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Mary Bowerman, cofounder of Save Mount Diablo and instru-mental in helping greatly expand the state park’s boundaries, died Aug. 21 in Lafayette. She was 97. Born in Toronto in 1908, Bowerman’s family moved to Pasadena when she was a teenager. She graduated from Berkeley in 1930 and went on to earn her doctorate in botany in 1936 under botanist Willis Linn Jepson. Her doctoral study of the flora of Mount Diablo was published in 1944 as Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo. Until this past May, when the Mount Diablo buckwheat was rediscovered by a Berkeley graduate student, Bowerman had been the last person to see the rare pink flower in 1936. In 2002 a new edition of the book was published with Barbara Ertter, curator of Western North America flora at the UC Jepson Herbarium, as the lead coauthor with Bowerman. Bowerman and other conserva-tionists began Save Mount Diablo in 1971 when Contra Costa County had a population of just 558,000, compared with the 1 million who live there today. The organization was dedicated to expanding and preserving the park’s open spaces. Hannah Ruth Wilbur, one of California’s first female lawyers, died in San Francisco on July 5. She graduated from Berkeley in 1932 and received her law degree from Hastings College. Her cousin Nina Fendel told the San Francisco Chronicle that Wilbur enrolled in law school at the urging of her mother, a successful business owner who raised her daughter after she and her husband divorced. Wilbur was one of just two women in her Class at Hastings. After graduating from Hastings in 1933 at the age of 23, Wilbur became one of the youngest lawyers in the state. She took a job with the State Relief Administration, a New Deal–era agency that helped the unem-ployed. She later joined the Farm Security Administration, working with migrant agricultural workers. After World War II began, she moved to the federal Office of Price Administration. Following the war, Wilbur opened a storefront practice in the Bayview district of San Francisco, and later joined a firm downtown. She stopped practicing in the late 1980s. “She just did a little bit of everything,” said Fendel. “She worked with people who might not have very much, but wanted to make sure things were in order when they died. She always thought of it as a quasi–social work way of practicing law.”  Robert Lawrence Beloof, a professor for 41 years, was struck and killed by a van while visiting two of his sons in Portland, Oregon, July 5. He was 81. Robert, a resident of Berkeley, was chair of the speech department at Berkeley in the 1960s, a period when many universities were converting their depart-ments to study communications. He pushed in the opposite direction, expanding the department to cover more humanities and to use a pedagogy derived from classical rhetoric, which explains why the department is now called Rhetoric. Robert’s gentle, bow-tied appearance hid an inner fortitude he developed in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. His father was a cowboy, and his mother, a boarding-house owner, repeatedly ran for governor as a socialist. I remember a student asking him for an extended deadline during a week of violent campus protests against the war in Vietnam. He denied her request with an inscrutable expression. None of us knew that during World War II, Robert, a Quaker, conscientiously objected to military service. Instead, he fulfilled his service in a Missouri labor camp and a Pennsylvania mental hospital—in his words, “cleaning up sh--.” He smuggled a camera into the hospital so as to expose what he consi-dered inhumane conditions. The resulting photos ran as an expose in Life magazine. Robert received a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and a master’s in drama and a doctorate in speech from Northwestern Univer-sity in 1954. His doctoral thesis, EE Cummings: The Prosodic Shape of His Poems, though controversial, attracted the attention of its subject, and the two poets became friends. He was also friends with Robert Frost. Robert joined the Berkeley faculty as an associate professor of speech in 1959, and in 1964 he concluded his rapid advance to department chair. He retired in 1989. He published three books of poetry, including the self-published Good Poems, as well as a critical essay, The Performing Voice in Literature. He also wrote an undergraduate textbook on oral interpretation. Robert was always a serious student of psychology. In preparation for his retirement from teaching, he earned a master’s degree in clinical psych-ology at San Francisco State University and practiced in that field for more than a decade. Robert left behind his wife, Helen; sons Marshall ’83, Douglass ’78, Laird, and Grant; and four grandchildren. —Remembered by Dio Roberts ’71, M.A. ’73  Bruce Bolt, professor emeritus of seismology, died July 21 in Oakland from pancreatic cancer. Bolt was a member of the faculties of both the Departments of Earth and Planetary Science and Civil Engineering. For those who are fascinated by earthquakes—or worried about them—Bolt’s work lives on. Gregory Fenves, chair of civil and environmental engineering, called Bolt “the founder of the modern field of engineering seismology.” Bolt, he said, “was an indefatigable advocate for communi-cation between seismologists and engineers. He could speak to broad audiences, right at their level, including legislators and governors.” Bolt was director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory from 1963 to 1989 and retired to emeritus status in 1993. He also spent 15 years on the California Seismic Safety Commission and helped design an earthquake experience for the California Academy of Sciences. Working as a professor through the plate tectonics revolution, Bolt gracefully adapted to the new paradigm, even writing a textbook on the interior of the earth. As head of the seismic lab, Bolt ushered the Berkeley seismographic network from its period of analog equipment and paper records into the age of broadband instrumentation and digital recording. “As a result,” said Douglas Dreger, associate professor of earth and planetary science, “Berkeley is still a leader in digital research. Bolt got all that started.” On the ground, Bolt’s consulting work affected the design of structures from campus buildings to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to Egypt’s Aswan Dam. But the exhibit he helped create at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park in 1998 may have been his most notable achievement, as tens of thousands of visitors stood in it to reexperience the 1906 earthquake and listen to his narration. His research revealed that the 1906 quake—long thought to have been centered at Olema on the Point Reyes Peninsula—in fact rumbled most powerfully near Daly City, just south of San Francisco. Bolt was born in Largs, New South Wales, Australia, in 1930. He received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and a D.Sc. at the University of Sydney. He came to the United States on a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship. During a later stint at Cambridge, he was invited to Berkeley. Bolt was also a major advocate behind the state’s efforts to map seismic hazards. Among his works are the Southern California and Bay Area Earthquake Preparedness projects; the California Earthquake Education Project; and seismic safety improvements for mobile homes, private schools, unreinforced masonry buildings, hospitals, and other essential services. Bolt was also president of the Faculty Club from 1994 until last year. In that position, he oversaw the collection of artwork produced by the Berkeley School from 1930 to 1950. Bolt is survived by his wife, Beverley (Bentley), four children, and 14 grandchildren. Murray Barnson Emeneau, emeritus professor of Sanskrit and linguistics, died in Berkeley on Aug. 29 at age 101. In his later years, Emeneau was often asked whether he owed his longevity to any particular regimen. He always answered, “No, just genes.” In fact, medical researchers have discovered in recent years that Emeneau’s hometown of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, produces the highest percentage of centenarians in North America. Emeneau was trained in classics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and at Oxford University. In 1926 he began studying Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European languages at Yale, where he received his doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on Sanskrit. From then until 1935 he did postdoctoral studies at Yale under the direction of leading anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir. From him Emeneau absorbed not only the then-new “structural” linguistics but also Sapir’s distinctive approach to what was later called “anthropological linguistics.” Emeneau spent 1935 to 1938 doing fieldwork on unwritten Dravidian languages of India. Back in the United States, after teaching linguistics at Yale for a year, Emeneau was hired in 1940 as assistant professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics at Berkeley. He became full professor by 1946 and later chair of the Department of Linguistics (a department he persuaded Berkeley to establish). He was a prolific interdisciplinary writer throughout his career, in areas ranging from Sanskrit philology to Dravidian linguistics to cultural anthropology. In 1971 he retired to emeritus status, but he continued his research, publication, and participation in academic activities well into his nineties. Along with his colleagues A. L. Kroeber, in anthropology, and Mary R. Haas, then in Oriental Languages, Emeneau was instrumental in organizing the Survey of California Indian Languages. Since its inception, the survey (later renamed the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages) has become the major project of its type in the United States, sending dozens of students on fieldwork. This work produced a long list of doctoral degrees and bookshelves of series monographs published in the University of California Publications in Linguistics. Emeneau’s honors included the presidency of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Oriental Society, four honorary doctorates, and numerous medals and citations. In Berkeley, he gave the Faculty Research Lecture in 1956 and was awarded the Berkeley Citation on his retirement in 1971. He is survived by a stepdaughter. —Remembered by William Bright ’49, Ph.D. ’55, emeritus professor of linguistics and anthropology, UCLA  Ruth Huenemann, professor emerita and pioneering founder of the public health nutrition program, died August 19 at the Lake Park Retirement Residence in Oakland. She was 95. Huenemann was one of the first researchers to recognize the importance of systematically studying the longitudinal development of obesity in children, conducting seminal studies that to this day inform the under-standing of childhood obesity. Her research and teaching combined rigorous scientific methods with a pragmatic approach to improving nutrition in a variety of cultural settings. She was particularly noted for several longitudinal studies of nutrition and physical activity among adolescents and children. In the Berkeley Teenage Study, she studied nearly 1,000 students from the Berkeley Unified School District from 1961 to 1965 to determine the factors related to the onset and prevalence of adult obesity. She also led the Berkeley Longitudinal Nutrition Study from 1969 to 1973, working with children from the age of six months to 16 years. The research revealed a link between low income and an increased risk for obesity—something that researchers are still trying to understand today—and dispelled the belief that overweight babies became overweight adults. Instead, she showed that activity level was much more predictive of future weight. She also addressed the influence of television and cars in the study with findings that showed teenagers were getting much less exercise than previously thought. Born in 1910 to a farming family in Waukon, Iowa, Huenemann was the second oldest of 14 children. After graduating from high school in 1928, she taught children aged six to 17 in a one-room school for five years between the Great Depression and Dust Bowl eras, saving money to attend college. She went on to receive a bachelor’s in nutrition from the University of Wisconsin in 1938, a master’s in nutrition from the University of Chicago in 1941, and a doctorate in public health nutrition from Harvard University in 1954. She joined the School of Public Health at Berkeley in 1953, where she founded the school’s public health nutrition program, establishing its curriculum, research program, staff, and funding. “In her first class... there were only two students who majored in public health nutrition. By the time she retired, the school had awarded more than 250 public health degrees in nutrition. The program she developed... had become the preeminent center for training of applied nutritionists in the country,” said Leona Shapiro, a colleague of Huenemann’s in the School of Public Health. Huenemann’s 24-year tenure at Berkeley included terms as chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the College of Natural Resources and chair of the Department of Social and Administrative Health Sciences in the School of Public Health. She sat on many notable committees throughout her career and was also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association and president of the Society for Nutrition Education. After retiring, she guest lectured at several universities, volunteered at the Berkeley Food Pantry and UNICEF, and served as an elder of her church. |
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