| 1973After 25 years of federal service, Joel Cleary recently retired from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Albuquerque, N.M., where he was an assistant professor and chief of orthopedic surgery. He has returned to Havre, Mont., where his general orthopedic surgery patients include Montana State University. • Clifton “Randy” Weyeneth is looking for former members of interdenominational UC Davis Navigators. He can be reached at [Randy.Weyeneth@navigators.org] or (719) 594-2733. |
| 1974Scott Cochrane is a pediatrician at Holyoke Pediatric Associates in Holyoke, Mass., where he has worked for the past 16 years. He lives in nearby Amherst with his wife, Carol, who is a physical therapist in the Amherst schools. Their daughter, Lizzie, is at the University of New Hampshire and their son, Eric, is at Keene (N.H.) State College. Scott still loves to swim and he returned last fall to California with his brother, Steve Cochrane, to swim the RCP Tiburon Mile, a race from Angel Island to Tiburon in San Francisco Bay. • Van Snow ’74, D.V.M ’78, a prominent equine veterinarian from Santa Ynez, died in April when his small plane crashed just short of the Borrego Valley Airport runway in Borrego Springs. He was 58. According to news accounts, he had been practicing for an acrobatic flying contest and reported mechanical troubles just before his Harmon Rocket crashed. He was an expert on treating lameness in horses and had been an early pioneer in shock-wave therapy to treat soft-tissue injuries and stress fractures. He practiced equine medicine in Virginia and the Santa Ynez Valley and in 1997 established Santa Lucia Farm, where he bred and treated horses. A flying enthusiast, he sold the Long EZ experimental plane to John Denver in which the singer crashed in October 1997. Dr. Snow is survived by his fiancé, Lindsey Creed; children April, Amy, Hayley, Tye, Shelbie and Cody; mom, Evelyn Brockel; dad, Lawrence Snow; brothers, Gary, Steve, Ronnie, Alan and Lawrence; sisters, Jan, Gayle, Rosalie, Marcia and Carly; seven grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews. • Francis Lee was featured in the 2010 summer edition.
Francis Lee by Jo Shroyer
Occupation: former CEO and current board chair for Synaptics in Santa Clara.
At your fingertips: If you don’t know Lee’s company by name, you probably know it by touch. Synaptics designs and produces the sensing technology used in more than 60 percent of the touchpads in laptops, smart phones, MP3 music players and other devices.
A series of fortunate events: Lee ’74 credits his company’s success to its employees—“In the end, it’s the people who get the job done”—and his own career success to luck. “My life has really been a series of things I stumbled into,” he said.
Pointing the way: Lee was 16 when he moved with his family from Hong Kong to Sacramento and enrolled as a junior in a local high school, not able to speak any English. “There were no ESL programs,” Lee said. “It was total immersion.” His first challenge was figuring out the cafeteria. “I pointed at some Twinkies near the cash register and handed over a $20 bill. That was what I had for lunch at first. And they were pretty good!” The next year, Lee transferred to McClatchy High School, and did so well in math and science that he was runner-up for a scholarship to the University of Southern California. But without the scholarship, he attended Sacramento City College for two years then transferred to UC Davis. He majored in electrical engineering on the advice of a Sacramento City professor who foresaw semiconductors as the wave of the future.
Semiconductor sense: After graduating, Lee went to work for the National Semiconductor as a product engineer. He stayed with the company for more than 20 years, the last seven in executive roles. In 1995, lee started a new company, NSM, a Hong Kong-based joint venture of National Semiconductor and S. Megga. He welcomed the return to Hong Kong for the chance to give his son and daughter a cultural immersion experience similar to the one he had. When they came back to the U.S. in 1998, his children were fluent in Chinese and he was ready for a new challenge. He joined Synaptics as director and CEO, positions he held for a decade until his retirement last July.
“We are not a tech company. We are a human interface company, making use of one of the five intuitive sense, touch.”
• Jack Czarnecki was featured in the 2010 summer edition.
Jack Czarnecki by Emily Grosvenor
Occupation: Truffle hunter
Food alchemist: Some people are never done finding what they’re looking for. Take Jack Czarnecki ’74, who grew up foraging for mushrooms in eastern Pennsylvania with his father, a mushroom photographer. Now one of the nation’s premier truffle experts, Czarnecki has parlayed his successful career as a restaurant owner and chef to bring the essence of truffles into the country’s food consciousness—one sweep of the rake at a time. For years Czarnecki wowed diners with truffle dishes at his restaurant, the Joel Palmer House, in Dayton, Ore. Now, he has created an authentic truffle oil using American ingredients—a first, according to Saveur magazine. “This is the culmination of my life,” Czarnecki said. “This is the project I was born for.”
The nose knows: While studying bacteriology at UC Davis, Czarnecki took a course that would forever steer him toward his career at the forefront of America’s food culture: “Sensory Evaluation of Wine.” “That’s the most important course I took for learning how to cook,” Czarnecki said. “It also taught me all that I needed to know about making a decent food product.” Now, his nose for scent and his well-honed palate have found new inspiration as he harnesses the essence of truffles, one of the world’s most sought-after ingredients. After months of experimenting in a home laboratory, Czarnecki discovered a way to produce a natural American truffle oil for commercial use. He starts with an olive oil with little natural flavor and infuses as much as half a pound of truffles for two weeks in each bottle to leech out the truffles’ heady scent. Selling online at oregontruffleoil.com, he ships the oil around the globe—surprising world-class chefs and home cooks who have never tasted truffles from outside of Europe.
Treasure hunter: Czarnecki digs truffles out by hand in the mountains of western Oregon. On a recent spring day, he tied a carved-out mild jug to his waist and trudged to a fern-blanketed patch under a single Douglas fir. And then he dug, looking for a glimpse of creamy white. If his eyes weren’t attuned to meager light filtering through the canopy, he just might have raked a baseball-sized white truffle past his foot and not even noticed. “That’s when I really get mad—when I’m standing right on top of them,” Czarnecki said, pulling a truffle out of the earth.
“It [digging truffles] is like a drug. Every one of the truffles you see pop out of dark sweet earth, it generates a dopamine response.”
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| 1975Barbara Frankel ’75 died of brain cancer in April in her Davis home at age 68. She had worked as an aide at West Davis Elementary School and a teacher at Davis Parent Nursery School and Valley Oak Elementary School for a total of 20 years. She retired in 1999, but volunteered in classrooms and for Sutter Davis Auxiliary, Jewish Fellowship of Davis/Congregation Bet Haverim, Yolo Hospice and other organizations. She was also was one of the founders and co-chair of Yolo Compassionate Friends, a nonprofit support group for parents whose children had died. Survivors include her husband of 48 years, Tom; son, David, daughter, Valerie and grandchildren, Aaron, Noah, Nathan, Simon and Abby. Her daughter, Loren, died in 2004. |
| 1976Karen Swenson is chief of staff at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. She received her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1981 and completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at UC Irvine in 1985. She co-founded Women Partners in Health in Austin, which now has seven women obstetricians. Her son, Winston Myers, is a freshman in college and daughter, Grace Katharine Myers, a high school junior at LASA High School. Swenson delivered one of her grandchildren, Ethan. She says she and her husband, Ken Cauthern, enjoy spring and the wildflowers of Austin. |
| 1977Guy Halgren was elected in April to a fourth three-year term as executive committee chair at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton. He is the first chair elected to four terms since the law firm was founded in Los Angeles in 1927. Since Halgren stepped into the management role in 2001, Sheppard Mullin has grown from a California firm with four offices and $149 million in gross revenue to an international firm with 11 locations, including New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanghai, and annual gross revenues of $361 million. • Susan Matcham, J.D., was appointed to a Monterey County Superior Court judgeship by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in April. She had been an assistant city attorney for Salinas since 2007. Previously, she was a partner at Caballero, Matcham and McCarthy from 1982 to 2007, a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance from 1979 to 1982, and a staff attorney for the Agricultural Labor Relations Board from 1978 to 1979. |
| 1978Jackson Gualco was recently re-elected president of the Institute of Governmental Advocates, a professional trade association that represents the interests of state-registered lobbyists. • Jennifer Robin is the author of the recently released Growing More Beautiful: An Artful Approach to Personal Style (Arteful Press), which has won awards from publishing groups for best fashion and design, beauty and self-help book. She is a career fashion stylist and owner of the image consulting firm Clothe Your Spirit, as well as an exhibiting painter. |
| 1979Two more Aggies have been inducted into the Vintners Hall of Fame—Randall Grahm ’79, owner of Bonny Doon Vineyards in the Santa Cruz mountains, and Zelma Long, who did master’s studies in enology and viticulture in 1968–70 and now produces wine in California at Long Vineyard and in South Africa under the Vilafonte label.
Grahm and Long were among five winemakers in March to receive the honor from the St. Helena-based Culinary Institute of America. According to the institute, Grahm “proved that it was possible to craft and sell great Rhône wine blends from California.” And Long, who worked for Robert Mondavi and Simi wineries before starting her own wineries, helped break the glass ceiling for women in the California wine industry.
Twenty-seven people have been inducted into the Vintner’s Hall of Fame since it was established in 2007. Among them are three renowned faculty members from the Department of Viticulture and Enology—professor emeritus Carole Meredith, inducted in 2009, and the late professors Maynard Amarine ’35 and Harold Olmo, both inducted in 2007—as well as alumnus Justin Meyer ’67, M.S. ’68, the late winemaker at Silver Oak Cellars, inducted in 2009. Two other Hall of Fame members have helped shape the future of UC Davis’ viticulture and enology program—the late winemaker Robert Mondavi, inducted in 2007, who helped establish the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, as well as the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and Jess Jackson, head of Kendall-Jackson wines, whose gifts are helping to making the new teaching and research winery a model of sustainability. To read more about the Vinter Hall of Fame inductees, visit ciaprochef.com/winestudies/vintners.html.
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| 1980Lisa Friedman Dunbar, Cred. ’81, who has overseen the expansion of Head Start preschool programs for the El Monte City School District in Los Angeles County, received the 2010 Distinguished Alumna of the Year Award from the UC Davis School of Education in April. She has been director of the district’s child development programs since 1992. A preschool program she established to blend regular and special education has been hailed as a national model. • Mindy Pennybacker, J.D., wrote the book Do One Green Thing: Saving the Earth Through Simple, Everyday Choices (St. Martin’s Press), which came out in March. Her book, which gives practical and effective tips on how to save energy, conserve water and use less toxic materials, has a forward by actress Meryl Streep. • The late Nancy Rupp Tibbitts was honored posthumously in March with a Common Threads Award for contributions to agriculture and her community. She worked at the UC Davis Internship and Career Center for 26 years, helping thousands of students find internships and careers in agriculture. In 1993, she and her husband, George, founded Tibbitts Farming Co., which produces rice and other crops. She died last October. Common Threads awards are sponsored by the California Agricultural Leadership Foundation, UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, California Women for Agriculture and various county farm bureaus. • Margaret Washington, Ph.D., a history professor at Cornell University, received the inaugural 2010 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians in April for her book, Sojourner Truth’s America (University of Illinois Press). The award is for best book in African American women’s and gender history. • Kum “Dan” Wong accepted a three-year scholarship from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, where he will be working on a doctorate in transportation planning. His proposed dissertation will focus on surface-based transportation modes and systems pertaining to airports and their surroundings. He recently retired as senior transportation planner with the San Francisco Airport Commission. • Michele (Simmons) Konnersman, D.V.M. ’80, died at her home in McKinleyville last December after suffering a stroke. A goat specialist, she consulted with large-animal owners and wrote several goat-related short stories and scholarly papers. In addition, she worked for Humboldt County nurseries and the U.S. Forest Service and was known for her skills as a farm equipment operator. She traveled the world with her husband, Brian, and is remembered for her intellect and curiosity as well as her love of animals, especially goats and cats. In addition to her husband, survivors include her stepdaughter, Jolene; brother George Michael Simmons and his wife, Ellen; and sister-in-law and her husband, Carol and John Turner. |
| 1982A book co-authored by Erv Thomas, Four Secrets to Liking Your Work (Financial Times Press), won a 2008 award from the Society for Performance Improvement and has been translated into six languages. He recently launched Iceberg Consulting in Folsom, and does leadership development training for companies. |
