HONOR: Family offers heartfelt tribute to slain UC Davis student; memorial award to support research

of the loss they have experienced. “I know that as a parent, but know that you have the compassion and support of your entire Aggie community. You are a true Aggie family, one that's connected to our students, our staff, and our faculty. We see that through your own work as well as valued members of our faculty and staff. We're here for you.

Obituaries

Please reach out if you need anything.”

Lee Miller, who directs the Auditory Neuroscience and Speech Recognition Lab at UC Davis and who worked with Abou Najm, expressed that in the last few years, he has been his mentor, research colleague, business partner, and friend.

He described Abou Najm as “brilliant, creative, driven, cocky,

Leon Louis Francois Wegge

Leon Louis Francois Wegge, 89, of Davis, passed away peacefully on Feb. 4, 2023, after a multi-year battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma (Waldenström’s disease). He was surrounded by his loving family when he passed.

Leon was born in 1933 in Breendonk, Belgium. After attending primary school, junior high and high school in Breendonk and nearby communities, he spent two years at a junior college in Antwerp before transferring in 1953 to the Catholic University of Leuven, graduating in 1958 with several degrees, including one in economics. After military service in the French section of the Belgian army, he spent six months working on economic models at the Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis in the Netherlands.

In 1959, a Fulbright Scholarship provided for the boat trip across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S., where he went on to study economics at MIT with Professor Robert Solow. In 1962 Leon met Beate, and they married that same year. Leon graduated with a Ph.D. in economics in 1963.

Leon’s first academic position was at the University of New South Wales in Australia. In 1966 he was recruited by the department of economics of UC Davis to develop their new graduate program. What followed were some of his most prolific years, during which he published many academic papers, taught graduate courses in econometrics, international economics and trade theory, and served on various faculty committees on the UC Davis campus.

“Let the battle begin,” ordered librarian Annette Parker, and the Battle of the Books teams dove into the questions that would determine the winner for the year. This was a favorite program started by Annette in 1974. It spread to the elementary schools, then junior highs and finally the high school in Davis. She initiated other incentive programs including family reading programs ending with ice cream socials.

She was the second child of Frank and Ruth Burnell Dietsch, with an older sister, Marietta and younger brother, Burnell. She was born in Portland, Ore., on July 4, 1927, and spent her first four years in Beaverton, Ore., where her father was a high-school principal.

The Great Depression forced them to move to the Los Angeles area, where there were more job opportunities. Annette graduated from Franklin High School in Highland Park in 1945. She attended L.A. City College, where she met Hal and received an associate’s degree, then on to UC Berkeley where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1949.

She and Hal were married on July 16 of that same year. Hal was attending what was then the University Farm for UC Berkeley in Davis as a pre-veterinarian, so Annette moved here, and they lived in a little cottage on Russell Boulevard. In those days, there were 3,500 people living in Davis, and there were sheep pastures just past their backyard.

Annette got a job teaching fourth grade at Dingle Elementary School in Woodland. She had no teacher training or experience and had to figure things out as she went along.

After Hal graduated from Vet School, they moved to Watsonville to start up a large- and smallanimal hospital with one of fierce, yet cocky,” and “joyful.” His hunger for knowledge and experience was palpable.

Miller called out three lessons that he learned from Abou Najm. First, impatience is a virtue when you're pursuing something important; second that some rules are dumb; and third, “Karim is always right.”

For the first lesson, Abou Najm wanted to build a new assistive

In their early years in Davis, Leon and Beate regularly hosted Thanksgiving meals at their home with foreign graduate students or visiting professors as guests. He spent sabbatical years in Leuven (Belgium), Bonn (Germany) and Wassenaar (Netherlands), which allowed him to focus on research and expose his children to different European cultures as well as help them strengthen bonds with extended family.

Leon very much enjoyed traveling to other countries for professional conferences. Perhaps the most memorable trip was Leon and Beate’s visit to Taiwan in the year 2000. At the invitation of Paul T. Mu (the founding president of National Dong Hwa University, Hua-Lian, and a former Ph.D. student of Leon’s at UCD), Leon presented his research to the Economics Department at National Dong Hwa University as well as at the Economics Research Institute of Academia Sinica, the highest academic research institution in Taiwan.

Leon retired from UC Davis in 1994 and remained very active with his research and interests. He presented his last conference paper in 2019 in Singapore. Until a few years ago Leon was a regular fixture on the UC Davis tennis courts.

Twice he completed the Dodentocht walk (“March of the Dead”) in Bornem, Belgium, the longest walking race in Europe, which requires participants to walk 100 kilometers

Hal’s classmates. Both Rebecca and Lorie were born there. Although Pajaro Valley Veterinary Clinic was thriving by then, the hard physical labor of constructing a hospital took a toll on Hal’s health.

The family moved back to Davis, where Hal enrolled in a Ph.D. program in physiology and eventually became a full professor at the Veterinary School. They built a home on Linden Lane, where three more daughters were born – Cindy, Judy and Susan.

Annette returned to work in 1970 to create an enrichment program at West Davis Elementary (now César Chávez) using parent volunteers. At its peak, there were 84 volunteers who taught so many enrichment classes that every one of the over 400 students was in at least one enrichment class during a given year.

That program resulted in an Activity Center at WDE which lasted for several years. When that funding ended, she was asked to take over the library. She went back to school to get her School Librarian Credential.

When West Davis Intermediate School (now Willett) was built, she became the librarian for both schools. She eventually spent all her time at WDI, within 24 hours. listening device for people with hearing loss, and there were no excuses for the delay. “We had an opportunity to make an impact in the world, right? So why to wait?

Let's go,” Miller said. For the second lesson, if rules were ill-considered, with a “cheerful defiance,” Abou Najm would find a way to change them, or he would find a way to work around them. Miller said that Abou Najm possessed an where she also took on the special reading program. Once again, she returned to school, this time to get her Reading Specialist Credential. She worked at WDI until her retirement in 2004, at the age of 78.

He enjoyed harvesting his organic almonds, listening to the music of van Beethoven and Handel and getting together with friends in a local gourmet club. He was a devout member of the Saint James Catholic Parish for nearly 60 years. He was an enthusiastic bridge player until the end. He was also an avid sports fan of all kinds of sports, but especially of grand slam tennis tournaments and the exploits of Belgian athletes.

Leon had a keen sense of familial history, and long before genealogy became popular, he engaged in rigorous research of the Wegge family tree as well as other family surnames that culminated in a small book on his findings, written in both English and Flemish.

He was a one-of-a-kind individual and will be greatly missed. Leon was predeceased by his parents Petrus and Alberta, his sister Rosa, and his brother Frans. He is survived by his wife Beate; brother Jos Wegge; children Simone (Victor Valdivia), Robert and Elizabeth (Jason Bennett); grandchildren Jane, Leo, Jacqueline and Victor; godson Dr. Leon Andries and many nieces and nephews.

A celebration of his life was held in his hometown of Breendonk, Belgium on April 2. A Memorial Mass will be held on June 9 at St. James Church in Davis with a reception to follow. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a donation to the International Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia Foundation (https://iwmf.com/ ways-to-give/), or to a local charity like Yolo Cares (Yolo Hospice), https://yolocares.org/.

After Hal died in 2003, she remodeled the family home, which enabled her to entertain large groups. She became instrumental in bringing Young Life, a program for adolescents, back to Davis and hosted gatherings for Young Life volunteers, including weekly meals for the college-aged leaders. She purchased a house on Hawthorne Lane to serve as a residence for YL leaders and a meeting place for students.

She was social to her core and had a party at her house for any excuse she could conjure. There were parties for new and longtime neighbors, bridge and potlucks, celebrations of every kind and sometimes just because.

After retirement she enjoyed traveling and bridge. She loved her bridge community and the friendships that developed through that connection. Over the decades, Annette developed wonderful friendships with a wide range of people in this community.

A celebration of life will begin at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 20, at the University Covenant Church. Friends are encouraged to bring photos or stories of their memories of Annette to display on a wall during the reception and then incorporated into a scrapbook.

To honor Annette and her strong commitment to literacy development, a fund has been set up in her name at Golden 1 Credit Union to support the reading program and library at Dingle Elementary School in Woodland. Please consider a donation to this fund.

“iron conviction a few of us have to defend what he believed.”

In honor of the legacy Karim has left behind, the Karim Majdi Abou Najm Memorial Undergraduate Student Research Award will provide stipends to support undergraduate UC Davis students doing research. The endowment will exist in perpetuity donate at https:// give.ucdavis.edu/Donate/YourGift/125342.

Michael Gass

Dr. Michael Gass, 90, of University Retirement Community in Davis passed away peacefully on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, from vascular dementia. He was born on Dec. 10, 1932, in Tilda, India.

Dec. 10, 1932 — April 18, 2023 GASS

He is predeceased by his parents, Herbert and Zola Dell (Harris) Gass, his brother, Eric Gass; sister and brother-in-law, Judith (Gass) and Jim Shearer. Michael (known to some as Mike) was a proud member of the Kodaikanal International School (Kodaikanal, India) class of 1950; Elmhurst College (Illinois) class of 1954, where he was captain of the men’s tennis team; and Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine class of 1958. He did further medical training at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and Gorgas Army Medical Center in Panama City, Panama. His specialties were tropical medicine, dermatology and pathology.

Born to Swiss medical missionaries, Michael was raised in India then furthered his education in the United States. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen while proudly maintaining his Swiss citizenship. Following medical school and internship, he trained at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and went on to work in Ghana, West Africa, with his former wife Ruth (Gumper) Gass.

They served in Ghana, Panama and then he continued service by working at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Later he moved to Davis, where he met and married Carol Bliss, and he continued his service at the Community Clinic of Davis and Student Health Services at UC Davis.

Michael was a deeply spiritual Christian man who strove to live life as simply as he could thereby giving much to others. He was a devoted and loving son, husband, father, stepfather, brother, grandfather (O’pa) and friend. He served others throughout his life using his skills as a physician, teacher and mentor. An avid tennis player, Michael also loved camping, canoeing and hiking, and was a staunch protector of the environment.

Michael is survived by his beloved wife, Carol; daughters Julia (Dade) Phillips, Leila Gass and Rebecca Gass; Carol’s daughters Pam (Steve) Stanley, Wendy (Kelly) Nelson and Katrina (Kevin) Benson; and grandchildren Michael and Sam Phillips, Hailey and Christopher Nelson, and Joshua and Zachary Benson. Also surviving are his sister-in-law Patricia Gass, niece Sandra Gass, nephew Robert Gass and great-niece Sonia Gass. Plans for a memorial service are pending. Michael selflessly donated his body to UC Davis, as a means of honoring others whose donations advanced his own medical education.

The family wishes to thank the staff at URC skilled nursing facility for their gentle, loving and high-quality care throughout Michael’s stay there, and to YoloCares hospice nurse Karen and aide Karla for outstanding care and communication with the family. Additionally, we are indebted to Michael and Carol’s URC neighbors who provided so much support, care, and love during the final months of his life. Memorials may be made to American Leprosy Mission, https://leprosy.org/, and Christian Medical College, https://giving.cmchvellore.edu/.

Calendar

Today n To help celebrate May is Bike Month, the city of Davis invites everyone to get on their bikes for the 13th annual Loopalooza from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. In partnership with Bike Davis, this beloved family-friendly tradition is a community bike ride event along the 12-mile Davis bike loop. There will be 11 interactive stations along the loop, Access the event map at https://www. cityofdavis.org/Loopalooza For information, contact city of Davis Safe Routes to School Coordinator Daniela Tavares at dtavares@cityofdavis. org. n Manfred Kusch, an emeritus professor at UC Davis, will lead a Yolo Audubon tour of his garden in Winters. He has cultivated his home garden, which borders on Putah Creek, into a true birding extravaganza. Kusch attracts a wide variety of birds in the gardens around the house, especially hummingbirds and orioles. The multi-layered vegetation on either side of the creek hosts spring migrants and residents such as grosbeaks, tanagers and a variety of warblers and vireos. Space is limited for this trip. Contact John Hansen to reserve a spot at jjhindavis@yahoo.com.

Wednesday n Join Project Linus to make blankets for children who are seriously ill, traumatized or otherwise in need. The next gathering is at the Davis Senior Center, 646 A St., from 1:30-3 p.m. All are welcome to attend the meeting and help sew Linus labels on handmade blankets that will