Natalie Cohen ’34, tennis champion and longtime supporter of Cal athletics, died Feb. 7 in Atlanta. She was 94. A member of both the Georgia Tennis Hall of Fame and Southern Tennis Hall of Fame, Cohen won 14 straight city and state doubles championships from 1945 to 1958 and famously defeated an 18-year-old player when she was 42. She was also the first woman to referee an NCAA men’s tennis championship.

At Cal she shocked classmates and broke a gender barrier by having the audacity to stand and cheer at football games when only male students were allowed to. Years later, the school dedicated a stadium seat in her honor.

Her over-the-top devotion to her university was one of her many sports enthusiasms. She was also a rabid University of Georgia football fan, a Hawks and Flames season ticket holder, and she attended nearly every Final Four basketball tournament for years. Cohen was occasionally found preaching the praises of "small ball" to Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox.

Cohen kept playing tennis as long as she could. "I don’t quite go after all the balls," she admitted to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987, when she was 75. "I figure there’ll be another one coming along in a little while."

Wilson Combs, who was expelled from Berkeley during the Great Depression only to win, two decades later, the University’s highest academic award and then join its faculty of architecture, died March 15 at his home in Berkeley following a stroke. He was 92.

While an undergraduate, he was a member of the editorial staff of the Razzberry Press, an annual scandal sheet that lampooned faculty members and published cartoons and scandalous gossip. Following its publication in 1933, Combs was expelled from the University.

Combs was the last survivor of a School of Architecture group assembled by William Wurster after he became its dean in 1949. They embraced Wurster’s "Bay Region Style" and made it a strong countervailing force in modern architecture to the then-pervasive "International Style" derived from Germany’s Bauhaus school.

Combs was considered the most artistically gifted of Wurster’s group. His presentation drawings were works of art and regularly garnered the coveted "KX" mark—the highest score at Berkeley in a system that was based on that of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His dedication was rewarded with the University Medal in 1953, Berkeley’s highest academic honor.