1966

In 1966, with a Masters in Economics from the Bocconi University of Milan, I won a two-year Harkness fellowship that had several appealing features (it was prestigious and hard to get, it required foreign students to make a three months trip all around the U.S., and let winners choose where to study). I chose Berkeley because it had an impressive sociological faculty, an active student movement, and I wished to discuss with Smelser my translation and my introduction to the Italian edition of Parsons'-Smelser's Economy and Society.

On July 22, 1975, Maurice Manel died in Montreal at the age of 35. A fertile, scholarly, and ironical mind, he is greatly missed by his friends at the University of California, Berkeley where he had just received his Ph.D.; his colleagues at Atkinson College of York University in Toronto; and those who knew him at Johns Hopkins and McGill, where he also did graduate work in sociology.

Plotting to avoid Vietnam, I went to U. Michigan where recent Berkeley graduate John Lofland convinced me to switch to Berkeley. I spent most of 1966-1968 on a spiritual/psychedelic journey, and was an indifferent student at best. After a year of world travel I returned briefly, but since I didn't 'love' America I left it. Four years in South America, farming, and abusing my body, propelled me to a missionary hospital where, rather than dying, I was reborn.

Ted Bradshaw, a UC Davis professor of community development who helped California communities grapple with base closures, energy issues and creating healthy social systems, died Aug. 5 (2006) while jogging near his home in Oakland. He was 63.

Trained as a rural sociologist, Bradshaw came to the Department of Human and Community Development as an assistant professor in 1995 after a nearly 20-year career as a researcher andlecturer at UC Berkeley. He made full professor in June.

Norma arrived in Berkeley in the mid-sixties with an undergraduate degree from University of Michigan in nursing, which she hated. Having never taken a sociology course, she plunged into graduate school to study social movements and social change, inspired especially by Herbert Blumer. Active in the anti-war movement, Norma wrote her dissertation on 'Vietnam and the Veterans' Consciousness' with William Kornhauser and Arlie Hochschild as committee members.

I entered the sociology graduate program in 1966 in my mid-30s. I had a law degree and had been working in law-related jobs for ten years. From law school on, I had been fascinated by the curious nature of law, and I was looking for an appropriate academic discipline from which to study it from the outside. Berkeley in the late 1960s was an exhilarating place for me, although I found myself a full half generation out of synch with the passionate young Marxists who seemed to make up most of my classmates.