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Stanley McCaffrey Former CAA executive manager Stanley E. McCaffrey '38 died on March 3 in Moraga at the age of 85. A native of Whittier, Stan was among the original 13 Alumni Scholars. A Phi Beta Kappa political science student, he served as student body president his senior year and was an outstanding member of the baseball and Rose Bowl football teams.
In 1956, he became vice president of the UC system, a position he held for four years. Then it was off to Washington for a year where he coordinated the California presidential campaign for his old Whittier friend, Richard Nixon. From 1961 until 1971, Stan served as president of the Bay Area Council. In 1971, he was appointed president of the University of the Pacific. During Stan's 16-year tenure at UOP, enrollment increased to a high of 6,000 students, the physical campus expanded to 42 acres, and the operating budget grew from $22 million to over $70 million. His administration also oversaw a highly successful capital campaign. While on leave from UOP in 1981-82, Stan served as president of Rotary International, with more than one million members in 22,000 clubs worldwide. The recipient of many awards, honorary degrees, and recognitions, his alma mater elected him a Berkeley Fellow and presented him with the Berkeley Citation "for distinguished achievement and notable service." Stan's wife Sue resides in Moraga; his son Steve is professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento; his daughter Nancy died in 1984. -Remembered by Dick Erickson '49, who succeeded Stan McCaffrey as executive manager of the CAA Peter Voulkos Peter Voulkos, an artist who taught at Berkeley for three decades, liked to say: "I try to make at least one beautiful thing a day." And he did. He was unique: charismatic, generous, unruly, tender and rough, often
Peter was born Panagiotis Harry Voulkos to Greek immigrant parents in Bozeman, Montana, in 1924. He first worked in his father's diner; during the War he served as a bomber nose gunner in the U.S. Army Air Corps. At Montana State University he majored in painting and discovered clay, receiving national prizes for his ceramic work. In 1951, on the G.I. Bill, he enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts. Two years later, he taught a summer workshop at the fabled Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he met painters (including Robert Rauschenberg), musicians (including John Cage), and poet Charles Olsen. He went on to New York, hung out at the Cedar Bar, and met Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline, who influenced his art for the rest of his life. In 1954 he started teaching at the Los Angeles County Art Institute, where he organized a ceramics shop; many of his students would become America's leading ceramic craftsmen and clay sculptors. He gained international attention in 1955 by winning the gold medal at the International Exposition of Ceramics in Cannes. That same year he saw an exhibition by the Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba which led him to stack and cantilever his large clay sculptures. I saw his enormous clay pieces the following year in his Los Angeles studio. Never had I (or anyone else) seen clay forms of this magnitude and power. I first had the opportunity to exhibit his work when I was the U.S. Commissioner for the premiere Biennal de Paris in 1959. A year later, as curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, I put on a small exhibition of his work as part of the New Talent series at MoMA, a show that received great acclaim from the craft world and avant-garde New York artists. By that time, Voulkos was teaching at Berkeley. With fellow sculptors Harold Paris, Sidney Gordon, Jacques Shnier, and others he established a major center for the study and practice of sculpture. Teachers and students worked at the Clay Palace, which was situated where the Berkeley Art Museum now stands, and cast bronze off campus at the Garbanzo Works. Future sculptors Stephen de Staebler, James Melchert, Bruce Beasley, Marilyn Levine, and Ron Nagle were among their students. For a number of years, Voulkos turned his attention to bronze, having built his own foundry in a 10,000-square-foot studio. In the 1960s he created major, powerful sculptures,twisting and coiling industrial tubes before putting them together in undulating rhythms. They are in public spaces and museum grounds throughout the country, including Return to Piraeus in the outdoor courtyard of the Berkeley Art Museum. In the 1970s he returned to crafting clay sculpture and continued to paint with glazes on clay, making amazing designs. In addition, he produced highly inventive collages, monoprints, and aquatints. Toward the end of his life, having survived bouts with cancer and drug addiction, he created ceramic sculpture-plates, buckets, stacks up to forty inches high-in which design and accident, an intuitive mind and a skilled hand, merged toward the creation of palpable materiality and mysterious spirit. Peter Voulkos loved working with an audience, and he died in February after conducting a workshop at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, demonstrating his wonderful skill to astonished spectators. We are all his audience. -Remembered by Peter Selz, professor emeritus in the history of art Thomas Flanagan Former English professor Thomas Flanagan, who died March 21 in Berkeley, had the enviable experience of essentially creating the academic specialty he came to dominate. His 1959 book, The Irish Novelists, 1800-
Flanagan's shrewd critical readings were buttressed by an acute awareness of the minutiae of Irish life, of customs, attitudes, and prejudices hinted at in coded language, even of the reticences some of his authors employed. His sensitivity was the more remarkable because, at the time of writing, he had never visited Ireland. But from 1961 he and his family were yearly visitors, and he became a popular and well-known figure in the cultural life of Dublin. Many Irish writers became close friends, and thanks to him Seamus Heaney, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Benedict Kiely, John Montague, and others read or lectured at Berkeley. Tom himself came to Berkeley in 1960 after undergraduate years at Amherst, interrupted by Navy service in the Pacific, and graduate work at Columbia. At Berkeley he mostly taught Victorian literature. He served as chair of the English department (1974-76), and earlier as chair of the Budget Committee, where his colleagues looked forward to his lively reports on candidates and discussions. In 1978 he joined the English department of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Retiring in 1996, he and his wife Jean returned to Berkeley, to the delight of their many local friends. Jean Flanagan died suddenly in January 2001 after a short illness. I also came to Berkeley in 1960. I had read Tom's book, and shared his interests in Irish history, literature, and folkways. In Wheeler we had almost adjacent offices where we sustained a conversation over many years, supplemented by meetings in Dublin during summer visits. He was the best companion for a Dublin walk, ready to recall the associations of every street, and when in Dublin a lively member of a group that met for lunch weekly at the Clarence Hotel (we went elsewhere after U-2 bought the hotel). Before leaving Berkeley, Tom had already commenced another career: he became an Irish novelist himself. At Columbia he had partly supported himself by writing mystery stories, many of them for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and had briefly considered an invitation to become a screen writer. In his Wheeler Hall office one afternoon, he found himself almost idly writing about a man named Owen MacCarthy. The man was a poet, worrying at an image and how he could use it. It was 1798. MacCarthy was about to be caught up in a French invasion of Ireland, and Flanagan, almost without intending it, was to be caught up in the writing of a moving and successful historical novel, The Year of the French (1979). Critics compared it to War and Peace. Tom poured into The Year of the French all his knowledge of Irish life as described by the novelists he had studied, his own love of the Irish landscape, his considerable gift for stylistic mimicry, his compassion for the peasants who joined the French and were executed by the victorious British. Again and again he catches the patterns of Hiberno-English speech, with its evasions and circumlocutions. And in portraying MacCarthy, the man of words caught up in violence, he was portraying the dilemma of his own friends, trying to maintain their integrity as poets amid the ordeal of Northern Ireland. Two more novels followed: The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). Though not strictly speaking a trilogy, his three novels together constitute a considered view of Ireland's long struggle for political independence. To read them is to begin to understand the nature of Irish experience, affected by the resentments of a subject people, nationalism, Catholicism, and the old dream of a rational and equitable society. Tom was a wonderful storyteller, with a keen eye for the revealing phrase, the telling gesture. To this was added a quick and sometimes corrosive wit. When a fellow airline passenger commented on the easy life of professors, and their three-month summer vacation, Tom conceded the point, but with tongue firmly in cheek, added: "Still, you have to realize that we only get four weeks at Christmas, a mere three at Easter. And some terms I have to teach six hours a week!" Not long ago, when the scandal of pedophile priests was beginning to surface, he asked me if I had been an altar boy. "Yes," I said. Had any priest ever molested me? "No," I replied. "Nor me," he said, and then, after a brief pause, added: "We must both have been very plain." -Remembered by Robert Tracy, emeritus professor of English and Celtic studies David Wood David Wood, who passed away at his home in Berkeley on April 21 at the age of 77, was the founder of the dance program at Berkeley. I first met him in the early 1950s, when David was an internationally known dancer and one
Born in Fresno in 1925, he graduated (with a degree in psychology) from Berkeley on his twentieth birthday; on the same day he was commissioned into the Navy and served aboard the USS Philadelphia through the end of the war. With support from the G.I. Bill, he moved to New York to pursue his interest in the theater. Although he originally intended to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, he was more attracted to its modern dance program. Soon Wood was invited to perform in works of the leading modern dance choreographers of the time: Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Alwin Nikolais, and José Limón. He also appeared in Broadway musicals and with the New York City and Metropolitan operas. His most memorable performances, however, were with the Martha Graham Dance Company with which he danced from 1953 until his return to Berkeley in 1968. During that period of great achievement in the Graham Company's history, David created the memorable roles of the Messenger of Death in "Clytemnestra" and the taskmaster in "Acrobats of God," a comic work showing the dark relationship between dancers and rehearsal director (a position David held for many years). Also I will never forget his portrayal of Tiresias, the blind seer, in "Night Journey," a role he occasionally performed during the annual New York seasons which we young dancers attended with a religious fanaticism. In 1968, at the invitation of Professor Travis Bogard, David returned to Berkeley to found a dance program within the Department of Dramatic Art, now called the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. That same year he also formed Bay Area Repertory Dance, a touring company of students performing dances created by faculty and guest choreographers. In 1976, just after David invited me to come join his dance faculty, I remember having a discussion with the late Viola Farber, a dancer with the Merce Cunningham company, which had been in residency at Cal. She was convinced that David's was one of the best university dance programs in the country. Located at the corner of Bancroft and Dana in a small redwood building, formerly a church, the dance program from its inception offered students a highly disciplined pre-professional training in modern dance, choreography, and music for dancers. Many Berkeley dance students went on to professional careers, performing in the companies of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and others. One thing I most appreciated about David was the integrity with which he approached things, never demanding more of his fellow faculty members or students than he was willing to give himself. Discipline, dedication, and passion for the art were uppermost on his list of priorities. His enthusiasm was infectious, and many students found themselves spending more time in the dance studio than in their classrooms. It was with good reason that he received both a Distinguished Teaching Award (1987) and a Berkeley Citation (1998). Over the years I grew to regard David and his extraordinary wife Marni (the current head of the dance program at Berkeley and David's ablest assistant throughout his years on campus) as close friends. During the years after his retirement in 1992, David Wood devoted much of his time to the completion of a book, On Angels and Devils and Stages Between, published in 1999. As Carolyn Brown, another former Cunningham dancer and long-time friend of Wood's stated: "David engaged in developing his own syllabus and courses in dance education....The question for him was how best to train dancers-their minds as well as their bodies. The results were remarkable." -Remembered by Carol Egan, lecturer emeritus in dance |
 David Wood Photo by Martha Slope
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