Honorary Degrees
Robert “Bob” Darwin
The late Robert “Bob” Darwin is the largest donor in CSUMB history. His legacy estate gift will provide scholarship support to CSUMB students, ensuring that financial barriers will not stop them from pursuing their dreams through higher education. Darwin died in April 2023 at age 96.
He was born in 1926 and grew up in and around Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of immigrant parents. After serving three years in the U.S. Navy, he attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where he majored in business and finance. He spent 10 years in Hollywood pursuing a career as a screenwriter, actor, producer and director. He left in 1967 — declaring it “totally corrupt” — and later wrote a memoir about his experiences.
He formed a real estate acquisition partnership and bought a ranch in Carmel Valley, California, and other trophy properties throughout the West. He raised thoroughbred horses and formed Transjet, the first jet-oriented, fixed-base operation in the Monterey, California, area.
Returning to writing – if only as a sideline – he became editor of The Streamliner, a rail-based, technically-oriented quarterly publication, then wrote “The History of the Union Pacific Railroad in Cheyenne,” a coffee-table book that became the most successful and highly praised rail photo book ever published. Darwin continued writing in his retirement years. He was working on a second memoir about his non-Hollywood years and another book, “Yuri,” recounting his father’s six-year-long flight out of Ukraine and around the world after the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917.
Darwin was inspired by his housekeeper, Polly De Leon, to give his historic gift to the university. De Leon was an undocumented immigrant worker from Mexico when Darwin first hired her. They became close friends, and she remained in his employ for over 25 years. She and her husband, Aquilino Zarazua, also a Mexican immigrant, became U.S. citizens and raised three daughters who all earned college degrees. The oldest, Blanca Zarazua, is now a tax attorney and specialist in immigration law.
In Darwin’s words, “Polly did what she always strove to do. That’s what I call success. … And if my money can help one more kid earn the same kind of success in life that Polly achieved for her children, then I will know that I didn’t do it in vain,” he said. “That will be my reward.