At 96, S. Milton Hender-son is one of UC Davis' oldest emeriti.

His son Jerry, 71, is an emeritus professor, too.

But wait, there's more: Today's faculty includes Jerry's son Brad, 47.

For a faculty to include three generations from one family is one thing. But to have all three in one room to share their UC Davis memories is rare indeed.

"It's unique," is how S. Milton Henderson described it during an interview in his apartment at Woodland's St. John's Retirement Village, where he has lived for two years. He types his own correspondence and uses a computer.

"I could ride my bicycle from one side of the campus to the other rather quickly," recalled Milton, who today uses a walker to help get around. It has been three years since he has been on campus. "It got so complicated over there, I didn't go over unless I had to."

Milton arrived on the Davis campus in 1947 — when it was still the University Farm — and stayed for 30 years. He was a professor of agricultural engineering, a graduate adviser and, for a time, an associate dean.

Jerry joined the mechanical engineering faculty in 1965, and, like his dad, stayed for 30 years. Jerry specialized in design and solid mechanics, and his career coincided with a significant increase in the number of female engineering students. A photo in the UC Davis history book Abundant Harvest shows Jerry in a lab, with the caption indicating that he "offered classes to improve female students' mechanical and electrical skills."

"After one or two years they did not feel comfortable and changed their major," Jerry recalled. "As a group, their experiences growing up were somewhat different from the men's. Some of my efforts at that time were to help the female students get over their perceived lack of understanding of hardware and the physical world, the reason many changed majors."

Brad came on board in 2002 as a lecturer in what is now called the University Writing Program. But do not think for a minute that engineering does not run through his blood, too: He teaches engineering and scientific writing.

Brad and his father both attended UC Davis for their freshman and sophomore years, before each transferred — Brad to California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in English, and Jerry to Iowa State University in Ames, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in agricultural engineering.

"Do you see a pattern here?" Brad asked jokingly, a reference to his and his father's transfers to other universities.

Jerry returned to Davis to receive his doctorate, and, as soon as he did that, he joined the faculty.

"You either like or dislike what your family does, because you see a lot of it — and I happen to like engineering," said Jerry, who now lives in Chico.

He said he had no plan to teach at UC Davis. "Things were so good, I didn't really have a plan," he said. "Basically, I took the first job that was offered to me."

Brad did not have a plan to come back, either. "For me, it was very serendipitous," he said. He had worked as a design engineer, a technical education consultant and a diversity program manager in the corporate world. Along the way, he received a master's degree in professional writing from the University of Southern California, and wrote Drums: A Novel, a book of poetry, and numerous stories and poems in a variety of publications. Oh, and he played the drums, too.

A year or two into his career at UC Davis, he said, "I realized, 'Wow, I'm back where I started.'"

He and his father are both Davis High graduates, Brad in 1977 and Jerry in 1952. Brad, during his two years as a student at UC Davis, was on the Aggie wrestling team. Jerry recalled that during his early years on the faculty he was an "instigator" of the engineering department's tradition of "making silly bicycles" for Picnic Day.

Milton recalled his own Picnic Days. "It was a good deal in those days because people came from everywhere," he said. "The place was flooded with people."

Jerry pointed out that Picnic Day still draws a huge crowd, "but you don't see as many people that you know anymore."

When he started as a freshman in 1952, enrollment was just under 1,500 "and we could park our cars in front of the library — the campus was that small."

Of course, the campus was smaller still when Milton arrived, not even a general UC campus until 1959. "It was pretty elemental," he recalled of his early days on campus. And, the students were "a rather bland group, not very ornery."

"They were there for business. Many had been involved in the war in one way or another. They were working for a living — and they really worked at it — none of this monkey business."

Earlier, he had his own "war" to deal with: the Great Depression. During this time, he attended Simpson College in his native Iowa, earning a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in math in 1932. "It was the loooowest point in the Great Depression," he said, drawing out the "o" to emphasize how low it was. "After that, it was not easy."

"There was only one job available that I could take — teaching math and physics at a country high school," he said. He recalled getting paid $100 a month for eight months. "Then I got fired!" But he quickly pointed out that everyone got fired, because officials shut down the school.

He ended up taking a job as a chemist for Ford Motor Co. in Detroit, working for Henry Ford himself. "He was very much in disfavor of people from universities," Milton said. "Because he ran a trade school where people learned one thing and that was it" — just like how people do one thing only on automotive assembly lines.

Milton, unlike Ford, liked academia. He decided to go back to school, enrolling at Iowa State and earning bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering. He worked during school on a federal grain storage project related to the war effort.

Later, at UC Davis, he specialized in crop drying — and Jerry noted that some people refer to a particular drying equation as "the Henderson equation."

And if that is not famous enough for the Henderson family, Jerry said the fourth generation offers hope. Brad's son, Silas (that is what the "S" stands for in his great-grandfather's full name), aims to be a physicist or professional musician. He is a freshman at UC Santa Cruz.

"We kept him in the UC system, just not at Davis," Brad said.