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 Myrl Richard Peter '42, August 29, in Sun City West, Arizona. As a member of the track and field team, he was part of the two-mile relay team that held the world record for five years; individually established the Cal stadium one-mile record of 4.115, which stood for 28 years; and participated in the 1941 Big Game track meet, where Cal took first place in every event. He was inducted into Cal's Hall of Fame in 1999. A Navy veteran, in 1958 he founded the Shoe Tree, a customer service-oriented shoe business, originally located across the street from his alma mater, and later expanded to San Francisco. He is survived by his wife Marcy, children Bradley, Douglas, and Deborah, and two grandchildren.
 Donald Davidson died August 29, from cardiac arrest following knee-replacement surgery. A renowned professor in the Department of Philosophy, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1981 after an already distinguished career that had begun at Queen’s College in New York and included posts at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, and Chicago. After his retirement, he continued teaching, directing dissertations, and otherwise participating in the department’s tasks. His most important published work may be found in three books of essays: Essays on Actions and Events (1980), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), and Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001). He is survived by his wife, Marcia Cavell, daughter Elizabeth, and two grandchildren.
In 1964-65, Donald Davidson was on leave from Stanford, visiting Oxford, where his work (almost all of it still unpublished) created enormous enthusiasm. He returned to the Farm, ebullient from the encouragement England had given him, and taught a series of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses in which we were privileged to witness him explore and develop the core ideas that would blossom into the long series of essays on which his tremendous reputation would be based--Truth and Meaning, Mental Events, and The Logical Form of Action Sentences among them. I imbibed his lectures and digested what I could, but there was always much in them that went beyond what I could take in. Fortunately, Don went on examining, shaping, enlarging, and revising his views over the course of almost four decades.
When he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1981, his fame had burgeoned and his classes were jammed. My excitement at being able to discuss his views with him in person was tinged with regret that the seminars on his thought that I had been offering for several years were now unnecessary. I remained a disciple and became his friend. His advice, encouragement, and example sustained me through many bad patches.
In what no one expected to be Don’s last days, he was awaiting publication of three new books of essays and looking forward to attending several more international conferences in a long series that his writings had inspired. He was hoping that knee-replacement surgery would make it easier for him to enjoy the collateral activities that these conferences always made possible.
My last and warmest memory of him is of conversation over a long breakfast with Don and his wife Marcia just a week before the surgery. We talked and laughed about the usual topics--politics, movies, history, future plans. But Don and his wife Marcia seemed especially in tune with each other that day, and the warmth of their mutual affection filled the room. Don was happy and vigorous, witty and acute as always. I went away sad to leave, but expecting many more such occasions in years to come.
Don was an intellectual model, mentor, protector, and friend to many. We will all feel his absence.
--Remembered by Bruce Vermazen,
professor emeritus of philosophy
 Bernard Williams, Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy and one of the world’s most important and most distinguished philosophers, died June 10 during a brief trip to Italy. He was 73. When he came to the philosophy department in Berkeley in 1988, his impact on this University was immediate and broad--and will be long lasting. His lectures and seminars in philosophy inspired students in many fields. He gave the Sather Lectures in the classics department in 1989, which became his brilliant book Shame and Necessity (1993). He was a valued member of the editorial board of the Berkeley journal Representations. He took part in many cross-disciplinary campus panels and symposia on film, law, and human rights.
Born in England in 1929, he accepted the White’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy in Oxford in 1990 and then divided his time between Berkeley and Oxford. He was deeply engaged in the politics and public life of Britain; he served on the board of the English National Opera for almost 20 years and on specially appointed government committees on a variety of social issues. By his own account, “I did all the major vices--gambling, drugs, pornography, and the public schools.” He was knighted in 1999 for services to philosophy.
It was unfortunate for us and, he felt, for him that he was not able to spend more of his time in Berkeley after his mandatory retirement from Oxford in 1999. It was always clear which intellectual community he preferred. Here he found stimulus and encouragement not only to carry his thought further, but to look in new directions for steps ahead. This came largely from the varied interests and fruitful work of the many friends he made here. It shows up best in his last and most wide-ranging book, Truth and Truthfulness.
For our part, we were all dazzled by his unmatchable swiftness of thought, his shrewd penetration directly to the heart of whatever the issue happened to be, and his unfailing lightness of touch in getting there. He was a man of apparently limitless energy, rarely flagging high spirits, and sheer enjoyment of whatever engaged him. You could not fail to be enlivened by his company, his conversation, and his affection. But above all, to many of us, he was a much-loved friend--sensitive, compassionate, deliciously witty, ever youthful, and great fun.
--Remembered by Barry Stroud, professor of philosophy
 Ronald Ross ‘56, Ph.D. ‘61, June 25, in Berkeley. As a graduate student under Luis Alvarez, he contributed to the discovery and description of many new particles. He joined the Cal physics department in 1961, covering a range of topics in physics and astrophysics, including investigation of moon rocks retrieved by the first Apollo mission and the search for dark matter. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other professional and teaching organizations, he was instrumental in construction of several research tools and was a thoughtful mentor to many students. He is survived by his wife Lee; daughters Kristine, Susan, and Linda; and three grandchildren.
 John Ogbu, professor of anthropology and education, and one of the nation’s leading scholars studying the minority achievement gap in education, died August 20 at the age of 64.
Ogbu was born in Nigeria and came to Berkeley as a graduate student in 1968. The three central passions were his family, his native country, and minority education--and he devoted his energies to each of these with great vigor.
I first met John when he was a young assistant professor and I was a graduate student from South Africa. Our common African roots drew us together, but what sustained our intellectual and personal relationship was our mutual interest in minority education. Over a 30-year period, we had numerous discussions about John’s complex theories on minority success and failure--views that richly informed both my work in schools and my later journalistic writing on education.
He challenged conventional orthodoxy by saying that even though schools had an important role to play, they could not on their own eliminate the achievement gap. The central insight in John’s work was that minorities who did not come here by choice--whom he called “involuntary minorities”--hold a set of cultural attitudes and behaviors that interfere with the learning process. Many develop an “oppositional identity” to the status quo and struggle against “the burden of acting white.”
By contrast, “voluntary minorities”--immigrants whose families chose to come to the United States--arrive determined to succeed, unencumbered by the baggage of “caste-like” minorities born here. As a result, they view tests and other challenges in the schools not as devices to make them fail, but simply as hurdles to overcome in order to get ahead.
Some of his views derived from his own experience. I remember frequent visits with him and his wife Ada when their children were in grade school. Each night after dinner in their Oakland home, the children would sit around the dining room table to do their homework, with John and Ada right there helping them. It was a model that parents, regardless of background or ethnicity, could profitably emulate.
John was passionate about his theories, but he was not flamboyant, which may explain why his work, while widely known within educational circles, did not attract the interest of the mass media for most of his life. That changed last fall with the approaching publication of his last book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Engagement, a treatise on why middle-class blacks lag behind whites even in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights.
“All I want is for people to read what I have to say before making up their minds,’’ John told me. He had a sly sense of humor, which helped him tolerate those who misunderstood or oversimplified his work. Jokingly, he told me that if the response to his latest book got too intense, “I’ll have to charter a plane to my home village in Nigeria.”
He is survived by his wife of 28 years, Marcellina Ada, and five children.
--Remembered by Louis Freedberg, Ph.D. ‘76,
an editorial board member of the San Francisco Chronicle
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