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Joe Willits ’48
 In 1948, when Joe was senior manager of Glee Club and I was senior secretary, Bob Sibley of the Alumni Association, among others, asked if there were any smaller singing groups available to perform for alumni gatherings. When Yale’s Whiffenpoofs came to town, Joe and I felt we could do as well. We started a new quartet that summer and expanded it to an octet in the fall. Today, the Cal Men’s Octet is still going strong--they’ve recorded a few albums, performed on four continents, and make a habit of winning national awards.
Although Joe and I only sang together in the Octet one semester, Cal and songs have bound our families together through the years. At the Lair of the Bear, on Bear Treks, and of course, after the Big Game, we sang Cal songs anywhere at the drop of a hat. We have even sneaked a few into our Christmas caroling forays around the South Bay.
In his professional life, Joe served as an electronics technician in the Navy during World War II and, after earning an MBA from Harvard, worked at Food Machinery and Chemical Corp. in San Jose for 17 years. He went on to become vice president of finance for a number of technology firms, including Varian, National Semiconductor, and Applied Materials.
But Cal always remained a focus of his attention. In 1988, Joe and I established the Cal Octet Alumni as a formal club of the California Alumni Association. Joe chaired reunions for the Class of 1948, was a board member and vice president of the Alumni Association, and received the CAA’s Excellence in Service award in 1999.
Joe died on October 30 at his home in Los Altos Hills. He is survived by his wife Phyllis ’49, two children, and three grandsons. He strongly believed that there should always be extracurricular singing groups at Cal. Thanks to Joe, there will be.
--Remembered by Howard “Howdy” Brownson ’48
August Carl Helmholz
 August Carl Helmholz, a nuclear physicist and former chairman of Berkeley’s physics department, died October 29 at his Lafayette home. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, attended Harvard college, and became an outstanding student and athlete. After moving to California to pursue graduate studies--and to be near his intended bride, Betty Little, who was studying at Stanford--he received his Ph.D. in 1940 under Ernest O. Lawrence, then was given a temporary instructorship, followed by a permanent appointment. He was the first Berkeley physics department graduate to become its chairman, taking over when Raymond T. Birge retired in 1955.
Besides being an accomplished research physicist, Helmholz was “one of the most conscientious teachers in the department,” according to a colleague. All of his research was done at the Radiation Lab (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), resulting in dozens of papers. During World War II, even while teaching, he worked with a Manhattan Project team using the 184-inch cyclotron to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. In a course in nuclear physics at the time, one of his students asked Helmholz if the separation of isotopes was practical. Because the work was classified, he had to say no. He must have hated to mislead the eager young man.
Carl and Betty have been most generous donors to the arts, music, environmental projects, and many other causes. They hosted numerous physics department parties, contributing enormously to the cohesiveness of the department. He was always kind, with a generous spirit, showing an interest in what others had been doing or were planning for the future. Even in failing health he was cheerful, unselfish, and sociable. Survivors include his wife Betty, four children, and two grandchildren.
--Remembered by Bob Birge ’45,
associate director emeritus, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Frank Stevens Crawford Jr.
 ’48, Ph.D ’53, one of the physicists who designed the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, which allowed scientists to detect dozens of new particles, died July 28 in San Rafael. He was 79. Crawford earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees in physics at Berkeley and joined the physics department in 1958. His book Waves is considered one of the best introductions to acoustics, waves, and vibrations; he also built numerous acoustic and optical exhibits that were displayed in the physics department and published 47 papers in the American Journal of Physics, many of them delving into mundane phenomena, such as the sound made by hot chocolate or a child’s Slinky. In the 1970s, Crawford used a length of flexible pipe to invent the “corrugohorn”--a musical instrument he played for admiring audiences on Telegraph Avenue. He later studied supernovas and conducted early work on adaptive optics, “rubber mirrors” that flex to remove the twinkle from stars. Upon retiring in 1991, he began investigating general relativity and cosmology. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth, ex-wife Bevalyn, and children Sarah ’86 and Matthew.
Richard Wollheim
 Professor Richard Wollheim, who taught philosophy at Berkeley from 1985 until the spring of 2003, died on November 4 at the age of 80. Born in London, he belonged to an extraordinarily productive generation of British philosophers whose influence is now felt throughout the field. Trained at Oxford, his thinking was shaped by the methods of conceptual analysis that were then coming to flourish. But where others used these tools primarily in the examination of questions concerning mathematics, the natural sciences, and ordinary language, Wollheim employed them successfully in such fields as psychoanalysis and the philosophy of art.
Even before he came to these topics, in 1959 he proved his extraordinary independence of mind by publishing a sympathetic and insightful work on the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley, against whom the analytic tradition in philosophy had originally revolted. Subsequent books on Sigmund Freud (1971), on The Mind and its Depth (1993), and on The Emotions (1999) testify to Wollheim’s profoundly committed and informed approach to the concerns of psychoanalysis. His classic monograph, Art and Its Objects (1968), and his book on Painting as an Art (1987) give evidence of his deep and abiding interest in the visual arts.
He was a prolific writer who wrote each page of his manuscripts in longhand and published not only seven major works in philosophy but also a novel, as well as numerous philosophical and art critical essays. For all that, he never appeared obsessed or driven by his writing, but maintained an admirable modesty about his achievements and a worldly distance from his work. Both quintessentially English and entirely cosmopolitan, he was a great conversationalist and wit who could sum up people and situations in short, telling, and utterly hilarious phrases, but who was also exceptionally sensitive to the needs and sufferings of others.
His true obsession in life was art. In Painting as an Art, he describes how he would contemplate a single painting for three hours at a time because he was certain that its meaning would open itself up only to that kind of attention. From 1949 to 1982, Wollheim taught at University College in London; he was permanent head of the philosophy department there from 1963 until the time he left. After three years at Columbia University he moved to Berkeley. In the final years of his career, from 1998 to 2002, he also served with great diplomatic skill as chairman of the Berkeley philosophy department. He is survived by his wife Mary and three children.
--Remembered by Hans Sluga, professor of philosophy
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