August Coppola, arts educator, dies at 75

He created the Exploratorium's Tactile Dome. He brought visual arts to the blind. And as an arts educator, author and former trustee of the California State University system, August Coppola is remembered as a Renaissance man.

The former dean of the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University died of a heart attack Oct. 27 at his home near Los Angeles. He was 75.

"Augy was a brilliant man," said his friend Jerry Brown, who as governor in 1981 appointed Professor Coppola to the CSU Board of Trustees. "He was a man of letters and ideas. I learned from him."

The father of actor Nicolas Cage, and the brother of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, Professor Coppola was often referred to as someone's relative. But his own charisma and immense intellect left lasting marks on California and on San Francisco.

While his famous kin brought the arts to large audiences, Professor Coppola brought countless people to the arts.

More than 20,000 people a year visit the lightless maze in a corner of San Francisco's Exploratorium, where they "feel, bump, slide, and crawl through and past hundreds of materials and shapes," according to the 1971 press announcement of the now-famous Tactile Dome.

Intrigued by touch

Fascinated by touch and its taboos - he told the Exploratorium that "the first commandment in life is given: 'Don't touch' " - Professor Coppola's exhibit made touch mandatory. He later wrote "The Intimacy - a Novel," about a man who interacts through touch.

He was the opposite of a naysayer, said Larry Eilenberg, his colleague at San Francisco State. "He was the absolute yes-sayer."

Everyone remembers the coffee. When he became dean of the College of Creative Arts in 1984, Professor Coppola brought a tablecloth and a gleaming espresso machine into the utilitarian conference room.

"The first thing he'd do was take everybody's coffee order," Eilenberg recalled. "I was not a coffee drinker, so the next meeting he had hot chocolate. There was a graciousness about him."

He invented the Purple Globe Awards and bestowed them on celebrities to entice them to come and tell students how their teachers inspired them, said friend Graziella Danieli, recalling that Gina Lollobrigida flew in for a day.

"He was a Renaissance man," she said. "He made you feel engaged and excited."

Professor Coppola co-founded CSU's Summer Arts Program in 1985, which serves 400 students a year.

And when a professor named Gregory Frazier invented a process in which readers describe movie action so that blind people can better understand it, Professor Coppola opened the AudioVision Workshop with Frazier and championed the idea at the Cannes Film Festival.

"August Coppola was a singularly creative leader who for almost a decade inspired the students and faculty of our school of Creative Arts," recalled San Francisco State President Robert Corrigan. "He reminded us all of why the arts matter."

High School of the Arts

He pushed the San Francisco Board of Education hard for a High School of the Arts. It was controversial because the existing arts program attracted mainly white, middle-class students.

The issue came to a head at a tense school board meeting on March 24, 1992. Black leaders were angry that their candidate had been passed over for superintendent, and upset that the arts school was first on the agenda. They stood on chairs shouting "Recall!" as the board members rose to leave.

Just then, Professor Coppola jumped up and proposed a deal: Arts school supporters would hold their testimony to 30 minutes, then relinquish the floor. Everyone agreed, and that night the board approved the school that Professor Coppola and others had advocated for a decade.

Today, nearly 1,000 students are enrolled - 70 percent of them students of color.

Professor Coppola earned his doctorate in comparative literature from Occidental College in 1960. A 150-seat theater at San Francisco State is named for him.