Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, The Cal Connection.
The hugely popular Proposition 13 has had a cascade of unintended consequences. Nobody ever called Howard Jarvis elegant or subtle. He was a gruff, curmudgeonly sort from the Republican political grassroots who had no problem saying what he meant, loudly and often profanely. When he pushed Proposition 13 onto the ballot in 1978 over the objection […]
The Tea Party gets all the press, but the Millennials are the future. On a swampy day in June 1988, I found myself—a 16-year-old skate punk with a dim view of politicians—at the Ronald Reagan White House. Specifically, I was at the backyard tennis court for a celebrity tournament organized by Nancy Reagan (my dad worked […]
In the Bay Area, the author finds self-righteousness by the cup. On Cal’s campus this spring, there was a large outdoor display of black and white photos of various Berkeley students. Some included little statements printed on them, one of which was, “Berkeley taught me to listen better and scream louder.” Another, added by a vandal […]
A fourth-generation Cal grad wonders if there will be a fifth. When my grandparents died and it was time to sell their Castro Valley home, I became the keeper of the University of California, Berkeley heirlooms. My great-grandmother’s 1919 yearbook. The wobbly blue-and-gold teddy bear my grandmother got when my mother was born. A set of […]
Sometimes you return to a destination after a long interval and come away with the realization that the changes you perceive are more about you than about the destination. Once I was an intrepid backpacker who spoke mostly English. Today, I am a 60-year-old man who speaks passable Cantonese and fluent Japanese, and I like […]
Pappy Waldorf’s final seasons Lynn O. “Pappy” Waldorf, now commemorated in bronze on the western edge of Faculty Glade, is a bona fide legend in college football, a coach in the pantheon with the Knut Rocknes and Pop Warners and Andy Smiths. In ten seasons at Cal (1947–1956), Waldorf notched a record of 67-32-4 and made […]
How Barbara Goodell ’68 used salsa to help women learn English. Snack time was piquant in Boonville’s adult school. The Mexican women studied English all morning, but their grandmothers’ recipes ruled during break, and so The Secrets of Salsa cookbook was born. Ten years and 25,000 copies later, the bilingual recipe book has gone far beyond […]
Why the BP oil spill may not be as bad as we thought. On April 20, an accident aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana released a geyser of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Early news reports looked devastating: pelicans dripping with oil, hermit crabs struggling through sludge, and out-of-work fishermen […]
A Berkeley Staffer’s nontraditional use for lab equipment. Last fall with Oktoberfest just around the corner, Phil Broughton, a radiation safety technician at Berkeley, found himself in need of a stein: “I had a really nice earthenware one, so I tore the kitchen apart looking for it.” He didn’t find the stein, but he did spot […]
People still have issues with the Sixties. It was a decade of idealism and divisiveness. Three years into the decade, Bob Dylan railed against mothers and fathers throughout the land. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Jim Morrison proclaimed we want the world, and we want it … now. Much of this can be explained […]
From jewelry to disasters, antiquities have much to tell us about ourselves. “Pompeii is our ground zero for disaster,” Kenneth Lapatin ’84, Ph.D. ’94, says, sitting in LAX airport, waiting for a flight to Paris to gather art for the exhibition Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse and Resurrection that will open at the Getty Museum […]
