversity and his experience in housing made him the ideal candidate for the position with IHDC. When he left to start his own tax consulting business in 1994, Krider was praised by the IHDC board of directors as a dedicated advocate of the residents. But the highest praise was the presence at his retirement reception of over one thousand current and former residents, who alternately wished him well and urged him to stay on.

Travel and music were Krider’s other passions. He and his life partner, Arnold Burton, visited dozens of countries, including Costa Rica, Kenya, Indonesia, Greece, and Great Britain, where he combined his love of travel with his devotion to the Beatles. Krider brought back from that trip several items to add to his extraordinary collection of Beatles music and memorabilia.

At its peak Krider’s Beatles collection consisted of 1100 items valued at over $30,000. Krider was especially interested in the rare and the off-beat. Remember those Yellow Submarine lunchboxes? The two-foot tall, blow-up Beatles dolls or the Flip Your Wig board game? How about the Yesterday and Today album cover with the Beatles dressed in butcher’s smocks and holding mutilated baby dolls with fake blood all over (the cover that was banned in the United States)? Ever see a Beatles pop-up book? The 1983 Swank article that included sexy photos of John and Oko? And who could forget the 45 of Buck Owens singing “Act Naturally”? Krider had them all.

When he died of AIDS in 1995, Krider left this collection, his most prized possession, to his sister, Elizabeth (Krider) Renfro (M.A., English, ’75), who teaches in Chico’s Women’s Studies program. “Bill told me I could sell it and use the money to travel, but I just couldn’t do that,” said Renfro. She kept it stored for two years and then offered it to Chico State’s Music Department.

Paul Friedlander, director of the Music Industry Program [see profile on opposite page], was ecstatic when he learned of the collection. “As a popular music historian, I find it fascinating to listen to the Beatles’ early work,” he said. “The recordings of the early sessions in Hamburg and Liverpool are especially interesting because they give us the ability to listen to their musical development, and [indicate] how they assembled their brilliant collage of American musics like rock and roll, rockabilly, soul, and Motown and formed it into hits like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ that struck us senseless.” But the collection isn’t just for music majors, Friedlander said. “Students studying sociology and history will have an archive of material to draw from in the pursuit of musicological analysis and the study of music in popular culture and society in general,” he said. The collection, officially titled The William J. Krider Beatles Archive, should be available for display next year.

“I know Bill would be proud to see his collection made available to students who have the kind of passion for music that he had,” said Renfro.

Casey Huff, University Publications