William C. Rockwell was Oski’s first and closest friend. As founder and creator of Cal’s beloved mascot, Rockwell’s contribution to the spirit of California is beyond measure. After all, how can one measure the meaning of Oski, or Oski’s service to the University, or his love for all who cheer for the Golden Bears?

As a freshman at Long Beach Junior College in the fall of 1938, Bill Rockwell was pressed into service as “Ole Olson,” mascot for the Long Beach Vikings. The mascot idea stuck with him, and when he arrived at Cal in the fall of 1941, he contacted the chairman of the Rally Committee, Tom Putnam, and offered to do the same for the Golden Bears. Putnam was sufficiently convinced, and Rockwell walked away with $25 in start-up funds and an introduction to Warrington Colescott, a Daily Cal cartoonist, who provided some design ideas as well as suggesting the name Oski, derived from the popular Oski yell.

In a secret cave under the back porch at Atherton Hall, Rockwell went to work with molding materials, well-used size 13 1/2 football shoes painted gold, two pairs of discarded Cal Band pants melded into one pair, kapok padding, an old football helmet, white gloves, and a large letter sweater. A short time later, at the freshman bonfire rally, Oski made his debut. That was followed the next day by his appearance at the St. Mary’s football game. The rest is history.

Oski’s popularity took its toll on Rockwell’s academic standing, however; and, after a particularly discouraging midterm grade in mechanical engineering 102 in the spring of 1942, he took the Key System interurban F train to the San Francisco Ferry Building and enlisted in the Navy. The duty officer who administered the oath was chief petty officer Tony Martin, later to become a popular singer.

After flight training at the newly built Livermore Naval Air Station with 50 other Cal recruits known as the Flying Golden Bears, Rockwell flew combat missions while based in the Solomon Islands, South Pacific. Rockwell was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross “for heroism and extraordinary achievement...while striking against an enemy airfield near Rabaul.” He “pressed his attack through heavy anti-aircraft fire which badly damaged his plane, to score a direct hit on the airstrip.”

After the war he resumed his studies in engineering, now with a more serious attitude. Although persuaded to resume his Oski career, he was far-sighted enough to lay the groundwork for an orderly process of passing on Oski’s lore to succeeding generations. The Oski Committee still functions today.

After graduation, Rockwell became a design engineer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Regional Research Laboratory in Albany, where he developed laboratory methods and food processing equipment involving refrigeration and freeze drying, vacuum systems, and microwaves. He retired in 1977 after 29 years.

Early in his career, he was recalled to active duty with the Marine Corps as a forward air controller during the Korean conflict. He once again distinguished himself and was awarded the Bronze Star. In this case, he, “...with utter disregard for his own personal safety, moved forward through accurate enemy machine- gun fire, to an observation post where he remained in an exposed position and directed a timely and effective air strike against several strong enemy positions, which neutralized the enemy fire sufficiently to permit the company to advance and occupy a favorable position on terrain which commanded an enemy division’s assembly area.”

All this from a man who was extremely shy and soft-spoken. Perhaps it was the Oski persona that helped Bill to overcome his shyness and blossom. Rockwell said, “I never liked to make public speeches and things of that sort.” But, as Oski, “I could just do all the action and never have to think in words. My contribution to Oski is really the pantomime, making exaggerated motions to show what he’s thinking or wants to do.”

Rockwell graduated with the Class of 1948. At their 50th Class reunion, in his Oski persona, he presented a bound copy of his oral history to Chancellor Berdahl to be deposited in the University Archives. Bill Rockwell, our first Oski, died October 26 in Anacortes, Washington, at the age of 81.

George Heuer Another of Oski’s close friends was George Heuer ’51. In 1949 an ad in the Daily Cal read: WANTED: A fine upstanding young man with athletic ability who likes to raise hell occasionally. (Signed) Oski P.S. I need a successor.

The five-foot-three-inch Heuer answered that ad and soon found himself in Memorial Stadium with several other young men, under the tutelage of the Oski Committee. They were instructed in all things Oski: how to mount the goal posts, walk the Oski gait, do the Oski handshake, and perform the Oski pantomime motions. For George, what followed was a lifetime association with everyone’s favorite roly-poly bear.

George’s first assignment as Oski was to appear in a stunt, filmed in a bear-bones television studio, promoting fledgling television station KQED. Oski has limited vision and spent most of his time bumping into cameras and stumbling over cables. But, when it was over, Oski was broadcast flirting with a pretty girl and grabbing at envelopes fluttering from the sky, with the punch line, “Keep those cards and letter coming, folks!”

Another of his stunts, in front of the rooting section, involved admonishing a lady to “Take off that red dress!,” to the delight of the then all-male rooting section. Under that dress, of course, was a blue and gold outfit. In time, Heuer became Oski’s head trainer, but the highlight for George was his participation in two of the three Pappy Waldorf Rose Bowls.

Heuer served for five years with the Navy during World War II, in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the Caribbean. He took advantage of the G.I. Bill and majored in mechanical engineering when he returned to Cal at the age of 28, already five years married.

He was 32 years old when he began his professional career involving research, development and sales with a diesel engine company, aeronautical engineering, and spacecraft design. He was an active member and spiritual leader of the California Alumni Club at Rossmor. George Heuer died October 15 in Walnut Creek, at the age of 81.

In the closing remarks of his oral history, in which he recounts his days with Oski, Heuer said he hoped the interview would contribute to “the enduring acceptance and appreciation of Oski in the Cal community.” George also expressed his hope that “100 years from now there will still be an Oski at Cal, and he will always be an inspiration to the California spirit.” Bill Rockwell and George Heuer, two of Oski’s closest friends, had many things in common. Both were born in 1919, served with distinction in World War II, were the exact same height as Oski, and died in October 2000. Oski mourns their loss.

—Remembered by Norden (Dan) Cheatham ’58, naturalist and photographer, who has conducted nearly 100 oral histories for the University Archives, including those with Bill Rockwell and George Heuer.

He got his first university job in the “boonies,” in Catania, Sicily, then bounded up the Italian academic ladder. The youngest person ever to hold a full professorship in Italy, he moved via Venice, Torino, Florence, and Pavia to the ultimate eminence of the Scuola Normale Superiore, the institute for advanced study in Pisa. In 1959 he took a part-time appointment at Berkeley and thereafter spent half the year in Berkeley and the other half in Italy, accompanied by his charming wife, Ora Thorson, whom he married in 1970 after a ten-year courtship. Carlo continued to teach at Berkeley until his retirement in 1991.

He was a rare scholar, creative, prolific, and remarkably wide-ranging. With Le Avventure della lira (1958) and The Economic History of World Population (1962) he early on became an authority on monetary history and demographics; the Italian newspapers turned to him for comment whenever there was a crisis in the lira. Later he followed his uncommon curiosity wherever it led. What happened when Europeans first put cannons on sailboats? What were the cultural consequences once people had mechanical clocks? What is the connection between literacy and economic development? Each of these questions, and many more, resulted in a characteristically small book of one to two hundred pages, written in elegant, witty, and spare prose, but heavily weighted with documentation based on original and often archival research.

Carlo loved old things, and was a particularly great collector of things deeply interwoven with his scholarship: clocks, medical instruments, ancient and medieval coins. He once gave me a 14th-century York silver penny because he knew that, as a student of medieval England, I would treasure its portrait of Richard II. He found in an antique shop a very old map of the island of Corfu, depicting a mysterious boundary that turned out to be a cordon sanitaire around a region under quarantine. It led to a whole series of books on the plague and on public health in Italy, many of them researched with notable gusto among the dusty original records of the Uffizi in Florence.

Always a technically correct economist, steeped in tables and statistics, he was nevertheless at heart even more a historian and a humanist. Needless to say, he had nothing to do with contemporary mathematical economics, and it is surely the portentousness and formality of the economist’s (and not the historian’s) traditional stance that he gently satirized in a 30-page jeu d’esprit for the edification of colleagues and friends and printed by his longtime publisher, Il Mulino, as a gift to him in 1976. Well buttressed with cost/benefit graphs, it was called “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.” It instantly became an undergound classic. A professor who was also president of an investment trust in Milano had it translated and bound in leather for his board of directors. When the demand became clamorous, it was published, along with another comic piece attributing the coming of the Renaissance to the aphrodisiac effects of the early pepper trade, as Allegro ma non troppo. It was a national best-seller, translated into French, German, and Japanese, and became a hit play in Paris and the French provinces. Carlo, awarded a presidential gold medal for humor, ruefully lamented that he had written twenty serious books, but only with this trifle had he gotten any recognition.

Visiting the Cipollas in Italy was to be led generously to delights well off the main tourist track: an old abbey in Orvieto; the town of Vigevano, with its walled ducal castle and piazza; the exquisite Carthusian monastery of Pavia, right next to which the Cipollas’ friend Bolfo had set up a perfect trattoria; the feudal village of Rovescala, set high atop a hill surrounded entirely by grapevines, and where the innkeeper, the priest, and the owner of the castle were locked in inveterate and deadly combat over who made the best purple wine. Wine! Carlo had turned a generation of Berkeley students on to wine; and it was no small advantage to tour with him the wineries of Piemonte, for at Torino he had taught students, like Angelo Gaja, who had become some of the greatest winemakers of the region.

He met the onset of Parkinson’s disease gallantly, buoyed perhaps by an ever-growing list of honors: Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Accademia dei Lincei, to which Galileo belonged; winner of the great Balsan Prize; and perhaps best of all, honorary Doctor of Medicine from his alma mater, the University of Pavia. The books continued to come. But if slow, it was a losing battle, and—most heartbreakingly to his family and friends—by the end he had gradually been robbed of his imagination, his humor, and his voice. He died September 5, in Pavia, at the age of 78.

For all his joie de vivre, Carlo was ever a realist, and one gratefully remembers what was his very favorite aphorism—from the prescription book of the medieval medical school at Salerno, where, while recommending the manifold curative properties of sage, it asks and answers the question why a man who has sage in his garden ever dies: Cur moriatur homo cui salvia crescit in horto? Contra vim mortis non est medicamentum in hortis. “Against the power of death there is no medicine in our gardens.”

—Remembered by Charles Muscatine, professor emeritus of English

Bob directed the UC Botanical Garden from 1973 to 1991, greatly expanding its plant collections, particularly from areas of his own research with Mediterranean climates similar to ours in California: Australia, Chile, and South Africa. It was the vastly expanded Friends of the Garden program, however, that perhaps pleased Bob the most. In an interview shortly before his death, he commented that its growth and evolution was one of his greatest pleasures. He liked getting to know people in the community, had a great admiration for many of the people in the program, and thought the docent program was “superb.”

Peter Raven, his friend, fellow graduate student, and currently director of the Missouri Botanical Garden stated that “turning the UC Botanical Garden into a world-class garden and leading place for studying and displaying the unique variety of California plants was one of his greatest contributions.” In recommending Bob for an Award of Merit by the Botanical Society of America (given in 1993), Sherwin Carlquist, Bob’s graduate student and current professor of botany at Claremont Graduate School, commented that even though small in size, the UC Garden “is, without a doubt, the most significant botanical garden in the United States, acre for acre, when compared to other gardens.” Bob grew up in Portland, Oregon, and from his early childhood delighted in collecting all sorts of animals, from Pacific salamanders to ducklings.

He graduated from nearby Reed College, and, following a Fulbright scholarship in New Zealand, he received a master’s degree from the University of Washington with Art Kruckeberg, who had earlier turned him on to the pursuit of a degree in botany. In 1961, he earned his Ph.D. in botany from Berkeley with Herbert Mason as his major professor. After short teaching stints at Reed College and Duke University, Bob was invited to UC Berkeley to fill the chair of retiring Herbert Mason. Among numerous assignments at the University, he served as director of the Jepson and University herbaria (1967-1982), chairman of the Botany Department (1986-1989), and chairman of the Editorial Committee, University of California Press (1975-1989).

In 1991, Bob became the grants director for the Stanley Smith Horticultural Foundation. He has, in addition, contributed generously to numerous non-profit and professional organizations throughout his career. He has received many awards for his contributions to the world of botany. From 1999 until his death Bob served as co-editor of the Natural History Series at UC Press.

–Remembered by Phyllis M. Faber, University of California Press

Back to Top