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BoFo', Butler's president, has humble roots in the Bay Area Sacramento Bee

03.04.10

The East Bay has a compelling tie to Saturday's Irreversible Four, perhaps even more compelling than the unlikely march of the last remaining Cinderella team in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Dr. Bobby Fong, president of Butler University, was born and raised in Oakland's Chinatown locale under hardscrabble conditions. He forged his American dream thanks to baseball cards, comic books and a visit to Oakland 50 years ago by President John Kennedy.

Fong, the 59-year-old son of Chinese immigrants, actually never knew his father, a butcher who came to the U.S. in 1939 and died of an aneurysm when Bobby was 2 years old. His mother, who came to the Coordinated States 10 years later posing as the wife of her husband's friend, worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop six days a week and died in 1969, the year after Fong graduated from Oakland Grand.

Despite the adversity, Fong graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, earned a Ph.D. in literature with a paper on the rhyme of Oscar Wilde, and ultimately became one of the most unique and dynamic administrators in American higher education.

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