After 63 years, Melvin Hull will finally get his UC Davis diploma. Hull, a World War II veteran who last attended UC Davis in 1942, will receive an Aggie diploma at the homecoming celebration on Oct. 20. Rita Bunch, assistant dean for UC Davis Extension, said she bumped into the Eureka resident at an Alumni College event earlier this year. ""He just said, 'I couldn't afford to pay for my diploma. It was during the war.'" Campus officials then looked into Hull's status and confirmed that he met graduation requirements for a bachelor's degree in May 1942 with a major in agriculture education. ...

Geology professor Jeff Mount will no longer be serving on the state Reclamation Board, which handles flood-control policy in California and oversees a 1,600-mile network of vital levees in the Central Valley. On Tuesday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced all seven board members of the state's top flood-control agency. The board recently had taken a tougher stance on urban development behind levees, pointing out that existing levees were built to protect farms, not people. ...

Chris Markus, M.A. '96, and Steve McFeely, M.A. '96, accepted an Emmy on Sept. 18 for "outstanding writing for a movie or miniseries" for HBO's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Markus and McFeely met in 1994 as students in UC Davis' graduate creative writing program. After watching episodes of programs like Baywatch, they hooked up together to write screenplays. "We realized, 'Somebody writes this and gets paid for it. We can write this and get paid for it,'" McFeely told UC Davis Magazine. ...

Long before the Aggie football team's extraordinary victory over Stanford University on Sept. 17, the two institutions had been in talks for another game in 2006 or 2007. But not so fast. The week following the historic upset, Stanford athletic officials were quoted in the Sacramento Bee as saying, "there are no plans at this time" for a rematch. To which UC Davis athletic director Greg Warzecka replied, "I hope this didn't ruin the opportunity. I talked to them last week and they told me how pleased they were with the ticket sales and they said we should talk after the game. I thought after the game that maybe I should give them a couple weeks before making that phone call." ...

The new chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, Peter Lichtenfels, recently returned from a trip to China. He met the artistic director of China's National Theatre and a number of prominent Chinese playwrights, and went to the new Asian Theatre Festival with shows from many other Asian countries. Says Lichtenfels, "The way Chinese people use space seems to be changing. All the apartments being built feel American in size; family sizes are small, so that they now seem to use more space." At a dancing event, Judy Halebsky , a doctoral student in theater and dance, joined in and was on China's national television network. ...

Mark Champagne, the director of the Associated Students of UC Davis, says that the ASUCD is planning on sponsoring early voting polling stations for the Nov. 8 election. They will be set up in the Memorial Union on Nov. 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8. James Schwab, ASUCD director of External Affairs, is already working with the Yolo County Clerk's office on the logistics, added Champagne. "This was hugely successful during the last election and got UC Davis significant press coverage," he said. ...

The UC Center Sacramento will launch a journalism program to teach UC students how to cover government and politics. Former California Journal editor A.G. Block has been tapped to develop the initiative. Block noted the center is exploring a variety of program options such as internships and a university news bureau, with faculty as editors and students serving as reporters. ...

The campus has a new online collection of recent photos available at photos.ucdavis.edu. Jan Conroy, director of editorial design, says, "We intend to continue to add new photos and remove hopelessly dated ones, as indicated by the length of skirts and sideburns, presence or absence of notable buildings, formerly fashionable piercings and hair coloring." University Communications has provided most of the photos, he added, but other campus units have donated some and "we would welcome more." ...

The book, Justice Waits: The UC Davis Sweetheart Murders (Callister Press 2005), by Sacramento writer and Davis native Joel Davis, chronicles one of the most shocking crimes in Davis and university history — the murders of UC Davis couple John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves. They were abducted Dec. 20, 1980, from the streets of Davis and found slain in a Sacramento-area ravine two days later. Said Davis, a former Davis Enterprise reporter, "I wrote it when I got impatient waiting for someone else to write it for me." More information is available at www.justicewaits.com.

If you have interesting tips or tales on campus personalities, please send them to cparker@ucdavis.edu.