Techs and the City The Ag Life Collaborating across ... · Jim Roese On the cover:Sommelier Jordan...

Techs and the City“New Urban Mechanic” Chris Osgood ’99

Troubled WatersCollaborating across disciplines to study the Delaware River

The Ag LifeTwo college friends team up to run an urban farm

FINE WITH

WINEFor a few oenophile Fords,

wine is more than a relaxing after-work drink;

it’s the work itself.

The Magazine of Haverford College SPRING/SUMMER 2014

FINE WITH

WINE

D E P A R T M E N T S2 View from Founders

4 Inbox6 Main Lines

18 Academix

27 Ford Games

30 Mixed Media

49 History Lesson58 Roads Taken and Not Taken59 Giving Back/Notes From

the Alumni Association

65 Class News81 Then and Now

EditorEils Lotozo

Associate EditorRebecca Raber

Giving Back EditorEmily Weisgrau

Class News EditorAlison Rooney

Graphic DesignTracey Diehl, Eye D Communications

Assistant Vice President forCollege CommunicationsChris Mills ’82

Vice President for Institutional AdvancementAnn West Figueredo ’84

Contributing WritersSamantha DrakeMichael FitzgeraldLynn GosnellLini S. KadabaAlison RooneyAnne Stein

Contributing PhotographersThom CarrollScott ChernisJohn ConsoliStephen FaustDan Z. JohnsonChris KesslerBrad LarrisonTommy LavergneKaren PhillipiJim Roese

On the cover: Sommelier Jordan Salcito ’02 photographed atMomofuku Má Pêche in New York City by Dan Z. Johnson.

Back cover photo: Alumni Weekend 2010 by Peter Tobia.

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Haverford magazine is printed on recycled paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste fiber.

6

F E A T U R E S

16 Portrait of the Class of 2014

36 The Ag Life for ThemFay Strongin ’10 and Sarah Turkus ’10 discovered their passion for food and farming as students. Now the two friends are running an urban farm in Providence, R.I. By Eils Lotozo

42 Techs and the CityPioneering “New Urban Mechanic” Chris Osgood ’99 is changing the way Boston delivers services and solves problems. By Michael Fitzgerald

Plus: Stephen L. Klineberg ’61 conducts the ultimate urban study. By Lynn Gosnell

50 COVER STORY: The Long and Wining RoadFive Fords who make, sell, champion, and study wine have found that following their hearts in the direction of an oenophile career—or business venture—has opened up a world of opportunities.By Rebecca Raber

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Haverford magazine is published three times a year by College Communications, Haverford College,370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, 610-896-1333,[email protected] ©2014 Haverford College

Haverford magazine is alsoavailable inadigital edition.

CHECK IT OUT AThaverford.edu/news/magazine

spring/summer2014

viewfrom founders

One year ago, my family joined yours as I becameHaverford’s 14th president. Much is made about thefirst 100 days of any presidency and what they augurabout the longer term. Given the distinctive rhythms

and issues that marked the year just passed, the first 365 daysseems like a more appropriate frame of reference, for that is howlong it has taken for the College to reveal itself to me.

SUMMERMy first few months were a time to becomefamiliar with the College. In addition to innu-merable visits and conversations, I tackleda long required-reading list of strategic plan-ning materials that the College has generatedover the past several years. The campus mas-ter plan, the Middle States reaccreditationreport, and the visions for our academicfuture had been guiding a planning processbegun under my predecessors. Drafting acoherent and visionary document throughcontinued collaboration with students, fac-ulty, and staff advisers would be a top priorityof my first year. From the porch at 1 CollegeCircle, I was able to digest and annotate thesecritically important reports while gently butfirmly teaching Allie, our golden retriever, not to chase the blacksquirrels (or at least not to catch them).

FALL The quality of my colleagues’ preparatory work enabled us tospring from the blocks at the start of fall term. Our StrategicPlanning Committee of students, faculty, and staff worked tirelesslyon a plan that will foster growth in areas at the core of our identitywhile ensuring that we remain a first-choice (and affordable)option for the best students in the world. Meanwhile, a budgettask force created a 10-year model to guide annual budgeting bycomparing year-by-year projections with long-term fiscal goals.

Having spent the summer familiarizing myself with this specialplace, I found it fascinating to then experience it as the semester

unfolded. The meaning and role of the Honor Code; the wayshared governance and broad-based, inclusive decision-makinginform everyday life and work; and, especially, the time I wasable to spend with community members, all brought to life theideas that had been articulated on paper. Together we addressedchallenging issues. A discussion about fossil-fuel divestment ledto a greater commitment to effecting change as an energy con-

sumer, while enabling students to participatein the investing process. Work on modifyingour financial aid policy resulted in our pre-serving “no loan” for nearly half the studentswho receive aid, while instituting a tieredplan that caps total debt at graduation at$12,000. We also began shaping a loan-for-giveness program that will further helpunburden students of debt. (More on thatlater this year.)

WINTER As this work proceeded, winter brought newdimension to my sense of Haverford. Hereare two vivid examples.

It is not uncommon for colleges and uni-versities to talk about balance between studiesand athletics. We compete in the Centennial

Conference, and as fall turned to winter I was delighted to learnthat we were leaving Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins—and every-body else—in the dust when it came to conference Student Athleteawards, a distinction reserved for those with high GPAs andstarting status on a varsity team. Fall sports: tops, with 5 honorees.Winter sports: tops, with 46. (Ultimately, through spring, wewould salute 172 honorees, more than half again as many as ourclosest competitor.) I guess you could say it is an imbalance thatreflects Haverford’s inner balance between athletics and academ-ics—and is something, I have since learned, that routinely happens,year after year.

Meanwhile, as anyone in the Northeast will attest, this was awinter to forget: snow upon snow, prolonged frigid temperatures,and downright dangerous conditions. Yet, as student Commence-

2 HaverfordMagazine

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My First Year at Haverford

Commencement 2014

SPRING/SUMMER 2014 3

ment speaker Oscar Wang ’14 pointed out in his address, Haver-ford’s loyal and dedicated staff was able to keep everyone fed,warm, and safe in their cross-campus travels, while faculty patientlyaccommodated weather-related scheduling changes in the serviceof maximizing their time with students despite the inconvenienceand disruption. It became clear to me that all community memberstake seriously what it means to own an experience and a placein the world. As both the new guy and someone with extensiveexperience in a variety of institutional settings, I am deeplyimpressed and grateful.

SPRINGThough late by the standardsof flowers and tree buds, springat Haverford blossomed onschedule with respect to servingthe fruits of our institutionallabor, as we presented the Boardof Managers with our draftStrategic Plan, which is seeingfurther edits this summer aheadof formal adoption by the boardin October. We also shared withthem our vision for a $225 mil-lion comprehensive fund-rais-ing campaign. With the board’sendorsement, and summernow under way, we are turningour attention to the case statement that will show you why theseare the right priorities for Haverford at this time. I look forward tosharing that statement with you in the fall.

We also found ourselves thrust into the national spotlight bya multilayered controversy arising from our Commencement cel-ebration. As you likely know, some students and faculty objectedto the selection of educator Robert Birgeneau for receipt of anhonorary degree. When Dr. Birgeneau responded by decliningour invitation, it seemed everyone had something to say aboutit. More commentary followed when William Bowen, anotherhonoree, offered his thoughts while speaking at the Commence-ment ceremony itself. (An aggregation of relevant material isarchived on our website at hav.to/14k.)

Wherever you stand on the many issues that surfaced during

this incident, I hope we can agree that, in the aftermath, severalquestions arise with which we will want to engage in the comingmonths:

n What should Commencement be? Who is it for? Whatattributes of such a ceremony can best convey, embody, andexpress our shared goals?n How can the energy of protest also power a process ofconstructive engagement, even when those on the otherside have less—or little—interest in participating? nWhere do issues of free speech and tolerance fit into this

discussion?As an institution founded

on principles of nonviolentsolution and committed to ethical leadership, it is imper-ative that we, of all collegesand universities, find a positivepath forward that goes beyondthe basic matter of rights—ofspeech, expression, and pro-test—and into the realm of dialogue.

As I write, today’s earlysummer storm is ending, skiesare turning blue from north tosouth as a cool front moves in,and sun illuminates the NorthDorms … then Roberts and

Barclay … and on down Founders Green. I just met many of youat Alumni Weekend (having long been a fan of Dave Barry ’69, Iam delighted to report that he is as funny in person as he is on thepage), and I will see many of you in the coming months as we pre-pare to celebrate the launch of a campaign for Haverford that willinspire pride as it instills confidence.

I hope you will return to campus for a weekend of special eventsin October, details to come in the near future.

Best wishes,

Dan Weiss

Alumni Weekend

4 Haverford Magazine

inbox

ONE MORE FORD CLIMATE SCIENTISTI read with interest your recent article“Investigating a Changing Climate.”[Winter 2014] Our son, Nils Johnson’94 has not yet seen it as he works at theInternational Institute of Applied SystemsAnalysis in Vienna, Austria. Just last week,his paper, “Stranded on a Low CarbonPlanet: Implications of Climate Policy forthe Phase-out of Coal-based PowerPlants,” was published. He is anotherHaverford graduate closely involved intrying to bring about change in the world-wide pollution of our atmosphere withcarbon dioxide and methane. He has beenworking in this effort for many years.My wife and I will be returning to

Haverford [in May] for my 60th classreunion. Unfortunately, Nils is unable toreturn for his 20th.The magazine is becoming more inter-

esting all the time. Keep up the goodwork! —L. Morris Johnson, M.D. ’54

“THEN” IN THE DC SUNKEN LOUNGEI’m at the home ofRob Kim ’89 and hiswife, Lauren Kim BMC ’89, and we’re

looking at the photo of students in theSunken Lounge in the 1990s [below] onthe last page of Haverford, Winter edition.I think the woman on the far left is

Tigist Hailu ’90, and the woman on thefar right is Catherine Wickerham ’90.What do other alums think?

—Lela Betts ’90

On the last page, in the “Then and Now”section, I was thrilled to recognize myclassmates from 1990, who also hap-pened to be two of my freshman yearroommates in Gummere! I might’ve evenbeen in the next room studying organicchem as well. ... The female student onthe far left is Tigist Hailu, and the otherfemale student (on the far right) is Cath-erine (Cat) Wickerham. I recognize themale students but can’t recall their namesat the moment.This brings back such memories. I

loved Haverford (but I do NOT missthose organic chem tests)!Thanks for keeping up the great articles

and photos in the magazine. I really enjoyreading it. —Jennifer Sherwood ’90

Re the picture in the magazine: AndrewCharwat ’88 and I had a pretty goodlaugh about it the other day, particularlybecause it’s labeled “Then”—which reallymakes us feel like relics! The caption alsosaid it was circa 1990s, but it was actuallysomewhere between 1985 and 1988.There is a story behind this picture: Thefour of us were not a study group froman organic chemistry class. Truth be told, I never took a chemistry class atHaverford! We were “posed” for this pic-ture for a recruiting brochure. For somereason, they picked us out of the dininghall and asked us to be part of the photoshoot. The vest that I am wearing in thepicture was not mine, but they suggestedI put it on. —Jesse Yallof ’88

ANOTHER BLAST FROM THE PASTWhile I cannot do the “Then and Now”1990s-era Fords on the inside back cover,I can identify most of the 1960s-era Fordson the back cover of the Winter 2014Haverford magazine.Ready to climb the Founders Hall

steps for lunch in the Great Hall (thenthe College dining room) are:Front row—Simon Adams ’68 (left)

and the late John Aldridge III ’68.Second row—William White ’67

(left), son of former Haverford PresidentGilbert White, and John Hough, Jr. ’68.Fourth row—Richard Hamilton ’68.Fifth row—Robert Swift ’68 (right)

and unknown.Blocked by the big tree is the former

entrance to the College library before theMagill addition. —Rich Weston ’68

GHOST STORY I very much enjoyed the latest issue, andwas intrigued to read (in the article onProfessor Maud McInerney) about “thefabled Woodside ghost.” I had neverheard about the ghost when I was atHaverford, and was hoping that maybesomeone could do a future article on it,and on other Haverford ghosts (if thereare any). I’m hoping you can interviewthe ghost, if possible (or maybe even haveit write the article).—Jon Reichman ’77

CAFÉ LIFEIn our item about the student-run Lunt Café(right) that ran in the Main Lines sectionlast issue, we asked readers to send us theirrecollections about other campus cafés inHaverford’s past.

In the early 1950s, the student snack barwas located in the basement of the Unionbuilding. Union also contained the cam-pus post office/mailboxes and the book-store on the basement level. On the upperfloors was the music department.The Coop was a place to congregate

for fellowship and conversation and forhamburgers, hot dogs, donuts, coffee,and milkshakes, especially when “things”went badly in the Dining Hall (FoundersGreat Hall). When the then-head dieticianMa Beatty brought forth one of her “spe-cial” meals, the Coop would do yeomanbusiness. Some of Ma Beatty’s specialsincluded: whale steak ... looks like steakand tastes like cod liver oil; Friday franks... also known as “fish puppies”; spinachspaghetti ... also known as “chlorophyllspaghetti”; plastic-eyed fried eggs; and,most exciting, mashed potatoes and peas,mashed together.Board was $13.50 a week, half of which

[went] to the waiters in the Dining Hallin Founders. This left $6.75 per week forfood spread across 21 meals—or $0.32per meal. Most of the students didn’t cometo breakfast, so that $0.32 for breakfastcould be added to the funds available forother meals. At one Tuesday Collection(a required gathering in our day), then-Comptroller Aldo Caselli spoke candidlywhen students complained about the quality of the food. In his inimitable Italianaccent, Caselli said: “If everyone come-ato breakfast, the food get-a worse-a thanit is-a!” There was the “raison d’etre” ofthe Coop. Many who skipped breakfastor weren’t enamored of whale steak foundsolace [there]. —Bill Kaye ’54


WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOUWe love it when our readers let usknow what they think about what wepublish in the magazine. Send us anemail at [email protected].

Or send a letter to:Haverford magazineCollege CommunicationsHaverford College370 Lancaster Ave.Haverford, PA 19041

Check out the digital edition of Haverford magazine athaverford.edu/news/magazine


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YAuthor Martin Amis gave theHaverford communityinsight into his soon-to-be-published new novel and

his methods for conquering writer’sblock when he came to campus for atalk and a public conversation withPresident Dan Weiss in March. Amis, a British expat who lives in

Brooklyn with his wife and two daugh-ters, is the author of 14 novels, sevenworks of nonfiction, and several collec-tions of stories. He received the JamesTait Black Memorial Prize, Britain’s

oldest literary award, for his memoirExperience, published in 2000.He started the evening in Founders

Great Hall with a rumination on dicta-tors, comparing Adolf Hitler and JosephStalin, or “the little mustache and thebig mustache,” as he referred to them.Amis has revisited World War II and theHolocaust in his writing over the courseof his career. Time’s Arrow: Or the Natureof the Offence, published in 1991, details the life of a German doctor atAuschwitz in a reverse chronology, andhis latest novel, The Zone of Interest,

scheduled to be released in the fall, is setin a concentration camp.Following the talk, Amis sat down

onstage for a chat with Weiss, whobecame friends with the author severalyears ago after Amis spoke at LafayetteCollege, where Weiss was president atthe time. Weiss, who called Amis “oneof the most accomplished writers aliveand a remarkably interesting person,”observed that, aside from his Holocaust-centered novels, the majority of Amis’work tends to explore the absurd side of life.

Martin Amis on Writing, Politics, and “Being Attracted to Extremes”

mainlines

Author Martin Amis (left) onstage in Founders Great Hall with President Dan Weiss. Watch a video of the event at hav.to/amis.

“It’s a simple matter of being attract-ed to extremes,” said Amis. “The mid-dle road does not appeal to me.”Fiction is a “spooky art,” Amis said.

Writing fiction is really “playing catch-up with your subconscious.” Heexplained that when confronted with acreative block, he stops writing anddoes something else. Meanwhile, hissubconscious gets to work solving thewriting problem.Weiss called Amis a master of the

English language and the creator ofunforgettable characters, noting thatAmis has been compared to CharlesDickens.His often “hideous” characters, Amis

said, are fun to read about, and are likelooking at a tiger in a zoo, as opposed toseeing one in the street right in front of

you. Monstrous characters can’t hurtyou, he said. “The real challenge is writ-ing about good people.”Asked what advice he would give

Haverford students, Amis cautionedagainst getting caught up in ideologyand political correctness, or the con-striction that comes with each. “Youshould not have a dependent mind. Youshould not need consensus or safety innumbers,” he said.Later, Amis questioned whether diffi-

cult decisions can be made in the UnitedStates, because of the fragile state ofdemocracy. “The egotism of govern-ments” means that elected officials try toavoid taking unpopular actions becausethey’re always thinking about the nextelection, said Amis, who declared that“several strains of complete insanity”

currently exist in the United States—theprevalence of guns being one of them.“There should be a humanitarian inter-vention in the U.S.,” he said.Amis’ appeal to readers of different

ages was evident as students, faculty,and staff lined up at the close of theevent to have him sign copies of hisnovels—from his 1973 debut, TheRachel Papers, to the 2012 satire LionelAsbo: State of England.As she waited to meet Amis, anthro-

pology major Gillian Miswardi ’16showed off her first-edition copy of his1989 novel London Fields. Chris Bobbe’17 brought a copy of Money that theauthor signed 20 years earlier forBobbe’s father, who mailed his son thebook so he could get a second signaturefrom Amis. —Samantha Drake


As Crow Flies Counterclockwise,which runs through Aug. 29 in MagillLibrary’s Sharpless Gallery, representsa collaboration between MellonCreative Resident Pato Hebert, anintermedia artist, and Chief of theLenape Nation of Pennsylvania ShelleyDePaul, who also teaches her tribe’slanguage at Swarthmore College. Theexhibit is inspired by the traditionalprophecy of The Fourth Crow, anallegory for the journey of the Lenapepeople that tells of the harmony of thetime before the Europeans arrived,through eras of settler contact,suffering, survival, and, eventually, aresilient resurgence. Featuring thewords of the crow’s story in bothLenape and English, as well as artifacts,musical instruments, and photos, AsCrow Flies Counterclockwise remindsvisitors that sometimes the “right”route on our journey is not necessarilythe shortest, or easiest, one.

ON VIEW


The Sunken Lounge subbed for the “Kitchen Stadium”setting of the Food Network show Iron Chefwhen studentgroup Fords Against Boredom hosted the DC Edition of

Iron Chef, a cooking competition whose participants could onlyuse ingredients they could find in the Dining Center. A rapt audi-ence observed the action in the Lounge, set up with workstations

with hot plates and supplies, as the four competing teams workedto devise an appetizer, entree, and dessert. The challenge: Eachdish had to use the secret ingredient—apples—in some way, andthe teams had to finish in under 30 minutes.The panel of judges, which included Miriam Abaya ’14,

Dean Martha Denney, Associate Director of Dining ServicesAnthony Condo, and Dining Center employee Jeff Gladney,sampled the food and rated the dishes based on taste, presen-tation, and overall quality.One creative cookery team (made up of Isabel Gross ’17;

Carolyn Poutasse, Jade Andrade, Shana Burstein, and LeahHollander, all ’15; and Evan Joslin, a visiting professor of chem-istry), found a place for the mandatory apples in a spinach salad(with cranberries, walnuts, and feta cheese), a dish of pennepasta (with grilled chicken and Parmesan), and a dessert toppingfor vanilla ice cream (the slices coated with cinnamon and ahoney-chocolate glaze).The competition was fierce, but Team 2—composed of William

Tortorelli, a visiting professor of classics, and students Sarah Betti,Erin Lipman, and Zak Oglesby (all ’17)—emerged victorious.Among the team’s culinary innovations was their interpretationof an Asian-influenced moo-shu-pork-style wrap (using flourtortillas) assembled right on the judging table. Their prize: DiningDollars redeemable at the campus café, The Coop.

—Eils Lotozo, Reporting by Kelsey Ryan ’14

Iron Chef, Dining Center Edition

Daniel Fries ’15 and Damon Motz-Storey ’16 teamed up for theIron Chef competition.

On April 1 the campus awoke to the Koshland Integrated NaturalSciences Center (KINSC) covered in streamers, balloons, googlyeyes, and silly drawings. As is the tradition, students in each ofthe departments housed in the KINSC festooned their part of thecomplex with themed decorations. Biology students went witha Pixar theme, planting the balloon-bedecked house from Up! inthe middle of Zubrow Commons and creating a Nemo-like under-

the-sea-scape, replete with jellyfish, across the overpass. Thosein the chemistry and psychology departments went with a WillyWonka theme, creating a cascading “chocolate” waterfall andglass elevator in the Rotunda. And in Hilles, the computer scien-tists showed their Dr. Who fandom with a handmade tardis anddalek, while our budding physicists celebrated Blue’s Clues withblue paw prints and a big, red “thinking chair.”

April Fools!

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FYIA FORMAL, FOUR-COURSE “etiquette dinner” in April offered students tips on proper behavior and which fork to use

from etiquette instructor Greg Victory (aka “Mr. Manners”). Student Activities, the Rufus M. Jones Institute for

Leadership, and the Center for Career and Professional Advising were co-sponsors of the event.


When the Admission Office was casting around for a way to giveprospective students a glimpse of Haverford’s nearby amenitiesand a sense of our location on the Main Line, the idea of an illus-trated map of the area around campus came up. Since no suchthing existed, Admission tapped artist Barbara Chotiner to createone. Chotiner’s impressionistic map details fun things to do, suchas record shopping at Gold Million (successor to Plastic Fantastic),seeing independent movies at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, and

exploring nature at Merion Botanical Park; and offers practical in-formation, including places to eat near Haverford and the locationof the nearest Bed, Bath & Beyond for stocking up on dorm neces-sities. The map was an instant success on social media, where itbecame one of our most liked and shared posts on Facebook ever.Going forward, Admission hopes to create an interactive versionof the map for the College website that will incorporate virtualtours given by students of their favorite off-campus destinations.

It’s a Map


Spotlighting the holdings of Quaker & Special Collections

IN THECOLLECTION

Joseph S. Meyer, Notebook: Excavation in Niffer [Nippur], 1894.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology architecture graduateJoseph Meyer was finishing up a world tour in the summer of 1894 when he met archaeologist John Henry Haynes bychance in Baghdad. Haynes was leading a University ofPennsylvania excavation of the ancient Sumerian city ofNippur in southern Iraq, and he persuaded Meyer to join the

expedition as an artist. Meyer’s detailed notebook records his observations of camp life as well as detailed sketches ofthe site, and his knowledge and graphic skills ended upcontributing significantly to the expedition’s understanding of Nippur’s architecture. The storied excavation wouldeventually uncover more than 50,000 cuneiform tablets, but just six months after he arrived at the Nippur site Meyer died of dysentery.

ON CAMPUS

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker, and ac-tivist Jose Antonio Vargas, who penned the widelydiscussed 2011 New York Times Magazine essay “MyLife as an Undocumented Immigrant,” came to cam-pus on March 21 at the invitation of the Students’Council Speakers Committee. In his Times piece, Var-gas, whose Filipino parents sent him to live with hisgrandparents in the United States at the age of 12, saidhe didn’t learn of his undocumented immigration sta-tus until he was 16 and tried to obtain a driver’s per-mit. After an intimate dinner conversation with 20Haverford students, Vargas gave a talk in MarshallAuditorium about his work developing the nonprofitDefine American, which seeks to change the conver-sation on immigration reform.

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Folk dancing has been catching on here on campus, thanks to the fledglingHaverford Folk Club. Founded last fall by Henry Bradford ’15, the clubstaged its first big community contra dance in Ryan Gym in April (above),with live music provided by student band the Cellar Doors. And during

finals week, Bradford organized an hour of dance every day as a fun and physicalstudy break for students. Folk dancing—which includes contra and square dancing, set dances, and

circle dances—has been part of his life since he was a tot, says Bradford: “My familyin Colorado has danced and led folk dances going back several generations.” Asa freshman, he developed a folk dance class through the College’s Ex-Co program,which gives students the chance to teach noncredit courses on subjects they arepassionate about. Buoyed by the interest of a handful of loyal dancers who’d attendedhis Ex-Co class religiously, Bradford launched the Folk Club, which now has morethan 60 members. The typical turnout at weekly meetings, though, has beenanywhere from 10 to 20 dancers, he says. “Teaching and calling dance in this com-munity has taught me there can be as much fun in an intimate six- or eight-personcontra dance as in a full hall with three long sets,” says Bradford.Meeting time is also devoted to singing and playing music together, which

is how the Cellar Doors evolved. (Last semester, the band line-up featuredBradford on five-string banjo, Micah Walter ’14 on fiddle, Bill Ristow ’16 onbodhran, a type of Irish drum, and Phillip Lu ’15 on guitar.) At weekly meetingswhen the band doesn’t play, Bradford uses recorded music. “I call to a large col-lection of music I’ve collected and catalogued, some of which is from digitized45-speed records that my grandfather has been using for decades,” he says.Bradford says he’s been happy to see a significant number of freshmen become

regulars at Folk Club meetings and events, and he’s hoping that bodes well for thefuture of the club and of folk dancing. While fun is the general aim, Bradford alsohas some serious guiding precepts for the club: “To welcome and encourage allwho want to participate; to do so with patience and good humor; to lead and followin all things with grace and elegance; and to treat one another as fellow-folk. I seethese ideas as eminently Haverfordian, and I’m lucky to have begun this group ina community that unfailingly embodies them.” —E. L.

Just Folk

As Commencement approached, we askedour Twitter followers (@haverfordedu) andvisitors to Haverford’s Facebook page (facebook.com/haverfordcollege) if they had any advice for our soon-to-be gradu-ates. Here are a few of their responses:Erica Blanco Sacci ‘07: “If you stilldon’t know what you want to be when you grow up, don’t worry. It all works out.”Dana Eiselen ‘11: “Have confidence in yourself and what you have to offer.Don’t be afraid to negotiate.”@JAH191XX (Jeffrey Haines ‘00):“Put the pool away on Lloyd Green thenight before.” Erin Heward Thurston ‘98: “The ‘real world’ is not always easy, but stickwith it. You don’t have [to] figure every-thing out right away. It all falls into placeeventually, and sometimes not in the wayyou expect.”

FYITHE CENTER FOR PEACE AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP awarded summer internships to 54 Haverford students and

10 Bryn Mawr students, who will travel to 18 countries, 8 states, and Puerto Rico. The program aims to help students

integrate academic learning with practical experience, and engage responsibly with social justice issues.

Advice for OurNewest Alums


Commencement on Instagram(instagram.com/haverfordedu).

Tracking Electricity Usage on CampusTHE COLLEGE’S EFFORTS in sustainability took another leapforward recently with the launch of the new Haverford CollegeBuilding Dashboard. This website allows visitors to track real-time electricity use in

14 buildings around campus that have been fitted with specialmeters. Included in the group are all of the residence halls, MagillLibrary, the Dining Center, Whitehead Campus Center, and theKoshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center. (Five additionalbuildings—Chase, Founders, Gest, Hall, and Stokes—are havingthe meters installed and will come online soon.)The Dashboard allows viewers to see how much electricity

each of the buildings uses daily, weekly, and yearly. Visitors canalso click on photos of the individual buildings to bring up adescription and the number of occupants, and see a constantlyupdated flow chart of electricity use in the building. In addition,the Dashboard page offers the College community ideas forsaving energy and asks visitors to commit to taking action. Amongthe ideas: swap out incandescent light bulbs for LEDs, take thestairs instead of the elevator, turn off lights in common areas, andwash clothes in cold water instead of hot. David Robinson ’14, who served on the College’s Committee

on Environmental Responsibility (CER), says he’s thrilled to seethe Dashboard come on line. “It’s impossible to substantivelyreduce energy use without first knowing how much energy weuse,” says Robinson. “In the past, Haverford has participated in anational recycling competition that showed us how much wastewe divert to recycling. Whenever we measured recycling ratesand shared the statistics with the student body, recycling ratesincreased dramatically. I am hopeful that the Building Dashboardwill have the same effect.”Look for an awareness campaign to publicize the Building

Dashboard in the fall, when classes resume, says Claudia Kent,

assistant director of facilities management, sustainability, andgrounds. Kent, who helps coordinate the work of the CER,envisions posters in individual buildings highlighting their energy use and carbon footprint, as well as a series of eventsand activities such as a dorm competitions and energy-reductionpledge drives. Other colleges and universities that have adopted the Building

Dashboard program have actively used its energy-monitoringcapabilities to challenge students to reduce use, says Kent.Cornell University, for example, stages a “Think Big, Live Green”Energy Smackdown contest.“Schools that use the Dashboard and take part in energy

consumption challenges drop their energy usage by about 10percent,” says Kent. “We can really do a lot with this.” —E. L.

For more information: hav.to/dashboard

Move-Out, RecycledTHE PARTNERSHIP WITH GOODWILL INDUSTRIES launchedduring last year’s move-out period resumed this year with largecardboard cartons stationed outside each dorm for students todonate unwanted items, instead of throwing them in the trash.And after the dorms were vacated, Haverford’s housekeepingstaff worked with Goodwill to clear out additional donation-worthy items that had been left behind. This year’s effort wasagain a big success: A total of 25 cartons containing 9,690 lbs. ofdonated goods was sent to area Goodwill stores, whose proceedssupport the organization’s job training programs.

GOINGGREEN


Haverford’s Friend in Residence program brought CanadianQuaker Evalyn Parry, a musician and theater artist, to campusfor two weeks of performances, class visits, meetings withstudent groups, and more. While in residence, Parry gave aconcert in Lunt basement (above), did an interview on web-based campus radio station WHRC, offered a workshop onfeminism for the Women’s Center, and presented her multi-media musical theater piece SPIN, which was inspired by thestory of the first woman to ride around the world on a bicyclein 1894 and features a percussionist “playing” a vintagebicycle fitted with electronic pick-ups. The Friend in Residenceprogram, which is sponsored by the President’s Office and theQuaker Affairs Office, aims to deepen appreciation ofHaverford’s Quaker roots and strengthen the College’sconnection to the broader Quaker community.

We’ve Got a Friend

T hree of the Class of 2014’s five Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows (MMUF),Simone Partridge, Brandon Alston, and Mariah Braxton (in photo, from left), rangin the new year by flying all the way to South Africa. The trio spent 10 days at the

MMUF program’s annual January conference, “Cape Town: A City of Contrasts,” with otherMellon Mays fellows from across the U.S. and South Africa. The conference, which washeld at the University of Cape Town, is designed to enrich the fellows’ understanding ofthe South African socio-economic, racial, cultural, historical, and environmental landscape.In addition to attending discussions and lectures, the fellows also toured local attractions,game and nature reserves, after-school programs, community gardens, and the townshipsnear Cape Town. “It was an amazing experience to be around so many hard-workingpeople,” says Braxton. “Our conversations were sometimes very divisive, as is the natureof such ardent topics, but this just showed the variations in the ‘black narrative.’ I foundmyself frequently at odds with my peers, but also frequently changing my viewpoint. It wasmy most impactful experience abroad thus far.” The MMUF program seeks to increasediversity in the ranks of higher-education faculty by creating a national network of scholarsat more than 40 of the country’s top universities and colleges. Starting at the end of theirsophomore year, the Mellon Mays fellows receive financial support and mentoring aimedat helping them prepare for graduate school and future careers in academia.—Rebecca Raber

That was Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Kruppspeaking to the Class of 2014 at Commencement about CharlesWurster ’52. A pioneering environmental scientist who helpedraise concern about the use of DDT, Wurster was one of thefounders of the EDF and has served on the organization’s boardfor an uninterrupted 48 years, said Krupp, who received an hon-orary degree during the graduation ceremony.

SOUND BITE

“You’re sitting where Charlie sat. Now go and do what he did. Find your passion and make it your life’s work.”


Cape Town Experience

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Studying abroad provides a change in perspective for many students, andthrough the lens of a camera, they can document and share their new expe-riences. The annual Study Abroad Photo Contest, sponsored by the Officeof International Academic Programs, is an opportunity to showcase some

of the wonderful images Haverford students have captured around the world. This year’s contest, which featured four subject categories—Places, Portraits, FordFaces, and Cultural Encounters—was the most competitive in recent history, butthrough two rounds of judging, these entries made the final cut. To see all of thephoto contest finalists, go to hav.to/10p.

Fords See the World

➊ “On Top of the World” (Swiss Alps):Katie Balmer ’15. Winner, Ford Faces.➋ “Thanksgiving Day Elephant Ride”(Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe): Ryan Gilliom’15. Runner-up, Ford Faces. ➌ “Monks on Cell Phones” (Tibet): AnnaBullard-Werner ’15. Runner-up, CulturalEncounters.

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➍ “Love Boat” (Ninh Binh, Vietnam):Noemi Agagianian ’14. Winner, Portraits.➎ “Arctic Adventures” (Finnish Lapland,Finland): Jennie Willemsen ’15. Winner,Cultural Encounters.➏ “Fuzzy Friend” (Isle of Skye, Scotland):Jennie Willemsen ’15. Runner-up,Portraits. ➐ “The Great Ocean Road at Sunset”(Victoria, Australia): Sophie Eiger ’14.Winner, Places.➑ “View From a Traditional MokoroCanoe” (Okavango Delta, Botswana):Ryan Gilliom ’15. Runner-up, Places.

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13served on Students Council

19served on Honor Council

92volunteered in the Customs Program

16 HaverfordMagazine

PORTRAITOFTHE CLASS OF 2014

ON MAY 18, 304 members of the senior class received their diplomas atCommencement and set sail into the world. Here’s a painted-by-numbers portrait ofthe Class of 2014 that shows something of who they are and a little bit of what theydid during their four years at Haverford.

90 science majors

156 social science majors

78 humanities majors

25 double majors

158 received some type of financial aid (Of these, 76 received endowed scholarships.)

participated insummer researchinternships funded

by the Koshland IntegratedNatural Sciences Center, or received KINSC supportto attend scientificmeetings, conferences, and research sites


92 participated in varsity athletics(some in multiple sports)

27 participated in club sports

140studied abroad

35

97participated in one or

more programs—such as summer internships,research projects, and service learning trips—sponsored by the Centerfor Peace and Global

Citizenship

worked with the John B. Hurford ’60 Center forthe Arts and Humanities through internships,research fellowships, arts grants, seminars, readinggroups, and the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

25 sang in a cappella groups

77 played in or sang with the Chorale, Chamber Singers,Bi-Co Orchestra, ChoraleOrchestra, or chamber music ensembles

56opted to live incommunity orspecial interest

housing

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Put an artist, a political scientist,an environmental chemist,and a documentary filmmakerin a room together, and whatdo you get? At Haverford, the

result was “Troubled Waters: Tracing Wastein the Delaware River,” an interdisciplinarymultimedia project that focused on howglobalization affects the river’s ecosystems,and gave students a chance to conducttheir own field research and then interpretand communicate their findings.

Sponsored by the Mellon CreativeResidencies Program and the John B.Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts andHumanities, the project brought to campusJesikah Maria Ross, a California mediaartist whose work combines educationand activism, to work with AssociateProfessor of Political Science Craig Boro-wiak, Assistant Professor of ChemistryHelen White, and filmmaker Vicky Funari,a visiting artist in residence in Haverford’sIndependent College Programs and Bryn

Mawr’s Film Studies program. Also partof the collaboration was Delaware River-keeper Maya van Rossum, who broughtin the Delaware Riverkeeper Network asa community partner on the project.

“Troubled Waters” also brought togeth-er 55 students taking chemistry, politicalscience, and documentary-film coursestaught by White, Borowiak, and Funari.As part of the half-semester project, theycollected water and sediment samples ona series of field trips to the river, researched

academix

Something in the WaterA collaborative project with a visiting artist teams political science, chemistry, and documentary film classes to track waste in the Delaware River. By Samantha Drake

Above: An image from the short documentary A Sample, by Caleb Eckert and CormacRada, both ’17, and Christine Dickerson BMC ’14. Right: Students in Helen White’senvironmental chemistry class went on five field trips to sample water and sediment inthe Delaware River for the Troubled Waters project.


the pollutants, created charts and mapsusing new media tools, and filmed shortdocumentaries, which can be found athav.to/tw14.

Seven types of pollutants in the riverwere spotlighted: plastics, oil, pharma-ceuticals, flame retardant, hormones andsteroids, human and animal waste, andpesticides and herbicides. Studentsunveiled their findings on each pollutantto classmates, faculty, environmentaladvocates, and the public on April 30, at the Marian E. Koshland IntegratedNatural Sciences Center (KINSC). Ascreening of the documentary film proj-ects followed.

“These kind of engaged arts and schol-arship projects really benefit the widercommunity,” says Ross, who visited thecampus several times during the semesterto talk with students and coordinate withthe professors, and with Science LibrarianDora Wong and Magill Library DigitalScholarship Coordinator Laurie Allen,who both helped refine the project. Ross,the founder of the Art of Regional ChangeInitiative at the University of California,Davis, calls “Troubled Waters” one of thebest experiences she’s had working withfaculty. “Haverford clearly prioritizes stu-dent-centered learning and faculty-artistengagement,” she says.

For their part, students experiencedthe challenges of environmental researchfirsthand. At the public presentation at theKINSC in April, Sarah Dwyer ’17 wasamong a group of students presenting anexhibit on pharmaceutical waste. Dwyerexplained that her group examined thedischarge of codeine into the river fromdrug substance manufacturer SiegfriedLtd. USA, which has a plant near the riverin Pennsville, N.J. Lack of informationabout the company’s wastewater treatmentand the effects of codeine in the river pre-sented the biggest challenges, Dwyer said.

Instead, the group had to rely on existingstudies and recent news reports.

Peter Durlacher ’17, who was amongthe students who studied flame retardants,explained at the presentation how hisgroup traced the migration of polybromi-nated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in mat-tresses made by Serta Mattress Co. at itsplants to landfills along the river, to theriver itself. Durlacher pointed out that,despite the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency’s support for the regulation ofPBDEs in mattresses and other householditems, the agency has been unsuccessfulat getting such laws enacted.

Borowiak, the political scientist, saysthe project was an opportunity for studentsto look at real-world issues as they tracedchemicals back to known or assumedsource companies, identified regulatorystructures, and studied the relationship

between local and global processes.“Pedagogically, I want students to seehow they’re embedded in the dynamicof global waste,” he says, pointing outthat, as citizens, everyone shares watersources with other communities.

“It’s a great project,” says van Rossum,the Delaware Riverkeeper, who attendedthe final presentation. She says she plansto look more closely at the data studentscompiled, and hopes she’s looking at thenext generation of environmental advo-cates: “Students are eager to be inspired.”

The Mellon Creative Residencies encouragefaculty in the natural sciences, social sciences,and humanities at Haverford, Bryn Mawr, andSwarthmore colleges to design arts residenciesaligned with their curricular and scholarlyinterests. To find out about the other creativeresidencies that took place during the academicyear, go to hav.to/mcr.

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A film crew from Japan’spublic television networkNHK came to campus inJanuary to interviewAssistant Professor ofAstronomy DesikaNarayanan for the showCosmic Front. The segment,which became part of ashow that aired on NHK’sSpace Channel in thespring, focused onNarayanan’s work oncreating simulations of starformation and galaxiesmerging. After the crewarrived and squeezed theirequipment into hisStrawbridge Observatoryoffice, they got right to work rearranging the space, said Narayanan, “to make itmore professorial”— and also to allow a better shot of him at his computer,displaying the videos he creates with his collaborators. “I was amazed at the depthof their questions,” said Narayanan about the interview. “NHK is like the BBC ofJapan, and they’d traveled around the world talking to experts. They came reallywell informed.” —Eils Lotozo

Starman


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Office HourAssociate Professor of Classics Bret Mulliganhas an office in Hall building crammedwith classical literature and books about ancient Greece and Rome, along with asizable collection of props and reproductions of artifacts that help his studentsunderstand the lives of those who actually lived in the ancient world. “I really like,in all my classes, to bring in cultural elements to remind my students that these werereal people,” says Mulligan, who teaches ancient Greek and Latin language classesas well as courses on literature, mythology, and history, including “Culture and Crisisin the Golden Age of Athens.”

PHOTOS: THOM CARROLL PHOTOGRAPHY

➊ Reproduction of a Roman shield:I bought it online as a gift to myselfwhen I got this job [in 2005]. I use it inclasses to give students a sense of what asoldier in a Roman legion would use andthe weight they would be carrying. Theywere famous for marching all day andbuilding a new camp every night. Theywere carrying not just their armor, butalso their kit and what they were goingto sleep with and even material for thefort they would build every night. Thereare various estimates that [they wouldcarry] 60 or 80 pounds on a long marchinto hostile territory.

➋Map of “HaverAthens”: We can’ttake 30 to 60 students to Athens at thestart of the semester, so [AssistantProfessor of Classics] Robert Germanyand I thought about ways we could bringAthens to them. We came up with theidea of taking the ancient city andnotionally dropping it on Haverford. Andit turns out that ancient Athens, withinthe walls, is about twice the size ofHaverford. [During the “Culture andCrisis” class] we place placards featuringvarious key sites in ancient Athensaround campus in the analogous place,and students conduct self-guided tours.

➌ Helmet: We use this reproductionhelmet in performances, like the Latinplay in the spring and the marathon clas-sics reading in the fall. It is also used as“The Helmet of Destiny.” In the Iliadthere’s a scene where the Greeks are try-ing to decide who will fight Hector, andthe Greek heroes place their names inthe helmet and out flies the name thegoddess selected. So rather than me call-

ing on students in class, sometimes weget creative and write down our namesin Greek or Latin and pull them out ofthe helmet.

➍ Playmobil figures: The goal inlearning Latin and ancient Greek is toread ancient texts, not to use them tofind out where the train station is or howmuch a baguette costs. ... Nevertheless,in my elementary Latin classes, whenthey are learning the basics, I’ll read outloud a fable or historical anecdote to mystudents in Latin, and we’ll act it outwith these figures to help them followalong with the story even if they don’tknow all the words.

➎Wall of books: Classics is a disci-pline that is shaped by loss. Maybe onepercent of classical literature survives.And of course, of shopping lists and legaldocuments and other documents of dailylife, only an infinitesimal amountremains. … These books representmaybe about two-thirds of high literaturethat survives from antiquity. Greek isgreen and Roman is red. There’s both anamazing amount, if you think about itone way, and a tragically small amount, ifyou think about it another way.

➏ Wire figurine: In the “ClassicalMythology” class, where we [explore]the purpose of myth, one of the projectscan be a creative project, and [my stu-dents] have written plays, composedsongs, painted paintings. This is one ofmy favorites pieces that a student [AbbyLarner ’11] has made. It’s a representa-tion of the Three Graces. It’s beautiful.

—Rebecca Raber

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They’re called hacker spaces, maker spaces, and fablabs, and they’ve been cropping up at colleges anduniversities all over the country, and launching ascooperative ventures in urban communities. Part

machine shop, part studio, part lab, these spaces allow peoplewith diverse interests to come together to collaborate and usethe latest technology to design and make cool stuff.

Now Haverford has its own place to create. Housed in aformer physics lab in the Koshland Integrated Natural SciencesCenter (KINSC), the HaverFab Maker Space for the Arts andSciences opened during the fall semester. The space is outfittedwith a 3-D printer, which uses an extruding process and plasticfilament to create three-dimensional objects; a 3-D scanner,which allows objects to be scanned to a data file and then repli-cated on the 3-D printer; and a ShopBot, an automated carvingdevice able to shape wood, plastic or aluminum.

The Maker Space, which was funded in part by a TeachingWith Technology grant from the Office of the Provost, cametogether through a collaboration that included professorsJoshua Schrier (chemistry), Sorelle Friedler (computer science),and Suzanne Amador Kane (physics). Student coordinatorAlexandre Leibler ’15 researched the equipment needed andhelped get it all set up.

“I’ve been interested in the technology for a while now,”says Leibler, a math and computer science major who heardabout the plans for the Maker Space and asked Schrier and

Kane if he could get involved. “They gave me a lot of freedomand responsibility to determine what was needed for the space,”says Leibler. “The thought was, this is a prototype, and wecould test what works and what doesn’t. We didn’t have a setidea about who would use the space. We said, let’s get it setup and see what its role becomes.”

One group that has embraced the Maker Space is theRobotics Club, whose members Leibler helped train on theequipment. “The 3-D printer allows us to make frames, chassis,wheels, gears—anything our brains can imagine,” says clubmember Casey Falk. “By making these tiny bits easily and effi-ciently, we can focus on the larger issues of design, implemen-tation, and logic that go into robotics.” (By the end of the schoolyear, club members had built a motorized robot equipped witha video camera that they hope to field-test in the fall.)

Leibler also assisted physics major and educational studiesminor Megan Holt ’14on senior thesis research she did withKane on devising 3-D realizations of graphics used in physicsand mathematics courses. Holt’s thesis, “Maximizing Acces-sibility for the Blind in Physics Education,” looked at howthese “tactile graphics” could aid blind and low-vision students.(Physics and mathematics student Daniel Gillen ’16, who isblind, tested the objects created to assess their usability.)

The Maker Space technology has also been put to use byKINSC instrument specialists George Neusch (biology) andDaniel Fabry (chemistry) to create replacements for worn out

Maker Space Makes its Debut

(from left) Megan Holt ’14, Alexandre Leibler ’15, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier check out the equipment in the Maker Space.

3Questions

You’ve said that you’re at Haverfordnot just to teach but to learn. Sowhat have you learned?Carlos Castresana: Basically this:being open. It is a very important thingat Haverford—especially in [my larger,25-student] class. It is like the U.N.You’ve got people from every continent,most of them are American citizens, butmany of [their families] came one or twogenerations ago from Asia, fromEurope, from Latin America … andthere can be a crossing of differentpoints of view. … It’s a perfectcombination for brainstorming. We saywe are now a family of 26, and this is anextremely profitable exercise foreveryone, to put together so manydifferent sensibilities of different culturesand study how can we be more usefulusing the tools of international justice.And in my smaller class, [it is like] I amone of the students. I am learning verymuch from Professor Isaacs because Iam closer to the model of lecturing

professor, but she is a master inprovoking discussion, debate, exchangeof ideas.

Is it different when you prosecute a head of state?CC: Absolutely, because supposedlyequality before the law is a basicprinciple in any domestic orinternational system, but equality has tobe built. Equality does not exist in reallife. There are societies that are rich orpoor, that have different races, different religions, minorities, and people are discriminated against. But when youcome to the court of justice, all theseinequalities should not [pass through]the door. Inside the court, we should allbe treated equally. But when you’re thehead of state, you have privileges, youhave immunities, you have influences,you have factual powers that protectyou. So the challenge for the prosecutoris to be able to get the court to treat thehead of the state as any other citizen.

What are you most proud of in your career?CC: There are two critical moments inmy career that in many ways changedmy life. One is the prosecution ofGeneral Pinochet, which was a turningpoint for all the global community. Andthe other unforgettable experience wasin Guatemala. I came to a place wherethe impunity in common crimes, in veryserious crimes—we are talking abouthomicide—was 98%. Yes, of every 100crimes, only two were solved. You canimagine the kind of safety and securityyou enjoyed there. But after three years of hard work in a dangerousenvironment with a lot of peoplesupporting us and with very bad guystrying to boycott everything we weredoing … my team and I were able tobring to court seven high-impact casesand get seven convictions. So it was avery clear message for the society inGuatemala, a demonstration that theycould enjoy justice. —R. R.

Carlos Castresana has held many roles over the course of his 35-year legal career.He’s been a prosecutor for the Supreme Court of Spain, a judge, a defense attorney,and a law professor. He has indicted high-ranking officials such as former ItalianPrime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, served as the United Nations-appointed Commis-sioner Against Impunity in Guatemala, and been a representative of the SpanishUnion of Progressive Prosecutors, for which he helped craft the legal strategy thatled to the indictment of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet and the arrestand imprisonment of Argentine dictator General Jorge Videla. Now he can add anew role to that long list: Haverford College visiting professor.

During the spring semester Castresana lived on campus and taught two classes:“Transitional Justice: The Politics of Accountability,” which he co-taught with PoliticalScience Professor Anita Isaacs, and “International Criminal Justice.” He also gavethree lectures as part of the President’s Social Justice Speaker Series.


parts in lab equipment, and to fabricate devices needed byHaverford scientists for their research, including a timed ther-mostat for an autoclave. But the Maker Space has a primarypurpose, says Schrier:“It’s there for students.”

Currently, anyone who wants to use the facility must makean appointment to do a safety walk-through and receive anequipment tutorial. “We maintain a list of allowed users, andwe rely on the Honor Code to ensure students only use equip-ment they are allowed to use,” says Schrier. “For the future,we would like to have open hours at night during the week,so that students can come in and say, ‘I’d really like to makeX.’ And we would have people there to help them.”

—E. L.A three-dimensional portrait of Dan Weiss produced on the 3-Dprinter in the Maker Space.

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It’s an early April afternoon, and in a packed classroom inHilles Hall, the College’s first-ever “Introduction to HealthStudies” class is exploring complex questions about poverty,violence, and health.First, three students give a short presentation that looks at

whether raising the minimum wage could be viewed as a publichealth issue. After the class gets the chance to comment, biologistKaye Edwards and anthropologist Christopher Roebuck, whoare teaching the course jointly, guide the group toward the topicof the week’s reading assignment: How is interpersonal violencesimilar to infectious disease epidemics?

Hands go up around the room. “Violence begins with oneperson, and it spreads,” offers one student. “To stop it, you needto find the root causes,” says another. As Roebuck jots theirresponses on the chalkboard, Edwards cues a video of a TEDTalk by Dr. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who applies theprinciples of public health to reducing violence in communitiesacross the U.S.

“Violence as a disease is more than a metaphor,” Slutkindeclares in the video, but after it ends Edwards asks the groupto consider just how precise the parallel is between violence andinfectious disease. “Learned behavior can increase violence,” sheobserves. “But does learned behavior increase infectious disease?”

This challenging class marked the launch of the new Bi-CollegeMulti-disciplinary Health Studies Program, which gives studentsin any major an opportunity to minor in health studies. Alongwith the intro course, which is designed to be team taught bytwo faculty members from different disciplines, the minor encom-

passes a capstone seminar that will feature distinguished speakersin the field of health studies, plus four additional courses to beselected from an approved list of courses offered at Haverfordand Bryn Mawr.

“There are health studies majors and minors developing atcolleges across the country,” says Edwards, an associate professorof Independent College Programs and the director of the newprogram. “But what makes us distinctive is that we are deliberatelymultidisciplinary across all three academic areas. We have anatural science, a social science, as well as a humanities focus.”

Edwards, who received her Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, anddevelopmental biology, and did postdoctoral work in tropicalparasitology, says the idea for the health studies program has beenevolving since she first taught a course called “Disease andDiscrimination” in 1993. Over the years, she advised studentslooking to piece together independent majors or minors in publichealth or health studies. But it was clear there was interest in,and a need for, something more.

“Many of our students who are interested in health don’t nec-essarily want to be a nurse or a doctor or a care provider,” Edwardssays. “They are interested in the policy issues, and the educationalissues. Or they are interested in health-care management, or inbecoming a medical anthropologist. The health studies minorwill allow them to go in many different directions.”

As they worked to create the program, Edwards and her coun-terparts at Bryn Mawr found a model in the Tri-College Programin Environmental Studies, which is also multidisciplinary. “Theywere incredibly helpful as we worked on planning this,” she says.

More than 30 students enrolled in the inaugural health studiesintro course, and 15 have declared their intention to minor inthe field. During the next academic year, the course offerings willexpand, with visiting faculty at Haverford teaching classes onhealth statistics and social epidemiology. Roebuck, a medicalanthropologist whose research includes work on the UnitedNations-sponsored “HIV Stigma Index,” will also reprise a coursehe taught in the spring, “Viruses, Humans, Vital Politics: AnAnthropology of HIV and AIDS.”

“The new health studies minor now offers students a coher-ent structure,” says Edwards. “The introductory course givesthem a shared vocabulary, and the capstone seminar experiencewill allow a group of students to examine health problemsusing a variety of methodologies. They can approach a healthissue from statistics or economics or ethics, or they can lookat its biological basis.”

This kind of multidisciplinary approach has the potentialto turn out the kind of creative thinkers needed to help solvepressing global health issues, says Edwards. “So much of thework on public health is about doing collaborations. You haveto be able to talk with people who are coming from differentperspectives.” —E. L.

New Perspective on Health


Kaye Edwards (front) and Chris Roebuck taught the inaugural“Introduction to Health Studies” course.

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After 28 years at the College,John Farnum Professor ofAstronomy Stephen Boughnis retiring from the class-

room. Colleagues, friends, and family got the chance to celebrate the man andhis career in April, at a daylong sympo-sium on campus that featured talks bysome of his astrophysicist pals as well asformer students who are now scientiststhemselves (see p. 69). Boughn will beheading off to Princeton University for afinal sabbatical year before his “official”retirement, but we caught up with himfor a chat about his nearly three decadesat Haverford.

What he enjoyed most about teachinghere: The wonderful students and thesmall venue. Before I came here, I taughtin the physics department at Princeton,which had 50 physicists. One of the mostenjoyable things about Haverford is thatmost of the people I have gotten to knowaren’t physicists or astronomers, or evenscientists. It was such a joy to go to thefaculty dining room—when we still hada faculty dining room—and sit downwith historians, and political scientists,and anthropologists.

Most memorable class: The freshmanseminar in astrophysics. I had studentsdo the readings and complete the assign-ments before they came to class, whichmet every other week. The class was moreof a workshop, where students wouldget up in groups of three or four and pres-ent on some really high-level concepts,like cosmic rays, the big bang, the tem-perature of stars. If a visitor ever walked

into the room, I’m sure it would havelooked like total chaos. The students wereall talking, and I was going around theroom encouraging the quiet ones, becauseto get the most out of the course youreally had to get in there and argue withyour teammates.

What he would say to a student con-sidering coming here to study astron-omy: This is a very good place. Whenwe hired [Assistant Professor of Astron-omy] Beth Willman in 2008, we had tomake a case for that hire, so I did my duediligence and looked back 20 years at allof our astronomy majors who had goneto graduate school or gotten a doctorate.What we found was that 1 percent of allastronomy Ph.D.s and Ph.D. candidatesin that period came through our program.That certainly wasn’t all me. My astron-omy colleague Bruce Partridge had nur-

tured the program since he arrived in1970, and Louis Green before him. Andnow with Beth, who is internationallyknown already, and with [AssistantProfessor of Astronomy] Desika Nara-yanan, who is a brilliant young theorist,I don’t see that number going down. Justtwo years ago, we had a bumper crop ofeight astro majors. Six of them werewomen, and five of those young womenare now in programs at some of the bestgrad schools in the country.

When he decided to become an astro-physicist: I was a freshman in highschool. I read this little book on Einstein’stheory of relativity. It was by Lillian Lieber.I still remember it.

What you might be surprised to knowabout him: I am an astronomy professorwho has never taken an astronomy coursein my life. Astrophysics is, in some ways,a subfield of physics, so it’s not all thatunusual. There are a lot of astronomers,especially those my age, like me.

Scientific discovery he’s most proudof: I worked with a scientist who was ayoung postdoc at Princeton at the timeon something called the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. Our work helped providean important piece of evidence that con-firmed the accelerated expansion of theuniverse. When I started out to do thatexperiment, I dearly would have lovedto find evidence refuting the accelerationof the universe. But it’s the standard cos-mological model now. Though I’m a skep-tic. I wonder if there is still somethingwe haven’t figured out. —E. L.

Stephen Boughn Retires

RE: HUMANITIES, the first national digital humanities conference for and by undergraduates, is now in its fourthyear. Organized by a group of Tri-Co students, and held on the Haverford campus in April, this year’s conference theme

(“Play. Power. Production.”) addressed critical game studies, the politics of digital technology, and global approaches to the digitalhumanities, among other topics. The two-day event featured keynote speakers as well as student presenters from across the country. Watch a wrap-up video from this year’s symposium at hav.to/rehum14.

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As a Haverford assistant professor in the Tri-CollegeDepartment of Linguistics, Brook Danielle Lillehaugenhelps her students analyze modes of human com-munication in such courses as “Introduction to

Language and Linguistics” and “Phonetics and Phonology.” ButLillehaugen’s passion for her subject goes beyond the classroom.She’s actively involved in fieldwork with speakers of the Zapoteclanguage of Mexico, one of the thousands of “endangered” lan-guages around the world, considered at risk of disappearing.

With the help of her students, Swarthmore colleagues in thelinguistics department, and Zapotec collaborators, Lillehaugenhas developed the Tlacolula Valley Zapotec Talking Dictionary,an online resource that allows users to see definitions and listento the native-speaker pronunciation of this Zapotec language,one of an estimated 40 such regional varieties. The dictionary issupported by National Geographic and the Living TonguesInstitute for Endangered Languages.

Lillehaugen began her work on Zapotec as a graduate studentat the University of California, Los Angeles. She started outassisting a professor who was working on a Zapotec dictionary,and when another group of Zapotec speakers reached out to askif they could collaborate on something similar, she suggestedLillehaugen take on the work herself.

“As I began developing the project, I started working withZapotec teachers in L.A., and I started going to Oaxaca to dofieldwork and to meet the families of my teachers,” she says. “Ireally grew to love Oaxaca, and now I get to bring my ownstudents there.”

During the summer of 2013, two of her students, Helen Felker’16 and Alex Mannix BMC ’15 (who are both credited as co-authors on the dictionary), received funding from the Center for

Peace and Global Citizenship to intern at a museum and culturalcenter in San Pablo, Oaxaca. The internships, which were arrangedby Haverford graduate Nicholas Johnson ’03, an anthropologistwho lives and works in Oaxaca, included an opportunity to helpcreate materials for a Zapotec language class for children, and todo Zapotec language-related fieldwork. Also traveling to Oaxacathat summer, to assist Lillehaugen with her fieldwork, were KatieMcCormick BMC ’13 and Swarthmore student Caroline Batten,who are also both listed as co-authors of the dictionary.

This past April, Lillehaugen took three students to a conferencein Oaxaca City, where they presented the Talking Dictionary tothe Town Council of Tlacolula de Matamoros and discussedways to collaborate on expanding the project. The result: AlexMannix is returning to Oaxaca this summer, funded again bythe CPGC, whose “continuing connection” internships allowstudents to resume work begun the previous year.

“We had a very, very positive reaction to the dictionary fromthe community,” says Lillehaugen. “So Alex will be trainingpeople this summer to take over actively growing it. We wantto leave part of the project in the community’s hands, so theyare not dependent on us.”

Lillehaugen is especially pleased to have connected with awoman in Oaxaca who plans to use the dictionary in the Zapoteclanguage classes she is teaching for adults. “In the town whereI work, the youngest speakers of the language are in their 70s,”says Lillehaugen. “The town Alex will be focusing on this summerhas speakers who are in their 30s, but the kids tend to shift toSpanish when they get to school.”

Though Spanish is key to functioning in the larger economyin Mexico, the erosion of native languages has also been a functionof discrimination, Lillehaugen says. “It’s needless. People can bebilingual. But native people have been actively discouraged fromspeaking their own language.” That may be changing, though,she says. “There is now a public-service campaign in Mexicothat tells people that these native languages are real languages.”

The number of speakers may be small, but the work of tryingto keep these languages from disappearing is important, saysLillehaugen. “There are probably about 7,000 languages in theworld—most of which linguists have not described. If we reallywant to understand what human language can be, we have tobase our theories off the broadest possible set of languages. Whatif you were studying trees? You could not understand what treesare if you only saw 10 percent of trees.

“Also, a lot of our knowledge about how humans understandthe world shows up in language. When you look at the namesfor plants and animals, and even locations, in a particular language, you see knowledge systems encoded. If you lose alanguage, you are losing an understanding of a way of beingin the world.” —E. L.More information: talkingdictionary.swarthmore.edu/zapotec/

Zapotec Spoken Here

Linguist Brook Lillehaugen (center) demonstrates the ZapotecTalking Dictionary in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Astroke of serendipity changedthe course of John David“J.D.” Bridges’ life forever.As a sophomore at Haverford

in 1999, he was wandering around anactivities fair in Founders Hall. A studentwith the fledgling crew team, a club sportthat had launched the previous year, tar-geted him with his pitch. On a whim,Bridges decided to give it a try.

“I’d never done any sport before,” hesays. (When he told his music-professorparents that he joined crew, they thoughthe meant stage crew, he says.) But fromthe first day, Bridges was smitten by histime on the water, and rose to captain andstudent coach by his senior year—expe-riences that have fostered his love affairwith the sport ever since.

A lawyer by day, Bridges—who is con-sidered one of the country’s top rowingcoaches—spends afternoons and more

coaching varsity boys’ crew at the privateShipley School on the Main Line. He alsoruns development camps; this summer,he will work with Philadelphia’s VesperBoat Club, attracting elite rowers interestedin training under him.

“The value of athletics, and rowing inparticular, is unquestionable in my life,”says the 34-year-old Nashville transplantto Wayne, Pa. “You see a kid who comesin as a freshman, and they’re completelygoofy, gawky, maybe they’ve never donesports before. Three or four years later,you see them come out as men. They’reconfident, disciplined, successful peoplewho have learned so much about them-selves and the world and what they canget out of themselves and the world whenthey spend a lot of time and energy.”

Much of the same could be said aboutBridges himself.

At 5-foot-10 and “a lot skinnier than

I am now,” the newbie athlete at Haver-ford was initially slotted as a coxswain,the lightweight who directs the boat.Rowers are usually big, tall boys with theleverage for powerful strokes. But whenBridges showed up for practice, the teamneeded another oar puller, and he wasput to use. He wasn’t necessarily a stand-out, but he had spirit.

“J.D. did everything with passion,”says Valeria Gospodinov, head rowingcoach at Haverford, who was hired whenBridges was a senior. Gospodinov, whoalso coaches the Radnor Boys Crew Club,sees Bridges occasionally at races. “He’sa very, very good coach, very dedicated.”

Bridges gives full credit to Haverford’sunusual ethos. “The Haverford experienceallows people to grow up and change andtry to do stuff they’ve never done before,”he says. “It’s life-changing.”

After graduation, the history major

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Crew Still Floats His BoatJ.D. Bridges ’02 started rowing atHaverford. He’s now a renowned

coach for the sport. By Lini S. Kadaba

taught school, and the job allowed himto coach at Moorestown Rowing Clubin New Jersey. In 2008, he got his master’sin kinesiology from Temple University;in 2012, he also earned his law degreefrom there.

All the while, he coached rowers. Inhis current legal job, snagged throughrowing connections, he works fromhome as director of contract administra-tion for MCPc, an Ohio-based informa-tion technology company. He also oweshis marriage to the water. Wife SheilaBridges is a physical-therapy assistantand rowing coach who once worked withBridges. She now coaches at WhitemarshBoat Club. “I’m not sure I could marrysomeone who was not a rowing coach,”he says in all seriousness.

“Guys like J.D. are gold in the worldof rowing,” says Paul Horvat, the vicecommodore of the Schuylkill Navy and a representative to the USRowing

Association. “They’re turned on by thesport.”

On a recent late-spring day, the riversparkles in front of a backdrop of CenterCity Philadelphia skyscrapers. The Ship-ley athletes, who tower over Bridges,carry oars onto the Penn AC RowingAssociation docks on Boathouse Row.

Two of them heft a long, sleek shelloverhead and flip it onto the water. “Let’sget rowing right away in the pick drill,”Bridges says. “Right away.” The boat takesoff, the oarsmen rowing fluidly, as Bridges,in jeans and a light-blue Shipley polo,issues instructions through a megaphonefrom a nuts-and-bolts launch.

When he coaches, Bridges says, hesees only lines and angles. “Drive withyour legs first,” he booms. “Keep thatoar off the water. Pull that blade highinto the body.”

But off the water, that all-business

demeanor gives way to some playful ban-ter with these boy-men, who call him J.D.Varsity captain Henry Goodhart, 17,describes Bridges as one of the best coach-es he has had. “J.D. makes us competitivewithout burning us out, without drivingus into the ground,” he says. “It’s aboutpacing yourself.”

Over the years, Bridges’ teams havewon national-level medals. His coachinghighlights from tenures at numerous clubsinclude four USRowing Club NationalChampionships and medaling rowers atthe Stotesbury Cup Regatta and NationalTeam trials. More than a dozen of the ath-letes he has trained in recent years row inDivision I programs.

Says Bridges, “I never imagined I wouldbe working with literally world-class col-legiate athletes.”

Lini S. Kadaba, a former staff writer for thePhiladelphia Inquirer, is a freelance writerbased in Newtown Square, Pa.


Each year during Alumni Weekend, the AthleticsDepartment inducts standout alumni athletes intothe Thomas Glasser ’82 Hall of Achievement,which is dedicated to the memory of Tom Glasser, arecord-setting Haverford track and field athlete whowas killed in the terrorist attack on the World TradeCenter. Here are this year’s Hall of Achievementhonorees:EVAN JONES ’49: Jones was an all-around athletewho competed in cricket, track and field, and soccer.Captain of the soccer team in 1947 and 1948, he stillholds the program records in points per game andgoals per game. During a writing career that hasspanned 50 years, he has authored plays, screenplays,documentaries, poetry, biographies, and novels forchildren. [For more about Jones, see p. 66.]DAVID L. STUBBS ’77: Stubbs ranks among thebasketball program’s career leaders in multiplecategories: rebounds, points, free throws made, and scoringaverage. He became the first player in Haverford history tosurpass 1,000 points and 700 rebounds over his career. AfterHaverford, he got his M.B.A. at the Wharton School at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, and since 2009 he has been apartner in Cambridge Capital, a private-equity company.PATRICIA DINELLA MCMILLAN ’86: McMillan wasnamed the Most Valuable Player on the women’s tennis teamall four years at Haverford and served as team captain her

last three. As a junior, she went 11-1 in doublesplay— the best single season winning percentagein doubles action in Haverford history—andqualified for the NCAA Championships in bothsingles and doubles. After college, McMillanworked in financial reporting at Prudential andplayed on the company’s tennis team. She laterbegan a teaching career, and last year was namedthe Bernards High School boys’ assistant tenniscoach.AMANDA FIGLAND ’88: Figland finished hertennis career with the most victories in Haverfordhistory. As No. 9 in the Intercollegiate TennisCoaches Association’s national poll in 1988, sheremains the College’s highest ranked women’stennis player. She continued to play tennis afterHaverford by joining USTA leagues in thePhiladelphia area and New Jersey. Figland is now

an attorney focusing on family law and insurance defense.SEAMUS MCELLIGOTT ’91: One of the most decoratedcross country and track athletes in Haverford history,McElligott was the last Division III student-athlete to also earnD-1 All-America status. After graduating, McElligott qualifiedfor the finals in the 10,000 at the 1992 Olympic trials andrepresented the U.S. at the 1996 World Cross CountryChampionship in Cape Town, South Africa. He died in 1998 at the age of 29.

Honoring Alumni Athletes

Patricia DinellaMcMillan ’86

The SOFTBALL team garnered theCentennial Conference title and made theprogram’s second trip to the NCAA tour-nament. The record season, which sawthe team rack up 29 wins, will be the lastfor head coach Jen Ward ’04, who is step-ping down after 10 years at the head ofthe program to relocate to the Washington,D.C., area with husband Tim McLean’06, who saw his last season as an assistantbaseball coach at Haverford. McLean, whobegan coaching in 2007, has taken a posi-tion as a baseball relations specialist at lawfirm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP.

It was also a memorable season for BASE-BALL, which won the Centennial cham-pionship for the second time in the lastthree years. Pitcher Tommy Bergjans ’15,who became the program’s all-time careerleader in strikeouts during a 3-0 win overDickinson College in April, was named afirst-team All-American by the AmericanBaseball Coaches Association, and wasalso selected as the Centennial Conferencepitcher of the year.

WOMEN’S TENNISearned third seed inthe Centennial Conference—the highestregular-season finish in program histo-ry—and continued its standout perform-ance in the conference semifinals as thevisiting Fords took down second-seededFranklin & Marshall College, 5-3, toadvance to the Centennial final for thefirst time.

MEN’S TENNIS started CentennialConference play by winning the team’sfirst five matches. Seniors Andy Doughertyand Matt Romei each won singles matchesin a narrow 5-4 win over Franklin &Marshall College to capture the third seedin the conference tournament and helpHaverford reach the Centennial semifinalsfor the fourth straight year.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL had a recordseason, with the squad winning theCentennial Conference tournament titleand a slot in the NCAA tournament forthe first time in program history. SeniorNina Voith, the program’s all-time leadingscorer, also became the first player in pro-gram history to earn All-America honors.

Senior Christopher Stadler claimed theCentennial Conference indoor crownsin the 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter

with championship meet record times,and earned All-America honors in boththe 3,000 and distance medley relay. A member of the CROSS COUNTRYand TRACK teams, Stadler added to the Haverford College Athletic Depart-ment’s long tradition of student-athletesexcelling both academically and ath-letically when he was awarded a pres-tigious NCAA postgraduate scholarship.To date, 26 Haverford student-athleteshave been named NCAA postgraduatescholars.


Keep up with your favorite Haverford team at haverfordathletics.com. For more about alumni athletic events and game schedules click on the site’s “alumni” tab.

athletics news“KICK START” FOR TYPHOON RELIEF EFFORTWhen Super Typhoon Yolanda hit South-east Asia in November 2013, killing 6,300people and causing more than $2 billionin damages in the Philippines alone,Katie Bigay ’13, the daughter ofFilipino immigrants, leaped into action.

“Within the first 24 hours of themedia coverage of the typhoon, it wasclear to me that I had to respond insome way,” says Bigay, a New Jerseynative who was directly affected byHurricane Sandy in 2012. Bigay, who works as a researcher and data analyst for thePennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance, contacted some of her Haverford friends tolaunch a project they dubbed “Kick Start the Philippines.” A former Haverford SOCCERplayer and current coach of Drexel University women’s club soccer team, Bigay workedwith her pals to organize a soccer tournament/fund raiser on Drexel’s campus, host anotherfund-raising event at a West Philadelphia restaurant, launch an online campaign for donations,and partner with a nonprofit organization to donate soccer balls to a school in the Philippines.“I am very proud of how hard the team has worked to keep this initiative going,” says Bigay,who reports that Kick Start the Philippines will be collecting money through the summer todonate to the ABS-CBN Foundation, a local charity focused on community development inthe Philippines. Bigay, who will begin Rutgers University’s public-health master’s programin the fall, also hopes to be able to send medical supplies to a newly opened women’s clinicin Tacloban.

Bigay organized Kick Start the Philippines with her former Haverford teammate and Drexelco-coachKatie Van Aken ’12, and had help from Kara McMahon ’13 and manyother Fords. Allison Martinez-Davis ’13has been maintaining a blog about the projectand Ben Van Son ’13 and Matthew Liscovitz ’13 volunteered at the tournament.

For more information: kickstartthephilippines.wordpress.com. —Rebecca Raber

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With influencesdrawn fromancient myths,classic fairy-

tales, 19th-century novels, andthe letters of Sylvia Plath andEmily Dickinson, it’s no won-der Dawn Potter titled herthird collection of poetry SameOld Story. After all, the book’s27 poems, whether theydescribe a modern-day trafficjam or an episode from Ovid’sMetamorphoses, are all suffusedwith the universal themes ofbirth, love, and death that haveinspired writers since thebeginning of time.“In manyways, this is a collection aboutstorytelling,” says Potter. “I wanted the title to pay homage to the storytellers whopreceded me.”

Potter’s stories may be

inspired by Norse and Greekmyths or the great books ofothers, but they are also stillrooted in her day-to-day exis-tence. Her reworking of theScandinavian fairytale “East ofthe Sun and West of the Moon”into her poem “The WhiteBear” transforms it into a storyabout the difficulties of modernmarriage. And it is hard not toread “Valentine’s Day,” herpoem about the “snow plowguy,” as autobiography, withlines like these:

He smiles broadly, like a manshould smilewhen he’s just finished plowing the driveway of a woman who’s rumoredto write poems, who’s ten years olderthan himself, and whose son plays socceron his daughter’s team…Potter’s family—she is rais-

ing two sons with her husband,photographer ThomasBirtwistle ’87, in Maine—makes appearances in herwork, but she is quick to addthat, while her poems may betriggered by actual events, theyaren’t journal entries and, aspoems, their realities areheightened, exaggerated, or fic-tionalized. Her family mem-bers, therefore, have all readher work, and none have com-plained about being used asinspiration.

Chloe Tucker: How did youbecome involved in this project?Carmen Crow Sheehan:This project percolated for years. Ihave known Kelsey Hoppe, headof the Chasing Misery team, forabout a decade now, and writinga book was the type of thing wewould talk about among friendson dark nights in Darfur while wewaited for the generator to kickin. Then, just before New Year’sEve 2012, after this idea had been

brewing for years, Kelsey sent outan email that began, “So, I’mdriving along in South Africa theother day thinking…” She wasreaching out at long last to a smallgroup of humanitarian types tofloat the idea of Chasing Misery—something that would incorporatedifferent voices, elements, andexperiences about humanitarianwork in a single volume. Did wethink we could do it? Could wecapture the complexity and depthof humanitarian work and its trueimpact—not just on beneficiaries,but also on aid workers? Couldwe go past the “do-gooder-ness”and really get at the rawness ofthe work, for good or ill? I lookedup the old email chain and re-read it today. My response: “Ithink this sounds smashingly fun.”Everyone else on the email chainagreed. And so it began.


mixedmediaSame Old StoryDAWN POTTER ’86

continued on page 35

Q&A: Carmen Crow Sheehan ’00What is it like to be a woman on the front lines of humanitarian response?What motivates someone to run toward the horrific scenes that otherscan’t even stand to watch on the news? And how do aid workers feelabout the difficult work they do—do they wonder if they make a differ-ence? These are just some of the questions that Chasing Misery: AnAnthology of Essays by Women in Humanitarian Responsegrappleswith. Co-edited by Carmen Crow Sheehan ’00 (along with fourother women), the book collects 21 first-person essays and 23 photo-graphs snapped at aid locations around the world to give readers asense of what it’s like to work in a conflict or natural-disaster zone. (Notall the locales are far-flung; there is a section about post-Katrina NewOrleans.) Sheehan also contributes a photograph, “A Midwife Assessinga River Crossing,” and an essay, “No Place,” about her time in Darfuras an emergency aid worker with the American Refugee Committee.Chloe Tucker ’07, the international programs coordinator forHaverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, talked to Sheehan,now a D.C.-area programming and training specialist for the PeaceCorps, about the difficulty of writing about her Darfur experience andthe importance of self-care for aid workers.

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“From their early days, [my]boys learned that making artrequires solitude and obses-sion,” says Potter, whose elderson is studying filmmaking andwhose younger son writes,makes music, and acts. “Theyunderstand that an artist can-not focus on making other people happy or comfortable.They also understand thatsometimes it’s just not easy totalk to another artist about thework she’s doing. Really, it’s anhonor to be the mother of suchastute and open-hearted young men.”

At the same time that Potterwas writing Same Old Song, shehad also started a sonnet proj-ect for which she copied all ofShakespeare’s 154 sonnets outof a book, word for word. (Asimilar undertaking withParadise Lost led to the creationof her award-winning 2009memoir Tracing Paradise: TwoYears in Harmony With John

Milton.) Every day she wouldalso compose a sonnet of herown about what was going onin her life. So while the poemsin the collection come in manyforms, they are bound togetherby the sonnets scatteredthroughout the book.

“It was a hugely instructiveproject,” she says. “I learned somuch about what a sonnet can

and cannot contain, what kindsof words propel a poet furtherinto a sonnet, how unimpor-tant rhyme really is to the basicdramatic arc of the form. Even though most of thepoems in this collectionare not sonnets, the ones that Idid choose to include create asort of formal backbone amongthe free-verse pieces.”

Potter, who also directs theannual Frost Place Conferenceon Poetry and Teaching atRobert Frost’s home inFranconia, N.H., has threemore books already in thepipeline. One is a manual onthe writer’s craft, based on thework she does at the FrostPlace Conference, and the sec-ond is a collection of essaysabout books she’s re-read manytimes over the course of herlife. Both books are due outlater this year. She’s also hard atwork on a new manuscript ofpoetry: a verse history of thecoal-mining region of south-western Pennsylvania that, shesays, begins in “prehistorictimes and traverses throughincidents such as the Frenchand Indian War, the rise ofFrick and Carnegie, and thearea’s subsequent Rust Belt desolation.” —Rebecca Raber

For more on Potter’s work:dlpotter.blogspot.com

LAURA SHIPLER CHICO ’94, editor: This Light That Pushes Me: Stories ofAfrican Peacebuilders (Quaker Books)

To mark the20th anniver-sary of theRwandan geno-cide, Chico, aprogram man-ager for theBritish organi-

zation Peacebuilding in East Africa forQuaker Peace & Social Witness, gatheredthe stories of more than 20 individuals fromsub-Saharan Africa who are all Quakers orinvolved with Quaker peace work and have experienced some form of violence.Featuring portraits by photographer NigelDownes, the book traces the peace builders’personal journeys and reveals how suffering can be transformed into a force for social change.

COLETTEFREEDMAN ’90:The Consequences(KensingtonPublishing Corp.)PlaywrightFreedman has writ-ten a dramaticsequel to TheAffair, her 2013debut novel, which


More Alumni Titles

Dawn Potter ’86

explored infidelity from the viewpoints of ahusband, his wife, and his mistress.Picking up five minutes after the last bookends, The Consequences continues its pre-decessor’s shared-perspective storytelling.

ELUN T. GABRIEL’93: Assassins andConspirators:Anarchism,Socialism, andPolitical Culture inImperial Germany(Northern IllinoisUniversity Press)Gabriel, an associate

professor of history and the coordinator ofthe European studies program at St.Lawrence University, uses various primarysources—from police reports to Reichstagspeeches—to examine the early history ofGermany’s Social Democratic Party and its influence on the history of the German empire.

EDWIN HARTMAN’63: Virtue inBusiness:Conversations WithAristotle (CambridgeUniversity Press)Hartman, a retiredprofessor who wasthe founding director of thePrudential Business

Ethics Center at Rutgers University, appliesAristotle’s virtue approach to business todeepen the understanding of businessethics and demonstrate how good charac-ter can and should matter in business.

THOMAS E.HARTMANN ’88:Broken Mind,Persistent Hope: A Memoir ofRecovery From BrainDamage and ManicDepression (Tate Publishing)

Hartmann writes about his struggle withmanic depression, how a head trauma sus-tained during a car accident amplified itseffects, and how alternative medicine aidedhis eventual recovery.

CHRISTOPHERKENT ’74: StayingOff the Wheel of Misfortune(Valley Vista Press)In this self-helpbook, Kent, a song-writer, performer,and teacher, tellshow to avoid 10 oflife’s biggest pitfalls.

The book is a companion piece to the CDPiece of the Puzzle (12 Songs of Hope),which aims to inspire listeners to prevailover challenges and is available separately.

Rochelle Davis,MIMI KIRK ’96,editors: Palestineand the Palestiniansin the 21st Century (IndianaUniversity Press)Kirk, an editor atthe NationalUniversity ofSingapore’s Middle

East Institute, co-edited this collection ofscholarly essays, which explore the legaciesof the past century on Palestinian societyand the possibilities of peace with Israeland self-determination in the future.

BRENDAN LANCTOT ’00: BeyondCivilization and Barbarism: Culture andPolitics in Postrevolutionary Argentina

(Bucknell UniversityPress)Lanctot, an assistantprofessor ofHispanic studies atthe University ofPuget Sound, exam-ines a turbulent timeof vying political

forces in Argentina during the 23 yearsunder dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas following Argentina’s independence from Spain.

TIMOTHY S.MILLER ’67,John W. Nesbitt:Walking Corpses:Leprosy inByzantium and the Medieval West (Cornell University Press) Miller, a professorof history at

Salisbury University, and his co-author givean overview of the history of leprosy, theattitudes toward it, and treatments for itfrom the ancient world to medieval times,with a primary focus on challenging mythsabout medieval attitudes towards the disease in both the Byzantine Empire andCatholic Europe.

JACK SCHNEIDER’02: From the IvoryTower to theSchoolhouse: How ScholarshipBecomes CommonKnowledge inEducation (HarvardEducation Press)An education historian who

teaches at the College of the Holy Cross,Schneider seeks to explain why some ideasfrom educational research gain traction inclassrooms while others don’t, and usesfour well-known historical examples to askwhat can be learned from their successes in influencing teachers.

More Alumni Titlescontinued from page 31


Ford authors: Do you have a newbook you’d like to see included in More Alumni Titles? Pleasesend all relevant information [email protected].


Sarah Jacoby ’06 is bicoastal—if youconsider the Delaware River and theChesapeake Bay to be “coasts.” Duringthe week she lives and works in a ware-

house space in Baltimore, where she is finishingup her M.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College ofArt (MICA), and then she spends her weekendswith her husband, Timothy TeBordo ’03, attheir apartment in Philadelphia. The constant com-muting isn’t easy—especially when you add in timespent in New York City sleeping on friends’ couchesto meet with editorial art directors—but it is all inservice of her burgeoning illustration career.

Jacoby, a former English major, has been work-ing in commercial art since her Haverford gradu-ation. She’s illustrated magazine and newspaperarticles, such as her recent piece that accompaniedthe May 10 New York Times article “The ToxicBrew in Our Yards.” And her work has appearedin (and on the covers of) books, like a comingseries from the retailer Anthropologie. “My favoriteproject was a piece I did a couple months ago fora book … about famous innovators, writers, andauthors, and their companions,” says Jacoby. “Igot to draw Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlos.” (Thatbook, The Who, the What and the When: 65 ArtistsIllustrate the Secret Accomplices of History, will beout from Chronicle in the fall.)

Jacoby’s illustrations are done roughly 60 per-

cent by hand, using watercolor painting and/orink drawing, and 40 percent digitally, using pro-grams like Photoshop. The results are innocent,poignant images, often of picturesque nature land-scapes that seem decidedly homemade. “The com-puter gives me the ability to achieve certain levelsof perfection that I am not personally talentedenough to execute,” she says. “So I get this expres-sive, painterly quality, but also a sort of a digitalintensity that compels people.”

Her work certainly compelled the people atthe American Society of Illustrators, who awardedher their gold medal in January for her “Seasons”series. The award, which she says is “like winningan illustration Oscar,” was exciting not just becauseit was a first for her (she’s since won several othercompetitions), but also because it meant her workwas displayed at the society’s New York head-quarters and taken on tour across the country.

Having her art recognized must also help makeher weekly I-95 slog feel worth it. Jacoby creditsTeBordo, who plays in the band Tinmouth, andher other artistic, ambitious Haverford friendswith inspiring her work and keeping her moti-vated. “Doing creative work takes huge amountsof tenacity,” she says, “[and] without them I’msure I would have settled for a different, ‘safer’career by now.” —R. R.For more information: thesarahjacoby.com

ART

Sarah Jacoby creates her whimsical illustrations, such as this image from her picture book Stray A While, by using a combination of her ownwatercolor painting and ink drawing, and digital manipulation.

Jacoby (above) created a study ofseasons, including Autumn Scene(shown below), that was included in herthesis show at MICA.

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Ben Diamond ’11has written andplayed all kinds of music since hisdays at Haverford: blues as a partof the George Urgo (’08) Blues

Band, David Bowie and T. Rex covers as apart of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival pro-duction of Eternal Glamnation, classical Arabpercussion, indie rock, European klezmer,and many genres in between. But this pastyear he made music of a different sort—music for puppets.

At the urging of former Haverford VisitingProfessor of English Peter Gaffney, Diamondwrote—and later played in performance—the score for an experimental puppet showthat Gaffney created about the life of 16th-century Italian nobleman, composer—andmurderer—Carlo Gesualdo. The show, titledGesualdo, in Heaven, had a six-day run inFebruary at the Pig Iron School Studio inPhiladelphia and featured life-size woodenpuppets and Diamond’s music. His score,written solely for percussion instruments(vibraphone, bass drum, cymbals, and anArabic drum called a doumbek), also includ-ed interpolations and impressions ofGesualdo’s own compositions.

“We knew we were making a show abouta composer—indeed a rather well-known,even infamous composer, whose music was extremely influential [to] several promi-nent composers of the 19th and 20th cen-turies, namely Wagner, Stravinsky, andSchoenberg—so we had a lot of source mate-rial to work with,” says Diamond. “The showeven involved our puppeteers singing oneof Gesualdo’s Renaissance madrigals. A bigpart of my process was to take little bits of[his] music—interesting chord changes, forexample—and to abstract them and manip-ulate them in order to build my score outof them.”

Gesualdo is well known for calling intoquestion the key “center” of a piece. (Musictheory students will know this as the “tonic”of a chord.) He shifts this key center con-stantly in his compositions, which has theeffect of sounding musically unstable, a characteristic that Diamond’s score tried tomimic.

“One of the most interesting things aboutthe process for me was thinking about theways that the musical instability that

At the heart of the Holocaust allegory Brundibar is the story of a brother and sister rallyingothers to overthrow a tyrannical organ grinder. So it is appropriate that another brother-sister team is at the heart of a recent production of the children’s opera at Meredith, N.H.’sWinnipesaukee Playhouse.

Bryan Halperin ’95 is the executive director of the Playhouse, which mounts shows by both pro-fessional and community-theater companies, and for six years he has staged a reading of a play in honorof Holocaust Remembrance Day. When his sister Glenna (Halperin) Lee ’02moved her family toNew Hampshire from New York last summer and took a job as the director of education at Temple B’naiIsrael, the siblings decided to join forces and mount a full-scale production instead.

“Other than creating ‘plays’ as kids at home, this is the first theatrical production we have worked ontogether,” says Halperin of the recent staging of The Brundibar Project, which includes not just the 1938opera Brundibar but also Tony Kushner’s related 2003 one-act play But the Giraffe.

Brundibar was first performed by children in the Prague Jewish Orphanage in 1942 and was famouslyremounted by its composer, Hans Krasa, in 1943 in the concentration camp Theresienstadt, where it waseventually performed 55 times by the camp’s children, many of whom eventually perished at the handsof the Nazis. Kushner was inspired by the opera (which he and Maurice Sendak had turned into an illus-trated children’s book) to write an accompanying one-act play about a girl who must choose betweentaking her beloved stuffed giraffe or her uncle’s Brundibar score with her when her family is sent toTheresienstadt.

“Bryan and I come to Judaism from very different places—I am observantly and spiritually Jewish,and he is culturally [Jewish]—but this production connects us,” says Lee. “We both care about ourhistory as a Jewish people. We both care about people learning tolerance and respect for others.”

While Halperin focused on the theatrical components of the project, Lee created a complementaryeducational packet and an exhibit for the Playhouse’s lobby that helped illuminate the opera’s historicalsignificance for the 650 audience members who attended the five early May performances.

“I found photos, artwork, and poetry and conducted interviews with people who had performed inBrundibar in Theresienstadt,” she says. “This exhibit portrays about six of their stories. I hope peoplemarvel at the numbers of the Holocaust—the horrific statistics—but remember a few amazing people tokeep their memories alive.”

The production is a family affair beyond its brother-sister production team. Three of the siblings’ fourdaughters appear in the show, which features an unusually large 58-person cast. And the theater itself isrun and was co-founded by Halperin and his other sister, his brother-in-law, and his wife (Johanna BlossHalperin BMC ’94, whom he met in a Bi-Co production of Fiddler on the Roof ).

“I always had looked up to Bryan—I even followed him to Haverford,” says Lee. “This was the firsttime he and I both got to see me, the little sister, as an equal and an asset. I’ve learned a lot about us.Turns out we both are very similar when it comes to our work ethics, enthusiasm towards a project, andour productivity—I had no idea we shared those traits.” —R. R.

THEATER MUSIC

Glenna (Halperin) Lee ’02and her brother Bryan

Halperin ’95 (on the steps)pose with the 58-person cast

of The Brundibar Project.

CT: When did you write “No Place,” your essay?CCS:The piece was based on ahodgepodge of things I had writ-ten while in Darfur—emails, jour-nal entries, that sort of thing—butI hadn’t gone back to compile orpolish any of it until I decided tosubmit a piece of my ownfor Chasing Misery. This was thefirst time since being in Darfurthat I’d re-read anything I hadwritten there, and it was actually avery tough process. Those typesof memories really stick to you,and even now as I think about it, Ican feel my heart rate rising. I leftDarfur in 2006, and seven yearspassed before I brought myself tore-visit those days with “NoPlace.” I’m glad I finally did.CT: How do you definehumanitarian work? For example, was the Darfuri midwife whom you pho-tographed also performinghumanitarian work?CCS: If I had to boil it down, I’dsay humanitarian work is the pro-

vision of assistance in crisis oremergency situations to savelives, alleviate suffering, and main-tain human dignity. Was the mid-wife by the flooded river in Darfurperforming humanitarian worktoo? Absolutely. She was thedean of a midwifery school and avery close colleague—we trav-eled together, worked together,ate together, brushed our teethtogether, all those things onedoes on long trips to the field. …When I think of her, I, of course,think of everything she did tosave lives, but perhaps more thanthat, I think of her dignity and

humanity. In a place where peo-ple did, and still do, such awfulthings—the rape, the killing, thedestruction—that element ofhuman dignity can be hard tokeep hold of. She never lost it.And she carried it for others. Ithink that element of human dig-nity is a piece of humanitarianwork that doesn’t get as muchpress, but that makes all the dif-ference. The midwife in thatphoto didn’t just save lives. Shemade them feel valued as peoplein an otherwise hostile environ-ment—that mattered a lot.CT: I've found the term “help to helpers” cropping upwith increasing frequency.How can “helpers” better prepare to engage in help insustainable ways?CCS: One recurring theme in myown observations is the impor-tance of “self care,” recognizingthat helping others can take a tolland trying to remember that weare much more effective in thelong run if we take care of our-

selves along the way. I supposeit’s like that speech they give onairplanes before takeoff: “Put onyour own oxygen mask beforehelping others.” That can be veryhard to do in the field of humani-tarian aid, and I think it’s some-thing most of us could get a lotbetter at. This is part of the reasonthe collective group of authorsand photographers for ChasingMisery decided that 10 percent ofall book royalties will go to theHeadington Institute—to helpthem continue to provide careand support to aid workers whenthey need it most. If you go to theHeadington Institute webpage, itstates their vision in a bold, yellowbox: “One day, all humanitarianworkers will have the personalskills, social support, organization-al resources, and public interestneeded to maintain their wellbe-ing and thrive in their work.” Ithink a lot of us share that vision.[It’s] easier said than done, butclearly there are people out therewho dare to dream.

Q&A: Carmen Crow Sheehan ’00continued from page 30

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Gesualdo created might have beenboth a cause and a symptom of theinstability of his life,” Diamondsays of the man who famouslyspent much of his life trying todecipher a book of incomprehen-sible symbols, was plagued by para-noia, and eventually murdered hiswife, her lover, and at least oneother person—possibly his owninfant son.

The 45-minute piece earnedgood reviews, and the creative teamhas already been invited to take the show to Munich, Prague, andBerlin. So now Gaffney and Dia-mond are working to raise thefunds to remount the show inEurope and other American cities.

Regardless of where the show goes from here, Diamond says heenjoyed the collaborative processof music-making for the theater.

“Creating music for an abstractpuppet show is somewhat differ-ent from creating music for a jazzquintet or a percussion ensemble,”says Diamond, who is also a part-time music teacher at Philadelphia’sScience Leadership Academy. “Be-cause I have interests in a large num-ber of different traditions, I vacillatebetween trying to separate my influ-ences from each other in order togive each the respect that it deserves[and] trying to find connections andparallels that allow my interests tocome together.” —R. R.

Ben Diamond ’11 wrote and performed the live score for Gesualdo,in Heaven, an experimental show featuring large, wooden puppetslike this one.


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TheAgLife forThemFay Strongin ’10 and Sarah Turkus ’10

discovered a shared passion for food and farming as Haverford students. Now the two friends are running Sidewalk Ends Farm in Providence, R.I.

BY EILS LOTOZO

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ITH COMMENCEMENT FAST APPROACHING

in the spring of 2010, Fay Strongin and Sarah

Turkus weren’t doing any of the things you might

expect soon-to-graduate Haverford seniors to do.

They weren’t sending out résumés, lining up inter-

views, or sifting through grad school applications.

Instead, the two friends were carefully tending

flats of vegetable seedlings in the HCA apartment

they shared with other members of Ehaus, and in

some borrowed space in the arboretum’s greenhouse.

Fay Strongin (left) andSarah Turkus wereHaverford roommates.Now they are partners in an urban farm.

The Ag Life for Them

After graduation, the pair would pack up their plants andhead north to launch a small farming operation devoted tosupplying a farm-to-table restaurant in Maine. Four years later,Strongin and Turkus are still at it. No longer in Maine, theyare now urban farmers, partnering with two of Strongin’s child-hood friends to run Sidewalk Ends Farm in Providence, R.I.Based on a 5,000-square-foot vacant lot on a residential block

near the city’s downtown, Sidewalk Ends runs a communitysupported agriculture program (CSA) that provides a weeklysupply of vegetables to 33 subscribers, who pay upfront for theirshares. The farm also sells its produce, herbs, and flowers to arearestaurants. And with the current growing season, SidewalkEnds is expanding its operation with the lease of 2½ acres ofland in nearby Seekonk, Mass. Through their evolution as farmers, Strongin and Turkus

have experienced the joys and challenges that come with beingpart of the leading edge of the sustainable-food movement—and with finding a way to make a living doing what they love. “My family has been asking me how it’s going, and I can say

it’s going great,” Turkus says. “The obstacles we face don’t seemso big because we have each other. I’m working with my bestfriends, so how tough can it be?”

t’s a warm, sunny day in early May,and though spring has been late to arrive inProvidence, Strongin is looking pleased as she sur-veys the healthy crop of salad greens emerging in

the tightly planted beds that line the lot at Sidewalk Ends Farm.While five Rhode Island Red chickens cluck quietly in theircoop, Turkus perches on a tree stump as she talks on her cellphoneto an agricultural extension agent about the results of the soiltest they recently performed on the land in Seekonk. “He saysit’s good that it was a hayfield, because it will be high in agriculturalmatter,” she reports. “But there is probably going to be prettysignificant weed pressure.”Out on the narrow street that borders the back of the lot,

Sidewalk Ends partner Laura Brown-Lavoie is directing thedumping of an enormous pile of wood chips. Brought by a friendwho works for a local landscaping company, the free deliveryhas come as a welcome surprise this morning, and will be usedto re-mulch the paths between the beds. Laura and her younger sister Tess, the fourth Sidewalk Ends

partner, grew up with Strongin in Brookline, Mass. And, likethe two Haverford grads, they got interested in the sustain-able-food movement in college. Laura, who went to Brown

University, worked as a volunteeron organic farms in France anddid an internship at City Farm, a pioneering urban farm in Prov-idence. Tess, a graduate of NewYork University, worked on a farmin Scotland and apprenticed witha rooftop-growing operation inBrooklyn. At Haverford, Strongin,a political science major, receivedsupport from the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (CPGC)internshipprogram to spend one summer working at a farm inNew Hampshire, and another at the Weaver’s Way urban farmin Philadelphia. Turkus (the younger sister of Justin Turkus ’08)was a religion major who took more of a philosophical approachto food, focusing her senior research on the subject with a thesistitled “Hungry for the Good Life: Exploring Michael Pollan’sVision of Ethical Eating in America.” The quartet got their true start in farming in Maine, thanks

to Strongin’s Haverford pal Ashley Brichter ’10, whose familyowned a restaurant called Paolina’s Way—which has sinceclosed—in the seaside town of Camden. “They wanted to growvegetables for the restaurant, and she told her mom about me,”says Strongin. “This was the chance to start a farm, and I wasready to jump at the opportunity to get more experience. So Iinvited Laura and Tess, and Sarah, too, to come with me. I feelso lucky to have gotten the chance to do that. It was definitely alearning experience, and one thing we learned was that we lovedworking together.”Their commitment to the venture (dubbed Well Fed Farm)

was for one growing season, but the friends emerged from ithooked on farming. Turkus went on to get a job at the Weaver’sWay farm in Philadelphia, where Strongin had done her intern-ship, and then became a full-time farm worker at Freedom FoodFarm in Massachusetts. Operated on organic and biodynamicprinciples, the farm sprawls over 80 acres and sells its vegetablesboth wholesale and at farmers’ markets, and raises chickens andpigs as well. “I worked for a really meticulous farmer who hadvery high standards,” says Turkus. “I learned how to be efficientin my work, and how to drive a tractor. I learned about green-houses and how to take care of animals.”Meanwhile, Strongin and Laura Brown-Lavoie both ended

up in Providence, where they were encouraged by the presenceof organizations like the Little City Growers Co-op, whichgives small urban growers access to markets they couldn’t


Top: Sidewalk EndsFarm is based on a5,000-square-foot loton a residential block inthe city of Providence,R.I. Bottom: Turkus (left) weighs saladgreens for a delivery(right) to a localrestaurant they supplywith produce. They also run a communitysupported agricultureprogram that provides a weeklysupply of vegetables to subscribers.

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The Ag Life for Them

reach on their own. They were also inspired by the exampleof a young man they knew who had gotten access to an emptylot and boldly started an urban farm. Looking at doing something similar, Laura began riding

around on her bicycle looking for suitable lots and leaving notesin the mail slots of nearby buildings in hopes of tracking downthe owners. One of those notes reached the couple whose houseabuts the Harrison Street lot that would become Sidewalk Ends.With their help, she made contact with the owner in Rochester,N.Y., and he gave them a green light to use the land. With only that verbal agreement to go on, they began the

painstaking process of making the land fit to farm. “There wasa significant amount of lead on the part of the lot where a houseused to be,” says Strongin. “On that part, we built raised beds.On the other part, we excavated the soil and threw it out andbrought in lots of compost.” They installed rain barrels, andbuilt a mobile washing station to clean the dirt off just-pickedproduce. That washing station came to the Sidewalk Ends farmers(who seem to be wired into every young farmer and agriculturalorganization in the region) through a “Farm Hack” event organ-ized by the National Young Farmers Coalition and the RhodeIsland School of Design. (The ultimate aim of the Farm Hackevents is to open-source any products that result from a collab-oration between farmers and designers.)They also built a system of composting bins, which they fill

with the aid of a complex network of sources, including pilesof leaves from the city, food waste from a nearby farmers’ market,horse bedding from the city police stables, and seaweed theycollect from a public beach. “A rural farm has a lot to rely on,but an urban farmer has to think about the whole city and beopen to everything they can find,” says Laura. With Tess coming aboard after she finished school, Sidewalk

Ends Farm operated for its first two seasons as part of a CSAcooperative with the partners’ urban farmer friend, who calledhis vacant-lot venture Front Step Farm. By their third season,in 2013, they were planting a piece of borrowed land on a friend’s

farm in a Providence suburb to test the idea of expanding. Turkus finally joined her old friends at Sidewalk Ends this

year, bringing what she learned at her last farm job to help withthe expansion to the acreage in Seekonk, where they will nowhave the room required to plant space-hogging vegetables likecabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and winter squash. They alsoplan to expand their flower-growing operation. Turkus, who took a soil class over the winter, will be focusing

on enriching the soil at the new location and looking at waysto extend the season with hoop houses. She and Laura haveboth dropped the waitressing jobs that had been supplementing

their income and are looking to their full-time work at the farm to pay the bills. “We’rea little nervous,” she says. Strongin—who manages the Sidewalk

Ends CSA, does outreach, handles many ofthe business aspects of the farm, and is pas-sionate about keeping the CSA membershipsaffordable—continues to waitress part-timeat a café in the neighborhood. During the

school year, she also works at a private school running extracur-ricular activities, including coaching an environmental scienceclub that competes in the national Envirothon competition. Tessworks for the Rhode Island Agricultural Partnership and is alsoinvolved with the Young Farmer Network, which encompassessoutheastern New England. Even with Sidewalk Ends expanding its reach this season,

“supporting four full-time farmers would be hard,” says Strongin.

ater on that same day in May,Turkusand Strongin make the 15-mile drive back toProvidence from Seekonk in the beat-up 1993Dodge Dakota pickup Turkus recently bought to

use as farm transportation. (“The gas gauge doesn’t work, butit’s earned its keep already,” she says of the truck.) They havespent the late morning squatting companionably in the field,transplanting row upon row of seedlings that will become cropsof chard, kale, collards, beets, scallions, and parsley. They’veplanted fragrant cilantro seeds and put in a row of nasturtiums—a hot seller for them last year with one Providence restaurant.Now it’s time for the farmers’ weekly meeting, which takes

place in the living room of the Providence apartment the Brown-Lavoie sisters share with some roommates. They speed througha lengthy agenda, which Laura keeps in a spiral-bound note-book—the same place she keeps the farm’s detailed plot maps


“FARMERS CAN BE SCIENTISTS OR PHILOSOPHERS,

OR WHATEVER YOU WANT,” SAYS TURKUS.

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showing what will be planted where. With an easy rapport, the women discuss how they’ll spend

the $11,000 grant they got from a partnership between thestate and private foundations aimed at strengthening the localfood system. On the top of the list is a tractor—in particular,a sturdy, easy-to-repair, vintage model. They’ll also use thefunds to install an electric fence that will deer-proof a one-acrefield in Seekonk. Finally, Turkus paces out the proposed sizeof the refrigeration shed they plan to erect in the new locationwith the help of a carpenter friend who is bartering his laborfor a share of the farm’s produce.Also on the agenda: a proposed road trip to Rochester, to

try to track down the elusive owner of the Sidewalk Ends lot.Since getting his blessing—over the phone—to begin plantingthree years earlier, they have been unable to make contact withthe man. Even when they sent him a proposal to buy the lot—with money raised through an Indiegogo campaign—they gotno response. More recently, the women have been workingwith the Southside Community Land Trust, which has secureda grant from the Nature Conservancy to buy the property andprovide a long-term lease to Sidewalk Ends Farm. “He hasn’teven gotten back to the Land Trust,” says Strongin. “He hasn’tsaid he wants us to leave. He hasn’t said anything.”Which means that, for now, the farmers are in limbo. They

would dearly love to rebuild the sagging wooden fence andinstall an independent water source (they now rely on the kind-ness of neighbors), but are hesitant to invest further in theproperty. Land insecurity is a major issue in urban farming, andthey’ve had a close encounter with a cautionary tale: That friendwhose urban farming effort first inspired them was booted offhis lot when the owner made a deal to sell it.

hatever happens, farming seems to havegotten into their blood. “It’s just part of my ethosto know where my food comes from and whogrows it,” says Strongin.

Turkus says she appreciates how infinitely multileveled theoccupation of farming can be, how many aspects of the worldit allows her explore. “Farmers can be scientists or philosophers,or whatever you want,” she says. And then there is the special joy of working with close friends.

“There are some days we’re working in the field when we debatethe world. And sometimes we don’t talk at all,” says Turkus.Says Strongin with a smile, “Sometimes we talk about what

we’re going to have for lunch.”


DOWN ON THE HAVERFARM

While at Haverford, Fay Strongin worked with a group of fellowstudents to create the Haverford Garden Initiative, a student clubthat planted its first garden at HCA in the spring of 2010. Each sum-mer since then, the CPGC has supported a student intern who’scharged with maintaining the garden and helping to develop itas a permanent program. Last year, the initiative took a new turnthrough the efforts of some senior environmental studies minors,who created the Agricultural Center for Environmental Studies,otherwise known as the Haverfarm, to develop their ideas for astudent-run agricultural space focused on food, justice, and en-vironmental education. In addition to the existing raised bedsat HCA, the gardening effort on campus now includes a largeplot behind the Facilities Management building, where studentswho turned out for a Haverfarm volunteer day in April spreadcompost and planted fruit trees and vegetables. On the planninggroup’s agenda for the farm are the construction of a tool shed,a rain garden, and an irrigation system. But topping the wish listis a greenhouse, which would extend the growing season fur-ther into the academic year. Alanna Matteson ’15, who pitchedin on the Haverfarm as an unpaid intern during the school year,will be overseeing the gardens this summer as a CPGC-sup-ported intern. Along with traveling to Iowa, as part of a farmingdelegation, and to Cuba to look at sustainable agriculture proj-ects, Matteson plans to spend the summer developing relation-ships with local organizations that could help advance thevision for the Haverfarm. —E. L.

Alanna Matteson ’15 is maintaining the Haverford Collegegarden this summer through a CPGC internship.

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CHRIS OSGOOD '99on a balcony atBoston's City Hall.


t was an early-spring morning, andChris Osgood ’99, “urban mechanic,” was deepinside Boston City Hall’s parking garage.

Outside the sun was glorious, brightening even City Hall’s stark Brutalist architecture. But Osgoodwas in the artificial light inside a truck, looking at an oversized blue vending machine filled with thingslike duct tape, work gloves, and safety vests. Next to him, another blue vending machine with windowedlockers held power tools.

He stood there, wearing a collared shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, gazing through steel-rim glasses ashe listened intently to a spiel on how the vending machines would help the city cut 50 percent from itscosts for supplies in just the first year of use.

Vetting industrial vending machines does not appear in Osgood’s job description. But as co-directorof Boston’s pioneering Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, he’s a kind of minister without portfoliowhose work encompasses a wide array of duties. In this case, officials from several city departments,including the Public Works commissioner, have heard similar spiels on this machine, and they wantedOsgood to look at it. That means there’s a problem that they want solved, and they’re asking one of theirvaunted new urban mechanics to get under the hood and make some recommendations.

As he listens, Osgood asks questions about how the machines work, and especially how officials cansee reports on what’s being used and spent. As he hears the answers, he sees real potential to solve aproblem and make the city run just that much better.


TECHS ANDTHE CITYAs co-director of Boston’s innovative Office of New Urban Mechanics,Chris Osgood ’99 helps city officials adopt new technologies to connect with residents, improve services, and solve problems.

BY MICHAEL FITZGERALD

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“It’s great to be in this truck!” he tells them. And hemeans it.

As an urban mechanic, Osgood tinkers with the cityas a whole, working across city departments to helpthem adopt new technologies and methods so they canengage more closely with citizens and provide betterservice. Launched more than four years ago, the Officeof New Urban Mechanics has done so well that whenBoston changed mayors, the new mayor, Marty Walsh,not only kept the office, he expanded it. The ground-breaking work done in Boston has led to similar effortsin other cities, including Philadelphia, whose Office ofNew Urban Mechanics opened two years ago.

Osgood has been interested in cities since he was akid. He spent his first nine years in Boston’s Beacon Hillneighborhood, before his family moved to nearbyBrookline. His father, a banker, was active in the city’sarts and preservation communities, and would takeOsgood and his older brother for walks and tell themthe back stories of public art. Osgood’s father also hada collection of old prints of the city and old books aboutBoston. Meanwhile, Osgood’s mother, a teacher, tookthem to the city’s excellent museums and aquarium.

In high school at Milton Academy, Osgood took aclass on American poverty that included spending timevolunteering at Boston-area shelters and exposing himto a different part of the city. He deferred college for ayear to work with AmeriCorps’ City Year program, land-ing a placement as a teaching assistant in a kindergartenclass in a Boston elementary school with a large CapeVerdean population. (Osgood says he can still sing theBarney theme song in Cape Verdean Creole, a variantof Portuguese.)

In college, he found his way to Bryn Mawr’s Growthand Structure of Cities program, and he says he knewfrom his first paper in an “Urban Culture and Society”course that he had chosen the right major. He wroteabout an open space in Philadelphia, the Clemente Parkand Playground, and how its design shaped the activityand social life of a neighborhood. “I loved it and was offfrom there,” he says. “I probably over-majored.”

Osgood says he was fortunate to be in the Growthand Structure of Cities program when its founder,Barbara Miller Lane, was still teaching. (She retired in1999.) “She’s a remarkable person,” he says, notingthat the interdisciplinary mix of courses he experiencedin the program continues to shape his work. “I talk to people all the time who feel like they’re not usingtheir undergraduate program in their day-to-day life.I feel like I use mine all the time.” It was an especiallyapt program for someone who wants to change citiesacross departments.

But, nearing his Haverford graduation in 1999,

Osgood wasn’t thinking about working for a city at all.His work experience had been at City Year, MASSPIRG(Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group), andthe Pennsylvania Environmental Council, all nonprofits.But a recruiter from the New York City Department ofParks & Recreation came to campus, and Osgood signedup for an interview. The department offered him a spot.

New York’s Parks & Rec is steeped in city shaping;it was the domain for 26 years of Robert Moses, “thepower broker,” one of the most influential urban plannersever. Moses’ old office is now the department’s conferenceroom. Another legend of urban planning, Frederick LawOlmsted, also maintains a palpable presence in thedepartment, which is headquartered in Olmsted’s crownjewel, Central Park.

In New York, Osgood started out as the advance per-son/staff assistant for a Parks & Rec commissioner, trav-eling around the five boroughs meeting constituents.He eventually became that commissioner’s chief of staff,and later was chief of staff and then senior advisor to another commissioner. When Michael Bloombergbecame New York’s mayor in 2002, replacing RudyGiuliani, Osgood found himself fascinated by Bloom-berg’s approach to running the city. “He looked at leadinga city as a major strategic and managerial challenge,”says Osgood.

Bloomberg’s style crystallized for Osgood that hedidn’t want to write public policy. “I was most interestedin how cities create value for their constituents,” he says.That realization led Osgood to Harvard Business School.Having worked in nonprofits and government, hethought he might go into private industry and learn itsrole in shaping cities. But at a panel on careers, he hearda speaker who was working in the Boston’s Mayor’sOffice as a Harvard Business School Leadership Fellow.Osgood decided then and there he wanted to do thesame thing, and after graduating in 2006, he went offfor his one-year fellowship, which has turned into 7½years of working on (and for) the City of Boston.

of the Office of New Urban Mechanics, Nigel Jacob,are sitting one day in May in a small fifth-floor con-ference room in Boston’s City Hall, behind a door justoff the capacious reception area for the Mayor’s Office.Osgood and Jacob started as Leadership Fellows onthe same day. They’ve worked together closely sincethen, in a kind of ongoing dialogue about how to maketheir city better.

Asked why governments aren’t considered inno-vative, Osgood says, “The services aren’t seen by peopleas services. There was a study by two professors at

Techs and the City


sgood and his co-director

Harvard Business School—”“It’s always ‘HBS,’ ” interrupts Jacob.“I know, I know,” Osgood says, smiling. “The study

asked, ‘Do you take advantage of any government services?’ And people said no. But if you ask, ‘Do youuse the mortgage deduction’ or ‘drive on streets’ or‘have kids that go to the public schools,’ well, of coursethey do.”

The pair has developed an effective partnership, play-ing to each other’s strengths, Jacob’s Mr. Outside toOsgood’s Mr. Inside. “I’ve always been the wonk andNigel’s always been the explorer,” Osgood says. Whatthey share is a passion for Boston, and for using tech-nology to make the city more engaged with its citizens.

Neither was hired to be an urban mechanic, a termoriginally flung as an insult at Thomas M. Menino(Boston’s mayor from 1993 to 2013), meant to makehim look like he had no vision for the city. Menino tookthe slur and turned it into a badge of honor. But therewas no formal office around it. Menino says that gotstarted, in a sense, because of Osgood.

“Chris came to me and said, ‘We should be usingtechnology in urban areas,’ ” says Menino, now co-direc-tor of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities. “I said,‘What’s your mind on? Why should we do this?’ ”Menino is famously technology averse, loath even to

install voicemail at City Hall during much of his timeas mayor. Osgood and Jacob believed that the rise ofthe iPhone and other smart handhelds meant that citieshad a new way to engage with citizens, and Bostonneeded to take advantage of it.

“He showed we could do it,” Menino says. One of the early efforts was a customer-relationship

management program, called LAGAN, that helpedtransform the city’s service departments, making themquicker to respond to requests from a citizen hotline.Potholes are now, on average, filled in around two busi-ness days after being reported. Sidewalk repairs havealso been speeded up, and burned-out streetlights arereplaced more quickly.

Another early project, developed before Meninoformalized the roles of Osgood and Jacob by creatingthe Office of New Urban Mechanics, was the appCitizens Connect, which lets citizens report potholesfrom their phones, using their GPS to set locations.Citizens Connect, launched in 2009, has been down-loaded by tens of thousands of people. Through it, thecity was able to turn residents into virtual eyes andears, and to respond to what they reported. The apphas been copied by scores of cities.

Osgood may be Mr. Inside, but that doesn’t mean heonly haunts City Hall. He and Jacob worked with local


NIGEL JACOB(left), co-director of the Office ofNew UrbanMechanics, hasworked closelywith Osgood sincethe office wascreated in 2010.

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entrepreneurs and the Public Works Department tocreate Street Bump, an app that uses a smartphone’saccelerometers and GPS to measure where roads arebumpy and automatically send information to a citydatabase. The goal was to know where street repaircrews were most needed. But the challenge was howto test the app. Actual potholes needed to be hit togather data and see if the phone revealed a differencebetween regular roads and bumps. Osgood doesn’t owna car (he usually bicycles to work). He had in the pastborrowed his sister-in-law’s car, but “I could no longerborrow her car for my experiments,” he says. Jacobwasn’t willing to give up his axles to the cause. The twoeventually found a willing accomplice in a press officer,who proceeded to drive them around Boston Common20 to 30 times in the city’s press car, hitting every potholethey could find. “It was not, like, reckless,” Osgood saysof their driving. “The press office needed zero encour-agement to be part of this.”

They found that the accelerometers did show bumpsin the road. Street Bump was developed further andreleased as an app on the iPhone. Now they are workingon a way to automatically dispatch road crews, insteadof having to send an inspector first to look at the bumps.

involve pothole drive-bys. In a typical week, he and Jacobspend about a third of their time meeting with officialsfrom various city departments to talk about needs andpossible new technologies, about a third working ondeveloping ideas, and about a third meeting with peoplefrom outside the city who have ideas to pitch, like thelocal tech entrepreneur who wanted to pay his parkingtickets from his phone. (That resulted in TicketZen,launched last year.) Another pitch from a woman whohad an idea for a tablet app that could help teach autisticyouth resulted in Technology for Autism Now, whichthe urban mechanics helped build and test.

They also give time to other cities. Story K. Bellows,co-director of Philadelphia’s Office of New UrbanMechanics, says Osgood and Jacob have been instru-mental in helping her office get started, sharing adviceand expertise. When it launched, the two came downon the train from Boston along with the city’s then chiefinformation officer. Bellows says they patiently answeredMayor Michael Nutter’s questions even after it was timefor them to catch the last train out. Nutter wound upgiving them a police escort so they could make theirtrain. Even now, “we’re on the phone at least once aweek,” she says. Philadelphia has adapted some of theBoston projects for its own use, and Boston has alsoadapted at least one Philadelphia program, a project

called FastFWD, which encourages civic entrepreneursto develop new approaches to social problems. (Phila-delphia is focused on urban safety, Boston on education.)The two offices jointly applied for funding from theKnight Foundation for a program called CommunityPlanIt, which encourages citizens to play a civic engage-ment game and get involved in community planning.They also have a joint web site, newurbanmechanics.org.

Bellows says Osgood “is incredibly visionary,” andlauds him for his patience and his ability to create thingsthat provide benefits across city departments and forresidents. She says he and Jacob are “baking this intothe DNA of how government works in Boston. That’sa real testament to their success. It’s a whole lot biggerthan just them.”

Osgood’s ideas also matter for cities that don’t for-mally have urban mechanics. “Most mayors in Americaaren’t big-city mayors, and most don’t have the abilityto innovate or the budget to innovate,” says AdamWood ’00, Osgood’s Haverford roommate and thechief of staff for the mayor of Bridgeport, Conn. WhatOsgood has done is give mayors like Bridgeport’s aninnovation incubator, spitting out ideas that other citiescan then copy. Bridgeport modeled several programsafter Boston’s, like Be Connected, which lets residentstake photos of things in the city that need fixing andupload them to a city database. “It’s a fantastic model,”Wood says, noting that Bridgeport officials have goneto meet with Osgood and Jacob.

Wood says Osgood was already driven by the samepassion for making cities better when he was in college.“He was all the time volunteering and doing things. He’salways been deeply concerned about urban issues,whether poverty or lack of access to quality education.”

Osgood isn’t just an urban mechanic. At 37, he’slearning to play the banjo. He’s also learning to bowl,by visiting all of Boston’s candlepin lanes. He ran thisyear’s Boston Marathon, raising money for Alzheimer’s,in honor of his father, who died last year. Osgood alsoloves the outdoors. He and his girlfriend have hiked2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail and climbed allthe 4,000-foot-plus peaks in New England. But work—the work of making cities great—preoccupies himmost of the time.

“You have to understand his DNA,” says Menino.“He’s all about service. He’d volunteer to work thephone lines to be of service. We have young peoplewho don’t want to work in government. Chris appre-ciates government.”

Michael Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist in Cambridge,Mass. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, TheEconomist, Fast Company, The New York Times, TheWall Street Journal and dozens of other publications.

ost of Osgood’s days don’t

Techs and the City


n a perfect spring day in April, more than 700Houstonians got together over lunch, at $100 a seat, tolisten to a college professor talk about his latest research.During a slide show complete with pie charts, bar graphs,and color-coded maps, all eyes and ears were on StephenL. Klineberg ’61 as he delivered the latest findings ofthe 33rd annual Kinder Institute Houston Area Survey,the longest-running study of a U.S. metropolitan area.

Conducted by phone each spring, the Houston AreaSurvey has tracked changes in the city’s economic base,demographic characteristics, and quality-of-life issues.Residents have expressed their opinions on ethnic rela-tions and diversity, public safety and crime, the envi-ronment, and even that relentless headache for com-muters—traffic. They’ve also weighed in on historicallydivisive social issues like gay rights, gun control, andcapital punishment, often revealing a good deal moreopen-mindedness than today’s overheated political rhet-oric would suggest. (For example, surveys have doc-umented a drop in support for the death penalty.)

“Even when they’re not entirely happy with what the

data are telling them,” says Klineberg, “people now seethis as a kind of institutional snapshot to get every year.”

During this 2014 survey rollout event and a circuitof media appearances, Klineberg, a professor of sociologyand co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Researchat Rice University, manages to engage his audience witha youthful exuberance that belies his 74 years. It’s thatconfidence in the data, paired with a passionate concernfor the city he’s called home since 1972 (through boomand bust and, for now, back to boom again), that haspeople hanging on every word.

“It’s Houston’s destiny—no one having chosen this—to be at the forefront of the demographic transformationsoccurring across all of America,” says Klineberg, duringa recent interview in his decidedly modest office on Rice’scampus. “The census projections for the U.S. in 2050 isthe same picture as Houston is today. So this is wherethe American future is being worked out.”

“He’s become a great convener of senior people fromvarious professions that can come around and talk aboutsolutions,” says Mustafa Tameez, the founder and man-


URBAN STUDIESHOUSTONis where theAmerican future isbeing worked out,says Klineberg.

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For 33 years, Stephen L. Klineberg ’61 has been measuring Houston’sdemographic shifts and changing attitudes with an annual survey that has become the longest running study of a U.S. metropolitan area.

BY LYNN GOSNELL

lineberg grew up in New YorkKaging director of the public-affairs firm Outreach Strategies.“He has built this following of people that have not justrespect, but great affection for him.” A prime exampleof Klineberg’s convening power is realized through hiswork with the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofitthat advances the city as a place to live and work.

Klineberg is an award-winning teacher—after receivingRice University’s top teaching award eight times, he wasretired from the competition in 2008. And he’s alsothat rare academic whose public scholarship has madehim a respected voice within Houston’s civic circles.Access to education as a hedge against poverty is a keytheme he touches on when talking to these groups.He’s especially concerned about a younger Houstonpopulation at risk.

Of Harris County residents under the age of 20,Klineberg notes, 51 percent are Latinos, 19 percent areAfrican American, 8 percent are Asians, and 22 percentare Anglos. “That means that 70 percent of the youngpeople in Harris County are Latino and African American,two groups which are the most likely to be living inpoverty. If Houston’s African American and Latino youngpeople are unprepared to succeed in the knowledge econ-omy of the 21st century, there’s no positive future.”

Klineberg has an answer for those who find the survey’sresults either surprising or frightening, or some combi-nation of both: “Data matter.”

Eugene H. Vaughan, an entrepreneur and the foundingchairman of the Center for Houston’s Future, regularlyinvites Klineberg to speak at the center’s Business andCivic Leadership Forum, a training ground and catalystfor local leaders to become more active in civic affairs.“He’s remarkable in the way he conveys his knowledgein a way no one else in Houston does.” To date, almost800 people have graduated from the forum. “Becausehe’s been doing this survey since 1982, Houston knowsitself better than any other city in the world,” says Vaughan.

Klineberg’s research has bolstered advocates of uni-versal preschool and kindergarten. Carol Shattuck, theCEO of Houston’s Collaborative for Children, first metKlineberg decades ago at a local Quaker Meetinghouse.

“He says frequently in his work that if we don’tmake sure that these children get through high schooland to a two- or four-year credential, we will live in avery different community 20 or 30 years from now,”Shattuck says.

It’s ironic that Houston owes this wealth of self-knowledge, in part, to the great oil and gas crash of1982. A few years ago, Klineberg was the subject of adocumentary titled Interesting Times: Tracking Houston’sTransformations Through 30 Years of Surveys. In the 24-minute video, he recounts the story of how the survey started, ended, and then continued.

“It was a one-time survey back in 1982. Houston wasbooming! Two months later, the oil boom collapsed and100,000 jobs were lost by the end of 1983. We said, mygod, we better do this survey again. … And for 30 years,my students have been … asking people identical ques-tions over the years. How do you see the world? Whatis happening in your life? We’ve sat back and watchedthe world change.”

and attended schools in both Europe and the U.S.before setting foot on Haverford’s campus in 1957. HisQuaker upbringing (his father was Jewish, his motherwas Quaker, and Klineberg and his two siblings wereraised as Quakers) has made him a natural advocatefor the underprivileged and for Houston’s diverse pop-ulation. “The one belief you have to have as a Quakeris that there is that of God in every person,” he says.“I came [to Houston] with that prejudice of equality,a prejudice of equal value and equal worth.”

After graduation (B.A. in psychology), he marriedhis Bryn Mawr sweetheart, Margaret Kersey, and wenton to earn degrees from the Sorbonne and Harvard.After a brief stint at Princeton, he joined Rice’s soci-ology faculty.

Klineberg, who served for many years on Haverford’sBoard of Managers and as a member of the Corporation(which focuses on enriching the College’s Quaker char-acter), says his next project is to write the definitive bookthat sums up and analyzes the wealth of data he’s collectedover the years. “There hasn’t been a significant book writ-ten about Houston since 1991,” he says.

As co-director of the Kinder Institute, he’s alsoworking to broaden the center’s impact. “The goal isnot only to do research that is transparently reliable,but to use that research to inform and inspire the com-munity on which it is based—to be a catalyst forinformed decision-making.”

In the meantime, Rice’s campus holds a special joyfor Klineberg and his wife—three grandchildren areenrolled there as undergraduates.

Reflecting on his undergraduate education, Klinebergsays, “What Haverford does so well is say, ‘It’s not enoughjust to know things; you need to make the world a betterplace. There’s a powerful statement in Quakerism, ‘Letyour life speak.’ ”

As a teacher and scholar whose reputation extendsfar outside the 100-acre campus of Rice University, Kline-berg’s life not only speaks, it speaks in a way that invitespeople to listen to what he—and the data—have to say.Lynn Gosnell is a freelance writer and editor in the ever-fascinating city of Houston, Texas.

Urban Studies



HISTORY LESSON

The College didn’t go fully coed until 1979, but Haverford actually turnedout its first women graduates decades before that. They were products of the T. WistarBrown Graduate School, which granted master’s degrees to 27 women, beginningin 1918 with Eleanor May Gifford, whose thesis focused on the Synoptic Gospels ofthe Bible. Established in 1917, the graduate program was funded by a bequest from

Haverford’s T. Wistar Brown Graduate School was launched in 1917 as a coed program and granted master’sdegrees to 27 women (including these circa 1925 scholars) during its decade-long existence.

T. Wistar Brown, a prominent Quaker and generousHaverford benefactor, who served on the Board ofManagers for 63 years. Brown had established theMoses Brown Fund (named for his father) to support“a graduate course in religious study,” and at thetime of his death in 1917, the fund had grown tomore than $372,000—a huge sum at the time. Justas remarkable, a suggestion by then-President IsaacSharpless that the program admit women appearsto have been easily approved when it came up fora vote during a 1917 board meeting.

Male students in the program lived in MerionHall (now faculty apartments), while the women(who outnumbered the men 6 to 3 at one point)lived in a residence referred to as “Graduate House”

(now Cadbury House). According to the minutesof a 1924 board meeting, women graduates of theschool went on to work as teachers, social and reli-gious workers, and missionaries. One worked inpenal reform, another in business. But in 1926, justa decade after its launch, the graduate school’s management committee issued a report that ques-tioned the cost of the program, and singled out inparticular the expense of maintaining a separatehouse for women. That was the end of the T. WistarBrown Graduate School. A female presence oncampus would not be felt again until the WorldWar II era, when the Relief and Reconstructiongraduate program began admitting women in 1943.

—Eils Lotozo

The IndependentVintnerIn 2000, married wine enthusiasts JenniferWaits ’89and Brian Mast started attendingthe Anderson Valley Pinot Noir Festival,which is held annually about two hoursnorth of their San Francisco home. Distin-guishing themselves from the more casualoenophiles at the fest, they attended not

only the tastings and dinners, but also thetechnical conference, where they oftenfound themselves the only non-experts inthe room, listening to scientific lecturesabout soil content. Five years later, theywere making their own wine.

The couple launched Waits-MastFamily Cellars with their first commercialwine in 2008. (Incidentally, that wine, the2007 Waits-Mast Wentzel Vineyard Pinot


The Long and

RoadWining

For some Fords, wine is more than just a delicious

after-work drink; it is the workitself. BY REBECCA RABER

OME PEOPLE DRINK WINE TO RELAX. Others imbibe as a way tocomplement and better enjoy a fine meal. But for these five Fords, wineis their life—or at least part of their livelihoods. They make, sell, champion,and study wine. For some, it is a second job or a hobby. For others, itrepresents years of training, study, and apprenticeship. For most, it hasn’tbeen a straight path from Haverford to these oenophile careers, but thisquintet of alumni has followed their hearts and found that their fervorfor fermented grapes has opened up a world of opportunities. S

VINTNERSJennifer Waits ’89 (left)

and husband BrianMast run Waits-Mast

Family Cellars, aboutique winery thatfocuses on pinot noir. PH

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The Long and Wining Road

Noir, was included in The San FranciscoChronicle’sannual list of the top 100 winesof the year.) They began by making theirproduct at a “participatory winery” in theirhometown that offered customers theresources to concoct their own vino, butthey eventually moved into a local, sharedprofessional facility. Waits-Mast makesonly pinot noirs—and for the most partonly single-vineyard ones—and sourcesthe grapes from the Anderson Valley andMendocino County.

“We’re not going for an over-the-top,overly extracted pinot noir,” says Waits,who notes that it was her husband’s passionfor pinot and the Anderson Valley Festival’semphasis on it that led to their single-vari-etal label. “We want to have balancedwines. We tend toward lower alcohol, butsometimes that’s hard to control. We wantto make food-friendly, elegant wine.”

Waits and Mast started making winefor their own consumption in 2005. Theirfirst bottle—made from grapes fromAmberRidge Vineyard in the Russian RiverValley—proved so popular with theirfriends that the couple eventually expand-ed their operation into theircurrent 400-case-a-year bou-tique business, which nowcan ship to 12 states aroundthe country and countsMichelin-starred restaurants,such as Manresa, as clients.

“There’s pictures of mesorting the grapes [our] firstyear, and I was pregnant,” says Waits. “Ourdaughter was born in 2006, so the wineand the child were all being developed atthe same time. It was kind of a crazy year.”

Though she and her husband are thedriving forces behind Waits-Mast, she isquick to note that they consider them-selves to be vintners, or wine merchants,who defer to the expertise of their on-staff winemaker.

“Brian and I have relationships with allof our growers, [as] we don’t actually ownany vineyards,” she says. “We purchasegrapes from small growers, and we’re theones who are figuring out what we’re goingto make every year. So we’re doing someof what the winemaker would do, but the

chemistry stuff, we’re notexperts in that, so we rely onour winemaker.”

Their “larger small busi-ness” takes a lot of time anddedication—a recent week-end found them traveling toChicago to pour at a pinot

noir tasting event—though both Waitsand her husband still maintain othersources of income. (She is a freelance writer,and he works in marketing.)

“There are challenging years,” saysWaits. “There was a year where there werereally bad wildfires, so there was a smok-iness to a lot of the wines. And there areyears where you’re really worried aboutfrost and late rain and rot, so it can be areal nail biter.”

Waits-Mast Family Cellars is trying togrow sustainably so that more people cantaste the delicious fruits of their labor. “Wedidn’t want to get too big too soon,” saysWaits. “We wanted to make sure we canactually sell the wine that we’re making.”

The ExpertMerchantOnly 312 people in the world qualify as“masters of wine”—a title that, in the indus-try, denotes one of the highest standardsof professional knowledge. Phil Bilodeau’96 is one research paper away from beingthe 313th, and the only one in the Mid-west. But rather than use his encyclopedicknowledge of wine to open a restaurantor start his own winery, Bilodeau useshis expertise to help people select inter-esting bottles every day at the two Mil-waukee-area locations of his Thief WineShop and Bar. (The name refers to a barrelthief—a long glass tube used to extractmaturing wine from barrels for samplingat a winery.)

“Wine’s a passion, and I’ve worked hardto learn and know as much about it as Ican,” says Bilodeau. “That’s a primary rea-son we’ve been able to succeed as a specialtywine shop—we carry a lot of eclectic and


WINE EXPERTPhil Bilodeau ’96

opened Thief WineShop and Bar in the

downtown MilwaukeePublic Market in 2008.He and his partner nowhave a second location.

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unfamiliar wines, and our customers trustus to be their filter. I feel like it’s easy tosell anyone anything once, but I’d so muchrather figure out what would be the perfectwine for that person and have them comeback saying, ‘That was a perfect recom-mendation.’ ”

The former Haverford English majorbegan his career on the East Coast in pub-lishing, but his burgeoning wine hobbyeventually led him to Napa and Sonoma,where he worked at Grgich Hills Estate,Trefethen Vineyards, and Sonoma CountyVintners, a trade organization representingthe region’s wineries, in wine educationand marketing. When it came time to strikeout on his own, though, he and cofounderAimee Murphy decided to open a winestore and bar in the heart of beer-and-bratscountry in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee is a big city,” says Bilodeau.“There’s a fair amount of people here whoenjoy and appreciate wine and haveenough disposable income to spend on it. And yet I thought the market was significantly underserved. …People here are really curiousand eager, and it’s been greatfor us.”

In 2008 they opened theirfirst location, inside the Mil-waukee Public Market, a sort

of Reading Terminal/Pike’s Place hybridfeaturing fish, cheese, spices, and otherfood merchants and restaurants. Two yearslater, they opened a second location, in thesuburb of Shorewood.

“We’re definitely a small shop, a spe-cialty store, but we’ve got a really well-rounded collection, a lot of interesting,small [wines] you won’t see anywhereelse,” says Bilodeau, who works almostevery day in one of his stores and spendshis off hours responding to customer emailsand researching new bottles to add to theshops. “We have a lot of regular customers,and I’ve earned their trust. They’ll let meput together a case for them, [saying] ‘Eight

reds, four whites, 300 bucks.’And they let me pick what-ever I want. That’s fun.”

Thief stocks about 750different wines at a time, andits bar offers a rotating selec-tion of 30 wines by the glass,

all of which are vetted by Bilodeau’s strictstandards and refined palate. But, he adds,“I’m not a wine snob. To me, wine’s just avehicle to help enjoy life and somethingto share with friends.”

The UrbanWinemakerIt’s relatively easy to get your hands ona bottle of Beaujolais or Bordeaux, buthave you ever tried a bottle of Roxanneor Marvin or Cyrus? Only visitors toMicrocosmos Chai Urbain, France’s first“urban winery,” have.

Microcosmos was started by Swisspatent attorney Lukas Völlmy ’96 andhis French teacher-turned-winemakerwife, Fabienne, as a way to make and sellFabienne’s wine in the historic center ofMarseille. The city is centrally locatedbetween several different wine regions,but is not considered part of one itself.Because France upholds a strict code ofrules for the classification of its hundredsof geographically defined appellations(such as Burgundy, Champagne, andSancerre), the duo couldn’t legally givetheir wine an appellation. So instead,they name their bottles for people.

In the generic “Vin de France” cate-gory, “You can’t put the year, you can’tput the type of grape you use,” saysVöllmy of the difficulties of marketingwine made in Marseille. “But in the end,we really like it. Being free from the tech-nical constraints of the appellation turnsout to be our strength. It allows us tofocus solely on quality and to make winesthat are different. [So] we just give eachone a different name—a personal name.… This year we’re using names fromFabienne’s favorite TV series, like Break-ing Bad.”


“We carry a lot of eclectic andunfamiliar wines,” says Bilodeau,“and our customers trust us to be their filter.”

PATENTATTORNEY

Lukas Völlmy ’96 (left)and his winemaker wife

Fabienne launchedFrance’s first “urbanwinery” in Marseille.


Since 2012, the Völlmys have beenmaking and selling wine in the city as away to have direct access to their cus-tomers and the different grape-growersthey use year-to-year.

“The reason we set up here was notto be a gimmick and make wine in town,”says Völlmy. “It was to have access togreat regions. To the east is Côtes deProvence, which is especially known forhigh-quality rosés, and when you gonorth, you have the whole Côtes duRhône, which is a huge grape-growingarea. And westwards, there’s anotherhuge area [Languedoc-Roussillon],which goes all the way to Spain. WithMarseilles being a logistics hub and hav-ing access to a refrigerated truck, we canget anywhere we want and bring backgrapes in perfect shape with only threehours of driving.”

Microcosmos makes only a few thou-sand bottles a year, almost all of whichthe Völlmys sell directly from their win-ery. (They hope to eventually increasecapacity.) They make six or seven differ-ent varietals at a time in 500-bottle runs;last year it was mostly whites and rosés.

But Völlmy has a wait-and-see ap-proach for this year’s harvest—especiallysince, unlike other wineries in Provence,he and his wife are adherents of what’scalled “parcellary selection,” the approachtypically used in Burgundy where grapesfor a given wine are all grown on thesame plot of land.

Setting up a winery from scratch hasn’tbeen easy though. At first, Fabienne wasworking at other wineries, while reno-vation of their commercial space draggedon. “When we did our first batch in thewinery in 2012, the equipment endedup coming two weeks before the harvest,”he says. “So we couldn’t commit to grape

growers, and two weeks before harvestwe had a shiny new winery and no sourceof grapes. We scrambled to get access togood parcels, but, adding to our misfor-tune, one of the most promising parcelswas completely ravaged by wild boars afew days before harvest. All worked outfine that year, but I suspect we’ll face thatuncertainty and stress every year, whichin the end is exciting.”

The Scientist-ScholarThe relatively short postgraduate life ofAlissa Aron ’11 has been full of wine.She spent the first year after her Haverfordgraduation on a trip around the worldstudying the interplay of science and art

in winemaking. Sponsored by a WatsonFellowship, she traveled to Spain, Austria,New Zealand, Argentina, Italy, and SouthAfrica, and worked harvest seasons inFrance and Chile. And when the yearwas over, she wasn’t ready to come home.

“I love this industry mainly becauseof the people who are in it,” says Aron.“The wine industry is notorious for beingone where you don’t make a lot ofmoney—there’s a saying, ‘If you want tobecome a millionaire in the wine industry,the best way to do it is to start with twomillion dollars’—but for that reason, the people that stay are there becausethey absolutely love it. So it’s a veryengaged, passionate community to liveand work in.”

Aron applied and was accepted to themaster’s program in international vintageat the École Supérieure d’Agriculture inAngers, France. The two-year programwas appealing for its broad oenology cur-

riculum, its roving location in Europe—six months were taught in France, threein Italy, and three in Spain—and its inter-national student body. (Her class wascomposed of 21 students from 12 differ-ent countries.)

The program “covers all aspects ofthe wine industry,” says Aron, “fromgrowing the grapes and viticulture tomaking the wine and oenology, to mar-keting. Then we also, of course, have, aspart of the oenology training, some edu-cation in wine-tasting, and in our off-hours we do a lot of wine appreciation.”

After finishing all of her classwork,Aron embarked upon her final programrequirement, a six-month internship atthe Jules Guyot Institute at the Universityof Burgundy in Dijon. For her internship,which is still under way, the former chem-istry major works in a lab where sheapplies environmental chemistry tech-niques to study premature aging in whitewines from Burgundy (a common prob-lem since the mid-1990s).

“I left Haverford saying, ‘Yes, I lovescientific research, but I’ve been doing itsince I was in high school, and I want todo some other things,’ ” says Aron. “SoI originally did not want to go back intostrictly academic research for my intern-ship. … But then [last semester] a UCDavis professor who is relatively well-known, Susan Ebeler, gave us a lectureabout wine chemistry, which was quitetechnical. It was the first time I had beenback in a chemistry classroom since I leftHaverford, and it rekindled the fire formy love of chemistry.”

Her research brought her back notonly to a lab, but also to the U.S. Shespent two weeks in May in SolomonsIsland, Md., running her French winesamples on the machines in an environ-mental science lab there. Next she’llreturn to France to write her master’sthesis and figure out where in the worldof wine she wants to make her mark.

“I’ve always thought that whatever I’mgoing to do as a career, I can’t quite imagineit, because it doesn’t exist yet,” says Aron.“But I think there’s a lot of room for inno-vation in the wine industry.”


“I love this industry mainly because ofthe people who are in it,” says Aron. “It’s a veryengaged, passionate community to live and work in.”

The High-ProfileSommelier Last year, Bon Appetit magazine calledMomofuku—a restaurant group thatincludes James Beard Award winner DavidChang’s five New York outlets, six inter-national locations, and chain of dessertshops—one of the 20 most importantrestaurants in America. And while themini-empire’s reputation rests on Chang’simpeccable ramen, fried chicken, and roast-ed pork belly buns, perhaps its secretweapon is Jordan Salcito ’02, who hasdevised an adventurous mix of libationsto help diners wash down their savorysnacks. Salcito, who was named one of thebest new sommeliers of 2013 by Wine &Spirits magazine, is Momofuku’s directorof beverage operations, which means thatin addition to choosing its wines, she isalso responsible for its beer and sake lists.

“One of the most excitingaspects of the company is that each of the four NewYork restaurants, plus [thebar] Booker and Dax, has acompletely different person-ality,” Salcito told The VillageVoice last year. “Our goal is toalways seek out deliciouswines that compel us and thatcomplement the food. …Each restaurant’s persona informs ourapproach to its list.”

Using wine to balance a menu comesnaturally to Salcito, who started her careerin the kitchens of some of New York’s finestrestaurants. After graduating from Johnson& Wales culinary school in her hometownof Denver, she landed a spot at Daniel inNew York, cooking under the great DanielBoulud. It was, in fact, a trip with Bouludto La Paulée des Neiges, a wine event inAspen organized by his sommelier, that

convinced her that her futurewas in potables, not paté.Sommelier gigs at Nick &Toni’s, Eleven Madison Park,and Crown followed, inter-spersed with yearly trips toBurgundy to work the grapeharvest.

“For me, the kitchen wasa wonderful place to begin acareer in wine,” she says. “At

Daniel, the kitchen team became a verytight community, and one of the mostincredible aspects of wine is a communalsense. From a more straightforwardstandpoint, the primary purpose of thekitchen is to harness flavor from the bestingredients. That approach mirrors greatwinemaking.”

At the encouragement of her boss atEleven Madison Park, Salcito began pur-suing certification in the Court of MasterSommeliers. Having already passed the


CHEMISTRYMAJOR

Alissa Aron ’11 traveledthe world on a WatsonFellowship studying the

science and art ofwinemaking. She’s now

finishing a master’sprogram in France thatcovers every aspect of

the wine industry.

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first three levels of examinations,she was invited to sit for the rig-orous three-partmaster’s exam lastyear. As this issuewent to press, shewas getting readyto take the finalpart of the test,

and should she pass, she will be only the20th woman in North America to hold thedistinction of being a master sommelier.

Working in such a male-dominatedprofession, Salcito is committed to teachingother women about the insular world ofwine. In 2012 she launched Bellus, herown line produced with some of the world’stop winemakers. Her first wine, Girasole,was a Tuscan mix of sangiovese, cabernetsauvignon, and merlot. (Bellus’ latestrelease, La Vie en Bulles, a sparkling roséfrom Mendocino County, will be availablelater this year.)

Her goal was to introduce non-oenophiles to reasonably priced wine madewithout manipulations (such as industriallyproduced yeasts, powdered tannins, or col-oring agents) and to empower drinkers tolearn about wine without feeling intimi-dated by it. She also wanted to give backto her community, so Bellus donates a portion of its proceeds to the Tory BurchFoundation, which offers microfinanceand mentorship to American women entre-preneurs. Additionally, to help her cus-tomers feel less daunted by their winechoices, she created PALA-TABLE, a chartprinted on all Bellus labels that helps peoplediscern different flavor profiles and under-stand their own preferences.

“One of the things that helped makewine approachable for me was under-standing the wine world’s lexicon,” saysSalcito. “Every industry has it’s own lan-guage. I felt that I might as well make thatlanguage accessible to everyone, so thatpeople can identify what they like anddon’t like in wine and communicate it toother people at restaurants and retail shopsin order to come home with a bottle they’llactually enjoy.”


Working in such a male-dominatedprofession, Salcito is committed to teachingother women about the insular world of wine.

TOP SOMMELIERJordan Salcito ’02

learned about wine asa chef in some ofNew York’s best

kitchens. Now thebeverage director for

the Momofukurestaurant group, she launched her own wine label,Bellus, in 2012.

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DON’T KNOW A MALBEC FROM A MONTRACHET?

Confused by the overwhelming selection atyour local shop? Looking for a wine-tastingvacation but unsure of where to go? We askedour Ford experts for some tips of the trade,

and their suggestions may help expand both your palateand your wine collection.

Several of our oenophiles recommended the oft-malignedrosé as the perfect summer beverage. “A lot of people thinkthat pink wine is zinfandel,” says PhilBilodeau. “There are so many brilliantdry rosés out there. They’re crisp,super-refreshing, great to enjoy on the patio, and really inexpensive. Alot of options are under $15 a bottle.”Lukas Völlmy suggests exploring high-quality bottles from the Var region ofFrance. “The rosés in Provence areunlike anywhere else in the world,”he says. “Their aromas can be exquis-itely delicate, but the flip side is thatthe wines are often fragile, a challengefor U.S. importers because rosés, par-ticularly if not first aged on lees, cango downhill very fast, in less than ayear.” And Jordan Salcito likes the less-er-known Bugey-Cérdon, which ismade in the foothills of the Alps frompoulsard and gamay grapes. “It’s asparkling, slightly off-dry rosé that is perfect for a picnic, asan aperitif, after dinner,” she says. “It’s one of the most deli-cious, least-known wines around.”

During her graduate studies in France’s Loire Valley,Alissa Aron became enamored with the local libations, soshe recommends seeking out any chenin blanc from theregion. For a Champagne alternative, she suggests ItalianFranciacorta. “It’s a sparkling wine that uses the Champagnemethod and the same grape varieties that they use inChampagne,” she says. “It should be less expensive thanChampagne but give you a similar experience.”

Regardless of what you decide to imbibe, wine aficionadoEd Zimmerman ’89 (his Twitter handle is @EdGrapeNutZim)endorses a contraption called Coravin, which allows you todrink a bottle without removing the cork, thus preservingthe life and flavor of the wine. (It works by extracting thewine through a thin needle inserted in the cork while simul-taneously replacing the missing wine with argon, an inertgas, to prevent oxidation.) Zimmerman, the chair of thetech group at the law firm Lowenstein Sandler, was so

impressed with Coravin that, after writing about it for TheWall Street Journal, he became an investor in the company.

If you’re not sure what wine will go with Indian food orsushi, or are still clueless about what exactly makes a bottle“biodynamic,” don’t worry. Michael Steinberger ’87 hasanswers. Those interested in learning more about the con-temporary wine world would do well to check out the formerSlate wine columnist’s new book, The Wine Savant: A Guideto the New Wine Culture. Brimming with information

designed to help the layperson navi-gate today’s crowded marketplace,this authoritative yet unpretentioustome is highly subjective (beware,Bordeaux and sauvignon blanc lovers),but full of good advice, including useful lists that can double as buyer’sguides.

Jennifer Waits encourages wine-loving travelers to make their way to the Anderson Valley Pinot NoirFestival, held annually in mid-May.She loves its intimate size and scopeand recommends the open houses atlocal wineries. “Plan ahead, though,”she says, “because it’s very rural. Somepeople stay in the Mendocino areaand then drive to Anderson Valley. Butthere are very windy roads, so it’spreferable to stay [locally] if you can.”

There is now also a profusion of wine advice availableonline. Aron endorses the Seattle-based blog winefolly.com,which helps consumers easily navigate the wine worldthrough articles, infographics, and videos. The site’s som-melier, editor, designer, and self-professed “wine squirrel,”Madeline Puckette, was named 2013’s wine blogger of theyear at the International Wine and Spirits Festival. Salcitoloves Delectable, an iOS application that allows users toshare wine recommendations. A sort of Instagram for thesommelier set, the app lets you snap photos of what you’redrinking, rate it, and share it. You can also see what yourfriends (and a who’s-who of wine experts, such as EricAsimov, wine writer for The New York Times) are drinking,and buy bottles you want to try.

The most important recommendation, though, accordingto Bilodeau, is to find someone knowledgeable that youtrust—whether at your local wine shop, a wine bar, oronline—and develop a relationship with that person. “Thenopen your mind and expand your palate,” he says. “Thereare a lot of great wines out there.” —R. R.


The More You Know...

Caitlin Caven ’08I was sitting in the exam room at mydoctor’s office alone, reading Final Gifts,a book by hospice nurses about caring forthe dying. The book got particularlypoignant, and I started to tear up; a voicein my head snapped, “Pull it together. He’sgoing to come in, find you crying, andyou’ll have to explain yourself.”

That voice in my head is usually right,the bastard. I sniveled and started wipingmy eyes (“Just allergies!”) as my doctoropened the door. He took one look at me,rolled his eyes, sighed, and left again. Iburst out laughing. He came back in, grin-ning. This is precisely why I chose thisdoctor: Sure, anyone can do a colonoscopy,but I like my gastroenterologists to havea little vaudeville in ’em.

There is an element of truth to everyjoke, and here’s one of them: I have nodoubt that some part of him dreaded seeing me. I am what the medical estab-lishment calls “a refractory case,” whichmakes me feel fun and pretty, like a prism.(I make rainbows!) Unfortunately, likeprisms, we refractory cases are generallyuseless except as teaching tools. “Refrac-tory” means that I fail every treatment, orit fails me. The beautiful constellation ofmy insides doesn’t take too kindly to med-ications, so my caretakers may as wellmake jokes: I’m going to be a problem.

I’m currently on a road I never wantedto take: that of full-time, professionalpatient. I was diagnosed with Crohn’sdisease, an autoimmune attack on thedigestive system, when I was 10. The med-ical understanding of Crohn’s is still some-what medieval, but the clumsy drugs thatexist got me (mostly) through high schooland (somewhat) through college. I wasable to live in sweet, partial denial untillate 2012, when, despite weekly doctorvisits and monthly E.R. stays, my symp-toms had gotten so severe that I was sob-bing behind sunglasses on public transitand too weak to climb the stairs to myapartment. Caitlin the self-sufficient,ambitious 20-something died, and what-

ever I currently am rose from her ashes.What followed was the hardest year I

have ever endured. I rallied my dwindlingenergy to go to acupuncture, nutritionist,doctor, and massage appointments, thenwatched numb marathons of reality TVin between. The air was tense with myfamily’s worry, though they did anadmirable job of trusting me to make myown decisions. My weight dipped to abarely human 70 pounds, as my brainchemistry and personality flattened tocardboard. For months, I was technicallyalive but nothing more.

With life-threatening illness, I’velearned, the first emotion to die is joy; thelast one to die is rage. Rage is what got meto one doctor’s office, and then another.The rage wasn’t tied to self-preservation—I was willing to die. It went beyond that.It was anger at the uselessness of the medical system, the way in which doctorafter doctor made concerned faces at me, then patted me on the head and toldme something akin to, “Good luck outthere, tiger!” It was rage at the assembly-line feel of a hospital, at how often myhumanity was discarded and bodilyautonomy all but ignored. It was ragethat my body was attacking other partsof my body, and all anyone could do was

give me saltines and bill my insurance. At my insistence, I was finally put on

IV nutrition administered via a PICC line,a long-term IV in my upper arm. It’s rel-atively subtle, as far as medical appendagesgo, and easy to hide. Ten months later, I’mback to my fighting weight, and my emo-tional spectrum has filled out nicely withother, less rage-y feelings. I’m doing anOK job of mimicking healthy, normal 20-somethinghood, and to a casual observer,I’m just another mouthy, hyper-literatepixie. (I live in Austin, Texas: We’re a dimea dozen.) The future is uncertain, though.I’m out of options, and the idea of con-tinuing to be fed like a houseplant withdropperfuls of Miracle-Gro is sobering.

It’s hard, now that I’ve had to confrontthe extent to which my illness has impact-ed my life, to parse out the differencebetween “Caitlin” and “Crohn’s.” Forinstance, in college I skipped or sleptthrough classes regularly, rarely did allthe readings, and chalked up my “Aimfor a B!” ethos as garden-variety laziness.Looking back, I realize that “not feelingwell” is not the same as “lazy.” And assomeone who has fought her whole lifeNOT to be defined by her illness, it’sstrange to renegotiate my memories toaccommodate this knowledge.

A residual side-effect of the last fewyears is that I no longer fear death. It isprofoundly freeing: Being fine with yourmortality is a real time-saver. It has setme on a totally different course, and putme in touch with some extremely inter-esting, wonderful people. It doesn’t makethe pain worth it, but it’s a pretty goodconsolation prize.

Caitlin Caven ’08 graduated with a degreein anthropology and currently lives in Austin,Texas. She writes the blog “Better LivingThrough Snark” for Psychology Todayabout being young and chronically ill. Sheis still fun at parties.

RoadsTaken andNotTaken

CARE TO SHARE YOUR STORY of roads taken (or not taken)

since graduation? Drop us a line: [email protected]



On the Saturday of this year’s Alumni Weekend, theAlumni Association held its annual Alumni Awardsceremony in Marshall Auditorium followingPresident Weiss’ “State of the College” and Q&A

session. Award recipients, who had been nominated by theirclassmates for their service to the College and society since grad-uation, spoke of the fond memories and positive associationsthey brought with them into their lives after Haverford. Of the11 awards presented this year, six were given in recognition ofoutstanding volunteer service to the College.

Stephen Sachs ’54 received theKANNERSTEIN AWARD FOR SUS-TAINED SERVICE TO THE COL-LEGE.“It is not hyperbole to say thatHaverford was a major force andplayed a major role in forming whoI am, my interests, my sense ofresponsibility,” he says. Stephen wasteased by his classmates for hisintense involvement in student gov-ernment, saying he “majored in theHonor Code.” This experience led

him to a career in politics and public service, as U.S. attorney forthe District of Maryland (1967–1970) and later as attorney generalof Maryland (1979–1987). Sachs was co-chair of the MarylandJudicial Campaign Conduct Committee in 2005, was appointedto serve on the Maryland Access to Justice Commission in 2008,and now consults for the Public Justice Center. The leadershipand example of then–College President Gilbert White had a pro-found impact on Sachs. “White was a palpable presence duringall four years,” he says, and the two formed a close personal rela-tionship that continued decades beyond his time at Haverford.He says his life has intersected with those of his fellow studentsin deep and meaningful ways. He and his wife, board member

Sheila Sachs, established the Sachs Family Fund for Public Policyand Public Service to assist students and faculty with work andresearch on issues related to education, health care, and otherareas that improve the quality of civil society in the U.S.

Richard Cooper ’64, who alsoreceived the KANNERSTEIN AWARDFOR SUSTAINED SERVICE TO THECOLLEGE, joined James Schlesinger’sWhite House Energy Office, whichprepared President Carter’s NationalEnergy Plan, in 1977, and later servedas chief counsel of the Food and DrugAdministration. “From [my] serviceon the Board of Managers, from 1997 to 2009,” Cooper says, “I cameto understand the issues facing a

small liberal arts college, and to appreciate the impressiveprocess.” His work in litigation, he says, “has meant dealingwith controversy as well as strongly opposed views and fiercepassions, and I have tried to extend the broad range of interestsI absorbed at Haverford in my professional and personal life.”

Kyle Danish ’89 received theWILLIAM E. SHEPPARD AWARDFOR EXEMPLARY SERVICE INALUMNI ACTIVITIES. A nationallyrecognized expert on climate changelaw and policy, Danish is a partner inthe Washington, D.C., office of thelaw firm of Van Ness Feldman, LLP.He has volunteered as Class of 1989class chair and has participated onthe planning committee for eachmajor reunion for his class. He is a

Alumni Awards Honor Wide Range of AchievementsEleven alumni returned to campus during Alumni Weekend to receive their awards for service and accomplishments. By Alison Rooney

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member of the Haverford College Lawyers Network and LacrosseAlumni Board. When Danish served as an advisor on energy andthe environment for the first Clinton Global Initiative, he men-tioned that the College’s Douglas B. Gardiner ’83 IntegratedAthletic Center was one of the first LEED-certified facilities ofits kind. “It was so well received that I had the pleasure ofwatching Bill Clinton link arms with Tom Tritton and bestowhim with a very public award,” Danish says. “It was fun to bea catalyst and a satisfying intersection of my professional andcollege life.” Still, Danish does not think of himself as a stand-out volunteer. “I fear I have gotten more from my experienceas a Haverford volunteer than I have given,” he says. “It turnsout the old adage is true, that volunteer work does more forthe volunteer than for those served. My alumni activities haveonly inspired me to do more for the College.”

Erik Muther ’94 received theWILLIAM KAYE AWARD FOR EX-EMPLARY SERVICE IN CAREERDEVELOPMENT. Muther learnedfirsthand about the value of careerservices as an undergraduate. As asenior he applied for 75 jobs andattended five off-campus recruit-ment days, which yielded him four job offers from companiesincluding Macy’s, Smith Barney,and Andersen Consulting—the last

of which he ultimately accepted, spending 12 years as a man-agement consultant, later focusing on health care. Now exec-utive director of the Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance,he has been the Haverford and Bryn Mawr career developmentrepresentative for the Philadelphia region since 1995, whenhe had been in the work world for less than one year. He creditsAmy Feifer, assistant dean and director of career services, withrecognizing what he had to offer. Muther adds that the Quakervalue of respecting all viewpoints and opinions has served him well in his professional role, which he sees as facilitatorand creating structure for discussions. He has been a sponsorfor the Whitehead Internship Program and a speaker, panelist,and mock interviewer at career events hosted by Haverford.He also serves as a regional admission volunteer and class co-chair.

Abby Colbert ’99, recipient of theARCHIBALD MACINTOSH AWARDFOR DEDICATED SERVICE IN AD-MISSION, received a J.D. and an M.A.in international relations from BostonUniversity. She was the managingattorney of the nonprofit Irish Inter-national Immigrant Center in Bostonbefore relocating with her family towestern Massachusetts, where she

worked at Community Legal Aid, and then to Sewanee, Tenn., where she has worked in the Dean’s Office at theUniversity of the South and volunteers with the Legal AidSociety of Middle Tennessee. Colbert has interviewed prospec-tive Haverford students as an admission volunteer for morethan a decade. “Because I felt a strong connection to Haverfordand a debt of gratitude for how my college years have shapedme as a person,” she says, “I wanted to give back to Haverford,but didn’t have a lot of discretionary money to make donations.Volunteering was a good way to stay connected to the College,even as I moved further away, and to give with my time whatI couldn’t with my wallet.” At the awards ceremony she observedthat the Alumni Awards “reflect the values of Haverford to rec-ognize volunteers in this way.”

Monroe (Monty) Sonnenborn’64 received the CHARLES PERRYAWARD FOR EXEMPLARY SERV-ICE IN FUNDRAISING. Monty re-calls fondly the diversity of intellecthe experienced at Haverford, theopenness to views and tolerance,and what he calls “a utopian spiritand cohesion.” After CambridgeUniversity and Yale Law School,Sonnenborn practiced at the NewYork firm of Fried, Frank, Harris,

Shriver, and Jacobson, before joining the legal department ofMorgan Stanley, from which he retired as general counsel forlitigation and regulatory affairs. A consistent and strong sup-porter of the College, Monty has led the effort to raise a sub-stantial class contribution to the Annual Fund in connectionwith his 50th reunion. He enjoys speaking with alumni whocontinue to express strong positive feelings about Haverfordand how much their experience here has done to color theirlives. “I am always impressed with how bright and interestinga group our alumni body is,” he says. “The hundred or so whograduated in my year are a kaleidoscope of interests in termsof what people have done with their lives.”

NOMINATE A 2015 AWARD WINNER

Recognize a classmate or fellow alum for outstanding service by submitting

your nomination for the 2015 Alumni Awards by Oct. 31, 2014.

Visit hav.to/alumniawards for details.

Visit hav.to/alumniawards for an expanded biography of each of this year’s winners.


A t the awards ceremony, the other five honorees reflectedon what Haverford has meant to them. Here are someof their remarks from that day.

“I have been all around the world,worked on all kinds of projects, oftenin some politically complex and, insome cases, corrupt places, and the values that became part of me here atHaverford have sustained and protectedme when the going got tough—whenthe sirens started calling, when it lookedlike the boat would crash on the rockyshore. Moral courage, community, con-sensus, value for the inner life of everyindividual, silence, and honor—these

have given me the outer armor and the inner strength to do thework I have done all these years.” —John Heller ’89, winner of theHAVERFORD AWARDFOR SERVICE TO HUMANITY. John is a senior directorat the Synergos Institute, a global nonprofit that addressesissues of poverty and social justice, and has worked withthe Council on International Educational Exchange, the Open Society Institute, and the Population andCommunity Development Association.

“This has been a big couple of weeksfor me. Last week I became a grand-father for the first time, and now I’m getting the Distinguished Achieve-ment Award. I guess the next big stepwill be death. Norm [Pearlstine] isreally more deserving of this awardthan I am. In the yin and yang of journalism, I am the yang.”—Dave Barry ’69, professionalhumorist, who received the DIS-TINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT

AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTIONS IN APROFESSION. He wrote a column that appeared in morethan 500 newspapers, won the Pulitzer Prize for com-mentary, and has written more than 30 books.

“I have had the luxury of following alot of great stories over the years, butnone more interesting than what ishappening to media itself. As recentlyas 30 years ago we were editing theWall Street Journalwith carbon paper.Twenty years ago the Internet was firstacknowledged as playing a role outsideof the Department of Defense; in thelate ’90s Google had not yet gone pub-lic; in the last decade Facebook and

Twitter were founded; and tablets are now only four years old.Given the speed of change, there has never been a more excitingor difficult time for established media companies.” —Norm Pearlstine ’64, who also received the DISTIN-GUISHED ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FOR OUTSTAND-ING CONTRIBUTIONS IN A PROFESSION, is chief con-tent officer and executive vice president at Time, Inc. Heserved as Time Inc.’s editor-in-chief from 1994 through2005 and joined Bloomberg L.P. in 2008 as chief contentofficer. Norm is the author of Off the Record: The Press,the Government, and the War Over Anonymous Sources.

“I learned about the value of leadershipand positive role models through mytime at the Sports Challenge Leader-ship Academy, founded by a Haverfordalumnus. This award makes me seehow all things are tied into one. If itweren’t for everyone who was part ofthis community, that experience wouldnot have been possible.”—Jason Polykoff ’06, recipi-ent of the YOUNG ALUMNILEADERSHIP AWARD, is the

new head men’s basketball coach at Earlham Collegein Indiana. After Haverford, where he was the Fords’ MVP and a Philadelphia Area Small College All-Starwith six top-10 individual career statistical records, he coached for five years at Friends’ Central School in Wynnewood, Pa., and then at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This place changed me, as I’m sureit changed all of us here. When I startedworking as a classroom aide in Phila-delphia as a sophomore, I got addictedto education. I’ve spent the last fiveyears in the trenches in the Philadel-phia public school system where thereis a travesty going on. We struggle toprovide resources to kids who need itthe most, and we’re going to keep fight-ing the good fight. I thank Haverfordand people working so hard for the

world. I’m not sure that happens everywhere.”—Alex Buxbaum ’09 received the LAWRENCE FOR-MAN AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN ATHLETICS, whichis awarded to a former Haverford athlete who has con-tributed to the betterment of society. As a tennis playerat Haverford, Alex and his doubles partner won theITA Southeast regional tournament, which earned himAll-American status and sixth place in the Division IIIdoubles national rankings. Alex currently teaches atParkway Center City.


giving back


A Look Back atALUMNI WEEKEND2014

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More than 1,000 alumni, family, and friends returned to campus May 30-June 1 to celebrate reunions.

Want more photos? flickr.com/groups/alumniweekend2014 • instagram.com/haverfordedu • hav.to/123

1. The Class of 2009.2. Reception with faculty.3. Jon Cohen ’79 was a panelist for The Haverford Experience and CivicEngagement.

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4. An exhibit in Magill Library celebrated 90 yearsof radio at Haverford.5. Members of the Class of’04: Aaron Scherb withElias, Elizabeth Bacon, FranKnechel, and Charlie Voswith Simon. 6. Dave Barry ’69 spokeabout and signed copies ofhis new book You Can DateBoys When You’re Forty.Watch the event athav.to/14g.7. Taylor Seybolt ’84 andTom Christensen ’84 spokeon the International Secu-rity and U.S. Foreign Policypanel.8. The Class of 1964 celebrated its 50th Reunion.9. Class of ’89 discussion on the value of a Haverfordeducation.

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giving back

1. Members of the Class of ’94: Paula Brathwaite, Preston Fulford, Dora Carson,Michael Clark, Luis Perez, John Dollhopf, and Kevin Jones.2. The Class of 1943 celebrated its 71st Reunion at the Scarlet Sages Luncheon: Bonnie O’Boyle, Bob Cryan ’43, John White-head ’43, Jack Moon ’43, and Helen Dennis.3. Jessica Wu ’09 and Ella Willard-Schmoe’09 play cornhole on Leeds Green.

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Ann West Figueredo ’84 recreated her yearbookphoto on Instagram in celebration of her 30th reunion and first year as vice president of insti-tutional advancement at Haverford. She was pre-viously the director of leadership gifts and bringswith her an MBA from Columbia University andmore than 25 years of business and advancementexperience working at senior levels of Fortune500 companies and nonprofits.

DOES YOUR CLASS YEAR END IN A 5 OR A 0? Save the date for Alumni Weekend 2015: May 29-31. Visit fords.haverford.edufor updates during the year. To get involved in planning your reunion: [email protected] or 610-896-1004.

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Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digitaledition of Haverford Magazine. To get updates on your classmates and otherHaverford grads, sign in to the alumni community: fords.haverford.edu.


Due to privacy concerns, the Class News section is not included in the digitaledition of Haverford Magazine. To get updates on your classmates and otherHaverford grads, sign in to the alumni community: fords.haverford.edu.

alumni obituaries34Hunt Jones died Feb. 14, in Louisville,

Ky. He was exactly 100 years old, havingbeen born in Waco, Tex., on Feb. 14, 1914. Hegraduated from Culver Military Academy in 1930,and from Harvard Medical School in 1938. Afterserving an internship in Hartford, Conn., Jonespracticed medicine in Eminence, Ky., and thenjoined the Navy in 1941, serving in the SouthPacific and aboard the aircraft carrier Altamaha. Hewas honorably discharged in 1947 as commander(MC) USN. After a couple of years of life-insurancemedical work in the late 1940s, Jones returned in1948 to Louisville, where he practiced medicine for60 years; he once told a Haverford classmate thathe enjoyed every day of it. Jones is survived by histhree children, Dr. Mary Wales North, StephenMunn Jones ’70, and Hunt Breckinridge Jones II;five grandchildren; and three great grandchildren.

37W. Lawrence Kimber, longtime of EastAurora, N.Y., died Feb. 22. He was 98.

Born in Philadelphia in 1915, Kimber worked formore than 40 years for Leeds & Northrup, aPhiladelphia-based manufacturing company atwhich his father was a key leader. Kimber wasinstrumental in reopening the Orchard Park (N.Y.)Friends Meeting in 1958 for weekly worship, andhe remained an active member of the Quakermeeting for the rest of his life, serving as clerk,treasurer, and trustee. In addition to sailing, tennis,skiing, windsurfing, and hunting, Kimber deliveredfood to homes for Meals on Wheels and volun-teered at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.Kimber is survived by his brother Richard; son,William, Jr.; daughters, Susan Kimber Kiviat andMargaret Hatrick; four grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

39Robert E. Peifer, Jr. died March 9.

43Leon Levintow, professor emeritus ofmicrobiology at the University of

California, San Francisco, died March 11. He was92. Levintow earned his M.D. from JeffersonMedical College in 1946 and went on to serve inthe Army Medical Corps. Upon returning to thecountry, he joined the U.S. Public Health Serviceand worked at the National Institutes of Health inBethesda, Md. In 1965, Levintow was invited tojoin the UCSF faculty. He was named chairman ofthe Department of Microbiology and Immunologyin 1978, remaining in that position until his retire-ment in 1993. During his tenure, the departmentbecame a world-renowned center for cell research.Levintow was also a knowledgeable music loverand a patron of symphony, opera, and chambermusic. He is survived by his wife, three sons, andthree grandchildren.

44Cornelius Webster Abbott died Sept.6, at age 91 in Baltimore. Abbott served in

the Naval Air Corps during World War II and con-tinued to fly for another 20 years. In 1964, he start-ed a commercial real estate firm, Abbott Associates.He was an active member of the NationalExchange Club of Maryland, the Hopkins Club,and the Maryland Club. He is survived by fourchildren, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Cyrus Beye died Jan. 14. He was 90. In 1946,Beye completed medical school and met his futurewife, Ruth Wilson, while interning at CityHospital in Cleveland. After their wedding in1948, they spent 18 months with the Army in thePhilippines. Beye completed his residency at theUniversity of Iowa, and in 1961 he was admittedas a fellow to the American College of Surgeons.Later, he was appointed head of the Iowa Board ofMedical Examiners. After retiring in 1981, he andhis wife toured the world aboard their first sail-boat. To share his love of sailing, Beye started theBobby Shaftoe Sailing School. In 1987, the couplemoved to Florida and continued to sail. Theyreturned to Yankton, S.D., in 2006. He is survivedby four children and many grandchildren.

45Robert Pontius died April 12, at age 90.During World War II, Pontius served in

the Navy and participated in the officer trainingprogram to attend the University of PennsylvaniaMedical School. He completed his surgical trainingat Baylor College of Medicine in Houston andserved as a research fellow with Children’sHospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston. Heagain served the country during the Korean War.In 1957, Pontius joined the staff of Children’sHospital of Pittsburgh as a pediatric cardiothoracicsurgeon. There he performed the first successfulopen-heart operation using a pump-oxygenator, anew machine that did the work of both the heartand the lungs. Known as a direct, detail-orientedsurgeon with a photographic memory, he sus-tained a deep connection with his young patients.He is survived by his five children.

49James Grosholz, a talented Haverfordrunner, died Jan. 11. Grosholz was

remembered for the 1949 NCAA national meet,where he set a Haverford record for the 800-meter/880-yard run, which stands as third-fastestin the program’s history. His studies at Haverfordwere interrupted by World War II, during whichhe served as a corporal for 18 months. AfterHaverford, Grosholz served as an R&D engineer,working for Air-Shields, Inc., in Hatboro, Pa.While there, he patented more than 15 hospitalsupply products, including Air-Shields’ Isolette, anincubator for premature infants. He and his wife

lived in Bucks County, where he enjoyed actingand designing sets with the Phillips Mill Theater inNew Hope. Grosholz is survived by his childrenand grandchildren.

Stanley Tarr died Dec. 26, at his home inPrinceton, N.J. He spent his professional career inthe insurance field, first with Liberty Mutual inPhiladelphia, Boston, and New York. Tarr thenbecame the first director of risk management atRutgers, where he helped create one of the coun-try’s first educational captive insurance companies.He ended his career as the president of Educationaland Institutional Insurance Agency, which insuresmany of the Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterianschools and colleges in the country. He is survivedby two sons and his grandchildren. According tohis son Chris, Tarr maintained an abiding love forHaverford and took great pride in having created acharitable remainder annuity in its favor.

51Courtney Siceloff, a devout Quaker andlifelong opponent of war and racism, died

Jan. 28 at age 92. During World War II, Siceloffwas a conscientious objector and worked at publicservice camps. After the war, he took a position asexecutive director of a community center on St.Helena Island, S.C., where he was involved in thework of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the heightof the civil rights movement. In 1968, he wasappointed deputy director for the Peace Corpsprograms in Afghanistan. Siceloff moved toAtlanta in 1973 to join the U.S. Commission onCivil Rights. In retirement, he devoted time tocauses such as outlawing the death penalty, shel-tering the homeless, and ending wars. He is sur-vived by two children and a grandson.

52Robert Atkinson died Feb. 11 at age 83.Atkinson served as a noncombatant in the

Army during the Korean War. In his career, he wasinstrumental in the development of early comput-ers. He operated a computer-processing and small-business accounting firm called Captron, locatedin Bristol, Pa. Atkinson, a longtime Bucks Countyresident, was active in local theater, served as thetreasurer of Bristol Friends Meeting, and assistedmany local charities, including Bucks Food forFriends. He is survived by his four daughters andhis stepchildren.

53Richard D. Brobyn died March 19, inBlaine, Wash. Born in Philadelphia, he

attended William Penn Charter School and laterthe University of Pennsylvania, where he receivedhis medical degree. He also earned his Ph.D. inclinical pharmacology. He spent five years onactive duty with the Navy stationed at Bethesda,Md., and Bremerton, Wash., and then spent 25years in the Navy Reserve. He fell in love with the


Pacific Northwest and moved to BainbridgeIsland, where he practiced medicine for manyyears and also performed clinical trials and drugresearch. He is survived by his wife, Olga; son,Scott; brother, Robert Brobyn ’61; and severalgrandchildren and great-grandchildren.

H. William Morrison, Jr. died Oct. 8 at age 82.For 25 years, Morrison was professor, director ofgraduate studies, and director of interdisciplinarystudies in social and behavioral sciences with theDepartment of Psychology at Stony BrookUniversity. He is survived by his wife, Rae; threesons; one grandson; four stepchildren; and ninestep-grandchildren.

55Garth Parker died Feb. 16 at age 80.Parker earned his M.B.A. from Cornell

University. For 40 years, he served as president ofSomay Products, Inc., a roof-coating manufacturerin Miami, Fla. Parker was an active member of theFirst United Methodist Church of Coral Gables,the Coral Bay Yacht Club, the Riviera CountryClub, the Executives Association of Greater Miami,the Orange Bowl Committee, and the RotaryClub of Miami. He was also involved in theHaverford College Alumni Association. He was

predeceased by his wife of 55 years, Rosalie, earlierthis year. He is survived by three sons and fourgrandchildren.

56Donald Cohill died July 4 at age 78. Afterearning his M.D. from the University of

Pennsylvania, Cohill served in the Air Force fortwo years in Glasgow, Mont. He started his med-ical practice in Shawano, Wis., and then returnedto the Philadelphia area in 1966 to complete hissurgical training at Abington Hospital. Cohillbegan his surgical practice in Racine, Wis., in 1970at Kurten Medical Group, and later practiced withAll Saints Medical Group. Partially retiring in2005, he continued as a doctor-patient liaison forthe All Saints Hospital. Cohill, who was prede-ceased by his son, is survived by his wife, Lorna;three daughters; and 10 grandchildren.

John Hawkins died April 22, in MountainHome, Ark., at age 93. A retired Marine Corps vet-eran of World War II and the Korean War,Hawkins worked as a foreman for SPS WesternStandard Press Steel and lived in Cotter, Ark., since1979. In his spare time he enjoyed gardening andfishing. Hawkins is survived by his daughter,Sharlea Franklin; son, John C. Hawkins II; four

grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; andbeloved dog, Jolo.

Edward Jackson Thompson, Jr. died Feb.17 at age 79. He was a sculptor, art dealer, and inte-rior designer in the Philadelphia region. Thompsonspecialized in classical architectural design and wascommissioned to redesign several court chambersin Philadelphia’s City Hall and court interiors at theDelaware County Courthouse in Media. Amonghis other public projects was the Martin LutherKing, Jr. Memorial Garden at Fifty Ninth StreetBaptist Church. Thompson was a history buff withan immense knowledge of the local history inChestnut Hill, where he lived. He suffered from arare condition called inclusion body myositis,which left him bedridden for the past 14 years. Heis survived by his wife of 54 years, Mary; son; andthree grandchildren.

63William Shermer, a 32-year resident ofPasadena, Calif., died April 22. He was 72.

After Haverford, he joined the Navy and ultimatelycompleted 26 years of naval service as a special-duty cryptologist. He was a trained and skilledMandarin linguist and eventually learned Spanish,Lithuanian, German, Russian, Latin, and some

DOUGLAS HEATHEmeritus Professor of Psychology DouglasHamilton Heath, who taught at the College for 30 years, died March 6, at his home in Haverford,where he and his wife, Harriet, had lived for 36 years.

Heath was born in Woodbury, N.J., in 1925.He left Swarthmore College in 1943 when he wasdrafted into the army. A Quaker, he served as anoncombatant conscientious objector, command-ing a medical corps in France, refusing to addresshis superior officers as “sir.” After the war, he fin-ished his undergraduate studies at AmherstCollege, graduating with a degree in psychology.He earned his doctorate in psychology fromHarvard University in 1954 and joined theHaverford faculty that same year.

Hired to strengthen the psychology depart-ment, and believing that one learns science by“doing” it, Heath required students to “do” psy-chology. Psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera ’78,one of Heath’s students, recalled what it was like towork with him: “He was a challenging mentor, butnot a harsh one. His insistence on thinking thingsthrough, and on excellence rather than short cuts,continues to bear dividends to me. In the firstmeeting when he advised my research, he mademe recite, until I repeated it twice perfectly, the dic-tum of Margaret Mead: ‘A clear understanding ofthe problem prefigures the lines of its solution.’This phrase has become a guide to me in all of mysubsequent studies and professional work, and I

have since taught it to many of my own studentsover the years.”

Shortly after he began teaching at Haverford,Heath initiated what would become a 50-yearlongitudinal study of adult development, chart-ing the lives of Haverford freshmen—and latertheir wives and partners—until they were wellinto their 60s to discover answers to questionssuch as: What are the keys to finding fulfillmentin life? What personality traits do successful indi-

viduals have in common? What factors deter-mine whether a child will grow up to be a suc-cessful adult?

His second groundbreaking study was inter-national in scope and looked at Americans,Italians, and Turks to test his hypothesis thatmature individuals had the same characteristicsregardless of the cultural and social environ-ments in which they were raised.

The findings from these two studies becamethe source material for countless talks, many aca-demic papers, and 11 books, both academic andpopular, including his 1991 book for generalaudiences, Fulfilling Lives: Paths to Maturity andSuccess. Heath’s research also informed much ofhis consulting work with schools—Quaker, pri-vate, and public—in the U.S. and worldwide.

In his later years, Heath and his wife, a psy-chologist and parenting educator, split their timebetween Haverford and down east Maine, wherethey built two summer cabins that became thegeographic center of the family. Heath also trav-eled the world. For more than a decade, hetrekked the Himalayas in Nepal every year—sometimes twice a year. He also spent winters inMexico, where he escaped the frigid winters ofPhiladelphia. Many of his last books were writtenbetween Mexico and Maine.

Heath is survived by his wife; his daughters,Wendilee Heath O’Brien and Annemarie Heath; his son, Russell Glen Heath; and sixgrandchildren.

I N M E M O R I A M

Douglas Heath



French, and Turkish. Once he retired, he becamethe co-owner, president, and chief operating officerof Blue Goose Charters, based in Baltimore. He wasan avid boater, community activist, gun enthusiast,and decoy collector. Shermer was active in theAirport Coordination Team (ACT), president of theMarine Trader Owners Association (MTOA), onthe board of directors of the Grand Harbor TrawlerAssociation, and held several positions on theAnchorage Marina board of directors. He is sur-vived by his wife of 35 years, Alexis Loo; his chil-dren from a previous marriage, Cassandra,Samantha, Amanda, and William Joseph; and 10grandchildren.

70Herbert (Herb) Massie died Dec. 27,2012, at his Columbia, Md., home at age

64. He worked as a police officer in Washington,D.C., and then attended Duke Law School. Hethen practiced law in Alabama and worked as a lawclerk for a federal judge. He is survived by his twinbrother, James Proctor Massie, and younger broth-er, Samuel (Trei) Proctor Massie III.

71Donald Will died Feb. 10. He was 65.Known for his commitment to social jus-

tice, Will had roots in the field due to his family’sinvolvement in groups such as the Fellowship ofReconciliation, an interfaith organization workingfor peace. A faculty member at ChapmanUniversity since 1987, Will had directed the PeaceStudies program since 1988 and helped create theInternational Studies master’s program. He men-tored the Black Student Union and annually tookstudents to the Model United Nations held in NewYork City. He was also instrumental in bringingmany distinguished professors to campus, such ascivil rights activists Cornel West and the Rev. JamesLawson. Will was active in the anti-apartheidmovement, along with his wife, Ntathu Mbatha(Leonora Will), who was born in South Africa.They lived in Orange, Calif., with his son, Alex.

79Stephen Gellman died Feb. 15. He was56. Gellman was a partner of Wachtell,

Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He earned his law degree atStanford Law School, where he was a member ofthe law review and the board of visitors. He is sur-vived by his mother, wife, and daughters.

84Jennifer Lynn Northrop died of a heartattack March 21. Northrop earned her

M.D. and Ph.D. (in biochemistry) from theUniversity of Washington in Seattle. She continuedher work as a medical resident, clinical postdoctor-al fellow, and then assistant professor in theDepartment of Molecular and Human Genetics atBaylor College of Medicine in Houston. Her chiefinterest was in pediatrics, particularly prenatal andchildhood cancer. Northrop, who had multiplesclerosis, served as geneticist at the TexasChildren's Hospital, where she worked with chil-dren with MS. She is survived by her parents andher three brothers.

98Richard Jonah died Feb. 22. He was 38.Jonah was co-founder and executive

director of Jonah Capital, a firm that invests inmining and mineral resources in Africa. Jonah alsofounded Mobus Property Holdings Ltd., a private-ly held Ghanaian property development company.After completing Haverford, he earned an M.B.A.from Gordon Institute of Business Science,University of Pretoria. He worked at GoldmanSachs in New York and at N.M. Rothschild inLondon in their investment banking divisionsbefore settling in Johannesburg, South Africa, in2002. He is survived by his parents and siblings.

HOLLAND HUNTER ‘43Holland Hunter, professor emeritus of econom-ics, died Jan. 18, at the Quadrangle in Haverford.Hunter, known to all as “Ho,” was born in 1921in Evanston, Ill., and grew up in a small townwest of Chicago. When his father died of a braintumor in 1935, Hunter and his two brotherswere sent to a boarding school in Colorado. Theschool’s headmaster was a Haverford alumnuswho influenced Hunter’s decision to attend theCollege. In a charming 1991 interview withEmeritus Professor of History Roger Lane that ispart of the Haverford College oral history project,Hunter recalled his arrival at the College: “Ishowed up at Haverford in 1939, never havingseen a Quaker.” After his graduation in 1943, heearned his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics atHarvard, returning to Haverford in 1949 to beginwhat would be a long, illustrious career as a pro-fessor of economics and renowned scholar of theSoviet economy.

Hunter, who would become an active mem-ber of Haverford Friends Meeting, was at once adistinguished economic historian and an expertpractitioner of mathematical economics, talentshe brought to bear on a highly original and influential critique of Soviet economic planning,especially in the sphere of transportation. A win-ner of several prestigious awards and fellowships,including a Guggenheim, he was at the sametime a model of Haverfordian humility, belovedby students and colleagues alike for a preternatu-

ral gentleness of speech and spirit, complement-ed by his generous wit.

Hunter was predeceased by his wife, HelenManning Hunter, a former professor of econom-ics at Bryn Mawr (the couple met at Harvard andmarried in 1945), and is survived by their chil-dren, Timothy, Christine, and Ann.

SLAVICA MATACICSlavica Matacic, professor emeritus of biology,beloved mentor to her students, and friend andcolleague to many current as well as former fac-ulty members, died Feb. 5, after a sudden andbrief illness.

Matacic earned her Bachelor and Master ofScience degrees in 1959 from the University ofZagreb School of Pharmacy, in what was thenYugoslavia, and her Ph.D. in biochemistry fromthe University of Zagreb in 1962. While a post-doctoral fellow in Zagreb, she met Professor ArielLoewy, who was on a sabbatical leave fromHaverford. Recognizing her intellectual and tech-nical skills, Loewy invited her to join his laborato-ry at Haverford as a postdoctoral fellow. Matacicwas appointed to the faculty as an assistant profes-sor of biology in 1964. Together, she and Loewywere the first to purify and characterize transgluta-minase, otherwise known as blood clotting factorXlll. Matacic then established her own researchlaboratory, which became a magnet for some ofthe strongest students in the Department ofBiology, including Jenni Punt BMC ’83 andAndrea Morris ’91, who would later becomeHaverford faculty members. Matacic’s researchstudies in later years focused on the mechanism ofcross-linking in cellular proteins for metaboliccontrol of cell development.

Matacic was the driving force behind thedevelopment of the junior year biology“Superlab,” in which students work on seven-

Holland Hunter

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week mini-research projects, developing intellec-tual and technical skills directed at four separateareas of biology. For her work in the junior laband in mentoring senior research students, shewas honored with the Lindback Award forDistinguished Teaching in 1985.

Matacic felt passionately that science shouldbe open to all and worked tirelessly to promotethe success of women, minorities, and first-gen-eration college students. Working with grantsfrom General Electric and the Pew CharitableTrusts, she developed the MAST (Mentoring andStudent Teaching) program, which brings middleand high school students from Philadelphia pub-lic schools to Haverford to work with undergrad-uates. The MAST program was later adopted aspart of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-supported program, and continues to this day asa project funded by the Marian E. KoshlandIntegrated Natural Sciences Center. In 1991,Matacic helped create a three-week residentialprogram for area high school teachers. An out-growth of that initiative was a program thatstocked footlockers with laboratory equipmentand then lent them out to teachers for use intheir classrooms.

Matacic served as the director of the HowardHughes Medical Institute grant program and formany years was the director of the MulticulturalScholars Program. In this role, she offered anextraordinary level of mentoring for generationsof multicultural students, guiding them throughtheir work in the sciences, helping them find on-and off-campus research opportunities, andworking with them to achieve their full potential.

When Matacic came to Haverford, there werefew women on the science faculty. Those whofollowed benefited from her pioneering effortsand learned from her. Upon her retirement in1999, the College honored her by establishing ascholarship in her name. She was also a trailblaz-

er in the art of effectively integrating her profes-sional and personal life. A wife, mother of two,and grandmother of five, Matacic loved her fami-ly above all, and her colleagues and friends bene-fited from her nurturing care. Her pastries werefamous, and her office and lab were noted gath-ering places for those seeking advice, or just amoment’s quiet conversation in the middle of abusy day.

She is survived by her husband, Misha; theirchildren, Andrea Cayley (Andrew) and MichaelMatacic (Ying); and grandchildren, Alexander,Anna, Edmund, Eleanor, and Olivia.

AL WILLIAMSAdolphus Levi Williams, Jr., whose mentorshipat Haverford spanned decades, died March 30.He was 71.

Williams became part of the Haverford familyin 1969, as a post-baccalaureate fellow of theRockefeller Foundation in political science, aftergetting a B.A. from Virginia Union University theyear before. His academic credentials and experi-ence in higher education testify to his faith in thepower of education to transform lives, and provethat learning is not only for the young: He wouldgo on to earn a J.D. from the University ofVirginia and a master’s degree in political sciencefrom Villanova University, become certified inmultiple areas of the law by institutions includ-ing Harvard, and do coursework toward a doc-torate at St. Joseph’s University.

Williams’ lengthy administrative career atHaverford—augmented by teaching—began in1972 when he returned to campus as an assistantdirector of admissions after obtaining his lawdegree. During the next decade, he became deanof student affairs, with additional responsibilitiesas prelaw adviser and affirmative action offi-cer. A transition to the law in the early 1980ssaw him hold a variety of positions, includinglaw clerk with the state Superior Court, attorney in private practice and for the City ofPhiladelphia, and assistant general counsel for Prudential Insurance.

Williams once again served Haverford aspart-time prelaw adviser while teaching Englishand history on Episcopal Academy’s Merioncampus for eight years, through 2008.

Like many Haverford alumni, Bill Caferro’84, now a professor of history at VanderbiltUniversity, remembers Williams for his candorand wisdom. “I was a student, one of many, andnot a very good student, either,” Caferro says. “Isought out Dean Williams as I was decidingwhether to quit college. When I told him I want-ed to leave school to be a ‘regular guy,’ he saidthat was one of the stupidest things he’d everheard. He told me about life, the way things are,and just generally got my attention at a timewhen I was inclined to listen to nobody. Thatmay have been just another day at the office forhim, but it meant the world to me. Decades later,

his wonderful daughter Julia would be myadvisee here at Vandy, which is a coincidence forthe ages since I would not be a professor—andprobably not have a college degree—withoutDean Williams.”

“I’ve lived by Al’s words to me: ‘Study hard,’ ”notes lawyer Michael Hicks ’78. “They carriedme through law school. Al taught me how tobrief cases and write precisely. I used those wordsas my guide through the bar exam. They are mymantra for understanding the inherent difficul-ties of any case—knowing that I can learn anything.”

Williams’ personal interests included martialarts (he had a third-degree black belt inShotokan karate), and he worked withEpiscopal’s junto (debate) and mock-trial stu-dents. Many Fords did not know that he had alsoserved in the Marines.

“Meeting Al changed my life,” recalls JerryCrossan ’79. “I took a history of martial artscourse with him during my freshman year. Webecame friends, and he encouraged me toexplore the martial arts. Actually, he didn’t really

‘encourage’ me—he pushed me very hard to digdeeply into karate, and this opened the door forme to the Far East, where I have been involvedever since. As a teacher and a friend, he wasalways there to help, but he demanded a lot. He was equally as interested in guiding his students to develop their character as in the subject matter.”

Pratap Mukharji ’81 has a similar recollec-tion, also linked to the martial arts—in his case,a classic of literature. “One of my most prizedpossessions is and always will be a copy of ABook of Five Rings,which he bought for me. Itsits on my office bookshelf, and I always remem-ber Al, his character, and his smile and laughterwhen I read and re-read it.”

A memorial service will be held inFounders Great Hall on July 18, at 4 p.m. All are welcome.

I N M E M O R I A M

Al Williams

Slavica Matacic

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“Students performing,1976” was the only information provided for thisphoto from the College Archives. But the white costumes and the bellsstrapped to their shins suggest that they’re doing a Morris dance—a form ofEnglish folk dance dating to the 15th century. Can you tell us more aboutthe photo or the group? Send a note to [email protected].

The students performing in this photo are The Lighted Fools, a 13-memberBi-Co improv and sketch comedy group founded in 1991. Their Februaryshow featured a sketch about attempting to rent a tiger from thePhiladelphia Zoo, said Benjamin Gutierrez ’14 (front and center), but whatwas going on in this scene, “no one can remember.” Haverford is also hometo a second comedy troupe: the all-improv group the Throng.

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