Alumni to Remember

Though no longer with us, these alumni made their mark.

pen and ink portrait of a Black man wearing a yellow shirt and dark tie, against a green background
 Ana Panaligan/UC Davis

 

Horace Hampton ’50

Horace Hampton ’50 was ASUCD’s first Black president. At the time he enrolled, he was only one of a couple dozen Black students who had attended UC Davis. As a student, he was very involved — serving as editor of The California Aggie, volunteering and of course winning the presidency at ASUCD. After UC Davis, he worked as a farmer and then in development and investment. He died in 1991. (Summer 1992) 

Harry Hazen

Harry Hazen ’18 — that’s 1918 — documented Davis life during the earliest years of campus. His photos figured prominently in a 2017 story detailing how Davis became a city after a fire damaged half the town in 1916. Hazen earned his diploma from the University Farm and became a commercial beekeeper, later running a flooring company in Los Angeles. He died in 1953.

Thomas Williams

Thomas Williams ’64, D.V.M. ’68, was a leading expert on sea otters, offering veterinary care at the Monterey Bay Aquarium from its outset and helping oil-drenched otters at the site of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. He died in 2017.

Ann Scheuring

Ann Scheuring ’76 wrote the first book-length narrative history of UC Davis: Abundant Harvest: The History of the University of California, Davis, consisting of approximately 400 pages and including more than 250 pictures and a set of reference appendices. She died in 2014.

Hiep Thi Le

Hiep Thi Le ’94 was plucked from among many hopefuls to take the starring role in Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth when she was just a student at UC Davis in 1992. The movie follows a young Vietnamese woman who survives the occupation of her country, marries an American marine and eventually returns home to confront her past. The character’s story hit close to home for Le, who resettled in California from Vietnam with her family. She died in 2017.

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