Should We Bring Them Back

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Should We Bring Them Back?

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De-Extinction

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Contents

FALL 2021 VOL. 132 NO. 3

SEYCHELLES PARAKEET Psittacula wardi

“It would be like taking your Toyota and swapping out parts until you have a Honda— if Hondas were extinct.”

—Richard “Ed” Green, Ph.D. ‘05, p. 24

24

WOOLLY MAMMOTH

ON THE C OVER

Mammuthus primigenius

Should We Bring Them Back?

Scientists are on the brink of reviving extinct species.

BY LEAH WORTHINGTON

DODO Raphus cucullatus

PASSENGER PIGEON

32 Billionaires in Space

Ectopistes migratorius

The race is on, but who stands to gain?

BY LAURA SMITH

38

Women with Wings A stewardess in the golden age of air travel

BY JULIA COOKE AND ANDE RICHARDS

TASMANIAN TIGER Thylacinus cynocephalus

42 Grave Justice Eric Stover lays bare the truth of atrocities.

BY GARY LEE

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MARCO WAGNER

CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 1

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Departments

5 Inbox 7 Editor’s Note

Friday–Sunday,

Telegraph

October 1–3

9 Treasures Lost and Found UC Museum of Paleontology celebrates a century of discoveries

The Gate 56 The Chancellor’s Letter Trepidation and hope

49 A New Era Q&A with newly hired J-school professor Lisa Armstrong

BY ANDE RICHARDS

Online Exclusive

BY KATHERINE BLESIE

10 Gleanings James Webb Space Telescope; Cafe Ohlone; Dr. Fill; etc.

13 Five Questions Q&A with Hannah Zeavin, author of The Distance Cure

Register for Reunion and Parents Weekend at Homecoming today!

55 Student View Read the winner of our quarterly undergraduate essay contest.

57 Class Notes 60 Snapp Chats 62 In Memoriam

17 Now This NFTs here! Get ’em while they’re hot!

Alums, friends, Cal parents and family members: Join us for an in-person gathering to celebrate all things Cal. Most lectures will be virtual.

18 Mixed Media Cal Performances returns; Miłosz in California; antifascist martyr; etc.

This very momentous weekend will include performances, virtual lectures, tours, open houses, and much more. Let’s rally around California’s banner in 2021!

67 Spotlight Cal at the New Yorker

Our Podcast:

68 In House News from CAA

The Edge

72 First Person Persistence and Pixar

Want to hear more about our cover story?

Download episode 13 of The Edge: “Should We Bring Back Woolly Mammoths?” Listen as Laura and Leah discuss the many challenges— technical, logistical, and ethical—confronting de-extinction.

22 Big Picture Triple Rock

Online registration closes September 17. homecoming.berkeley.edu

You probably already know that Sather Tower is filled with fossils, right? But have you ever seen them? Come along as the UC Museum of Paleontology’s Dr. Mark Goodwin takes us on a video tour of the premises. Watch “The Bones of the Campanile.”

Tele photo: Nobel laureate John Mather, Ph.D. ’74, snaps a selfie with the muchanticipated James Webb Space Telescope.

Find these and other exclusives at californiamag.org.

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MEREDITH GIBB

THE CAMPAIGN FOR BERKELEY

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Editor in Chief Pat Joseph

Deputy Editor Laura Smith

Senior Online Editor Leah Worthington

Design Director Michiko Toki

Design Associate Anita Wong ’78

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8/5/21 7:05 PM

OUR SUMMER COVER STORY, “LAST WILL,” (p. 24) by Ruth DixonMueller ’64, Ph.D. ’70, about the controversial topic of voluntary death/medical aid-in-dying, prompted mostly positive response.

Mary Huber said Dixon-Mueller’s essay covered concepts she had been mulling for a long time. “And I’m not depressed—I’m actually a joyful person. I am 79 years of age and experiencing my third adventure with cancer, which is currently in remission … for how long? No one knows. … A copy of your article has been printed and placed in my file. My two daughters have copies, and we have discussed my end-of-life options in great detail.”

Patti Palmer said the article “resonated with my longtime thoughts and beliefs. I don’t plan to die anytime soon (I’m 61), but I want my death to be my choice, especially after watching my mother die at 67, after radiation and chemotherapy for lung cancer. … At the very least, I appreciate conversations about ‘normalizing’ death since it’s going to happen to all of us.”

Emily Risberg ’81 wrote, “I just went through this experience with my mother. She had ovarian cancer and chose to end her life.

It turned out to be one of the most profound experiences of my entire earthly existence. I was fortunate enough to spend three weeks prior to her passing in her little apartment and we had the time of our lives … all the while knowing this was the last time we would spend together.”

John Bateson ’73 strongly disagreed with the essay. “All of us want a ‘good death’ in which we’re in our homes, surrounded by loved ones, and in charge of our lives up to the end. … The answer isn’t to assist people in dying. Rather, it’s to improve end-oflife care.”

The thought was echoed by Thomas and Mary McCarthy.

“In our opinion, as 90-year-old seniors, [physician-assisted suicide] does nothing to enhance appropriate care for the elderly infirm.

On the contrary, it will lessen confidence in families, doctors, and other agents [and] weaken societal protections for those with severe mental and physical conditions, for the sake of an

‘enlightened’ few who want to be able to say ‘I did it my way.’ ” Approaching 100, Lorraine Osmundson ’48 was dismayed by the woman in the essay who chose to end her life at 65. “I could sympathize if she had a terminal disease or something. But to miss out on what for me would be at least 35 more lives, that is insane. Life is so darn interesting.

There are never enough hours to do everything I want to do.”

She added, “I admit the cover got me into my favorite chair to check it out.”

That’s all we can ask.

Send letters to californiamag@alumni. berkeley.edu.

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Editor’s Note Monarch the bear at Cal Academy of Sciences

© CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

We live in a place where the state animal— mascot of this very university—has been extinct for just shy of a century. No one alive today has ever seen one, but not so long ago they roamed California by the thousands, in kind with the Hupa, Miwok, Yahi, and all the multivarious human tribes that also inhabited the land.

Sadly, the grizzlies did not survive Europeans and gunpowder. In 1772, one was shot to death on the banks of Strawberry Creek just west of what is now the Berkeley campus by a member of the de Anza expedition. One hundred fifty years later, the last-known physical specimen of Ursus arctos californicus was gunned down in Tulare County. And that was it: As the dodo went, so went the Golden Bear.

As Berkeley Professor Anthony Barnosky established in a landmark study published in 2011, we are on the cusp of what is commonly called the “sixth extinction,” a mass die-off to rival the one that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. That event, we know (also thanks to Berkeley scientists), was caused by an asteroid impact.

This time, it seems, the asteroid is us. The damage is irreversible.

Or is it?

In this issue, California’s Leah Worthington examines the outlandish, but increasingly plausible, idea that science may be able to resurrect extinct species, from recently departed northern white rhinos to long-gone Ice Age mammoths. Worthington’s test species is the passenger pigeon, once so numerous in North America that they darkened skies as they migrated overhead. Newfangled genetic wizardry may have them darkening skies once again.

There are plenty of reasons why so-called “de-extinction,” however well intentioned, might be a bad idea. And yet the law of technological inevitability suggests that anything we can do, we will. Given that, it behooves us to start thinking now about how we might use the practice judiciously, in service to worthy ecological ends. One of the people leading that discussion is Berkeley alum and UC Santa Cruz ecologist Douglas McCauley ’01. As he cautions: “Unless we actually think about what was it that caused [these species’] extinction in the first place, these things coming out of our lab are not going to stand a chance for survival, and we’re going to see more species be pushed to the brink of extinction.” See “Should We Bring Them Back?” page 24.

While many of us are wringing our hands over the fate of this planet, others are yearning to colonize new ones—or at least venture in that direction. In what Berkeley Professor Robert Reich called “one small step for billionaires,” Virgin Atlantic/Galactic’s Richard Branson took a brief sub-orbital jaunt in

July, followed by Amazon/Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, who spent 11 minutes in space several days later. The scuttlebutt is that Tesla/SpaceX’s Elon Musk isn’t far behind.

(For the record, a Berkeley billionaire was there first and went farther: Charles Simonyi ’72 logged not one, but two, privately financed trips to the International Space Station.)

As California’s Laura Smith observes in the pages ahead, we are clearly in a new space race—one between nabobs, not nations. And while many are hailing Bezos, Branson, Musk, et al. as visionaries, Smith wonders: Do we really want to buy the vision they’re selling? Read “Billionaires in Space,” page 32.

If there’s a more expansive and democratic version of the space tourism dream, it may involve the servant classes who will no doubt be required to tend to the rocket set’s needs and whims, much as air hostesses tended to those of the jet set.

Beginning on page 38, find the story of Cal alumna Holly Borowiak-Rogers ’70, who flew with Pan Am to destinations like Moscow and Tehran in the golden age of air travel and found the experience both liberating and eye opening.

Professor Eric Stover has also traveled the globe in his long career as a human rights investigator, leading forensic teams in unearthing mass graves and other evidence of atrocities in places like El Salvador, the Balkans, and Rwanda. His most recent focus is closer to home—in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of a race massacre that took place there 100 years ago. Former Washington Post reporter and Tulsa native Gary Lee profiles Stover in his story, “Grave Justice,” beginning on page 42.

Those are just some of the highlights of this issue, which also includes a centennial celebration of the UC Museum of Paleontology (p. 9), an interview with Lisa Armstrong, a new hire at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (p. 49), and news of Berkeley’s first auction of a non-fungible token, or NFT (p. 17)—another harbinger of things to come.

Rich Lyons, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, was one of the people behind the NFT effort.

He described it to me via email as “one of the most fun Berkeley projects I’ve ever worked on. We were ‘schooled’ the whole way by a team of recent grads who know this world inside and out.” He signed off: “It is not our world, my friend.”

—Pat Joseph CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 7

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEONTOLOGY (UCMP)

Treasures Lost and Found

celebrates its centennial this year, but the story of its founding begins nearly two centuries ago, when California’s newly formed legislature commissioned a survey of the state, eager to map its gold deposits.

A team of geologists led by Josiah Whitney struck out for the wilderness, collecting fossils and taking meticulous notes on California’s natural wonders, from the soaring granite walls of Yosemite to the towering sequoias of the Sierra—“grand wonders of the vegetable world.” They published their findings in a monumental tome adorned with vivid illustrations and a gold-embossed cover.

The legislators were not impressed. They had sent the men out on a prospecting mission—or so they thought. Whitney remarked in frustration at the lawmakers’ disapproval: “We have escaped perils by flood and field, have evaded the friendly embrace of the grizzly, and now find ourselves in the jaws of the Legislature.” When those jaws clamped shut, cutting off funding, the team gave a portion of its fossil cache to the newly formed University of California, establishing the founding collection of what would later become the UCMP. But it was the dogged determination of a trailblazing woman scientist named Annie Alexander that gave the museum its official designation. Her interest sparked on a visit to Crater Lake in 1899, Alexander began auditing courses taught by the renowned Berkeley paleontologist John Merriam. The two became close, and Alexander, a sugar heiress, began funding the professor’s expeditions, many of which she also joined. Alexander and Merriam were intellectual partners for many years, but she soon grew frustrated with his thirst for recognition and influence.

“I am more than ever convinced that it is quiet research that brings results,” she wrote to the famed naturalist George Grinnell. To ensure that quiet research continued, she wrote to the University in 1921, offering to fund a separate museum of paleontology. The UCMP was born.

“Museum” may be a bit misleading; the UCMP is a research collection and is mostly closed to the general public. That said, it has worked hard to bring its resources to the world via the internet. In collaboration with the National Center for Science Education, the museum has created awardwinning educational websites including Understanding Evolution, Understanding Science, and Understanding Global Change.

TJ GEHLING

The UC Museum of Paleontology celebrates a century of discoveries.

By Katherine Blesie ’21

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49

Number of Cal athletes who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (in 10 different sports)

3

Cal’s rank among universities for number of athletes on Team USA, with 16

18

Number of countries Cal athletes represented in the Games

SYDNEY PAYNE

ROSEMARY POPA

JOACHIM SUTTON

RYAN MURPHY JACK CLEARY

VALERIE ARIOTO ANNA ILLÉS CAILEIGH FILMER

ROSER TARRAGÓ

KATIE MCLAUGHLIN

TOM SHIELDS

ALEX MORGAN

16

Number of medals won

by Cal athletes in Tokyo, including 4 golds

18 223

Cal’s ranking, if it were a country, in Tokyo medal count

“Yeah, I just want more.”

Golfer Collin Morikawa ’19 after winning the British Open in July. His performance inspired one commentator to remark that he handled pressure “as well as anybody I’ve seen since Tiger Woods.” The 24-year-old Cal alum told reporters, “I’m glad I look calm because the nerves are definitely up there. But you channel those nerves into excitement and energy, and that puts you away from a fear factor into ‘This is something I want.’”

Total number of medals won by Cal athletes in the history of the Olympics

FU2020 First photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999, this globule in the Carina Nebula, some 7,500 light years from Earth, was dubbed, for obvious reasons, the “Defiant Finger” by the scientists who first analyzed it—among them, former Berkeley astronomer Nathan Smith. Not surprisingly, more than one science outlet presented the rudely raised cosmological digit as a fitting send-off to 2020.

10 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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ABOVE: NASA/DESIREE STOVER; BELOW: NASA, ESA, N. SMITH ET AL., AND THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI/AURA)

The only physical public exhibition is a small collection of castings on display in Valley Life Sciences, dominated by the towering T. rex in the atrium. Absent a single building to call its own, the museum’s collection is scattered across campus, including in the Campanile, which houses fossils on five floors—everything from cave bears to saber-toothed tigers. In the years since its founding, the museum has grown its collection to roughly half a million specimens, attracting world-class researchers who have helped shape our understanding of life on Earth.

One of those researchers is geologist Walter Alvarez, who, in collaboration with his father, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez, and Berkeley chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, pieced together the asteroid impact theory explaining the demise of the dinosaurs ABBEY more than 65 million years ago.

WEITZEIL The Alvarezes found a loyal adversary in Bill Clemens, the museum’s eighth director, whose decades spent studying fossils in the badlands of Montana had convinced him that the Alvarez theory was bunk; the dinosaurs had been moving toward extinction for millennia before the asteroid struck. While the feud was mostly collegial, the elder Alvarez famously remarked to the press that paleontologists were “more like stamp collectors” than scientists. Ouch.

The stamp collectors have continued to do groundbreaking science nonetheless. In the ’90s, a team led

by UCMP faculty curator Tim White, co-director of Berkeley’s Human Evolution Resource Center, uncovered “Ardi,” a 4.4 million-year-old hominid skeleton in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression that changed the way we think about early human evolution. In 2009, the journal Science called Ardi’s discovery the breakthrough of the year.

Current museum director Charles Marshall emphasizes that the accomplishments of museum affiliates like Alvarez, Clemens, and White are just icing on a much bigger confection. “The real cake,” he says, “is UCMP’s century of hard work, billions of fossils, and thousands of papers that have helped us build a more complete understanding of the fossil record as a whole.” The museum’s strength, he adds, is in “facilitating the interaction of paleontology with the richness of so many other fields: computational biology, math, computer science, ecology, but also from the added information each fossil gives us when we analyze it in relation to the collection as a whole.”

Marshall says paleontology is in the midst of a revolution, thanks to digitization and the creation of databases such as the Paleobiology Database, which he co-founded. While only about 4 percent of known fossils have yet been entered into the Paleobiology Database, the percentage is growing every day. “Lost treasures,” Marshall has written, “are waiting to be rediscovered within museums themselves.”

POPA, CLEARY, SUTTON: AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGS; PAYNE, FILMER: AP PHOTO/LEE JIN-MAN; MURPHY: DAVID MCINTYRE/ZUMA PRESS WIRE; ARIOTO: AP PHOTO/JAE C. HONG; TARRAGÓ, ILLÉS: AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY; SHIELDS: AP PHOTO/MICHAEL SOHN; MORGAN: SIPA VIA AP IMAGES; MCLAUGHLIN: AP PHOTO/ASHLEY LANDIS; WEITZEIL: AP PHOTO/GREGORY BULL

Gleanings

“What are we, Stanford on Mars?”

ABOVE: NASA/DESIREE STOVER; BELOW: NASA, ESA, N. SMITH ET AL., AND THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI/AURA)

POPA, CLEARY, SUTTON: AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGS; PAYNE, FILMER: AP PHOTO/LEE JIN-MAN; MURPHY: DAVID MCINTYRE/ZUMA PRESS WIRE; ARIOTO: AP PHOTO/JAE C. HONG; TARRAGÓ, ILLÉS: AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY; SHIELDS: AP PHOTO/MICHAEL SOHN; MORGAN: SIPA VIA AP IMAGES; MCLAUGHLIN: AP PHOTO/ASHLEY LANDIS; WEITZEIL: AP PHOTO/GREGORY BULL

M

Telegraph

In an article in the July issue of Stanford magazine about the campus’s first website, former Stanford director of communications, Terry Shepard, recalled “being bemused that some were so obsessed with Cal that they objected to a blue sky and yellow sun. ... Do people really want a cardinal sky?”

Beyond Hubble AFTER A QUARTER-CENTURY IN DEVELOPMENT and years of delays,

the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is poised to finally launch in November. Its multiyear mission: to explore other Earth-like planets and seek out the universe’s first light.

Orbiting one million miles from Earth, JWST will capture remnants of infrared light from the earliest star and galaxy formations more than 13.5 billion years ago, a split second after the Big Bang (or about 100 million years from our location). Its suite of four instruments will decipher the light to determine stellar compositions and their surrounding environments. It will also examine the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting nearby stars to determine their suitability for life.

“This opens our eyes to the infrared universe and tells us about our history from the Big Bang until now, and how it was capable of making all the objects we see, including a home for ourselves,” says John Mather, Ph.D. ’74, a Nobel laureate who serves as the JWST senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

The $9.6 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is a four-story-tall, approximately 14,000-pound global effort by thousands of scientists and engineers from 14 countries and three space agencies. It is most notable for its 21-foot-diameter mirror of 18 gold hexagon reflectors polished within nanometers of accuracy, as well as five silver sunshields to block the Sun’s radiation and cool the telescope to minus 388˚F. All of that folds into a 16-foot-diameter Ariane rocket and unfurls en route to its permanent orbit.

The JWST advances the Big Bang radiation measurements that earned Mather and UC Berkeley astrophysics professor George Smoot III the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics. Smoot is involved with a team scheduled to use the telescope for gravitational lensing research. They’re joined by a slew of fellow Berkeley alumni and professors involved with this next-generation observatory.

JWST deputy telescope scientist Marshall Perrin, Ph.D. ’06, worked on methods to unfold, align, and test the mirrors at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which helps guide the JWST’s science and mission operations. Perrin’s research group will also lead some of the first exoplanet imaging observations. Lead commissioning scientists Randy Kimble, Ph.D. ’83, at Goddard, and Scott Friedman, Ph.D. ’84, at STScI, worked on the instrument testing during development, and are now helping plan the steps to ready the telescope for viewing once in orbit.

After the craft’s deployment and testing by late spring (pending a November launch), the Berkeley astronomy department will take an active role in the mission’s Director’s Discretionary-Early Release Science program, enabling pre-selected science teams first use of the telescope to gather preliminary data to assist future observers. Professor Imke de Pater and Associate Professor Dan Weisz ’04 will helm two of the 13 teams chosen to test drive and calibrate the telescope, establish baseline measurements for future researchers, and conduct their own research, which they hope to begin analyzing next fall. The only pair of team leaders from a single university, de Pater will observe Jupiter and its moons, and Weisz, nearby galaxies. Weisz’s team is also writing the software that will enable other scientists—and the public—to evaluate JWST images.

“My program is designed to enable community science,” he says. “There is discovery space for us, but our focus is on enabling discovery space for everyone.”

—Susan Karlin CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 11

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Gleanings AI IS CROWNED CROSSWORD CHAMP AT THE ANNUAL AMERICAN CROSSWORD PUZZLE TOURNAMENT in April, some 1,300 contestants raced to see who

could complete the eight puzzles the fastest. The winner was Dr. Fill, an AI system developed by Matthew Ginsberg and helped to victory by Berkeley’s Natural Language Processing Group (NLP), headed by Professor Dan Klein.

The first computer to win the event, Dr. Fill completed most puzzles in well under a minute and only made three mistakes, edging out its top human competitor by 15 points.

This was not Fill’s first rodeo: In 2012, the Doctor placed a respectable 141st out of 660.

In March 2021, the NLP reached out to Ginsberg to see if they could borrow Dr. Fill’s code to compare it with their own Berkeley Crossword Solver. Instead, Ginsberg suggested they join forces and enter the competition again.

What does it take to make a crossword champion? NichVincent Medina olas Tomlin, a graduate student with the NLP, explained that welcomes while computers are generally “really good at language lunchtime tasks,” they face many of the same challenges humans do guests to when completing crosswords. Obscure knowledge, curthe café.

AFTER A FORCED HIATUS from in-person dining due to rent events, and riddles tend to trip up Dr. Fill just as they COVID-19 and the closure of University Press Books, do people. Like humans, computers do better on the easy where it was originally hosted, Cafe Ohlone is coming Monday New York Times crossword puzzle than the tougher to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Saturday one.

November.

But, despite what you might think, 100 Originally a food pop-up where guests ate percent accuracy is not a must for crossword from one long table three times a week in the champs. Unlike Siri, which we expect to give us the right answer every time, Tomlin says back of the bookstore, the restaurant, owned Fill only needs to achieve 90 percent accuby Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino ’16, will racy to be king of the crossword domain. now feature separate tables and native plants Tomlin wants to improve Dr. Fill by for natural social distancing. better equipping it to handle recent facts: Along with the traditional, OhloneOne model allows Fill to search Wikipedia inspired dishes the café specializes in—softfor clues. boiled quail eggs, chia pudding, and hazelnut While Fill’s success may discourage some flour biscuits, to name a few—Medina and Treflesh-and-blood crossword solvers, know Berkeley economics Professor Martha vino also want to incorporate foods from the that the tournament’s $3,000 cash prize was Olney tweeting on July 19 about the tribes’ more recent history, ones influenced awarded to the top human performer this “creepy and discomforting” feeling of year, not the algorithmic Dr. Fill. In the meanby colonization. One example: Venison Chile returning to her campus office for the time, at least one puzzle constructor has Colorado, combining traditional Ohlone game first time since March 13, 2020 vowed to make a crossword for next year’s with Mexican spices and cooking techniques. competition that will thwart a computer.

Berkeley anthropology Professor Kent Game on.

Lightfoot was the first to suggest the café move —M.C.

Cafe Ohlone Comes to Campus

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COURTESY OF HANNAH ZEAVIN

to the museum, but the decision was complicated by the painful history between the Ohlone people and the Hearst family, not to mention that between Indigenous peoples and anthropology more generally.

The museum has yet to return thousands of sacred objects and ancestral remains taken from Ohlone land. And the museum’s namesake, Phoebe A. Hearst, built her mansion on Ohlone land, not far from where Medina’s ancestors lived in poverty. Lately, however, the museum has indicated its desire to return objects belonging to the Ohlone while also promoting Ohlone visibility. Medina and Trevino are optimistic the move will help to repair the relationship.

“We want to see reconciliation,” Medina told the San Francisco Chronicle in June. “We want to see a world where we can see our culture uplifted even by institutions that in the past haven’t done right by our people.”

—Margie Cullen

CAFE OHLONE: MOGLI MAUREAL; GINSBERG: CHRIS PIETSCH/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

“It’s like Pompeii on my computer.”

5 Questions

Telegraph

Hannah Zeavin, Berkeley Lecturer and Author of The Distance Cure Your new book is about teletherapy, which has become more commonplace during the pandemic. Tell us how you define the subject.

I decided to use the most broad idea of teletherapy, thinking about what “tele” means, which is “at-distance.” I incorporate letter writing, the advice column, and broadcast radio. But of course, things like telephone, email, FaceTime, Zoom—all of that would be teletherapy. The case I start with is Freud, who worked via letter with many people and had a full-blown analysis with a five-year-old boy who was agoraphobic. He wouldn’t leave the house. So the father (a student of Freud’s), Freud, and the little boy all worked together via post—and it helped.

The best argument is that teletherapy will disrupt, à la Silicon Valley, and fix what is wrong with mental health care. But of course, it’s much more complicated than that. And, across its long history, teletherapy has been escorted by a democratizing promise, that it’s for everyone who doesn’t have access to mental health care.

The problem is, the way teletherapy is often deployed now is as a replacement for in-person therapy. And it’s not because of the pandemic, but because of the appification of mental health care, which promises “therapy” for all but doesn’t fix the access problems. Not really.

Do you think the moral panic around teletherapy is valid?

COURTESY OF HANNAH ZEAVIN

CAFE OHLONE: MOGLI MAUREAL; GINSBERG: CHRIS PIETSCH/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

What is the best argument for the current forms of teletherapy, compared to an in-person model?

It’s like any moral panic around technology—that it’s ruining our most intimate relationships.

A lot of these apps are not supplying care that is either deep, nor for people who otherwise wouldn’t receive treatment. People who evangelize contemporary teletherapy argue that they do those things, but they don’t. That doesn’t mean no one’s ever had a successful interaction. And it doesn’t mean that some therapists don’t love it.

A central claim of the book is to remind readers that distance is not the opposite of presence—absence is. But it would be really disappointing if teletherapy became only synonymous with corporate apps.

Can you talk about the history of teletherapy in the Bay Area?

The suicide hotline was first pioneered by an Anglican priest named Chad Varah who saw that mental health crises in his parish often had to do with questions that people couldn’t ask—not even in a confessional. He realized they needed the protective qualities of anonymity and distance.

In the United States, the hotline idea got imported to the Bay Area in the late ’50s, early ’60s, run by Bruce Mayes. He advertised on the inside flap of matchbooks: “Thinking of ending it all? Call Bruce.” He sends a bat signal, if you will, that it is a queer-friendly, queer-run hotline. This was the moment of the Lavender Scare and raids on the gay bars of San Francisco. At the time, San Francisco had the highest per capita suicide rate in the world outside of West Berlin.

Mayes wouldn’t allow any trained social workers or psychiatrists to work the hotline because he believed those disciplines carried such intense judgment about queerness and suicide. He didn’t feel this way. He wanted to help people who wanted to be helped, but not punish or criminalize those who didn’t. So he starts this hotline, and the suicide rate in San Francisco cuts in half within one year.

Now that the pandemic is easing, will we see a return to more inperson therapy? If not, what have we lost?

We know that what we license in an emergency often sticks with us on the other side, and we need to be really careful. Is it only good that we can now do therapy sessions on FaceTime, or is there a cost—and is the cost privacy?

—Daniel Lempres, M.J. ’21 CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 13

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Better Plastics

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FROM THE MICROPLASTICS LEACHING FROM OUR laundry to the Styrofoam swirling in the Pacific garbage patch, it seems the world is awash in plastic waste. While we have struggled and failed to wean ourselves off plastics, Berkeley scientists are working hard to address the problem by making polymers that are more readily recyclable and biodegradable.

Our plastic crisis stems heavily from the limitations of the recycling technology we use, as well as the materials our plastics are made of. According to the EPA, less than 10 percent of plastic discarded in the United States in 2018 was recycled. And of the seven types of conventional plastics currently enumerated in the resin identification label (the chasing-arrows icon stamped on our products), only two are actually recyclable. Even those lose so much of their quality in the process that they can rarely be recycled more than once.

Enter poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, a new material that promises to be endlessly recyclable. The breakthrough discovery came in 2017, when a team of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led by Brett Helms, Ph.D. ’06, noticed, while cleaning glassware, that PDK broke down to a snow globe-like flurry of dispersed solids, depolymerizing back to its original monomers, the basic building blocks of plastic. The process, known as chemical recycling, had produced

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monomers that were good as new and could be re-polymerized into new material with no loss in quality.

While the team enthusiastically announced the new material in 2019, major questions over the costs and logistics of introducing PDKs to the market remained.

In April, a team led by Helms, Corinne Scown, Ph.D. ’10, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson published a study demonstrating how PDK plastics could be produced at scale and made commercially viable. For now, the ideal application for PDK is manufacturing, where material can be reclaimed and recycled without passing through a conventional sorting facility. Think large products like furniture and automotive parts. But Helms hopes to see consumer products, such as shoes and glasses frames, being made from PDK in the near future.

Another alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastic are biodegradable materials. But they have two major problems. First, they are often indistinguishable from single-use plastics and, if not properly sorted, can contaminate recyclable plastics.

Also, it can take months for the material to decompose in industrial-scale composting facilities. Even decomposed, biodegradables can form microplastics that contaminate the ocean and infiltrate the food chain.

Better biodegradables are on the way, however. A new process developed by Berkeley scientists uses a polyester-eating enzyme to break down plastics quickly in a standard compost bin. An April study coauthored by Ting Xu and Scown showed how, in a matter of days or weeks, heat, soil, and water successfully release the enzymes, which are trapped in the polymer at room temperature. These enzymes reduce the plastic to monomers, which soil microbes then feed on. Not only is the process fast and inexpensive, it also eliminates microplastics.

Still, challenges remain. Organic farmers, for example, “are not technically allowed to use compost that includes compostable plastics, no matter how thoroughly they have broken down,” Scown explains. She adds that, ultimately, “there is no silver bullet to solving the plastic waste crisis; because plastics are used for different applications, all with different properties, it would be nearly impossible to develop one special polymer that works for everything.”

In the end, she says, “reducing consumption is one of the most powerful tools we have.”

—Nathalia Alcantara

Happening at Berkeley

No

As UC Berkeley gradually returns to live, in-person events, we’ve rounded up a few recommendations for the fall.

On Campus Reunion and Parents Weekend at Homecoming Berkeley’s annual celebration kicks off October 1 with a slate of spirit events, lectures, a 5K, and more. homecoming.berkeley.edu

Cal Football Tailgates Celebrate the return of Cal football in classic pre-game style. Special events include Young Alumni and Big Game tailgates. alumni.berkeley.edu/tailgates

Volunteer Awards Honor the alumni and friends who serve the Berkeley community. awards.berkeley.edu

Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein Cal Performances’ production mesmerized its virtual audience last fall.

Live viewers can enjoy the “gripping gothic tale” on October 31. calperformances.org

N.Ov Alt: M Iris W ing wi Manti the co planttive. R to imi feel o or om popul do, N. the bi eggs o ing an

Places and Spaces UC Botanical Garden Visitors can once again enjoy the 34-acre garden and its more than 10,000 types of plants in person. (CAA members save 15% on garden memberships.) botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu

BAMPFA The iconic art space celebrates the Pacific Film Archive’s 50th anniversary this year. Catch one of the multimedia exhibits, which include textile art by Berkeley fiber artist Kay Sekimachi, or a free film on the outdoor screen. bampfa.org

Virtual and On-Demand Race and Climate Change Professors Dan Kammen and Sarah E. Vaughn in candid conversation about how climate change and racial justice converge—and where solutions might lie. alumni.berkeley.edu/raceandclimate UC Alumni Career Network Join UC-system alumni for career-growth topics including non-tech jobs in tech and personal financial management. universityofcalifornia.edu

Alumni Making a Difference Can we use greater-good concepts like gratitude and service to heal from the past years’ collective unrest? This series explores how we use our experiences to make a difference for the future. alumni.berkeley.edu/difference Berkeley China Summit Founded by alumni in 2016, this annual conference encourages collaboration between the US and China. Past guests include Nobel laureates and global entrepreneurs. berkeleychinasummit.org

Further Afield Historical Baseball Tour Go behind the scenes of America’s National Pastime as you visit Cooperstown and catch games at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. alumni.berkeley.edu/baseball

For the latest alumni events: alumni.berkeley.edu/events.

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Gleanings

The TB Fighter

Academese

GROWING UP IN BURUNDI AND CAMEROON, Dr. Mireille Kama-

“Delta is a lightning strike and loosening restrictions is the wind.”

Meme

Surely, you’ve heard of memes, the viral images and accompanying text that get shared ad nauseum online (shout-out to Kermit the Frog *sipping his tea*). But did you know where the word “meme” originated? According to Britannica, credit goes to British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who minted the neologism in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to denote a “unit of cultural information spread by imitation.” “Meme” is derived from the Greek word mimēma, meaning “that which is imitated.”

Dawkins rendered it monosyllabic to sound “a bit like ‘gene.’”

Anti-Proverb

You know what they say: “Absence makes the heart go wander.” And, “Where there’s a will, there’s a lawsuit.” Okay, maybe you’ve heard the “correct” endings to these phrases—but you can’t deny it, the changes were kind of funny.

Meet the anti-proverb, which University of Vermont professor Wolfgang Mieder, who coined the term in 1982, defines as “parodied, twisted, or fractured proverbs that reveal humorous or satirical speech play with traditional proverbial wisdom.” You can’t say that again.

Snowclone

Now, let’s have a look at snowclones. According to the Collins Dictionary, a snowclone is a sentence formula that is “adapted for reuse by changing only a few words so that the allusion to the original phrase remains clear.” Popular examples include “To X, or not to X” and “X is the new Y.” Substitute for X and Y and you can Mad Lib your own anti-proverbs. The term, invented by economist Glen Whitman, was inspired by the journalistic cliché about all the words the Inuit reputedly have for snow. Of course, “snowclone” is also a pun on “snowcone,” making it doubly clever.

—W.G.P.

KAMARIZA: HARVARD

riza, M.A. ’15, dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

“I had a general curiosity towards nature,” says Kamariza.

“I was particularly intrigued by the sky and the stars and the vastness of space. As a result, I had a fondness for science classes.”

“As I got older,” she continues, “I refined my interests to more-realistic dreams. Medicine looked like a viable path, but I never considered research as a potential career since I had never seen a Black woman scientist.”

Kamariza, who moved to the United States at age 17, completed her bachelor’s at UC San Diego before earning her master’s at Berkeley and, finally, her Ph.D. at Stanford, where she developed her technology for the rapid diagnosis of TB. She is now a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and co-founder of OliLux Biosciences, Inc. Kamariza’s innovation uses a novel molecule she developed that essentially lights up TB bacteria, making the pathogen fluorescent. As explained in the Harvard Gazette, “researchers only need a microscope and a reagent to see that tuberculosis is present and alive” in a patient’s blood sample.

“Not only is it simpler to use [and] faster to use, but it also can tell you whether the pathogen you have is drug resistant and even what kind of resistance you have,” she told PBS NewsHour in May. For Kamariza, the fight against TB is personal. “I grew up knowing that tuberculosis is a disease that you could die from,” she said. “And it’s a disease that is prevalent in my community.”

According to the World Health Organization, some 10 million people fell ill with TB in 2019 and 1.4 million died, making it “one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent (above HIV/AIDS)” worldwide.

To save lives from TB, detection is critical. Between 2000 and 2019, an estimated 60 million lives were saved by diagnosis and treatment. But historically, diagnostic tests for TB haven’t been adequate and/or available to those most in need.

Kamariza’s technology is currently undergoing clinical trials. She hopes that it can reach communities in need as soon as possible—but progress has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the meantime, Kamariza hopes her story can inspire aspiring scientists.

Her message for young minds? “Dream UC Irvine public health professor big and work hard!” she says. “Someone Andrew Noymer, Ph.D. ’06, quoted in once told me success is 90 percent hard the “California Today” newsletter of work, 9 percent luck, and 0.9 percent the New York Times, on August 4, 2021, madness. It takes a little bit of thinking amid a sharp uptick in COVID-19 out of the box in order to achieve somehospitalizations in the state thing new.”

—Wyatte Grantham-Philips 16 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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Now This

Telegraph

Got Your NFTs Right Here THIS MAY, THE UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCED it would auction off non-fungible

tokens (NFTs) connected to two of its most recent Nobel Prize–winning discoveries: Jennifer Doudna’s gene-editing tool, CRISPR, and James Allison’s cancer immunotherapy.

Rich Lyons, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, explains that the idea of creating NFTs around a piece of intellectual property (specifically, university patent disclosures for Doudna’s and Allison’s inventions) is a way to get the world excited about the scientific breakthroughs coming out of Berkeley, and academia in general.

“There’s so much skepticism around science lately. We do want people coming away from this and saying, ‘That is pretty cool!’”

—M.C.

KAMARIZA: HARVARD

WTF is an NFT?

NFT stands for “nonfungible token.”

Fungible items are interchangeable; for example, dollar bills (and bitcoins) are fungible because each one has the same value as every other.

Non-fungible items, by contrast, are unique, like Picasso paintings.

So, an NFT is basically a digital asset that is designed to be unique and, therefore, precious.

You may well wonder how anything digital can be unique, since it’s so easily copied. Fair point. Lyons likens NFTs to original photographs.

“People say I can create a fake simply by taking a screenshot. You can do that with any photograph. Does that mean photographs are worthless? Absolutely not.”

Going, Going … Gone

Berkeley alumna Maggie Valentine ’20 led the creative design of the immunology NFT, titled “The Fourth Pillar,” a reference to the other pillars in the fight against cancer: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The NFT comprises ten pages of James Allison’s original notes and correspondence—in negative, rendered as a grid, slightly askew against a deep blue background.

The auction was held on June 7 and, over the course of 24 hours, four independent bidders made six bids in total.

The winning bidder was FiatLuxDAO, a group of alumni connected to Blockchain at Berkeley, who pooled their resources. Their winning bid was more than $50,000.

The date of the CRISPR NFT auction is yet to be determined, but Lyons expects it to be even more successful.

After all, no less an authority than Bill Nye the Science Guy has called CRISPR the most important discovery in the last several years.

And if the Science Guy says so, well…. Let the bidding begin!

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Mixed Media

The Return of Cal Performances

COURTESY OF ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

Don’t you miss it: Angélique Kidjo will perform Talking Heads’ Remain in Light at Zellerbach in October.

(physical) doors. And the 2021–2022 performance lineup is filled with incredible talent.

“When the pandemic forced Cal Performances to close its doors in March 2020, no one could have imagined what kind of year lay ahead,” said Jeremy Geffen, executive and artistic director of Cal Performances, in a June announcement video. “[But] we have dedicated our work to the idea that the arts can and must play an important role in how we face today’s challenges.”

After a year of online shows with Cal Performances at Home, the in-person return kicked off on August 21, with a special event by the musicians of the original Goat Rodeo Sessions—Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile.

The next performances will begin in early October, including Ballet Hispánico, jazz prodigy Matthew Whitaker, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra with magisterial pianist Mitsuko Uchida.

Audiences can enjoy concerts ranging from dance or music recitals to theater and programming for this season’s Illuminations series, “Place and Displacement,” which combines performing arts and community conversations on the subject of large movements of people and inequity around the world. “Displacement has been part of our common history as human beings on this planet,” said Beninese singer and Cal Performances’ 2021–22 artist-in-residence, Angélique Kidjo. “Art becomes a form of resistance.”

“Nothing—absolutely nothing—can stop the performing arts,” Geffen said in June. “And we can’t wait to share it all with you throughout the coming year—as we go from ‘Cal Performances at home,’ to ‘Cal Performances is home.’”

Ticket sales and scheduling for the 2021–22 season can be found on the Cal Performances website at: https://calperformances.org/2021-22-season.

—W.G.P.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MARCH OF LAST YEAR, CAL PERFORMANCES has opened its

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Czesław Miłosz: A California Life

By Cynthia L. Haven

ASSOCIATED PRESS

COMING IN LATE OCTOBER FROM HEYDAY BOOKS, this new title about Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), Berkeley’s only Nobel laureate in literature, purports to be the first to view its subject through the lens of the poet’s adoptive state. Miłosz spent four decades in exile from Poland, much of it as a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Cal. His tenure (1960–89) was marked by complicated feelings toward California and the counterculture that grew up around it.

As the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project notes, Miłosz, who had fled Soviet oppression, “at first supported the student Vietnam anti-war protests, but eventually he distanced himself due to what he perceived as the protestors’ naive pro-marxist ideology.” If he sometimes felt alienated from the cultural milieu, he nevertheless felt grounded by his vantage point in the Berkeley Hills, where he lived and wrote. In Visions from San Francisco Bay, Miłosz wrote, “There are many cities and countries in my mind, but they all stand in relation to the one that surrounds me every day.” Awake or dreaming, he continued, “the four corners of the world begin with the forms almost within reach of my hand.” Author and literary critic Cynthia L. Haven knows her subject well. Her previous books include An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz and Czesław Miłosz: Conversations.

—P.J.

Live

in community

An urban cohousing community focused on a sustainable future Located in a historic, walkable, bikeable West Sacramento neighborhood close to the river

COURTESY OF ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

Private condos available to reserve NOW

Call Shelly at 425.308.0639 www.washington-commons.org

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Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain

By Cindy Weinstein, Ph.D. ’89

Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits on Presidential Power

By Prof. Daniel A. Farber THERE HAS BEEN NO SHORTAGE OF REPORTING on the lawfulness, or otherwise, of

Add to Cart SuChin Pak ’97 OSTENSIBLY A PODCAST ABOUT WHAT’S WORTH BUYING, Add to Cart brings together

veteran journalist (and Cal alumna) SuChin Pak and comedian-writer-director Kulap Vilaysack for a free-form discourse on consumerism and everything that we buy—or buy into.

Which products are worth the financial and emotional investment? And what do these purchases say about who we are? Each week, topics of conversation range from dependable Poise bladder leakage pads or highly rated sex pillows, to critical discussions about the impacts of societal beauty standards, police violence, and anti-Asian hate.

As Pak wrote on Instagram last December: “Who knew that talking about what we buy could lead to so much laughter and at times heartfelt truths about our childhoods, how we grapple with our identity as Asian American women and as conscious (& sometimes impulsive) consumers.”

Add to Cart premiered in November 2020.

Episodes are released on Tuesdays and can be found across streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and RadioPublic.

—W.G.P.

presidents’ actions while in office. Headlines like “Can President Trump Pardon Himself and His Family?” and “Fact Check: Can the President enact a nationwide mask mandate?” seem to highlight the general murkiness, no matter who is in the White House, regarding presidential authority. In the end, does anyone really know what, exactly, presidents can and can’t do, by law?

This is the question Berkeley Law Professor Dan Farber seeks to answer in his new book from UC Press, which he describes as a “roadmap” to understanding the often ambiguous rules around executive power. The road isn’t always clearly marked. Even Farber, a pre-eminent constitutional scholar, was surprised to learn that, when it comes to the commander in chief ’s ability to start a war, the Constitution isn’t exactly straightforward. Can the president fire anyone in government?

“The evidence is actually pretty shaky,” says Farber.

While Contested Ground challenges the public perception that presidents have nearly unlimited authority, it also stresses that legal checks and balances only go so far. “The extent to which people think you’re powerful … can translate into real power,” Farber says. “What you might consider to be just theater, it can be powerful theater.”

—Leah Worthington

BRAIN: ISTOCK; PAK: LEMONDADA MEDIA; CONSTITUTION: BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

At 58, Cindy Weinstein is the same age her father was when he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She learned of his diagnosis as a graduate student at Berkeley. While devastated, she didn’t yet have the strength or the words to process her grief.

Thirty-three years later, she is finally ready to face it.

Finding the Right Words tells the story of a daughter’s struggle to understand her father’s disease, which robbed him of his memories as well as his ability to read, write, and speak. Through anecdotes from life pre- and postdiagnosis, Weinstein paints a loving and often poignant picture of their relationship as the disease progressed.

With the addition of scientific explanations of the pathology from UC San Francisco neurologist Bruce Miller, Weinstein’s book acts as both a goodbye to her father and a guide to others dealing with similar loss.

—M.C.

TOP: PBS WISCONSIN; BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVE

Mixed Media

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Telegraph All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

By Rebecca Donner ’93

ing secret anti-Nazi meetings in her Berlin apartment. What started as a small group of co-conspirators became a driving force in the underground resistance. Harnack engaged working-class Germans, helped Jews escape, wrote and disseminated leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime’s crimes, and even helped the Allies obtain topsecret information. But in 1942, when she was ambushed by the Gestapo during an attempt to escape to Sweden, her life was tragically cut short. Adolf Hitler overturned what was initially a six-year sentence to prison camp, and on February 16, 1943, she was beheaded by guillotine, becoming the only American woman executed on a direct order from Hitler.

In her latest book, a biography of Harnack, novelist Rebecca Donner reconstructs the remarkable story of a woman whose life had largely remained unknown

until now. The great-great-niece of Harnack, Donner draws from documents including letters and diary entries from her family archive, as well as research she conducted in Germany, Russia, England, and the United States. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is a non-fiction political thriller that brings to life the forgotten history of a fighter considered by some historians to be the only American in the leadership of the German resistance.

—N.A.

BRAIN: ISTOCK; PAK: LEMONDADA MEDIA; CONSTITUTION: BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

TOP: PBS WISCONSIN; BOTTOM: NATIONAL ARCHIVE

IN THE 1930S, MILWAUKEE-BORN RESISTANCE FIGHTER MILDRED HARNACK began organiz-

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Big Picture Delta Blues: Diners enjoy beers and food outside at Triple Rock Brewery and Alehouse in early August. The brewpub, co-owned by Reid Martin ’79 and his brother, John, has been a favorite watering hole of Cal students since it opened in 1986. But since the pandemic began, business has been unpredictable. “There have definitely been a lot of ups and downs with the variants,” says manager Joel Adams. “We’re trying to adapt as well as we can,” he adds, but notes that, with the Delta variant surging, the rules for indoor and outdoor dining seem to change weekly. “This is a trying time for everyone in the industry.”

—Laura Smith

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SHOULD WE

BRING THEM

BACK? Scientists are on the brink of reintroducing extinct species.

BY

© MARC SCHLOSSMAN/PANOS PICTURES

LEAH WORTHINGTON

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THE MOST BELOVED

BIRD in history

may very well have been a 29-year-old pigeon by the name of Martha.

the billions was reduced to a few captive flocks—and then, eventually, to one.

Martha, who’d grown up in captivity, had no offspring of her own. So desperate were her caretakers to continue her lineage that they offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find her a viable mate. None succeeded.

At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, Martha fell from her perch, never to rise again— one of the rare occasions in which historians could pinpoint the exact moment of a species’ extinction. An obituary in the New York Tribune read: “A keeper making his daily visit to the bird’s cage found that the thread by which life had hung for weeks had snapped, and forthwith the news was sent out over the wires of the great press associations, for the loss of Martha, last of a vanished race, was as interesting to the world in some respects as the death of a potentate.”

Of course, the real tragedy was that the loss of the passenger pigeon was neither surprising nor unique. For as long as the Earth has sustained life—some 3.5 billion

ENNO MEYER, PASSENGER PIGEON, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION LIBRARIES

It was the early 1900s, shortly before the United States entered the First World War, and Martha was at the height of her fame. Perched on her humble roost at the Cincinnati Zoo, she was an object of fascination to the thousands of visitors who lined up just to catch a glimpse. With her muddy-gray plumage and mottled wings, Martha may not have looked the part of an animal celebrity, but she was hardly average—in fact, she was the very definition of one of a kind.

After the death of her companion George in 1910, Martha had become the world’s last living passenger pigeon.

There was a time not long before when her kind accounted for more than a quarter of the birds in North America and may have been the most abundant bird species on the planet. Named for their migratory behavior, they flew in enormous, almost biblical, masses that could take days to pass overhead and were known to darken the entire sky. “The air was literally filled with Pigeons,” recalled prominent naturalist John James Audubon about a flock numbering in the billions. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow.”

Traveling at 60 miles an hour in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles long, the mere sound of the pigeons’ passing inspired whisperings of apocalypse. Witnesses compared it to stampeding horses or a train rumbling through a tunnel. Livestock scattered, children ran home, adults dropped to their knees and prayed. In their wake, the passenger pigeons left a path of tornado-like destruction: toppled trees, razed crops, droppings several inches thick. They were a terrifying and seemingly indestructible force of nature. Until they weren’t.

Ironically, the passenger pigeons’ very abundance may have spelled their demise. An agricultural pest and reliable source of protein, they became easy targets for hunters who slaughtered them in the tens of thousands, sometimes simply by swatting at them with poles. By the late 1800s, hunting pigeons had become a booming business that was aided by two new technologies: the telegraph and the railroad. In a matter of decades, a bird that once numbered in 26 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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years—so too has it seen the permanent few decades. “God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, disappearance of life forms, the dinosaurs man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs,” Michael Crichton famously wrote being a particularly extreme example. in his novel Jurassic Park. In the 30 years since his prescient observation, But Martha’s high-profile death trained audacious projects to bring back the likes of woolly mammoths, Tasmanian national attention on an alarming new— tigers, and, yes, passenger pigeons, have only accelerated. Unlike in Crichton’s and, until then, largely ignored—trend. cautionary novel, however, proponents of de-extinction aren’t aiming to creMore recently dubbed the “sixth ate biological spectacles but are promising, mass extinction,” our modern, instead, a new era of species revival in the “De-extinction human-dominated era has been name of ecology. marked by an acceleration in As noble as that may sound, it raises species loss. Close to a thoumany difficult questions: Which species went from concept to sand animal species alone have should get a second chance? How do we died off in the last 500 years, make sure the world we’re bringing them and the prognosis is only getting into is better than the one they left? And, worse. We even have a word for perhaps most troubling of all: Should we be animals like Martha: “endling,” playing God? right before our eyes.” meaning the last of her kind.

The years leading up to Martha’s death marked a shift in the country’s attitude toward endangered species.

In 1900, Republican Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa helped pass the Lacey Act, the nation’s first wildlife protection a young, ambitious molecular biologist packed his bags and moved halfway law. “We have given an awful exhibition around the world to Leipzig, Germany. Richard “Ed” Green had just finished of slaughter and destruction, which may his Ph.D. at Berkeley and was off to join Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Instiserve as a warning to all mankind,” he said tute. Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist who completed a postdoc at Berkeley, was on the House floor, lamenting the passenleading cutting-edge research in the study of ancient genes, or paleogenetics. ger pigeon’s impending extinction. “Let And Green wanted to help. us now give an example of wise conservaHoping to make an impression on the boss, Green took it upon himself to tion of what remains of the gifts of nature.” try sequencing the genome of the cave bear and mammoth, species that vanThat was followed, in 1913, by the Weeksished millennia ago—and succeeded. “We were directly sequencing DNA from McLean Act to regulate the hunting and these bones that were tens of thousands of years old,” says Green, who discovselling of migratory birds, which in turn ered a field ripe for technological development. He ultimately became part was replaced by the even stricter Migratory of the team that pieced together the first draft of a Neanderthal genome and Bird Treaty Act. But in terms of staving off co-founded his own Paleogenomics Lab at UC Santa Cruz. There, he and colmore extinctions, legislation has come up laborator Beth Shapiro began applying the same techniques he helped pioneer woefully short. In her 2015 Pulitzer Prize– in Germany to an ambitious new venture: reconstruction of the passenger winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An pigeon genome.

Unnatural History, environmental journalResurrection wasn’t the goal. As far as Green and Shapiro were concerned, ist Elizabeth Kolbert writes that current the project was about rebuilding and studying the genetic code of a long-lost, models predict the loss of up to half of all poorly understood bird. New insights, they hoped, could help solve the mystery living species in the next century. of the pigeons’ sudden decline, perhaps revealing genetic quirks that, in addiAnd yet something else has changed tion to hunting and other human pressures, may have made them susceptible too. For as long as we’ve hunted, exploited, to population collapse. In 2010, using samples from the toe pad tissue of nine and otherwise driven plants and animals to preserved specimens housed in the Royal Ontario Museum, they put together oblivion, we’ve accepted the irreversibility the first large DNA data set—one step toward a full genome. of this damage. That harsh reality is in the Meanwhile, 80 miles north of Santa Cruz, on a houseboat in the quaint, name itself—“extinct,” which comes from waterside town of Sausalito, a new idea was brewing in the minds of two illusthe Latin word extinctus, as in “put out” or trious futurists, Ryan Phelan and her husband, Stewart Brand. “extinguished.” As in, it would take an act of A self-described serial entrepreneur, Phelan found quite a match in Brand, God to relight. creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and a key player in everything from the Well, humans have never shied away Acid Tests of the ’60s to the personal computer revolution of the ’80s and ’90s. from playing God. Phelan, who graduated from Cal in 1974, had been Brand’s intellectual and A century after Martha died and was romantic partner for nearly four decades. At the time, she was in the process promptly frozen, stuffed, and placed on of selling her genetics company, DNA Direct, and looking for a new project display at the National Museum of Natuwhen they got to talking with Harvard geneticist George Church about the ral History, we’re preparing to strike the future of genetic technology. proverbial match. “De-extinction,” as it’s “The three of us got going about how it could actually impact conservation,” somewhat flippantly called, has been the remembered Phelan, who wears her long blonde hair loose around her neck, subject of much scientific inquiry, not to on a Zoom call this summer. A series of three-way conversations revealed a mention speculative fiction over the last shared curiosity about the promise of de-extinction—with Church focused on

POTENTIAL REALITY

ENNO MEYER, PASSENGER PIGEON, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION LIBRARIES

IN 2005,

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Facing page: A passenger pigeon flock being hunted in Louisiana, as depicted in Illustrated Shooting and Dramatic News, 1875

the audience. “Do you want extinct species back?” The applause was tentative.

WHEN UC Santa Barbara ecology professor Douglas McCauley ’01 first heard about de-extinction, around five years ago, it all seemed to him theoretical at best.

“I’d seen some tidbits of reporting in the news out of the corner of my scientific eye about developments in de-extinction.”

At first, he says, “my assessment of the science … was that it was more in the state of, ‘Can we do this?’” But when the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s newly formed De-extinction Task Force published a 2016 report outlining their “Guiding Principles on Creating Proxies of Extinct Species for Conservation Benefit,” he knew the science was getting serious. “For me, it became important to ask, ‘Should we do this?’”

McCauley, who received a dual B.A. in integrative biology and political science

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ILLUSTRATED SHOOTING AND DRAMATIC NEWS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Above: “Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon” mural by John A. Ruthven in Cincinnati, Ohio

TERENCE FAIRCLOTH

the woolly mammoth and Brand on the passenger pigeon. On February 8, 2012, they convened a dozen experts, including UC Santa Cruz paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro, for their first official meeting in Church’s lab at Harvard. “De-extinction went from concept to potential reality right before our eyes,” Phelan later told the New York Times.

That first meeting led to a second, bigger meeting in October of 2012, this time hosted at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., and bringing together everyone from representatives of major conservation NGOs to Sergey Zimov, a founder of the Woolly Mammoth Revival Project at Pleistocene Park in Siberia. Phelan says it was at that meeting that they decided to share their idea with the world, “to actually broaden it to include other stakeholders, including the public, and get word out that there’s a group thinking about all this.” And somewhere along the line, she says, they coined the name Revive & Restore, “with the idea that any work that we would do would never be just simply about reviving an extinct species as a curiosity; it would be about restoring an ecosystem.”

The following spring, in March of 2013, a landmark conference was jointly hosted by the National Geographic Society and Phelan’s newly founded nonprofit, Revive & Restore. Stewart Brand himself kicked off the event, “TEDxDeExtinction,” with a dramatic talk titled “The Dawn of De-extinction. Are You Ready?” which formally announced their mission to bring back the passenger pigeon. Loftily christened “The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback,” the project encapsulated the visionaries’ grand ambitions: More than de-extinction, Brand promised a chance at atonement for our past sins. “The fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.”

And so, a year short of the 100th anniversary of Martha’s death, de-extinction took the national stage. “What do people think about it?” Brand asked

“For me, it became

ILLUSTRATED SHOOTING AND DRAMATIC NEWS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

TERENCE FAIRCLOTH

important to ask,

from Berkeley, describes himself as a “broadly trained ecologist” on the lookout for “better tools to do a better job with conservation.” After stints as a deckhand on a fishing boat and as a wildlife manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he settled at UC Santa Barbara, where he built a career applying cuttingedge technology to conservation efforts. “I realized that I was just not getting enough of the picture, or solving enough of these problems, using traditional tools,” he told Vice in 2017.

For McCauley, who now directs the interdisciplinary Benioff Ocean Initiative, a nonprofit bringing solutions-oriented science to bear on crowdsourced conservation projects, the promise of de-extinction—a twenty-first-century solution to a centuries-old problem—had a certain appeal. But something concerned him. Entrepreneurs, rather than scientists, seemed to be controlling the narrative, and without a sufficiently critical lens.

Wanting to bring in the voices of genetic and conservation biologists, he gathered a few colleagues to talk it out over tea. “We

had some reservations about these tools, but we decided, ‘Well, let’s lay those aside, let’s ” leave the ethics aside,’” he recalls. Diverging from the mainstream debate, which he says was consumed by methodology and morality, they took an agnostic approach, discussing how, ideally, to leverage this new tool for good. The result, published in August 2016 in Functional Ecology, was a rather unusual paper—a set of guidelines for doing ecologically meaningful de-extinction. Aptly titled “A Mammoth Undertaking,” it was in some ways the product of McCauley and his co-authors’ discomfort with the direction de-extinction efforts appeared to be going, particularly with regards to reviving the woolly mammoth. “It seemed like we were headed on a trajectory where we were making oddities for zoos rather than restoring ecosys tem function.”

SHOULD WE DO THIS?

BY THE TIME McCauley’s paper was published, the passenger pigeon de-extinction project was in full swing. Ed Green and his team at UC Santa Cruz had completed an important first step: sequencing the whole genome. Though officially published in 2017, the sequence was actually finished several years earlier, an accomplishment that Green describes as less of a eureka moment than a gradual unveiling. Even with well-preserved DNA samples from more than 40 passenger pigeon specimens, the researchers couldn’t simply stick it all back together—they needed a reference genome to figure out where all the CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 29

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pieces belonged. For that, they turned to the passenger pigeon’s closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon.

“We use that as a scaffold to put together the genome of the passenger pigeon,” says Green. “It’s like the picture on the front of the puzzle box. It kind of tells you where everything goes.” To be clear, he wasn’t literally splicing together pieces of DNA, but rather a digital facsimile. “The end result of that is a computer file,” a sequence of A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s. “It’s not an actual genome; it’s just knowledge of what that genome was.”

The sequence represented the closest anyone had come to resurrecting the extinct bird. The next step—constructing a physical genome for breeding the first generation of baby passenger pigeons—would be a bit trickier. In fact, when the project first started, technological limitations might have made it nearly impossible. But the discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, by Berkeley chemist Jennifer Doudna and fellow Nobelist Emmanuelle Charpentier, has made gene editing faster and more accurate than ever before.

Described as “molecular scissors,” CRISPR allows scientists to make very precise cuts in DNA and insert new genetic material—a tool with obvious implications for de-extinction science. “The big-idea concept is that we take the genome of the band-tailed pigeon, or some close relative,” says Green, “and bit by bit, turn by turn, tweak this into a passenger pigeon. It would be like taking your Toyota and swapping out parts until you have a Honda—if Hondas were extinct.”

Green makes an important point: Rather than a true passenger pigeon, the final product of this revival project will be a sort of band-tailed-passenger hybrid. Similarly, the Woolly Mammoth Revival Project is planning to make what would be essentially a hairy, cold-adapted Asian elephant. Which raises interesting philosophical considerations. “If one starts deliberately walking away, genetically, from one species toward another species,” asks Green, “at what point have you walked far enough that you have a new species?” Hybridizing genetic cousins, it turns out, calls into question the very “If there’s no place definition of a species. And, semantics aside, what if these Franken-animals don’t look, or for animals to live, then behave, quite as expected?

As Green says, “We’ll find out when we make a passenger pigeon.”

WHAT’S THE POINT? ”

FIVE YEARS after the publication of McCauley’s paper, “A Mammoth Undertaking,” he feels more optimistic about the promise of de-extinction—if done well.

So, how would we do it well? In his paper, he articulates three main rules for proceeding. Rule number one: The species should be functionally unique.

“Not all species are created equal in the world of ecology,” he says. While some species have overlapping niches, others play a critical, and irreplaceable, role in their ecosystem. Hippos, for example, pump vital nutrients from the savannahs where they graze into the rivers where they bathe. An entire ecosystem rests on their ability to maintain this metabolic cycle. Passenger pigeons, it seems, fit this bill. As migratory birds, they aided in forest maintenance and may have contributed to seed dispersal as well. Turns out those massive flocks were more than just a public nuisance—by breaking branches and disturbing tree canopies, they supported a diverse and constantly regenerating habitat.

“It was an ecosystem engineer,” says Phelan of the pigeon, adding that, in its absence, native plant and animal species have declined, with certain habitats becoming more of a monoculture. For her, de-extinction isn’t about “going

back to just some Romantic period in time.

It is going back to what would be called a biodiverse and a bio-abundant nature.”

That said, successful reintroduction of keystone species would require that the ecosystem still exist to some degree. Which brings us to McCauley’s second rule: The best candidates for de-extinction are the recently extinct or even not-yet extinct.

“We use time as a proxy for ecosystem change,” McCauley explains. Woolly mammoths, who lived during the last glacial period, are a good example: Climate change contributed to their decline, and in the roughly 10,000 years since they went extinct, warming has continued to turn the vast grasslands into mossy tundra. Even passenger pigeons, only a century gone, would return to a world transformed.

“When the passenger pigeon was numbering in the billions,” he says, “the forests of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States looked vastly different. This was when we had large, dominant forests of chestnut, which—because of chestnut blight—have gone from numbering close to billions to being now closer to 100.” If American chestnut trees were a major source of food for the pigeons, could they survive a world without them? Passenger pigeons also required “enormous uninterrupted stands of tree canopy,” says paleogeneticist Ed Green.

Without an environment that can support their needs, de-extincted species would, at best, end up as novelties in zoos. As McCauley puts it: “If there’s no place for animals to live, then what’s the point?”

Of course, not all ecosystems have changed to the point of being inhospitable to their former residents. Take Yellowstone’s gray wolf: In 1995, more than 60 years after the last gray wolf disappeared from the park, eight new individuals were relocated there from their home in Alberta, Canada. What followed was remarkable.

Despite fears that the wolves would run rampant, killing local livestock or simply wandering back to their home up north, they stayed, and the park’s ecosystem benefited. Elk populations, which had begun to overrun the landscape, decreased, willow stands grew, and beavers flourished.

The wolf reintroduction project, which Phelan describes as “transformative,” made Yellowstone a bastion of conservation research and, for her, serves as an example of how well-managed reintroductions can be successful, even decades down the road.

“In species evolution and in Nature’s evolution, [100 years is] a blip in time,” Phelan says. And while there’s no doubt

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t s t b d w p p a t

r fi d l i o t a l “ d n a i h

o a b b b P n n b w t i t w

e c t t a 1 m s t t p c w

s w e “ i

FOR NOW,

that the landscape has changed and ecosystems have been degraded considerably, the passenger pigeons would benefit from being what Ben Novak, lead scientist on the progress toward a passenger pigeon is slow and uncertain. The effort is largely de-extinction project, calls “generalists”— unfunded and mired in the technical challenge of engineering and implanting well equipped to adapt to new forest comgerm cells into a viable, surrogate parent. positions. Like Phelan, Novak believes their Think of a Russian nesting doll: On the outside is the surrogate pigeon, and presence, like wolves in Yellowstone, would inside is a developing chick, whose gonads contain either sperm or eggs—each actually be restorative, helping to reverse representing half of a future bird. By using CRISPR to genetically modify those the cycle of habitat degradation.

Of course, that kind of impact would germ cells, scientists can (theoretically) create a chick whose sperm or eggs require numbers. McCauley’s third and carry the passenger pigeon genome. Breed two transgenic chicks and you’ve final rule is somewhat self-evident: Candigot yourself a full-blown passenger pigeon hybrid. Needless to say, this takes date species must be able to reach a popua few generations—and quite a bit of luck. Two years ago, Novak successfully lation sizable enough to actually have an implanted modified germ cells into a male surrogate, but only a few sperm impact on the ecosystem. “Some contained the edited genes; the odds of that of these functions and some of pigeon giving birth to a hybrid were 100,000 to “These projects demonstrate, the things that species do are 1. He’s currently working on producing better achieved by virtue of having avian chimeras, with a goal to hatch the first if nothing else, large numbers,” says McCauley. generation of passenger pigeon chicks in the “When you’re choosing cannext seven to twelve years. didates for de-extinction, you In the meantime, efforts are underway to how hard it is to remedy need to think about: Can you learn more about the natural history of the actually recover them to meanpassenger pigeon—where it lived, how it inter” ingful levels? If you can’t, peracted with its environment—to inform best haps you shouldn’t start.” practices for breeding and eventual release.

Abundance, of course, was If this all sounds like a lot of work, that’s one of the passenger pigeon’s defining charbecause it is. Not only are these steps many years down the line, but the proacteristics. Assuming you could bring them cess will also look very different for each species. “These projects demonstrate, back, what would it take to get their numif nothing else, how hard it is to remedy the past mistakes,” says Phelan. bers to anything approaching their former And successfully remedying those mistakes could itself carry a risk; namely, bounty? A lot of time and resources, says that if we normalize de-extinction, we may unwittingly free ourselves from the Phelan. “We are strong believers in the responsibility for preventing further extinctions. This “moral hazard” is someneed to do things incrementally. … There’s thing McCauley takes very seriously. not going to be a moment when there are a “We also can’t forget our culpability in driving these extinctions in the first billion passenger pigeons in the sky. There place,” he says. He worries that the shininess of a new tool like de-extinction will be times when there’s a dozen in capscience will distract from the gravity of the problem it seeks to solve. “We can tivity, several dozen in captivity, a hundred create test-tube rhinos, we can create GMO ferrets. But unless we actually in captivity. And we’ll start to see, what’s think about what was it that caused the rhinos and the ferrets to get close to the impact and how does it work? And then extinction in the first place, these things coming out of our lab are not going to we’ll go on to the next level.” stand a chance for survival, and we’re going to see more species be pushed to It’s worth noting that humans don’t the brink of extinction.” exactly have a good track record when it For her part, Phelan is undeterred by such concerns. While there may be comes to ecosystem interventions. Cane plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t pursue de-extinction, she’s convinced by toads are a classic cautionary tale. Native one compelling reason we should: We can’t afford not to. to South and Central America, these warty “There are problems right now that are so significant that the current conamphibians were introduced to Australia in servation toolbox can’t solve,” says Phelan. “Inaction is an action that humans 1935 to control the beetles that were decitake when they feel paralyzed by the fear of intervention. And we can’t be mating Queensland’s sugarcane. It was a paralyzed by fear.” She hopes that de-extinction will one day become comspectacular failure. The founding 102 cane monplace—and that future generations, their skies periodically darkened by toads swiftly multiplied to the thousands, Martha’s feathered kin, will look back at today’s world as a blip in time, a fewthen hundreds of thousands. Their present hundred-years’ outlier of declining biodiversity. population somewhere around 200 million, It’s a grand vision. But not an impossible one. cane toads are considered one of the world’s “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s boring science. I would be shocked worst invasive species. if it didn’t come to fruition,” says Ed Green. “It is far too late to start worryWith the cane toad in mind, proceeding ing about whether we are playing God or not—we’ve already done this. And one slowly with passenger pigeons would seem thing we definitely need to do differently is acknowledge what we’re doing and wise. Phelan agrees but also points to an start taking responsibility.” exit strategy should things get out of hand.

“There is a recall button if you need it. And Leah Worthington is senior online editor of California and co-host of the magait’s called hunting.” zine’s podcast, The Edge. Download episode 13 for more pigeon parley.

THE PAST MISTAKES.

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of space, called it “possibly the most expensive midlife crisis ever.”

But every space industry person I spoke to for this article discussed Musk and Bezos with a kind of sheepish admiration. “[Musk has] basically brought the launch cost down by two-thirds,” said NASA veteran of four space missions and former International Space Station Commander Leroy Chiao ’83.

At the same time, Chiao is skeptical of the idea that the enormous price tag will ever be accessible to ordinary earthlings.

Still, Orbital Assembly’s Greenblatt saw the spate of private space shots as monumental. “There is a huge paradigm change happening.”

grew up in rural Pennsylvania on a working farm that was owned by the boys’ school where his father taught English for 40 years. Greenblatt was a quiet, bookish kid who spent a lot of time in the library reading every science and math book he could get his hands on. But he was also interested in nature, and on starry nights, he would gaze at the sky. “I often looked up and imagined myself out there, among the stars somewhere,” he said. After earning his doctorate at Berkeley, as he was emerging into his scientific career, the news on climate change was growing increasingly dire. He recalls thinking to himself, “Wait, I don’t just want to work in a lab. I want to do something that’s going to make a difference.”

He took a postdoc at Princeton with the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which was where he began to demonstrate the kind of outside-the-box thinking that would eventually lead to his work in the space industry. “It was actually very easy for me to just imagine a world reinvented, that doesn’t use carbon as an energy source, because I didn’t feel as constrained to what I already knew about how the world worked. I actu-

LAURA SMITH

day in June, a smattering of reporters stood on an industrial lot in Fontana, California. Orbital Assembly, which calls itself “the first large-scale space construction company,” was unveiling DSTAR, its Demonstrator Station Truss Assembly Robot, which would, in theory, build large structures in space. One structure in particular had garnered most of the media attention and was quickly making a name for the company: Orbital Assembly plans to build a luxury space hotel.

Called Voyager Station, it “will be the largest man-made structure in space when complete,” according to the company, and promises amenities such as fine dining, a basketball court, and a movie theater. A rendering of the hotel shows a leggy woman sitting at a bar, cocktail in hand. Another shows a handsome, silver-haired man with his teenage children, all gazing nonchalantly at the planet they’ve left behind.

The company expects to have roughly 300 paying passengers and 100 staff by 2027.

Tickets will go for a mere $5 million a pop.

This was catnip for outlets like CBS, Yahoo News, and Trevor Noah’s Daily Show. “Wait, did they say there’s going to be a movie theater in space?” Noah quipped. “I guess when you think about it, it kind of makes sense.…

It’s like, ‘Wow, the Earth. Wow, the Moon.

Want to go watch Lion King?”

Jeff Greenblatt, an environmentalist turned space entrepreneur who earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Berkeley in 1999, left his environmental work to become Orbital Assembly’s chief visionary officer in 2019. While that may sound like an odd career move, Greenblatt was convinced that humans and/or manufacturing would have to move off-planet in order to lessen the ecological impacts on Earth. He brought his 19-year-old daughter to the DSTAR demonstration in Fontana, where she helped him tighten some of the final bolts.

A month and a half earlier, the team had done an initial test to make sure the technology worked. Someone flipped the switch to start the robot and nothing happened. Luckily, it had been an easy fix, but this time around the company had a crowd.

Everyone waited. Once again, a switch was flipped, and over the next 24 minutes, the automated assembly robot moved a sixton truss across what looked like a giant conveyor belt until there was a steel structure 70 meters long—almost the length of a football field. Orbital Assembly had shown that it could use robotics to move massive amounts of metal and build large structures—on Earth. It wasn’t exactly a Space Odyssey, but it was a milestone nevertheless—one that most in the space tourism sector had never reached. The engineering, the heavy machinery, and the six tons of metal were all a point of pride for a company in an industry full of paper tigers pedaling vaporware. Of course, building structures in space would be an entirely different matter.

Which isn’t to say that space tourism wasn’t already taking off. For a certain elite class of human, it most certainly was.

This was the summer of billionaires in space. On July 11, airline magnate Richard Branson embarked on a sub-orbital space flight with his company Virgin Galactic.

Nine days later, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos rocketed to space with his company, Blue Origin, while rumors circulated that Tesla’s Elon Musk was not far behind: the Mars-obsessed Musk reportedly reserved a $250,000 seat on one of Branson’s supersonic space planes.

Upon landing back on Earth, Bezos thanked Amazon employees—many of whom make less than $30,000 a year—for funding his ride (“You guys paid for all this.”). Critics shook their heads. Berkeley Professor Robert Reich tweeted that it was “one small step for billionaires” while Peter Ward, the author of The Consequential Frontier, a book about the privatization

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ally had to ask the question like, ‘Why are we so dependent on fossil fuels? Why can’t we just run windmills and solar panels for everything?’” His mentor put his arm around him and said, “Now, how much time do you have?”

In 2014, a friend started sending him articles about Musk and his plans for SpaceX. “I thought, ‘Hold on. What has changed here while I’ve been paying attention to the environment?’”

Greenblatt started spending more time at space conferences and began consulting for space-related companies. While many of those he met were decidedly “out to lunch,” he also found a lot of “brave thinkers” in the industry. “For me, it’s probably one of the most freeing scientific communities I’ve found.”

Then he encountered the team that would become Orbital Assembly. Some of them came out of NASA’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Lab, and they were working with actual hardware. He thought, “These are smart guys. They’ve really thought this through.” He would email back and forth with them every few months and, occasionally, do some calculations for them. Eventually, they asked him to come on board. He chose the title chief visionary officer. His job, as he describes it, is to “think big and outside-the-box, focusing on long-term strategy.”

His vision goes beyond sending onepercenters into orbit. The ecologist in him sees a larger mission. “It’s kind of become an environmental imperative,” he says. “It’s hard sometimes for people to understand that we’re rapidly outstripping the ability of our planet to support the lifestyle and number of people that we have, and that we can’t quickly change that.”

He explains that sometime in the near future, we will want to be—may need to be—“a multi-planet species.” When he first started researching the possibility of off-planet life, he was intrigued by Musk’s suggestion of a Mars colony, but quickly realized that planetary colonies had too many challenges. As Tarek Zohdi, a Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, pointed out, “the amount of radiation you’ll receive on Mars will basically irradiate you to the point where you’ll have cancer so quickly, it won’t matter what you do.”

Similarly, astronaut Leroy Chiao is skeptical of this idea of humanity becoming a multi-planet species. “I don’t subscribe

HUGE PARADIGM CHANGE HAPPENING.”

to that theory,” he says. “I think it’s always going to be easier to figure out how to fix the Earth or stay living on the Earth than to go to terraform Mars.”

But Greenblatt is increasingly convinced that we must plan for life off-Earth and that these colonies must exist in large, rotating space structures. For him and the Orbital Assembly team, the hotel and its billionaires are a sort of headfake, though they prefer the term “milestone.” “We want to make the building of large structures in orbit completely routine and feasible and affordable,” says Greenblatt, “so that we can essentially build a space-based civilization.” The hotel is just the first step.

was launched into space and five days after Branson had safely returned, I boarded an airplane to Tucson to meet Greenblatt and the rest of the Orbital Assembly team at Spacefest, one of the first big space conferences since the pandemic began. While I

was skeptical of the idea of space hotels and contemptuous of the pet projects of billionaires, I was curious nevertheless. A new space race was on, and this time it wasn’t countries but companies duking it out for the chance to plant flags and win “firsts.”

The question was, whose ideas were outlandish and whose would be a staple of the future? If the space entrepreneurs were visionaries, I wondered: Did we really want to buy the vision they were peddling?

Tucson looks a great deal like Mars with its sprawling, monochrome desert landscape. Even the highway sound barriers are beige. And like Mars, it appears at first glance to be unfit for human habitation. It is the kind of place where you half expect to find a sun-bleached and scavenged human skeleton on the hiking trails, where the canyons fill with the ominous screams of startled birds and there is always a rattling or rustling just off the path. The slowly boiling hum of the heat is occasionally broken by the sound of fighter jets from the nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. But through a combination of sheer CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 35

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When I ask the Orbital Assembly team what the future of space travel looks like 50 years out, they are confident that partial gravity will play an essential role: “Lots of things spinning in space,” says the CFO, Tim Alatorre. The group discusses how people will need to live in space for years at a time, and not just live, but thrive.

There will need to be infrastructure to support the people who are mining asteroids. In keeping with his environmental vision, Greenblatt explains that there is the potential for all heavy manufacturing, and all the pollution it entails, to be moved off-planet. “So that frees up a lot of Earth for productivity and, hopefully, ecosystem restoration.”

“To imagine that we’re going to have millions of people working in space in a decade is fantasy,” Greenblatt had told me in an earlier interview. “But by the end of the century, I don’t think it’s fantasy.”

He said there are moments in technology development when the inventor thinks, “‘I don’t know what the use of this is, but I think it’s interesting.’ Often, things are invented before there’s a good use for it.”

Consider the elevator. At the time, there weren’t many buildings tall enough to require one. Elaborately designed “ascending rooms” or “upstairs omnibuses” appeared in the swankiest New York hotels, but people were terrified to use them.

Without the safety demonstrations at the 1854 World’s Fair in New York, elevators likely never would have gone mainstream.

In time, they were scaled down and made less expensive. Now we get in them without a second thought, and virtually all tall buildings have them. It makes you think: What are the billionaires’ trips to space other than safety demonstrations and the realization of childhood dreams, anyway?

milling about the vendors’ stations among the aging astronauts and middle-aged men in SpaceX hats. I talk to an astrophotographer from Scottsdale who uses incredibly expensive cameras to take photos of deep space. “Many people think space is black,” his wife tells me. “But it’s not. It’s full of colors more vibrant than you can imagine.”

All weekend, I have noticed a little girl in

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ORBITAL ASSEMBLY

stubbornness and ingenuity, about half a million people call it home.

Tucson was also the inauspicious site of an infamous utopian space venture gone wrong: Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 being Earth, of course), the $200 million experiment conducted by a company called Space Biosphere Ventures to build an airtight, entirely self-sustaining ecosystem it hoped to eventually launch into space.

The project ended in a spectacular disaster when keystone species began dying and the whole environment was overrun by cockroaches and threatened to collapse.

Fearing for their colleagues’ lives, a pair of scientists who had spent two years living in the biosphere went rogue and pulled open doors, breaking their seals, to rescue them.

The pair was arrested and charged with burglary and criminal property damage. As post-mortem studies of the project pointed out, the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars and couldn’t provide what the Earth provides for free. It was a stunning argument for protecting what we have rather than hatching convoluted plans in space.

Spacefest was taking place at a Marriott resort at the edge of Tucson Mountain Park, a 20,000-acre stretch of desert spotted with saguaro cactuses that is in danger of being overrun by invasive buffelgrass.

Impossibly, there is a perfectly green golf course on the premises.

The Orbital Assembly team, which is typically spread across the Western United States, was in high spirits as we stepped outside to talk on one of the resort’s many balconies. Delighted by the landscape, they spent time comparing notes on Gila monsters and discussing the worst kinds of UV rays. Between panels, they had made a connection with a spacesuit manufacturing company, and one of them had just touched a Moon rock. Unlike most of the Spacefest attendees who are here for pleasure, they are here for one reason and one reason alone: to network. They are possessed by the rehearsed optimism of a group of

people who are about to embark on another round of fundraising.

Orbital Assembly is betting big on partial gravity. While weightlessness seems appealing at first, Greenblatt explains that it’s both uncomfortable and unhealthy. As their co-panelist, space robotics expert Jeromy Grimmett, said earlier that day, “Space is trying to kill you.”

Greenblatt had previously told me that weightlessness “is fun for a while, but then it becomes a real inconvenience. Nothing stays down. Eating is hard. Personal hygiene becomes a real hassle; it’s not very pleasant. You have trouble with your vision; you get bone and muscle atrophy.”

Berkeley billionaire and pioneering space tourist Charles Simonyi ’72, who twice traveled to the International Space Station, described the uncomfortable sensation of being aware that your skin is a sack that contains floating organs. “In a way, you never rest because you always feel the pressure from the inside of your body on your skin.” And those are the known challenges of a zero-gravity environment.

The long-term effects of weightlessness are still being studied.

Greenblatt explained that by making the Voyager hotel spin, everything inside will get pushed to the perimeter so that the outer edges become the floor. At high enough spin rates, this will feel similar enough to Earth’s gravity to make daily life more bearable but will still have a novelty effect because it will be less gravity than we experience on Earth. The renderings for the Voyager Station show this in action: a guest playing basketball leaps through the air to do a slow-motion slam dunk.

At Spacefest, there is a lot of talk about five and ten years out, about what technologies will exist then and how space entrepreneurs can, right now, build with the presumption that those yet-to-exist technologies will come to be. One such assumption is fully reusable space rockets, which will reduce launch costs considerably. And indeed, SpaceX has already gone a long way toward delivering on this dream.

GREENBLATT EXPLAINS THAT SOMETIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE, Top: Artist’s rendering of Voyager Station in orbit.

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MAY NEED TO BE— “A MULTI-PLANET SPECIES.”

Bottom: A proposed suite on Voyager Station.

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a dress with stars all over it, dragging her bemused father around, pleading with him to hurry to the next talk or event. A man is selling space-themed posters, one of which reads, “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted, it belongs to the brave.” I find the man with the Moon rock. I hold it and can’t help but feel disappointed. The fact of it is amazing, sure—a rock, containing pieces of the Moon!—but it looks like parking lot rubble.

The night before I left Spacefest, I was stopped in the hotel’s lobby by a bellhop.

The Marriott in Tucson appears to be exclusively operated by overeager University of Arizona students. “Hey!” the young bellhop calls out. “Hey, are you writing about Orbital Assembly?” I tell him that I am. He looks me firmly in the eyes and says with a hungry confidence, “I want to work for them,” as if saying it will make the dream come true.

In the airport the next morning, Branson is on the television at my gate. He is so giddy, he is almost levitating as he talks about his sub-orbital space flight. He says he can’t believe it was real, that he is waiting to wake up.

As my plane takes off, the engines groan.

The wheels lift off the runway, and we rise

into the sky above the orange landscape.

There is nothing but scrubland and scarred earth as far as the eye can see. Soon we are in the clouds. It occurs to me that in another time, not all that long ago, this was impossible.

Laura Smith is deputy editor of California and co-host of the magazine’s podcast, The Edge. Check out episode 12, on space tourism, wherever you get your podcasts. Search: “California The Edge.”

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A Stewardess’s Adventures in the Golden Age of Air Travel

By Julia Cooke and Ande Richards

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Holly Borowiak-Rogers still remembers the flyer pasted up on campus : “You want to

travel? Call this number.” It was 1970, and she would soon see her four years at Cal come to an unceremonious end—literally. After National Guardsmen gunned down four students at Kent State, Berkeley administrators had canceled graduation.

A journalism major, Borowiak-Rogers (Borowiak before marriage) was unsure of what came next for her. She had a summer internship lined up in Washington, D.C., and an invitation to cut sugarcane in Cuba with her then-boyfriend (and later Green Party candidate), Peter Camejo, a studentactivist who had the distinction of being on Gov. Ronald Reagan’s list of the “ten most dangerous Californians.” Just a few weeks before he was set to graduate, Berkeley expelled Camejo for the “unauthorized use of a microphone.”

Craving adventures of her own, Borowiak said no to Castro and Camejo but yes to Pan Am. While many of her Berkeley friends thought she was copping out, to Borowiak it was an opportunity to see the world and be part of an exciting new industry.

By the mid-20th century, it seemed all of America was taking flight. Passengers began to favor air travel over ocean or rail in the postwar 1950s, due in part to technological advances such as a jet plane that sliced a trip across the Atlantic down to six or ten hours, depending on whether there were tail- or headwinds.

Airlines competed for passengers by touting technical innovations, but only so many customizations to the new jet plane existed. Prices were stabilized by the government at $400 or $500 to cross the Atlantic, so flying was too expensive to be a regular undertaking for anyone but the rich. Each airline tried to convince customers that it had the highest level of luxury and service, and the women who served a predominantly male clientele became a particular selling point.

A decade earlier, solitary international travel was rarely undertaken by a woman who could not leverage high social status to excuse her lack of a chaperone. And most women had married long before their mid20s. In the 1950s, only a third of American women were still single at age 24; some

years, more teenage girls walked down the aisle than attended the prom.

The women applying for stewardess positions in the 1960s had been forbidden to wear pants in high school and sometimes even in college. Now, during layovers, a stewardess could pull off the skirt of her uniform, put on slacks, and, chaperonefree, sashay around the museums of the 16th arrondissement; she could wear jeans and wander through Mexican markets.

What was revolutionary was the lack of “should” in this job, with a plenitude of “could.”

This invitation to try out an unfettered version of oneself somewhere else had appealed to enormous numbers of women from the start of the commercial airline industry.

At the beginning, though, they had not been welcome to apply for crew positions.

When air travel was raw and new, cabin attendants, in the established model of train stewards, had been men.

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crew. The pitch worked. A nurse could more naturally reassure a fearful passenger, the executive wrote in a memo, or minister to airsick men. “The passengers relax,” reported an Atlantic Monthly writer.

“If a mere girl isn’t worried, why should they be?”

By the 1960s, nursing acumen was no longer a requirement for stewardesses, who were now expected to cultivate a glamorous and more worldly image. They were educated, often multilingual, attractive, and dressed in uniforms created by top designers like Oleg Cassini, Coco Chanel, and Pierre Cardin.

The cabin of an international airplane was a sought-after workplace for young,

unmarried, mostly white women. Base pay was commensurate with other acceptably feminine roles: nurse, teacher, librarian, secretary. Perks included insurance, free air travel, paid vacation, and stipends on layovers. Layovers in themselves were extraordinary. Airlines in the early 1960s hired only 3 to 5 percent of applicants.

In 1970, Borowiak became one of those.

“They needed a whole bunch of people for the 747, otherwise, I don’t think I would have been hired. I wasn’t their type. I had hair long enough to sit on. I was very Berkeley.”

Flying was glamorous then and the service deluxe. TWA offered Sky Chief service with breakfast in bed. On Continental, passengers walked to the plane across a velvety gold carpet. On the President Special to Paris, Pan Am gave women passengers orchids and perfume and men cigars after a seven-course meal.

With hubs in London, Istanbul, and New York, Pan Am flew only to international destinations, making it unique among airlines at the time and adding considerably to its allure.

Borowiak was drawn to the Russia route, in particular, because of her father, an intense, charismatic man who favored all things Russian, including communism.

Holly says her parents hosted meetings of left-leaning folks at their house in the ’40s.

Her dad felt that the Soviet Union took care of everyone and didn’t leave people behind— unlike in the United States under capitalism.

COURTESY OF HOLLY BOROWIAK-ROGERS

I wasn’t their type. I had hair long enough to sit on. I was very Berkeley.

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His affection was cultural as well. “He took

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me to the ballet,” she says. “I grew up with stories of all the ballet dancers. Nijinsky! I even got to see Margot Fonteyn dance with Nureyev! I grew up listening to the Soviet Army chorus.”

When her dad insisted that she study Russian in high school, Borowiak rebelled by barely passing. Nevertheless, she learned enough to get the job at Pan Am. “When I went to my interview, I knew there was no one who spoke Russian. I memorized a Russian dialogue and said it and was hired.”

The airline had been chasing a Moscow route for years, albeit with some hesitance.

In 1966, hoping to gauge Moscow’s interest in reaching some sort of agreement with Washington while waging indirect war in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson revived talks over an international air accord.

The air agreement had been a single gain, a way toward potential agreements on space treaties, nuclear war, and, possibly, Soviet mediation of peace in Vietnam.

Though one of Pan Am’s founders, Juan Trippe, had known that the route would be a financial loss for the airline, “Pan Am does what’s best for the country,” he said. The aim was diplomacy, not dollars. “With this great instrument of friendship and understanding, the airplane, we were able to open up the heart of the communist world,” CEO Najeeb Halaby told the airline’s managers.

Expectations were high, if uncertain; the USSR hoped for dollars. “We want tourists, and we expect to carry about 50,000 a year from the U.S. within a few years,” said a Soviet Ministry of Civil Aviation chief in a colorful eight-page spread in Life.

Both Aeroflot and Pan Am professed the hope that air service might soften relations between the two world powers. The flights were “more symbolic than whole coveys of heavenly doves,” a reporter for a Pennsylvania newspaper wrote.

“Blue Skies, Champagne and Caviar Make Cold War Seem Lost to Oblivion,” Newsweek proclaimed even as other headlines about the latest Soviet spy ring uncovered in West Germany and the threat posed by lagging North American nuclear detection cast the claim in a dubious light.

Nuclear war felt less like an existential threat than it had a decade earlier. Still, Pan Am management struggled to lure Russian language–qualified stewardesses to crew the new flights. And potential travelers weighed the allure of vodka and caviar against memories of duck-and-cover drills and cinder block family fallout shelters. A ticket to Rome carried no such associations.

Not surprisingly, Borowiak’s Russia forays weren’t without restrictions. In addition to a special visa, visitors were issued papers that they would keep with them at all times while in the country. The Russians had a copy and the visitor had a copy.

If you didn’t have your papers on you, it would mean trouble.

On a typical trip, she would check into a hotel in Moscow, then the station manager—a Pan Am employee who would look out for stewardesses on the ground— would get tickets to the ballet. After seeing one too many Bolshoi performances, she decided to try venturing out on her own.

On one of her first solo outings, Borowiak visited a dumpling shop. She took a bite of a too-spicy dumpling and noticed what she thought was a vodka decanter in the center of the table. She poured herself a shot glass to cool the burn.

It wasn’t vodka. It was vinegar.

“Everybody was standing around laughing. And I felt like such a stupid American.”

The women who flew the Moscow route soon learned that they were not just stewardesses in the eyes of the Russians. They were also possibly spies—spies with access and a good cover story. Borowiak knew she was being watched, and on subsequent trips, things were not so carefree. Once, at a big hotel, “just like the one in A Gentleman in Moscow,” she was hit on the neck from behind.

“I could feel someone digging into my bag behind me. I look back over my shoulder, and I see this guy holding some stuff and running away. And he had gotten my wallet with my papers.”

Borowiak had witnesses to the mugging, but none who would talk to the authorities. She herself was taken down into the pale green bowels of the hotel and interrogated.

“And so they start saying, ‘All right, you say you don’t have your papers. Did you give your papers to someone?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t give my papers to anybody.’ And they said, ‘How do we know that? Maybe you’re trying to give your papers to someone, you know? So they can leave or something?’

And I said, ‘No, I did not give my papers to anybody.’ And they kept trying to get me to sign something that would say I gave my papers to someone. I said, ‘No, I’m not going to sign that. I did not give my papers to anybody.’ And so finally, they said, ‘OK, you go to your room and think about it.’”

Finally, her flight captain came and told her the Russians would never accept her story. He said, “You know, we have to get

you out of here. We don’t want there to be an incident. We just started flying here.”

Aside from one last flight to Leningrad, that was the end of the Russia route for Borowiak, who says the Moscow experience was a wake-up call. “I grew up with liberal parents, and I grew up believing that the Russians had a better system than we did. When I went there, until this incident, I really thought highly of the Russians.

When I was treated the way I was treated there, for the first time I appreciated the freedoms we have in the U.S.” She continued to work for the airline until the mid-’80s. Society evolved, and she went from being a stewardess to a flight attendant who was part of a union. Her far-flung adventures and misadventures continued, like the time she was arrested in Tehran for jogging alone and wearing shorts, an incident she chalks up to the stupidity of youth. After her days at Pan Am, she married and had a family and several jobs, including stints as a detective and a yoga instructor.

Air travel started to lose its magic in the late ’70s, attended by changes both good and bad. Lower fares and more frequent flights democratized flying. Flight attendant uniforms became more functional as the emphasis shifted from overt sex appeal to utility. Skyjacking and airliner bombings became alarmingly common. In 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was blown up by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board, as well as several on the ground. Pan Am stopped flying on December 4, 1991.

Today, Holly Borowiak-Rogers looks back at her time working with Pan Am as an exciting and powerful experience. She says there was intrigue and alludes to the fact that there was spying going on with some Pan Am personnel.

She’s still close with many of the women she worked with, and they get together annually to reminisce about their travels.

“I’ve had like six other careers since then,” Borowiak says. “But the women from my Pan Am days are definitely the most interesting, dynamic, intellectually curious women I could ever hope to have in my life.”

Julia Cooke is the author of Come Fly the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2021).

Parts of this article were adapted from that book and her research. Ande Richards, M.J. ’22, provided additional reporting and writing.

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G R AV E JUSTICE

ERIC STOVER had no professional path when he set out backpacking through South America in early spring 1976. At 23, he was inspired by wanderlust. But by the end of that monthlong trip, Stover was clear about his life’s mission. The journey started in Chile, where he witnessed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bloody crackdown against critics. Argentina was more of the same. In Buenos Aires, militia were roaming the streets, arresting student demonstrators. Stover was swept up in the melee, thrown in jail overnight, and eventually taken to a stadium with hundreds of young Argentines. When the captors discovered that Stover was American, they put him on a plane to Bolivia. The Argentines were not so fortunate. Some were interrogated and tortured, others were “disappeared,” never to be seen again.

“I was scared,” Stover recalled. “But when I got over the fright, my eyes were opened. I realized that I could use my privilege to do something positive and useful.”

He pledged to devote his life to investigating and prosecuting human rights abuses.

For more than four decades, Stover, the faculty director of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, has stayed the course of his pledge. He has explored massacres and other atrocities around the world, from the decades-long Violencia in Central America to the raping and pillaging perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. He is as adept as any person on the globe at examining instances of horrific violence, piecing together what happened, and identifying who is responsible.

ERIC STOVER HAS SPENT A CAREER UNEARTHING ATROCITIES. BY GARY LEE

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been left to rot for months on the floors of schools and churches. Other times, finding remains can take decades. Most of the 30,000 desaparecidos from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s remain unaccounted for, their bodies dumped in the ocean or otherwise made to vanish.

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In 2018, Jonathan Silvers, an award-winning filmmaker who had collaborated with Stover in producing films about atrocities in different corners of the globe, suggested that they work together on a documentary about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Stover was keenly familiar with the events surrounding the Tulsa tragedy.

Snow, his mentor, had led the official commission that had probed the massacre nearly 20 years earlier, in 2001, and invited Stover to join. An illness had prevented it, but Stover still did his homework.

After a newspaper account that a young Black man had assaulted a white woman in the elevator of an office building, a white mob organized an attack on the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood on May 31, 1921. After a day and a half of pillaging, the white attackers had left 35 blocks of the community in ruins, murdered an estimated 300 Black Tulsans, and left thousands without homes. The violence had

“This was not just a case of mob violence. It was close to being state-sanctioned.”

Stover in Tulsa, site of the longburied race massacre

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of such investigations, Stover thought he knew all of the complex twists and turns involved in comprehending large-scale catastrophes.

Then came Tulsa.

JONATHAN SILVERS/SAYBROOK PRODUCTIONS

Stover’s commitment to shedding light on acts of barbarity—and bringing the perpetrators to justice—is the central theme of his life. “The denials or objections to how these crimes happened are inevitable,” he said. “That’s why it’s crucial to establish an accurate record and get the story out.”

In the early 1980s, a group of Argentines asked for Stover’s counsel in finding those who had disappeared under the country’s military regime. In need of advice about forensics, he contacted Clyde Snow, whose probes of human rights cases worldwide were legendary. Snow became Stover’s mentor and collaborator for over three decades. Together, they worked on more than a dozen cases, starting with the first forensic investigations of the disappeared in Central and South America. In 1985, they analyzed the remains of the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in São Paulo, Brazil.

In the long list of investigations Stover has undertaken, one stands out as the toughest: uncovering the bodies of the thousands of men and boys who were murdered by the Bosnian Serb Army in Srebrenica in 1995. As head of the international forensic team assigned to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Stover began traveling to the remote site of the incident in Bosnia six months after it occurred. Dutch peacekeepers had covered up the crimes, so he and others turned to interviewing survivors for clues. Later, using infrared lights and metal detectors, they discovered four graves containing more than 8,000 corpses.

As Stover examined the bodies, he found paraphernalia the victims had grabbed before fleeing: the keys to their houses; photographs of their families; sometimes a cross, a rosary, Koran, or other religious object. Close examination of the bulletridden bodies also showed that the victims’ hands were tied behind their backs with cloth apparently taken from nearby farmhouses. This evidence was later used to bring Serb general Ratko Mladić and more than 150 other perpetrators to trial in The Hague. The tribunal sentenced Mladić to life imprisonment. Stover feels that the cloth and other paraphernalia were probably crucial in Mladić’s eventual conviction.

Every massacre investigation is different. In most cases, Stover arrives on the scene with a team of forensic experts to begin the painstaking search for bodies.

Sometimes they are lying at his feet. In 1994, following the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda, he found corpses that had

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decimated the so-called Black Wall Street district, nationally known as one of the most successful conglomerations of Black businesses in the United States.

Stover, examining the event through the same lens he used to research massacre cases abroad, found stark similarities. As in Srebrenica and Guatemala, in Tulsa there were reports of mass graves where victims had been buried. Just as in Argentina and elsewhere, many from the affected Black community had been separated and placed in internment camps (which officials had claimed were for the protection of Black Tulsans). As a result, many victims were isolated from their families. A hundred

JONATHAN SILVERS/SAYBROOK PRODUCTIONS

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f e .”

years later, some families have still not recovered the bodies of those they lost.

Another strikingly familiar aspect of the Tulsa massacre was the collaboration between the white mob and Tulsa city officials. “It turned out that police had armed, and in some cases even deputized, the perpetrators,” Stover said. “So this was not just a case of mob violence. It was close to being state-sanctioned.”

Tulsa posed a new set of challenges. Stover pointed out that most of the massacre investigations he has conducted took place within a few years of the incident. In Tulsa, a century has passed, making excavations, examination of corpses, and other processes researchers are pursuing far more complicated.

Another unusual aspect of the Tulsa story was the silence. For decades, neither white nor Black Tulsans had talked about it. Stover calls it “the hushed history.” In Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere,

Stover found that victims and survivors would eventually open up and tell their stories even if the perpetrators remained silent.

In Tulsa, neither side dared speak about what occurred. “The privileged whites felt as if they couldn’t say anything to damage their image of being the oil capital of the world,” Stover said. “And the Blacks just did not want to pass the pain of what happened to their children.”

What really made Tulsa different for Stover was proximity: This was a massacre that had occurred on American soil. The other atrocities he had researched were on the other side of the globe, allowing for some emotional distancing. Here was a case where Americans had wreaked destruction on other Americans, and not in the distant past, but in the 20th century.

As the centennial anniversary of the massacre approached, it only magnified awareness of how little progress Tulsa, and the country, had made in reckoning with a long history of racial injustice.

The Tulsa story was emerging against the backdrop of a nation rocked, once more, by racial tensions.

In November of 2018, when the team arrived in Tulsa to start filming the documentary, the air was thick with questions.

Among them: What happened to the victims never accounted for? How was the enduring trauma being addressed? Why had the earlier probes stopped short of exhuming bodies?

But from a filmmaking perspective, the biggest dilemma was how to get the survivors of the massacre and their descendants—and other Tulsans—to talk.

For help, Silvers and Stover enlisted Deneen Brown, a Black woman and veteran Washington Post reporter who had Oklahoma roots and had written about the massacre. She became a co-producer of the documentary and a guide for viewers through the predominantly Black community of North Tulsa.

Brown and team found a city slowly starting to address the darkest chapter in its history. G.T. Bynum, the white mayor of Tulsa, had reopened the investigation of the massacre, and a forensic team had been appointed to investigate unmarked graves at a local cemetery to determine whether they contained the bodies of massacre victims.

Dr. Robert Turner, the outspoken minister of Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, a prominent Black congregation in Tulsa, had begun a public campaign for reparations for surviving massacre victims and their descendants.

Stover was heartened by what he found.

The search for mass graves, while still unresolved, indicated that Tulsa officials were making an attempt to find lost victims of the massacre. Black and white Tulsans were beginning to share their memories of what happened—positive steps, Stover feels, and an indication that the city is trying to heal its wounds.

AFTER TWO AND A HALF DECADES of teaching at the Berkeley School of Law, Stover, who is in his late 60s, looks every bit the academic, although not of the rumpled variety: trimmed mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, jacket always neat, shirt always pressed. He speaks with clarity and dispassion, evincing years spent at podiums, delivering lectures, seminars, and workshops. (His classes at Berkeley are almost always oversubscribed.)

Close colleagues say his quiet persona and low-key disposition may also be an outgrowth of his work, his way of coping with the weight of years spent digging up graves and confronting the unspeakable.

Besides teaching, Stover has directed the Human Rights Center for a quarter of a century. The law school founded it in 1994, two years before Stover’s arrival. The Center receives funding from foundations and private donors. Under Stover’s leadership, its staff has grown considerably and built an impressive record of success in training investigators and researchers of war crimes and other severe violations of international humanitarian law and human rights. Its motto: Pursuing justice through science and law.

Over his tenure, Stover has endowed the Center with a solid commitment to rigorous empirical research. In his experience, reliable data is what wins legal cases. He has pushed for the use of forensic technologies, such as ground-penetrating radar and DNA analysis, which, in some cases, have helped identify victims and link perpetrators with the crimes.

“I am not an activist,” says Stover. “I am a strong believer in standing back and following multiple operating hypotheses when investigating cases.”

It’s an approach that has served him well.

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the Human Rights Center has established an internship program that has sent more than 400 students to engage in human rights projects with NGOs and other organizations in communities across the globe.

“What sets him apart as a teacher is the ease with which he refers to personal experiences doing human rights work in the field,” said Alexa Koenig, who took one of his classes as a graduate student and now serves as executive director of the Human Rights Center. “Hearing about his field experiences makes you realize that it is possible to have a real impact. And that’s powerful.”

In the end, the lengths Stover goes to in investigating cases illustrates how deeply he feels that justice must be brought to the abusers.

When reports surfaced of possible mass graves near the town of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, the group Human Rights Watch asked him to look into it. Getting there was an arduous journey. He first flew into Damascus, then was smuggled undercover across the border by boat, and eventually shuttled to a site where there had been reports of bodies. After some challenging rock climbing, he and others in the team found a cave-like area that contained human remains. Careful digging revealed that it was a mass grave filled with hundreds of bodies of women and children, likely slaughtered by the Iraqi military years earlier. Stover carefully examined the corpses and documented dental records, remnants of clothing, and other remains of the murdered Kurds. His subsequent report for Human Rights Watch brought international attention to the mass graves in the region. It also recommended the steps that the Iraqi government should take, such as creating a missing persons bureau and conducting DNA research to identify the victims.

Stover is “constantly reminded that we are called up to tell the final chapter of someone’s life.”

This page: In the desert outside of Mosul at the outbreak of the Iraq War, investigating the slaughter of Kurdish civilians

by Saddam Hussein’s forces

Facing page left: Child soldiers who escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Says Stover, “I asked ‘Who wants to go to school?’ and all their hands shot up.”

Right: Stover with Alice Achan (right) in Uganda

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OPEN SOCIETY JUSTICE INITIATIVE

UNDER STOVER’S TENURE,

A few years after the 1991 Vukovar massacre, where several hundred Croatian prisoners of war and civilians were murdered

by Serb paramilitaries and dumped in a mass grave in nearby Ovčara, Stover traveled to the scene with a team led by Snow.

There, he discovered a body a few hundred feet from the gravesite. As he examined the corpse closely, he found that what remained of the hand bones were clutching a Saint Christopher medal. Stover gathered that the victim had probably escaped the grave and was shot down while attempting to flee.

The team turned their evidence over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which convicted 15 people for their involvement in the incident.

HANNAH MUFTI

he conducted the first study on the toll of landmines in Cambodia and other postwar countries—research that helped launch the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. His work surveying mass graves throughout Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunal provided vital evidence in the prosecution of several of the high-level officials.

Stephen Cody, an assistant professor of law at Suffolk University and a past student of Stover’s, who worked with him on a study of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, said of Stover that “his influence and impact on how we go about human rights work is enormous.… He was one of the early pioneers of using witness experiences in the prosecution of the perpetrators. He was one of the first to place witness testimonies on the same level as experts. That was groundbreaking.”

Part of Stover’s professional mission is to keep the standards high for new generations of human rights investigators.

Together with Snow, who died in 2014, he helped build a team of researchers to investigate human rights abuses in Argentina.

The training team included a pathologist, a forensic radiologist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, and an odontologist. They taught the Argentinians the importance of taking a multidisciplinary approach to investigating atrocities.

The Argentine group, in turn, started similar teams in Peru and elsewhere in South America. Stover and Snow also assisted in launching a similar group of student investigators in Guatemala.

In an interview, Stover explained that these kinds of probes are not only significant in building cases but also in terms of bringing closure to survivors. He says he is “constantly reminded that we are called up to tell the final chapter of someone’s life.”

Stover is a great believer in collaboration. At Berkeley, he pairs with other faculty members to co-teach courses and has teamed up with many human rights advocates, photographers, documentarians, and prosecutors in his investigations.

His partnership with Silvers, the awardwinning filmmaker, has resulted in several documentaries, including Dead Reckoning, a three-part series on the flaws of the model of justice conceived by the Allies

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after World War II. Silvers says of Stover, “The honesty, thoroughness, and humility he brings to telling human rights stories are probably without parallel. It’s an honor to work with him. Everybody who collaborates with him feels that way.”

Stover has also joined forces with the well-known French human rights photographer Gilles Peress. Together, they have produced several books, including The Graves: Srebenica and Vukovar—two haunting examples of ethnic cleansing.

Stover is “one of the most efficient persons anywhere in helping bring abuses of human rights to justice,” Peress says.

He “knows how to prepare and present rock-solid cases. His impact on human rights around the world is impossible to overstate.”

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IN 2003, Stover traveled to northern Uganda to investigate the destruction that had been wrought by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

There, he met Alice Achan, a Ugandan social worker who was counseling hundreds of internally displaced girls, many of whom had been raped and left pregnant by LRA fighters.

“At first, I saw Eric as one of the many who came, asked questions, and then disappeared,” Achan recalled. “But he said he’d come back.”

A few months later, Stover returned.

During a meeting with families at a refugee camp, one of the girls made an emotional plea for a school to continue their education. In response, Stover stood up and, fighting tears, told the audience that he would do his best to help bring a school to the area.

In the next few months, he helped secure funding from the MacArthur Foundation to found the Pader Girls Academy, which opened in 2007.

“Since then, I have looked at Eric as second to God,” Achan said. “He is the definition of a humanitarian.”

In Stover’s view, one of the biggest questions that hangs in the air following a mass tragedy is, what can be done to help survivors cope with their loss and the enduring trauma?

His probe of the genocide in Rwanda dramatized the point. He and a female Rwandan official had driven in a pickup truck to some towns where the violence had occurred. One evening, the official asked to stop at her family home. It was located in a remote village, which she had not visited in the half-year since the massacre occurred.

She went in alone and found the corpse of her son on the floor. When she emerged, she asked to sit in the back of the truck and wailed all the way back to the Rwandan capital of Kigali, three hours away.

“This need for family members to come to some terms is universal no matter where you are,” Stover said, whether it’s 9/11 or the sinking of a South Korean ferry. “In each case, they need to be able to have the remains and give them a proper burial.”

Investigators can address this need by engaging families in their processes, Stover feels. Relatives or descendants can be a vital part of gathering evidence, observing the handling of remains, and, finally, of serving as witnesses in the prosecution of those responsible.

TOGETHER, the documentary team of Silvers, Stover, and Brown produced Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, a 90-minute film that aired on PBS on the centennial anniversary of the massacre. It featured interviews with a range of Tulsans, including descendants of victims, detailing their perspectives on what occurred and what needs to happen for the city to move forward. The son of a victim retells his mother’s account of white men approaching their house with torches, lighting the curtains on fire, and reducing everything the family had to embers. Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum discusses how getting to the bottom of the massacre is the only way for the city to heal.

The film also draws attention to the work of the team excavating the mass graves at the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery.

Stover is encouraged by the fact that the investigators of the Tulsa massacre are taking great pains to engage ancestors of the victims in the process. Last June, when remains were pulled from the mass graves at the cemetery, descendants took part in a ceremony to help carry them out.

“This is an important step in trying to address the lingering trauma,” Stover said.

“There must be other such efforts to reach into the community. Unless there is the involvement of descendants, the trauma will continue to be passed on to the next generation. This is what others who experienced tragedies have done. And it is what Tulsa should do.”

Gary Lee was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the neighborhood where the 1921 massacre occurred. He has been a staff writer for Time and the Washington Post and is currently a senior editor at the Oklahoma Eagle, Tulsa’s Black newspaper.

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New Blood Students and New Dean Drive Change at J-School.

By Ande Richards

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLARA MOKRI

A New Era Students drive change at J-school

By Ande Richards

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This summer, after a nationwide search and interview process involving current students, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism announced the addition of two new faculty members: Lisa Armstrong, an awardwinning reporter and associate journalism professor at City University of New York (CUNY), and Shereen Marisol Meraji, co-host and senior producer of NPR’s Code Switch. The two will teach courses on race and journalism as well as reporting.

The new hires come in response to an electronic uprising staged by students last June, amid a season of pandemic and protest. Weary from what they saw as the inequity in the department and a lack of empathy from their instructors, the outgoing class, led by Ashley Omoma ’20, dispatched emails detailing their experiences at the J-school. The passionate missives lit up computer screens of deans, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni.

“Since being at the J-school it is apparent that this institution is very much ok with enacting violence against its Black students, poor students and non-white students,” she wrote in a letter in the weeks following graduation. (Omoma uses “violence” in a very broad sense, to include non-physical actions and inactions experienced as harmful.)

“How can the J-school call out the violence committed by police onto Black bodies while ignoring acts of violence perpetrated against its own students? It is clear there is cognitive dissonance here and it needs to be taken seriously if the school wants to show it cares about the wellbeing of ALL its students.”

Omoma, who was deeply impacted by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, drafted a list of 22 points calling out the school for what she felt was a lack of meaningful response to those events and larger systemic issues regarding race at the journalism school. Two points in particular gained traction with the administration, setting in motion a series of events: Omoma criticized the school for having no full-time Black faculty members and went

New hire: Lisa Armstrong brings reporting chops and empathy to her teaching role.

on to write that “it is even more so violent” that the school didn’t hire “a Black person or person of color who actually studies race and journalism.”

Shortly after the students aired their grievances, Professor Edward Wasserman stepped down as dean months earlier than planned. Professor Geeta Anand became interim dean and eventually acting dean with the support of her peers and the J-school’s graduate student body.

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The Gate A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Anand said she supported the students’ demands, which she saw as “a vehicle for transforming the school,” and cited her own background as a campus activist at Dartmouth “who took over the college president’s office with a group of students to demand divestment from companies doing business in South Africa.”

Lisa Armstrong, who started at Cal this summer, was born in New York to parents from Trinidad and Tobago. At three, she and her family moved to Kenya, where they lived for 12 years before relocating to Jamaica and eventually returning to the United States in time for Armstrong to attend university.

“I have all of these pieces from all over the world. So, on the one hand, I don’t necessarily fit in 100 percent anywhere....

I can adapt to different environments. I’m curious about different things.”

As a professor for more than a decade at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a full-time faculty member there since 2017, Armstrong played a key role in the school’s equity and inclusion plan. Her work has also appeared in the Intercept, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, and CBS News, and her reporting on Robert Taylor—who is serving a life-without-parole sentence for a crime committed at 16—was turned into a multimedia stage performance that premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 2019.

This summer, California intern and Berkeley J-school student Ande Richards, M.J. ’22, met with Armstrong over Zoom to discuss her new role. The interview has been edited for clarity.

“The journalism industry is changing.

Journalism schools are changing— what we teach and how we teach.

Whether we want to go on this journey or not, students are going to make us.”

The Kerner Commission, which was commissioned in 1967 after the Detroit riot, stated in part: “When the white press does refer to Negroes and Negro problems it frequently does so as if Negroes were not a part of the audience. This is perhaps understandable in a system where whites edit and, to a large extent, write news. But such attitudes, in an area as sensitive and inflammatory as this, feed Negro alienation and intensify white prejudices.”

We’re still getting narratives that lack nuance and context. I read an analysis of news coverage of the protests after George Floyd was killed that said that, while there

were often details about rioting and looting, there wasn’t enough about the root reasons for the protests: police brutality and racism.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a headline, “Buildings Matter, Too,” playing off of “Black Lives Matter,” and the column was essentially about how unfortunate it was that protesters were destroying buildings.

The headline was in poor taste because you’re essentially equating buildings with Black lives. (The Inquirer acknowledged this.) There are other examples of ways in which communities are, in my opinion, unfairly covered or misrepresented.

Many qualified people were vying for this position. What particular set of skills set you apart?

It’s tricky to say because I don’t know what others brought to the table. Still, I would say emotional intelligence or empathy. I am really concerned with students succeeding, not just in the classroom or even in the field but just overall, as people.

Maybe you’re working or have a family and trying to get all of this stuff done. It can be stressful. I try to mentor folks and talk to them about stuff outside the day-to-day.

What is your approach to teaching race and journalism?

[My approach] starts with the history and looks at how communities of color have been covered, then at how some of those practices are still in place now.

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An article in the New York Times a couple of years ago about the Inuit community played on a lot of the stereotypes of Indigenous people.

In reading stories about the recent assassination of the Haitian president, I’ve seen over and over that it’s “the poorest country in the western hemisphere,” when I know from my reporting there that there were systems put in place, including by the American government, that have left Haiti impoverished. So, it’s not as simple as saying that this country is “poor.”

I’m sure people have been questioning these practices for decades, but it has become more pointed in recent years, both in terms of what I see from other working journalists and what I see from students— what they’re demanding and how they think journalism should be.

like a “protest” versus a “riot”—how do we refer to what happened to George Floyd?

How do we even describe that?

I had a conversation with other journalism professors about the coverage of the shooting of the people at the spa in Atlanta and whether you could use the term “hate crime.” And one professor was saying there’s a very strict legal definition of a hate crime. And, you know, there’s been reporting on the fact about why it’s challenging to get things labeled as hate crimes and the fact that often Asian Americans don’t report attacks. It’s not black-and-white.

The thing that I appreciated the most was the media analysis I saw; there was context on the coverage of their protests and the language that different outlets were using. So, I think we have a way to go in journalism, but there was an awareness.

Several major news stories highlighted racial inequity in the United States this year. Which stories do you feel were handled best, and which ones fell short?

Helping other instructors address diversity in their curriculum is part of your new role.

What’s your road map for this?

I think there was a mixed bag. If you look at the coverage of George Floyd’s murder—the coverage of the protests and how narratives developed, and the language was applied,

One of the things I said during the interview process is that we live in a country where race is built into everything. It’s something I think students need to be aware of. And, it’s not just race; it’s how we

report on folks with disabilities, it’s how we report on LGBTQ+ communities. There are a lot of things that I think students need to be aware of.

If you’re a Black woman, you might not get paid as much as a white man. So there are all of these things that are at play in the industry. I also think it needs to be discussed early on because, hopefully, everyone’s done their homework before they applied to J-school, but you know, it’s a tough industry.

I’ve had several students of color who have been unable to find jobs after graduation, and some ultimately end up leaving journalism altogether. A few years ago, I did a survey of journalists of color and editors at several major outlets. The idea was in part to find out why these journalists were unable to move from being reporters into editing/managerial roles. The white editors I interviewed said they were looking for more diverse talent, but that when there was an opening, they tended to just go to the people in their circle—generally other white folks.

And here again, the journalists I interviewed expressed frustration that there was no way for them to advance in newsrooms.

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And in terms of my own experience, because of what I cover—incarceration, and before that I was doing a lot of international reporting—I’ve mainly worked with white male editors, and that has been challenging at times.

The journalism industry is changing.

Journalism schools are changing—what we teach and how we teach. Whether we want to go on this journey or not, students are going to make us. We all have things that we need to learn, and I think that as professors, we should always be learning and finding ways to do things better.

What will you miss the most about New York City, and what are you looking forward to the most here in the Bay Area?

Where I live in Brooklyn, I can walk outside my door, and if I need a loaf of bread, I can walk to the corner. If I want to get my hair done, I can walk a block. I can walk to wherever I need to go. I live in an incredibly diverse neighborhood. My family is originally from the Caribbean, and I can get all kinds of Caribbean food and ingredients for meals.

I will miss my friends. I will miss the Newmark J-school because I’ve been there for a very long time.

What I’m looking forward to the most?

I am looking forward to working with the folks at the [Berkeley] J-school. You know, one of the reasons that I took the job is that I could see that there was movement in the direction that I think journalism needs to be going. So I feel like I’m joining a team of people who are committed to similar goals.

I’m trying to prepare for the J-200 [Reporting the News] Oakland class. I’m not from Oakland, and I feel very strongly that I should know something and line things up. So I’ve been trying to find activists and people from organizations to talk about the work that they’re doing so that hopefully they can come and talk to the class.

I love teaching. And so the opportunity to collaborate with other people and offer something to the students is exciting.

It’s an adventure. It’s an opportunity to meet new people and work with new people.

Gear up for fall.

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Ande Richards is a second-year graduate student at the Berkeley J-school. She currently lives in South L.A. with her rescue pitbull Ralph and a thriving indoor succulent garden.

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Student View Welcome to “Student View,” a new column featuring the thoughts, opinions, and musings of undergraduate writers at Cal. This summer, for our second “Student View” essay contest, California asked current Cal students to answer the question: What gives you optimism for the future? Below is the winning essay. For entry entry rules and other winners, go to: alumni. berkeley.edu/california-magazine/ student-view-column-contest.

Missing the Movies

By Maya Thompson ’23

JOHN CROWE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

I learned how it felt to miss the movies and how it felt to mourn them. Fenced out of my favorite places, I found peace in the dissonance of wishing I were somewhere that’s designed to transport me somewhere else.

Before quarantine, the last film I saw in theaters was the 2020 version of Emma. My grandma and aunt bought matinee tickets, and they took me to our local Arclight Sherman Oaks theater—the one by the Cheesecake Factory, an abandoned furniture store, and a stone plaza. I remember it rained that day, and all of the colors everywhere deepened. Rain ricocheted against the plaza’s bubbling fountain, and everyone was eager to get inside, away from the onslaught. When we came out of the theater, the downpour had stopped, but the ground still steamed. Most people remained indoors, and they would effectively and unknowingly stay there for the next year and a half.

When the pandemic shuttered movie theaters, streaming services were heralded as their successor. It’s not that I don’t enjoy streaming services, but I’ve become wary of the isolation they create. Theaters are at their best when they’re communal—the trailers, in all their idealism and promise, conjure an incandescent magic and bewitch everyone, riveting their attention to the screen. The air conditioning hums, and the smell is buttery and saccharine.

At the same time, when privacy is a choice, there are few acts more selfrestorative than watching a beloved movie at home—something as jubilant as Singin’ in the Rain or as all-consuming as Amadeus. When I stream movies, the ceiling fan in my bedroom also hums, but instead of a plush seat, I’m perched belly-down in a twin-sized bed under the fluorescent glare of my overhead light.

I’ve always thought movies were my pool of hope, and in this sense, the pandemic made me a better swimmer. When reality’s tensions simmered, I could ease the burn, test the waters with a movie like Before Sunrise, and by the end of the hour, I was fully submerged in dusky, ethereal Vienna. It’s more than a way to pass time, it’s a way to transcend it.

When movie theaters began to reopen, I was eager to restore my own norms, a feeling that quickly became muddled with the anxious leftovers from this year inside. The first movie I saw in theaters was A Quiet Place: Part II. Cautiously armed with our vaccine cards and Tuesday matinee tickets, my friend and I were relieved to see only a handful of other patrons.

Somehow, my favorite part of the movie was the audience’s silence. In the moments when we held our breath, we could hear the explosions and exclamations from the room next door as it played the ninth installment of the Fast and

Furious franchise. People are rightfully nervous, but the movie theaters’ absence was heavy as lead.

The pandemic blurred the line between work and leisure. It was insufferable to spend days crouched over screens of different sizes. Going back to the movies replenished my reservoir of optimism. I realized we’re not inching backwards, not toward the norms we once knew. Instead, we’re compelled to move forward. The credits will roll, but if we’re patient, we can catch the scene at the end—the flare that unsettles the dread of permanence, that baits promise, and that reminds us to keep looking ahead.

Maya Thompson, originally from Los Angeles, is a rising junior at UC Berkeley, where she studies English and Russian literature and serves as the deputy arts and entertainment editor for the Daily Californian.

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These words are being penned in July, but they shall not be read until September, and we have learned throughout the course of the pandemic the value of a simple, precautionary principle: Expect the unexpected. Now, as the Delta variant takes hold, masks come back on, and the politicization of science persists, it is clear that after an extended period of dealing with unprecedented challenges, our transition back to a new normal will also be filled with unexpected developments; some welcome, some not.

Yet, as the campus continues with plans to resume in-person instruction in the fall, and as I consider our prospects for the future, I am not disheartened. Far from it. Over the course of the pandemic, we have witnessed and experienced a remarkable coming together of students, faculty, staff, and alumni in support of each other, our university, and our academic mission. Our community, and its every member, rose up as one to confront the pandemic’s challenges and disruptions; and adapted to the unprecedented with courage and innovation.

I see this year’s record-breaking number of applicants for admission as a powerful vote of confidence in the relevance of Communion: higher education in general, and what Berkeley has to offer in par- Masked students ticular. I see the growing diversity of the students we are admitting select fruit at Crossroads as a reaffirmation of our public character and foundational values.

Our amazing faculty dedicated an extraordinary amount of time dining hall. and effort to make the very best of distance learning. Along the way they developed new muscles, ideas, and approaches that are opening up new, exciting pedagogical possibilities. Regardless of what unfolds in the short term, this newfound prowess in remote instruction could allow us to increase our undergraduate capacity given the growing elasticity of place. For example, we are now looking at the possibility of new internships at distant locations and expanded study abroad as a possible win-win: new learning and engagement opportunities for our students, and the potential to relieve the pressure on curricular and infrastructure bottlenecks.

We have learned a great deal along the way and are now better prepared to face new challenges—and opportunities—in the future. I believe that we are emerging from this extraordinary year stronger than ever and uniquely equipped to meet the demands and opportunities of these times.

It wasn’t long after I graduated from college that the wonderful Canadian musician Joni Mitchell sang about how “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Now, after many months when it was so difficult to gather and connect, to engage in and benefit from all that a university has to offer, we are more deeply understanding and appreciating the power and purpose of community in a collegiate setting. This, too, is a source of hope and excitement for the road ahead. Since my very first day as chancellor, I have prioritized efforts to establish, strengthen, and sustain a true sense of belonging and connection for every student, for every member of our faculty and staff. For it is a strong campus community that allows us to take intellectual risks, to continuously challenge the status quo, to learn from one another, to model and embody our societal values, to thrive amidst an amazing diversity of origins, identities, and beliefs.

While I am grateful for the extent to which we have been able to sustain a sense of community in the virtual world, there is simply nothing like the real

thing. I see signs that the yearning for and appreciation of community have never been stronger. With that in mind, before us lies a thrilling opportunity and important challenge as we will begin this academic year with some half of our undergraduates having never lived or learned on campus. This quest for communal connection assumes even more importance given the current salience and rising urgency of issues related to social justice.

Competing for our concern and attention as the pandemic exposed and amplified societal inequities was mounting evidence that systemic racism is far from being a thing of the past in our country. In the context of our university’s belief in equity and justice, we have an opportunity to rethink and re-examine how we can best engage and activate our community to, in the finest Berkeley fashion, challenge the status quo and advance the greater good; to model the change we want to see.

I cannot end this piece without an expression of profound gratitude for our alumni. The moral, intellectual, and financial support you have provided since the pandemic struck has been record breaking and awe inspiring. Over at Cal Athletics, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Cal Performances, spirits have been buoyed by a resurgent demand for tickets, the urge to gather again, to partake of and contribute to all that flows from the ties that bind us together.

—Chancellor Carol T. Christ

BRITTANY HOSEA-SMALL

I will admit to feeling a bit trepidatious as I begin writing this column.

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Class Notes

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Miriam Malach, a writer living in New York City, published her novel, All or Nothing, in May. All or Nothing follows an unlikely trio grappling with love in the 1950s, a time before people could publicly be who they wanted to be, and when “all or nothing” bumped up against the compromises we all must make for happiness.

Class Secretary: Bill Woolley, 4300 Pasadena Dr #31, Boise, ID 83705, wlwandvlb@gmail.com

forests, hiking trails, and ponds. The Sharps are surprisingly healthy and happy, having made many new friends and becoming very active in the management of the community and in the sports activities as well. Dan continues to work a bit, including helping a friend sell a company.

Class Secretaries: Beth Mott, 14 Mariposa Dr, San Luis Obispo 93401, bethmott@charter. net; Ollie White, 292 Hacienda Carmel, Carmel 93923, ollie@razzolink.com

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“A little dab’ll do ya.” Brylcreem for the men and a spray of White Shoulders for the women will make us mindful of the forthcoming 70th reunion for the Class of 1951. The date is Friday, October 1, in the Chevron Auditorium, International House from 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., during Reunion weekend. We will share the day with Classes from ’71 and ’81 for a luncheon. Our Oski and Cal marching band will be present, plus other dignitaries. Information is forthcoming from Berkeley Foundation to us individually. Registration will begin August 2 at: https://bit.ly/3zrvF2s. Any questions may be sent to me at: elayne.mccrea@yahoo.com. This is hot “off the press” as of July 2. You will no doubt have heard from the university before this.

Alums who have contacted me are: Louise Kermode of Palm Desert, who is alive and very well, Hampton Terry of Valencia, Spain, and Joan Foster Nugent of Laguna Woods, who have become reacquainted from days on the Sophomore Council. Hamp was president, and Joan, the secretary. Please take good care of yourselves and stay well. We will see one another soon.

Class Secretary: Elayne McCrea, 23500 Cristo Rey Dr #503H, Cupertino 95014, elayne. mccrea@yahoo.com

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The year 2022 will mark the 70th anniversary of our graduation from Cal. Some of you have inquired about a reunion, and the Class Committee has begun to think about a plan. Please let me hear from those of you who would attend an event on campus in June 2022.

Provide name, address, and number attending.

We need to have some idea about attendance in order to plan effectively. We look forward to the reopening of the campus and the prospect of being together again. Good luck to all, and Let There Be Light!

Class Secretaries: Elaine (Hartgogian) Anderson, 1326 Devonshire Dr, El Cerrito 94530, 510/2323419 ; Bob Rowell, rwrowell@gmail.com.

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Dan Sharp and his wife relocated from Stamford to Redding, CT, three years ago to a wonderful retirement community with three levels of care when/if needed. Meadow Ridge is high up on a hill and surrounded by lovely

As you might have read in the Summer issue, we were wondering who the oldest member of our Class might be. At the moment, Bob Mitchell holds the distinction. He was born December 12, 1929. Can anyone beat that? Bob said he would have graduated earlier than 1954, but he served in the Korean War for three years. Bud Henry is not a contender but has been an active supporter of campus organizations including the Haas School of Business, Cal Athletics, the library, and the Cal Alumni Association (CAA), where he served on the board of directors along with our late classmate Don Denton. In 2000, Bud received CAA’s Excellence Service Award and the Class of 1954 Hall of Fame Award. He also served on the board of directors of CAA’s club in Orange County. After living in North Tustin for 38 years, he moved to Laguna Woods after the passing of his wife.

Bud says that Laguna Woods (formerly Leisure World) is an ideal place for a single woman or man who wants to remain active. Jim Griffin, Jack Ken, Bill Morrish, Bob Merrick, and others (including your Class Secretary) are very interested in a 2022 reunion at the beautiful University Club atop Memorial Stadium. Let us know if you are, too.

Class Secretary: Beryl Voss, 1330 Jones St #604, San Francisco 94109, berylvoss@gmail.com, 415/673-2074

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Bob Adams, a Sigma Nu on campus, graduated in business/P.E. He served in the Army in France, then at IBM until ownership of Educational Industrial Sales Inc. of Northern California. In retirement, Bob and his wife, Lois, a Cal classmate and AOPi, enjoy travel and a growing family of three children, eight grandchildren, and two great-granddaughters. Now living at the Forum at Rancho San Antonio retirement community, Lois is active on the RSI Health Board, and Bob raises money on the board for an Appreciation Fund and the 501C3 Health Fund.

Class Secretaries: Bob Leslie, 40 Windward Hill, Oakland 94618, relarbmed@aol.com; Rosemary Meehan Mein, 3748 St. Francis Dr, Lafayette 94549, rosemein@comcast.net, fax 925/283-2318

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Our Class will celebrate our 65th anniversary at the Homecoming Golden Bear Luncheon on Friday, October 1, starting at 11:30 a.m. in the Pauley Ballroom in the MLK Jr. Student Union. There will be reserved parking for a fee. This is the perfect time for living groups or other University-affiliated groups that you were part of to reserve a table(s) and renew longtime friendships. Our Class will be seated together for the served lunch. Check the online registration link, homecoming.berkeley.edu, for more details. There will be golf carts available for classmates to get to the library for a tour of the Preservation Department after lunch. You can see how much our Class of 1956 Humanities Preservation Endowment for the Library is depended upon. Our Class now has a goal of $32,000 for unmet needs of the department. A few of these necessary items are a paper-conservation vacuum suction table with humidification dome, CeeLite flexible light sheets used in book repair, Dahle self-healing cutting mats, and a preservation pencil to direct vapor to very small areas. Please send your donation to UC Berkeley, Donor and Gift Services, 1995 University Ave., Suite 400, Berkeley, CA 94704-1070.

See you at our reunion in October, and Go Bears!

Class Secretary: Barbara Jopp Chinn, 5405 Carlton St #404, Oakland 94618, chinnacres@ sbcglobal.net

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Pete Hegerle muses about the pandemic: “Naked without your mask, and afraid, wondering if you are doing the wise thing, because you don’t know who has and who has not received a double dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

Our world was as big as we made it until the virus jailed us all. That’s when Cal’s ingrained lessons kicked in and took control. In 2020, I was captain of my own ship. I traveled. I hiked along the shore of the lake out my back door. I saw things I had never noticed walking the golf course overlooking my house. The trees were many and stately. Reaching for the sky, they knew no bounds. I envied their freedom. I saluted them as I wanted to be part of them, to carve my name: ‘Pete passed by here many times in 2020-21.’ So vibrant green was the grass. I had kept my eye only on that little white ball. I never noticed the grass or the critters that peeked at me while I invaded their world. How varied, how many, how ignored. Long-legged turkeys, noisy, floating geese, scared bunnies there, but never appreciated. And one fine day, in spite of the pandemic, I did have quite the serendipity as I hiked. I found an embedded, old, copper penny minted in San Francisco in 1958. Now THAT was a GOOD year!” Nancy Bruce Applequist moved east with her husband, Jon Applequist, after graduating from Cal. He was a chemistry professor at Cal CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 57

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and Columbia University. In 1965, he became a professor of biophysics at Iowa State University.

Their five children grew up in Ames, and four now live in other states around the country. She remembers the Mediterranean climate of Berkeley, the morning fogs, and rainy storms in winter. When she lived in CA , she wished it would snow. Now she has seen a few blizzards and has shoveled plenty of snow. The summers are hot, humid, and green, and one has to be wary of tornadoes. She has not been in one yet, but last summer they had a derecho, which did a lot of damage to trees and power lines. Although she has never ridden a tractor or combine, she has gotten used to living in a rural state.

Class Secretary: Ann Bradshaw Jenkins, 190 Walnut Ave, Unit 102, Santa Cruz 95060, anndobie62@gmail.com, 831/840-6495

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In light of the pandemic-driven uncertainty around campus events in fall 2021, the Class of ’61 has extended its 60th Reunion Year into 2022, dubbing it “61 for ’61.” We will culminate our celebration in our 61st year with an event on campus, with several smaller events happening earlier. The first will be a luncheon at the University Club in San Francisco on November 19, the day before Big Game at Stanford; then several virtual events in early 2022 with guest speakers; and, finally, an on-campus event in fall 2022. Class members will be receiving emails regarding these events as they unfold. Meanwhile, members can contact reunion co-chair Joy Maguire at joycelyn_maguire@yahoo.com for more information.

Class Secretary: Sandra Mitchell, sandramitchellphd@gmail.com

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Eric Wallace says that his third literary novel (and sixth book), Mind After Mind, was published in May. It’s about a renowned Seattle cartoonist who discovers that he can read minds. “The novel is not science fiction or fantasy,” Eric says. “It’s a realistic work with this one little twist: the protagonist can read minds. It’s literally thought-provoking!”

Class Secretaries: Donna Hartman Dutton, 39 San Clemente Drive #102, Corte Madera 94925, donnad13@aol.com; Richard Cerruti, 31611 Paseo Rita, San Juan Capistrano 92675, racerruti@hotmail.com

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Carl Boggs, M.A. ’65, Ph.D. ’70, reports: “I am finally submitting notes regarding my own activities and work. My 25th and most recent book is titled Facing Catastrophe: Food, Politics, and the Ecological Crisis. I received the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association and am the author of more than 500 articles, essays, and reviews. While at Berkeley, I worked at the Daily Cal as a sports writer and editor. As a grad

student, I participated in the Free Speech Movement, sitting in at Sproul Hall. I was instrumental in bringing to the U.S. the political thought of Antonio Gramsci. After Berkeley, I taught at a number of major universities: Washington University, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, Carleton University, and Antioch University.”

Class Secretaries: Doris Hawks Torbeck, 295 Silvia Dr, Los Altos 94024, doris.hawks@ gmail.com, 650/949-4157; Tom Shelton, PO Box 442, Forestville 95436, casatom@yahoo.com

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The Class of ’66 is poised to break all 55th Reunion records! Under the leadership of Marily Allen Howekamp and Phil Litts, the leadership committee set goals of raising $6.6 million for our Class endowment and other Cal programs before December 31 as well as attracting 110 reunion attendees on Homecoming Weekend, Oct. 1–3. Consult https://reunions. berkeley.edu/content/class-1966 for details and https://give.berkeley.edu/funddrive/243 to donate. Mike and Raelee Wiles Williamsen are celebrating both their 54th anniversary and the publication of Delivering Safety Excellence: Engagement Culture at Every Level, a treatise on how to deliver turnarounds in developing cultures, based on their travels to and work in more than 100 countries since their graduation.

They live with Rae’s brother (Tom Wiles ’65) on a farm in rural Illinois. Ron Enfield is celebrating the release of his new book, Incorrigible.

Having spent 30 years in technical publications for Bell Labs, Oracle, and others, this is Ron’s first solo book. A culmination of a project his late wife, Diane, began more than 35 years ago, it traces her difficult family life as well as the story of their marriage. Despite Diane’s worsening dementia before her death, he continued to care for her. Ron volunteers for the Alzheimer’s Association to help caregivers. Living in Laguna Woods, John Pohl and his wife, Judi, have two adult sons, Jonathan and Clint. Following graduation, John earned both a master’s and a doctorate from MIT. After working for several companies, he founded his own, Energy International, in Mission Viejo. He has held academic positions at the University of Queensland and Virginia Tech, and has worked in 28 countries.

Class Secretary: Mary Beth Mulvey Buck, 212 East 63rd St, New York, NY 10065, mabuck1@aol.com

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Don George reports: “One thing I’ve realized is that we’ve been ‘sheltering in place’ here in the mountains for the last 20 years! We invented the concept but didn’t know it! I’m still plugging along with my banking expert-witness business. Gray or no hair (me) is a real plus in my business! Now, we’re looking forward to spending more time on campus, going to games, having lunch with old buddies,

etc. Our local chapter of Cal alumni, Bears in the Woods, is hosting Jim Knowlton next week at Garwoods. The repercussions of the SCOTUS decision in the NCAA case will make for lively discussion.” John Lovewell is currently serving as chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of World Politics, an independent graduate school of national security and world affairs based in Washington, D.C. John also remains active in commercial real estate development in Silicon Valley. Sandra (Sayre) Flattery and husband, John, have sold their big house and moved into a new condo in Ketchum, ID. They love walking and biking everywhere and not having gardens, ponds, streams, and horses to take care of. Their four children and seven grandchildren are all well and happy. In May, they embarked on a three-week driving trip through the Pacific Northwest and loved the Quinault and Hoh rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula, where Sandra had a workshop with her fellow Sun Valley Club photographers. A monthlong driving trip in Northern California is coming in mid-September. She hopes to see some classmates!

Class Secretary: Diana Powers, 100 Marin Center Dr #14, San Rafael 94903, dianapowe@aol.com, 415/250-1640

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To join the Class of ’68 email list and learn about upcoming events, please contact cal68@blueconnect.org, and tell your friends. The Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE), founded by the Class of ’68, supports Cal undergrads who go to Washington, D.C., each semester to study and do internships. In fall 2021, three Cal undergrads will receive a stipend from the Center. Also, recent GSPP graduate students received funding for Advanced Policy Analysis projects. They were: Sarah Brandon, MPP ’21; Dylan Crary, JD-MPP ’21; Daniel Morales Campos, MPP ’21; Colleen Pulawski, MPP ’21. CCDE also recruited and supported GSPP students working with Alameda County’s Census effort to reach “hard-tocount” residents. It led public forums, including a discussion on Reimagining Public Safety as part of the campus-wide Reimagining Democracy series. For information on the series, see: https:// bit.ly/3iBWR7U. To contribute to the Center, see: https://bit.ly/3kOXZru. Class Secretary: Diane Moreland Steenman, 2407 W. Hazelhurst Ct, Anthem, AZ 85086, dsteenman@aol.com

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Tamila C. Jensen, alum of the Experimental (Tussman) Program, completed her term as president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association. Tamila writes and teaches widely through the Center for International Studies and owns a small law firm in Granada Hills. Alan White graduated with a B.S.

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in business and economics and went on to get a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii in geography with a focus on marine resources management. He was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador and then the Philippines. He worked on the technical guidance and management of various large USAID -supported projects in Southeast Asia, where he and his wife spent the last five years working to improve conservation of marine biodiversity and fisheries resources. Alan now lives in Kailua, HI, and is enjoying some time off before his next assignment. He says Cal set him on a path of wanting to explore the world and assist with the adaptations needed in our changing times. Connie Vandervort Logg earned a B.A. in computer science and an M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science. Now retired, she was a computer scientist at SLAC Laboratory and specialized in the analysis, specification, design, and implementation of hardware and software systems. She has numerous publications and was honored as a Professional of the Year by the Global Who’s Who for outstanding contributions and achievements. She has three children and enjoys international travel. Henry Cohen majored in psychology. He says he was shaped by Cal and his Jewish upbringing to fight for social justice and strive to create a nation that makes good on its promises to all citizens, as articulated in the Constitution. He recently retired from a 30-year career in automotive sales, representing Mercedes-Benz at two dealerships in New Jersey, where he has lived since 1986. Previously, Henry taught school in St. Helena, worked as a winery tour guide, and earned master’s degrees from Hebrew Union College and Washington University in St. Louis, where he met his future bride, Nancy, with whom he parented two sons.

Class Secretary: Richard Carter, 99 Florada Ave, Piedmont 94610, camktgrp@comcast.net

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Ann P. Meredith received the Steven Schwartzberg Grant from the Dramatists Guild Foundation. She is also a member of the Broadway Women’s Alliance, the Dramatists Guild, and the League of Professional Theatre Women. Ann is an adjunct professor at NYU and a member of the College Art Association and Queer Caucus for Art. Sally Mansfield Abbott has written a coming-of-age novel set in the Central Valley in the early 1970s. Miami in Virgo captures the waning days of the 1960s counterculture and the dawn of the women’s movement.

Sally obtained an M.A. in creative writing at SF State and taught classes on goddess worship in prehistory at several Bay Area colleges, including UC Extension.

Class Secretary: Louis Goldman, 465 Grove St, Glencoe, IL 60022, goldmanLB@yahoo.com, 312/622-8448

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Brent Green, MPH ’76, is a Bay Area organization leadership coach with IntelliVen. He is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and an adjunct trainer for UC Davis Extension. Brent is a former consumer panel representative for the U.S. FDA and NGO United Nations World Assembly in Vienna. Brent’s interdisciplinary research and publications focus on mental health, intertwining psychology, consultation, human empathy, and addiction self-recovery, among others. He is former senior editor of the Journal of Social Issues volume on old age and health policy.

Class Secretary: Dan Ahern, 21 Sea Wolf Passage, Corte Madera 94925

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Vincent DiGirolamo’s book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys was awarded the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age’s 2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Prize.

Class Secretaries: Jamie Wells Behrendt, 124 Laurel Grove Ave, Kentfield 94904; Karl Keller, 7504 Brentwood Dr, Stockton 95207

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The Class of 1980 rocks on. Enjoying retirement like there is no tomorrow, Leo O’Farrell recently played the links on a hot day at Davis Municipal Golf Course with alum Steve Roscow ’81. Your Class Secretary played too. Bill “Willie” Hinchberger loves the life in Paris. Another American expat, Mike Quigley, lives the life in South Korea, practicing law, riding his Harley, and golfing like a demon.

Class Secretary: Kevin Johnson, 232 Tern Pl, Davis 95616, krjohnson@ucdavis.edu

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Robert Albo has become a fiction writer after 30-plus years in the tech industry.

He has an engineering degree from Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard. His first novel, Her Dark Matter Necklace, was released in April and has seen strong reader interest. Friends are surprised by his newfound passion, as is he.

Class Secretaries: Linda Martin Takimoto, 1320 Lawrence St, El Cerrito 94530, ltakimoto@ yahoo.com; Tyler H. Hofinga, 114 Meadow Ln, Orinda 94563-3209, tylerhofinga@yahoo.com

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Roy Chuck serves as the Paul Henkind Chair in Ophthalmology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was just elected to serve as the second editor in chief of the journal Translational Vision Science & Technology. Susie Wyshak has come full circle in her real estate career, which began in marketing at Mason-McDuffie, builder of many historic Berkeley neighborhoods. After years of investing herself, she enjoys helping fellow Cal Bears with their lairs.

Class Secretary: Dan Aloni, 14952 Alva Dr, Pacific Palisades 90272

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Otto Bischof, who graduated with a dual degree in physics and astronomy, co-wrote a book titled Electric Vehicles: The Automobiles of the Future, which discusses the technology and necessity of electric vehicles given our current climate crisis.

Class Secretary: Bernadette Hartfield Hotaling, 2080 Lorain Rd, San Marino 91108, bhotaling@ hkfinc.com

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Elwyn Cabebe will be the new medical director of the Stanford Cancer Center South Bay. Elwyn, who has completed his medical oncology fellowship at Stanford, will be leading all cancer center services.

Class Secretary: Eda Chao, 393 Dean St, Apt 2B, Brooklyn, NY 11217, edachao@yahoo.com

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Gabriel Loiacono has published How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories. The book is dedicated to the memory of Caroline Cox, a Cal Ph.D. who taught in the history department.

Class Secretaries: Paul Huang, donhenley0789@ gmail.com; Jonathan Stewart, calboy@alum. berkeley.edu; Deborah Yim, dyim98@gmail.com

Class Notes will soon be moving exclusively online, making it easier for classmates to post, share, and access news about each other. Look for more announcements as we unveil a freshly redesigned CAA website.

Class Secretaries: Email your notes (classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu) with “Class year” in the subject line. You can also mail a hard copy to Class Notes, California magazine, CAA, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720-7520.

Please bold class members’ names; each class is limited to 250 words.

Read our submission guidelines at alumni.berkeley.edu/classnotes.

Can’t Find Your Secretary?

Email classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu, or call 510/900-8246 for names and contact info.

Submissions deadlines: Winter 2021 issue: Sep. 24 Spring 2022 issue: Class Notes will be submitted online. Details coming in the next issue.

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Snapp Chats Alumni Notes from Martin Snapp, J.D. ’72

Becky Wheeler ’49 died on April 9 in the home where she grew up in Walnut Grove on the Sacramento Delta, one month shy of her 94th birthday.

covers much more than which fork to use. Sarah learned about etiquette literally at her mother’s knee.

“My mom ran a successful flower business and incorporated etiquette into much of her work. This opened my perspective about what manners really do for us, and influenced the course of my life. Etiquette was threaded into the whole of my education at Cal, especially my folklore class with Professor Dundes and my English lit classes with Professor Breitwieser.”

After her mother died 21 years ago, she took over the family business and expanded it to include teaching and writing about etiquette and producing big events such as the monthly Oakland “First Fridays” street festival, the annual “Bike to Work Day Bike Happy Hour,” and the San Francisco Education Fund’s “Tipping for Teachers” celebrity waiter event.

She also coaches private clients, ranging from CEOs to women transitioning from incarceration back into society.

“Women in rehab facilities are looking to start over, and they wonder, ‘How am I going to get a job? How am I going to make new friends?’ I tell them they already know many of the answers but don’t realize it. The way they made it through prison included showing respect, and etiquette is all about respect.”

I couldn’t let her go without some Etiquette 101: How do you make a good apology? How do you write a

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KIDDER: COURTESY OF SARAH KIDDER: ROGERS: COURTESY OF KATE ROGERS

Move over, Miss Manners. Sarah Kidder ’05 is the new etiquette guru in town—and her expertise

COURTESY OF THE WHEELER FAMILY

One of her final wishes was to see Cal one last time, so her daughter and son-in-law, Caroline Perkins ’84 and Tadd Perkins ’83, arranged for her to have a virtual tour of the campus.

“She started at Sproul Hall, which was called the Administration Building back then, and the Student Union, which, of course, hadn’t been built yet when she was there,” says Caroline.

“Then she went through Sather Gate, past Dwinelle—which wasn’t there when she was, either—and Wheeler to Doe Library, where she and I spent many happy hours in the Morrison Room. Then she stopped by the Campanile and finally ended up at the Big C.” The Campanile was a bittersweet memory— the place where she last saw her college boyfriend before he left for the war the next day.

“The way she told it, just as he was leaning in to give her a kiss and ask that special question, her parents stepped out from around the corner. They were kind of spying on her. They whisked her away, leaving that poor boy standing there. She told me, ‘That was the meanest thing I’ve ever done.’ She was so cross with her parents, but she was a dutiful daughter.”

After the virtual tour, Caroline kissed her mom goodbye. The next morning, she got a phone call from Becky’s gardener, who was in tears. He said Becky had died peacefully in her sleep. That campus tour was one of the last things she ever did.

Becky was born on May 8, 1927, the third generation of her family to go to Cal, starting with her great-grandfather, Arthur McArthur Seymour, who graduated in 1891 and holds the distinction of being the first person ever to turn down the prestigious University Medal. “He thought others were more deserving,” Caroline says.

Becky Wheeler was born Dorothy Beck, but at Cal her sorority sisters in Kappa Kappa Gamma dubbed her Becky, and the nickname stuck. After graduating from Cal, she became the society editor of the San Francisco News and one of the first television columnists in the Bay Area.

While covering the Bachelors’ Ball on assignment from the newspaper, she met her future husband, Bill Wheeler. “She turned him down three times and then he was the love of her life,” says Caroline. They wed in 1953, had three daughters—all staunch Democrats, like their mother—and stayed happily married until his death in 2004. “We just found all their love letters, which is super fun.”

She was a committed local activist, working to protect the community and environment against high-rise development and freeway construction, co-founding the West Pasadena Residents

Association in 1962. After Bill retired, they returned to Becky’s family home in Walnut Grove, and she threw herself again into civic engagement.

“One of the first things she’d ask you was, ‘So what are you doing with your life?’ ” says her son-in-law, Tadd. “What she really meant was ‘What are you reading?’ ‘Where are you volunteering?’ and ‘What shared friend did you last see?’ ” “She never missed voting in an election, and she was especially happy to live long enough to cast her last vote for Biden,” says Caroline. “She also helped me address more than 1,500 envelopes to send getout-the-vote messages to voters in the swing states.”

When she died, her family buried her ashes under an oak tree, said her favorite prayer, and sang her favorite song, “Hail to California.”

“It was the only song that made her smile and cry at the same time,” says Caroline.

KIDDER: COURTESY OF SARAH KIDDER: ROGERS: COURTESY OF KATE ROGERS

COURTESY OF THE WHEELER FAMILY

letter of sympathy? And, yes, how do you know which fork to use?

First, the apology: “Own what you did wrong and apologize for it. Period. Don’t try to explain, and don’t make excuses. In short, don’t make it about yourself. If you like, ask for forgiveness, but give them time. And please, please, please say, ‘Please.’ ” Next, the sympathy letter: “Don’t make it all about yourself. The tried-and-true statements—‘My deepest sympathies,’ ‘My thoughts are with you,’ ‘My sincere condolences’—are always a safe bet, especially if you didn’t know the person who passed well. That said, when possible, it’s nice to add something positive about the person who passed—about their warm smile, the way they lit up the room, or how much you will always love them.”

And finally, the fork: “Unlike many things in life, etiquette is not here to stump you. If a table is properly set, there will only be utensils on the table that you need to use for the meal that you’re having. You go from the outside in. The first utensils you’ll be using will be on the perimeter of your place setting. Think of utensils as breadcrumbs, like Hansel and Gretel.

Remember, forks are not here to embarrass you. It’s actually harder to use the wrong fork than you think.”

As expected, Sarah ended our interview with her favorite phrase, “Thank you.”

When Kate Rogers ’09 arrived on campus freshman year, she noticed something was missing: Here, in the very heart of California cuisine, there was no cooking club! So she decided to start one.

She made friends with local chefs, invited them to campus to teach cooking classes, and led her club members into nearby restaurant kitchens to learn from the experts. The first year was a great success, and by year two she decided to take things up a notch. She organized “The Big Cook-Off” between Cal and Stanford, with the mayors of Berkeley and Palo Alto among the judges. (Cal won, of course.)

By Kate’s junior year, the Cal Cooking Club had mushroomed to more than 600 members, making it

one of the largest organizations on campus. So, with encouragement from celebrity chefs like Alice Waters ’67 (with whom she interned at Chez Panisse during senior year) and Jamie Oliver, as well as food writer and Cal journalism professor Michael Pollan, she decided to expand to the larger community, stepping down as the campus club’s president to found an off-campus club for children, which she named the Sprouts Cooking Club.

“Working for Alice Waters taught me scads of lessons. She didn’t hesitate to take your hand or look you directly in your eye as she spoke. At lunch, she was adamant that everyone sit together, from the dishwasher to the office secretary to the line cooks. Here at Sprouts, inclusivity is also of the utmost priority.”

Sprouts is a year-round operation, where children and young adults learn everything it takes to eat and live sustainably, including butchering whole pigs, making aioli from scratch, and the trick to the perfect stir-fry. They have made butternut squash ravioli at Boulevard and French cuisine at La Folie, and deboned chickens at Nopa.

In summertime, the local apprentices are joined by out-oftowners who come from as far away as New York, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. They’re able to beef up their résumés (pun intended), get entry-level jobs, and, best of all, find a real passion for cooking.

So what sparked Kate’s passion for food? Her mother.

“I think my first fascination with food stemmed from curiosity. My mom magically put dinner on the table for our family of nine, and I had no idea how she was doing it. So I decided to learn how to cook so I could unravel this mystery. My first creations were pretty hairy. I remember pizzas with Tootsie Rolls, all sorts of combinations that didn’t really make sense. And then, little by little, I started to learn enough skills that I could make simple dinners for my family.”

Like the restaurant business itself, Sprouts had to adjust to keep up with events after the pandemic struck last year.

“We decided to offer our virtual coaching classes to youths all across the nation. And we are really, really having fun because it’s allowing us to connect with chefs from literally all over the United States and do meaningful, fun, affordable, simple recipes that kids from any state could create on their own at home for their families.”

“I think kids are having a really hard time with COVID, and the amount of depression and anxiety has skyrocketed with the amount of time at home and also the time away from school.

We’re really excited about these classes because it’s a little beacon of light in otherwise grim settings.

And it’s also a way for chefs who have closed down restaurants, or are in a transition with their careers, to give back to kids, and I think that’s really special.”

Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@ comcast.net.

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In Memoriam

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Virginia Lee Pearson Anderson, May 3, in Oakland. Born shortly after the end of the last great pandemic, Virginia graduated from Oakland Technical High School as war clouds gathered in Europe. By the time she left Berkeley, the student body had changed radically, many of the young men having enlisted or been drafted, and all Japanese students taken to internment. Always proud of her association with Cal, she went on to get a teaching credential and taught for 32 years at Alameda High School, after her marriage to J. Herbert Anderson. She prepared students for the dreaded Subject A exam and, after retirement, helped interview students for Alumni scholarships. She became one of the secretaries for the Class of ’44, and was always happy to go back to campus for reunions and student interviews. She lives in the memory of her loving daughter, Kathryn Anderson ’70, and many students, friends, and colleagues.

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Carol (Coates) Copeland, June 15, in Albany. Carol graduated from Berkeley High School and UC Berkeley before marrying S. Bruce Copeland at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley. Bruce’s work took the family to Connecticut, Illinois, and Virginia, among other places. They returned to the Bay Area in 2004, eventually moving to Oakland’s Lake Park retirement community. With a quiet grace and a winning smile, Carol had a knack for engaging people young and old. Her mother’s mastery of art influenced Carol’s painting, weaving, and pottery. She loved reading, gardening, and walking in nature. Carol had a strong sense of social justice; in every new town, she and Bruce would seek out the Protestant church that best matched their progressive values. Carol’s memory will be cherished by her children, Sue, Tom, Janet, and Margaret; five grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

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John Wallis “Wally” Madocks, Jan. 5. A month or so prior to his passing, Wally was enjoying life with Ruth on their farm in Arroyo Grande. Wally grew up in the Sunset District. From the beginning, Christian Science was central to him, and at Cal, the Christian Science Organization became the center of his social life. There, he met lifelong friends and his future wife, Laurel Gunnerson. In 1942, Wally entered the Army Air Corps and remained stateside, working as a maintenance engineer until 1946. After his discharge, he returned to Cal and graduated with degrees in mechanical engineering and business. Laurel and Wally were married in 1952 and settled in Tacoma, WA. Wally started working for Tidewater Oil Company (the old Flying A) and stayed until his retirement in 1986, continuing as a consultant until 2008. In 1973, two years after the passing of Laurel, Wally married Clare Wisecarver. Clare, a wonderful wife and loving stepmother, passed in 2008. As

to the secret of his marital success, Wally said it was two words: “Yes, Dear.” A giving, honest, and capable person, Wally maintained the local buildings of the Christian Science church and the Berkeley Christian Science Organization. He loved making jams and preserves, and his marmalade, applesauce, and plum jam were worldclass. His family will gratefully remember him and keep his gifts alive.

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James K. Luce, Jan. 21. Born in Le Mars, IA, Jim moved west with his family after the Dust Bowl years. He started college at San Diego State, but transferred to Berkeley, where he completed a geology degree with pre-med classes. His passion for medicine and helping others continued throughout his life, from treating polio patients at an Army base in Hawaii to treating cancer patients in Texas. An active man, Jim enjoyed bird watching and challenges: he was still hiking the Colorado Fourteeners into his 80s. He is survived by his second wife, Candace; children, Holly, Laura, Douglas, and Gregory; and stepdaughter, Deidre, among others.

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Dorothy “Dottie” Anderson Tregea, June 12. After earning a degree in anthropology in 1949, Dorothy went to work for the University and met the love of her life, Forrest Tregea. The couple married in 1952 and had five children. After Forrest retired from Berkeley, they moved to Walnut Creek. Dorothy volunteered for many years at the Lincoln Child Center Thrift store, “The Bee Hive.” She enjoyed her water aerobics group, and was a very competitive bridge player. After Forrest’s death in 1993, Dorothy continued to attend Bears games and only missed a few in over 70 seasons—a streak that ended with the pandemic (although her cardboard cutout was present during the 2020 season). She celebrated her 90th birthday at Memorial Stadium with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She was very proud of having attended the Olympics in 1984 and getting her picture taken with the Giants’ three World Series trophies. Family was most important to Dorothy, and favorite family gathering spots include Fentons Creamery, Spenger’s Fish Grotto, and Disneyland. Dorothy is survived by her sons, Jim and Sam; daughter, Martha; stepson, William; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

50

Florence “Flossie” (Cooper) Myer, April 24, in Walnut Creek. Born in Fort Benton, MT, Flo left the family farm to study business administration and foreign trade. While at Cal, she used her typing skills to establish a business taking dictation for professors’ research papers and textbooks. She raised two sons in El Cerrito and moved to Walnut Creek in 1994. She was an active member of the United Methodist

Church and the Rossmoor Computer Club. She is preceded in death by her husband; two sisters; and son, Chuck, and is survived by her brother, Jere; son, Dale; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

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S. Walter Kran, Feb. 4. After attending medical school at the University of Chicago, Walter served in the Air Force as an officer in the Medical Corps. He eventually returned to San Leandro, where he lived for 40 years, practicing medicine at two area hospitals until 1994. His proudest achievements included being elected chief of staff in 1973, instituting the first mammography program in the region and setting up the first CT scans and MRI services in the area. He is survived by his wife, Lisa Casey Kran.

52

Joan Bernardi Breece, Nov. 26, 2020, in Mill Valley. Born in Oakland to Theodore Bernardi ’24 and Regina Parent, M.A. ’28, Joan grew up in Berkeley, ultimately graduating from Cal with a degree in decorative arts. She married Howell Breece, M.A. ’39, and raised a family in Sausalito while volunteering at Audubon Canyon Ranch and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. Joan and Howell spent summers camping in British Columbia, traveled extensively through Europe, and attended every Dixieland jazz concert and festival they could.

Joan is survived by three sons, Conrad, Ted ’79, and Tim ’82; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Hon. Anthony DeCristoforo Jr., May 1, in Sacramento. The son of Italian immigrant parents, Tony enjoyed a long and distinguished legal career, including serving as a Sacramento County Superior Court judge from 1985–99. A die-hard Golden Bears fan, his fall Saturdays were spent attending games and tailgating with lifelong friends from Cal. He loved to cook, grow tomatoes, and travel, especially to Italy. He is survived by his wife, Elinor; children, Lora, Cara, Tony ’89, and Joe; and five grandchildren.

Ronald J. Ostrow, June 14, in Chevy Chase, MD. A soft-spoken but tenacious reporter who won respect from colleagues and leading Democrats and Republicans alike, Ronald served 33 years in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau. During his years at Cal, he was active in all four Class councils and was a permanent Class officer. He is survived by his wife, Alyce; two stepdaughters; and four grandchildren.

Hans Reifer, May 4, in Pinehurst, ID. At Cal, Hans was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi and the varsity soccer team, and graduated with a B.S. in agricultural chemistry. He served in the Army from 1953–55, graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1957, and spent his career in new product development and

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management in the food industry at Pillsbury, Lipton, and Carnation. Later, he became director of his own marketing consulting firm, Reifer & Associates. After many years in Los Angeles, where he raised his family and taught skiing on winter weekends in the local mountains, he retired to northern Idaho’s Silver Valley, where he was an ownership partner of Lookout Pass ski area. There, he skied more than 100 days per winter well into his 80s and spearheaded a skiinstruction program for seniors. In 2016, Hans was honored by the Professional Ski Instructors of America for 50 years of service. He is survived by a sister; three children; and a son-in-law.

Lee Talbot, April 27. Lee was a loyal member of the Golden Crew of ’52 and a professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University in Virginia. The renowned ecologist authored the Endangered Species Act, advised U.S. presidents and the United Nations, and conducted decades of groundbreaking research across Africa and Asia, often with his wife, Martha, at his side.

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Patricia (Krieger) Boege, June 11, in Walnut Creek. While earning her degree in decorative art, she was a devoted member of Chi Omega sorority, chairman of card stunts for football games, and a member of the Prytanean honor society. She met her husband, Raymond ’54, while at Cal, and was predeceased by him in 1985. A Bay Area native, she was an enthusiastic A’s fan. Growing up, she was an accomplished ballerina, and taught dance after graduating from Cal. Later in life, she became a travel agent and enjoyed many trips to Europe, Asia, and South and Central America. She also enjoyed singing and the arts. She is survived by her children, Juliet, Stephen, and Sally ’89; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

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Dede Brandes White, Feb. 8, in Carmel.

Dede’s life was always an adventure and included jumping out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuting to Earth on her 70th birthday. At Cal, she was a member of Gamma Phi Beta. She lived for more than 50 years in and around Carmel and is survived by her husband of 63 years, Oliver “Ollie” White; three children; and three grandchildren.

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Robert Rowe Cannon, ’57, MBA ’58, June 10, in El Cerrito. He is survived by his children, Constance ’84 and Rob ’87, and two grandchildren. Donations may be made to UC Berkeley or your favorite charity.

Amos “Sonny” Stackhouse III, Nov. 2, 2020.

Born in New London, CT, Amos grew up in San Anselmo and graduated from Berkeley with a degree in electrical engineering. He spent 15 years in the aerospace industry, where he helped

develop NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, which transmitted scientific data back from the Moon. He also worked for Ford Motor Company and as an engineering consultant. He met his wife, Marian Humphrey, on a blind date, and they married in 1982. Amos was an avid tennis player and baseball and hockey fan. He is survived by Marian and his former spouse, Ursula Sass; three children, Mark, Stacy, and Coleen; and multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

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head coach Ray Willsey and legendary defensive line coach Bill Dutton. He worked as a railroad engineer before retiring. He leaves his wife, Jackie, and many lifelong friends and former teammates.

22

R ac ha el De n g, April 27. Rachael was born in West Vancouver, British Columbia. She was quoted in the Daily Californian saying that the term “Berserkeley” encouraged her to enroll at Cal. An aspiring entrepreneur, she was a member of CS KickStart, FEED, and PERIOD at UC Berkeley, and won numerous scholarships, and leadership and hackathon awards. Friends describe her as full of light and positivity, and a joy to be around.

Rachael is survived by her parents.

Samuel S. Peden, June 5, in Vancouver, WA. Sam was born in Portland, OR, and moved to California to finish high school. At Cal, he was active in the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was head cheerleader for the last Cal Rose Bowl team. After graduation, he worked for the Walnut Creek Police Department for two years until he was hired by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Sam worked in Redding, Seattle, and Portland during his 34-year career with the IRS. After retiring, Sam opened a private consulting business representing clients to the IRS. He loved helping people and made many friends over the last 23 years.

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Donald R. Winslow, Aug. 27, 2020. After graduating from Berkeley with a bachelor’s in civil engineering, Don became a California-registered civil engineer who worked on the construction of the I-5 in Northern California. Later in life, he received an MBA from Boston U. and worked on highway management projects in Peru, Ecuador, and Portugal. He spent the end of his life in Red Bluff. Don is survived by his wife, Arlene; children, Frank, Donna, and Krista; and twin grandsons.

FACULTY AND STAFF

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Mary Alice Sullivan, in Salinas. Known as the girl in the white rain jacket while at Berkeley, Mary became the quintessential Cal graduate: taking her children to peace marches, sewing blankets for the homeless, and sending out protective and healing energy with her crystals to all who needed it. She is survived by her two sons, Daniel and Joshua; daughter, Crissy; and five grandchildren.

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David Benjamin Wolf, April 9, in Santa Rosa. David was born in Dayton, OH, and grew up in Los Angeles. He earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.A. in economics in 1966. After marrying Ruth in 1965, they both served in the Peace Corps in Malaysia, returning to the Bay Area in 1968. David also attended Stanford University, completing a Ph.D. in education in 1984.

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John Medaris, Feb. 20. At Cal, John lettered in football and wrestling, participated in club boxing, and was part of the 1969 and 1970 Cal football squads. He played for

Graham Flitz, June 2, in Berkeley. Graham was pursuing his Ph.D. in environmental health sciences in the School of Public Health and had successfully advanced to qualifying exams and his dissertation. To continue Graham’s dedication to research, in lieu of flowers, lasting memorials may be made to the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Fund or to local environmental organizations. Graham is survived by his parents, James Flitz and Suzanne Summerwill; his brother, Evan; his aunt and second mom, Kristin; and many loving friends in Berkeley.

Hardy Frye, June 16, in Berkeley. Born and raised in Tuskegee, AL, Hardy joined the Army after high school. In the 1960s, he became involved in civil rights activism, later going on to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Berkeley in 1975.

He would return in 1977 as a postdoc, and was involved with the formation of the Institute for the Study of Social Change. After retirement, he would again return to Cal, as a lecturer in African American studies. The longtime Berkeley resident was honored for his efforts in support of civil rights in the United States and the world.

Rep. Barbara Lee read a tribute to him into the Congressional Record.

Marla Plecha, May 11. Marla was born in Fallon, NV. After attending the University of Nevada, Reno, she completed her O.D. at Pacific University School of Optometry, where she fell in love with her future husband, Stanley Plecha. Following graduation, she pursued her goal of improving eye care for veterans and created a residency program in optometry at Berkeley. She is survived by her husband; two children, Delaney and Stanley; and her mother and siblings.

Irwin Scheiner, May 29. Irwin earned his B.A. from Queens College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A professor emeritus CALIFORNIA FALL 2021 63

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at Berkeley in the Department of History and the Institute of East Asian Studies, his research interests included social thought in Japan, the Far East, and the late Tokugawa era. He published many papers and books including, most recently, Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period: Methods and Metaphors.

Creating a Lasting Connection to Cal The Cal Alumni Association (CAA) gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the donors who contributed $2,500 or more to The CAA Fund between January 1 and December 31, 2020.

The CAA Fund Society is a group of alumni and friends who create a lasting connection to Cal through their philanthropic leadership and commitment to our alumni association. An annual contribution of $1,000 or more establishes membership in The CAA Fund Society.

Hearst Society ($10,000+) Camp Saint Andrews Patricia A. Graffis ’53 Natan Minc and Laurie Minc Gordon E. Moore ’50 and Betty Moore

Julie Shin Morgan ’89 and Bradley P. Morgan Ph.D. ’91 Bradford Oelman, Kathryn Oelman Meagher ’67, and Sarah K. Meagher ’01 Georgieanna Scheuerman Ph.D. ’80 and Richard Scheuerman

Gayley Society ($5,000+) Vicky Y. Cao ’95 and Alex X. Huang ’94

Eric R. Mart ’70 and Janice N. Mart

Bill Connelly and Jennifer L. Connelly ’92

Ronald D. Morrison ’68

Stephen L. Eastwood ’71 and Dorne Eastwood

John B. Ryan MBA ’68 and Daniela Tossi Ryan

David E. Kepler II ’75 and Patricia A. Kepler

Jon M. Walford ’63 and Pamela M. Walford

Mary P. Komoto ’78 and Brian K. Komoto

Oxford Society ($2,500+) Tara L. Bunch ’85 and Eleanor Mercado

Joy A. Kovaleski ’77

Candace C. Callan ’02

K. Mark Lee ’77 and Monika P. Lee

Gay Callan ’70

Leonard E. Look ’83 and Laurie A. Look

Marc A. Carrasco ’93 and Linda M. Assante Carrasco

Lynne Koll Martin ’78 and Tevis Martin ’78

Dean J. Chu ’78 and Wilma K. Chu

Constance Murray M.L.S. ’72

Patricia A. Dwyer ’78 Barbara M. Ferrigno ’62 Mildred Y. Gardner and Frank F. Gardner

Paul S. Nagata ’79 and Susan S. Nagata Jocelyn C. Quintana ’78 and Alexander T. Quintana ’77 Joseph J. Shen ’91 and Serena Y. Shen

Amy O’Connor Goodman ’94 and Michael Goodman

Gary R. Slavit ’78 and Evelyn Margolin

Melvin B. Heyman ’72 and Jody E. Heyman

David B. Wake, April 29, in Oakland. A native of South Dakota, Dave earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, where he met his wife, Marvalee. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1968, where he was a professor of integrative biology and a director of the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Dave was known as the world’s leading expert on salamanders, and was among the first to warn of the decline of amphibian populations worldwide. He discovered more than 144 new species of salamander and had four amphibian species named after him. He is survived by his wife, as well as his son, Thomas; sister, Marcia; brother, Thomas; and a granddaughter.

Howard A. McDaniel ’65

Brian Tom Godsey ’85 and Jill Darcangelo Godsey ’90, MBA ’96

Richard J. Hartje ’65

Martin Wachs, April 11. Born in 1941, Marty taught at Northwestern, UCLA, and Berkeley after receiving his doctorate from Northwestern. At Berkeley, he directed the Institute of Transportation Studies and became known as an expert in the field of transportation planning, writing four books and 180 articles on the subject. He was a researcher at RAND, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and served on many advisory boards and commissions. Marty was also a lifelong Dodgers fan and longtime UCLA basketball season ticket holder. He is survived by his wife, Helen; daughter, Faye; son, Steven; and two grandchildren.

Alison F. Shimada ’85 and Chong Jin Lee Thomas Thomson ’67 R. Thornton ’90 Art B. Wong ’63 and Janet Lewis Wong ’70

alumni.berkeley.edu/fundsociety

For In Memoriam guidelines, please visit alumni.berkeley.edu/California/ guidelines.asp. We prefer that you email submissions to californiamag@alumni. berkeley.edu with “Obituary: first name, last name, class year” in the subject line, but you also can mail a hard copy to In Memoriam, California magazine, CAA, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720-7520. Submissions may be edited for length and clarity.

Submissions deadlines: Winter 2021 issue: Sep. 24, 2021 Spring 2022 issue: Dec. 17, 2021

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Engaging and eclectic in the East Bay. Oakland is the gateway to the East Bay with a little bit of everything to offer , and St. Paul’s Towers gives you easy access to it all.

An artistic, activist, and intellectual Life Plan Community, St. Paul’s Towers is known for convenient services, welcome comforts and security for the future.

Get to know us and learn more about moving to St. Paul’s Towers.

For information call 510.891.8542.

St. Paul’s Towers is a proud partner of the UC Retiree Learning Series presented by UCB Retirement Center.

100 Bay Place, Oakland, CA 94610 / covia.org/st-pauls-towers a not-for-profit community owned and operated by covia, a front porch partner. license 011400627 / coa #351

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Golden Bears Life Membership Congratulations and thank you to our newest Golden Bears Life Members for expressing an ongoing allegiance to the past and future of our incomparable alma mater.

1950s

Evelyn M. Emmrich ’52 Victoria W. Chin ’54, CRED ’55 Marilyn M. White ’54 Ethan C. Galloway Ph.D. ’55 Wayne O. MacDonell ’56 Katrine B. Watson ’56 Shirley R. Donovan ’57 Honorable Thomas B. Donovan ’57, J.D. ’62 Jean E. Livermore ’57 Jean C. Jennings ’58, Ret. Roxanne McLaughlin ’58 Helen H. Skov ’58, C.Esing ’64 Professor Roger D. Jennings ’59, Ph.D. John R. Jung ’59, Ph.D.

1960s

John Bradley Hall Ph.D. ’60 Dr. David A. Lightner ’60 Consuelo H. McHugh ’60 Louis Francis Ricci ’60, D.Pharm.

Weyman W. Wong ’60, M.D. Donald B. Hoover M.S. ’61 Robert L. Meline ’61 Anthony A. Turpin ’61 Sally S. Champe ’62 Mireya A. Jones ’62 Jerrold S. Cooper ’63, M.A. ’64 Dr. Carol M. Hurwitz ’63, M.S. ’07 Stephen L. Shirley ’63 Dolores E Ali Ph.D. ’64 Suzanne Godshall-Douglas ’64, C.Mult. ’65 Paul G. Nebel ’64, MBA ’65 Carol Wharton ’64 Lois C. Ertel ’66 Frederick Michael Gragg ’66, Ph.D. Rodman D. Grimm MBA ’66 Bonnie K. Moran ’66 H. Kendall Raymond, Jr. ’66 Bradley R. Tabach-Bank ’66 Gerald T. Lundblad ’67 John Paul O’Connell Ph.D. ’67 Leslie H. Soltz ’67 Stephanie L. Tyau ’67 William J. Wren ’67 Roger C. Bush ’68 Susan L. Kishler ’68, M.A. ’71 Claude L. Kishler, Jr. ’68, M.A. ’71 Richard P. Lessin ’68, M.Eng. ’70 Larry D. Struve J.D. ’68 Kathleen J. Devine ’69

1970s

1980s

1990s

Joseph H. Faull ’70 Ying W. Go ’70, M.S. ’73 Michele A. McLaughlin ’70, CPA Scott C. Muller M.L.A. ’70 Deborah H. Mytels ’70 Therese Roos ’70 Janet L. Schwartz ’70, M.A. ’73 Richard C. Yee ’70 Phillip W. Berman ’71, Ph.D. Maria Bertero-Barcelo ’71 Robert K. Okazaki ’71 Honorable Wayne S. Snowden J.D. ’71 Cecilia C. Cheng ’72 Victoria F. Hagbom ’72 Robert John Matutat ’72, D.Pharm.

Dana K. Olson ’72, M.A. ’76 Roger D. Simon ’72 Regina J. Trujillo ’72 David K. Chan ’73 Glenn R. Christ ’73 Homer T. Gee ’73, M.S ’74 Robert P. Moody ’73, Ph.D. John C. Slevin ’73 Jeanne F. Stickel ’73 Michael T. Sullivan ’73 Angela Kasprzyk Gardner ’74 Rev. Ronald K. Kobata ’74 Jozsef Miklosvary M.L.S. ’74 Clifford D. Wong ’74 Deborah C. Blank ’75 Dr. Tina Etcheverry ’75 Lavinda M. Han ’75 Dorothy J. Lindsay ’75 Adrian B. Ryan M.Arch. ’75, M.C.P. ’82 Alice G. Saunders ’75 Edward E. Szaky ’75 Thomas E. Bowe, III ’76 Judith Brooks ’76, M.A. Charles H. Ensey ’76 Howard J. Hertz ’76 Linda Anderson-Maarleveld ’77 Rachelle Ann Bergmann ’77, M.A. ’80, Ph.D. ’85 Mark Thomas Lewellyn Ph.D. ’77 Denise L. Marchant ’77 Mark Voge ’77 Peter H. Bresler J.D. ’78 Richard C. Hubble ’78 Karen L. Matteson ’78 Alfonso J. Quintero ’78 Christina J. Tworek ’78 Jon K. Fong ’79 Richard H. Johnston ’79 Anthony Mirante ’79 Michael P. Pert ’79

Bill A. Carle, III J.D. ’80 Carolyn K. Dudley ’80 Aimee B. Dunn ’80 Marylee Guinon ’80 Damian V. Lambros ’80 Jack A. Tyler, Jr. ’80 David Y. Hu M.S. ’81 James J. Lucey ’81 Shelley H. Richardson ’81 Wesley C. Collier, Jr. ’82 Robert L. Farnsworth MBA ’82 Dr. Mark A. Hansen ’82 Yuri Kaneda ’82, D.D.S. Dimitri P. Magganas ’82 Craig M. Nishizaki ’82 Ehsan Ettehadieh M.S. ’83, Ph.D. ’85 Margaret E. Hellwarth ’83 John J. Prehn ’83 Carol A. Ravano ’83, M.S. ’84 Barbara J. Banks ’84 Dr. Brian Kenton Fong ’80, O.D. ’84 Gary J. Gero ’84 Ralph W. Haskew ’84 Judith A. Ilgen ’84 Thomas D. McCarville ’84 José Luis Moscovich M.S. ’84 Shirly D. Quan ’84 Eric G. Strellis ’84 Jennifer H. Dowley ’85 Gloria T. Jue ’85 Karen L. Bowen J.D. ’86 Henry A. Collin, IV ’86 Margaret Eleanor Johnson ’86, Ph.D. Dr. Peter J. Kostelec ’86 Ricardo M. Terrones ’86 Jill L. Brown ’87 Lynn N. Gerson ’87 Ifiyenia Kececioglu Ph.D. ’87 Joel A. Krajewski ’87, M.S. ’97 Virginia Landin Nelson ’87 Annie M. Liang ’87 Gary Richard Moncher Ph.D. ’87 Steven R. Ow-Ling ’87 Dana S. Rieger J.D. ’87 Kimberly A. Smith ’87 John M. Wirum ’87 Marcia Benjamin ’88 Michelle E. Branchaud Simi ’88 Michael M. Chan ’88 Mark D. Clifford MBA ’88 Kimberly K. Kelly ’88 John S. Kutzer ’88 Patrick A. White MBA ’88 Amanda R. Adolph ’89 Michael A. Gallin ’89 Shishir K. Sinha ’89

Francis N. Chu ’90 Hallie B. Hart ’90 D’Ann Rose Penner M.A. ’90, Ph.D. ’95 Fritz Renema ’90 Dr. Rajendra K. Bose M.S. ’91 David Antony Carrillo ’91, J.D. ’95, L.L.M. ’07, J.S.D. ’11 Roger C. Tim ’91, Ph.D. Linh My Cao ’92, D.D.S. Arturo M. Cornejo MBA ’92 Michael H. Metelits M.A. ’92 Emily W. Mencken ’93 Mwangavu A. Jones ’94 Greg L. Tanaka ’94 Asoke K. De Ph.D. ’95 Laura A. McDevitt ’96 Rodrigo Orduna ’96, M.C.P. ’05 Professor Bin Yao Ph.D. ’96 Michael M. Forbes ’97 Todd David Hodes M.S. ’97, Ph.D. ’02 Liam P. Moran ’97 Dr. Farzin Yaghmaie ’97, M.A. ’02 Evelyn E. Zlomke M.P.H. ’97 Jennifer L. Allen ’98 Yuewen Chun ’98 Usha L. McFarling M.A. ’98 Jagdev Ram ’98 Kito B. Robinson ’98, Esq. Sonny W. Au ’99, M.S. ’04 Jeffrey T. Davidson ’99 Michael J. French ’99 John Timothy Giles Ph.D. ’99 Dr. Sky Jennifer Wolf ’99

2000s Kevin Tai ’00 Georgia P. Bajjalieh ’01 Stephanie Lee ’01 Jenny M. Reyes M.S. ’01 Satbir S. Bal ’02 Sitthikit Chariyasatit ’02 David E. Harris ’03 Justin P. Nakamura ’03 Tiffany M. Chiu ’04 Sara M. Taylor ’04 Javaid H. Ansari ’05 Zhoujia Bao MBA ’05 Steven M. Kusalo ’05 Anh M. Nguyen ’05 Alan Fung-Schwarz ’06 Remi J. Mustapha ’06 Aneliya Ansari ’07 Brian R. Gross MBA ’08 George E. Misa ’08 Alana G. Pechon M.I.M.S. ’08

Thomas R. Schwei ’08 Dr. Nihar K. Shah Ph.D. ’08 Michael A. White ’08 Alexandra S. Farrokhian ’09 Jennifer V. Gateb ’09 Benjamin Chae Lee ’09 Gerard M. Sunga ’09

2010s Beatrice Chiu-Au ’10 Peter A. Nelson M.A. ’10, Ph.D. ’17 Maria De Los Angeles Almanzo Ed.D. ’11 Linh M. Tran ’11, M.I.D.S. ’19 Shishir Agrawal MBA ’12 Rezuan Wong ’12 Elena Alvarado-Peters MBA ’13 Naeem Azizian ’13 Sanketh Katta ’13 Zhi Jun J. Lu ’13 Amy S. Tang ’13 Micah A. Fry ’14 Taylorr Gray ’14 Lauren A. Week ’14 Carlos A. Cerda Torres M.P.H. ’17 John-Neil R. Hunter ’16 Ryan K. Liu MBA ’16 Austin M. Pritzkat ’16 Jesika T. Barmanbek ’17 Brooke D’Amore Bradley ’17 William L. Shotwell ’17 Justin Schuyler ’18 Bangjie Xu ’18 Rachel J. Blanchard ’19 Allison Sheu ’19 Joan S. Zhu ’19

2020s Steven Booth M.I.C.S. ’20 David W. Ng M.I.C.S. ’21

Friends of the University Mark Brosius Debanu Das, Ph.D. Marilyn A. Forni Margaret L. Grosse Babette B. Harding Father Jayson J. Landeza Odilo C. Lima Dr. Lorraine M. Massa Laura Rosen Heather Tidrick Yolanda Vega

Become a Golden Bears Life Member today!

888.CAL.ALUM • alumni.berkeley.edu/goldenbears Golden Bears Life Membership: Current Life Members

(one time, tax-deductible payment)

New and Annual Members

1_FP ADS_F21.indd 66

$300 $1,300

Future Golden Bears Life Members will be recognized in California magazine and will also receive a custom-made blue and gold Golden Bears lapel pin and a special new membership card.

The list of Golden Bears Life Members above is accurate from April 1 to July 6, 2021.

8/8/21 12:32 PM

Spotlight

In his cover illustrations for the New Yorker, Adrian Tomine ’96 has created some of the most iconic images of life under quarantine, including “Love Life,” from Dec. 7, 2020, which showed a young woman on a Zoom date, holding a cocktail and dressed to kill —from the waist up.

Not visible to her date are soccer shorts and unshaven legs, not to mention the cats, clutter, and chaos of her cramped apartment.

Tomine is the author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed 2015 graphic novel Killing and Dying and the illustrated memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020).

Before joining the New Yorker, Bill Buford ’77 was, for 16 years, editor of the literary journal Granta, where he coined the term “dirty realism” to describe a generation of authors writing about “the belly-side of contemporary life.”

Buford himself is probably best known for laying bare the belly-side of English life in his book Among the Thugs (1990), about that country’s football hooligans. Buford was fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1995 to 2002, a position the Times said “carries clout equivalent to St. Peter’s at the Pearly Gates”—at least in the minds of aspiring writers. Buford is still an occasional contributor to the New Yorker, now mostly writing about food. His most recent book, Dirt (2020), chronicles his quest to master French cooking.

Deborah Treisman ’91 got her first rejection letter from the New Yorker at age 11. She graduated from Berkeley in comparative literature at 16. In 2003, she became the youngest person to be named fiction editor at the New Yorker, the same magazine that had rejected her younger self. Treisman rose to the spot after a stint as deputy under fellow Cal alum Bill Buford. She was raised in a family of high achievers; her mother, Anne Treisman, was a renowned psychologist who taught at Berkeley for many years, as did her stepfather, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D. ’61. Of her own august position in literary Valhalla, Treisman has said, “This is a great job, but it’s a job.”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PATRICK WELSH

Joan Acocella ’66, who graduated from Berkeley as Joan Ross, has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995 and for many years was the magazine’s dance critic. In 2005, she delivered a lecture at Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities called “Ballet and Sex.” She began the talk by saying that she had mistitled it. What she actually wanted to discuss was the “use of the female crotch and its armature in classical ballet.” She lost her courage, she said, when she thought about that title—“Ballet and the Crotch”— appearing on a flyer.

“Nevertheless, that is my subject.”

Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Mike Twohy, MFA ’73, provided the raw material for the magazine’s first-ever caption contest in 1998. His drawing depicted a lab scientist and rats, the researcher himself dressed in a giant rat suit. The winning caption: “More important is what I learned about myself.” These days, Twohy mostly devotes himself to writing and illustrating children’s books. His titles include Outfoxed, Mouse and Hippo, and Spacebot. His most recent New Yorker contribution was an illustrated “Shouts and Murmurs” collaboration with daughter Clare about pandemic life, titled “Places Beyond Boredom.” First stop: “Charades-forone bored.”

A proud alumna of the Daily Californian, where she once served as editor-in-chief, Margaret Talbot ’84 joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2004 after stints at the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and Lingua Franca. She is the youngest daughter of the late screen actor Lyle Talbot, the subject of her 2012 book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century. Her newest work, released in June, is a collaboration with brother David Talbot, founding editor of Salon, called By the Light of Burning Dreams. Kirkus calls it “an intelligent and sympathetic reappraisal of the political upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s.”

—P.J.

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08122021130618

IN HOUSE

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

At the Lair: (l-r) Zack Freeno; UC Regent John Perez; Aden Kun ’91 and Susan Kun; Ana García; Angela Salazar and CAA President Alfonso Salazar ’90; Assemblymember Phil Ting ’92; Sean Peterson; UC Berkeley Director of State Government Relations Adrian Diaz ’04; Los Angeles Unified School District Board Member Mónica García ’96; Susana Razo ’97; Cloey Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79 and Everett Hewlett; Romania Whitlock and Chief People & Culture Officer Eugene Whitlock.

DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

I write this from Camp Gold at the Lair of the Golden Bear as I watch families taking full advantage of the fresh air, blue skies, and outdoor space to roam freely.

68 ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU

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Race and Climate Change, a discussion between energy professor Daniel Kammen and anthropology assistant professor Sarah E. Vaughn, hosted by Mary Nemerov ’94. Kammen and Vaughn shared how advocates are building a common language beyond technology and economics to influence policymakers toward rethinking traditional representation and distribution. You can watch a recording at alumni.berkeley.edu/raceandclimate.

Together, we can emerge from the pandemic as a stronger Cal community supporting our students, young alumni, and communities. We look forward to seeing you in Berkeley in October for Reunion and Parents’ Weekend at Homecoming. CAA will be celebrating our Cultural Chapters and first-generation alumni.

Visit alumni.berkeley.edu/homecoming for a detailed schedule.

Together, we rise.

Image: Cal Alumni Association

For many of us, spending time in nature with loved ones and friends is the best way to recharge. In June, we celebrated our Cal Athletics leaders at the Cal Bears in the Woods Alumni Chapter’s Coaches Caravan event in Lake Tahoe. The “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper sticker is so much more than a slogan. It is a true call to action for every visitor, who can have an immediate impact on preserving the beauty of this wondrous retreat. While the United States Senate finalized a bipartisan infrastructure bill that included investments in clean energy, I joined the Cal Alumni Club of Washington, D.C. for their annual welcome picnic.

We are witnessing the global effects of climate change. I join my fellow loyal Cal Discoveries Travel participants as we watch the news and see places where we visited in great distress. My heart goes out to the families in Germany who watched their loved ones and hometowns swallowed by relentless rain. Here in the United States, the Pacific Northwest is managing record-high temperatures and stupendous wildfires, smoke carrying to fill the skies above Toronto, New York City, and Philadelphia.

The convergence of racial injustice and accelerated climate change has pushed minority populations to live in the periphery of their own communities. In late July, the Cal Alumni Association led

Fiat Lux,

Executive Director Clothilde Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79 CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

8/18/21 11:54 AM

C

Yourconnection connectionto toBerkeley.

Berkeley.For ForLife. life.

Your

Letter from the President

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 2020 ANNUAL REPORT

1

Total Revenue and Support: $9,324,024

y

Total Expenses: $11,639,868 0.58% 0.73% 2.86% 5.89% 11.69%

les ber 33.56%

13.60%

1.87% 27.70%

70.43%

31.09% Other revenues Cal Discoveries Travel Advertising Lair of the Golden Bear

Contributions and support Investment returns Membership Royalty programs

CONDENSED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION (AUDITED) All numbers in thousands

CONDENSED STATEMENT OF ACTIVITIES (AUDITED)

2020

2019

$3,631

$2,965

456 1,372

199 1,400

ASSETS CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE, NET LOAN RECEIVABLE RELATED PARTY RECEIVABLE PREPAID EXPENSES AND OTHER ASSETS INVESTMENTS PROPERTY AND EQUIPMENT, NET OPERATING RIGHT-OF-USE-ASSET TOTAL ASSETS

122 89 24,710

168 26,898

8,622

9,062

62 $38,942

$40,814

LIABILITIES AND NET ASSETS LIABILITIES ACCOUNTS PAYABLE AND ACCRUED EXPENSES

r

CONTRACT LIABILITIES DERIVATIVE FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT LIABILITY FOR PENSION BENEFITS BONDS PAYABLE, NET OPERATING LEASE LIABILITY TOTAL LIABILITIES

Image: Cal Alumni Association

WITH DONOR RESTRICTIONS TOTAL NET ASSETS TOTAL LIABILITIES AND NET ASSETS

All numbers in thousands

NET ASSETS NET ASSETS WITHOUT DONOR WITH DONOR RESTRICTIONS RESTRICTIONS

LAIR CAMP AND PINECREST CHALET ROYALTY PROGRAMS MEMBERSHIP DUES CONTRIBUTIONS AND SUPPORT SPECIAL EVENTS, NET TRAVEL PROGRAM ADVERTISING OTHER REVENUES INVESTMENT RETURNS (LOSSES) NET OF RELATED INVESTMENT EXPENSES

SUPPORTING SERVICES:

1,298 5,600

1,115 5,706

66 $11,460

$10,834

$40,814

3,129

3,325 173 2,071 161 1,245

267 68 549

267 68 549 3,115

5,123

(216)

(197)

$9,324

$21,640

$8,198

$8,198

$12,089

3,225 217 $11,640

3,225 217 $11,640

3,623 301 $16,013

($2,316)

$5,627

2,382

733

($376)

1,043

$38,942

378

$9,700

1,259

$29,980

2,751

(1,487)

EXPENSES

$27,482

$6,747 1,553 1,439

1,487

1,962

9,220

$54 1,090 1,268

NET ASSETS RELEASED FROM RESTRICTIONS

$1,008

8,845

$

(216)

1,917

$20,760

2019 TOTAL

$54 1,090 1,268

(LOSS) GAIN ON DERIVATIVE FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT

$1,320

$18,637

2020 TOTAL

REVENUE, GAINS, AND OTHER SUPPORT

TOTAL REVENUE AND SUPPORT

NET ASSETS

WITHOUT DONOR RESTRICTIONS

Program expenses General and administrative expenses Development expenses

PROGRAM EXPENSES GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES DEVELOPMENT EXPENSES TOTAL EXPENSES

REVENUES, GAINS, AND OTHER SUPPORT OVER EXPENSES ($1,940) BEFORE OTHER CHANGE

($376)

LOSS ON SALE OF PINECREST CHALET CHANGE IN PENSION LIABILITY CHANGES IN NET ASSETS NET ASSETS, BEGINNING OF YEAR NET ASSETS, END OF YEAR

(420) (183)

(183)

269

(2,123)

(376)

(2,499)

5,476

20,760

9,221

29,981

24,504

$18,637

$8,845

$27,482

$29,980

The condensed financial information presented has been audited by Moss Adams, LLP and should be read in conjunction with the 2020 audited financial statements and related notes, which may be requested from the CAA Accounting office.

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

InHouse_F21_fnl.indd 69

How invigorating it is to share the hard work of the Cal Alumni Association (CAA) in pursuit of our mission to support the university and connect its alumni in 2020. CAA rose to the challenge of the times: unleashing creativity, reimagining engagement, and creating exciting programming. I am grateful to our Board of Directors, senior leadership, and staff for transforming our programs to provide virtual experiences that inspire Cal spirit. Many alumni also conducted research, developed tools, and implemented solutions to keep us safe during the pandemic. Last, I am grateful for our Chancellor’s leadership and guidance in developing strategies to bring students back on campus this fall.

As challenging as the year was, the Cal alumni community found ways to connect through robust virtual programs, engaging more than 9,000 alumni. One standout example is the group of alumni who ensured incoming students received warm welcomes to campus, making transitions to Berkeley as smooth as possible throughout the summer. New transfer students enjoyed an inside look at career paths at an alumni-hosted virtual mixer during orientation.

Alumni Chapters provided vital community gatherings, such as the UC Berkeley Black Engineering and Science Alumni Club’s COVID-19 Vaccines: Science and Facts workshop. The annual Berkeley China Summit, where leaders discuss business, public health, technology, and culture in the US and China, engaged nearly 1,000 participants virtually. The Lair of the Golden Bear captured our attention with family-friendly programming straight from Pinecrest, CA, including weekly campfire broadcasts and at-home activities.

California magazine launched The Edge, a podcast “for surviving our modern world”—in which we navigate complex issues from human genetic engineering to the science of psychedelics with the help of UC Berkeley. California’s stellar journalism earned the Grand Gold Award from the Council for Advancement of Higher Education.

Elected as Board President in July, I embrace the opportunity to serve. Connecting, communicating, being present, advocating, and giving back are the pillars of my approach. In true Cal spirit, the CAA team and I are looking forward to gathering around athletics, arts, and cultural events in 2021. We are ready to take advantage of the uptick in excitement, and I invite you to actively engage, participate, and contribute to CAA and the university.

With your continued support, we will deliver on our mission and reinforce Cal’s commitment to excellence and inclusion.

Go Bears!

Alfonso R. Salazar ’90 President, Cal Alumni Association ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU 69

8/18/21 11:54 AM

IN HOUSE

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Raven Gatson has been living with her sorority sisters near the UC Berkeley campus since January 2021. This is the first time she’s been on campus. The buildings are still closed, but she’s able to walk around and imagine a bustling Sproul Plaza at noon. At last, after years of planning for college, she was at the school for her.

“It was really interesting to commit to a school that I had never gone to and couldn’t go to because of COVID-19 restrictions,” Gatson recalls. When she chose Cal, she knew COVID-19 wasn’t going to go away before the first day of classes. Campus tours and move-in days were all shunted, and her college experience was contained to a computer screen. She worked hard for years to make it to a prestigious university like Cal, but in the wake of the pandemic, Gatson had to learn how to adapt quickly.

This is a very unique experience,” Gatson reflects. “It was a great way to test my mettle because it was a transition from my senior year to now.”

Image courtesy of Raven Gatson

After a Year of Online Instruction, Raven Refocuses Her Goals

Lifelong Learning Through Travel Explore educational travel opportunities in 2022 by visiting alumni.berkeley.edu/travel. caldiscoveries@alumni.berkeley.edu | 510.900.8222 alumni.berkeley.edu/travel Like us on Facebook @caldiscoveriestravel Follow us on Instagram @caldiscoveries

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“ With the knowledge I now have, I want to help liberate the Black community.”

Image courtesy of Raven Gatson

—Raven Gatson, Alumni Scholar

Since elementary school, Gatson had college on her mind. Her mother, a school counselor, had instilled in her the importance of education. Before she knew how to drive, Gatson knew she wanted to leave her home state of Texas for college. She considered going to school to be an anesthesiologist. “It was always at the forefront of my mind,” Gatson says. “I was thinking about just mainly going to a good college.”

She had high school all planned out. She was part of different clubs, on student council, and a sports editor for the school newspaper.

When it came time to apply to school, Gatson had no apprehensions.

“Because I worked so hard throughout high school and had planned so meticulously, I did feel very comfortable during the application process,” she reflects.

She applied to a bunch of schools, but the universe seemed to keep pointing her to UC Berkeley. “For some reason, I just started seeing Berkeley pop up more, whether it was a professor on CNN or it was just kind of in my radar subconsciously,” she remembers.

She had done all that she could to get into a great university. All she could do was wait. Then, the first letter came in. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t an acceptance.” Upon receiving her acceptance letter from Cal, she was shocked and emotional.

Signs kept telling Gatson that Cal was the place for her; namely, the African American Initiative Scholarship. “Out of all my options, it just felt right,” she says. Each year, the scholarship, totaling $8,000 per year, is awarded to Black incoming first-year students. Beyond the financial aid, a cornerstone of the scholarship is mentorship. Current students and alumni regularly meet to discuss their experiences at Cal. “The transparency is refreshing and eases up the tension,” Gatson says. “I don’t expect things to be perfect, but I do expect transparency.”

While Gatson has worked most her life to get to this point, she acknowledges that studying at Cal isn’t the end. It’s just the jump-off point for the work she wants to do in her community. “I think going to college is a privilege, and being a Black woman, I know that it’s a privilege to be at Berkeley.”

Gatson says she was fortunate to have a mother who knew how to guide her through the college application, but recognizes that others don’t have the same resources. In a place that is “information overload,” Gatson wants to help demystify not only the college application process, but any sector of life that has traditionally not been welcoming of underserved Black communities. “With the knowledge I now have, I want to help liberate the Black community.”

Learn about the African American Initiative Scholarship at alumni.berkeley.edu/aai.

I

LOVE THE CONNECTIONS!

I really love spending time with my neighbors who’ve become good friends. It’s just great to live in a diverse community of people who are welcoming and who’ve led such interesting, accomplished lives.

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8/18/21 11:54 AM

First Person

Green and yellow flames engulfed Maleficent as she transformed into a gigantic dragon.

Rachelle Federico ’11 As told to Nathalia Alcantara

challenging, but with the help of my wife, I learned how to make a budget, how to follow it, and we made it work. Looking back, it was probably the best thing that could have happened.

Today, I don’t ever wake up on a Sunday morning dreading work the next day.

I’m as happy as can be with my job. In the little over three years that I’ve been at Pixar, I went from being a production assistant to a department manager. I’m slowly making my way up and enjoying every step along the way. My ultimate career goal is to become a producer, making decisions that are going to make the best film possible, partnering with directors and building up people around me to be the best versions of themselves. Not only do I want to be a producer, I want to be the best producer.

I still have many dreams for my career, but I look back and I’m so proud of what I have already accomplished. I proved everyone wrong, including myself.

To anyone with a dream, I would say: Keep trying, keep going, show people that you’re hungry and that you want to be there regardless of how long it takes.

MICHELLE LAMOREAUX

“Fire is supposed to be red!” I thought, staring at my TV. Then, when Prince Phillip threw his sword through the heart of the fire-breathing monster, I was done.

I always loved animation, but Disney’s Sleeping Beauty instantly became my favorite movie. I was still in elementary school when I first watched it, but at that time I already knew that I wanted to work with films. I didn’t know how to get there; I just knew I wanted to make people feel the magic I felt watching those movies. But it didn’t turn out to be a quick road.

I’m from Tucson, Arizona, and, growing up, I was surrounded by my grandparents, aunts, and uncles on both sides. Like a typical Latino family, we all lived together.

I loved it. But I knew I had to leave the nest if I was ever going to work in the film industry. It was a difficult decision; I’m the oldest of four sisters, and the first in my family to get out of the city or go to college.

Playing sports was my only way out. My family would always take me to University of Arizona sporting events, where they would tell me, “This is going to be you!” Playing basketball in high school, I got attention from college scouts and later a full ride at Cal. I majored in media studies, hoping to understand how movies influence the world, and, of course, aiming at a career in the industry.

One day in my freshman year, at lunch with the team, I mentioned my love of animation. My coach mentioned that Pixar was down the street. I immediately dropped my fork. I had no idea Pixar was near campus!

The next weekend, I asked a teammate to drive me there to take pictures. My world went upside down. I was like, “This is it. I’m going to get there.” I applied about 10 times for any kind of starting position, and I took every bit of advice I got from anybody who had worked there. I just kept trying and trying, but no luck.

After I graduated, I was desperate for income and started applying to everything under the Moon, specifically in marketing and TV commercials. It was just miss after miss. Finally, at a post-game interview with donors, I met someone who worked at a solar company.

I was hired as an operation assistant and ended up staying in the solar industry for about seven years, climbing the corporate ladder and eventually becoming a manager. I had a typical tech job in San Francisco, and it was paying well. Still, I continued to apply to my dream job at Pixar a couple of times a year, and every time I would just get a different reason why I didn’t get the gig.

I decided it was time to compromise. In 2018, at age 29, I restarted my career from scratch. I took a job as a production assistant at Pixar, which meant a 70 percent pay cut. I went from overseeing a group of about 20 engineers to doing basic assistant work, from eating out every night, to cooking dinners on a tight budget. It was 72 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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8/23/21 7:58 PM

08232021220709

Introducing The Graduate Wine Collective, a unique program featuring wines crafted

by UC Berkeley alumni.

Become a founding member and start discovering the wines of UC Berkeley.

Learn more at alumni.berkeley.edu/thegraduatewine.

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