Farewell
Philip Brown, Jr. (B.S.’44 ME) died on April 9. Brown was a member of Alpha Delta Phi and in Navy ROTC. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, received specialized sweeper training and served on the U.S.S. Hobson during the WWII assault on Okinawa. Brown began a career at Otis Elevator as a draftsman and worked his way up to executive vice president for the U.S. far west and Pacific basin regions. He and his wife of 67 years, Dorothy, raised four children.
Benjamin Buzzo (B.S.’42 ME) died on July 27. After graduating from Berkeley, Buzzo entered the U.S. Army and served as an officer in Europe during WWII, taking part in the Normandy invasion on D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Buzzo began a career as a petroleum engineer and worked in the U.S. and internationally. Buzzo and his wife, Marylin, were married for 63 years and raised four children.
Arthur Fong (B.S.’43 EE) died on March 17 at the age of 92. The son of a grocer in Sacramento, Fong decided to forgo the family business and instead attended UCLA, and then Berkeley. Three years after graduation, he was recruited by William Hewlett to join Hewlett-Packard, at the time a company of only about 100 people. In the 1960s, Fong’s designs accounted for about a quarter of all HP’s revenue, bringing in a total of $55 million. Throughout his career, Fong received awards and recognition from HP, Berkeley Engineering and IEEE. Fong retired from HP in 1995. He and his wife, Mary, were married for 69 years and together raised four children.Gee-Minn (“Jimmy”) Chang (M.S.’86 MSE) died on March 6. Chang obtained his B.S. from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan before coming to Berkeley, where he worked in the Microlab and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was a semiconductor process engineer at Integrated Device Technology (IDT) in San Jose. In 2000, Chang returned to the Microlab as a senior development engineer until his death. Chang and his wife of 27 years, Edna, raised two daughters.
William Godden died on April 6 at the age of 88. A civil engineering professor at Berkeley, Godden served as associate dean of the college from 1964 to 1991. During WWII, Godden worked on a team of six engineers designing military bridges in Europe and North Africa. He received his Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Belfast and also served on the faculty there. Godden and his wife of 54 years, Anna, raised four children.
Frank Alwyn Martin (B.S.’48 ME) died December 6, 2011, in Ashland, OR. Born in Los Angeles in 1922, Frank served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during WWII. He was stationed in Roswell, NM, where he worked on the Norden bombsight. Martin then worked for Lockheed Aircraft until his retirement in 1980. Martin and his wife of 60 years, Jeanne, raised four children and spent their empty nest years traveling the world. Martin fought Parkinson’s disease for 12 years and died two months short of his 90th birthday.
Douglas C. Moorhouse (B.S.’50 CE) died on March 14 at the age of 86. After serving in WWII, Moorhouse worked his way up to president and CEO of Woodward-Clyde, a leading consulting engineering firm. Moorhouse was nominated to the
National Academy of Engineering. After his retirement, he built a vineyard and house in Alexander Valley. He and his wife, Dorothy, raised two children.
James Murakami (B.S.’52 ME) died on April 28. Murakami grew up in Sonoma County; after Pearl Harbor, he and his family were incarcerated first in Merced, CA and then in Amache, CO for three years. Murakami served in the military before graduating from Berkeley. He was the national president of the Japanese American Citizens League and was instrumental in passing redress legislation requiring the U.S. government to apologize for the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in WWII. Murakami and his wife of 59 years raised two children.
Scott Shoaf (B.S.’63, M.S.’71 CE) died on May 3. He was appointed deputy director of the department of public works and received a commendation from San Francisco mayor Art Agnos for leadership during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Shoaf and his wife, Rebecca, were married for 30 years.
Robert Lee Vance, Jr. (B.S.’54 CE) died on March 1. He was a member of the Chi Psi fraternity at Cal, and throughout his life he remained an avid Cal football booster. He worked for the California Department of Transportation as a project manager before joining C.K. Moseman Construction. In the 1990s, Vance founded RLV Engineering. He worked on highway and bridge projects throughout the Bay Area and in Los Angeles and Honolulu.