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My
first college chemistry lecture in 1976 was from (ex-Bruin)
Professor George Pimentel, inventor of the chemical laser.
It was just before the big game and he had a large beaker on a
table that held two fluids: the top half red and the bottom half
white. And 5 minutes before the scheduled end of lecture, he
said, "I hope you're all going to the game to support Joe Roth and
the team", and then he held a dropper over the beaker and with one
drop turned it to blue and gold. Joe Roth died, soon after
that post-season, from cancer, as did Pimentel, 13 years
later. Cal football designates each year's home game against
either USC or UCLA as the Joe Roth Memorial Game which features
throwback Joe Roth era uniforms.
My first engineering class was Mechanics of Materials, taught by
Kiev born, and Stanford alumnus, Professor Egor Popov, using his
text. On the first day, the hall was over-packed, with some
students standing in the aisles. Popov looked about and
said, in his Russian accent, "there are too many of you here, some
of you...vill be eliminyated." I had a bit of trouble with
the first homework and erased quite a bit, so in the third session
Popov said "some of your homeworks vere so messy, I could not
believe it" - prompting me to be very careful and neat from then
on. In the 5th session he asked the class if any of us new
anything about music and, because I had just read it in a paper
that morning, I said "well, Pavarotti is on TV tonight." He
looked oddly at me and went on with class and gave us our first
exam. He stood behind me until I had finished and, as I was
about to start checking, said "well, I did not think it was very
difficult" - so I skipped the check, turned it in and used the
extra free time to read sci-fi in the faculty glade on a beautiful
day. |
