A celebration of life for UC Santa Barbara Athletics Hall of Famer Donn Bernstein will be held as part of the All-Gaucho Roundup on Saturday at 9 a.m. inside the university’s Athletics Building at the Womble Hall of Fame and Reitnouer Auditorium.
No RSVP is necessary to attend the event.
Bernstein served as UCSB’s first full-time sports information director from 1964 to 1972. Although he moved on to become the SID at the University of Washington and then the media coordinator for ABC Sports, he remained an ardent booster of Gaucho athletics until his death at age 83 on Oct. 16, 2019. He received the university’s Honorary Alumnus Award in 1979.
He spent the latter part of his life living in Manhattan, having retired in 2016 after a 25-year career at the public relations firm of Cohn & Wolfe. But for about a half-century, he also kept a home at the rustic cabin he’d bought in the 1960s on Isla Vista’s Del Playa Drive.
Bernstein was inducted into the CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America) Hall of Fame in 1982 and the UCSB Athletics Hall of Fame in 2002. He was also the first non-USC alumnus to be presented the “Tommy Trojan Award,” a recognition of his long service and support of college football.