My Prince Charles Story

 By the death of his mother, Prince Charles has been elevated to King Charles III of Great Britain.  I sort of met Charles in Oct 1977.  Here's the story:

My friend Joe Ito and I were playing frisbee on a lawn on the UC Berkeley campus just North of what was then called "Barrows Hall".  (it was recently "unnamed", because Barrows himself had been strongly racist, especially against indigenous people).   We saw a huge crowd of students headed for Barrows, much larger than any classroom could possibly hold.  Curious, we joined them and we soon found out that Prince Charles was coming for a visit.  Neither of us were particularly interested, but the crowd was so big that making our way against it would have been close to impossible.  Joe and I found a place on top of a stone retaining wall and under a covered walkway leading to the building.  We sat there for about 20 minutes until the Prince's entourage walked past.  Charles himself stopped right in front of us and began talking to Joe, asking him what his major was (philosophy), where he was from (El Cerrito, just a couple of miles north of Berkeley),  how he liked UC Berkeley (very much) and then walked on.  I was sitting squeezed up next to Joe is a big, dense crowd, so I heard everything and Charles definitely saw me.  After he moved on, a zillion people including a reporter for the student newspaper "The Daily Californian" asked Joe a zillion questions, mostly about why Charles had picked him (no idea).  Joe is (or was) a short, athletic, very Japanese looking fellow with thick glasses and straight black hair down to the middle of his back.  He was planning to go to law school, although at my suggestion, he took a computer programming class, did well in it, and became enamored with APL, so he might have changed directions.  We lost touch after graduation and I have no real idea what happened to him.  He was very smart though, so unless something awful happened to him, he probably was reasonably successful.  He resembles the judge in the OJ Simpson trial slightly, and that judge is about 5 years older than Joe, comes from Southern California, and is named Lance Ito.  Interestingly, he got his law degree at Berkeley's Boalt Hall about 2 years before Charles's visit, while Joe and I were both students there.  Law students don't interact much with the general student population at Cal, so it's unlikely either of us met him, but certainly not impossible.