Groundbreaking school principal, navigating the 20 year process of making Oakland Central High School transform into Polytechnic High, and ultimately opening Oakland Technical in 1915 at its current location.  Fisher served the school for 28 years, was ahead of his time in espousing the value and dignity of both vocational and academic education, and in forging strong school-community bonds.

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be thinking and another to always be working, and we call one a gentleman and the other an operator; whereas the workman ought to be thinking and the thinker to be working, and both should be called a gentleman in the best sense.

Charles Fisher, the son of founding principal, P.M. Fisher, was an Oakland Judge in the 1950s and 1960s and a Republican Party activist.  His name appeared frequently in the Oakland Tribune as the judge who, for example, sentenced a popular jockey for speeding on the freeway and another for running a betting operation in a residential
neighborhood of Montclair.

In 1963 he was written up in the Tribune for condemning conditions in the court holding room, saying the air was so bad that prisoners had collapsed, and for criticizing the jammed (as many as 110 men) holding cell’s single room on Monday mornings. However, two years later, when there was pressure to create a civilian commission to investigate alleged police brutality in Oakland, he went on record saying that this would be a “grave mistake,” adding, “I have been a municipal court judge for nearly 12 years and I have yet to see one authenticated case of police brutality.”

Curiously, in 1971 Fisher crossed paths with former Tech student, co-founder (along with Bobby Seale) of the Back Panther Party, Huey Newton (OT ’59), when Newton was on trial, for the third time, for shooting an Oakland police officer. During the retrial, Newton’s attorney, Charles Garry, subpoenaed former Municipal Judge Charles Fisher, at that time a leader of the Citizens Committee for Law and Order, to answer a charge that his committee was intimidating the 25 judges of the Alameda County Superior Court to “get tougher” in “political cases.” The trial was so heated that, according to the San Francisco Examiner on Oct. 12, 1971, “for the first time in county history, signs have been posted at every entrance to the courthouse and nearby Administration Building advising that all parcels, purses, briefcases, and packages are subject to search by armed sheriff’s deputies.”

(Written by his great-nephew, Felix Kuehn, Winnipeg, Canada)

In the spring of 1894, Western Canada’s first art school, the Winnipeg School of Art and Design, was opened in Main Street’s prestigious Ryan Block. In April, the Manitoba Free Press introduced the school’s director, Mr. Goddard F. Gale, to its readers by informing them that “under the guidance of the best living painters, his whole life has been spent in the studio.” The paper then went on to explain, “On both the maternal and paternal sides of the house he belongs to a race of artists. His grandfather, Joseph Severn, sketched the only portrait ever made of the poet Keats. …In fact the Gale family was so intimate with the famous art connoisseur and author, John Ruskin, that when Mr. Gale was a boy, his sketches were taken to Ruskin for criticism and correction.” Mr. Gale’s qualifications as an art teacher were further certified by the reporter who noted that Mr. Gale had studied “at the art schools on the continent under the inspirations of the grand old masters.”

Thirty years later, the popular California publication, Overland Monthly, carried a full-page article highlighting several aspects of the life and work of Mr. Gale. It concluded by stating, “Gale loves to share with his friends the interesting people he has known. He talks with Western directness in the diction of one trained from his childhood in the classics. In his sprightly anecdotes the Victorians of his boyhood live again.” Having noted, “Few Americans – Goddard Gale is a good American – have so close an acquaintance with the great men of the Victorian period in England,” it continued by explaining another connection between the renowned author of the Stones of Venice and Mr. Gale’s family:

The towering personality of Goddard Gale’s boyhood, the closest of the family friends, was John Ruskin. Gale’s uncle, Arthur Severn, married Ruskin’s adopted daughter and niece, and still lives at Brantwood, the old Ruskin home. Severn, now in advanced years, is known as one of the greatest watercolorist of England.

Speaking of Mr. Gale’s parental home, this article explained:

His father, Frederick Gale, a parliamentary barrister, was one of Gladstone’s legal advisers and carried out the plans for some of the greatest political campaigns, although curiously enough himself a staunch Conservative. Gale has many boyhood anecdotes of those campaigns and of those who fought in them.

Among the other Gale family friends were Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign, (Godard Gale remembered him “as the handsomest man he ever saw) and Francis Trevelyan Buckland, an well-known surgeon, zoologist, popular author and natural historian. “The boy Gale loved to catch snakes for Buckland on vacation, and carried on his quests in the face of severe parental objections which included a search for concealed reptiles whenever the boy returned from a tramp.” Another family friend was Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days. Published in 1857, it remains the most widely read of the dozens of 19th century British school novels.

Although the 1894 article asserted that Mr. Gale “has been a prominent artist for years on the staff of the Graphic,” it did not specifically elaborate on his rather remarkable immediate antecedents, that of having been a southwestern Manitoba homesteader. It is the Overland Monthly which provides us with a fascinating insight into this aspect of Mr. Gale’s life. Having noted his boyhood hunting expeditions on behalf of Dr. Buckland, this article continued:

Perhaps the love of the out-of-doors then fostered led Goddard Gale early in life to Canada, where he lived for some years, making drawings for illustrated papers and seeing frontier life at its wildest. A fittingly romantic courtship and marriage have been followed by an ideally happy home life.

“Seeing frontier life at its wildest” included not only his years as a western Canadian pioneer, but also his career as a surveyor and civil engineer in the employment of the Canadian Pacific Railway then constructing the first transcontinental railroad across British North America. Principally involved in surveying as well as designing and building bridges in some of the most rugged terrain on the face of the earth, the Canadian Rockies, (To family members and others, he always maintained that he was the first white person to see Lake Louise, Canada’s most beautifully situated lake), these were months of hardship, privation and extreme danger. In the introduction to his two-volume study of this herculean undertaking, the Canadian author Pierre Burton echoes Mr. Gale’s recollections, “In winter, when the blizzard strikes and the heavens are blotted out, it can be a white hell; in the summer, by all accounts, it is an enchanted realm.” In later years, Mr. Gale revelled in sharing “tall tales” of his experiences in during these railroading months.

It was in the fall of 1884 that Mr. Gale determined to terminate his railroad career in order to establish a Manitoba home two hundred miles southwest of Winnipeg, the provincial capital. Here he selected a homestead on land where an ancient Indian and fur-trading trail forded South Antler Creek, a tributary of the Souris River. The southern edge of his homestead touched the Canada-US boundary and four miles to the west was eastern border of the vast North West Territories. Those who saw the endless expanses of virgin prairie all agreed that it was indeed an “enchanted realm,” an endless expanse of wild flowers; crocuses, violets, blue, white and yellow, buttercups, silverweed, daisy, fleabanes, hare bells, wild roses and sweet peas; blue Siberian peas, white anemones, beard tongue, three-flowered avons and wild prairie lilies. In fall, even the driest spots were brightened by the beautiful red flowers of the fall cactus, a plant about the size of a golf ball encased in a armour of needle-sharp spines.

Although at the time of Mr. Gale’s arrival in Township 1-29 (its legal description) there were only five other neighbours living on its 36 square miles, it soon became the focal point of a settlement of British settlers. Many of these were recent arrivals from England and for the most part ardent members of the Church of England – and enthusiastic cricketers. Being the son of one of Great Britain’s outstanding cricket authorities, it was natural that Uncle Goddard would have taken a leading role in the organization of a local cricket club. Municipal politics was another area of special interest so that Mr. Gale was elected as the local representative on the council of the original Municipality of Arthur, one which comprised the present municipalities of Arthur, Edward and Albert. In 1890 he was elected the municipality’s third reeve.

It was while a resident of this district, then known as Butterfield after the local post office, that Mr. Gale’s name is prominently associated with the building of the first church of any denomination west of the Souris River. Lacking the resources to construct a church worthy of the noble aspirations of their fledgling community, on behalf of their newly-organized parish, Mr. Gale communicated with friends in England and approached church societies and individuals to obtain the funds to provide the necessary building materials. They responded generous with sums ranging “from ten guineas to one shilling.” At Butterfield, where all of the actual construction work was done by volunteer labour in the astonishing short time of thirty-eight working days, the finished structure was comparable with many English village churches. In an October 1892 article written for publication in English papers, Mr. Gale’s father, on a visit from England to Manitoba, described St. George’s Church at Butterfield in these words:

The building, which is fifty-six feet long, twenty wide and twenty high, is built of stone quarried by the farmers last year and hauled to the site of the building. It consists almost entirely of grey and red granite and sandstone found in the sloughs – dried up watercourses – all over the prairie. The sidewalls are ten feet high and two feet thick and the east and west walls twenty feet in height. The church is pure Gothic, and the roof of wood, covered with shingles – wooden “slates,” which look much nicer than slate and are almost imperishable in this climate.

Its consecration by the Archbishop of Rupert’s Land, Robert Machray, assisted by Rev. Wood and Mercer on Sunday 4 September 1892 attracted a majority of the district settlers of every denomination. After the service, Mr. and Mrs. Gale entertained the officiating clergy at a noon dinner in their home.

Unfortunately, the high hopes of this “British Settlement” were soon crushed by a combination of factors. A general lack of practical farming experience (made particularly evident by its pioneers having chosen a semi-arid corner of Manitoba for their new homes …the beautiful little cactus plants should have been a warning), was soon exacerbated by drought and crop failures. By the turn of the century, many of St. George’s parishioners had come to the conclusion that their homesteads were more suitable for feeding buffalo than growing crops. The parish was mostly abandoned, some moving only a few miles to the northwest into the Lyleton community where the land was better, a few returned to England, others decided to again try homesteading further west, while others found new homes in other parts of Canada or the United States. Some are reported to even have moved to Australia. By 1903 St. George’s had almost no parishioners. Today, almost a century and a quarter later, the once magnificent English church graced with a delicate spire and “eleven Gothic arches” is a unique, picturesque prairie ruin.

Mr. Gale and his wife made their way to Winnipeg – briefly – where, as we have already noted, he established an art school. From western Canada’s “Chicago of the North” the Gale’s soon moved to California where Mr. Gale’s cousin, George Henry Goddard, a gold seeker of 1850, had become one of the state’s most prominent surveyors and cartographers. The Gale’s first home in Alameda County was the town of Livermore situated some forty miles east and slightly south of Oakland. Here Mr. Gale opened an art studio in which he offered art classes and taught drawing in the Livermore High School. This was also the birthplace of their daughter, Claudia Fitzroy Gale in September 1897 and their son, Frederick Francis Sadler Gale in March 1899. Soon after this the family moved to Oakland where Mr. Gale soon became prominent in the art community of that city. Here he was appointed head of the Art Department in Oakland’s best known school, now known as Oakland Technical High, then as the Oakland Manual Training and Commercial High School.

During the first week of January 1903, tragedy struck the young family when Mrs. Gale passed away two months short of having reached her thirty-fifth birthday. She left her husband a widower with two small children, Claudia almost five and a half and Frederick, not yet four. Mrs. Gale, the former Lillian Georgina Sadler, was the daughter of the prominent pioneer settler, Jesse Johnson Sadler, of the Winlaw district south of Gainsborough, Saskatchewan. Thus, when Mrs. Gale passed away, her husband brought her remains (together with the infant she had died bringing into the world) back to be buried in the family plot in the Winlaw cemetery.

The following year when he returned to visit her grave and his in-laws he extended his visit to the Pembina Crossing district south of Manitou to visit, in the words of the local paper, “his old friend, R.N. Lea.” This was a friendship which had extended back to the first days of Mr. Gale’s arrival in Manitoba. In the fall of 1880, at Emerson, “The Gateway City to the North West,” Mr. Gale had made the acquaintance of Mr. R.N. Lea, an artist by avocation, a prosperous Warwichshire tenant farmer by profession who had decided to enrich his life – and perhaps even his bank account – by pioneering in western Canada. The two quickly became fast friends, and Mr. Lea soon persuaded the young man, whose original intention had been to immediately secure a civil engineering job with the Canadian Pacific Railway, to instead accompany him to his new home in the Pembina River Valley, Fairbrook Farm. Here, Mr. Lea suggested, Mr. Gale could be the tutor to the older of his eight children during the coming winter months. Mr. Gale agreed. It was a quarter century later, in July 1904, that he returned to Fairbrook Farm. It was a happy reunion and in June of the following year Mr. Gale made yet another visit, this time to marry Mr. Lea’s eldest daughter, Ada Mary Lea. When she had been nine, she had been his favourite pupil. Now thirty-two, she and Mr. Gale were married in the old log church at Pembina Crossing. He was forty-six she was thirty-two.

Although Mr. Gale occasionally did works on religious and historical studies (in 1894 when the Manitoba Free Press reporter had visited him in his Main Street studio, Mr. Gale was completing an oil on the early Christian martyrs) his preferred subjects were found in nature. The 1894 Free Press noted that Mr. Gale had been busy on “Rocky Mountain scenery and Canadian landscapes for the Graphic.” As a young man, Mr. Gale had mastered floral painting and still life; later engineering studies in England had perfected his drafting and mechanical drawing skills and in California he became famous for his California landscapes and coastal scenes. San Francisco Bay and the Carmel Coast one hundred miles farther south were the most frequent inspiration for his works.

Mr. Gale was a contributor to many competitions on the Pacific coast. In September 1908, according to the Manitou Western Canadian, “Mr. G. Gale, son-in-law of Mr. R.N. Lea, was a successful competitor in the recent art exhibition held in Sacramento, California. Mr. Gale’s works in watercolours carried off two blue ribbons against the leading artists of the Pacific States.” Of course it was not just small-town Manitoba newspapers who acclaimed Mr. Gale’s artistic gifts. His name was particularly well known to readers of the San Francisco Call, particular to those who followed its art columns “In the World of Art” author by Lucy B. Jerome and Margaret Marshall Doyle. The December 1924 issue of Overland Monthly also includes an evaluation typical of his peers. It noted:

The work of a California artist attracts such attention in Europe that the editors of La Revue Moderne and La Revue du Bom et du Beau write for material for critical and biographical articles; when the art critic of the London Post commends the work as among the most striking at the autumn exhibit at Liverpool, Californians are interested but not surprised. Goddard Gale’s paintings have long been known to lovers of art. The painter has won medals at various exhibits, notably the Grande Prix at the Alaskan-Yukon Exhibition [1909, Seattle Washington]. His paintings of Carmel, Point Lobos, and the Sierras are in the permanent exhibit at the Oakland Auditorium and in other collections around the Bay.

From more than fifteen hundred pictures in the autumn exhibit at Liverpool, which is considered one of the most important in Europe, the judges selected thirty-four, including the paintings of Sargent, Sorolla-y-Bas-ticla, Pissarro, Aman-Jean, and Charles Sims, R.A. Among them was “On the Trail to Paradise” by Goddard Gale, a scene in the Kings River Country of the Sierras. The picture shows the late afternoon sunshine red on the snowy peaks in the distance and the blue and violet shadows on the canyon wall shaded with oaks and pines.

Goddard Gale is a versatile painter in watercolor and in oil; a conservative who has never forgotten his early training at South Kensington. He greatly admired the work of his friend, Sidney Yard, the California watercolorist, and the same poetic and romantic atmosphere pervades the pictures of both these artists. Of the Keith school, as was Yard, Gale also has the warmest admiration for the paintings of George Inness, and his oils show in the warmth of color and arrangement of masses the influence of the earlier painter.

In June 1930, Mr. and Mrs. Gale observed their silver wedding anniversary and two years later, at the age of seventy-three, Mr. Gale retired as head of the Art Department at the Oakland Technical High School. However, he continued to paint until days before his passing on the the morning of Friday, 12 August 1938, after a short illness in Oakland’s Peralta Hospital. He was seventy-nine years of age. His funeral service was held the following Monday from the Telegraph Avenue Chapel of the Grant D. Miller mortuaries in Oakland. He was survived by his widow, Mrs. Ada Gale of, as well as his son Frederick F. Gale, a prominent Oakland businessman, and his daughter Claudia F. Gale, a well-known teacher in the California public schools. He had been a member of the Bay Region Art Association and the Oakland Tent No. 94, Woodmen of the World. In 1917 the Oakland Museum sponsored a display of his works and following his passing it had a memorial exhibition of a collection of his paintings.

Mrs. Gale survived her husband less than a year, passing away in her home at 2003 East Twenty-Ninth Street on 4 August 1939 at the age of sixty-six years. Mr. and Mrs. Gale’s remains rest in the Evergreen Memorial Park in Merced, California. Mr. Gale had been predeceased, in addition to his first wife, his mother in 1874, his father in 1905, his first son, Claude Stanley Gale who died at the age of one year in October 1892 and his only brother Arthur Stanley Gale who died on his homestead in the Lauder Sandhills of Manitoba early in 1891 under exceptionally strange circumstances. Both Mr. Gale’s son and brother are buried in the cemetery of the Butterfield Anglican Church in the Copley district of southwestern Manitoba. His current descendent include three great granddaughters: Shannon Gale of Wayzata, Minnesota; Kristin Gale of Deep¬haven, Minnesota and Courtney Gale of Half Moon Bay, California, and two great grandsons: John Goddard Gale Jr. of Phoenix, Arizona and Joshua Spencer Gale of San Fran¬cisco and four great grandchildren. Mr. Gale’s only grandchild, John Goddard Gale, died January 2010 at the age of sixty-nine at Santa Cruz, California.

Born in Mitcham, England, a suburb of London, Goddard Gale was the son of Frederick Gale, a prominent London barrister and a world-renowned cricket expert and Claudia Fitzroy Severn, a daughter of Joseph Severn, the Victorian painter who also served as British consul in Rome for twenty years. He received his elementary education in Surrey, England, and in Kent where he attended Tonbridge High School. Here the curriculum was purely classical, Greek, Latin, French, German and art. He continued his art eduction in the Art School in South Kensington, London, known since 1896 as the Royal College of Art. This was followed by additional practical studies in blacksmith shop, pattern-making, machine shop, draughting and the designing of bridges and railroads at the Crystal Palace School of Practical Engineering in London, England. Upon graduation, he secured employment as a draughtsman with Henry Vignoles, the English engineer famous for his construction of bridges and railroads in Russia, Poland and Italy. It was shortly before his twenty-second birthday he left England for Canada.

Louise Jorgensen moved from San Francisco to Oakland with her parents in 1906 after the earthquake. She attended Tech from 1913-1916, making her part of the cohort who moved form the old school on 12th and Market to the new building on 45th and Broadway. Very involved in high school life, Louise was Commissioner of Girls Activities in 1915 and active in dance productions and student government.

After graduation in 1916, Jorgensen set out on the path that was to define her life, studying dance in New York and back in the Bay Area with such notables as Ernest Belcher, Anita Stewart, and Mme. Mahr Mieczkowski (ballet), Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (modern), Irene Weed (ballroom), and Lloyd “Pappy” Shaw (square dance).

A professional dancer and choreographer, Jorgensen is perhaps best known as the force behind the Oakland Christmas Pageant, performed annually at the Oakland Civic Auditorium (now the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center) to crowds of up to 8,000 from 1919 to 1987. Beginning in 1925, Louise directed and choreographed the pageant and from 1919 until the last production in 1987, she herself danced in the pageant’s finale as “The Spirit of Christmas.” Technically an employee of Oakland Parks and Recreation, her devotion to the pageant was a labor of love and her life’s work.

She made the rounds of every public school in Oakland the fall of each year recruiting children to perform, annually turning more than 1,500 kindergartners to teenagers into fairies, elves, reindeer, holly berries, polar bears and toys. Jorgensen called the pageant “a gift to the city of Oakland from its children” (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/A-Beloved-Pageant-Oakland-event-still-stirs-2971311.php#page-1). Her history with the pageant is memorialized in a book Oakland’s Christmas Pageant 1919-1987.

Louise Jorgensen died in 1995. One of her former dancers and closest friends let us borrow Louise’s scrapbook for material for this book. Thank you, Aileen Moffitt, Class of 1968!

An accomplished artist, Xena Wright was best friends throughout her life with her high school classmate, Louise Jorgensen (an accomplished dancer and choreographer who directed the Oakland Christmas pageant for decades). Xena’s drawings appeared regularly in Scribe News. Many sketches done during her years at Tech were preserved in her friend Louise’s high school scrapbook. At Tech, Xena was active in social affairs and charitable activities.

After graduation in 1916, she drew cartoons for local newspapers and in 1920, she moved to New York City to further her career as a cartoonist. By 1924, she was listed in a national directory of graphic artists and by 1928, she was regularly publishing pen and ink drawings in the popular “pulp fiction” magazines of the day which had names like Love Story, All-Story Love, and Five Novels Monthly. Her marriage to Donald Maxwell in 1932 ended in divorce in 1933 and she never remarried or had children.

David Saunders, who maintains a website about pulp artists of the 1920s and 1930s (www.pulpartists.com) described the evolution of her drawing style this way: “Although her early style was based on the fashion tastes of the roaring twenties, her drawing style in the 1930s evolved to become strong, bold and contemporary.”

She died in New York in 1940 at the age of 43.

Bernice Morse attended Durant Grammar School before coming to Tech. Her mother, Laura Lincoln Muir Morse, was the niece of John Muir, the famous naturalist. Laura was married to Elbert Morse, whose brother was partner in a medical practice in Oakland with former Governor Pardee. The Pardee residence is now part of Preservation Park on Lake Merritt.

Bernice often described her years at Tech as the “happiest years” of her life. After graduation, she worked in the office at Tech and later for the Berkeley School District. In 1923, she married J. Peyton Kane, who became the National Advertising Manager for Safeway Stores in the 1940s. Later they ran a printing and advertising plant in Berkeley with their two sons.

Bernice was an honored guest at the Landmark Dedication of Oakland Tech on October 4, 1986. She was named “Sweetheart of the Class of 1987” at the ceremony. Bernice died shortly afterwards at the age of 88. Her diploma, report cards, and this information were sent to Tech in 1990 by her sons J. Peyton Kane Jr. and Weston Muir Kane.

Suzanne Westaway, Class of 1954, and Lauralee Westaway, Class of 1957, provided this information about their father, Dewey Westaway:

Dad grew up in the same house that he raised us in and that we still live in. At Tech, Dad took shop classes. He knew how to join miter corners and repair electric appliances. He was always able to work around the house doing things as he had a little bit of knowledge of a lot of things. He studied Spanish at Tech and spoke it exceptionally well. He could recite poems in Spanish and English. There’s something to be said of the discipline of that old rote memory style of education. He was a very good public speaker. He could always introduce someone at a speech or open a ceremony and he did it with ease. More rhetoric was taught at that time. He enjoyed high school. He went out for track, but after he came in last in one race, he quit. He also played baseball and was a good swimmer. Al Kyte was there when he was.

Our father’s father was killed in World War I when a German U-boat torpedoed his merchant ship. Our father was still at Tech at the time of his father’s death, so at age 16 or 17, he became responsible for his mother and sister, both of whom were ill. Our father grew up fast. If his father had lived, he would have gone to college, but he had to work after graduation to support his family. Dad was very mature when he graduated in 1917.

Dad had learned enough drafting at Tech to get a job working at the Hanlon Shipyards in Oakland, which later became Morse Shipyards in the Oakland Estuary. It manufactured ships for World War I. He got the equivalent of about two years of junior college at Tech. That’s how advanced it was.

After graduation, our father joined a reserve unit of the Army Air Corp which flew out of Crissy Field in San Francisco. He never went overseas, but he did learn to fly. They didn’t have navigational tools back then and their flight instructors just told them that to land at Crissy Field, they should line up with the Berkeley Pier! World War I was a huge event in our father’s life, in everyone’s life who lived through it. When we were growing up in the 30s and 40s, you could still see victims of gassing from World War I. The telltale sign was a badly deformed nose and our parents used to tell us, “He was gassed. Don’t stare.”

After the shipyards, our father went to work for an electrical company in San Francisco. What he learned at Tech led to that as well. His Tech education served him well.

Our mother, Mae Morse, went to Tech too, but she left before she finished as my father’s sister did. It was common for women of that generation to go through junior year and then leave to do business studies at, for example, Heald Business School, for a year. A lot of the Italians just went to work at canneries or laundries. There was a sense in general in our parents’ day that girls didn’t need to be educated. They needed to generate income or to find a husband. Our mother talked about parties and sporting events, maybe a sorority at Tech, but she was not much of a student. She wasn’t a big reader, but she was really funny and very creative.

James Morse, our mother’s brother, graduated in 1922 or 1923 and her sister Grace graduated in 1931 or 1932. She was seven years younger than our mother and by then, it was more accepted for girls to stay in school. James went on a football scholarship to Fresno State. His son William Morse also went to Tech and graduated in around 1948.

A student at Tech when it moved to its current location in 1915, Gabriel Ticoulat, affectionately called “Tic” by his classmates, was active in student leadership, sports, and music (both the band and the orchestra). He took a number of business classes. After graduating in June of 1917, he served as a corporal in the US Army until the war’s end in November, 1918. After the war, he went to work for the San Francisco-based paper company Crown Zellerbach, first as a laborer and over time as a clerk, salesman, sales manager, vice president and eventually, as Senior Vice President. In 1951, Gabriel was the Director of the National Production Authority (NPA)’s wood and paper division mitigating, for example, a shortage of newsprint that an undersupply of the sulphur used in processing paper had caused. In 1952, he served as the Deputy Administrator for International Materials Activities for the Defense Production Administration (DPA). In the years that Gabriel was with Crown Zellerbach, it grew to become one of the largest paper companies in the world, producing pulp, paper, logs, lumber, plywood, and containers. He died at Rossmoor in 1982.

Gabriel Vizzard, the grandson of Gabriel Ticoulat, supplied the following information:
Gabriel was one of the “dollar a year” men who served the country during the war years [World War II]. The government would not allow them to be volunteers; they had to work for at least one dollar to be employees. Gabriel had been involved with rationing paper production for the government during the war and, more interestingly, he was an envoy to the Soviet Union. He made several trips to Russia to discuss trade and was briefed by intelligence services on his return.
After the war, he was sent by his company, Crown Zellerbach, to develop joint ventures in developing the paper industry in France, where he had deep family roots, in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. He hired Jean-Philippe Galichon as his lawyer and adviser. Jean Galichon’s brother had been Charles de Gaulle’s chief of staff during his years as President of France during the 1950s. Just after the war, Jean Philippe Galichon had been the principal administrator for the Marshall Plan in France.

When Gabriel arrived in France for the first time, he thought he was conversant in French since he was the child of French immigrants. He could not understand why people did not understand him. He discovered that the French of his family was, in fact, Gasconnais, a regional dialect of French that is a mix of French, Spanish and some remnants of Latin. He went to language school and in the end, he was quite adept at speaking proper French. He was a life long Republican and a member of the well known Bohemian Club.

Duffy, whose real name was Hyman Gold, started boxing while a student at Tech. He changed his name to “Oakland” Jimmy Duffy to appeal to Irish fight fans and because of the anti-Semitism of the times. He became Oakland’s first boxing champion when he won the Pacific Coast welterweight championship in 1922. His overall record as a fighter was 115 wins, 26 losses, and 26 draws, including a win over world light welterweight champion Pinky Mitchell in a non-title bout in 1925. He is a member of the Jewish Boxers Hall of Fame. He died in 1979 at age 78.

Joyce (Holloway) Barthelson became a noted arranger, pianist, conductor, and piano teacher. She was a staff pianist for several local radio stations, taught piano, and co-founded in 1944 the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY. The school still exists under the same name. Barthelson wrote operas, piano pieces, concertos, and songs.

Stephen Bechtel Sr. was the second son of Warren A. Bechtel, the founder of the Bechtel Corporation, and the president of the company from 1933 through 1960. After graduating from Tech, he served as motorcycle dispatch rider with the 20th Engineers during World War I. Upon returning to the States he studied engineering at UC Berkeley, but dropped out during his junior year to join the family construction business. At age 33 Bechtel became company president when his father died suddenly, and at a critical time for the company: concrete was being poured for the Hoover Dam, Bechtel’s largest project up till that point and the largest public works project in U.S. history.

Stephen saw the company through the successful completion of the Hoover Dam, and over the next thirty years, he expanded Bechtel into a huge and successful engineering company with operations all over the world. His motto was His motto, was “We’ll build anything for anybody, no matter what the location, type or size.”

Stephen handed the presidency of the company over to his son, Stephen Jr. in 1960, but stayed on as the chairman until 1969. Time Magazine named Stephen Bechtel one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Della Lundberg was born in 1903 in Oakland, the only child of Hugo Lundberg and May Lundberg. When Della was a student at Tech, her father’s occupation was listed in the census as “timekeeper” for a “fishing company.” Judging from her yearbook page, Della was active in high school participating in the Piano Club, a choral concert, something called the “May Festival,” and a fashion show. She was a member of the Honor Society all four years.

After graduating in 1919, Della entered a mercantile apprenticeship program at a store in Oakland where she earned, in 1921, $12/week. At the time of her marriage at age 24, she was not working. She married Raymond William Baker, who was working as an electrical engineer. (This information came from census records and from a scrapbook which Della kept of her high school years that someone found at a yard sale and donated to Tech.)

An Olympian and the first player west of the Mississippi to be named a first team All-American in football, Harold “Brick” Muller, Class of 1919, was a three-sport star at Oakland Tech: track and field, football, and baseball. He attended high school in San Diego before transferring to Tech, likely when his football coach from San Diego, Clarence Price, was hired as an assistant coach at Cal. He followed Price to Cal for college, finding time to win a silver medal in the high jump in the 1920 Olympic games, in Antwerp, Belgium, with the encouragement from Cal track coach Walter Christie. He was 19 at the time.

Upon returning to the Cal gridiron, Muller led the team to victory in the 1921 Rose Bowl. During that Rose Bowl game, Muller had two interceptions, three recovered fumbles, five receptions and three completed passes, as the Bears crushed Ohio State in a 28-0 upset. One of Muller’s plays during that game was so unusual that it was featured in a print issue of Ripley’s Believe it Or Not. No surprise that in the same year, Muller became the first player west of the Mississippi to be named a first team All-American, an honor he would bring home again in 1922. Muller was signed to the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926, and became both head coach and a player until the team folded in 1927.

The 6’2”, 215 Muller was famous for the size of his hands, and with professional football still in its infancy when he graduated in 1922, he turned to a very different field where dexterous hands were an asset: orthopedic surgery. During World War II Muller, a Major, served with the Army Medical School. He also eventually served as a physician for Cal athletes and for the 1956 US Olympic Team.
Cal established the Brick Muller Award in 1949, which is awarded to the most valuable lineman on the Cal football team. In 1950, Muller was named to the all-time All Star college teams by the Helms Foundation and AP, and was a charter member of the College Football Hall of Fame when it opened its doors in 1951.

Josephine Holub played violin with the Arion Trio until 1932. Her name appears frequently in local press in the twenties and thirties in connection with concerts in the East Bay.

Margaret (Avery) Rowell was described in her obituary in the New York Times in 1995 as one of the country’s best-known teachers of the cello. She taught cello at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for 14 years and was on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Mills College and San Francisco State University. She developed a unique technique for playing the cello using one’s “whole body” which has come to be known as the Rowell Method and is used around the world.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Milman Parry (1902-1935) in 20th century classics scholarship. He completely changed the field of Homeric Studies (the study of the ancient Greek epic poet Homer), so much so that Parry’s influence is still relevant today. The anthropological approach that he pioneered permitted him to reflect in a new way on a very old problem, one rooted in late antiquity. The so-called “Homeric question” asks whether Homer actually existed and if he did, what role he played in the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Recording and studying traditional songs in the Balkans in the 1930’s, Parry was able to recognize signs of oral poetry in the two ancient epics. This suggested that for a long time, well before ever having been written down, the Iliad and the Odyssey were sung and as oral poetry, would therefore have been changed or “recreated” during each performance.

This realization launched Parry’s brilliant academic career and quickly brought him to an eminent position. Those of us in the field wonder to this day what he might have done, if he had only had more time, which amazing papers and books he might have written. We can only imagine. After studying at Oakland Technical High School (Class of 1919), where he first learned Latin and possibly became interested in the classics, Parry graduated from UC Berkeley and then earned a PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris where he worked with the famous scholar Antoine Meillet.

Parry taught at Harvard University until he met a tragic death when he was only 33 years old. Reports at the time said that he was accidentally killed by a shotgun in a hotel room in Los Angeles. An ancient Greek poet wrote: “He whom the gods love, dies young.” The gods must have loved Milman Parry a lot, if they gave him such a short time and such a great talent. He left many papers and a son, Adam, who published them in a volume in 1971. At the time of his death, Parry was just establishing a reputation in his field, but today his work is considered to be the turning point of Homeric Studies in the 20th century.

No one who approaches the study of Homer today can ignore the contributions of Milman Parry.

(Contributed by Marco Gemin, PhD student at Università di Roma “Tor Vergata,” Italy, Visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley in 2014.)

Taylor Douthit was a Major League baseball outfielder with the St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, and Chicago Cubs. Douthit is the all-time record holder for range factor by a center fielder. He played in three World Series for the St. Louis Cardinals, winning one in 1926. He made 547 putouts in center field for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1928, the most in a season by a big-league outfielder. In a career that spanned all or part of 11 seasons, Douthit played 1,074 major-league games, his final one in 1933. He had a .291 career batting average, but hit .336 for the Cards in 1929. He attended UC Berkeley and was inducted in Cal Sports Hall of Fame in 1988 for baseball and basketball. He died in Fremont at age 85 in 1986.

Wilhelmina Wolthius, Class of 1919, known later as Antonia Brico, became one of the first female symphonic conductors. She was the first woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic and the first to conduct the New York Philharmonic.

Her obituary in The New York Times in 1989 quotes her as saying, ”I do not call myself a woman conductor… I call myself a conductor who happens to be a woman.” She founded the Women’s Symphony Orchestra in New York City and conducted the Denver Businessmen’s Symphony until 1985. Both were renamed in her honor.

Folk singer Judy Collins directed a film in 1974 honoring her former teacher’s life entitled Antonia: Portrait of a Conductor.