Trip to Pleasant Hill - Day Two

A Day to Connect With Old Friends

Bill with Chuck Siebenand

One of the pleasant surprises with my email newsletters is that friends know where I am.  So last June when we were in San Francisco, I heard from some friends in the Bay Area who wanted to get together.  Time didn't permit then but I made time this trip and was able to spend an enjoyable Friday with Chuck and Anna Marie Siebenand and then with John Hannigan and Joe Jaklevic.

I got to know Chuck during my "second career" as pastoral planner for the Diocese of Rochester.  Chuck did the same work for the Diocese of Oakland and we served together on the board of the Conference for Pastoral Planning and Council Development.  He and Anna Marie treated me to breakfast in their home in Richmond.  As you can see, their garden blooms magnificently reminding me that I wasn't in Rochester anymore.

Joe Jaklevic, John Hannigan, and Bill

Chuck drove me down to Berkeley where I met Joe and John.  The three of us graduated from Rockhurst College (now University) together in 1962.  John and I also attended Rockhurst High School together.  Both went on to distinguished careers:  Joe in physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories for 40 years and John in medical statistics as a consultant in and around Stanford.  We reconnected after fifty years at our college reunion a couple of years ago.  After lunch, John took off for Cupertino where he lives while Joe took me on a tour of the labs where he worked.  In addition to some fantastic views of San Francisco, I learned about the history of the lab which part of the history of nuclear physics.  I also learned about the distinction between Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.  Ernest O. Lawrence invented the cyclotron which was central to the discovery of modern physics.  The original building still exists but is now home to the Advanced Light Source is a third-generation synchrotron light source, one of the world's brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams.

Joe showing me various laboratory stations in the current synchrotron.

When I got back to Pleasant Hill, we had a dinner from Three Brothers from China celebrating Chinese New Year, the Year of the Horse.

Click here to view photos in the updated Picasa album.