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     November 7, 2009

      
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Amazing space

Photo by Bonnie Powell
One Monday morning this fall, students found a new object of attention on Sproul Plaza—a leafy labyrinth had sprung up overnight, the handiwork of Natalie Pollard, a graduate student in landscape architecture.

The meditative motif was meant to help passers-by slow down, Pollard says, and to reveal a landscape that they had, perhaps, taken for granted. “Some people started to walk the path, but then the clock went off and reminded them to get to class,” she says. But a few students scurried past with eyes wide shut: “One person literally tripped over me—she was talking on her phone.”

The design is not technically a maze, Pollard explains. “A maze is meant to confuse, a labyrinth is meant to calm. It’s a universal symbol. People may not understand, but they do seem to get it.”
—Linda Schmidt


A drink deferred
More than 30 members of Cal’s 1958 Rose Bowl team gathered, appropriately, at the Rose Garden Inn on Telegraph Avenue to root for the Bears as they battled USC on October 9. Among the attendees were Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Kapp, and East-West Shrine Game director Jack Hart.

“As proud as I am of our accomplishments,” Bates said, “I can tell you the ’59 Rose Bowl Bears are ready to give up our claim as the last Cal team to play in the Rose Bowl.”

Kapp(standing), with Bates, co-captain
Jack Hart, and coach Bill Taylor.
But in a turn of events all too familiar to die-hard fans of the blue and gold, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory in the final seconds of an otherwise stellar season as the Bears wound up at the Holiday Bowl. And amid the mournful multitudes, perhaps nobody is more disappointed than former head coach Kapp, who, in 1982, promised his players that he would give up tequila until the Bears won the Rose Bowl.

In an early November interview, before the bowl bids were officially announced, Kapp noted the possibility that Cal might be denied the chance to run for the roses.

“If by chance we get shuffled out in this process,” he said then, “I’m thinking of asking for a papal dispensation.”

We’re on the phone to the Vatican.
—Carolyn Jones







Articles

Cover Page
The true blue line
Bowled over
Actually, it is rocket science
The treasures of Bancroft
Q and A: A conversation with Michael Pollan
An editor's farewell

Departments

Alumni Almanac
A Personal Essay
Calendar
CalZone
In Memoriam
Keeping in Touch
Letters
Recalling Cal
Talk of the Gown
Twisted Titles


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