Volume 25 · Number 2 · Winter 2008
Letters
The summer of love lives on
I came upon your story “The Summer of Love Lives On” [summer ’07] by chance and loved reading it. It brought back a lot of memories. I was the first manager of the Coffee House. . . . Timothy Leary had come to campus, gave his “Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out” talk the quarter or so before, and suddenly school seemed meaningless to me. So I “stopped out” for a quarter. I wasn’t one day into my stop-out, when the chancellor and the head of ARA Slater, the food service at the time, asked me if I would take the Coffee House pro-ject on. The deal was, if the Coffee House broke even at the end of its first six months, the student body got to keep it permanently. I gave it everything I had. . . . The food came from ARA Slater at the time. I’ll never forget opening day. We were all so nervous. . . . The turnout was overwhelming — a couple hundred students by lunch time, line way out the door, us scrambling for all we were worth. It was a huge hit and remained so from then on out. Oddly, I don’t recall the home-baked brownies that are said to be a tradition from the beginning. But then, we were doing a lot of things, all so new, that nothing was a tradition yet. And maybe folks did call it the CoHo, but to me, it was the Coffee House — and one of my proudest accomplishments.
Ellen O’Neill
Thank you so much for mentioning the ASUCD Coffee House in your article on the Summer of Love. Some of my fondest memories of UCD took place there, where I was a kitchen employee from 1997 to 2001. I wholeheartedly agree with current students that it is the best place to work on campus, even despite 6 a.m. opening shifts! I remember fun and camaraderie, and use the food knowledge I learned there to this day. And I continue to win people over by making Tatros!
Amelia Johnson ’01
Oakland
Pride of the campus
As I watched the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco earlier this summer, I was very pleased to see the Cal Aggie Marching Band-uh marching up Market Street. I saw no other college or university represented that day, so I was very proud to be an Aggie alum that day. So a big thanks, Aggie Band-uh, from all current, former and future gay Aggies. You are indeed “Bold, Blue and Bitchin’ and the Pride of the Davis Campus.”
Dave Mosher ’75
Overlooked case connection
As a Davis alum, I read with interest your article “Fingered by a Bug” [fall 2007]. Although you were not aware, I was the FBI behavioral profiler who was tasked by the Kern County District Attorney’s Office and the Bakersfield Police Department to conduct a behavioral analysis and interpretation of the crime scene behavioral dynamics. I testified as an expert witness at the trial along with Professor Lynn Kimsey. It would have been an even more interesting article for your readers if they could have seen two UC Davis alumni involved in this case as experts from completely different perspectives. It was a great article, though.
Mark E. Safarik ’76
Executive Director, Forensic Behavioral Services International
Fredericksburg, Va.
Voting machine worries
Regarding “Voting Machine Vulnerabilities” [fall ’07 issue]: I’m surprised or actually pretty worried that nobody has mentioned that whoever writes the voting machine program can hide somewhere in the computer code some little routine that can do whatever with the vote count. It could even evade being discovered on a test run if the code didn’t kick in until the voting date. I sure hope somebody (many somebodies) are checking the code and compiling it after it’s checked to make sure we don’t get scammed by voting machines or “chads” again.
Steve Holmes ’75