Inducted in 2010
Mountford "Monty" George Reedy - Class of 1939
Monty was quarterback and captain in 1930 when Taft High first beat Bakersfield High and won the Valley Foot ball Championship; he continued his athletic career at UC-Berkeley. After service in WW II, he returned to teach in Taft, and for the next 25 years, he and his wife, Mary Ann, promoted a wide ranging positive working relationship between the high school and the larger Taft community. Monty has been inducted into the Bob Elias Hall of Fame and Taft High baseball teams still play ball on the field named for him.
Dr. Francis A. Sooy - Class of 1945
Dr. Sooy became Chancellor of UC-SF in 1972 and held that post until 1982. His decade of duty was a contentious one as civil rights and protest movements roiled the social environment in San Francisco. Dr. Sooy was particularly skillful in working with these dynamics and led a major expansion and modernization of Moffitt Hospital, built a new home for the School of Dentistry and added a major new hospital wing. Through it all, he maintained a regular schedule of clinical appointments and otolaryngology surgery.
George Gianopulos - Class of 1945
George was Group Supervisor for the first successful project to acquire close-up photos of the surface of the moon; this was a precursor to the Apollo Manned Space Missions. He was later Director of Mission Control, Viking Project, for which his team developed software used to deploy Viking Landers which first sat down on the surface of Mars and gathered data and images. He concluded his career directing the efforts of 3,000 en gineers to develop real-time army battlefield information.
John Silcox - Class of 1944
John Silcox received his BA (geology) from UC-Berkeley in1951, and joined Standard Oil Company (Chevron). In 1984, John was named President of Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc. (COPI), directing operations in 30 countries and all continents except North America. Later, as Chevron's representative on the multi-industry American Trade Consortium, he led negotiations with the Soviets and Republic of Kazakhstan over exploration and development of oil rights. The giant Tengiz oil field, in Kazakhstan, doubled Chevron’s proven reserves.
Dr. Gilbert G. Weigand - Class of 1968
Gilbert Weigand’s work for the Depar tment of Energy (1996-1998) highlighted his creative brilliance. During that period, he was able to develop and build high-performance ultra-computers that operate at more than 1.8 trillion calculations per second. He also developed technologies to monitor the nation’s aging nuclear stockpile. A major component of this program uses large computer simulations to examine weapons physics. This allowed the United States to abide safely to the terms of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Mary Simon Wilson - Class of 1952
Born without arms, but with a pair of talented feet, Mary Simon Wilson played xylophone and later marimba, winning a talent contest in Hollywood and appearing on live television in Bakersfield for several years. A mother of two, she opened and successfully managed a child care center, and working with families in Europe, Japan and Australia, she inspired and instructed them on ways to raise their “thalidomide” babies. Throughout her life, she embraced new ways of living helping to redefine what it means to be normal.