By Barbara Anderson
INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
The story of how Onome Ojo '00 came to be drafted by the New Orleans Saints football team is proof once again that fact is stranger than fiction. The former Aggie wide receiver had never played in a football game until he came to UC Davis. He certainly had no intention of playing here until flag football caught his interest. He never would have joined the football team if a friend hadn't introduced him to coach Bob Biggs' wife in church. His play wasn't particularly impressive his first two and a half seasons. But then, oh, that last half-season. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it, "Ojo started catching everything in sight and running a long way after each reception." And the rest is history--or prelude. And certainly, as Ojo said to the Chronicle, "It's a miracle to me."
FIRE THAT FACT CHECKER
Sure, UC Davis is physically the biggest campus in the UC system, but Time magazine stretched things a wee bit in its profile of alumnus David Pearson '84 earlier this year. Pearson, general manager for Mondavi's French operations, is a graduate, they said, of the University of Southern California in Davis. Put some Aggie overalls on that Trojan!
UNIVERSITY OF HOLLYWOOD IN DAVIS
Heard on TV's "Dharma & Greg": Greg, speaking of the show's community garden, "The botanist from UC Davis recommended more fertilizer. . . ." That's UC Davis: manure advice and a whole lot more.
Seen and heard on TV and in print and radio ads across the country: professor emeritus of entomology and bee wrangler Norm Gary. Gary has been a local celebrity for many years, known for his ability to train bees and for his intestinal fortitude to stand still--or even play a saxophone--while covered with the critters. He's handled bees for some 17 movies now, including Fried Green Tomatoes, My Girl, Man of the House, The Beverly Hillbillies and numerous horror flicks, but now he's the star himself—in national TV and radio spots and in full-page ads in Time, People, Sunset, Popular Mechanics—hat makes me nervous," he says from behind a covering of creepy-crawly bees. He may be seen coast to coast, but he's still not recognized on the street. "People don't recognize me without my bees on," he says.
A GOOD BOOK
It's 109 degrees, it's your turn for a blackout, so head for the beach and pull out a good book! Just in case you could use some reading suggestions, we asked a couple UC Davis folks what's on their summer reading list.
Says Greg Pasternak, assistant professor of land, air and water resources: "This summer I plan to go back in time as well as head into the future" with, first, A Doctor's Gold Rush Journey to California, edited by Necia Dixon Liles. The diary of Dr. Israel Shipman Pelton Lord, the book's last line is, "If I should get time, I will give you my reasons why I think [99%] who . . . go to California are either mad-men, fools or radically unprincipled, and of course dishonest." The second title on his list is Eon, by Greg Bear, about which Pasternak says: "Imagine boarding a hollowed-out asteroid on a journey to the stars, only to discover a means for creating a universe within the universe. . . . Would you still care about the stars when you have whole galaxies to explore within?"
Belfast-born Winder McConnell, chair of German and Russian and director of Medieval studies, plans to stick closer to Earth with books about his Irish homeland, although he observes, "It's easy to become ambitious about summer reading and then discover that reality intrudes upon the best laid plans." McConnell hopes he'll have time to get to Frank O'Connor's The Big Fellow: Michael Collins & the Irish Revolution ("this book combines both my prejudice for O'Connor as a writer and my interest in one of Ireland's great, if ill-fated, political personalities, a leader in the fight for Irish independence"). Next is Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf ("I have met Heaney only once, during his visit to this campus in the '80s, and found him not only a marvelous poet, but also a remarkable 'mensch'"). And last, Arthur A. Durand's Stalag Luft III: The Secret Story is about one of the biggest prisoner-of-war camps in Germany for allied air force personnel and the place from which the "Great Escape" took place. Although this may seem to have nothing to do with Ireland, the subject holds significance for him, McConnell says, because his Uncle Winder, after whom he was named, was a Royal Air Force squadron leader who was captured when he bailed out over France in 1944; he was subsequently interned in Stalag Luft III until its evacuation in 1945.
PLAY ON!
Harley English, retired professor of plant pathology, gives new meaning to the term active senior. English, who retired in 1978 and just celebrated his 90th birthday in April is a nationally ranked tennis player who still hits the courts three times a week. He was feted this spring with a grand party, and friends and Aggie supporters are working to raise $20,000 toward UC Davis' planned tennis center to have a court named after the inspiring nonagenarian.
