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Richard Bolt A founder of the Internet age and an expert in acoustics who found himself drawn into several momentous events of recent American history, Richard Bolt ‘33, M.S. ‘37, Ph.D. ‘39, died January 13 in Rochester, New York. Bolt earned degrees in architecture, physics, and acoustics before continuing his research at MIT, where he later became a professor and founder of MIT’s acoustics lab. During World War II, he was instrumental in developing methods for detecting enemy submarines through their acoustic signatures. After being hired to design the acoustics for the United Nations’ General Assembly Hall, Bolt formed the consulting partnership Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (later BBN Corp.) with an MIT colleague and a former student. The group developed acoustic designs for auditoriums and concert halls throughout the world, and gained public recognition in 1973, when Bolt was named to help analyze the most infamous Watergate tape during the Congressional investigations. After coating the tape in question with a magnetic fluid, his group located 14 distinct stops and starts, effectively destroying White House claims that an 18-minute gap was the result of a single accidental erasure. BBN also analyzed recordings of the 1970 Kent State University shootings and of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, concluding that a gunshot may have originated from the grassy knoll. Bolt and his firm were also at the forefront of computer technology. They designed the first modem in 1963; played a leading role in helping to build ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet; and sent the first e-mail message. Bolt retired from BBN in 1976, after 23 years as chairman. He held positions with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, was a former president of the Acoustical Society of America, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He published numerous articles on noise control, biophysics, and public policy. Richard Bolt is survived by his children Beatrice, Deborah, and Richard and seven granchildren. John Gardner
CAA Alumnus of the Year for 1965 John W. Gardner, Ph.D. ‘38, died February 17 at his Stanford University home. Gardner was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the Johnson Administration, played a key role in enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was responsible for starting Medicare. He also presided over the creation of the Public Broadcasting System, and in 1970 he founded Common Cause. Born in Los Angeles, he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford before coming to Berkeley, where he received his doctoral degree in psychology. Carl Van Heuit Former All-American football player Carl Van Heuit ‘51 died January 6 at his home in Kensington. He was 74. Carl grew up in Berkeley, and was an outstanding baseball and football player at Berkeley High School, graduating in 1945. He enlisted in the Marine Corps and, after his discharge in 1947, enrolled at Cal.
He played on the Rambler (junior varsity) football team in 1948 and made the trip to the Rose Bowl as a member of the scout team. He was selected to receive the Ken Cotton Award as the most courageous football player, Rambler and varsity. He was the starting safety on Cal’s Rose Bowl teams of 1949 and 1950 and led the team in punt returns and interceptions both years. He won the Ken Cotton Award for an unprecedented second time, and also was named a first-team All-American defensive back in 1950. Carl was not very big (5-foot 8-inches and 160 pounds), and he wasn’t very fast, but he made up for these deficiencies with unbelievable determination. In November 1950, the undefeated Cal Bears played the undefeated Washington Huskies in Seattle. For the Bears to win the conference, they would have to defeat the Huskies at home. In the second half, with Cal leading 14-7, Washington’s Hugh McElhenny, one of the best running backs in the history of college football and later the National Football League, broke into the secondary and was on the way to what looked like a sure touchdown. (It should be noted that McElhenny was very fast; he was the national junior college high hurdles champion.) But Carl willed himself to catch McElhenny from behind, and somehow he did. The Bears played inspired defense and, on fourth and goal to go, stopped the Huskies and went on to win the game. (Some felt that Carl made the play to impress his new in-laws, who were in the stands that day, and to make a statement to his wife Eileen, who had attended high school with the great McElhenny.) Carl is a member of both the Berkeley High and the University of California Athletics Hall of Fame and was named to the All-Century Cal Football Team, among other honors. Cal’s legendary coach, Pappy Waldorf, called Van Heuit one of the five best players he ever coached (along with Otto Graham, Jackie Jensen, Rod Franz, and Les Richter). Pappy wrote: “Football will cease to be football on the day it has no place for a boy like Carl Van Heuit, who by any measurable standard was too short, too slow, and too light to make a college football player.” In his entire career as a punt returner, Carl never fumbled a punt and was never stopped without a gain. He is still number three on the all-time list of Bear punt returners. Following graduation, Carl served for six seasons, at $1 a year, as assistant coach for the Rambler and freshman teams, and was a volunteer freshman coach for twenty years. He also served as an assistant rugby coach after having been an outstanding scrum-half on Doc Hudson’s rugby team. He was a strong supporter of Cal’s baseball program and was proud of his role in helping to raise more than $250,000 for the major renewal of Evan’s Diamond. He established the Van Heuit Family Scholarship, which is accepting donations through the California Alumni Association. Carl and Eileen lived in Kensington for 47 years. He retired as a vice president of the Travelers Insurance Company. Carl battled Parkinson’s Disease for almost twenty years with the same determination he showed in all walks of his life. I am blessed to have been a friend, for almost 60 years, of the most loyal, competitive, generous, and courageous person I have ever known. -Remembered by Jack Vohs ‘50, a classmate and teammate of Carl Van Heuit at Berkeley High and Cal Desmond Clark Desmond Clark was already a legend in prehistoric archaeology when he took a professorship at Berkeley in 1961. Born in London in 1916, he quickly developed a life-long passion for prehistory, going on to formal study at Cambridge University. In 1938 he became curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Memorial Museum in what is now Zambia. Desmond and his wife, Betty, took up the challenge of building that museum deep in the heart of Africa. As one of the few professional archaeologists on the continent, Desmond’s work was truly pioneering. His service during World War II as a sergeant in a field ambulance unit attached to the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, and later as a civil affairs officer, allowed him to extend his archaeological investigations into British Somalilands, Ethiopia, and Madagascar, while Betty ran the museum in Livingstone. In the years that followed, the Clarks planned and built a new museum and established the National Monuments Commission to protect archaeological sites in Northern Rhodesia. Such activities led to the honor of his appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His field work accelerated and, by the middle of the century, he returned to England and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, adding the Sc.D. in 1975. Clark’s career contributions to African archaeology spanned and illuminated the continent’s record, from cultural beginnings to modern ethnographic practice. Desmond received numerous and diverse honors for his research, including honorary doctorates from two African universities. He reported and synthesized his findings regularly and widely, in dozens of books and hundreds of research papers. He literally wrote the book on The Prehistory of Africa (1970). Desmond’s continental view of African prehistory made him a driving force behind an ever-growing community of scholars engaged in revealing human origins and evolution. One of these scholars was Berkeley’s Sherwood Washburn, who recruited Africa’s pre-eminent archaeologist to the faculty here in 1961. Desmond Clark played a central role in Berkeley anthropology. The program that he and other colleagues built established Berkeley at the pinnacle of paleoanthropological research for much of the late twentieth century. His contributions to the University were enormous. He mentored uncounted students, including first-generation archaeologists from many African countries; he donated valuable collections to the Hearst Museum of Anthropology; and he received Berkeley’s highest honors-a Faculty Research Lectureship in 1978, and the Berkeley Citation in 1986. The Bancroft Library has just completed his oral history, An Archaeologist at Work in African Prehistory and Early Human Studies: Teamwork and Insight. Upon “retirement” in the mid-1980s, Desmond again accelerated his field research, continuing to break new ground in Ethiopia and China. His team revealed, in 1999, the earliest evidence of meat and marrow procurement by early hominids, 2.5 million years ago in the Horn of Africa. This research, like the dozens of other studies Desmond initiated elsewhere in Africa and Eurasia, opened major windows on the human past, and revolutionized studies of human origins and evolution. One of my cherished memories of Desmond is his leading us into the Middle Awash field site in 1981. With a nearby volcano as his compass, the 66-year-old Professor Clark strode through the dust of this roadless terrain, followed in a line by the local Afar people, game scouts, his colleagues, and Ethiopian and American graduate students. He was propelled forward by an infectious passion to explore and to discover. He was confident, optimistic, and dedicated. Desmond was, and will always be, admired by all of us who followed him for so many years. A gentleman colleague of amazing grace and generosity, a teacher of truly global impact, and a friend of so many, Desmond represented the best of Berkeley. He was a towering and shining example of the highest standards of scholarship. He was an inspirational teacher and mentor. The Clarks always brought the world to Berkeley, and always brought the Berkeley world together. Desmond was a colleague whose humanity and kindness created a community that mourns with his wife and family (I encourage alumni to visit and contribute at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~lhesjdc1/). Neither Berkeley nor archaeology will ever be the same without Desmond Clark. But both will move forward-inspired by one exceptional man’s quest to open and explore our prehistoric past. -Remembered by Professor Tim White,
Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and Department of Integrative Biology |
 Richard Bolt
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