Passing of David Watanabe

Friends of David Watanabe share word of his death recently in Bellevue, Washington following heart surgery. He was 74. Watanabe was the first campus photographer and cinematographer, joining the UW-Green Bay academic staff in 1969 after years as filmmaker at the Delaware Educational Television Network. He traveled the state with production crews from the campus Center for Television Production, shooting miles of 16-millimeter black-and-white film before electronic video production supplanted film for on-location recordings. With colleague Mike Brisson he chronicled the first half dozen years of UW-Green Bay’s history on the Shorewood campus. (Some of the images and scenes that will be viewed in our 50th anniversary slideshows and films will be Watanabe’s work.) A third-generation Japanese-American, Watanabe was born in Hawaii the year of the Pearl Harbor bombing.