Cubberley Senior High School
Bill Sailor
Bill's Latest Interactions
great to see you on zoom Susan Vollmer!
Click on "view website" to go to my facebook profile. Add me as your FB friend!
Jeremy Sommer
Sept. 6, 1957-Aug. 19, 2013
San Francisco, California
Jeremy passed away peacefully at home with family and friends at his bedside, after an eight month bout with pancreatic cancer. Born in San Francisco but raised in Palo Alto, he graduated from UC Davis in 1980 with a degree in economics.
Jeremy created and built Zocalo, a successful, nationally distributed, handcrafted furniture business. He traveled for work and pleasure to Europe, Mexico, and Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Russia. He especially loved Italy, learned Italian, and made more than 60 trips there, amassing a huge group of close friends.
Jeremy was a lover of good food, was a great cook and was always willing to learn how to prepare dishes from places he had visited. Interested in cooking and entertaining since he was young, he was a generous host to friends, family and many people through his hosting with the cultural exchange programs of SERVAS and Couch Surfing.
He will be remembered as a dynamic entrepreneur who excelled at marketing and advertising while feeding everyone around him at all times. He was a ferocious Scrabble and Bridge player, a lover of musicals, and as someone who had a great sense of humor and a robust joy for living.
In his last six years, he supported three orphanages in Laos and made yearly trips there to bring supplies and to make donations for new dormitories and programs.
He cherished his many friendships from grammar school days and kept in touch with many friends, relatives and countless others around the world.
He is survived by his mother, Edith Sommer of Palo Alto, brothers Jon Allan Sommer (Amy Neal) of Centennial, Colo. and Paul Harris Sommer (Laura Selby) of Mercer Island, Wash.; four nieces and nephews, and countless friends.
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/obituaries/memorials/jeremy-sommer?o=3668
From FACEBOOK 9/18/2015
BY JACK ANDERSON AND JOSEPH SPEAR
POSTED: February 20, 1986
WASHINGTON — It was two years ago that Jock Hatfield died at the age of 26,
and we still feel his absence acutely. Jock was a talented and caring
reporter who followed the basic rule of investigative journalism: Comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Jock had arrived in our chaotic offices from California with one rumpled
suit, enough money for about three meals - and a burning ambition the size of the Capitol dome. He was as green as new grass, but tempered by obvious physical handicaps that would have caused a lesser person to give up.
Roaming Washington's sterile corridors of power, Jock was soon diligently
and cheerfully exposing the graft and the gaffes, the mistakes and
malfeasance that are red meat to a good reporter. His first story exposed
an Interior Department giveaway of 300,000 acres of public land to the coal barons - an exclusive that set the standard for a string of scoops on
similar deals for those favored by the high and mighty.
Jock's personal courage was limitless. He was particularly proud of the
columns he filed from Haiti. At no small risk to himself, he detailed the
repression and corruption that blighted the wretched inhabitants of the
Duvalier domain, and planned to return for a follow-up even after the
Haitian government had made its displeasure with his first series clear.
He never made the trip. He learned that, in addition to his physical
disfigurement, he had inoperable cancer. Jock chose to spend his remaining weeks doing investigative stories on Capitol Hill.
It was in those final days of pain and debilitation that Jock showed courage of an even rarer sort. He never whined or bemoaned the lousy hand fate had dealt him. He retained his capacity for both outrage and amusement at the ethical frailties that he had set himself to expose. Never revealing the hopelessness of his situation, refusing to play his sources for sympathy, Jock poured all his energies into his chosen craft. He died without fuss or complaint.
His friends, determined to preserve his memory in an appropriate way, set up the Jock Hatfield Memorial Scholarship Fund to compensate young reporters who will cover the stories that Jock would have. Donations to the fund and scholarship applications will be accepted by its director, Susan Benesch,
at 945 West End Ave., No. 6-B, New York, N.Y. 10025.
Peter Gioumousis