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Vernon DeMars, architect, professor, and former head of the Department of Architecture, died April 29 in Oakland. He was 97. His career spanned six decades beginning in the 1930s when he designed homes for migrant workers in the Central Valley. He also helped create Berkeley’s Wurster Hall Environmental Design Library with several Cal colleagues. But his most notable legacy is the University’s student center, which includes Zellerbach Hall and Sproul Plaza. He left his mark on the socio/civic conscience of the Bay Area, arguing strenuously and relentlessly as early as the 1950s for tearing down San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway and creating a grand plaza between Market Street and the Ferry Building that would enable the city to turn itself toward its greatest natural resource—San Francisco Bay. Ironically, it was not city planners but the destruction caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that finally set DeMars’ vision into motion. He was born in San Francisco, where his love of architecture could be traced to the Beaux Arts construction throughout the city for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. “I got to be taken with the grandeur of it all,” he recalled in a 1988 oral history. “The great gardens and the fountains and all the nice things that a city can be.” He enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1927, the year that John Galen Howard retired as campus architect and head of the architectural department. Following graduation in 1931, he continued doing graduate work. Later, while a visiting professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from 1947 to 1949, DeMars co-directed a student research project that led to a 12-story faculty housing project that the then-influential Architectural Record magazine called one of the 50 most significant buildings in the United States. At MIT he met William Wurster, dean of the architectural school. A few years later, the two reunited at Berkeley, where DeMars became a professor and Wurster was named architectural dean. The two led the establishment of the College of Environmental Design, the first in the nation to merge the disciplines of architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture. DeMars succeeded Wurster as head of the architecture department from 1959 to 1962. He also worked in several architectural firms during his career. Upon his retirement in 1975, DeMars received the Berkeley Citation and in 1999 was honored as a distinguished alumnus by the College of Environmental Design and its alumni association.  Muriel Taylor Collier, a trailblazing African American who battled Alameda County to become the first black social worker in Northern California, died on March 25. She was 95. An Oakland native, she entered Cal in 1927, when few black women were enrolled at the University. She graduated in 1931 at a time, historians say, when the best jobs most black women could aspire to were as domestic helpers. She applied for numerous positions, noted Robert Haynes, former director of Oakland’s African American Museum and Library, in the Montclarion newspaper: “She was turned away time after time.” After she was turned down by the Alameda County Department of Social Welfare, the black community rallied behind her. Demonstrators protested in front of the agency's Oakland headquarters for more than a year until she was hired. “Throughout her life, Muriel never ceased to challenge convention or forge new paths,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) of Oakland. After two years as a county social worker, Collier enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she received her master’s degree in social work. She returned to Oakland and resumed her career. She joined the Red Cross during World War II and was assigned to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a segregated training facility for black soldiers. There she met her future husband Frank Collier, who would become one of the famed “Tuskegee Airmen,” African American pilots who would perform distinguished service during the war. Following the war, they moved to Oakland. She became a social worker for the Veterans Administration in Palo Alto, where she worked until retiring in 1979. He served in the Korean War as a B-29 navigator and after his discharge, enrolled at Stanford and became Stanford's first African American to graduate with honors. He worked at the San Francisco Chronicle until retiring in 1980. As a couple, the Colliers were a political force. Lifelong members of the NAACP, they supported black causes and were influential in the mayoral elections of Lionel Wilson and Elihu Harris. “Life for her was about serving and overcoming,” Harris recalled. “She kept moving forward, never looking back.” Survivors include two daughters.  The Honorable Wakefield Taylor, noted jurist and ardent supporter of the University, died on April 6 at his home in Martinez. A descendant of Gold Rush pioneers, he was born in Ukiah, California, in 1912. Taylor earned a B.A. from Cal in 1934 and a J.D. from Boalt Hall in 1937. A stellar student, he was a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian of his class. He was student body president in 1933–34, when he and Stanford student body president Gerald Trautman signed the agreement that the Axe would be awarded each year to the winner of the Big Game. He was on the staff of the California Law Review while at Boalt Hall, and a Charles Mills Gayley Fellow. He lived in Bowles Hall and International House. After serving as an officer in Naval intelligence during World War II, Taylor returned to private practice in Contra Costa County. He became Antioch’s city attorney, and chief deputy district attorney for the county. In 1951, Governor Earl Warren appointed him to the Superior Court. He was elevated to the California Court of Appeal in San Francisco in 1963, and in 1970 was named Presiding Justice. He sat numerous times, by assignment, on the Supreme Court of California. While serving in San Francisco, he became the 34th President of the Commonwealth Club of California. He was the founding chairman of the Center for Judicial Education and Research, and he served several terms on the state Judicial Council. Justice Taylor retired in 1982 at the age of 70 after 31 years on the bench. Chief Justice Rose Bird once said that one of Justice Taylor’s outstanding characteristics was his “generosity of spirit.” Certainly that was true in his relationship with Cal. He was the first president of the UC Berkeley Foundation. He was active with the California Alumni Association, serving as an advocate and Alumni Council member. He was a leader in the Centennial Fund Campaign in the 1960s, was head of the Class of ‘34 campaign to endow the Robert Gordon Sproul Chair in Agricultural Economics, and was president of the Boalt Hall Alumni Association in 1979–80. He was a member of the SF Grid Club and a fervent football fan who attended games well into his 80s. Taylor was a charter member of the Berkeley Fellows. He received the Berkeley Citation in 1981.The Boalt Hall School of Law named him Alumnus of the Year in 1982. In 1985 he received the first Life Achievement Award of the Citizen of the Year program in Martinez, where he lived for 60 years.. Survivors include his wife Carmel ‘36, and children Marylee ’64, Tom ’67, Cathy ’75, and Doug ’70. Philip Morrison, who earned his doctorate in theoretical physics under physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer at Cal in 1940, and moved to the front ranks of science in his 20s while helping build the first atomic bomb, died April 22 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 89. He will be most remembered for his pioneering work on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. “If Earthlings ever find ET, substantial credit should go to Phil," said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for SETI@home, Berkeley. He joined Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project in 1942. He was in charge of a particularly crucial and dangerous project that physicist Richard Feynman called “tickling the dragon”—determining how much uranium or plutonium was necessary to start a chain reaction without blowing everyone up in the process. On July 12, 1945, he rode from the Los Alamos, New Mexico labs to the Trinity testing site alongside the plutonium core of a device nicknamed “Gadget”—the world’s first atomic bomb—in the backseat of a Dodge. Four days later, at 5:29 a.m., he participated in the detonation that would change the world. After that, Morrison actively wrote and spoke out against nuclear war and the arms race, and the potential humanity now had to obliterate itself from the Earth. In 1959, Morrison, who was then at Cornell University, and Giuseppe Cocconi wrote a paper proposing the potential of microwaves in interstellar communications, which was published in the journal Nature on September 19 of that year. The Morrison-Cocconi paper laid the foundation for most of the SETI projects conducted in the past 35 years. Morrison, who ended his academic career at MIT, was a prolific writer and developed a large following, particularly for articles he wrote about "interesting things," as he put it, for Scientific American. Morrison also collaborated on the film Powers of Ten, and the PBS series The Ring of Truth. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and earned many honors and awards from the scientific community. At the time of his death, he held the rank of Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded by the MIT faculty and administration. He is survived by a stepson.  Ruggiero Stefanini, emeritus professor of Italian and Near Eastern studies, died at his family home in Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy, on May 6. He was 72. Stefanini was best known for his exuberant lectures on the Italian poet and writer Dante Alighieri. An online course guide for new students based on recommendations from a survey of 2,000 undergraduates urges, “You cannot leave Berkeley without having Stefanini teach you The Divine Comedy. His lectures are so animated and exciting; it is more like going to a theater than a class.” Stefanini also taught classical philology and the ancient Indo-European language of Hittite. “His students adored him,” said Steven Boterill, acting chair of the Italian Studies Department, “and, in return, he dedicated his life to them… He was the beating heart of this department for 40 years.” After earning the equivalent of a doctorate with an emphasis on Hittite from the University of Florence in 1957, he was an assistant to the chair of Germanic philosophy for a year, then served in the Italian Army before coming to Cal in 1961 as an assistant professor. In 1992, Stefanini and Nicolas Perella, another professor of Italian studies at Cal, together translated Man of Smoke, an avant-garde novel written in 1911 by Aldo Palazzeschi. He also published numerous articles, plays, and poetry. During the summers, he returned often to Italy or taught at Middlebury College’s foreign-language and literature program. While there, he always put on a play, sometimes one of his own. “He was theatrical in the best sense of the word,” said Perella, “because he enjoyed people, he enjoyed life, and he enjoyed nature.” He retired in 1994 but continued to teach one course a semester through the graduate division. He is survived by three sisters. Louis Leithold, legendary Advanced Placement calculus teacher and author of The Calculus, a widely used college and high school text, died at his home in Pacific Palisades on April 29. He was 80. After growing up in San Francisco, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s in mathematics from Berkeley, in 1945 and 1946, respectively. Shirley B. Gray, professor of mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles said, “His text really led a major change in emphasis…Leithold was more or less the first to incorporate the concepts and vocabulary of set theory, a major component of ‘New Math,’ into the calculus curriculum of the 1960s.” He was also a sought-after trainer of calculus teachers across the country; one of his protégés was Jaime Escalante, the former Garfield High School teacher whose success with inner-city students in Los Angeles was profiled in the film Stand and Deliver. “I called him my advisor,” Escalante told the Los Angeles Times. “He was one of the great mathematicians. His book had beautiful problems.” Leithold spent most of his 50-year career teaching at various colleges and universities; but in 1998, at the age of 72, he was invited to launch a calculus program at Malibu High School. He initially taught first- and second-year calculus as an unpaid consultant, and only later did he accept a salary. Trevor Packer, executive director of the AP program for the College Board, told the Times, “A lot of his fame is not just due to his textbook, but to his impact on other teachers and students. That’s where he left his mark—in classrooms across the country, through their teachers.” Leithold is survived by a brother and two grandchildren.  Judith Emily Gruber, political science professor and expert on regional governance, died at her home in Berkeley on June 1. She was 54. Chairwoman of the political science department from 2001 to 2003, Gruber specialized in urban politics, intergovernmental relations, and public administration. In her book Controlling Bureaucracies: Dilemmas in Democratic Governance, she explored ways the public can exert democratic control over government. Gruber was also instrumental in establishing child-care centers on campus and in creating a policy that allows all professors to take parental leave. “She felt that one of the biggest obstacles for women trying to advance in academia was the conflict between their work and their family,” said Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at Cal who worked with Gruber for 15 years on a committee to institute family-friendly policies, in the San Francisco Chronicle. Gruber was responsible for the campus publications “A Guide to Balancing Work and Family” and “A Guide for Working Parents.” She also helped create the Chancellor’s Committee on Dependent Care, which she co-chaired from 1989 to 1995. Gruber graduated from Cornell University then went on to receive her doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1981. A year later, her doctoral dissertation won her the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Award for the best dissertation in the general field of public administration. She is survived by her husband, Joseph Houska, and two sons. Donations in her memory can be sent to the Early Childhood Education Program Annual Fund, Development & Community Relations, Office of Undergraduate Affairs, 203 Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1530, Attention: Judy Gruber Scholarship Fund. |
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