Amherst Summer 2014

Singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke ’85 made a one-woman show about her mother’s dementia

MUSICAL MEMOIR

Summer 2014 ALSO Newsrooms today PAGE 14 Life after Amherst?

PAGE 16 Natural history PAGE 20

IN THIS ISSUE

Ì SUMMER 2014 | VOLUME 66

FEATURES

NUMBER 4

DEPARTMENTS

16 LIFE AFTER AMHERST?

BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD ’53

2 VOICES 4 COLLEGE ROW

Twelve years after his once-imagined retirement date, an English professor wonders whether he’s now said enough.

20 OUT OF THE SHADOWS

BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10

Kirk Johnson ’82 takes a science writer behind the scenes of the most visited natural history museum in the world.

26 ARE YOU GETTING THIS DOWN, BOOLIE?

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

Singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke ’85 spent two years caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Then she wrote a musical about it. Ì

|

ON THE COVER

Jonatha Brooke ’85 photographed by Adam Krause in New York City, July 2014

PLAYING PIANO where Brahms once played ERASING the “Amherst Awkward”—with hugs RESEARCH on glass houses and rejecting privacy AND MORE

12 SPORTS TENNIS Doubles champs Jordan Brewer ’14 and Gabby Devlin ’14

14 POINT OF VIEW As ads go the way of the buggy whip, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner reflects on print newspapers’ heyday and newsroom life today

33 BEYOND CAMPUS MEDICINE A health care hub in a busy soup kitchen SMALL BUSINESS Selling antiques in an Ikea world SOCIAL ACTION Helping kids in postwar nations DEPRESSION How do depression drugs work?

SAILING Leadership lessons from the sea

39 AMHERST CREATES MUSIC Tim Kepner ’00 and his rock band; kids’ music from Ben Gundersheimer ’89 FICTION Professor Judith Frank’s All I Love and Know BIOGRAPHY The couple behind the Folger Shakespeare Library SCULPTURE Wrenford Thaffe ’13 had an exhibit at the Boston Children’s Museum

46 CREATING CONNECTIONS A special section from Amherst’s advancement office

52 CLASSES 120 IN MEMORY 128 REMEMBER WHEN The 1952 tennis team outlasted Yale and Williams to retire a coveted trophy

“I saw the killings. I experienced the starvation. At no point did I give up.” PAGE 36

ONLINE

Ì WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE

MORE NEWS l Amherst has a new dean of students, ALEX VASQUEZ, and a new Counseling Center director, Jacqueline Alvarez. President Biddy Martin says the “entire community will benefit from their presence” and experience.

l Did you see the photo of Oprah Winfrey in an Amherst sweatshirt?

Remember THE MOOSE in the president’s yard? Did you know Julie Segre ’87 stopped a “superbug”? All made our list of the most clicked, tweeted, liked and shared Amherst news items of 2013–14.

AUDIO AND VIDEO l Watch a reunionweekend lecture by Nobel Laureate JOSEPH STIGLITZ ’64. Also find video and audio from more than three dozen other reunion panels, performances and talks, including a conversation with President Biddy Martin.

PHOTOS BY ROB MATTSON, BIDDY MARTIN AND HAO LIU ’16

l Hear from the newest honorary degree recipients: THAI LEE ’80, David Brooks, Cullen Jones, Nate Silver, Sarah Sze and Jide Zeitlin ’85.

All gave lectures during commencement weekend.

DIGITAL YEARBOOKS l OLIOS from 1861 to 2012 are now available digitally, thanks to the college’s Archives and Special Collections and IT offices. See who lived in your dorm sophomore year. Look up your senior picture. Find old ads for long-departed shops.

VOICES

“I am inspired by Adrie Kusserow’s work to make us aware of the human family we’re part of on this diverse earth.”

OUR HUMAN FAMILY I ENJOYED READING “FINDING REFUGE” (Spring 2014), about Adrie Kusserow ’88’s humanitarian and educational work. While Amherst equips students for so many things, like making lots of money, I appreciated learning about a life of consequence and am inspired by Kusserow’s work to make us aware of the human family we’re part of on this diverse earth.

Martha Schumann Cooper ’95 GILA, N.M.

One Mother’s Day Adrie Kusserow ’88 knocked on a door unannounced.

That knock has changed lives from Vermont to South Sudan.

Spring 2014

Finding

Refuge

ALSO Great Fakes PAGE 16 Your Generation PAGE 22 U.S. Rep. Tom Davis PAGE 26

’71

A Model Who Codes PAGE 38

son in a decade, I couldn’t help but reflect on the even better results just two years later, when Amherst was undefeated and finished second in the Lambert Trophy standings. At the final game, after the Little Three Championship was cemented at home against Williams, the old wooden goal posts didn’t stand a chance, as demonstrated by the souvenir that I still possess. The full season record is painted on it.

Jim McCashin ’65 PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIF.

From left, Adieu Dau Thiong, Atem Deng and Adrie Kusserow ’88 c1-13_AmherstSpring201 4_r1.indd c1

SUCCUMBING TO POLITICS THE SPRING 2014 PROFILE OF TOM DAVIS ’71 (“The Prince of Bipartisan Politics”) favorably portrays the congressman as a moderate Republican with a bipartisan bent. I am not intimately familiar with his overall voting record but remember well his deplorable leadership role in the notorious Terri Schiavo matter in 2005.

Ms. Schiavo sustained a cardiac arrest at home in 1990, leading to coma and persistent vegetative state. She was maintained on life support over the next 15 years with a prolonged legal battle between her husband (legal guardian) and parents, with the former wanting to remove life support in accordance with her orally expressed wishes and the parents opposed. Expert neurological opinion indicated no hope of recovery, and an MRI showed no functioning cerebral cortex (subsequently confirmed at autopsy).

Despite multiple rulings in Florida courts in favor of the husband, in 2005 Congress chose to intervene and passed legislation giving federal courts jurisdiction in the hope that life support would be resumed. Federal court rulings again favored the husband; Ms. Schiavo died shortly thereafter.

4/21/14 3:35 PM

It was distressing at the time to see an intelligent, presumably scientifically literate Amherst graduate ignore the science in the case and succumb to the politics of the right-to-lifers who were having a field day. Congressman, I know you had lots of company, most notably Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician who surely knew better, but we have high expectations for Amherst graduates.

This unfortunate episode was perhaps a harbinger of things to come: the widespread rejection of solid scientific data re. climate change, for example, for political reasons.

Congressman, I welcome your response.

Leonard R. Prosnitz ’57, M.D. CHAPEL HILL, N.C. AN EVEN BETTER SEASON WHEN I FINALLY FOCUSED ON THE TOP photo on the Fall 2013 back cover (“Football Fans,” Then and Now) I realized that many of my fraternity brothers appeared. In reading the caption regarding 1962 being the best sea-

1968 RUGBY FANS: YOU’RE INVITED THE AMHERST RUGBY TEAM HAD AN unprecedented season in spring 1968, going undefeated in 14 matches against powerhouses including Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, Old Blue and a Bermudian all-star team.

The 1968 rugby team will celebrate that season at a cocktail/dinner reception during homecoming on Nov. 8, 2014. Given the strong following the team had on campus that season, we welcome participation by anyone with a connection to the 1968 team, whether player, fan or well-wisher.

Spring 1968 was a magical time at Amherst—nothing but sunny days in April and May. In contrast with societal turmoil (Vietnam, the draft, the civil rights movement), Amherst was an oasis.

That year Amherst rugby was ranked first in the East (Wisconsin was first in the Midwest and Stanford in the West).

Joe Schell ’68 and John Kehoe ’70 were first-team All-Americans. There were more than 200 college teams in the

McCashin’s piece of a 1964 goal post. When Amherst won the Little Three Championship, the goal posts didn’t stand a chance.

2 Amh Amherst m er ers rrsst st SSummer umm mm m mer er 2201 2014 014 014

country, and rugby was solely a spring sport, with no divisions. Nearly all college rugby teams were therefore dominated by football players. We faced Yale and Harvard players who later played in the famous 1968 Harvard-Yale football game (postgame Harvard Crimson headline: “Harvard beats Yale, 29–29”).

Indeed, tiny Amherst played against Yale All-Ivy football players Bruce Weinstein (later of the NFL) and Glenn Greenberg.

We were most fortunate to have Australian Dale Toohey, a grad student at UMass, as our coach. It was his first coaching gig. In time Dale became a rugby icon, coaching arguably the most successful college rugby program ever at Long Beach State in California, as well as Australian and U.S. World Cup teams. He received many awards, in-

SYLVIA PLATH BIOGRAPHY I AM SEEKING AMHERST MEN FROM the classes of 1951–55 who knew or dated Sylvia Plath (Smith College ’55) to interview for a forthcoming biography of Plath (published by Knopf ).

Please contact me by email at clarkh@ marlboro.edu or by phone at (774) 392–0086.

Heather Clark, Ph.D. Professor of Literature Marlboro College MARLBORO, VT.

JOEL HASKELL

cluding induction into the International Rugby Hall of Fame.

Space at the reception is limited. To participate, contact me at rholloway@ mhdpc.com or (978) 762–5802.

Bob Holloway ’68 TOPSFIELD, MASS.

AMHERST VOLUME 66, NUMBER 4 EDITOR

Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst.edu ALUMNI EDITOR

ROB MATTSON

Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031 DESIGN DIRECTOR

Ronn Campisi ASSISTANT EDITOR

Katherine Duke ’05 MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Lawrence Douglas Mark Edington Darcy Jacobs ’87 Ron Lieber ’93 Elizabeth Minkel ’07 Megan Morey Meredith Rollins ’93 Peter Rooney WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU Ì WE Amherst welcomes letters from

Adrie Kusserow ’88’s work with Sudanese “lost boys” (“Finding Refuge,” Spring 2014) won praise on Twitter. A breakthrough by Amherst physicists David Hall ’91 (above left) and Michael Ray (“A Magnet Like No Other You've Seen”) earned congratulations. And one alumnus used the achievements of model/programmer Lyndsey Scott ’06 (“The Beauty of Coding”) to hound a certain college to the west.

difference! Am proud of my college classmate.” ANDREW N. CARPENTER ’88

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

“One person [Kusserow] can make a

“Feels great to be acknowledged by my alma mater.” LYNDSEY SCOTT ’06 Re. Lyndsey Scott: “Take THAT, Williams!” JACK HODSON ’70 LYNDSEY SCOTT

“Great story about an ’88 alum from Vermont doing beautiful work with Sudanese refugees.” ELODIE REED ’13

“Amherst Physics crushing it. Congrats to Professor Hall.” PARKER MOODY ’14

its readers. Please send them to magazine@amherst.edu or Amherst Magazine, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

Letters must be 300 words or fewer and should address the content in the magazine.

WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE

Amherst (USPS 024-280) is published quarterly by Amherst College at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000, and is sent free to all alumni. Periodicals postage paid at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 to Amherst, AC # 2220, PO Box 5000, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 010025000.

Summer 2014 Amherst 3

news and views from campus

College Row Playing Where Brahms Once Played A rising senior took a break from the physics lab to perform his winning piano composition in Vienna

IF YOU SPEND the bulk of the summer in Professor Larry Hunter’s lab breaking new ground in the field of physics, what do you do to take a break? If you’re DANIEL ANG ’15 , you hop on a jet to Vienna to perform your prizewinning piano composition for an international audience.

Ang’s compo-

4 Amherst Summer 2014

sition “Klavierstück I: Energetic Fixations for Piano Solo” won third prize in the National Young Artist category of the Golden Key Music Festival Piano Composition Competition (open to U.S. residents) as well as an honorable mention in its International Young Artist category (open to people worldwide). He’ll

perform the piece at Ehrbar Hall in Vienna—where Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler once played—as part of the organization’s August 2014 festival.

Ang is a triple major in physics, math and music.

This was his first time entering a music composition contest, and he has since entered more.

WILLIAM SWEET

Ang began composing the piece last summer, while he was also working with the Advanced Cold Molecule Electron Dipole Moment experiment group at Harvard. This followed a sophomore year in which he co-authored a paper with Hunter for the journal Science.

“I started doodling on the piano,” Ang says, “and I got fixated on this opening chord.

I came upon this one bar-gesture and put it on paper. The hardest part is getting that initial spark of material.

Once you’ve got that, it gives you the impetus for the next bar and the bar after that.”

The composition grew out of his interest in merging the traditional and nontraditional in music. He was studying harmony that summer, and the seven-minute piece uses chordal harmony based on intervals of fourths, rather than the traditional harmony familiar to many singers and instrumentalists, which uses thirds.

Ang keeps his science side and his music side distinct, so don’t expect any papers on the physics of music.

“I want to develop as a person with scientific skills, but also with musical skills. My version of liberal arts is: you focus on two or three areas, and you become better at being a scientist and being a person of letters. It’s about being a balanced person.”

Photographs by Rob Mattson

Unfamiliar Ventures

Every Amherst student is required to take a first-year seminar—a small, often interdisciplinary course that serves as an introduction to critical thinking. The college encourages students, in choosing their seminars, to “venture into the unfamiliar” instead of favoring their current interests. Here are some of the 29 first-year seminars to be offered this fall.

Illustrations by Oliver Munday

MAKING SENSE OF DEATH In “Death and Dying in Islam,” sudents explore symbolic meanings of funerary rites, attitudes toward the veneration of the dead, relationships between the living and dead, and ideas about salvation.

They also conduct their own ethnographic work.

INSTRUCTOR: Assistant Professor of Religion Tariq Jaffer

KIDS IN AMERICA “Growing Up in America” examines how race, ethnicity, social class and gender shape the experience of childhood. Readings include Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

INSTRUCTOR: Elizabeth Aries, Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in Social Sciences (Psychology)

ONE IS SILVER, THE OTHER GOLD “Friendship” explores, among other things, the relations between friendship and love, and the ways in which men’s and women’s conceptions of friendship differ. Readings include The Epic of Gilgamesh.

INSTRUCTOR: Class of 1959 Professor Emeritus of English Kim Townsend

NEW GENES “Genes, Genomes and Society” considers human gene therapy, GMOs, the use (and potential misuse) of DNA fingerprinting by governmental agencies and the ability of parents to screen potential offspring for diseases. INSTRUCTOR: David Ratner, Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee Professor of Biology

TRUTHINESS “Secrets and Lies” investigates how politics is informed by the keeping and telling of secrets, and by the telling and exposing of lies. Readings include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Machiavelli’s The Prince.

INSTRUCTOR: Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science

YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS “Drugs in History” looks at the drug war, prescription drugs and drug use in popular culture. Students watch Drugstore Cowboy.

INSTRUCTORS: Francis Couvares, E. Dwight Salmon Professor of History and American Studies, and Jerome Himmelstein, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology Summer 2014 Amherst 5

COLLEGE ROW

You

6 Amherst Summer 2014

Look

Familiar A student project aims to erase “the Amherst Awkward” by placing strangers (very) close together

Photographs by Stella Honey Youn ’15E

STUDENT LIFE U You’re on your way to class. You see a familiar face—that guy from chemistry lab sophomore year. But do you know him well enough to say hi?

You avert your eyes and keep walking.

This is what students call “the Amherst Awkward,” says Rachel Nghe ’16. “Because Amherst is such a small school, you’ll see people you recognize, but you would never smile, despite the fact you’ve seen them 10 times in the past week.”

Last semester Nghe tried to combat the phenomenon—by asking strangers to pretend to love each other.

Modeled on Touching Strangers, a much-publicized project by photographer Richard Renaldi, the student-led effort involved approaching people on campus, pairing them up and having them pose for portraits as if they were twins, or best friends, or newlyweds.

As the subjects talked about how to pose, they also shared their names.

“Laughter broke the awkwardness,” Nghe says. “There were many ‘couples’ who said, ‘I’ve seen you around.’”

The idea came when Adrianna Turner ’14 saw a video about Renaldi. “He created a moment in which two people had to experience each other,” she says. “That’s what I wanted to come out of this project.

It was about the experience of having to pose in this intimate position with someone you are not familiar with, of taking the time to experience being human and to share that experience with someone else.”

Amherst can be mentally and emotionally exhausting, Turner says. “I’d walk past someone and ignore their presence, not on purpose but because my mind was so full of other things. I wanted to give people the opportunity to slow down and experience something different.”

Nghe herself was the subject of a portrait. She pretended to be the relative of a returning veteran. “When I was hugging her I was trying to express relief and sadness at the same time,” she says, “but we couldn’t stop laughing at the silliness of hugging each other when we don’t really know each other.”

Nghe does not remember her partner’s name, but now, when they pass each other on the quad, their eyes meet. And they smile. EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

Summer 2014 Amherst 7

COLLEGE ROW

Inside Glass Houses Turns out, TMI predates Facebook

how a historical rejection of privacy might have influenced architectural trends.

Katsaros—who teaches 19th- and 20th-century French literature, culture and art— has developed a scholarly interest in “self-surveillance”: “the idea of opening up your life for everyone to see.”

Today, this might take the form of a Facebook post. But French Surrealist artists of the 1920s and 1930s also embraced opportunities to expose intimate thoughts and experiences.

Around that same time, it became fashionable for architects to incorporate large amounts of glass into their 8 Amherst Summer 2014

↓ Paris’ Maison de Verre (“House of Glass”) was an artistic and literary salon for the Surrealists.

An Amherst delegation is in Japan

COLLECTION OF LE FAMILISTÈRE DE GUISE

buildings. “And obviously, glass, being transparent, speaks to that new theme of transparency, openness, not keeping any secrets,” Katsaros says.

She’ll spend the coming academic year earning a master’s from Harvard in the history and philosophy of design (with a $262,500 New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). After two semesters of coursework, she plans to spend time next summer touring Paris’ famed Maison de

↑ The French utopian community Le Familistère de Guise rejected the very idea of privacy.

Verre (“House of Glass”), designed in the 1920s and used as an artistic and literary salon by the Surrealists.

Also on her itinerary are buildings in the south of France designed by 20thcentury architect Le Corbusier—par-

MARK LYON

ROB MATTSON

RESEARCH U Associate Professor of French LAURE KATSAROS is going back to grad school—to study

Baseball Diplomacy

ticularly a communal structure in Marseilles.

Katsaros traces the theme of selfsurveillance to radical utopian socialist philosopher Charles Fourier in early-19th-century France. “He absolutely rejected the idea of privacy, of hiding” and outlined a theoretical “architecture that would allow for communal living and the sharing of everything—not just property but also [sexual] partners and children.”

Among the short-lived utopian communities later founded by Fourier’s disciples was Le Familistère de Guise, north of Paris. Katsaros (who is originally from a suburb of Paris) would like to visit and study Le Familistère as well. KATHERINE DUKE ’05

TRAVEL U Many college students visit faraway places. Few bring along the outgoing dean of the faculty.

Twenty-two members of the Amherst baseball team are in Japan this August on a cultural exploration. Their first stop is Doshisha University—Amherst’s sister school in Kyoto— where they’ll play three games of baseball against their Japanese counterparts.

Then they’ll visit Miyagi and Tokyo. Joining the students is a very Amherst mix of people: Gregory Call, who just ended 11 years as dean of the faculty; three coaches; an alumnus; and two professors.

“The idea started as somewhat of a joke,” says Samuel Morse, professor of the history of art and Asian Languages and Civilizations.

“Greg’s a big baseball fan. I help run our academic exchange with Doshi-

ON THE ITINERARY: SHRINES, BASEBALL, THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTRY AND A TSUNAMI-RAVAGED CITY Kyoto

Miyagi

Baseball practice and welcome party at Doshisha

AUG. 12 Run

AUG. 5

AUG. 6 Game 1, Doshisha University vs.

Amherst College; tour of Fushimi Inari Shrine and Sake brewery

Tour of Hikone Castle and Taga Shrine

AUG. 7

Game 2; Afternoon trip to Nara (Todai-ji temple and Nara Park) AUG. 8

AUG. 9

Day tour of

Kyoto AUG. 10

Game 3

clinic for middle school baseball players in Tagajo, a city heavily damaged in the 2011 tsunami Tokyo

AUG. 13-14 Asakusa district, Roppongi Hills, Baseball Hall of Fame, Nakamise shopping arcade and Ministry of Foreign Affairs AUG. 13 Tokyo Dome for Hanchin Tigers vs. Yomiuri Giants (Japan’s version of a Red Sox-Yankees face-off )

sha. I remember saying, ‘What better way to improve relations between the two schools than through having our baseball teams play each other?’”

The notion gained steam when Mark DeWaele ’79 worked with Morse and baseball coach Brian Hamm to organize a panel at Amherst on baseball in Japan. It featured Yale Professor William Kelly ’68, an authority on sports in Japanese society, and former Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, who earlier managed the Chiba Lotte Mariners in Japan. DeWaele— a Connecticut dentist who played baseball at Amherst—helped raise $150,000 in travel costs for the trip.

Call, Morse, DeWaele, Hamm and Trent Maxey, professor of Japanese history, are all traveling with the players, as are two assistant coaches.

“At different times the ambassadors from Japan to the United States, Canada and the UN were all Amherst graduates,” Morse says.

“That shows Amherst already is quite well known in Japan. I hope that after this trip we’ll be even better known.” PETER ROONEY

Stats Facts

ROB MATTSON (2)

Starting this fall, students will be able to declare a major in statistics

THE AMHERST-DOSHISHA CONNECTION Doshisha University is a private college in Kyoto founded by Joseph Hardy Neesima, Amherst Class of 1870, who was the first Japanese student to graduate from an American college or university.

The Amherst-Doshisha relationship dates to Doshisha’s founding in 1875. Programs include faculty and student exchanges. Doshisha President Koji Murata visited Amherst in June to sign an agreement extending the relationship between the two schools.

August’s Amherst vs. Doshisha baseball games mark the first time the two schools have faced each other in a sport.

Nicholas HorACADEMICS U Thank Nate Amy Wagaman and Shu-Min ton, above, Silver, at least in part: interest in Liao and lecturer Xiaofei Wang. says interest the use of data is growing.

Math enrollments at Amherst in statistics is Silver, the statistician behind have doubled in recent years. on the rise. the FiveThirtyEight blog (and an “We’ve been seeing a surge in Amherst honorary degree holder), “has [interest in] pure mathematics, applied shown it’s possible to make sense of mathematics and statistics,” Horton things that had been thought to be due says. Math was the fifth-most-declared to chance,” says Professor of Statistics major for the Amherst Class of 2014.

Nicholas Horton. From online dat“The number of degree programs in ing to health care, everyone wants “to undergraduate statistics are relatively take advantage of the information now small,” Horton adds, “but they are available to us.” growing dramatically.”

Now, Amherst students can major Interest is also growing at the high in statistics. Horton has joined the school level: In 2013, 169,508 students renamed Department of Mathematics took the Advanced Placement statistics and Statistics, which also includes three exam, up from 58,230 in 2003, accordother stats experts: assistant professors ing to the College Board. E.G.B. Summer 2014 Amherst 9

COLLEGE ROW

Take Aim at All the Sky Amherst awarded 474 bachelor of arts degrees on May 25 And now the plant, resigned To being self-defined Before it can commerce With the great universe, Takes aim at all the sky And starts to ramify.

So ends “Seed Leaves,” a poem Richard Wilbur ’42 wrote for Robert Frost in 1964. Fifty years later Wilbur rededicated the 34-line beauty to the Amherst Class of 2014.

In a strong, affectionate voice, the Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate read “Seed Leaves” to the 474 graduating seniors and 5,000 well-wishers gath-

ered on a sunny commencement morning.

President Biddy Martin drew heavily from “Seed Leaves” in her commencement address.

“Ramify, at its root, refers to the process of branching out, extending, becoming more complex, taking shape as we take aim,” she said.

“The purpose of your education at a place like Amherst is not to determine the shape you will take … but to provide an environment in which you can ramify.”

In her speech, Martin credited members of the class with helping to “inspire

a national movement to end sexual assault on campuses.”

She continued, “In response to other urgent challenges, you have organized to address the human causes of rapid climate change. You have advocated for immigration reform.

You have insisted on greater openness to a wider range of political perspectives.”

Martin encouraged the Class of 2014 to “take your decency, your earnestness, your gratitude and your hard work out into a world badly in need of all those qualities, a world in which it is too easy to be cynical.”

“Your education here is a

well-earned treasure,” Martin said. She then made another reference to Wilbur’s poem: “Celebrate what you have achieved and ramify.”

The student speaker was Katherine E. Sisk ’14. “I’m encouraged enough by the example you have set that the right amount of passion and compassion can make our lives great—and that even if it doesn’t, at the very least it will make them better,” she told her classmates. “That even if we fall short or sideways of what we were aiming for, we’ll be okay, and we might be happy, and we won’t let our fires die.” E.G.B.

What’s Next?

Here are some of the new job titles of members of the Class of 2014 RESEARCH ASSISTANT Duke University Hospital ASSOCIATE CONSULTANT Bain & Co. ASSOCIATE ACCOUNT STRATEGIST Google ASSOCIATE WEB DEVELOPER LinkedIn

“Even if we fall short,” said Sisk, “we won’t let our fires die.”

TEACHER Mississippi Teacher Corps MANAGEMENT TRAINEE Norfolk Southern Railway LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism SOLAR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM ANALYST SunEdison

l 7 HEAR WILBUR READ “SEED LEAVES.”

F WATCH MARTIN AND SISK ADDRESS THE CROWD. www.amherst.edu/magazine

Going Far An unprecedented number of new Amherst alumni—12 from the Class of 2014 and three from other recent classes—have been offered Fulbright Fellowships to teach and study abroad.

They will, among other things, research political autonomy in Nicaragua; teach English in Argentina, Vietnam and Turkey; explore changing identities of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees in Jordan; and study stained-glass restoration in France.

Amherst IAL awarded SPENCORS honorary HO doctorates to seven people during the commencement ceremony.

DAVID BROOKS, New York Times op-ed columnist and author, most recently, of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement CULLEN JONES, recordbreaking swimmer, fourtime Olympic medalist and leader in efforts to bring diversity to his sport and teach young people to swim THAI LEE ’80, president and CEO of SHI International, a $5 billion corporation that provides information technology software, hardware and professional services YASUO SAKAKIBARA, an authority on transportation economics and a creator of the field of American studies in Japan. Sakakibara died in 2013; his daughter, Richi Sakakibara ’88, accepted the degree on his behalf.

NATE SILVER, statistician and editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight blog. In 2008 Silver correctly predicted U.S. presidential election results in 49 states, as well as every winner in the U.S. Senate races.

Martin conferred seven honorary degrees. One went to Nate Silver.

n

THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLASS OF 2014

Number of new graduates

Countries represented by the class (including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Ethiopia and Myanmar)

Photographs by Rob Mattson

Senior theses completed

Percent who took a course in poetry

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(&2120,&6 (1*/,6+ 36<&+2/2*< 32/,7,&$/ 6&,(1&( 0$7+(0$7,&6 Most-declared majors

SARAH SZE, a contemporary artist who creates large-scale sculptures, including Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), displayed on New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High Line JIDE ZEITLIN â&#x20AC;&#x2122;85, private investor, trustee emeritus of Amherst and board chairman from 2005 to 2013. Zeitlin played a leading role on two Amherst presidential search committees.

Summer 2014 Amherst 11

COLLEGE ROW

Ì SPORTS GABBY DEVLIN

JORDAN BREWER

Doubles Duty After finishing their college tennis careers the same way they started— together—Gabby Devlin ’14 and Jordan Brewer ’14 took the red eye to graduation.

TENNIS U While other seniors were packing up their dorm rooms and preparing for tent parties, Jordan Brewer ’14 and Gabby Devlin ’14 were 3,000 miles away from campus, hugging on a tennis court in Claremont, Calif.

They’d just won an unprecedented third NCAA title together in doubles.

The victory made Devlin only the second Division III women’s player in history to claim four straight doubles championships. Brewer—Devlin’s partner for three of those four wins—also finished the season as national runner-up in singles play.

Brewer and Devlin did not linger on the West Coast, because they had another achievement to celebrate. They flew to Harford and caught a van back to campus, where they arrived with only half an hour to spare before the commencement march began.

12 Amherst Summer 2014

THE MATCHMAKER In 2010 Coach Jackie Bagwell paired up her top recruits—Brewer and Devlin—despite Brewer’s inexperience in doubles play. “When putting together doubles combinations, I’m always looking for personalities that mesh,” the coach says.

She also looks for complementary skill sets. Brewer’s proficiency in setting up her partner, combined with doubles specialist Devlin’s expertise at the net, proved a winning combination. “I did not plan on sticking Gabby and Jordan at No. 1 doubles in their first year,” Bagwell says. “They decided that themselves, when they rolled through the Northeast ITA Tournament with impressive ease.”

BUILDING CHEMISTRY “Doubles isn’t as much about tennis as it is about learning what your partner likes and doesn’t like,” says Devlin. Brewer prefers the baseline; Devlin likes to be at net. Brewer is serious on the court; Dev-

lin is playful. After a difficult practice, the two would go for frozen yogurt together, but during winters on campus, they were usually apart. “When you’re involved in a sport as intense as tennis, you need some personal space,” Brewer says. “We made sure to do that in the offseason.”

LOST LUGGAGE The women’s tennis team landed in California for the NCAA championship at 2 a.m. on May 17—but their luggage did not. With their bags in Philadelphia and a practice on the schedule, Bagwell picked up 11 sports bras and 11 pairs of Nike shorts at a nearby Sports Authority.

The luggage arrived in time for the start of the team championship, during which the women placed second in the nation.

A BALL TO THE FACE In the first set of the individual doubles championship on May 24, Brewer took a ball to the face. “I think it went straight

A van was waiting when Devlin and Brewer landed at Hartford. They got to Morrow at 9:30 a.m., threw on caps and gowns and dashed to Memorial Hill, where classmates guided them to their spots in the line.

MILAN REED (9); GRADUATION PHOTO COURTESY GABBY DEVLIN

to my nose,” she says. “My whole face went numb. I was having a hard time seeing.” Devlin felt responsible. As Devlin explains, one of their opponents from Emory “started to poach across the court, so I hit a lob to the open spot behind her, but she made a great play and lunged backwards for the ball. Unfortunately, Jordan was unable to get out of the way or get her racket up in time. I was concerned Jordan would resent me for it.”

THE COMEBACK Resentment was not on Brewer’s mind.

“I had to refocus,” she says. She told herself, “This is our last match. Do I want to remember having a pity party, or will I look back and think, I persevered.”

THE RED EYE After the doubles victory the two champions blasted music in their hotel room while they showered and packed. Then— only three hours after the end of the final

match—Brewer, Devlin and Bagwell boarded the plane. A van was waiting in Hartford. The driver—one of Bagwell’s friends—dropped the seniors at Morrow Dormitory at 9:30 a.m. They threw on caps and gowns and dashed to Memorial Hill, where their classmates guided them to their spots in the line.

NEW STARTS Brewer will soon begin a master’s program in social work at Columbia University. She plans to take at least a few months off from tennis, “to enjoy not having the intense training I’ve had most of my life.” Devlin has her eye on law school, but first she’ll take a year to travel. She also wants to get back to snowboarding—which, like tennis, relies on gut instincts, she says. Speaking of tennis, Devlin will probably join a women’s league: “It’s just way too much fun, and it’s been a part of my life forever.”

MICHAEL O’BRIEN

More Trophies Brewer and Devlin weren’t the only Amherst tennis players to take home trophies this spring. The men’s tennis team won the NCAA championship for the second time in program history, and Joey Fritz ’14 (above) captured the men’s individual singles title. It was an NCAA-winning season for a track and field senior, too. Naomi Bates ’14 claimed her second national title when she defended her crown in the long jump at the outdoor meet.

Devlin and Brewer at the doubles championship in California and, the next morning, at their Amherst graduation

Summer 2014 Amherst 13

Before POINT OF VIEW

WE DIDN’T

RECOGNIZE

CRAIGSLIST

PRINT

NEWSPAPERS’ HEYDAY EVEN WHEN IT LANDED ON OUR DOORSTEPS.

BY RICHARD READ ’80

Read, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, writes on international affairs and business for The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Ore.

14

AMHERST | Summer 2014

CHARLES ST. CYR, A SAN DIEGO UNION REPORTER IN 1981, TRIED VALIANTLY to dissuade me from a journalism career when I wrote him for advice, fresh from editing The Amherst Student.

Editors are relentless, Charlie typed, in a three-page, single-spaced letter.

Reporters rub shoulders with sordid characters ranging from prostitutes to politicians. Land a big story, he said, and your publisher kills it to protect an advertiser. At week’s end, a newsman makes just enough to cry into his beer.

I telephoned Charlie and thanked him for the letter. I told him I was hooked, I wanted in. “You read every word?” he asked. “You still want to be a journalist?” Yep, I said.

“OK,” Charlie said. “Let’s get you started.”

Good to his word, Charlie helped me launch a 33-year odyssey that’s spanned 60 nations, war zones, earthquakes, tsunamis, economic crashes and, yes, interviews with hookers and heads of state, although seldom in the same room. My path through the Fourth Estate has coincided with journalism’s arc, from the days of hot type and handsome newspaper profits to the Internet era, when newspapers struggle to survive.

When I began in Portland as a general-assignment reporter at The Oregonian, we answered colleagues’ heavy black desk phones and left handwritten messages. We typed our stories on IBM Selectrics. On deadline, the clunky typewriters thundered to a newsroom crescendo.

Reporters fixed typos with correction tape. We handed our epistles to grouchy city editors. They tore off carbon copies and shoved the originals into pneumatic tubes that sucked them into the old building’s guts for scanning by a mainframe computer.

Photographers shot pictures with film cameras. Senior editors disappeared for multi-martini lunches. Longtime reporters played bridge in the cafeteria. The septuagenarian writer sitting to my left had flown his plane to Mount St. Helens to cover the eruption.

Technology marched on. By the late 1980s, when I realized my dream of becoming a foreign correspondent, faxes—not telex machines—beamed stories home from Tokyo. I roamed the Far East, bankrolled by burgeoning auto ads back home. I covered the rise of Asia’s middle class, Japan’s boom and bust, China’s economic opening and North Korea’s repression. Before dawn each day, fleets of trucks delivered fat papers across the Pacific NorthIllustration by MELINDA BECK →

west. More than 450,000 subscribers depended on The Oregonian as the region’s main information broker.

In 1997 I somehow talked my editors into letting me explain Asia’s economic crisis by following a container of french fries from a Washington State farm to a McDonald’s in Singapore and then on to Indonesia’s revolution. The series won the paper’s first Pulitzer Prize since 1957, the year I was born. A brass band played, champagne flowed, and Portland Mayor Vera Katz, wearing a purple pantsuit, flung herself across the newsroom for a hug.

We didn’t recognize print newspapers’ heyday even when it landed on our doorsteps. During the 1990s we crafted in-depth narrative stories, exposed injustices and forced reforms. Many journalists enjoyed solid middle-class lifestyles.

And then came the Internet, the master of creative destruction. In a few clicks, Craigslist vaporized millions of dollars a year in classified-ad revenues. The Or-

Illustration by tk

egonian rescinded its lifetime job pledge.

The company implemented early-retirement packages, generous buyouts, then not-so-generous buyouts and finally layoffs and cuts in pay and benefits.

Home deliveries of the shrunken print edition dropped to four days a week.

News went digital. Now, reporters are evaluated mainly on the number of page views their online posts attract. Celebrity stories, sports reports and cute pet photos capture plenty of clicks.

The twice-daily Selectric crescendo has gone the way of pneumatic tubes.

The newsroom has the muffled sound of an insurance office as writers tap computer keys, posting developments as soon as they surface. Often, we publish news online first, for editors to review later.

News these days reaches many more people faster. A Phnom Penh stockbroker can comment on my latest business post as quickly as a Portland beer brewer—and expect an answer just as promptly. Information beams to smart phones, reaching

younger news consumers. Tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook entries spread developments ever wider.

Us old hacks thrived on the thrill of nabbing the news first and getting it right.

Given a few extra minutes, we strove to imbue our writing with flair. As my old friend Charlie predicted, we gathered each Friday for beers, but with little to cry about. A publisher has never killed one of my stories.

We signed up for the same reasons that many young writers join the industry now: to learn something new each day, to write the first draft of history and, as journalist Finley Peter Dunne quipped in 1902, to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”

But as lucrative car ads go the way of the buggy whip, some Amherst grad smarter than me must find a revenue source for high-quality journalism crucial to our democracy. Otherwise the comfortable won’t be afflicted, and the afflicted won’t be comforted. k

Summer 2014 Amherst 15

By William H. Pritchard â&#x20AC;&#x2122;53

16 Amherst Summer 2014

LIFE

Pritchard is the college’s Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus. In the coming academic year he’ll teach “Shakespeare” and “Modern British Literature, 1900–1950.”

AFTER

AMHERST

?

The secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking being whose life is limited and to whom death is dreadful.

—Samuel Johnson

W

AY BACK IN THE ’60S AND ’70S OF THE departed century, I would occasionally think about just when I would retire from my life of teaching at Amherst. Since back then there was a mandatory retirement at age 70, I figured my number would come up around 2002, by which time I would have taught here for 45 years, a pretty good run it then seemed to me.

But fate intervened when the law decided it was unlawful for colleges and universities to fix on a specific date when professors must stop professing. So the easiest, most attractive option for me was to keep at it full steam. Not quite full steam: over the last decade I gradually lowered my course load from four to three courses a year, then—entering what is called phased retirement—to one course a semester. Having served out my Phase, I became, last June, an Emeritus, honorably discharged from service, as the dictionary has it.

But the college administration in its benignity invited me to stay on for another three years, teaching a

Photograph by JOHN GOODMAN

Summer 2014 Amherst 17

AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES

Pritchard in 1995. In class, he promotes the idea “that the function of literature is to instruct through pleasure.”

course each term and advising the occasional honors candidate. Having completed the first year of that three-year extension, where do I find myself?

Dr. Johnson’s invocation of the “secret horror of the last” has always resonated with me insofar as I have been not always horrified but usually fascinated by the Last: Much of my life ever since high school has been a matter of

Russell. Perhaps it was now time to pronounce as over that phase of my life? Still, I hung on through the lean years at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one; then, lo and behold, there were Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to win one championship and come close to a couple of others. Now they too are gone and the question remains: how long, if at all, should I hang on through the next few lean years with the Celtics, waiting for the fat ones to come round once more?

The secret horror of the last makes me want to hang on to things generally. This past year one my two, great, enormous KLH speakers, bought as part of a high-fidelity set in the 1950s, went on the blink. The electronics guy suggested I might get some new ones, more compact, not all that costly. No, I said, please fix the one I’ve got.

Accordingly, with both speakers now producing, plus a new amp, I’m listening to Toscanini conducting Schubert, Pollini playing Chopin, Duke Ellington’s “Solitude,” as all the old music gets revived in the late afternoon, just before drink and suppertime. Speaking of drink, as we must, shouldn’t I try out a new beverage, new cocktail,

One of my two, great KLH speakers, bought as part of a high-fidelity set in the 1950s, went on the blink. The electronics guy suggested I might get some new ones. No, I said, please fix the one I’ve got. saying: well, this is the last time I will… do this, do that, read and write about that. When the Boston Celtics began their decline back in the early 1990s, I posted a picture of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish sitting disconsolately on the bench near the end of a Boston defeat in the playoffs.

I considered my 35 years of Celtic fandom all the way back to old times at the Boston Garden, sitting up near the top to watch Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn and Bill 18 Amherst Summer 2014

something to vary the daily routine? No, there is only one drink, and it’s made with Booth’s Gin and Tribuno Dry Vermouth. How could anyone improve on that?

And then there is Amherst College. How has it changed over the years, how much and for better or worse? Alumni back for their reunions wonder how different things are from their undergraduate days decades ago. (“Is there still a required curriculum?” they inquire, haplessly.) When asked,

I answer them in two ways, both equally true and false. The first is, Oh yes, no fraternities, coeducation, no curriculum to bother with, plenty of—I pause for the swell in the word—diversity! Then, on the other hand, no, it hasn’t really changed, still a lot of smart kids among the less so, lively classrooms, faculty who care about and read their students’ work without the benefit of teaching assistants, unlike Harvard.

When I consult the course catalogue, one of the few items left deemed worthy of hard copy, I find it swollen to 600 pages, whereas 200 used to be more or less the rule. As for the courses contained therein, most of them with much too lengthy and pompous descriptions, I find this or that one— mainly in the humanities and social sciences—to be absolutely preposterous. Whoever thought that could be worth spending a semester on?

A similarly swollen expansion may be noted in the realm of athletics, a particular example being lacrosse, which at one time was a minor sport, coached rather informally by the minister of Grace Episcopal Church, a muscular Christian. Today large crowds gather Friday and Saturday afternoons for seemingly endless contests complete with amplified music (well, sort of music) and watched by older visitors with their enormous cars, families, dogs and cases of bottled water. As one who has lived for a long time across the street from Pratt Field, I see and hear this firsthand, the onetime football field, as it was called, having been replaced by a sports palace worthy of Ohio State. There are moments when I wonder whether this, along with all the other sports, is what the college is really about.

But I have no right to complain: As a teaching emeritus I have retained my office in the basement of Johnson Chapel. My IBM Selec-

FVideo: Rand Richards Cooper ’80 interviews Pritchard for a 2002 oral history www.amherst.edu/magazine

AMHERST COLLEGE OLIO

tric typewriter still serves me well, even though I have bowed to the exigencies of the 21st century and have a computer at home (courtesy, of course, of the college) where I can word-process my essays and reviews. These continue to mount up, even as reviewing outlets have shrunk.

The noble Hudson Review, though read by few, now in its 56th year, continues to welcome my quarterly reports on subjects such as Jonathan Swift or Duke Ellington.

For shorter flights I depend on the friendly editors of The Weekly Standard and Commonweal magazine. The Standard is strongly Republican, but has back pages presided over by a literary editor who doesn’t require me to choose parties, just to write about books.

Commonweal, a liberal Catholic journal, is also reassuringly hospitable, even though I’m no more a Romanist than a Republican.

When I revealed to my spouse that I was going to write something vaguely on the subject of life after Amherst, she scoffed, declaring that there was, for me, no life after Amherst. A shrewd remark, reminding me of how bound to (or stifled by) the place I have been, ever since as a 16-year-old freshman I wore my green beanie and dutifully said hello to upperclassmen. (Freshmen say hello first, was the rule.)

Now I hardly speak to anyone, don’t go to faculty meetings, don’t go to department meetings,

don’t have student advisees. In fact, students are to be encountered pretty much only in the classroom, since email and online resources have eliminated the need for office visitations.

As for my classroom, I do what I’ve always done, that is, I read aloud from a poem or novel and try to help students get better at becoming the kind of “ear reader” Frost admired, and to promote an idea that some students seem never to have encountered in an English course— that the function of literature is to instruct through pleasure, and that literature exists to provide supreme instances of that pleasure.

And my colleagues, where are they? Not, it seems, in Frost Library browsing for books, since everything more or less can be done at home over the wires.

The digital world has triumphed: When I recently turned in my grades by hand instead of doing it online, I asked a staff member in the registrar’s office how things were going. Fine, she replied, except we miss seeing people, to which I replied that I was there handing in grades on paper so as to keep up standards. I felt even more quixotic than usual.

Shall I go on? Or have I said enough? Thus speaks the Lady in Milton’s Comus. The answer is plain to anyone who has ever been visited by a secret horror of the last. k Pritchard’s yearbook photo from 1953. He majored in philosophy at Amherst.

NEVER STOP WRITING Excerpts from three of Pritchard’s recent book reviews THE WEEKLY STANDARD

Updike

by Adam Begley It is much to Begley’s credit that he has managed the job in 12 chapters—each of them, beginning with Updike’s upbringing in Berks County, Pennsylvania, clearly focused on and skillfully intertwining the most important events of Updike’s life and the many works that he produced as a prolific man of letters.

COMMONWEAL

George Orwell: A Life in Letters Edited by Peter Davison Orwell was a very sick man by the time he finished rewriting and typing Nineteen Eighty-Four—much of the work done in bed and, as Davison points out, with a mechanical typewriter and the accompanying carbon copies. Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, as I have just done, with the picture of a desperately ill man behind the words, has increased my admiration for that strong, imperfect, painful novel.

THE HUDSON REVIEW

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington

by Terry Teachout But unless my own case is atypical, I think Ellington will continue to be listened to mainly for the short, three-minute numbers from the years 1927–1942. Teachout says about “Ko-Ko,” perhaps the most impressive and most praised recording from this period, that it constituted “a relentless procession of musical events that contained not a wasted gesture.” Repeated listenings to its propulsive excitement prompted me—as when reading a poem notable for its diction and rhythmic movement—to look for critical help in unpacking some of its richness.

Summer 2014 Amherst 19

O

BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10

ut of the shadows

Kirk Johnson ’82 takes a

science writer behind the

scenes of the most visited

natural history museum in the world.

Photographs by BROOKS KRAFT

20

AMHERST SUMMER 2014

Johnson is director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where an elephant greets the 35,000 to 40,000 visitors who come through the main entrance every day.

Summer 2014 Amherst 21

T

HE CORRIDORS ARE DARK, lit only by a distant strip of fluorescent bulbs. Around us, the earthly remains of thousands of creatures from across millions of years sit silently in cabinets, waiting to be rediscovered. At the end of one row, a wide leg bone looms out of the shadows, taller than a person. “I like coming down here and just opening random drawers,” says Kirk Johnson ’82. He also looms large in the shadowy corridors—tall, with the solid build of a former rugby player. He flips a switch, illuminating long stretches of green wooden cabinets.

Johnson is director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the largest and most visited natural history museum in the world. He has taken me deep into the bowels of the museum, an area off-limits to the public. As with most other museums, the vast majority of Natural History’s holdings are never displayed; instead, its 127 million specimens— spanning fields from anthropology to entomology to botany—are collected, catalogued and stored here for scientists to use in their research. Right now, we’re in the paleobiology section—Johnson’s specialty.

The Smithsonian Institution encompasses 19 public museums and galleries, the National Zoo and nine research institutes, with a combined budget of more than a billion dollars. Natural History is the largest of these in terms of budget, employees and collections. Its building on the National Mall opened in 1910, built in part because the Smithsonian needed space for its rapidly growing stock of specimens and artifacts. As the collections continued to expand over the subsequent century, the museum added new wings to its original building. Every day, between 35,000 and 40,000 people come through the doors—free of charge, as is the case with all Smithsonian museums.

Johnson became director in 2012 after more than 20 years at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. His career has taken him to fossil digs on every continent. He’s also spent much of his time writing, giving talks and appearing on television with one broad message: Museums are not just relevant today, but crucial. When the Smithsonian asked him to apply for the directorship, he initially demurred. But he soon concluded that there is no better place than the Smithsonian to spread his message about the value of museums. “They’re going to hand me the keys to a big car,” he says. “If you actually believe what you’re saying, you’ve got to step up and do it.”

Natural history museums, and the Smithsonian’s in particular, have three main roles: They are where experts do basic scientific research; they “inspire and educate our public,” as Johnson told a Congressional committee in January; and they are “where we keep the treasures of our culture,” he says. To Johnson, these combined roles make natural history museums the “toolkit[s] of the 21st century.”

Most people, however, don’t realize that scientists conduct research in museums. “People are always surprised”

when they see the collections, Johnson says. “They think everything is for display.” This ignorance can be perilous: funding for museum research is often among the first budget lines to go in a financial crisis. The public can’t miss what it doesn’t know is there.

While Johnson views museums as essential in the 21st century, there’s no denying they are creations of the 19th— more precisely, in the Smithsonian’s case, 1846, the year it was founded by Congress. “So many things invented in the 19th century are no longer relevant,” Johnson says. “Kids are just not getting outside very much. They’re more inscreen, indoors, more afraid.” People are seldom without their electronics. But this, he argues, makes natural history museums especially relevant: they get children excited about the natural world. “They create scientists,” he says—an important goal in its own right.

G

22 Amherst Summer 2014

ROWING UP IN WASHINGTON STATE, Johnson went on many fossil-finding expeditions. On one visit, at a remote beach, a fossil collector split open a large, round rock to reveal a perfectly preserved crab. The collector let Johnson keep the fossil. “That was it; I was done,” Johnson told an audience at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum in Seattle this year. “I was going to become a paleontologist.”

That museum is where his mother would drop him off, starting when he was 13, after she’d become “fully fed up with driving me to fossil sites,” he said in the lecture. “She figured that if she deposited me at the museum, somebody else would do it for her. And, strangely enough, that was true.”

That somebody was Wesley Wehr, a volunteer curator who took Johnson on fossil-hunting trips around the state.

On one such trip the teenager found a site with numerous

One cabinet is labeled Misc Dinosaurs. A part of him wants to sit down and start classifying fossils and deciphering the handwriting on century-old labels. leaf fossils, including the fossilized leaf of a linden tree that turned out to be a newly discovered species. Ten years later, when Wehr and another scientist published a paper on the species, they named it Tilia johnsoni in Johnson’s honor.

Johnson’s passion for paleontology led him to Amherst— specifically, to the natural history museum (then named the Pratt Museum, now the Beneski). When he visited campus as a high school student, he met Gerry Brophy, the museum’s director at the time. “He said, ‘If you come here you’ll have a job for your entire time here,’” Johnson remembers.

Indeed, Johnson helped curate the museum’s fossil collections throughout his four years at Amherst.

(When the Pratt Museum closed about a decade ago so the building could be turned into a first-year dorm, Johnson pushed for the creation of a new museum, rather than simply putting the collections into deep storage. “It’s one of the finer small college museums,” he says of the Beneski, which opened in 2006 in the new geology building.)

Johnson wrote his senior thesis under the guidance of Ed Belt in the geology department. Belt recalls, “He came here from Seattle with a fair amount of background information and experience in fossil collecting.” But initially, Johnson was more dedicated to rugby than to his studies.

Only after injuring both knees did Johnson “really settle down and start getting A’s,” says Belt.

Johnson’s Amherst thesis examined leaves from the Paleocene, the first geologic epoch after the dinosaurs were wiped out. While working on it, he attended a paleobotany meeting in Petersham, Mass. “It was a small meeting,” he says, “but almost all of the major players in the field were there.” By chance, his roommate there was Leo Hickey, a renowned paleobotanist from the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. “Leo and I hit it off,” says Johnson, and Hickey helped him finish his thesis work.

Hickey soon left the Smithsonian to join the Yale faculty and head up the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Johnson started a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, but he joined Hickey on field expeditions in Montana, Wyoming and the Arctic. “It was basically a long academic courtship,” Johnson says. “By 1984 it was completely clear that I would do my Ph.D. with him at Yale.”

Johnson started at Yale in 1985 and spent many field seasons studying a geologic unit in North Dakota known as the Hell Creek Formation. This formation has been extensively studied, both because it is extraordinarily fossil-rich (it is the source of most of the known Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons) and because it shows clear evidence of the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Johnson focused on plants that existed before and after the asteroid impact, finding that many plants had gone extinct with the dinosaurs. Years later, Hickey told Belt, “Kirk was the best student I ever had.” (The admiration was mutual. “I could not

imagine a better advisor,” Johnson wrote in the acknowledgements of his Yale dissertation, thanking Hickey—who died in 2013—for his “companionship and collaboration in the Arctic and out West, brutal criticism, excellent advice, and friendship,” as well as for practicalities like “his ’71 Chevy Blazer, pick-axe, cleared leaf collection, home brew.”)

Johnson’s next stop was the Denver museum, where he became chief scientist in 2004 and devoted much time to field and expedition work. George Sparks, that museum’s president and CEO, recalls a Thursday evening when Johnson came running into his office. A field site had just yielded a new set of fossils, and Johnson was about to go check it out. “He was literally bounding down the hall—and he’s a big guy!” says Sparks. “He reminded me of a little boy on Christmas morning.”

Johnson’s most ambitious undertaking in Colorado was an excavation at Aspen’s Snowmass ski area. During a 2010 construction project, workers had turned up mastodon tusks. They called the Denver museum; Johnson and others went to take a look. Their subsequent expedition uncovered a trove of well-preserved Ice Age skeletons, including giant ground sloths, six mammoths and 50 mastodons. In a 70-day blitz, Johnson organized more than 300 scientists and field technicians to excavate as many bones as possible before construction resumed. “It was the culmination of all my childhood dreams,” he said at the Burke Museum, “to lead a shovel army into the mountains and extract literally thousands of gigantic bones.”

T

O APPEAL TO A YOUNGER GENERATION, some people think museums should produce more digital content. Johnson, however, believes that if natural history museums play to their strengths, kids will continue to come—and to be fascinated. “You’re competing in a world where there’s so much digital stuff,” he says. “You’re not going to compete well. Meanwhile, you’ve got all the ammonites and the Hope Diamond and the gold nuggets. Why would you go digital if you’ve got the real stuff ?”

One effort to target a younger demographic is the Smithsonian’s new Q?rius center, which introduces teenagers to the science that takes place in museums. Located on the ground floor of the museum, it is part lab, part classroom and part collections vault. Young people come there to meet Smithsonian scientists, to simulate DNA analysis and to examine skull samples.

All over the museum are scenes that support Johnson’s thinking. At its Live Insect Zoo, children fearlessly watch a tarantula eat a cricket, their anticipation evident as the cricket wanders haplessly around the spider’s terrarium.

(The adults in attendance aren’t quite as fearless as the children. One older, bearded man says, “She’s going to feed a Summer 2014 Amherst 23

GEOFFREY GILLER

Last year alone, museum researchers published the discoveries of 392 new species.

These include a member of the raccoon family and a beetle that lives in ant nests.

Johnson holds a tooth of a Desmostylus, a semiaquatic mammal that lived during the Miocene epoch. “They look like little sixpacks,” he says of the teeth.

tarantula? I’m going to back up.”) The children listen attentively as the presenter describes how the tarantula would bite the cricket and then regurgitate digestive fluids into the bug to dissolve its innards. The kids don’t seem to mind the graphic details.

In the Hall of Human Origins, a young girl stops to contemplate a bronze statue of a Neanderthal child who is about her size. In the atrium, a band of five teenaged boys with backpacks and baseball caps stride purposefully past the elephant that greets visitors. They appear to have come on their own.

After less than two years on the job, Johnson has had little time to put new exhibits and initiatives into place.

He’s mostly following the strategic plan put together by his predecessor, Cristián Samper. “It’s a good plan, so I’m playing it through,” he says. It involves a major renovation of one of the most popular areas, the Fossil Hall. Slated to open in 2019, the new hall will take visitors from the most recent Ice Age back to the early Earth in an exhibit entitled “Deep Time.”

A centerpiece of the Dinosaur Hall will be a recently acquired, nearly complete and extremely rare T. rex skeleton.

For now, visitors can see scientists at work through a metal grate as they scan and create 3-D models of all the skeleton’s bones.

The T. rex digitization is an example of science that is often done behind the scenes but that Johnson’s staff has made public. Finding ways to publicize museum research is a nationwide concern, says Chris Norris, president of The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. “We’re not very good about articulating what we do in terms of long-term benefits,” he says, even though such research “ultimately has applications in areas like public health and conservation and resource management.”

But to give the public a full picture of the science taking place at his museum, Johnson needed a full picture, too. So he asked every researcher working at the museum to write about their research and recent achievements. The resulting report is a 575-page tome.

In 2013 alone, researchers from the museum published the discoveries of 392 new species—both extinct species found only as fossils and those still living today. Among these species are the olinguito, a member of the raccoon family from South America; a red-andblack beetle from French Guiana that makes its home in ant nests; and two plants from the Colombian Andes with long, narrow, hairy flowers that are most likely pollinated by hummingbirds.

The research is not limited to finding new species. One ongoing Smithsonian project is the Recovering Voices Initiative, which seeks to document and study the world’s endangered languages and to bring indigenous people to the museum to study and discuss artifacts from their cultures

as a way of revitalizing their languages and energizing their communities. Another research focus is on the Arctic—important for scientific understanding of climate change. “In climate change scenarios,” Johnson explains, “the Arctic changes three to four times faster than the rest of the planet.” Yet another project has museum scientists working with the National Marine Fisheries Service to determine whether fishing regulations are sufficiently protecting dolphins in the Atlantic Ocean.

Johnson is no longer doing the research, but the boy who dug for fossils can’t resist wandering through the collections, rediscovering tucked-away specimens. Opening one drawer, he shows me a vaguely horselike fossilized skull.

“That’s a really cool animal no one has ever heard of,” he says. “It should be a famous animal. It’s called a Desmostylus.” He points out its teeth. Each one is made up of six individual compartments. “They look like little sixpacks.”

We come across things that make Johnson less happy, too. Large portions of the collections are disorganized; the labels are either incorrectly filled out or have degraded or been lost over time. One cabinet is labeled Misc Dinosaurs.

“When people don’t curate well,” he says, “ subsequent people have a hard time deciding what to do next.” A part of him wants to sit down and start classifying fossils and deciphering the handwriting on century-old labels.

Instead, he opens a door and we’re suddenly amongst the visitors again. “I do the whole MBWA thing—Management By Walking Around.” He chats with the visitors, staff and volunteers who keep the public parts of the museum humming. He then leads me back through more hallways, opening doors with the key he got when he became director: “Opens every door,” he says. “Haven’t found one I can’t get into yet.”

Up some stairs and through yet another door, we emerge into the rotunda at the center of the museum. Six floors below is the main entrance, with the elephant; people flow steadily in through the doors. Johnson leans against the banister, staring down at the visitors. “This floor isn’t open to the public, so you just come up here like you’re on the bridge of a ship,” he says.

A

24 Amherst Summer 2014

FEW HOURS EARLIER, I’D BEEN ONE OF those people streaming into the building. After pausing at the elephant that dominates the atrium I’d turned left, into the Hall of Mammals. This hall is organized by continent, starting with Africa, where a lion on a pedestal looks proudly to the sky, with hints of The Lion King. Below the lion, two lionesses attempt to take down a water buffalo.

On a nearby tree, a leopard lounges next to a freshly killed gazelle draped over a branch. “You know what? It’s kill or be killed,” a woman says to her friend.

Upstairs, in the Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals, is

“We kind of have a monopoly on time,” Johnson says of natural history museums. While most people think in terms of election cycles, “we’re the ones that talk about big time things—100 millilon years ago, or 10 million years ago.”

one of the pièces de résistance: the Hope Diamond. While it is not, as one man exclaimed to his daughter, “the biggest diamond in the world!,” it is enormous, deep blue and impossibly flawless. Nearby, a college-aged man poses for a picture next to a 10,363-carat aquamarine.

I don’t get to visit the Fossil Hall, which is walled off for its conversion to the new “Deep Time” exhibit featuring the T. rex. “We kind of have the monopoly on time,” Johnson says of natural history museums. “We’re the ones that talk about big time things—100 million years ago, or 10 million years ago.” By looking back across such massive timescales, Johnson hopes visitors will also look forward.

“Most people think about, at most, an election cycle,” he says. That can lead to shortsightedness on issues such as climate change: “How do we, as humans with our rapidly growing populations, not destroy all the natural ecosys-

tems?” he wonders. The stated mission of his museum is to understand the natural world and our place in it. “It’s almost like that mission is written,” Johnson says, “for the 21st century.”

Perhaps equally important: the experience of standing beside a towering T. rex, or examining a leaf fossil, or observing a spider eat a cricket, or imagining the life of a lion, can change the trajectory of a young person’s life, possibly leaving him or her in perpetual awe of the natural world.

In the collections, it’s evident that Johnson’s sense of awe has not diminished. “Check this thing out,” he says, opening yet another drawer. “This is like the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen.” It’s a fossil the size and shape of a large sweet potato—a lizard, with perfectly preserved facial features and back scales. Johnson giggles.

“Isn’t it wild? A lizard turned to stone.” k Summer 2014 Amherst 25

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

Are

You

Getting

This Down, Boolie?

Singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke â&#x20AC;&#x2122;85 put her career on hold to care for her mother, who had dementia. Then she wrote a musical about it.

AMHERST

26

SUMMER 2014

Photographs by ADAM KRAUSE

Summer 2014 Amherst 27

IT WAS LIKE THE hum of the old Dolby sound test, but instead of

→”From the first minute,” says Brooke of her time as a caregiver, “it was clear that survival was in finding a creative way through it.”

F+5 Links to video clips from My Mother Has 4 Noses and audio clips from the record www.amherst.edu/magazine

an electronic crescendo demanding her attention, it was her mother’s voice at a Christian Science independent-living facility in Boston.

→Brooke performing her onewoman musical play, My Mother Has 4 Noses.

The show incorporates old photos of her mother, who once studied clowning.

“You know, you could just stay here,” her mother said. “My bed is big enough for both of us. Or we could put pillows on the floor.”

That’s when Jonatha Brooke put her next record, and her next tour, on hold.

By then Brooke had made 10 records during her fruitful career as a folk-rock singer-songwriter—roughly one every other year since her first in 1991. Her earliest were with Jennifer Kimball ’85, her partner in The Story, the group they started at Amherst. Her most recent album was 2008’s The Works, in which she set unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to music.

Now it was 2010. Brooke’s mother, Darren Stone Nelson, a poet, was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s and in a home illequipped to care for her, although the staff was trying its best.

Usually, visits would end with Nelson telling her daughter, “You’re busy. Don’t worry about me; I’m fine.” She never wanted to be a burden. So when Nelson said, “You could just stay here,” her daughter knew: “That’s the cry and I’m going to answer it.”

Brooke realized, “I can give her what she needs, which is love. I can’t be impatient with her. This is not her fault. It was like everything else went away, and there were these two tiny voices—mine and my mother’s.” In that moment, her mother became the only thing that mattered.

Brooke lives in a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue in Spanish Harlem, where the walls are painted in aqua, orange and red, and a semicircular diner booth sits off the kitchen. In addition to living there, she and her husband, Patrick Rains, who is also her manager, use their apartment as an office for their two record labels. When I visited on a late-spring afternoon, a staffer was working at a desk next to the living room.

Behind her were stacks of Brooke’s CDs. In September 2010, Brooke was supposed to make another record. “Instead,” she says, “I moved my mother in with me”— first into the back room of their apartment and then, about three weeks later, into a small apartment four floors down.

With Rains and his sister Julie (and soon with others caregivers as well), Brooke joined the millions caring for loved ones with dementia.

“From the first minute,” she says, “it was clear that survival was in finding a creative way through it.”

ON VALENTINE’S DAY IN 2014, BROOKE MADE her off-Broadway debut at The Duke on 42nd Street. It was opening night of her one-woman show, My Mother Has 4 Noses.

The musical, which has 10 songs, documents the final two years of her mother’s life. It was Brooke’s first stint as a playwright, and as an actor.

The project began as a blog. As she cared for her mother, Brooke took notes and photos. “I started writing about it on my website—short stories about caring for my mom,” she says. “I’d keep them distilled, not maudlin, not too depressing. I’d try to

find something redemptive about whatever happened that week. And people started really responding.” From an August 2011 entry: She told my husband Patrick that she didn’t have any kids. But she calls me 10 or 15 times a day and knows exactly who I am.

She told me that she will marry Patrick if I ever let him out of my sight. And, fickle as ever, just yesterday, she fell madly in love with Julie’s husband Jim, and proposed to him. So I guess it was a good weekend.

A month later Brooke wrote that Nelson was growing fearful of getting up each day.

Imagine everything that made sense yesterday being gibberish today. She is angry and lost. No map, no GPS, no guide.

Sometimes the only thing that helps is holding her hand and staring deep into her eyes. “Are you REALLY Jonatha,” she’ll say. “Yes, mom, I’m really Jonatha.” More tears, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Initially, Brooke thought the material might inspire her next record. “As I learned more and wrote more and got more responses from my fans,” she says, “it became clear there was something powerful about approaching Alzheimer’s artistically, talking about it through songs, through stories. Yes, some of them Summer 2014 Amherst 29

were harrowing, but there was great humor and great love at the root of everything.”

Even before Alzheimer’s, Nelson “would mine the daily dialogue for theatre,” Brooke writes in the liner notes to the My Mother Has 4 Noses CD (a companion to the musical). “Boolie!” Nelson would say, calling her daughter by a nickname. “Are you getting this down? It’s good! We should make a play out of it!”

Brooke was getting it down, and

by November 2011, she thought it might be a play. She got in touch with a Pittsburgh theater director, Tracy Brigden, and gave some background: In addition to being a poet, Nelson had studied clowning. She was a Christian Scientist and wrote the “Looking Homeward” column in the Christian Science Monitor for 10 years. She had three children—Derek Nelson ’80, Todd Nelson and Brooke.

And she really did have four noses—prosthetic ones, a result of cancer that had spread across her face. By the time she moved in with Brooke and Rains, Nelson

↑ Brooke’s mother, Darren Stone Nelson, was a poet and columnist.

→ The show was a critics’ pick in The New York Times and Time Out New York.

sing hymns, listen to Andrea Bocelli, Plácido Domingo, The Sound of Music.”

Nelson’s favorite movie was The Red Shoes. “She’d say, ‘Have you seen The Red Shoes?’ and they’d watch the same 20 minutes of it four times in a day. “She’d hold court,” Brooke says. “She loved to joke with you about your nose.

“Boolie!” her mother would say, calling Brooke by a nickname. “Are you getting this down? It’s good! We should make a play out of it!” was sleeping only in 45-minute stretches and needed around-theclock care.

Brigden was putting together a June 2012 festival of new plays.

She wanted to add Brooke to the schedule. “Mom died Jan. 31,” Brooke says, “and I got to work. I had this deadline, June 1, for this thing I had not even conceived.”

In writing the songs and script, Brooke drew from her daily routine with Nelson. Each morning by 9, she’d go to her mother’s apartment. “Her nose might or might not be on. She’d be working on her poems, going through the L.L. Bean catalog. We’d read psalms or the Christian Science lesson. We’d 30 Amherst Summer 2014

She’d say, ‘I’m a very important poet, but you have a wonderful nose. Is that your nose? You know, I can take mine off.” One morning Brooke came down to find her mother, sans nose, wearing sunglasses and singing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”

When she couldn’t find the right word, Nelson would crack jokes and make puns. Other times, she’d sing the Cream of Wheat jingle.

“We were lucky,” Brooke says, “that with Mom, her core essence surfaced, which was a loving, generous, childlike-in-the-best-way persona.”

Much of “Mom’s Daily Theater” made it into the play. On stage at

The Duke, Brooke spoke of coming to see her mother at breakfast: “She had her nose tied upside down to the bridge of her glasses through its nostrils. She had already tried scotch tape and glue stick. She asked me, perfectly innocently, if it was acceptable.

I told her it was very clever indeed and I thought it would pass muster. ‘Who’s Muster?’ she said.

‘We don’t know anybody named Muster—Gotcha!’ Mom’s noses are brilliant maxillofacial works of art. My mother was also a piece of work. I loved her so much, but I never knew how much, until now.”

From that monologue, Brooke moved into song: Are you getting this down? These dark and crazy scenes Are you getting this down? The laughter in between ’Cause everything I wanted eluded me each time The only thing I ever knew was mine, The only thing I ever knew was mine, Was your love. Your love.

MORE THAN

15 MILLION Americans provided 17.7 billion hours of unpaid care to friends or relatives with dementia last year, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Nearly 60 percent of dementia caregivers rated their

emotional stress as “high” or “very high”; more than one-third experienced symptoms of depression.

As Brooke learned, this is in part because dementia caregivers never know what to expect. “She would change,” Brooke says of her mother, “and there would be another new normal that I would have to figure out: This is a whole new Mom this week. This is angry Mom. This is cuckoo Mom who can’t remember how to put on her nose. You have to let go of your conception of the person.” Brooke spent much of each day problemsolving: Was Nelson in pain? Was she hungry? What would make her happy: Singing? Reading the Bible?

Watching The Red Shoes?

While writing the play, Brooke would spend all day in the music room near her bedroom, where she’d read pieces of script into her Photo Booth video app, watch her delivery and rewrite from there.

Sometimes, Rains would come in at 10 p.m. to remind her to eat dinner.

The first public reading was at Brigden’s Momentum Festival of New Plays. “I’ve never been more frightened in my life,” Brooke says. “But if I’m not scared, why bother? I mean, I was terrified taking care of my mother.”

The response from the Pittsburgh audience was exactly as she’d hoped: “that they would take

away the love story at the root of it all.” Earlier, in December 2012, “we got this idea to do a fan funding campaign” for a companion CD. The campaign raised nearly 300 percent of its goal; it paid for the record and more workshops.

The Warner Theatre in Torrington, Conn., asked to do the world premiere. Sara Hannafin, then director of development at the theater, explains: “A good friend casually mentioned to me that Jonatha Brooke had written a play. I knew her work as a singer.

I knew how talented she was.”

Hannafin saw a chance to raise money for the theater and to bring in a new audience. She went to Brooke’s website, found contact information and sent an email.

Before long, Hannafin found herself watching the performance in Brooke’s living room.

The Warner show took place in June 2013. “We sold it out,” Brooke says. “We had one day to go in, figure out how to light it, what it would look like, sound check, and then we did it the next day. And we did it again at the Philly Fringe Fest in September.” Again, the show sold out.

“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” says Hannafin of hosting the premiere. “I’ll never forget it.

The show is literally for everyone.

It gives you this intimate portrayal of caring for a loved one. I don’t

DISCOGRAPHY Brooke’s first two albums, released on Elektra Records, were with Jennifer Kimball ’85 as part of the folk-rock duo The Story, which they started at Amherst. Brooke went on to release two solo albums with MCA/ Universal. She then started her own label, Bad Dog Records, in 1999. Among her other work, she composed the theme song for the TV show Dollhouse on Fox.

1991 Grace in Gravity

1993 The Angel in the House

1995 Plumb

1997 10 Cent Wings

1999 Jonatha Brooke Live

2001 Steady Pull

2004 Back in the Circus

2006 Live In New York

2007 Careful What You Wish For

2008 The Works

2014 My Mother Has 4 Noses

Katy Perry and Quadroon Brooke hopes to bring My Mother Has 4 Noses to other cities. She’s been busy with other projects, too. She co-wrote two songs with Katy Perry.

One of them, “Choose Your Battles,” is on Perry’s new pop album, Prism, and features Brooke on kalimba—a thumb piano.

Brooke is also at work on three new musicals, including one with pianist, keyboardist and composer Joe Sample. She is writing songs for his play Quadroon, which is based on the true story of Henriette DeLille, a free woman of color in 19th-century New Orleans.

DeLille’s mother, a free Creole woman, had a marriage-like “alliance” with an already-married white man. This system, similar to common-law marriage, was called “plaçage,” and DeLille was expected to enter into it as well, but she instead wanted to be a nun. In 1842 she founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, the first order of African-American nuns. “The musical is an embellished version of her story,” Brooke says.

Summer 2014 Amherst 31

think there was a dry eye in the house.”

Brooke and Rains started quietly raising more money to bring the show off-Broadway. “And we just went for it,” Brooke says.

The show ran for 10 weeks at The Duke. Night after night, sniffles from the audience intensified her performance, and no song elicited more tears than “Time,” which is about being unprepared for her mother’s death: I’m not ready any more I thought I was, but there’s the door I’m not ready like before

their own stories of caring for parents, siblings or spouses. On the show’s website—fournoses.org— she invited fans to post personal stories, poems and photos.

One man wrote of caring for his father: “What happens when the child becomes the parent?

Fear happens, and sadness, and guilt, and confusion, and about a thousand other things. … I am so grateful to have discovered My Mother Has 4 Noses. It is a show that reflects the highs and the lows of one of the most difficult parts of my life.”

“I started saying goodbye to

“We had no idea what to expect. You sort of think, Are they just being nice to me because I’m 50? Are they throwing me a bone?”

So give me just a little more time.

Please don’t come today Tomorrow’s not good either ’Cause I know, it’ll mean forever.

“Time” is “devastating and gorgeous,” raved the New York Times. The show was a critics’ pick in the Times and Time Out New York. Characterizing 4 Noses as “unavoidably sad, yet poignantly funny,” the Times praised Brooke for “the artistic demands she makes on herself here as a writer, musician and actor.” Brooke “gives voice” to heartache, wrote Entertainment Weekly, “without ever veering into mawkishness” in narrative and song: “The Amherst grad punctuates her story with the kind of amusing, acute details that marked her earliest lyrics.”

Of the critical response, Brooke says, “we had no idea what to expect. You sort of think, Are they just being nice to me because I’m 50? Are they throwing me a bone?” Her friends dismissed the idea: “The New York Times,” they told her, “does not throw anyone a bone.”

After each show, it would be “a cry fest” in the lobby, Brooke says, with audience members sharing 32 Amherst Summer 2014

my mother sometime in 2003,” wrote one woman. “She and I have parted ways a thousand times since. … I only know that she is a new stranger every time we meet again, as much to herself as to me.”

Many posts address Brooke directly. “Jonatha,” wrote one husband, “your songs from My Mother have touched my heart, and sometimes torn it apart. My wife is disabled from orthopedic issues, and suffers from bi-polar disorder. … Your songs convey the same feelings of love and loss, and the sometimes overwhelming burdens that wash over me. I see myself in these songs, I see my wife, and I see the struggles (and successes) that we experience every day.”

THE FIRST SONG BROOKE ever wrote was at Amherst, in Professor David Reck’s introductory music composition course, which she took sophomore year.

The first assignment was to choose an e.e. cummings poem and set it to music. “It was like being hit by lightning,” Brooke says.

She chose “love is more thicker than forget,” and the resulting

song is on two of her records, Grace in Gravity and Live in New York.

She and Kimball (her partner in The Story) approached Reck with the idea for a Special Topics course in which they’d create a concert of original songs. “He gave us full course credit to write and then perform the songs,“ Brooke says.

“I think we got an A.” Thirty years later, her mother’s own poetry appears in 4 Noses. The song “Scars,” for example, takes its chorus from a Darren Stone Nelson poem, “Words About Writing,” which instructs a younger writer, “Start again, more than you ever dreamed you could.” Brooke sings: So you start again, more than you ever dreamed you could Start again, again, again Start again, when no one thought you would.

Brooke once found a scrap of paper in her mother’s trash. It was another of Nelson’s poems, “Song.” Her mother had scribbled in the margin, “probably written around 1950—should we sell it to Hallmark Cards?” Brooke decided to finish the poem. The result is “Mom’s Song,” which she sings near the end of the show: And now I know a lot about a little bit of you The innocence and the ignorance and the love that got us through. ’Cause you’re the one I want to learn by heart before I die It’s still your eyes that make me smile, and it’s still your eyes that make me cry.

Your eyes, so blue My love, it’s true Your eyes, my tears You know the only place I feel at home Is here alone with you, my dear, it’s true.

In lyrics such as these, and in the music, and in the stories that Brooke spent two years getting down, the tragedy is impossible to ignore, but so is the love story. k Emily Gold Boutilier is the editor of Amherst magazine.

alumni in the th world

Beyond Campus

A Full Belly and a Flu Shot In a New Hampshire soup kitchen, two medical students expanded a nascent clinic into a health care hub.

BEING STUDENTS rather than doctors meant that Erik Andrews â&#x20AC;&#x2122;09 and Christine Breuer â&#x20AC;&#x2122;09 had more time to forge personal relationships with those who needed care.

Photograph by Joshi Radin

Summer 2014 Amherst 33

BEYOND CAMPUS

Come for the Meal, Stay for the Checkup Two medical students created a health care hub in a busy soup kitchen.

BY BEN GOLDFARB ’09 HEALTH CARE U They come every

Breuer and Andrews are students at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine in Hanover, N.H., an Ivy League enclave 30 miles from postindustrial, povertystricken Claremont. When the duo were awarded Schweitzer Fellowships in 2013 to undertake a public health project, their thoughts gravitated to the soup kitchen, where previous students had founded the embryo of a health clinic in 2012. Last summer Breuer and Andrews set about expanding the nascent clinic into a health care hub.

Because of their student status, the pair could not directly administer care. Instead they developed a screening process, gleaning data such as bloodglucose levels, body-mass index and substance-abuse history, which they used to route patients to hospitals and specialists. For patients who hadn’t seen physicians in years, the screenings could prove revelatory.

“Many people who come to the soup kitchen are either pre-diabetic or have advanced-stage diabetes and don’t even know it,” says Breuer.

Breuer and Andrews quickly saw, however, that connecting patients with doctors wasn’t enough.

Many patients did not know how to apply for Medicaid. Some could not read hospital forms. Others had no way of getting to the doctor. Seemingly minor challenges became insurmountable barriers.

Helping patients navigate logistical obstacles was, says Andrews, his and Breuer’s greatest contribution. Being students made them less intimidating, and it gave them more time to develop personal relationships. When a homeless man named Alan was tentatively diagnosed with lung cancer at the ER but had no way of getting to a pulmonologist, Breuer and Andrews picked him up at 5 a.m. and gave him a ride.

34 Amherst Summer 2014

JOSHI RADIN

evening—more than 100 hungry souls standing in line outside the Claremont Soup Kitchen in central New Hampshire. Though they arrive for hot meals, many are also in dire need of medical attention, for problems ranging from diabetes to psychiatric illness to frostbite. And for a year, in two new exam rooms in the soup kitchen’s dining room, Christine Breuer ’09 and Erik Andrews ’09 organized that crucial care.

Andrews and Breuer at the Claremont Soup Kitchen in central New Hampshire

Christine Breuer ’09 MAJOR: PSYCHOLOGY

“Can they read? Can they write?

Can they drive? The gaps to care can be very simple.”

Erik Andrews ’09 MAJOR: ECONOMICS

“We [can] get this guy a $5,000 test, but we can’t get him a 30-minute car ride?”

(Alan’s tests were negative; in February he wrote to Andrews to say he’d gotten a new job and home.)

“We have all these systems to get this guy a $5,000 test,” Andrews says, “but we can’t get him a 30-minute car ride? There’s this term you hear a lot in medicine: ‘patient has poor compliance.’ Well, there are a lot of reasons for noncompliant patients.”

As success stories like Alan’s spread, other facilities began taking note of the clinic in the soup kitchen.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center donated exam tables. Medical supplies came from the nearby Good Neighbor Health Clinic. Valley Regional Hospital supplied flu shots. Students and nurse practitioners began pitching in hours.

Further growth, however, will be accomplished by other Dartmouth med students. Breuer and Andrews handed off the clinic’s reins this spring. For the next year, Andrews will hold a pathology fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and Breuer will travel the country completing clinical rotations. Behind them, they leave a clinic that’s strong and growing stronger—and with them, they take valuable lessons. “It’s made me aware of the barriers patients face,” says Breuer: “Can they read? Can they write? Can they drive? The gaps to care can be very simple.”

Ben Goldfarb ’09 is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, in OnEarth Magazine and elsewhere.

The Case Against Ikea

a percentage of each sale. Scott’s team handles shipping, a task many dealers are happy to hand over. Within a month of its launch the site had 50 suppliers, three employees (in addition to Scott and his wife), a crew of freelance contributing writers and an advisory board. In the first six weeks of operations it acquired $10 million worth of inventory and earned $64,000 in gross revenue.

Scott’s goal is to bring “a new perspective to an older industry.”

The site has an uncluttered layout and a slightly gritty feel (“less shiny-happy, more rock and roll,” Scott says). It also has a broad view: The site features not only Queen Annes but also, for example, once-again-stylish items from the Mad Men era.

In a world of cheap, massproduced furniture, Scott emphasizes the value of pieces that have endured. “We love the idea of embracing the past and embracing things that aren’t brand-new,”

In a world of cheap, mass-produced furniture, why buy antiques?

BY KATHERINE GUSTAFSON ’01 SMALL BUSINESS U Douglas

Scott ’01E entered the antiques business in a manner as time-tested as the furniture he sells: through family.

He took on marketing for his father-in-law’s French furniture shop in Coral Gables, Fla., where he soon noticed a problem: “Most people think of antiques in somewhat of a negative sense,” says Scott: “grandmother’s dusty attic, garage sale furniture.”

MAJOR: ENGLISH

“These are things with history and background and story.”

Katherine Gustafson ’01 is a Seattlebased freelance writer and editor.

Clockwise from top: Delft vases, a Western Union lamp, a poster from Austria, an Italian desk, a 1940s lamp and two very different 20th-century chairs

COURTESY THE HIGHBOY

Hoping to encourage more people—including younger ones— to become collectors, he branched out from the shop this past January, launching an online venture, TheHighBoy.com, as “an attempt to get people excited and aware of antiques.”

Scott began his business career as a consultant, but when he and his wife, Olga, started a family, he wanted a job that required less traveling. He joined father-in-law Ignacio Granda at Alhambra Antiques, where Scott taught himself the basics of online marketing.

“We were one of the first antique shops to have a strong online presence,” he says.

He went on to start an online marketplace for antiques dealers in Miami—an experience that taught him antiques can sell well online when the site has a high volume of pieces, and when those pieces are offered by respected dealers.

Dealers who partner with The HighBoy pay a monthly fee and

Douglas Scott ’01E

he says. “These are things with history and background and story.

We’re spurring people on to be more creative and live more interesting lives.”

Creative and interesting is an apt description for Scott’s own interior décor, which includes an art deco chandelier, a mid-century Brazilian rosewood dining set and religious art dating back to the Renaissance.

Antiques give people a chance to explore the past, he says: “One reason I went to Amherst was to learn about the world—history, culture, arts, languages. Coming from a small town in Indiana, the world seemed incredibly big and amazingly interesting. I knew nothing of it. I wanted to be inspired. I wanted to be well-rounded. That’s what I wanted from an Amherst education, and that’s what I want to do with The HighBoy.”

Summer 2014 Amherst 35

BEYOND CAMPUS

“At No Point Did I Give Up” He escaped the grave—literally—during Liberia’s first civil war. Now he’s working to rehabilitate child soldiers and bring running water to families.

BY WILLIAM SWEET SOCIAL ACTION U It’s hard

to top cheating death at the age of 10, but Kimmie Weeks ’05 has managed to do it.

36 Amherst Summer 2014

To help children in postwar African nations, Weeks has done everything from lobby governments to start a music label.

SENAY BERHE/WORLD’S CHILDREN’S PRIZE

Growing up in Liberia during the country’s first civil war, Weeks escaped the grave, literally: he was nearly thrown into a mass grave by neighbors who thought he’d succumbed to cholera, but he regained consciousness as his mother beat on his chest.

Three years later he cofounded Voice of the Future, Liberia’s first child rights advocacy organization. He went on to publish a report about the government’s involvement in recruiting child soldiers. This put him in danger of assassination by Charles Taylor’s regime, and so, at age 17, Weeks found political asylum in the United States.

Weeks is now back in Liberia, working from multiple vantage points to help children in postwar African nations. Last year he won the World’s Children’s Prize Honorary Award, in part for his work with Youth Action International, a nonprofit he started while at Amherst. YAI helps young people in Liberia, Uganda and Sierra Leone by, among other things, providing homes for orphans, rehabilitating child soldiers and lobbying governments.

Weeks is also board chairman— appointed by Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corp., which is working to pipe water to more than 800,000 Liberians who haven’t had running water since 1990. He also works part-time as chief corporate communica-

Kimmie Weeks ’05 MAJORS: HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

“Do not get in your mind that Africa is a hopeless place, just a continent of bloodshed.”

tions strategist for Cellcomm, the country’s second-largest mobile telecommunications provider.

In addition, he’s started a music label, KLW Entertainment, to promote Liberian musicians, and he’s on the speaking circuit.

“Many young Liberians are still living in a mental state of despair,” says Weeks. “I use my story to say, ‘I have gone through exactly what you went through. I’ve gone through the war. I did not leave Liberia until 1999. I saw the killings.

I experienced the starvation. At no point did I give up.’”

In 2011, at age 29, Weeks became the youngest person ever to receive an honorary degree from Amherst. When he speaks to American audiences, he puts a different twist on his talk.

“Do not get in your mind that Africa is a hopeless place and it’s just a continent of bloodshed,” he tells them. “It’s a beautiful continent, a continent of great people, of people with great resilience, of people with hopes and dreams, and if we can put our hands behind them in a very simple way, the impact can truly transform the continent.”

He does not have plans so much as passions, he says. These include expanding YAI’s scope. “That commitment to improve other people’s lives,” says Weeks, who has not ruled out running for public office, “that’s been the drive for everything I do.”

William Sweet is a writer in Amherst’s communications office.

A biologist is trying to figure out how exactly depression drugs work—and why they make some patients suicidal.

BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 DEPRESSION U When it comes to treating depression and anxiety, one type of drug is the most effective and most commonly prescribed: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. This class of drug includes widely known brands such as Prozac and Zoloft, as well as dozens of others. But despite their prevalence, scientists don’t know exactly how these drugs work.

Researchers have a term for such systems, in which the inputs and outputs are clear but the mechanisms remain inscrutable: “black boxes.”

The hows and whys might not matter, except that SSRIs have a dark side. Patients who start taking them can initially experience an increase in anxiety. For some reason, teenagers seem especially prone to this phenomenon. Sometimes it can make them suicidal.

Some SSRI packaging, therefore, displays the FDA’s most serious warning, for drugs with potentially lethal side effects. This happens to be called a “black box warning,” because it appears inside a bold, black rectangle.

Liz Bauer ’97 is targeting both of these black boxes.

She wants to find out what, exactly, SSRIs are doing in the brain, and thereby help doctors and drug companies learn how teenagers can safely take them. “I’m interested in what cells are activated by these drugs

Liz Bauer ’97 MAJOR: NEUROSCIENCE

Her research has already revealed something new about how SSRIs work.

and how those cells interact with the fear circuitry,” she says.

Bauer is an assistant professor at Barnard College in New York, where she uses rats as her test subjects.

Her research has already revealed something new about how SSRIs work.

When Bauer started her work on the drugs, she expected a particular part of the brain usually associated with fear and anxiety—the amygdala—to be responsible for the initial increase in anxiety. But she and her team saw no heightened activity in the amygdalae of rats that had been given Prozac. “It was surprising,” she says. “We thought we would find something there.”

Instead, they discovered that SSRIs seem to be acting on cells in a related but separate structure known as the BNST—the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.

This was something new. “Until we published the paper,” she says, “we were the only ones who knew” about the BNST’s involvement in this problematic side effect of SSRIs. Now she’s delving deeper into the BNST. Using extremely thin slices of brain—only a few cells thick—Bauer is looking at individual brain cells of rats treated with SSRIs. “You can ask all these different questions,” she says: “What are the cells doing?

Which cells are active? What are their characteristics?”

Down the road, she hopes to figure out how exactly the BNST communicates with the amygdala. While it will take more research before pharmaceutical companies can use her work to design safer drugs, Bauer hopes that, eventually, her work will help unlock the black box of SSRIs—and banish the black box warning from their labels for good.

Geoffrey Giller ’10 is a science and environmental writer.

His work has appeared in Audubon and Scientific American, among other publications.

GEOFFREY GILLER (2)

Scrutinizing Prozac

“I’m interested in what cells are activated by these drugs and how those cells interact with the fear circuitry,” Bauer says.

Summer 2014 Amherst 37

BEYOND CAMPUS

Don’t Just Lean In— Go to Sea

Crane Stookey ’76 MAJOR: INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

Sailing as the new M.B.A.

BY KATHERINE GUSTAFSON ’01 SAILING U Growing up on Cape Cod, Crane Stookey ’76 loved wooden boats and sailing.

After a career on land (as an architect) he returned to the sea—as a tall-ship officer and founder of a sailing school.

One great way to create a team, he says: have people sleep across the oars

At least 50 traditional, multi-masted sailing ships operate today for educational and historicalreproduction purposes. Each one needs a paid crew.

Stookey sailed these ships for four years, mostly as chief mate, traversing the Caribbean and both coasts of the United States and Canada.

Many ships he crewed were training ships, on which young people learn to sail while studying science. Stookey enjoyed the teaching as much as the sailing, so he established The Nova Scotia Sea School in 1994. “The Sea School was never about teaching people how to sail,” he says. “It was about teaching people how to grow up well, how to take command of the boat and their lives.”

The Sea School won a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003. Stookey left its helm in 2006 to make yet another career change, to executive leadership coaching. His interests in coaching and sailing merged in his 2012 book Keep Your People in the Boat: Workforce Engagement Lessons from the Sea. k

Stookey’s Leadership Lessons from the Sea

After a career on land (as an architect), Stookey became a tall-ship officer and founded a sailing school.

THE SITUATION IS THE BEST TEACHER. In The Nova Scotia Sea School, 13 people live for 21 days in a boat with no cabin. They sleep across the oars, laying oars side by side and spreading sleeping pads and bags on top. The gear is under the oars, so once the sleeping bags are rolled out, no one can get at anything without everyone getting up and moving the oars. Stookey says this generates teamwork faster and more effectively than any leader’s guidance or admonition.

A young woman with little experience had to tack the boat (change its direction) in the middle of the night, and the only command she gave was “Places, everyone.” Her equally novice crew members lined up and wordlessly tacked the boat perfectly.

The crew wanted to be trusted, and she trusted them liberally, which gave them the confidence to do the job.

LEADERSHIP IS A PRACTICE OF GENEROSITY.

LEADERS CULTIVATE LEADERS. Stookey’s captain was out in

a small boat with some passengers when the engine died and the boat began drifting out to the open ocean. Suddenly in charge of the ship, Stookey wanted to call the Coast Guard, but a crew member had the idea to rescue them using a kayak. Stookey was skeptical, but the crew won him over. The crew member tied himself to a lead and launched himself into the ocean. He saved the people’s lives.

GIVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY NEED, DON’T GIVE THEM WHAT

COURTESY CRANE STOOKEY

THEY DON’T NEED, AND KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. Young

38 Amherst Summer 2014

crew members at The Nova Scotia Sea School would often bicker and complain. Stookey and the other leaders would sit back and let a voice of calm and compromise emerge from the group. Stepping in would have risked stealing away the crew’s self-reliance, Stookey says, creating a situation where the crew looked to the leaders for solutions instead of to themselves.

arts news and reviews

Amherst Creates

Wrenford Thaffe ’13 at home with one of his sculptures, a 6-foot-long kinetic plywood fish, which was part of his recent exhibit at the Boston Children’s Museum

Photograph by Jessica Scranton

Plywood Sculptures that Move— and Teach

Summer 2014 Amherst 39

AMHERST CREATES

Bonesaw the Tireless He’s taught history. He’s performed in parking lots.

And after a show, he’ll stick around to play Frisbee with fans. | BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10

→ Tim Kepner ’00 traces the first iteration of his band to a freshman-year jam session in Stearns.

ROCK U When Tim Kepner ’00 answers his phone for this interview, he’s finishing a long day: his reggae-, rap- and metal-tinged rock band, Full Service, is touring, and after playing two energetic shows in Denver for loyal fans (“They knew all the words. There was a dance-off.”), the band had stuck around to play high-altitude Ultimate Frisbee with anyone who could muster the energy.

Kepner (who goes by “Bonesaw” to just about everyone) traces the first iteration of the band to a freshman-year jam session in Stearns. Full Service went through several lineups during his college years, but its core remained Kepner on lead guitar and his brother Dave (“Hoag”) on drums.

Kepner played baseball at Full Service is cussion (they’re big on nicknames), and it’s known for its indefatigable Amherst and majored in history. known for its grassroots work ethic in creating and After graduation, even though indefatigable engaging with “fansaws” (the band’s he’d never been there, he knew grassroots followers). his fate awaited him in Austin, In 2008, the band embarked on a Texas, whose alternative music work ethic in “Takeover Tour,” in which it followed scene was on the cusp of national creating fans.” the national tour of reggae-rock band attention. But he had to wait for 311, setting up guerilla-style unlicensed Hoag to graduate from Yale. So he got a job teaching history and coaching football and concerts in parking lots outside each show. This summer Full Service again joined a 311 tour—but baseball at a boys’ school in Connecticut, where he this time it was official. Full Service was part of 311’s made an impression.

“Unity Tour” for all three Texas dates.

“He played a concert in our auditorium wearing The band’s latest album, Carousel, showcases the a cutoff T-shirt and leather pants and got so into it, brothers’ sunny harmonies and hook-heavy songheadbanging his shoulder-length hair,” says Ben writing skills. Now they’re on a “20 tour”: they play Levison ’11, Kepner’s student at the time. “It was hilarious and awesome but also showed how driven small shows in fans’ living rooms and yards, each for about 20 people, for $20 a head. The original he was, how relentless.” plan was to book 20 of these shows, but they’ve That year Kepner made “ great memories,” he since played more than 150. says, “but I was so far out of my comfort zone, and I first met Kepner when I interviewed him for I was also very lonely.” Lessons from Amherst The Amherst Student in 2008. My last question then Professor Barry O’Connell sustained him. “Taking his class was a turning point. The stuff we studied— was where he saw himself in five years. His answer: “I’m not falling for that trap!” Today his answer is Thoreau, Emerson, things like that—these things were hitting me at the exact right time. Barry was at the same. Bonesaw doesn’t want to know what’s the center of it all, convincing me to push my limits. coming around the next corner.

That’s what inspired me to go to Texas.”

Full Service is now rounded out by Sean “Sunny” Nicholas Mancusi ’10 has written for the New York Times Book Review and many other publications.

Eckel on bass and Elliott “Smell” Lardon on perJENN MURTHA (2); BELOW LEFT: ALEX FAUVNER

FULL SERVICE The reggae-, rapand metal-tinged rock band was part of 311’s “Unity Tour” for its three Texas dates this summer.

“

40 Amherst Summer 2014

After the Bomb When terrorists attack a crowded Jerusalem café, a gay couple is thrust into parenthood. | BY NICK MANCUSI ’10

SAMUEL MASINTER ’04

ALL I LOVE AND KNOW Judith Frank, Professor of English and Elizabeth W. Bruss Reader HarperCollins

NOVEL U An inciting incident, more gruesome than most: Daniel Rosen’s twin brother, Joel, and Joel’s wife are killed in a terrorist attack at a crowded café.

They’ve stated in the past that if anything should ever happen to them, they’d want Daniel to take care of their two children, Gal and Noam.

However, the parents of the deceased mother, themselves Israeli children of the Holocaust, think the children would be better off with them, and Daniel’s own parents think their home might be best. A further complication: the children live in Israel, where, Daniel quickly learns, the state can have a stronger say in awarding custody of displaced children than even the will of the parents.

At his side, Daniel’s committed boyfriend, Matt (oh, that’s another complication: being a gay couple does not make their efforts to adopt any easier) has reservations not only about his own ability to raise children but also about their relationship in general.

Frank is interested in the most basic emotional underpinnings of overtly political gestures.

This is the dramatic Gordian knot at the heart of All I Love and Know, the second novel from Judith Frank, English professor at Amherst since 1988. Many of these themes and conceits have gone largely, if not entirely, untreated by fiction until now, and their attendant drama is original and captivating.

But Frank is also interested in the most basic emotional underpinnings of these overtly political gestures, and it’s when she allows her characters to pause and assess their internal states that her writing becomes most incisive.

Frank is both an identical twin and a mother of twins. Here she is on the suddenly severed connection between Daniel and Joel: [Matt] rocked him for a long time, thinking about Daniel walking around in Joel’s clothes, about the two of them in the womb together, how they’d been together before they were even human.

They’d started out breathing that same element together, their tiny astronaut bodies floating, bumping against each other in silent salutation…

And here’s Frank on the visceral gut-punch of grief that, if less well-rendered, would have left the novel a lovely house with no foundation: In private, they would be shaving or brushing their teeth when their knees would buckle, and they would cry out. Each time it shocked them, to be so thoroughly felled. Joel and Ilana came in and out of their dreams, stunned and bleeding and weeping and begging for help, or miraculously alive and wondering what the fuss was all about.

After the highly charged first half of the book, with its musings on the political positions of Israel and the potential historical ironies therein, sexual politics and civil rights in America and abroad, the problem of modern terrorism and the long shadow of the Holocaust, the story zooms sharply to an unassuming home in familiar Northampton, Mass.

Custody of the children having been won, the courtroom drama concluded, the problems become almost exclusively domestic.

The changing of a diaper is more pressing than the subversion of heteronormativity, the cooling of affection more of a crisis than human rights abuses in the West Bank. (All of this plays out, by the way, on perhaps the most accurately and hilariously recreated representation of Northampton ever set to the page.)

We watch, then, the death of one idea of parenthood and the triumph of another. The addition of children to the lives of Matt and Daniel fails to sublimate their frustrations into any larger meaningfulness; all of their problems remain, and their relationship is tested to its limits.

But parenthood also brings them closer to the messy, inconvenient, excruciating and utterly beautiful business of being human. Their ability to feel, for better and for worse, is heightened, and it’s the ways in which these two people, endowed with new vulnerabilities, explore their strange new world that make this book such a worthwhile read.

A writer once said that to have a child is to “decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Sometimes, the decision is made for you.

Summer 2014 Amherst 41

Grant at the Folger, standing in between portraits of the library’s founders

AMHERST CREATES

COLLECTING SHAKESPEARE: THE STORY OF HENRY AND EMILY FOLGER Stephen H. Grant ’63 Johns Hopkins University Press

WHY AMHERST RUNS THE FOLGER

42 Amherst Summer 2014

A Grand Obsession Henry and Emily Folger began collecting Shakespeare two weeks after their wedding, while still living with his parents. | BY TESS TAYLOR ’00

BIOGRAPHY U Henry Folger and Emily Jordan were born in the mid-19th century, a time in which performing Shakespeare was frowned upon but reading it was encouraged. Many American families owned only two books: Shakespeare and the Bible.

Folger and Jordan were from thrifty middle-class families. Each was educated at a newly emerging liberal arts college—he at Amherst, she at Vassar. Introduced years later, they married and became partners in an enormous life’s work: collecting Shakespeareana for the New World.

They started this venture in 1885, two weeks after their wedding, while still living with his parents. By 1932, several decades and one oil fortune later, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on prime real estate in Washington, D.C. It houses the fruits

of their labor: 82 First Folios, 275,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts.

In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant ’63 traces a unique story of collecting. Even without his interest in Shakespeare, Folger’s life would be of interest: He rose from modest means to become a right-hand man to Rockefeller at Standard Oil. Folger traced his roots to a Nantucket whaling family. His parents were stretched so thin that they had to take him out of Amherst for a time. In the end, he had Charlie Pratt (of the Brooklyn Pratts) as a roommate, so he was well primed to get a job at Pratt’s father’s company, Standard Oil. Folger made himself invaluable to Rockefeller by compiling reports and gathering data, and at one point operating a front company, which reaped great profits. Navigating through Standard Oil’s

COURTESY STEPHEN GRANT

Henry Clay Folger, Class of 1879, became president of Standard Oil Co. He died in 1930, two years before the Folger Shakespeare Library’s dedication. His will specified that the library be administered by Amherst—a move that came as a surprise to the college.

The library is now home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection.

PROFILE

There’s No Crying in Music

Tess Taylor ’00 is the author of a book of poems, The Forage House. She is a visiting assistant professor at Whittier College and reviews poetry for NPR.

Ben Gundersheimer’s concerts occupy a zone somewhere between Sesame Street and a folk-rock club. | BY WILLIAM SWEET KIDS’ MUSIC U With multiple tour dates and a CD coming out, Ben Gundersheimer ’89 has a fan base that is getting bigger every day: some don’t even need to ride in a child safety seat anymore.

Known to his pint-sized fans and their parents as “Mister G,” the singer-songwriter is at work on his fifth studio album of children’s music; previous work landed him a Parents’ Choice Gold Award. His concerts occupy a zone somewhere between Sesame Street and a folkrock club. Pretty good, for someone who once called it quits as a professional musician.

“I was burned out. I was ready to make a change,” he says. “I wasn’t inspired and didn’t see a place for myself in it.”

An English major and one-time captain of the Amherst baseball team, Gundersheimer spent his first two decades after college on the road and in clubs, pausing to attend Berklee College of Music.

After sharing the stage with Phish, Dan Zanes, the Spin Doctors and Martin Sexton, he shifted gears completely in 2008, earning a master’s in education from Smith College, intent on teaching school.

“I would write songs with my students, just because that’s what I knew how to do,” he says of his time as a student teacher at Smith’s Campus School. “The kids really came alive with that process. We were songwriting and learning through songwriting. For me it was more natural and more fun than going through a curriculum.”

Songs from the Campus School, where he later served as music teacher, became the backbone of his first children’s CD, Pizza for Breakfast.

Gundersheimer has been writing music since he was 9 and speaking Spanish since junior high (when he decided being bilingual might

Gundersheimer credits Amherst baseball for his persistence in music.

COURTESY BEN GUNDERSHEIMER

“

growth, Folger amassed an enormous fortune. Although he probably gained the lion’s share of that fortune through running and later selling the oil front, Grant goes to pains to show how the Folgers were also exceptionally frugal—he froze water in a pan to save money on ice delivery, and he went to work with sandwiches in his pocket.

The Folgers assembled a vast array of manuscripts—books on music, psychology, Shakespearean instruments and nearly every other subject the Bard touches, which is to say, nearly everything.

In accounting for this grand project, Grant’s book slants toward Henry, though Emily probably Folger rose from did most of the reviewing modest means of catalogs and selecting of materials for acquisito become a right-hand man tion. Grant wonders if saw his intelligent, to Rockefeller at Folger dedicated partner as a Standard Oil.” “Portia,” without also wondering whether she saw her husband as a Prospero, Hamlet or Puck.

At times, Grant buries interesting facts in favor of unstinting praise—each chapter seems to end with a paean to the couple’s greatness. And Grant is so eager to paint a picture of the ever-frugal Folgers that he underplays the somewhat questionable sources of their money. Grant might have told the story more boldly, with no less respect for Folger’s successes. Indeed, endless praise (“The Folger family exuded affection, frugality, and trust in divine wisdom”) sometimes deadens the tale. The book doesn’t reveal much about Shakespeare studies at the time, and it is sometimes hard to trace exactly what motivated the Gilded Age couple to this particular grand obsession.

Nevertheless, Collecting Shakespeare shows the arc of a couple’s long and grand ambition. Those of us affiliated with Amherst will enjoy details of the young Folger’s life at the college circa 1875: how he endeavored to save money by doing his own laundry but ended up burning his socks on the stove, or how he overindulged a time or two with Pratt and then regained equilibrium by skipping breakfast.

Here’s one detail that haunted me: Folger won an undergraduate essay contest that paid $100—then worth a year’s tuition. Later he endowed a prize that allows Amherst students to study at the Folger.

It does not cover a year’s tuition, certainly, but it’s a rich luxury and a truly grand gift. Folger gave back in enormous measure. Having access to a library like the Folger enriches us all.

be useful in his desired career as a professional baseball player), but he thought to put the two together only after a visit to Colombia in 2010. Now he performs and records in Spanish as well as in English. The Spanish material, featured on his albums Bugs, Chocolalala and ABC Fiesta, has added a Latin flavor to his shows and introduced grooves satisfying to an adult audience.

Gundersheimer credits Amherst baseball for his persistence in music.

In particular, he cites the influence of coach and taskmaster Bill Thurston: “The experience of playing for this rigorous coach was the preparation for my years in the rock clubs: You’ve got to earn it, it does not come easy, and no one’s going to give you anything.”

Or, in the words of Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own, there’s no crying in baseball. “There were a lot of reasons to quit in my first two years” on the Amherst team, Gundersheimer says, “but I stuck it out, and I ended up as captain. That was good preparation for the music business.”

William Sweet, who has violated the no-crying-in-baseball rule, is a writer in the college’s Office of Communications.

Summer 2014 Amherst 43

AMHERST CREATES

His Sculptures Don’t Sit Still Wrenford Thaffe ’13 took his honors exhibition to the Boston Children’s Museum. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05

“Running Man,” part of the Children’s Museum exhibit, was inspired

by Thaffe’s four years on the track team at Amherst.

The “bird” inside the cage is made of printer parts, an egg beater, old CDs, an electrical transformer and a remote-controlled toy car.

44 Amherst Summer 2014

SCULPTURE U Inside the Boston Children’s Museum, a wooden cage hung from the ceiling.

The “bird” inside was made of printer parts, an egg beater and some old CDs, as well as an electrical transformer and a remote-controlled toy car. When kids and parents pressed its buttons, the creature flapped its wings.

This bird is part of a menagerie created by Wrenford Thaffe ’13, a young artist whose moving animals were on exhibit this year in a gallery at the museum.

When Thaffe was a child in rural Jamaica, he drew in a sketchbook, designed homes for his pets and observed his father’s farm work. Upon learning about electrolysis in high school, he went home to run experiments with batteries and fluids. “My parents grew accustomed to seeing many glass containers with weird-looking liquids around the house—all in the name of science,” he says.

He declared a chemistry major at Amherst but also studied political science, sociology and art.

In Professor Carol Keller’s introductory sculpture

course, he used wood and wire to build a motorized model of a chlorophyll molecule. “This was the first time I combined art and science in a deliberate way,” he says. “I soon saw that double-majoring in chemistry and art was a beautiful possibility.”

Thaffe’s senior honors exhibition in Fayerweather Hall, The Reincarnation of Sculptural Forms, featured the aforementioned bird, as well as a 6-foot-long kinetic plywood fish and “a wooden freestanding quadruped” with gears inside.

He also used a garage-door opener to control a Roomba vacuum cleaner, which he’d equipped with a marker on a swinging arm, allowing it to draw circles on the floor. And he built a humanoid figure out of a printer and fax machine. Activating the printer’s motor triggered the figure’s translucent rubber eyeballs to roll—the idea being “to animate the ghostly sounds you hear when you reboot a printer.” The exhibition garnered Thaffe the college’s Athanasios Demetrios Skouras Prize.

Before graduating, Thaffe asked the Boston Children’s Museum whether his sculptures might

SHORT TAKES

ANTHONY RUSSO

appeal to visitors. “To my surprise, they became interested in doing a show,” he says. Animal Motion Park was on display from February through April 2014.

Four of its sculptures came from the thesis exhibition, and Thaffe added two remote-controlled snakes—one “made from the circuit boards of recycled computer mice,” the other “from PVC rings linked by a rubbercoated wire that brought electricity to the tail” so it would slither subtly from side to side.

The objects incorporate “many of our teaching areas—art, science, engineering, recycling,” says the museum’s collections manager, Rachel Farkas.

“Wrenford’s kinetic sculptures show that art isn’t just a picture on a wall.”

Thaffe aspires to attend graduate school for industrial design and to become an entrepreneur. For now, he is the George and Virginia Shattuck Fellow at Boston’s Museum of Science. He gives presentations involving live animals, super-cold substances and “musical Tesla coils.”

During the science museum’s “Lightning Show,” Thaffe is the one in the birdcage—a big metal one.

The world’s largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator zaps the cage with more than a million volts, without electrocuting him. “The excitement from the audience,” he says, “is always amazing.” k

This summer Amherst alumni guide us through hidden histories, faraway lands and even our deepest inner selves. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 It all starts with Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, by John B. Judis ’63 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). John T. ’76 and Winifred C. Young, writing as “J. W. Yanowitz,” also explore the Arab/Israeli conflict in their novel Guns for Judea: The Story of a Boy Soldier in the Middle East During World War One (CreateSpace).

JESSICA SCRANTON

Katherine Duke ’05 is the assistant editor of Amherst magazine.

After that: The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath, by George H. Nash ’67 (Hoover Institution Press). Chase Morsey Jr. ’41 reveals The Man Who Saved the V-8: The Untold Stories of Some of the Most Important Product Decisions in the History of Ford Motor Company (CreateSpace). And Alan Blum ’69, M.D., presents the short film Blowing Smoke: The Lost Legacy of the Surgeon General’s Report (University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society).

While Michael Wayne ’69 is Imagining Black America (Yale University Press), Junius Williams ’65 explains the Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power (North Atlantic Books).

Tony Brasunas ’96 leads the way to Double Happiness: One Man’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China (Torchpost Creative), and Susan McWilliams ’98 goes Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (Oxford University Press).

For inspiration, look to Fred Sievert ’70’s God Revealed: Revisit Your Past to Enrich Your Future (Morgan James Publishing) and Kimberly Palmer ’01’s The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life (AMACOM).

Drink up Andrew G. Schneider ’03’s novel Undercaffeinated and Overexposed: The Tale of a Coffee Shop Princess (self-published). Revel in The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia, by Colleen McQuillen ’94 (University of Wisconsin Press). And listen to The Six Brandenburg Fantasias, composed and conducted by Lawrence Axelrod ’81 and performed by Ensemble Nouvelle Époque (innova).

Summer 2014 Amherst 45

special section: Creating Connections

Amherst Advancement www.amherst. edu/alumni alumni@ amherst.edu

Creating a strong link between alumni and the College The high level of alumni involvement is a testament to the value of an Amherst education and the importance of Amherst relationships.

Amherst relies on alumni engagement to further its mission—be it service as a Pathways mentor or class officer, or participation in the Annual Fund or the Alumni Trustee Election. Alumni—more than 20,000 of you—are a critical part of the life of the College.

During the past year 13 percent of alumni took on volunteer roles and nearly 70 percent engaged with the College.

During the past year 13 percent of alumni took on volunteer roles and nearly 70 percent engaged with the College through events, giving or online programming, or by offering feedback. This level of involvement is a testament to the value of an Amherst education and the importance of the relationships formed at the College.

Many of these alumni engagement opportunities stem from the ongoing work of the Executive Committee of the Alumni Council. For more than 80 years, since its creation in 1929, the Executive Committee has served

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEMBERS Kerry P. Brennan ’77, Chair of the Executive Committee Leo P. Arnaboldi III ’81, P’17 ’14, Alumni Fund Chair Angela N. Brown ’00 Aimee Carroll Flynn ’99 Alumni Fund Chair Katherine K. Chia ’88, Alumni Fund Chair Kelly Louise Close ’90 Stephen Gang ’72, P’09, ’04 Alessandra Bianchi Herman ’86 Steven Klugman ’73 Mabel I. Lajes-Guiteras ’99 Edwin M. Macharia ’01 Annie C. MacRae ’04 Joseph F. McDonald ’58, P’93 Michael D. Mulligan ’68 Kirsten Poler ’88, President of the Society of the Alumni Evan A. Redwood ’12 Anne-Claire C. Roesch ’08 Annette Sanderson ’82 Elizabeth Julier Wyeth ’80

President Biddy Martin addresses a full house of alumni following the meeting of the Society of the Alumni at Reunion in June.

46 Amherst Summer 2014

as an advisory body between alumni and the College and as an avenue for alumni to become more involved with Amherst. The Committee supports the work of the Advancement office and its goal to provide mutually beneficial engagement opportunities, and it also has responsibility for appointing representatives to an array of alumni committees. The Executive Committee meets three times a year, in addition to the annual meeting of the Society of the Alumni held at reunion.

As chair of the Executive Committee, Bill Woolverton ’73, P’17, ’12, with the alumni secretary, oversaw the adoption of new bylaws to expand committee membership from nine to 15 members and streamline its work. Increasingly, the Executive Committee is expanding its role to support the flow of ideas between alumni and the college, as demonstrated with the Executive Committee’s call for feedback on the College’s strategic planning process.

This fall will usher in a change of leadership for the Executive Committee, with Woolverton concluding his term as chair and with Kerry Brennan ’77 taking the helm. Meanwhile, in the College’s Advancement office, Elizabeth Anema and Betsy Cannon Smith ’84, P’15 have been appointed to new roles. Anema will serve as the executive director of alumni and parent programs and annual giving, supporting the work of the Executive Committee, and Cannon Smith as alumni secretary, with strategic oversight for special communications and projects within Advancement.

Though leadership roles have

Students express their gratitude toward alumni

Philanthropy in the Next Generation Amherst was founded, and has thrived, through the generous support of Amherst alumni, parents and friends. For today’s students, this tradition of philanthropy is more visible than ever. In turn, our students have found new ways to contribute to and enrich the College and the community.

BILL WOOLVERTON ’73, P’17 ’12 speaks in Johnson Chapel during the annual meeting of the Society of the Alumni.

changed and the Executive Committee has expanded, its core mission remains the same—to create a strong link between alumni and the College.

“From the start, the Executive Committee has fulfilled its mission because of the dedication and keen insight of its members. Bill Woolverton epitomized those qualities, and the changes he oversaw are integral to the committee’s continued success,” said Megan Morey, chief advancement officer. “Now, we look forward to welcoming Kerry Brennan to the chair position, and we’re excited about creating additional innovative and engaging opportunities for alumni to connect with Amherst.”

To learn more, offer feedback, nominate a classmate or contact the committee, visit amherst.edu/ alumni/volunteer/society or email alumni@amherst.edu.

In recent years, with the help of a team of Student Engagement Fellows, philanthropy on campus takes center stage each February with a weeklong, Valentine’s-themed event called Love My Alumni Week. Students learn about and recognize the myriad ways alumni support the College—as mentors, volunteers and steadfast donors. They also have the opportunity to express their gratitude to alumni by writing thank-you notes for their support and service.

This year, more than 350 students wrote over 5,500 thank-

you notes, more than doubling the previous year’s record.

Meanwhile, graduating seniors continue to join together in a Senior Gift tradition that dates to the 1930s. This studentled fundraising effort gives each class the chance to say thank you to Amherst with a gift of their own.

This year’s senior class, led by Dan Carrizales ’14, successfully achieved participation from more than 85 percent of the class.

Outside the classroom, students in-

Student Engagement Fellows (from left) Leilani Webb ’14, Jessica Maposa ’17, Savannah West ’15, Mapate Diop ’16 and Wangene Hall ’14

creasingly represent Amherst in engagement with the wider community. In 2013– 14, more than 1,000 students worked alongside community residents, many on a weekly basis. They tutored adult ESL learners, collected oral histories, hosted events for nonprofits as part of athletic teams and grew food at Amherst’s Book & Plow Farm. In these endeavors students recognize that they learn as much as they give.

“The education we receive at Amherst will benefit us throughout our lives,” said Engagement Fellow Jessica Maposa ’17. “We are proud to give back and help ensure that same level of education is available for many years to come.”

Summer 2014 Amherst 47

special section: Creating Connections

Amherst Advancement www.amherst. edu/alumni alumni@ amherst.edu

Helping students by sharing knowledge The Pathways Mentoring Program connects alumni and students in a formal mentor-mentee partnership.

One of Amherst College’s greatest assets is the engaged and committed alumni network. Not only do graduates stay in contact with one another, but they maintain a connection and dialogue with those on campus.

For years, the Career Center has encouraged students to reach out to alumni, who have been generous in sharing insights and wisdom. Last fall, the office of Alumni and Parent Programs and the Career Center launched the Pathways Mentoring Program, which connects alumni and students in a formal mentor-mentee partnership.

Pathways helps you learn to apply “the tools you are cultivating at Amherst,” said Amelia Schoenbeck ’14.

support for mentors and mentees, which can help guide conversations and goal setting.

Each alumni participant fills out a questionnaire, creating a virtual profile of his or her background, passions and expectations. Students browse the profiles of prospective mentors and then initiate contact via the Pathways online interface. Once a request has been made, a proposed mentor may review that student’s profile, which includes answers to similar questions, or have a phone conversation. The alumni mentor then accepts or declines the partnership. Each mentor can have up to two mentees per semester. “Ultimately, it is up to the students to try to make the best out of this opportunity,” said David Chang ’16, one of The aim of Pathways is twofold: Dee’s mentees. to help students and to engage INTERESTED ALUMNI are Mentors are neither expected alumni. Pathways does just that by encouraged to register for nor encouraged to provide jobs matching students and alumni in or internships. Instead, Meadows Pathways via the Amherst mutually beneficial relationships. described her role as “a sounding website or to email “Mentors ask questions the stuboard and goal-accountability partpathways@amherst.edu. dents aren’t asking themselves,” ner.” She offers advice on how her Ursula Olender and Carly said Ursula Olender, director of the mentees can position themselves Nartowicz are eager to Career Center and associate dean strategically, play to their strengths help with the creation of of students, who co-manages Pathand leverage opportunities available mentor profiles and to ways with Carly Nartowicz, associon campus. answer any additional ate director of online programs.

“Pathways helps you identify the questions.

“This helps students reflect on and tools you are cultivating at Amherst think intentionally about what they and learn how to best apply them,” are doing with their time on campus.” said Amelia Schoenbeck ’14, one of Meadows’ menOnce at Amherst, the flexible schedule and tees. “That is much more worthwhile long-term plethora of options can be overwhelming. “That’s than alumni just handing you a job.” where Pathways can come in with active mentoring and bridge that gap,” said Denny Meadows ’84, who How it helps mentored two students this year. She and her fellow Ralph Washington ’16 joined Pathways looking for mentors help students identify, enhance and reoriperspective on whether to pursue finance or conent the skills they develop at Amherst. sulting. Dee had experience in both sectors. Currently a senior associate at Sycamore Partners, Dee tried to demystify these two fields for Washington, How it works describing typical assignments and workdays.

Meadows and Milo Dee ’09, who also mentored two “This program is a great way for students to students, were impressed by the motivation and follow-through of their mentees. Pathways is an opt- learn how they can take the extremely valuable, but sometimes more theoretical and abstract, concepts in program, so students are proactive and eager for learned at Amherst and see how this relates to the interaction. The Career Center provides structured

48 Amherst Summer 2014

DENNY MEADOWS ’84

DAVID CHANG ’16

Kaliski looked to her mentor, Meadows, as a role model. Meadows helped the rising senior to position herself strategically.

JESSICA KALISKI ’15

MILO DEE ’09

real world,” said Dee. This summer, Washington is interning in sales and trading at Citibank in New York.

Mentoring need not be constrained by industry. Jessica Kaliski ’15 had no interest in retail but was drawn to Meadows’ leadership background and personality. “Our interests didn’t necessarily align,” said Kaliski. “But I could tell that she would be someone I could look to as a role model.” Kaliski, who hopes to pursue environmental science or public policy, is interning this summer at Resource Environmental Solutions in New Orleans.

Alumni mentors

The Pathways program welcomes alumni from all walks of life, including those who are retired or taking time off for any reason, as they have a great deal to offer.

“As someone who has had life experiences, you are going to have insights, advice and suggestions,” said Dee. “This is an opportunity for you to take some of that valuable knowledge and share it with someone who really wants to use it to grow.”

Pathways is open to all students, and this year about 80 percent of active profiles were for sophomores and firstyear students. Many are looking for guidance in managing their time. Washington, for example, wanted to learn “what should I be doing at Amherst now so that I can be prepared later in life.”

A survey of Pathways participants revealed that they spent 44 percent of their time talking about academic topics, 28 percent on general life topics and 28 percent

on professional topics. Schoenbeck wanted advice on work-life balance. Kaliski wanted to improve her speaking and leadership skills. Meadows advised Kaliski, an economics major, to look into course requirements for graduate programs in public policy. Dee pushed Chang and Washington to expand their focus beyond economics and try other subjects.

Grateful students

While the Career Center has been helping students connect with alumni for years, typically those were one-off interactions, and some students were hesitant to contact alumni, saying it felt like they were making a cold call.

“With Pathways, you have this agreement of a one-onone relationship, and you are encouraged to continue the conversations,” said Chang.

In its inaugural two semesters, 245 Pathways partnerships were formed, but that is just the beginning. “My dream of how Pathways develops,” said Dee, “is for it to become a giant Amherst network that can connect students to any profession or any interest.” Indeed, a goal for next year will be to expand the diversity of interests, majors and industries that are represented in the mentoring pool.

The Pathways program continues to grow, with 734 registered mentors. Student interest is also on the rise, with 564 registered. “We have such a strong alumni network,” said Schoenbeck. “And the information one can gain from this network is priceless.”

Summer 2014 Amherst 49

special section: Creating Connections

Amherst Advancement www.amherst. edu/alumni alumni@ amherst.edu

New science center will enable innovative teaching Combined with new dorms and a landscaped walkway, the building will transform the East Campus.

This preliminary planning image illustrates the proposed locations for the new buildings (in yellow, with science center at right and dorms at left) and does not represent the actual design, which will evolve in the coming months.

“The way we teach science has changed dramatically,” said Associate Professor Anthony Bishop.

These days, campus eyes are looking east. There, on the site of the Social Dorms, the College will build a new Science Center with a focus on environmental sustainability and adaptability.

“The way we teach science and conduct research has changed dramatically in the decades since Merrill was built,” said Anthony Bishop, associate professor of chemistry and chair of biochemistry and biophysics. “We’re looking forward to flexible spaces in the new building that allow for innovative and modern ways of teaching science.”

Designed by Payette Associates, the firm behind the Beneski Earth Sciences Building, the 250,000-square-foot

50 Amherst Summer 2014

science building will contain an innovative mix of classrooms and research and teaching laboratories. Upon completion in fall 2018, it will house the biology, chemistry, computer science, neuroscience, physics, psychology and biochemistry-biophysics departments. With an estimated cost of $214 million, the facility will accommodate approximately 80 percent of all science classes, as well as 15 to 20 percent of all non-science classes.

This cross-pollination is deliberate and aims to encourage interdisciplinary study and foster learning communities.

But that’s just one aspect of the transformation in store for the East Campus. To replace the Social Dorms, new residence halls will be built to the south of Merrill, where the

temporary dorms Plaza and Waldorf are now located. Kyu Sung Woo Architects, known for their work at Bowdoin, Brandeis, Dartmouth and Harvard, were chosen to design residence halls that have more shared common areas and a neighborhood feel.

And then there’s the Greenway—an ADAcompliant landscaped walkway lined with trees and benches— which will meander from Valentine Dining Hall along a reconfigured Mead hillside, past the new Science Center and down to the new dormitories on the southern end.

“The Greenway is vital to connecting the planned Science Center and housing into the fabric of the campus,” said Jim Brassord, chief of campus operations. “It encourages foot traffic

and outdoor gatherings while offering new paths of movement around the perimeter of the hillside.”

Designed by the award-winning Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who created New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Greenway will offer numerous spaces for students to socialize and work outside on group projects. In addition to promoting more interaction within the community, it aims to connect the older and newer parts of campus.

“With the new dorms and the Greenway,” said Abigail Bliss ’15, a student member of the Facilities Framework Committee, “Amherst will blur the boundary between living and learning.”

President Biddy Martin sees the transformation of the East Campus as reflecting Amherst’s resolve to steward its resources wisely and its values as a preeminent liberal arts institution.

“We’re creating a worldclass science center, sited in the context of a compelling vision for the future development of the campus. The benefits to students and faculty will be immediate, tangible and long-term.”

Something wonderful is happening

Teachers are teaching, Students are learning, Alumni and parents are giving, Over and over and over again!

Thank you.

Summer 2014 Amherst 51

REMEMBER WHEN

Ì 1952

From left, Ed Wesely, David Mesker and Coach Frank Gillespie with the sought-after NEI trophy. “We never played harder, or with more determination, than we did that weekend,” writes Wesely.

Phew!

BY ED WESELY ’52

Early that spring we’d beaten top players from Yale, Harvard and visiting North Carolina in team matches, and we’d go on to defeat Williams to win the Little Three title. But our proudest moments were spent on Yale’s clay courts in late May, as we played in tense matches to retire an eight-point Challenge Trophy.

The trophy was the prize for earning eight points in the New England Intercollegiate Championship, which took place over a spring weekend each year. A scoring rule, adopted in 1900, awarded schools one point for winning a singles or doubles competition and half a point for being a runner-up. Schools carried points from one year to the next, but they accumulated slowly, even 128 Amherst Summer 2014

CURTIS L. BARNES JR./AMHERST COLLEGE

We didn’t know it at the time, but Amherst tennis was in transition in 1952.

We practiced on venerable (if dusty) courts, now vanished from a shelf above Hitchcock Field. We hit white tennis balls with wooden racquets, standard ensembles since the 1880s.

for the most talented teams.

Dartmouth won the first Challenge Trophy in 1911 and Williams the second in 1923. Entering the 1952 tournament, the 15th year of competition for trophy number four, Amherst and Williams each held seven and a half points.

“Phew” is the best way I can describe the championship weekend—which, for me, meant playing 16 sets of tennis. We’d play a match, find a soft drink or candy bar, replace dusty socks and be called again.

Late Saturday David Mesker ’53 and I warmed up for a semifinal match against Williams that would seal the trophy’s fate.

The Williams players

The 1952 tennis team outlasted Yale, Harvard and Williams to retire a coveted trophy.

began strongly and were soon serving at 6-0, 5-4, and two points from winning.

David made vital shots in this game, and after a slow start I perked up. Eventually we broke Williams’ serve, got clicking and dictated the rest of the match. Sunday we beat Yale handily and brought the trophy home.

The Amherst Student announced, “Amherst Retires 8-Point Trophy,” and the headline is apt, because success was cemented by all 1952 teammates, and by earlier players, too: Tom Rodman and Wyly Lamar, 1941 doubles winners; Bruce Daniels and Chuck Keevil, 1948 doubles champs; and especially

Bill Smith ’51, whose three New England Intercollegiate singles championships put the trophy within reach.

Mindful of this legacy, we never played harder, or with more determination, than we did that weekend.

I recall, too, how much fun we had during the season, joking about how to “stay loose” in blustery April wind or when dusted by snow at Dartmouth.

We build camaraderie that’s kept us writing, visiting and smiling for six decades. k Ed Wesely ’52, tennis team captain his senior year, rears and releases monarch butterflies (more than 7,000 at last count) in Wayne County, Pa.

Alumni and Parent Programs FA L L

S C H E D U L E

AMHERST READS SELECTION OF THE MONTH

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944

SEPTEMBER 25-26

Executive Committee Meeting on Campus

amherst.edu/alumni/EC

OCTOBER Catching Lightning in a Bottle: How Merrill Lynch Revolutionized the Financial World

NOVEMBER

E V E N T S

The Executive Committee supports the work of the Advancement office and serves as an advisory body between alumni and the college.

SEPTEMBER

BY PROFESSOR RON ROSBOTTOM

O F

BY WINTHROP SMITH ’71

All I Love and Know

OCTOBER 2- 3

Return to the Amherst classroom with weekend classes led by distinguished professors. Topic to be announced. amherst.edu/alumni/today

Family Weekend DECEMBER Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty

BY PROFESSOR AUSTIN SARAT

An opportunity for families to join students on campus, sit in on classes, enjoy sports competitions and performances, tour museums and attend special lectures including: Eliot Young ’84, P’17, principal research scientist at Southwest Research Institute Space Studies, on NASA’s high-altitude balloon program; Dr. Paul Rothman P’15, dean and CEO of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, on the changing face of American health care; and Professor Ron Rosbottom on his new book When Paris Went Dark. amherst.edu/go/familyweekend NOVEMBER 7-9

Visit amherst.edu/alumni for upcoming Virtual Lectures, regional events and Amherst Today programs.

amherst.edu/go/homecoming

Amherst Today

OCTOBER 24-26

BY PROFESSOR JUDITH FRANK

Orioles, and Neal Huntington ’91 of the Pittsburgh Pirates; hear Professor Austin Sarat look back on 40 years of teaching at Amherst; hear Professor Emeritus Kim Townsend read from his new book on Amherst’s 14th president, John William Ward; and celebrate the kickoff of the 150th anniversary of the Amherst College Glee Club. And, of course, cheer Amherst on to victory over archrival Williams on the football field.

Homecoming Get the inside scoop on major league baseball from General Managers Benjamin Cherington ’96 of the Boston Red Sox, Dan Duquette ’80 of the Baltimore

NOVEMBER 8

Amherst/Williams Regional Football Telecasts Join hundreds of alumni, parents and friends at one of the many telecast parties across the country and the world to watch the 2014 Amherst-Williams football game. amherst.edu/alumni/telecast COMING SOON!

Mini Online Classes (MOCs) This year, Amherst will launch a series of four-week-long Mini Online Classes (MOCs), a pilot of The Dean of Faculty’s PICT Initiative (Project in Innovative Curriculum and Teaching). Classes will be taught by Amherst professors and will be open to all members of the Amherst community. The classes will be asynchronous, allowing people to self-pace and participate as schedules and time allow.

Anna Martini, professor of geology and co-chair of environmental studies, will lead a mini online class on hydrofracking. A class description and more information will be available in the fall. amherst.edu/alumni/moc

AMHERST PO Box 5000 Amherst, MA 01002

THEN & NOW

Crew

At reunion in May, about 30 alumni met at the boathouse at Coolidge Bridge to relive their college rowing days.

The annual reunion row has taken place at least as far back as 1998. “It’s an incredibly connected family,” says Coach Bill Stekl.

Above, members of the women’s crew in 1981.

Then a varsity sport, rowing is now a club sport at Amherst. Its teams have won some 50 medals at New England championships in the past 15 years.

1981 Women’s Crew

2014 Reunion Row

OLD PHOTO FROM AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES; NEW PHOTO BY ROB MATTSON