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CHEERS: Mondavi helped establish Napa Valley as a premier wine-making area.
Eric Riseberg/AP |
The Godfather
When Robert Mondavi graduated from Stanford, he followed his father’s encouragement and entered the wine business. Crippled by Prohibition and the Depression, the few Northern California wineries left were struggling. Wine drinkers in this country were, like Mondavi’s parents, mostly immigrants who made their own. Today Napa Valley produces some of the best vintages in the world, thanks in large part to Mondavi’s forceful vision. He was, one observer said, “the godfather of American wines.”
Mondavi, ’36, died May 16 at his home in Yountville, Calif., at 94. He was born in Virginia, Minn. When he was 10, the family moved to Lodi, Calif., where Robert’s Italian father, Cesare Mondavi, worked as a grape wholesaler. After graduating from Stanford, Robert Mondavi worked first for Sunnyhill Winery. But Mondavi—acting on his belief that Northern California wineries could produce top-notch wines—persuaded his parents to buy Charles Krug Winery in 1943. He introduced new technologies and debuted the first tasting rooms while running the winery with his brother, Peter. In the mid-1960s, he built Robert Mondavi Winery, an immense landmark on Highway 29.
A marketing guru, he knew that part of selling wine was making the lifestyle appealing. He was among the first to place wine in context with good food, and decided to make wine from sauvignon blanc (which he renamed fumé blanc) because he knew the fancy name would appeal to customers. His sales skyrocketed.
Success did not come without price. Mondavi had a legendary falling-out with and decades-long estrangement from Peter (they eventually reconciled), and divorced his first wife, Marjorie Declusin, after nearly 40 years. In 1980, Mondavi married a former employee, Margrit Biever.
In 2004, the Mondavi family sold its winery to Constellation Brands for $1.03 billion, but his children carry on in the business. In 2007, he was the only living honoree in the inaugural class of the Vintners Hall of Fame. He was known for many philanthropic gifts, notably $35 million to UC-Davis for a performing arts complex and a science center.
Four decades after Mondavi’s arrival in Napa Valley, when French judges picked American wines (many made by Mondavi protégés) over French ones in a blind taste test, Mondavi knew he had helped to cement the place of American wines on the world stage.
Survivors: his wife, Margrit; two sons, Michael and Timothy; one daughter, Marcia; nine grandchildren, including Caitlin Borger, ’06; and his brother, Peter, ’36.
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HERE TO HELP: Myers secured medical aid for thousands around the world.
Peggy Myers |
Always a Doctor
When his youngest child entered college, Theodore M. Myers could have started down the road toward a relaxing retirement. In-stead, he spent the next 25 years volunteering in medical clinics around the world.
Myers, ’45, MD ’48, of San Mateo, died May 11, at 83. Born in San Francisco, he graduated from Stanford Phi Beta Kappa and served in the Air Force during the Korean War. He was a Bay Area physician and psychiatrist who, in 1962, worked aboard Project Hope, a converted Navy hospital ship. Two decades later, when all five children were out of the house, he and his wife, Peggy, committed themselves to international relief work. Peggy, a photographer, accompanied Myers on his trips, documenting the volunteer work.
Their first trip was to Sudan, where 400,000 Ethiopian refugees had fled. Myers returned a year later as a volunteer consultant to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which aids refugees around the world. Myers made more than 10 trips to Ethiopia, establishing village-based medical programs throughout Gondar province and creating a clinic in Addis Ababa that continues to provide care for 23,000 Ethiopian Jews who have migrated from the countryside. In Cuba, Myers established a Havana pharmacy and started a consulting program that brings American academic doctors to visit with Cuban physicians and discuss advances in medicine. In Russia, he formed a program offering medicine to elderly members of Jewish communities. For 13 years, he conducted an international conference in Russia, giving American and Russian physicians an opportunity to confer.
Survivors: his wife of 57 years; three daughters, Barbara, Melanie and Jennifer; two sons, James, ’86, MS ’88, and Marc; and a brother, Maxwell, ’44.
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MAN OF SCIENCE: Lamb changed physics.
Courtesy Stanford News Service |
The Physicist
Willis Lamb’s eponymous groundbreaking discovery six decades ago still forms part of the foundation of quantum electrodynamics and is a key aspect of modern elementary particle physics. Willis E. Lamb Jr. died May 15 in Tucson, Ariz., at 94. He earned a bachelor’s degree from UC-Berkeley and then completed his PhD there in 1938.
While teaching at Stanford, Lamb won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics for the “Lamb shift.” The work, conducted at Columbia University in the 1940s, led physicists to rethink the basic concepts behind the application of quantum theory to electromagnetism.
A year after winning the Nobel Prize, Lamb left Stanford for Oxford. He moved again in 1962, to Yale. In 1974, he joined the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. His many awards included election to the National Academy of Sciences and the 2000 National Medal of Science. Survivors: his third wife, Elsie, whom he married in January; and a brother, Perry. |
