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Mike Koll
 Gruff. Descriptions of Mike Koll '42, who passed away July 1, often included that adjective. Dick Heggie '45, CAA president in 1987-89, prefers "flinty." However you phrase it, there is no question that Mike Koll was a man who got things done. A champion pitcher on the Cal baseball team and perennial alumni leader, his most lasting legacy may be as founder of the famed Lair of the Golden Bear family camp in Pinecrest.
I first met Mike in 1969, when I was a lowly kitchen worker at the Lair's Camp Blue, and he was completing his second decade as camp director. Before my second summer in the kitchen, I met with Mike and dared to seek a raise. The meeting was brief. There would be no raise.
But he could be kind and gracious, too. I next saw Mike three months later, after Camp Blue manager Wayne Crow '60 had persuaded me to switch to program director. "Wayne and I argued over it loud and long," the Lair director told me, pumping my hand, "but he says you're his man, so I am behind you all the way."
And so he was, for the next 33 years, through my summers at Camp Blue to the completion of my term as CAA president, the day before he died.
Mike Koll was a superior Cal baseball player, with an unblemished pitching record (10-0) against Stanford, a league batting title, and the best career batting average (.403) of any Cal hurler. In 1941, he was awarded the Jake Gimball Award, presented to the senior student "with the best attitude toward athletics." (Many who played softball, tennis, or golf with Mike in later years have stories to share of his competitive excess, told with a smile and a nod.)
In 1949, CAA Executive Director Stan McCaffrey '38 recruited Mike to start a new family summer camp for the Association. Mike had graduated with honors in forestry and, after a brief post-war stint in his native Midwest, was looking for work in California. He thought he was signing on for a two-year project; instead, he served 35 years as director of the Lair, creating and managing what became a benchmark alumni family camp.
He found his counterweight in the beautiful and gracious Jane Biedenbach '50, a Lair staff member who became his bride. Daughters Lynne '78 and Loretta '82 grew to be Lair campers and then staffers and Cal alums. At the 50th Lair staff reunion in 1999, the Camp Gold softball field was renamed "Koll Field" in Mike's honor. "Dad was known as a tough manager," Lynne recalls, "but to us he was always a supportive and loving parent. He taught us the important things in life; he valued family above all else."
Despite being synonymous with the Lair, Mike Koll did much more for Cal and CAA--where he had the longest tenure of any employee. He raised funds for and oversaw the construction of Alumni House. With Pappy Waldorf and others, he arranged tailgates at the Rose Bowl and throughout the West. He organized reunions, introduced faculty to alumni through numerous CAA programs, and expanded the Alumni Leadership Scholarship.
In 1983, Mike was appointed interim executive director of the CAA, though no one initially considered him a candidate for the permanent position. "But he decided to throw his hat into the ring," said Claude Hutchison '60, CAA president 1985-87. "And in the end he was the unanimous choice." On his retirement in 1988, then-UC President David P. Gardner, M.A. '59, Ph.D. '66, described Mike as "one of those special individuals whose abilities, dedication, and loyalty have yielded extraordinary benefits for UC."
Mike came to the Lair one last time in May for the Order of the Lair, Working Bear pre-camp weekend he had launched 23 years earlier. Such weekends, by invitation only, were a mixture of grunt work and humorous celebration--evidence of Mike's "lighter core under the flinty exterior," as Heggie puts it. One week later, Mike braved a chilly evening to attend my farewell dinner as CAA president at a Lair-like outdoor venue. When Mike and Jane left, the 160 staff and alums in attendance rose as one in a prolonged standing ovation.
At Lair campfires, he enjoyed the staff's a capella rendition of "California, here's to thee." So, here's to thee, Mike Koll.
Go Bears!
--Remembered by Mark Ornellas '72,
CAA president 2001-03
Gregory Peck
 Hollywood icon Gregory Peck '39, who caught the acting bug when he was asked to audition for a student production at Berkeley, died June 12 in Los Angeles at the age of 87. He had also been a member of the Cal crew team.
After graduation, Peck lived and acted briefly in New York before finding his way to Hollywood, where he debuted in the 1944 film Days of Glory. Peck's heroic good looks made him a natural star; he was also well known for his off-screen integrity. Peck appeared in some 60 films in the course of his career, including such classics as Spellbound, The Yearling, Twelve O'Clock High, Moby Dick, and Cape Fear, and took home the Oscar for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
Fame never dimmed Peck's pride in his alma mater. He presided over the opening of Zellerbach Hall in 1968 and appeared on the Zellerbach stage in 1996 to host a program of clips and reminiscences. He established a men's crew team endowment in honor of coach Ky Ebright; he also attended the San Diego Crew Classic just last year. (He kept a low profile at that event so as not to distract attention from the young men on the water.)
Peck was active in many charitable and social causes, serving as a longtime member of the National Council on the Arts, national crusade chairman of the American Cancer Society, and co-founder of the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center. Peck received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is survived by his wife Veronique, four children, and six grandchildren.
Ernst Haas
 Ernst Bernard Haas, a leading authority on international relations theory and Robson Professor of Government emeritus in political science, died March 6 in Berkeley. He was 78 years old.
Haas and his family immigrated to the United States from Frankfurt, Germany, in 1938. He worked in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service from 1943 to 1946, and earned three degrees from Columbia University, culminating with a doctorate in public law and government in 1952. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1951 and, over the course of the next 50 years, published 20 books and monographs, as well as 56 articles and book chapters. The Journal of Foreign Affairs named his groundbreaking 1958 work, The Uniting of Europe, as one of the 50 most significant books in international relations in the last century. His expertise made him a valuable consultant to many international organizations, academic groups, and government departments, including the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations.
Haas was director of the Institute for International Studies from 1969 until 1973 and retired from campus in 1999, although he continued to pursue his research and to teach his graduate seminar "Theories of International Relations."
Haas was widely known as a rigorous scholar and an excellent mentor to his students. "He was the kind of mentor that you get once in a lifetime," said John Ruggie, M.A. '68, Ph.D. '74, professor of international affairs and director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University. "He was much more than a professor; he was a surrogate father and a good friend."
Survivors include his son Peter, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a grandson.
Leonard Michaels
 Leonard Michaels, a professor of English at Berkeley for 25 years, died May 10. He was probably best known for The Men's Club, nominated as the outstanding novel of 1981 by the National Book Critics Circle and made into a 1985 film (for which he wrote the screenplay). He produced many other works of fiction and autobiography, from his first collection, Going Places (1969) to the linked stories published over the past year in the New Yorker. He was honored by awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.
Michaels graduated from New York University, then earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan before joining Berkeley's English department in 1969. He retired from teaching in 1994 and had lived in Italy with his wife Katharine, M.A. '77, for the past seven years. They returned to the Bay Area in early April. He is survived by his wife and children Ethan, Jesse, and Louisa.
His writing, his teaching, his friendship, his love, his anger were all rooted in his own need to stop wasting words or using them dishonestly. He was faithful to the page, to the rhythm of the prose, and determined to make each word count. I sometimes thought that the injunction in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style--"Omit needless words"--had been carved into his brain before he learned to talk.
He made the short story shorter, the diary entry clear-cut and pointed, the memoir--a form that encourages prolixity and self-aggrandizement--come into sharp focus. His sentences were often juridical as well as grammatical; and the guilty party was as often as not himself. His words have a clarity and edge that defies you to stop reading, whether you like what you're reading or not. And his printed pages are as economical, as sparsely filled, as the pages of a poetry book.
These stylistic traits seemed to me molded to his temperament like a made-to-measure suit of clothes. At their heart was his New York impatience--never enough time, never enough space; the very air seemed rationed and all but used up. The subway was packed; the apartments crammed with life; parking spaces at best a ten-second opportunity. And so the style is staccato, the dialogue a fencing match; the ideas aphorisms, all in the service of his pressing sense of urgency. Not so much "time's winged chariot hurrying near" (too fancy a phrase) as "C'mon. C'mon! C'mon!!"
These are not the slow, impacted rhythms of institutional life, nor even those of most teaching. Academic prose is--to put it kindly--spacious. We seem to need endless patience, with each other, with our students, and of course with the books we choose to teach or write about. The job was not exactly tailor-made for Lenny's temperament, but it was ripe for the critique his restless irritation brought to it. Yet for the part of the expected work that mattered most to him--the chance to write in freedom--he taught himself and his students to take enormous pains in order to record pain, or pleasure, or anything else that mattered deeply. There were never any shortcuts permitted there.
Much of the rest of what went on in academic life was to him blah, blah, blah, a waste of breath. He seemed finally to carry his impatience even to his dying, cutting to the quick, as though his whole body were at last talking the language he had made, a language that will bear his imprint like an imprimatur of his own, and that deserves to last.
--Remembered by Alex Zwerdling, professor emeritus of English
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