Fall 2014 amherst magazine

FALL 2014

In 1974 Theodore Rosengarten ’66 wrote an oral history of an Alabama tenant farmer.

This summer it was a hit for the second time.

Forty Years and a Mule!

IN THIS ISSUE

Ì FALL 2014 | VOLUME 67

FEATURES

NUMBER 1

DEPARTMENTS

20 STORIES OF LIFE

BY TRACY JARRETT ’11

2 VOICES

Julie Keith Jarrett ’81 died from AIDS in 1994. To imagine the person her mother might have become, a young reporter traveled from East Harlem to Cape Town to Chicago.

28 A SMASH HIT. AGAIN.

BY STEPHEN HOFFIUS

Forty years ago Theodore Rosengarten ’66 wrote an oral history of an Alabama tenant farmer. This summer it became a best-seller for the second time.

34 THE POPULISTS OF WALL STREET INTERVIEW BY CULLEN MURPHY ’74

Winthrop H. Smith Jr. ’71 gives an inside perspective on Merrill Lynch, from its start as a one-man shop in 1914 to its inauspicious end in 2008. Ì

|

ON THE COVER

Theodore Rosengarten ’66 photographed

by John McWilliams in South Carolina, September 2014

4 COLLEGE ROW MAKING the case for talking about religion BOB WOODWARD on Obama and getting to the truth PARTIES have a new home in an old steam plant BEING a female professor at Amherst in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s AND MORE

14 SPORTS SOCCER When no one else was watching the game, Professor Frank Westhoff was there. He still is.

16 THE BIG PICTURE Afternoon light on the quad

18 POINT OF VIEW The Upshot’s Aaron E. Carroll ’94 on how medicine is like an LJST course at Amherst.

41 BEYOND CAMPUS EDUCATION Why few black men teach in U.S. schools ADOPTION A single rabbi’s path to motherhood HEALTH A researcher’s discovery could help solve the obesity puzzle HOMELESSNESS Housing 105,580 people, and quickly SALES Tom Shepard ’40 on selling VapoRub

47 AMHERST CREATES FICTION Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, by Chris Bohjalian ’82 NONFICTION Slavery and freedom at the racetrack; the Nazi occupation of Paris MEMOIR Jim Rooney ’60’s musical odyssey THEATER Actor Wendy Rich Stetson ’91

54 CLASSES 122 IN MEMORY 128 AMHERST MADE Three ’40s alumni popularized the coffee mug, ending the long reign of the cup and saucer

When she said, “I want to be a mom,” people replied, “You’ll meet the right person.” PAGE 43

ONLINE

Ì WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE

MORE NEWS l The Amherst Schubert Project celebrated Franz Schubert’s Cello Quintet, widely considered his greatest work, with a live recording of performances by the BRENTANO QUARTET and Michael Kannen, as well as other events.

l President Biddy Martin and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Weinman VISITED ASIA this fall to strengthen the college’s connections with alumni and prospective students in mainland China, Hong Kong and Korea.

WEBCASTS l Amherst has partnered with Northeast Sports Network to provide free live webcasts of nearly all HOME GAMES this academic year. Webcasts include professional production techniques, camera operators and broadcast crews.

BLOG

PHOTOS BY CHRISTIAN STEINER AND ROB MATTSON AND COURTESY OF PIERCARLO VALDESOLO

l Well Mixed, the new

Amherst guest blog, features, among others, Jonatha Brooke ’85 on the first song she wrote, PIERCARLO VALDESOLO ’03 on why people can be unethical and Rachel Ravreby Lintgen ’94 on why she became a teacher.

PHOTO SETS l See students in the SWING, SALSA AND BALLROOM DANCE CLUB practice moves in the basement of Lipton Dorm. Also: Photos from orientation, homecoming, family weekend and the annual fall festival

VOICES

“All of the photographic and electronic information available today cannot substitute for real-life experiences.”

WHY MUSEUMS MATTER I COULDN’T AGREE MORE WITH THE sentiments expressed by the Smithsonian’s Kirk Johnson ’82 (“Out of the Shadows,” Summer 2014)! All of the photographic and electronic information available today cannot substitute for reallife experiences. When I was teaching a course in ornithology and explaining how light bird bones were, I passed around in class a pelican humerus and a human humerus. Getting to actually feel the difference in weight (29 grams vs. 120 grams) of these two nearly equal-sized bones made the point for the students far more forcefully than anything I was saying.

Museums that provide visual, and sometimes tactile, experiences will always be an important adjunct to the educational process, reinforcing information from other sources. The Beneski Museum certainly fills that role for Amherst students and other visitors. I look forward to seeing it myself on my next visit to campus.

Charles T. Collins ’60 LONG BEACH, CALIF. → The writer is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach.

JUST SAY HELLO THE SUMMER ISSUE CONTAINS A SAD dichotomy: the current “Amherst Awkward” (p. 7) contrasted with Professor Pritchard’s memory of “dutifully” saying hello to upperclassmen (p. 19). Perhaps

2 Amherst Fall 2014

THE STORIES BEHIND THE PHOTOS Many ’60s alumni wrote to identify the students on p. 69 of the Summer 2014 issue. At left is Jerry Mintz ’64. At right is Dave Pellegrin ’64. “Mintz was on my floor of Stearns freshman year” and was a bright, likeable classmate who loved German opera, wrote Alan Fraser Houston ’64. “Pellegrin was on the same Stearns floor, a musician (drummer), also very bright and well-liked. He transferred to Harvard [but] appeared at the [Amherst] class of ’64 reunion this year, after 50-plus years, to the absolute delight of a number of us. A great reunion!”

Several alumni picked out the face of Art Henshaw ’64 behind Pellegrin, as well as the back of Barry Palmer ’64’s head (at the chair with the Amherst jacket). Tom Hanford ’62 even tried to ID a third, mostly obscured, student at the HenshawPalmer table: “I would guess Ron Ziemba ’64, based on the hair part and cigarette,” he wrote. “All were close friends and fraternity brothers in Psi U.” On p. 55 of that same issue, George Bria ’38 spotted longtime leading lady Claudette Colbert in the photo of the 1945 launch of the S.S. Amherst Victory. Colbert is in the front row, at right. She won an Academy Award in 1935 for her role in It Happened One Night.

there is a place for some dutiful traditions, those which engender a sense of community and foster lifelong habits that serve one well. Just say, “Hi.” Mac Langford ’60 LOPEZ ISLAND, WASH. THE PAINTER, THEN AND NOW WE WERE DELIGHTED TO SEE ONE OF our favorite pictures on the back cover of Amherst (Spring 2014). For years we’ve treasured a framed copy we have of this portrait of Bob Forrester ’67, the young philosopher painter, looking only slightly different than he does now. We were a bit surprised that the magazine called him an unknown student, since he was on the front cover in the same photo back when he was a student, and we knew who he was right away: our kids’ Grandpa Bob. Darcy Forrester Carr ’97 Jonathan Carr ’96 ARLINGTON, MASS.

MEMORIES OF DUSTY COURTS I READ WITH INTEREST THE ARTICLE BY Ed Wesely ’52 (“Phew!,” Remember When, Summer 2014). Ed was my fraternity brother whose tennis exploits were regularly demonstrated. But beyond this, his reference to “venerable (if dusty) courts” brought back memories of being forced to play tennis on those hellish courts in the spring of my senior year in order to meet the (then) requirement of an individual sport in order to graduate from Amherst.

Dave Winslow ’53 BROOKHAVEN, N.Y. CORRECTIONS BECAUSE OF AN EDITING ERROR, THE Summer 2014 notes for the class of ’79 incorrectly referred to Ashley Pozefsky Adams ’79, a man, as “she.” We apologize for the mistake. Also, the photo caption on p. 59 of that issue is incorrect: Milliken was torn down to make way for King and Wieland dorms.

BOSTON GLOBE “Frank renders this story with an intimate knowledge of her settings, Jerusalem and Northampton, with the tender and trying moments of child rearing, and often, with humor. All of the characters, down to the bit-playing caseworker, Hebrew instructor, and baby Noam, come alive on the page.”

NEWSDAY The

SAMUEL MASINTER ’04

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR TWO FACULTY AUTHORS RONALD C. ROSBOTTOM’S new book When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944, earned a National Book Award longlist nomination (see the review on p. 44) and reached No. 8 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. JUDITH FRANK’S novel All I Love and Know (Amherst Creates, Summer 2014) won coverage in publications ranging from The Boston Globe to People to the Israeli paper Haaretz.

“considerable power” of All I Love and Know “comes from two sources not always found in combination: first, the seriousness of the social issues it takes on, and second, its psychological, nearly Jamesian style, following its characters tick by tick through their emotions and thoughts.”

AMHERST

WALL STREET JOURNAL “The

strength of Mr. Rosbottom’s book lies in the details he has culled from memoirs, letters, papers, films, plays, songs and diaries that illuminate the experience of both the occupiers and the occupied.”

EDITOR

NEW YORKER “Again

ALUMNI EDITOR

and again in his research into Parisians’ experience during the war, Rosbottom writes, he found descriptions of the way in which ‘physical and psychological space seemed to progressively narrow.’ … As wartime suffering goes, this might seem relatively trivial, but suffering isn’t always comparative, especially for those in distress.”

VOLUME 67, NUMBER 1

Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst.edu Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031 DESIGN DIRECTOR

Ronn Campisi ASSISTANT EDITOR

Katherine Duke ’05

“The function of literature is to instruct through pleasure,” wrote Professor Emeritus William H. Pritchard ’53 in “Life After Amherst?” (Summer 2014). On Twitter, the essay led to a conversation between two Pritchard fans who graduated nine years apart.

MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

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

“Want to know about my English advisor at @amherstcollege? You get a pretty good flavor in this heartfelt perspective.”

ANIA WIECKOWSKI ’03:

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.

“I had Pritchard in ’90. Very cool. Thanks for tweeting.”

BILLY TOWNSEND ’94:

WIECKOWSKI: “Having him as a professor is such an experience—I bet there’s a whole club of us out there.”

TOWNSEND: “Freshman

WIECKOWSKI:

much.”

“Six words that teach so

JOHN GOODMAN

year got a string of Bs from him. Last paper said, in his gruff way: ‘this was better. You loosened up.’”

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.

Fall 2014 Amherst 3

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM CAMPUS

06 Want to study art at the Mead? Take a course in French conversation.

College Row

09 A former steam plant has re-energized the student social scene.

No matter a person’s religion or lack thereof, says Gaura, there’s value in letting “others into our world.”

Tim Gaura ’15E argues in his senior project that Amherst students should talk more about their religious and philosophical views.

THIS He Believes

q Gaura has spent a year growing out his “thesis beard.”

4

STUDENTS U There are a lot of things about Tim Gaura ’15E that make him a highly visible presence at Amherst. For one, he gets around on a unicycle. At 28, he’s older than most of his classmates. Plus, he sports a year’s growth of facial hair— his “thesis beard.”

And not least is the senior project for which the beard is named. This paper is prompting much interest and discussion throughout the AmAmherst Fall 2014

herst community—because it’s about the community, and about a subject that, Gaura says, we don’t discuss enough.

Specifically, his project posits that Amherst students spend too little time talking about their religious and philosophical beliefs and identities.

Through a survey answered by some 150 students and dozens of in-person interviews, he’s found that students are often hesitant to converse with

one another about the frameworks through which they seek answers to life’s deepest questions.

No matter a person’s particular religion or lack thereof, Gaura believes, there’s “a value in having these conversations, a value in being able to allow others into our world. But that’s also a vulnerable position,” he says. “If we’re atheist, we’re afraid of being seen as amoral—as [unable to] be a good person. If we’re theist, Photograph by Rob Mattson

“WHAT ARE

the Bastards Hiding?”

Bob Woodward on Obama, getting to the truth and his tryout at the Post

e “As the CEO, he needs to find a way to work his will,” Woodward said of Obama.

POLITICS U While President Obama has “the armor of a good heart” and high hopes for the country, he has not found a way to engage Congress productively, said Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist and author Bob Woodward to a crowd of nearly 600 in Johnson Chapel.

In the September talk Woodward gave his take on current and former commanders-in-chief and on the state of American politics today.

He described a “leadership problem” in the White House and Congress: “There are certainly failings on both [political] sides. But Obama is the CEO. He’s the president.

He’s got incredible leverage. And as the CEO, he needs to find a way to work his will.”

Recalling that an Obama aide once remarked of the president,

ROB MATTSON

we’re afraid of being seen as antiintellectual. If we’re spiritual but not religious, we’re afraid of being seen as superstitious.”

Gaura, who was homeschooled starting in fifth grade by his conservative Christian family and who transferred to Amherst from Monroe Community College in Rochester, N.Y., has found Amherst unusual in this reticence. At other schools where he’s taken classes—including Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—people seemed to him much more comfortable with declarations and discussions of faith or philosophy. He views that comfort as a positive, and he argues that Amherst students’ comparative silence on these topics means they miss out on opportunities to learn from and empathize with one another.

He received funding for his project (which started as an anthropology thesis and became an interdisciplinary Special Topics project) through the college’s Gregory S. Call Undergraduate Research Program, and he’s completing it this semester with guidance from Deborah Gewertz, the G. Henry Whitcomb 1874 Professor of Anthropology; Writing Associate Michael Keezing; and Michele Barale, the Thalheimer Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies and co-director of the Writing Center. The final written work will include Gaura’s personal narrative of faith and learning, incorporate the stories of students he interviewed and draw from research into the religious history of the college.

Gaura intends the writing to be more accessible than a traditional academic thesis would be. He plans to invite students, faculty and staff to a campus event in December at which he’ll describe the project and its findings, answer questions and perhaps facilitate a broader discussion of these issues.

And he has another, more private post-project ritual in mind: to symbolize “shedding the weight of my undergraduate, sophomoric years and re-emerging,” he will shave off his beard. KATHERINE DUKE ’05

“He has the armor of a good heart,” Woodward said, “I think that really is true. He has the best of aspirations for the country, for himself and where we’re going. But the engagement to get things done is just not happening.”

In terms of national security, Obama’s job is to “comfort our friends and scare the hell out of our enemies,” Woodward argued. “Sometimes Obama does the opposite,” which can displease Republicans and Democrats alike.

CAROLINE J. HANNA

“WHAT ARE THE BASTARDS HIDING?” Woodward said that’s his first thought when he wakes up each morning.

So how does the legendary reporter get politicians to talk?

In a video interview on campus before his Johnson Chapel talk, he outlined his method: “Get to know people, interview them, listen, treat them seriously, get documents, get notes, go back, go back. That’s how you can get closer to what is hidden.”

Woodward began his journalism career with a failure.

He was working at the Pentagon, finishing his Navy service, when he started reading The Washington Post. He walked into the Post with no experience and asked for a job. He wrote a dozen articles, “none of which they published,” and after two weeks the editors said, “You don’t know how to do this. You failed the tryout.”

“I said, ‘Thank you, because I now know this is what I want to do,’” Woodward said. The young man found a job at a weekly paper in the Maryland suburbs, and the Post hired him in 1971.

The next year, he teamed up with Carl Bernstein to start investigating Watergate. By 1974 they’d published the No. 1 bestseller All the President’s Men. He has worked there ever since.

Fall 2014 Amherst 5

COLLEGE ROW

Study at

THE MEAD Want to look at art? Take a course in geology, or psychology, or French conversation.

ART U Hundreds of students come to the Mead Art Museum each semester as part of organized class visits. And they’re not all taking art or the history of art.

In fact, the museum is routinely host to courses from throughout the college’s catalog. Students in these courses gather with their professors in a gallery or in the study room to examine works of art from the collection.

The Mead’s interim director, Pamela Russell, has organized class visits for the past five years as head of education. The effort to connect the Mead’s collection with courses began in 2007 through the efforts of former director Elizabeth Barker, now head of the Boston Athenaeum.

Here are some of the courses that visited the Mead in recent years, with examples of objects they viewed.

COURSE:

BIG BOOKS OBJECT: Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, &c 1 The 1990 Frank Stella sculpture is inspired by one of the biggest books of all, Moby-Dick, which was on the reading list of this first-year seminar. The acrylicon-aluminum sculpture is more than 83 inches high.

1

COURSE:

STEREOTYPES AND PREJUDICE OBJECT: The Young Men 2 How do stereotypes and prejudices develop, why are they maintained, and how can they be reduced? Psychology students studied photos that depict instances of segregation and, in this 1992 photo by Tina Barney, privileged white men who display a sense of unease.

2

COURSE:

SEMINAR IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC: LISTENING, HEARING, AUDITION OBJECT: Raga: Girl listening to musicians 3 This course examined listening as a culturally specific practice and as a kind of performance in its own right. Students viewed images that illustrate modes of listening to music. One was this 19thcentury watercolor-on-paper from India.

COURSE:

3

GEOLOGY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST

q THE MEAD ART MUSEUM

6 Amherst Fall 2014

OBJECT: By a Mountain Lake (Lake in the Grand Tetons) 4 Geology students studied the origins of the natural landscapes of western North America, giving special attention to national parks. Among the paintings they viewed was this 19th-century oilon-canvas by Albert Bierstadt.

4

MEET THE

’18s

COURSE:

FRENCH CONVERSATION OBJECT: La Dame IndignÊe 5 To gain confidence in idiomatic French, students discussed French social institutions and culture. As part of this work, they studied various French photographs, including Robert Doisneau’s 1948 image of a woman showing surprise and shock.

5

COURSE:

MIND AND BRAIN

Exactly 8,479 students applied to join the new first-year class. Of that pool—the second-largest in Amherst history—1,174 were admitted and 469 enrolled. Among these new first-years is a blacksmith, a U.S. military veteran and an internationally ranked table-tennis player.

OBJECT: Wounded Centaur 6 Students in this first-year seminar

ADMISSION RATE

explored the human-animal connection through the representation of composite mythological creatures. They studied an 1890 bronze sculpture by German artist Franz von Stuck.

Č• ÎŒ

COURSE:

THE SECRET JESUS

AGE RANGE

OBJECT: Christ and the Samaritan Woman

16531

7 Religion students examined stories

about Jesus that were well-known in antiquity but are less familiar today.

They looked at images of Jesus in art, including this undated watercolor by American artist Hulda H. Conover Dayton (1828–1915).

6

INTRODUCTION TO THE PEOPLES AND CULTURE OF EURASIA OBJECT: Russian Marriage (Mariage russe)

SELF-IDENTIFIED U.S. STUDENTS OF COLOR:

8 A selection of Russian works of art

1: 1994.8, gift of Steven M. Jacobson ’53 2: 1995.8, museum purchase with Allan P. Albert ’67 Photograph Fund 3: 1967.77.a, gift of Alban G. Widgery 4: 2002.129, given in memory of Nathalie Hawthorne Olena by her husband, Arnold T. Olena, and their children, Laura, Douglas, Kenneth, Randy and Marnie 5: 1979.109.a.1, gift of Kenneth Futter 6: 1973.5, museum purchase 7: 1950.33, gift of Miss Katherine C. Cowles 8: 2001.113, gift of Thomas P. Whitney ’37

ȼ ‍ ݣ‏

ČĄ Ö­

COURSE:

provided a new context for students learning about the diversity of historical experiences of ethnic and national groups of Eurasia. This 1928 watercolor is

by Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin.

RECEIVING AMHERST FINANCIAL AID

7

NON U.S. CITIZENS LANGUAGES SPOKEN COUNTRIES REPRESENTED U.S. STATES REPRESENTED

8

10% 30 31 39

plus Washington, D.C. (Six new students are from Alabama and five are from Hawaii—records at Amherst for both states.)

Fall 2014 Amherst 7

COLLEGE ROW

NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING SPEECHES U President Biddy Martin used this year’s convocation address to challenge the idea that online education is equal to the residential college experience. Last year, she said, she was on a New York Times panel with someone from the online education firm Coursera. As Martin remembered, the executive argued that “the value proposition of higher education is content delivery and a credential.”

“Every day,” Martin told the class of ’18, “we hear a new call for a kind of education that can be scaled and operationalized, and its outcomes counted.

Every day another proposal for a college education that requires neither places nor human relationships.”

At the podium in Johnson Chapel, she argued that education “without a sense of place, without sounds and smells and tastes, without the messiness and

ROB MATTSON

In her convocation address, President Martin took online education firms to task.

l F VIDEO www.amherst.edu/magazine

inconvenience of human relationships, is not an education that we should allow people to promote without resistance.”

Speaking to the first-years, Martin previewed their next four years: “You’re not simply going to be listening to what especially purveyors of online courses now like to call ‘sages on the stage,’ who simply stand in front of you and deliver content.”

She cited the late Amherst

English Professor Benjamin DeMott, who wrote, “A good classroom is one in which collaborators enjoy a stretch of intelligently active sympathetic engagement with one another.”

Education of this sort, Martin said, takes “duration in the relationships we build, it takes low student-to-faculty ratios, it is very expensive—and it is life-giving. I know that from my own experience.”

E.G.B.

TWO JOIN BOARD The newest college trustees are from the classes of ’69 and ’91.

JOSEPH F. QUINN ’69 is a professor of economics at Boston College, where he’s served in several administrative positions, including as department chair, faculty athletics representative, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and interim provost.

Quinn served on President Clinton’s Advisory Council on Social Security and is the co-author of two books and numerous articles, most of which are about retirement behavior and the economics of an aging society. He was on the crosscountry and lacrosse teams at Amherst and was a member of Theta Delta Chi. 8 Amherst Fall 2014

He went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics at MIT. An active alumnus, he has served in many roles, including as chair of the executive committee of the alumni council and as a member of the 2010-11 presidential search committee.

DAVID SUTPHEN ’91 is a partner at Brunswick Group and specializes in strategic communications. He manages the Washington, D.C., office and advises Fortune 500 companies, including Nike and Microsoft, as well as major charitable organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Prior to Brunswick, he was a senior executive at Viacom and the Recording Industry Association of America. After attending Michigan Law School, he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for 3rd Circuit, practiced law at Covington & Burling and then moved into politics,

serving as chief of staff to former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. and general counsel to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. A former varsity player at Amherst, Sutphen is secretary of the board of the U.S. Soccer Foundation—the official charity of U.S. Soccer— and is active on numerous other nonprofit boards.

The Amherst board of trustees consists of President Biddy Martin, 14 term trustees chosen by the board members and six alumni trustees elected by the alumni body. Quinn was elected by alumni; Sutphen was chosen by the board. E.G.B.

MATTHEW CHOW ’18

q The soft opening drew 350 people to the Powerhouse. The next night, 500 arrived.

IF YOU BUILD IT,

WILL THEY COME? Within days of its opening, a steam-plant-turned-party-space had re-energized social life on campus.

PARTIES U A former steam plant on the east side of campus reopened in September as a student party space. Tasked with drawing crowds to the Powerhouse, a student committee first talked about using the airy, industrial building for traditional weekend parties.

“We quickly diverted from that route and decided we should have late-night events,” says Bear Kaminer ’16. “That was a really successful approach.” That’s to put it mildly. Since opening on Sept. 5, the Powerhouse has drawn as many as 600 students at a time.

Opening Day At the soft opening on Friday, Sept. 5, about 350 people came to the Powerhouse between 4 and 6 p.m. to mingle inside and on the patio, enjoy snacks from Valentine and delight in the large windows and exposed beams. “We wanted to show off the space,” says Kaminer, an architectural studies major.

Illustrations by Adam McCauley

Wings ’n’ Things

Beach Bash TAP

Fever

Catered by Pioneer Valley Pizza and Wings Over Amherst, a “Wings ’n’ Things” party ran from midnight to 2 a.m. on Sept. 6. The committee hoped to attract the largest possible number of students, but without intruding on the existing, earlier social scene. “We said, ‘Let’s have a latenight event and provide food. Instead of going to your room, come to the Powerhouse. We’ll have a DJ and turn the inside into a dance floor.’” More than 500 students migrated over to the space.

More than 600 students came to a beach-themed party sponsored by the campus activities board.

There was limbo on the patio and a DJ and smoothies inside. Samanta English ’15, one of the organizers, says the party brought different groups of students together. “It was exciting to watch the numbers grow throughout the night,” she says.

The Powerhouse stretched its legs by hosting a local cover band, Fever, in late September. The live music drew about 600 students and proved to Kaminer that the space would be well-suited to student concerts and theater performances. Future plans include using the building as a daytime study space, and one art student has expressed interest in hanging a sculpture in the room.

The Goonies A screening of the 1985 movie The Goonies drew only eight students, but the low turnout got the committee thinking about ways to increase publicity and make future movie nights more successful.

One idea, Kaminer says, is to offer the over-21 crowd a glass of wine with their popcorn. (The Powerhouse has a pending alcohol license.)

The student committee is seeking advice from alumni with expertise in marketing and branding, event production, interior design and related industries.

Email powerhouse@ amherst.edu.

Fall 2014 Amherst 9

COLLEGE ROW

WHAT CHILDREN

Really Think How do our ideas about childhood inform our ideas about history?

RESEARCH U It’s a culture often overlooked by scholars, though we have all at some point belonged to it: the culture of children.

For a book she’s writing, Professor Karen Sánchez-Eppler is delving into various archives to research children’s own accounts of their lives in the 19th century—an obvious strategy, she believes, but also a groundbreaking one.

“I feel a little bit like how it must have felt doing women’s history scholarship in the ’70s,” says Sánchez-Eppler, the L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English. In many of the same ways that histories of women and nonwhites have been given short shrift, she says, the lives and opinions of children are often devalued.

Her research is for a book on how our ideas about childhood inform our ideas about history. She first became interested in studying children in their own words as she worked on her 2005 book, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

“My first book had been on abolitionist and feminist politics, and it would have never occurred to me that I could write a responsible book if I had only been using sources from white men,” she says. “But here I was writing a book about childhood in which I was only having sources from adults, and that seemed completely fine to me. I suddenly had this moment of ‘Oh my God—I never would have done this with my first project.’”

For her 2014–15 sabbatical year, she is doing research at Chicago’s Newberry Library, the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Del., and the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University.

WILLIAM SWEET 10 Amherst Fall 2014

IMAGINARY WORLD THE MEAD ART MUSEUM’S PAMELA RUSSELL likes to attend small-scale auctions for sport.

In 2013 she won the bid on a shoebox full of what the auctioneer simply called “children’s doodles.”

They were in fact the writings of two boys, Arthur and Elmer Nelson, who grew up in New Hampshire in the 1890s. These miniature books describe farm life through children’s eyes, and also include illustrated stories of imaginary lands and historical exploits.

Russell—the Mead’s interim director—showed the books to Professor Karen SánchezEppler, who made them the subject of a Mellon Research Seminar last spring. The books are now in the college’s Archives and Special Collections, and they’re among the items that will inform Sánchez-Eppler’s research on children.

Above, a horticultural catalog from the boys’ imaginary world and their drawing of the family farm. Right, an ad they created.

u Ashley Burns designed a semester-long investigation of poverty and housing.

e Kerry Ratigan will teach a new seminar on contemporary social policy issues in China.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

SANDRA COSTELLO

IN PRACTICE

COURSES U The first time Assistant Professor of Political Science Ashley Burns was asked to make a public policy decision, she was fresh out of college and interning for the Charlotte (N.C.) Housing Authority. The CEO wanted Burns to weigh in on a problem, and she dutifully outlined each option and all possible outcomes. “He looked at me like I was crazy,” she says.

“He didn’t want a 20-page paper. He wanted me to tell him what to do.”

Last spring Burns and a colleague, Assistant Professor of Political Science Kerry Ratigan, took part in a Five College effort to bring public policy into the liberal arts classroom, and they’ve used that experience to create new, upper-level, policy-centric seminars.

Two new courses teach students how to make real-life public policy decisions.

Burns has redesigned a previous course into an investigation of poverty and housing. “I want my students to feel like policymakers,” she says. “I want them to be able to take the skills they’ve gotten in political science and put them into practice.”

Next spring Ratigan will teach a new seminar on contemporary social issues in China. Students will research “very specific, focused areas of social policy—health, education, welfare or environmental policy,” she says.

“In a liberal arts environment, we have the intellectual luxury of engaging in philosophical, conceptual debates, and unpacking everything

and making a critique of everything,” Ratigan says. “But policymakers want to know, ‘Well, what do you want us to do about this tomorrow?’”

In her own research, Burns studies public housing as a way to understand social stratification, particularly in the American South. She spent years researching a neighborhood in Durham, N.C., where a public housing community was demolished and then redeveloped as mixed-income housing.

“The idea behind mixedincome housing,” Burns says, “is an assumption that if assisted-housing residents live near relatively more affluent neighbors, those people

will be good role models for the poor. However, such gains would rely on interaction and relationships, and I don’t find such outcomes in my research.”

Ratigan studies health care in rural China. In her survey of more than 1,000 people in 160 villages, she’s found that coastal regions with exportfocused economies “tend to view social policy as a way to further develop their workforce,” and that these regions invest more in health care and education.

By contrast, parts of China that are not dependent on exports are more likely to invest in pensions, housing benefits and poverty alleviation. “They prioritize those programs over health and education,” she says.

JENNY MORGAN Fall 2014 Amherst 11

COLLEGE ROW

Caught Inside

A MYTH A theater performance on the quad kicks off a year of translation-themed activities.

12 Amherst Fall 2014

The Double Edge Theatre show drew from stories in Don Quixote, The Odyssey and Arabian Nights.

ROB MATTSON

SPECTACLES U It was like being caught inside a myth, mid translation.

In September an audience on the first-year quad found itself submerged inside a performance by an unusual theater company. Double Edge Theatre, based in Ashfield, Mass., and known for its rigorous physical performance and collaborative ensemble approach, presented a “traveling spectacle” throughout the entirety of the quad. Actors included troupe member Milena Dabova ’07.

The performance, conducted for Amherst’s annual Copeland Colloquium, drew from stories in Don Quixote, The Odyssey and Arabian Nights and featured the troupe’s trademark style of elaborate sets and acrobatic choreography.

Actors were suspended from trees, stationed atop Frost Library and employed in operating set pieces—a cyclops head, the wooden horse that ambushed Troy, the ship that bore Odysseus home.

Goddesses on platforms, jinn emerging from lamps and a silver horse over the horizon: the crowd was nimbly ushered from piece to piece. These pieces integrated aerials and dance, as well as song and verse in Greek, Albanian, Arabic, Turkish and Georgian.

Amherst’s 2014 Copeland Colloquium, “Words in Transit: The Cultures of Translation,” is a collection of lectures, films, courses and performances examining language in the world today and how language affects immigration, journalism, diplomacy and the role of the humanities in a multicultural society.

The year-long colloquium is being organized by Professors Ilan Stavans, Catherine Ciepiela ’83, Anston Bosman and John Drabinski. W.S.

The Coeducation

BOOK U A new book that explores the heartbreaking and inspiring stories of the first female professors at Amherst gives insight into the evoluWhat was it like for the early female professors at Amherst? tion of gender equity in society and on campus.

The experiences described ELIZABETH ARIES, at left. In in Gender Matters: The First 1975 she “had the great good Half-Century of Women Teachfortune to join Rose Olver” on ing at Amherst—such as being the psychology faculty, “and given a starting salary less thus was the only woman at that than that of a husband “so time who had a senior woman mentor in her department.” as not to upset the stability of the marriage”—serve as a reminder of just how much the college has changed in a generation.

ROSE OLVER, “Amherst now is certainly at left, during her pioneering not the Amherst I came career, and to—it’s not just different, below, with but better,” says Rose Olver, Aries at the the L. Stanton Williams ’41 2011 sympoProfessor of Psychology and sium.

Women’s and Gender Studies, Emerita. “And that is due JANE TAUBMAN, above, arrived in part to the many voices, in 1973 and was the first partreal talent and exceptional time tenure track professor. scholarship of women faculty in the past 50 years.”

Olver was the college’s first female tenure-track professor. She and colleagues Elizabeth Aries, the Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in IN 1974, as the faculty voted on coeduSocial Sciences (Psychology), cation, female professors wore “Keep and Jane Taubman, professor Abreast of the Times” T-shirts. emerita of Russian, together edited the book.

Published by Amherst this through their influence that, time,” says Taubman. “It make up about 46 percent of fall, it chronicles an October in the early ’80s, Amherst wasn’t until the 1990s that the faculty.

2011 campus symposium of implemented a maternitywe started seeing women “We’ve looked at the same name. leave policy that enabled routinely chairing committees coeducation and the The book contains, among professors to take off time and departments. Today we experience of women other elements, transcripts for childbirth. And in 1986, have women serving as the students over and over and of symposium sessions, thanks to a recommendation president and dean of the over again,” Aries says. “What essays from participants, from the Committee on faculty, and there are several we have never looked at is and autobiographies the Conditions of Work for departments that are majority the coeducation, so to speak, and necrologies of the Women, the college initiated female.” of the faculty. What are the “pioneers”—Olver, Aries, its first campus daycare Aries notes that, at present, lessons we can learn so we Taubman and more than program. a large group of new, diverse, don’t repeat our mistakes with 50 other women hired as “Changing a tenure-track talented professors—includthese new faculty? These are Amherst professors between college or university is like ing many women—has arrived critical discussions to keep 1962 and 1983. turning a battleship—it takes on campus. Women now having.” C.J.H. The impact of female professors on college policies has been significant. a TO ORDER a copy of Gender Matters ($25 plus $3.75 shipping /handling), send a check, payable to the Trustees of Amherst College, to the Amherst Communications Office, Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

For example, it was only

AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES (4); JESSICA MESTRE ’10

OF THE FACULTY

Fall 2014 Amherst 13

Ì SPORTS

COLLEGE ROW

When no one else was watching the game, Professor Frank Westhoff was there. Forty years later, he still is.

THE FIRST Best ROB MATTSON (2)

Fan

IT’S EASY to make the case that Frank Westhoff is the No. 1 fan of Amherst sports. The professor of economics has been a constant, generous fixture on the sidelines ever since his arrival on campus in 1973. He reliably attends every women’s soccer home game, as well as most home football and basketball contests. When he’s not in the stands or in the classroom, he’s in his office on the third floor of Converse, where classical music plays softly in the background and Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia—a foam finger, a mini helmet—decorate the shelves.

His first real job

Coeducation’s early years

Westhoff grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, played high school football and was on the track team. He majored in electrical engineering and economics at MIT before starting a Ph.D. program in economics at Yale.

He accepted his first and only “real” job, in the economics department at Amherst, and finished his doctorate a year later. q Megan Kim ’16 dribbles through the Bates defense on Sept. 28 as Westhoff watches from the Hitchcock Field sidelines.

14 Amherst Fall 2014

As a young professor, Westhoff, with his wife, Louise, became friends with Michelle Morgan—then head coach of women’s basketball, lacrosse and soccer—and her husband, Jay. In those early days of coeducation the two husbands were often the only fans at the women’s games.

“To have a consistent faculty presence on the sideline became very important for the

players,” says Morgan, now senior women’s administrator in the athletics department and head coach of women’s golf. “He took an interest in the kids, would see them in passing on campus, remembered their names and would congratulate them on their good efforts.”

HEAD CHEERLEADERS Which psychology professor is an ice hockey fan? Which math professor can’t get enough of Amherst football? Which sociology professor cheers at both softball and volleyball games? Here’s a list of the faculty liaisons to Amherst teams.

BASEBALL Austin Sarat (LJST, political science) Gregory Call (math) Trent Maxey (history)

In the early 2000s then-Athletic Director Peter Gooding instituted a formal faculty liaison program, and Westhoff became the official liaison to women’s soccer. Westhoff has been with the team ever since.

“He’s there for the students if they have any academic questions,” says head coach Jen Hughes. “He’s a great resource for the players and he’s also our No. 1 fan.” Over the years, he has traveled as far as Maine, Vermont and New Jersey to watch the team play.

At the start of each season he invites the players to stop by his office. Some take his classes or have him as their academic adviser. Every spring he takes the senior players, as well as the coaching staff, out to Bistro 63 or Johnny’s Tavern to offer congratulations and say goodbye.

But it’s not always the last goodbye: the relationships he’s built are so strong that he’s been invited to players’ weddings.

At a recent alumni event Hughes asked former players to think of words they associate with the program. “Almost all of them,” she says, “wrote down Professor Westhoff.”

Most memorable games When you’ve attended almost every home game and occasional away games for 40 years, it can be hard to pick

MARK BOX

Making it official

favorites. But two contests stand out: In 1994 Westhoff watched the women’s soccer team play its first national postseason game. And he’ll never forget the abundance of fans who showed up when the women hosted the Final Four, in 1996.

BASKETBALL MEN’S: Ben Lieber (academic support and student research) WOMEN’S: Molly Mead (Center for Community Engagement)

SOCCER Men’s: Rhonda CobhamSander (English) Women’s: Frank Westhoff (economics)

SOFTBALL AND VOLLEYBALL Ronald Lembo (sociology)

SQUASH

What’s new this season Women’s soccer ended last season with a 10-4-3 overall record and a third straight NCAA championship appearance. Now the Purple & White boast a stellar defense, with all-league selections Maya Jackson-Gibson ’15 and Holly Burwick ’16 headlining the unit. While the team lost six of seven top goal producers from 2013, it returned leading scorer Megan Kim ’16.

The team has a talented newcomer in forward Hannah Guzzi ’18, who is leading the team in goals and points.

Among the early victories of the 2014 campaign was a 2-0 win over Williams.

Throughout the fall, Westhoff was there on the sidelines, as always. He’ll continue to be in the seasons to come, devoted as ever. MICHAEL O’BRIEN

FIELD HOCKEY Sandra Burkett (chemistry)

MEN’S: Robert Benedetto (math) David Ratner (biology) WOMEN’S: Elizabeth Young (chemistry)

FOOTBALL

SWIMMING

Peter Uvin (provost) Danielle Benedetto (math) Vanessa Walker (history)

Mark Marshall (chemistry)

GOLF MEN’S: Paul Rockwell (French) WOMEN’S: Sarah Turgeon (psychology)

ICE HOCKEY MEN’S: Catherine Sanderson (psychology) WOMEN’S: Samuel Morse (art history)

TENNIS WOMEN’S: David Sofield (English)

TRACK/CROSS COUNTRY MEN’S: Rebecca Sinos (classics) WOMEN’S: Ashley Carter (physics)

LACROSSE MEN’S: Matthew Schulkind (psychology) WOMEN’S: Nicola Courtright (art history) Fall 2014 Amherst 15

THE

BIG Picture AFTERNOON LIGHT filled a peaceful quad during fall break. e If you would like a reprint of this photo, email magazine@amherst.edu with your name and address, and we will send you a complimentary copy.

Photographed on Oct. 12, 2014, by BOB O’CONNOR

Fall 2014 Amherst 17

POINT OF VIEW

DON’T BE SO SURE HOW MEDICINE IS LIKE AN LJST COURSE AT AMHERST.

BY AARON E. C A R R O L L ’ 94

Carroll is an associate dean for research mentoring and a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

He is a regular contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times.

18

AMHERST | Fall 2014

WHEN I WAS A STUDENT AT AMHERST, I sought out classes that relied on tests, not essays. I was always more comfortable with subjects that had answers, where you could be right or wrong. I especially enjoyed classes in computer science, although it wasn’t my major, because when you were done, there was no question whether you’d done well or poorly.

Things worked or they didn’t.

I thought that was how medicine was going to be. In medical school I spent countless hours memorizing facts about the human body. I learned how cells worked, how organs functioned. After years of study, I was finally released into the hospital, ready to practice.

That’s when it all began to fall apart.

I found that the way we treat disease is incredibly doctor-dependent. Some doctors are interventionists, ordering lots of tests and procedures. Others are minimalists, preferring to let the body heal itself. Yet for many illnesses, I learned, people had the same health outcomes no matter what we did.

What stunned me—though it will surprise no one who has ever encountered a medical professional—is how sure we always sounded about each treatment plan.

Some doctors know how to say, “I don’t know.” But their ranks are too small.

Doing medical research is hard, timeconsuming and expensive. The number of things we haven’t studied dwarfs the number of things we have. Often, we have to take what data do exist and extrapolate them to cover wider areas. Experience guides us. But we rarely express

this “best-guess mentality” to patients.

I questioned everything my attending physicians said. Why did we charge $150 to build foam sleep wedges for babies with gastroesophageal reflux? Why did we put coughing babies in croup tents?

This did not endear me to my supervisors, and I soon realized I’d be better off helping to answer the questions myself.

When I shifted to research, I learned that many treatments don’t work or have no evidence to support their use.

These days I spend most of my time talking about health policy, often health care reform. Again, we have few real answers; that prevents almost no one from speaking as if they are sure their opinions are correct.

This is a problem. Our system is an utter mess. I know people exist who believe the U.S. health care system is number one in all ways, and I hear from many of them daily, but on almost any metric you pick, we’re woefully behind.

We are one of the few systems in the developed world that fails to provide universal access to its citizens. We are unbelievably expensive, in terms of both insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. More people go without needed care in the United States than in any comparable nation. And our quality, while excellent for certain conditions in certain hospitals, falls short when considered for the country as a whole.

Our life expectancy and our mortality rates are surprisingly middling-topoor when measured against those of comparable countries.

Ideas for reform are rarely rational or based on evidence. In the same breath, Illustration by MONIKA AICHELE

Americans will demonize Canada’s insurance system while lionizing Medicare.

Single-payer health care is evidently American-as-apple-pie if you’re 65, but tyranny-and-the-end-of-freedom if you’re 64. Conversely, people will rail against for-profit companies in medicine while personally enjoying the many benefits of drugs, medical devices and private insurance.

Such surety in the face of so little data can lead one to despair.

In those moments, I think back to one of the few classes I took at Amherst that was essay-based, “Legal Institutions and Democratic Practice,” taught by Professor Lawrence Douglas. I swear, I can’t remember why I chose that course.

It covered the history of the courts in the United States, highlighting important cases along the way and how legal decisions changed the way the country worked over time.

Often, I was sure I knew which side of a case was “right.” Yet many in the class believed the opposite. And Professor Douglas didn’t tell us the answer, because there was no “answer.” How do you proceed when you don’t know the right thing to do?

Years later, I decided the answer lay in the class itself. The point of discussing the cases in class was not to reach the truth. It was to teach us the importance of the arguing. We have to keep challenging, keep refining our thoughts. Over

time, if we allow the argument to continue, we might learn what’s best.

This understanding has made me more humble about what I “know.” It’s led me to write a few books debunking medical myths. It’s led me to hold greater equipoise about what I might find in my research. Most importantly, it’s led me to bring up ideas in public forums, and to listen to what people say back.

I always wanted to be a test-taker, not a writer. But there’s no progress to be made in only repeating what we “know.”

It’s not always fun to read the online comments about what I say, but it’s immensely rewarding to be part of the debate. As I learned many years ago, it’s so often the argument that matters. k Fall 2014 Amherst 19

BY TRACY JARRETT ’11 e

Stories

of 20

Photographs of Tracy Jarrett by BETH PERKINS AMHERST Fall 2014

Julie Keith Jarrett ’81 died from AIDS in 1994. To imagine the person her mother might have become, Tracy Jarrett ’11 traveled from East Harlem to Cape Town to Chicago.

Life Fall 2014 Amherst 21

I remember the day my mom died. The night before, we’d fallen asleep together in her room. I was wrapped up tight in my Princess Jasmine sleeping bag at the foot of her bed as she slept delicately next to my grandmother.

22 Amherst Fall 2014

Fall 2014 Amherst 23

I woke up

THE NEXT MORNING IN A PANIC ON the floor of my own bedroom, still zipped in my sleeping bag, while my dad slept on my bottom bunk. When I got up and ran for the door my dad suddenly awoke. He tried to stop me, but before he could say a word, I’d already run down the hallway into my parents’ room. Mom wasn’t there. I stared at her empty bed for what seemed like forever.

No one had to say a word. I knew she was gone.

It is now 20 years since I stood in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom not understanding why my 35-yearold mother, Julie Keith Jarrett ’81, had just died from AIDS. Even now, at 25, I can’t say that I fully understand why she died or why my father and I are HIV-free, but I can say that I am learning to answer questions about

family about what it was like to learn my mom was HIV-positive and to take care of her, knowing people would judge her and that she would die. In New York I met with a mother and daughter who were educating women in their East Harlem community about how to live healthily with HIV. Susan and Christina Rodriguez’s quest was motivated by their personal experiences: both women were infected with the virus.

Halfway around the globe, in Cape Town, South Africa, I spent time with another HIV-positive mother, Nozi Samela, who was dedicating her life to mentoring other mothers with the virus and helping them learn to take care of themselves and their newborn babies.

Two years later, in spring 2014, I caught up with these courageous women.

CAPE TOWN “I’M SORRY TO SAY THAT YOU HAVE MISSED A lot,” Nozi said, laughing, when she picked up the phone this May. Hearing her familiar voice took me back to South Africa, where we’d met for the first time; I still remember the salmoncolored coat she wore that day, her smile, her bubbly laugh.

In July 2012 Nozi had been new to her job as a communications associate for mothers2mothers, an international nonprofit that trains HIV-positive mothers to help other HIV-positive women who are pregnant. It also sets up mentorship programs aimed at preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

Nozi had just found out she was pregnant with her second child. At the time, I never would have known that Nozi was living with HIV. She looked happy and healthy; she was glowing, and she was thriving in her career. But that was not always the case. Eight years earlier, she’d told me, she was 19, six months pregnant with her first child and recently diagnosed with HIV. She was living at home, taking care of her siblings and cousins, unable to attend university because her aunt had spent the money Nozi had saved for enrollment.

She felt scared, stuck and unsure of her future.

With the help of m2m, Nozi changed her life. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy and became one of the program’s mentors, sharing life-saving knowledge, such has when and how to breastfeed, how to take HIV medication, how to talk to your spouse about family planning and how to eat healthily. But then she suffered the worst loss imaginable: In 2007 her toddler son was killed in a car accident. “I hated the organization,” Nozi told me in 2012, as she looked back on her son’s death and her role as an m2m mentor mother.

“It was called mothers2mothers, and I was no longer a mother.”

Over time Nozi redefined what being a mother meant to her. She didn’t leave m2m. In fact, she became more involved. “Mothers2mothers is not just about helping women accept their HIV status, or about helping women give birth to HIV-negative children; it

In Chicago I interviewed my family about what it was like to learn my mom was HIV-positive and to take care of her.

COURTESY TRACY JARRETT

Because Julie Keith Jarrett (right, with Tracy) was not in a highrisk group for HIV, she went untreated for a decade.

the life my mother might have lived had she been diagnosed at a time when HIV wasn’t a death sentence.

Many of these answers came in 2012 when I set out on a reporting journey for GlobalPost across two continents to document the lives of women, in particular mothers, living with HIV. The strength and courage illuminated in their daily lives made me proud of who I imagined my mom would have been. Having HIV wouldn’t have meant a life of unhappiness, but instead a life helping and caring for others—including me.

In my hometown of Chicago I interviewed my

24 Amherst Fall 2014

©PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON/CORBIS

is helping women go on with their lives,” she said in 2012. “It is helping women understand that being HIV-positive is not the end of life, but actually a beginning of a new chapter.”

Today, Nozi has a 2-year-old daughter, Mbali.

“All over again things have changed for me,” Nozi says now. This time, she says, motherhood is not simply about loving her new baby but about learning to be a mother again, about discovering Mbali’s personality and how it differs from that of her son.

Nozi had a complicated delivery with Mbali that left the mother with no feeling in her body, for reasons doctors could not diagnose. The numbness made nursing impossible. As doctors tried to figure out what might have gone wrong, Nozi was hospitalized and Mbali put in the hands of nurses. Nozi was concerned, with good reason. Formula is against the World Health Organization’s instructions for HIV-positive mothers, because when combined with breastfeeding, it can increase the risk of transmitting the virus.

Eventually, Nozi recovered and decided to breastfeed. Little Mbali, meanwhile, needed to be tested.

“I will be honest with you: I was scared. I was terrified,” Nozi says of taking Mbali to the clinic. “I knew that I had taken my treatment; I knew I had done everything right, but then I still knew that even if the mother takes antiretroviral drugs and does everything right there is still a 2 percent chance her baby could be infected.”

The test took a week to process. “The day I went to [the] clinic to fetch the results I didn’t hear anything the counselor said to me. I was praying that if anything could change now, let it be changed. I knew if she was HIV-positive nothing could change at that moment, but I was praying for [a] miracle.”

Mbali’s test came back negative. “For a moment I was confused about what ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ meant—mind you, I am someone who has been working with HIV for over six years, but in that moment I was so confused the nurse had to explain it to me,” Nozi remembers. “I was so happy to learn my baby was HIV-negative. Even though I knew there would still be a small chance for her to contract HIV through the course of breastfeeding, in that moment I was so happy.” Nozi was determined to follow the WHO guidelines to exclusively breastfeed Mbali.

These guidelines are based on research showing that a combination of exclusive breastfeeding and antiretroviral treatment significantly reduces the risk of transmitting the virus from mother to child.

With the help of m2m, which made sure she received pre- and postnatal care specifically tailored to HIV-positive mothers, Nozi protected both of her children from contracting the virus.

M2m’s efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission “are paying off,” says the organization’s cofounder and international director Robin Smalley, “but there are some countries where there’s a long way to go,” such as Mozambique and Botswana, two of South Africa’s neighbors. Under the leadership of CEO Frank Beadle de Palomo, m2m has expanded its services to address more general maternal and newborn health issues in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Our mothers are now being trained to do TB testing, to give referrals for cervical-cancer screening, to raise awareness about malaria prevention and to determine malnutrition,” Smalley says. M2m is also working with the governments of Malawi and Uganda, where HIV is virulent and access to health care limited, on programs that would provide onestop testing and support for women, so that they do not have to go to multiple clinics for different services.

Nozi hopes to use the coming years to travel abroad as an ambassador for m2m. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.4 million children are living with HIV, the majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Most acquired HIV from their mothers, but with interventions such as antiretroviral therapy, the risk of mother-to-child transmission can be reduced to 2 percent. “I may have saved my daughter from HIV, and other women have saved their children, but there are so many women giving birth to HIV-positive children,” Nozi says. “I feel that I still have a role to play in advocating for mothers living with HIV in the entire universe.”

“I may have saved my daughter from HIV,” says Nozi Samela, “but there are so many women giving birth to HIVpositive children. I feel that I still have a role to play.”

EAST HARLEM A FEW DAYS AFTER I CALLED NOZI, I WENT TO EAST Harlem, N.Y., to visit Christina Rodriguez and her mother, Susan. It was my first time visiting their office in a local community center. I walked up the stairs to Susan’s office, where Christina greeted me Fall 2014 Amherst 25

COURTESY TRACY JARRETT

$180,000 in capital funding for a mobile cooking classroom and emergency response center. “This district has one of highest rates of obesity, poverty, asthma and cardiovascular disease in the state,” Susan says. “It’s really important that we bring what we know to the community in terms of healthy eating and cooking.”

SMART has also been working with the Harlem Community & Academic Partnership to become “researchready,” a technical designation that would allow SMART to collect data on their own programs to assess and then publicize the impact they are having. “Government and academic institutions have their own criteria for assessing effectiveness of programs, so a lot of community-based organizations get left out when talking about effecting change,” says Janet Carter, SMART’s program director. “Becoming research-ready is about bringing us and what we do to the table.” Susan gave a presentation on SMART’s journey to becoming research-ready at the July 2014 International AIDS Conference in Australia, and Christina went with her.

Christina hopes to graduate from college next semester and has a long-term boyfriend. Susan is helping another daughter raise two young boys and is supporting Christina’s younger brother as he finishes college. Despite these competing interests and obligations, neither Christina nor Susan will rest until SMART makes a visible and lasting difference in the lives of those in their community.

“When she talks about this mobile kitchen project, this is when she’s shining and glowing,” Christina says of her mother. “This project, that’s her drive right now.”

“I hit the jackpot with my kids,” Susan says. “I’m continually amazed at what all three of my children do.”

I was amazed by Christina, too. Before meeting her, I’d avoided thinking deeply about what my life would be like had I contracted the virus—I wouldn’t have much of a life, I thought. But Christina, with her curly locks that closely resemble my own, proved to me that an HIV-positive life is one worth living, and that, in fact, your HIV status is not the most interesting or defining thing about you.

Here we are—Christina with HIV, me without—and as we navigate our 20s, we both butt heads with our parents when they tell us what to do; we both experience happiness and heartbreak in relationships; we’re both driven by a passion for improving the lives of people with HIV. I thank Christina for showing me what my own life might be like had I

Susan and Christina Rodriguez are the motherdaughter team behind SMART, a group run by and for HIV-positive women to encourage healthy living.

with a warm hug. Susan got up from behind her desk and hugged me as well. I felt like I was home.

When I first met Christina two years ago, I couldn’t help but compare our stories. We are roughly the same age. She was 5 when her dad died; I was 5 when my mom died. Susan had contracted HIV from Christina’s dad; my dad did not contract HIV from my mom. Christina was HIV-positive; I was not. We were opposite sides of the same coin.

Susan, like Nozi, helped me envision the life my mother might have had if she’d lived. Christina was the only one I knew who could show me what my life might have been had I been born positive.

Christina was the only one of her parents’ three children to contract the virus. Her HIV-positive status propelled her to help kids in the same situation, and she and her siblings founded a youth program under SMART, the community-based group that Susan had founded in 1998. SMART University

Before meeting Christina, I’d avoided thinking deeply about what my life would be like had I contracted the virus.

(Sisterhood Mobilized for AIDS/HIV Research and Treatment) is an educational organization run by and for HIV-positive women to teach about and encourage healthy living.

When I first met Susan and Christina, SMART served fewer than 500 people and struggled to find consistent funding. Since then, the organization has expanded, moving to a more central location in East Harlem. While funding is still a struggle, SMART now helps close to 750 people. In 2013 the organization was selected by community vote to receive 26 Amherst Fall 2014

MY FAMILY’S STORY I PROMISED SUSAN, CHRISTINA AND NOZI THAT I would keep in touch. Each time I hear their stories, the gaping hole that opened up as I stood staring at my mother’s empty bed is filled up a bit—made a little smaller by their love for life, their love for their families and the pieces of their lives that they have shared with me.

My mom never told anyone how she thought she may have contracted the virus. My grandmother has come to believe that my mom got it from a man whom she was dating in her early-to-mid-20s. He died from AIDS a few years before my mom did.

My dad believes she got it before that, maybe from someone in college. But because my mom did not fit among any of the “four H’s”—hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, homosexuals or Haitians, a rule of thumb doctors used in the early ’90s to pinpoint people at risk for HIV—she went untreated for nearly 10 years.

Perhaps because I look uncannily like my mom, or perhaps because they hold on to her through me, my dad and grandma often unwittingly call me “Julie.” Every time I hear her name, I am reminded of her accomplishments—Amherst graduate, successful businesswoman, mayoral aide and mom.

She taught me how to pump my legs on the big kid swing, how to chew on the side of my mouth when I had a loose tooth and how to never lose my faith.

After my mom died, my family never mentioned her disease, at least not to me—it was a secret. My grandma says this is because no one wanted me to lose friends, to be gossiped about, to be ostracized.

If people knew you were around someone who was HIV-positive, they would not want to touch you, come to your house or eat off your silverware.

However, my mom did not hide her diagnosis.

She looked sick; she had lost weight and her hair.

People sometimes advised her to claim to have another disease, such as cancer, but she wouldn’t.

Aside from me, our whole family knew about her HIV, and so did close friends. But no one ever talked about it. My grandma says there were no feelings to talk about, because they all knew what happened to AIDS patients: they died.

Today my grandma knows that times have changed, but she remains nervous when talking about my mom and HIV. She worries that, in sharing my own story, I will brand myself in a negative way. When I was reporting for GlobalPost in South Africa in 2012, my grandma was proud—she saved every article I wrote and said she was inspired by my speaking out. Still, whenever I tell her that I am writing another story, she asks the same two questions: Is NBC—my full-time employer—OK with me yet

again covering HIV for GlobalPost? And am I sure I don’t want to write about something else, so that I don’t pigeonhole myself as the girl who writes only about AIDS? I always answer “yes” to both questions, and whenever I visit Chicago, I find my newest article printed out in my grandmother’s room. She’s coming around to the fact that my interest in writing about AIDS is not merely a phase. My reporting on women and families affected by HIV is something I will carry with me throughout my career. I want to give HIV-positive people the chance to tell their stories, and to make sure they are not ostracized or forgotten. It is important for me to tell the story that my mother cannot tell for herself. k Tracy Jarrett ’11 is an award-winning reporter and writer for NBC News. Her work has appeared on Dateline NBC, Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today and nbcnews.com. Her reporting on HIV in South Africa was made possible by a Kaiser Family Foundation/GlobalPost reporting fellowship. An earlier version of this article appeared on GlobalPost.

Julie Keith Jarrett in her Amherst yearbook photo. “After my mom died, my family never mentioned her disease, at least not to me,” writes her daughter.

AMHERST COLLEGE OLIO

contracted HIV. This is something I didn’t expect to find on the journey to understanding who my mom might have become.

Fall 2014 Amherst 27

28 Amherst Fall 2014

Forty years ago Theodore Rosengarten ’66 wrote an oral history of an Alabama tenant farmer.

This summer it was a bestseller for the second time.

A Smash Hit. Again.

BY STEPHEN HOFFIUS Photograph by John McWilliams q

Fall 2014 Amherst u Ned Cobb with wife Viola and son Andrew. Courtesy Theodore Rosengarten.

29

ON APRIL 18 THE NEW YORK TIMES published the kind of rave review that any author would love, but especially if the book in question was first published 40 years earlier. It said that when customers at Square Books, the great independent bookstore in Oxford, Miss., come looking for the one book that best describes the South, the owner directs them to All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, by Theodore Rosengarten ’66. The critic, Dwight Garner, seemed unfamiliar with the book, an oral history of an Alabama tenant farmer, though it had won a National Book Award when published in 1974. He found it, read it and proclaimed in the review, “[I]t is superb—both serious history and a serious pleasure, a story that reads as if Huddie Ledbetter spoke it while W. E. B. Du Bois took dictation.”

Rosengarten was one of 19 students who walked out. “I had told my mother what was going to happen,” he remembers. “I didn’t tell my father. So my father poked my mother and asked, ‘Hannah, what’s he doing?’” The next day a photograph of the walkout appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

The following year, when he was called for the draft and went for his physical, Rosengarten undressed to reveal The next day the book soared to No. Robinson was smashing barriers as well himself painted head to toe with a tap1 on Amazon’s list of best-sellers. Sevas base hits. “For me,” Rosengarten has estry of anti-war slogans and symbols. A eral companies have since asked about written, “the narratives of black people walking billboard, he was immediately the film rights. An audiobook will be and Jews in America were emerging sidismissed. (A similar stunt a year later released this year. All God’s Dangers is a multaneously.” He adds, “I’ve never felt might have led to his deployment.) hit. Again. an artificial separation between black libInstead of heading to Vietnam, Rosengarten, who lives off a dirt road eration and the struggles of Jewish peoRosengarten pursued graduate school at in a South Carolina fishing village north ple.” His career has been built on both.

Harvard in a program called the history of Charleston, reports that the book of American civilization (now American 1963, after a year at the Unihas been in print continuously for four studies). Late in December 1968 he and versity of Denver, Rosengarten decades. Just like Garner, readers keep his girlfriend, Dale Rosen, a Radcliffe transferred to Amherst. He loved discovering it and are thrilled when they undergraduate, traveled to Alabama to hearing professors in American studdo. The author regularly receives phone interview Ned Cobb, who had been acies debate major issues: the Cherokee calls and email from readers who claim tive in the Alabama Sharecroppers Union removal, the Vietnam War, civil rights. that it perfectly describes their fathers— in the 1930s. Rosen was writing her or grandfathers—black or white. All God’s “It was a great method of teaching, and senior thesis on the organization. When very inspiring, to know that nothing is Dangers has inspired oral historians the police went to foreclose on some really settled and carved in stone,” he around the globe for decades. James Earl of his neighbors, Cobb had confronted Jones bought the film rights years ago but says. “At Amherst you were taught a them and gotten into a shootout. He had eventually gave them up. A one-man play canon, but you were also taught to disserved 12 years in prison. sent.” He squeezed into crowded lecture starring Cleavon Little had a brief run Rosengarten and Rosen pulled up to halls to hear Leo Marx intone passages off-Broadway. the home where Cobb was living. He stood up as if he had been expecting them.

As a child he had been Ned Cobb stood up as if he had been expecting them. As a child he had told that after slavery been told that after slavery Northern whites had arrived in Alabama to Northern whites arrived in Alabama to help black help black people, and though they had left, they would return. people, and though they had left, they would refrom Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn.

All God’s Dangers is one of only two turn. They came back during the union He heard William H. Pritchard ’53, in books Rosengarten has written in his drives in the 1930s. And now they were 45-year career. But as he leans back in his his early 30s, interpret T.S. Eliot, while here again. “Hello, my children,” he poet Archibald MacLeish, then about home office, looking out over the marsh, greeted them. “I always recognize my 70, challenged Pritchard from the back he says, “I’m pleased with my productivpeople when I see them. Come on in. ity.” He’s talking not just about the books row. He signed up for one of Ed Dolan’s Come on in.” classes on Homeric Greek, then came he’s published, but about his life.

The three sat down to chat, and Rosen Ted Rosengarten grew up Jewish in the back for more. asked Cobb why he had joined the union.

Like many of his classmates, RosenCrown Heights section of Brooklyn—a “I was haulin a load of hay out of Apagarten took part in the anti-Vietnam borough that has produced a surprising falya one day,” he began. Eight hours number of Southern historians—at a time War demonstrations of the mid-’60s. later he completed his answer, by way of When U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert when Eastern European refugees were explaining the joys and sorrows of growMcNamara was about to receive an honmoving into the neighborhood (and into ing cotton as a black man in Alabama. orary degree at commencement in 1966, his apartment building) and when Jackie Rosen and Rosengarten staggered away,

IN

30 Amherst Fall 2014

“I’ve never felt an artificial separation between black liberation and the struggles of the Jewish people,” says Rosengarten.

His career has been built on both.

Photograph by John McWilliams

Fall 2014 Amherst 31

overwhelmed by the bulk and beauty of his account. From this impromptu interview Rosen took the information she needed for that portion of her thesis. Rosengarten soon realized he “had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey,” as one reviewer would write.

Two years later Rosengarten moved to Alabama, where he lived in a converted Pullman car. Several mornings a week he arrived at Cobb’s house with his tape recorder and sat on the porch or in the toolshed, asking questions. Cobb told him stories that may or may not have answered his queries. Each day Rosengarten played for Cobb the preceding day’s conversation. The old man scowled and retold the story, spinning it slightly differently. Rosengarten stayed for months.

“I wanted to learn a way of thinking, something more private than information, more revealing,” he has written. “I was seeking their reflections, the stories they told themselves about themselves.”

the manuscript from Pantheon and delivered it to Knopf, a few floors away.

Within a week he had a contract.

The book was like no other: a black farmer telling stories in colorful language about his struggles and triumphs, philosophizing, teaching. It begins, “My daddy had three brothers—Hubert, Bob, and Nate—and I’m named after one of em. Now, that Hubert, he was a over-average man.” One day Hubert went up to a white man’s house where he saw a dangerous-looking dog in the yard. He asked the white man to restrain the animal, and the man claimed the dog was “wired up, I fenced him.” But when Hubert opened the gate the dog immediately attacked him. “Uncle Hubert, he just jumped behind that white man, picked him up by his waist and commenced a slingin him at the dog, fightin the dog with the man. … Uncle Hubert just knocked that dog down goin and a comin until he knocked one of the white man’s shoes off… .”

Over the next 550 pages Ned Cobb feuds with his father (a man born when Lincoln was president), marries twice, teaches his children as best he can, raises large crops of cotton and corn and wins a reputation as a good provider. Along the way he is cheated by some white landlords and merchants, befriended by others; he generally outsmarts his foes. But in a climactic scene with the pathos of Greek tragedy, he stands up against the sheriff, and as a consequence leaves for prison. Robert Coles wrote that the book

thropology,” he remembers, “and some suspicion against the tape recorder as a tool of a social-change agenda, except when the speakers were retired generals or corporate executives. But as soon as the book appeared—it all happened very quickly—the dean of the graduate school called me and said they would like to award me a Ph.D. for the work.”

SO

what does a young scholar who has produced a masterpiece at age 30 do for a follow up?

Well, Rosengarten and Rosen, who eventually married, moved to McClellanville, S.C., a town so small it is often omitted from maps. They felt as if they were living Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before—no stoplights, no coffee shop and a main street that ended at the town dock. They found some likeminded people, many but not all natives of the area. They rented a small frame house that they papered with National Geographic maps to keep the wind from blowing between the boards. And they slowly, painstakingly, dug into their new community in ways he put it all together. not unlike how Ned Cobb lived in TalHe transcribed the lapoosa County, Ala. interviews and, in those pre-personalThey learned to fish and crab and computer days, cut the pages apart and shrimp. They grew a garden and baked taped them back together. The floors of bread. They shared stories with their new his apartment were carpeted with manuneighbors; they listened a lot. script. Eventually he edited all the stories In 1978 they bought 26 acres of botinto a massive narrative, changing Ned tomland on the edge of the Cape Romain Cobb’s name to Nate Shaw to protect National Wildlife Refuge. They told Cobb and his family from recrimination. themselves that if the persistent mosquitoes drove them away, as often seemed likely, at least the land would The Rosengartens papered their house with National Geographic maps be a good investment. In to keep the wind from blowing through the boards. And they dug into 1980 they built a frame house with windows that their new community in ways not unlike how Ned Cobb lived in Alabama. overlooked the changing colors of the marsh; Because the labor story was cenagain, a good investment, not necessarily “possesses the same luminous power we tral to the book, Rosengarten took his associate with Faulkner.” In the Times 40 a permanent home. years later, Garner would compare it to manuscript to the left-wing publisher They had a son, Rafael, in 1979, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 Pantheon, a division of Random House. another, Carlin, in 1984. They worked to classic by James Agee and Walker Evans Eventually the Pantheon editors proestablish a public elementary school with about white tenant farmers. posed cutting out what they considered other parents and a remarkable school As the praise piled up in 1975, the the extraneous stories—“all that stuff administrator, Juanita Middleton, who Harvard committee that oversaw doctorabout mules and farming,” the very had moved back to McClellanville after ates in Rosengarten’s program changed substance of Cobb’s life—and paring the more than a decade in New York City, its mind. Previously the members had manuscript down to the labor confrontawith the goal of “revolutionizing educaturned down his proposal to record Ned tions. Rosengarten refused. A Harvard tion” in the community where she was Cobb’s life story as the basis for a dismentor gave him the name of an editor born and raised. The Rosengarten boys sertation. “There was some feeling that at Alfred A. Knopf, a different division of were among the 10 percent of the school oral history belonged in sociology or anRandom House. Rosengarten picked up population that was white. The effort to

THEN

32 Amherst Fall 2014

establish a quality middle school in town took more years, and many contentious meetings with residents who balked at having a school that was mostly AfricanAmerican in the heart of the village.

And they continued to do history work. At the South Carolina Historical Society, Rosengarten was introduced to the journal of Thomas B. Chaplin, an antebellum cotton planter from St. Helena Island near Beaufort, S.C. He transcribed and published it, along with a biography of Chaplin. Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (1986) won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Tombee describes the desperate times around the American Civil War with a narrative as strong as if it were a novel.

Rosengarten once said, “What I found distinctive about the journal was its picture of ordinary life—the naming of things and the ebb and flow of relationships, the diminution of experience by monotony and its elevation by passion.

Great events loom behind the scenes, but in the visible world, people are eating, working, sleeping, falling ill and dying.”

The cover of the first edition featured a wood-block illustration by Dale.

Rosengarten received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 and spent most of the money in no time, paying bills, buying a new boat (almost required for living in the area), and covering the costs of trailers for neighbors whose homes were destroyed when Hurricane Hugo flattened much of McClellanville in September of that year.

He taught for short stints at Duke, Harvard and the University of California, Irvine. He wrote speeches for the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities and published essays on a wide range of topics.

But a great deal of his work has had nothing to do with history. He founded two rural soccer clubs and coached in both of them. In the early years most of the players were African-American, from low-income homes. They needed instruction, but also shoes, uniforms, transportation and, often, encouragement and dreams. Rosengarten prodded them to finish high school and helped them find scholarships to enter college.

He coached them for life, not just soccer.

But they also played great soccer, often whipping opponents from Charleston’s lily-white suburbs.

Ted and Dale Rosengarten have often worked together on projects. One of Dale’s passions has been the local coiled baskets constructed of native sweetgrass, bulrush and pine needles, wrapped with strips of palmetto fronds. For centuries in South Carolina, lowcountry AfricanAmericans have made these baskets in styles not unlike those made by their ancestors in Africa. They are among the most iconic art forms of the area. In 1986 Dale published an exhibition catalog, Row upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry, then expanded her research on the connections between lowcountry baskets and those made in Africa. In 2008 she, Ted and colleague Enid Schildkrout published a monumental book on the subject, Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art, which accompanied a traveling exhibit.

THE

couple have also combined research and writing on the subject of South Carolina Jewish heritage. Dale curated an exhibition and assembled an elegant catalog, A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life (2002), which Ted edited and introduced. For 20 years Dale has built up a Jewish Heritage Collection for the Special Collections department of the College of Charleston library.

Ted Rosengarten too now concentrates on Jewish history. He teaches at the College of Charleston, where he holds the Zucker/Goldberg Chair in Holocaust Education, and at the Honors College at the University of South Carolina. Every other summer he and Dale

lead student tours to Poland, Germany and other countries.

Just as he originally experienced Eastern European immigration to Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson at the same time, so he sees direct ties between the slavery under which Ned Cobb’s father lived and the concentration camps to which he takes his students. He has written, “I would say about Nazism what historian Frank Tannenbaum said about slavery in Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, published just after World War II: ‘Nothing escaped’ the influence of the Nazi program to kill the Jews, ‘Nothing and no one.’ Like slavery before it, Nazism ‘changed the form of the state, the nature of property, the system of law, the organization of labor, the role of the church as well as its character, the notions of justice, ethics, ideas of right and wrong.’ Nazi ideas, like slavery itself, ‘influenced the architecture, the clothing, the cooking, the politics, the literature, the morals of the entire group—white and black [Aryan and Jew], men and women, old and young.’”

Because of those connections, Rosengarten’s classes on the Holocaust are wide-ranging. He references African history. He describes slavery in America.

“He’s the most moving speaker I’ve ever heard,” says one of his students, Catherine Mueller.

Rosengarten’s involvement with many of his students and student-athletes extends beyond the classroom and tours.

He oversees senior theses and encourages career aspirations. He has helped edit the books and articles of students and friends, and even of strangers.

So when Rosengarten says he’s satisfied with his productivity, he’s not thinking just of the books he has added to bookshelves, but of the way he has worked with his community, friends, neighbors and students. As he walks around a classroom today, peering over his glasses, tossing out questions, his students often look to him the way he sat transfixed before Ned Cobb. They have found an openhearted, generous man who shares what he has learned from college classrooms, Alabama cotton fields and Nazi death camps. They have found a master storyteller. k Stephen Hoffius is a freelance writer and editor in Charleston, S.C. Fall 2014 Amherst 33

34 Amherst Fall 2014

OF Wall

The Populists

PHOTOGRAPH BY Asia Kepka

35 AMHERST

Winthrop H. Smith Jr. ’71 gives an inside perspective on Merrill Lynch from its start in 1914 to its acquisition by Bank of America in 2008.

FALL 2014

STREET

TEN YEARS INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION TWO AMHERST MEN, Charles E. Merrill ’08 and Winthrop H. Smith ’16, set out to teach the average American to invest in the stock market. This effort to “bring Wall Street to Main Street” revolutionized the financial world, made Merrill Lynch a household name and fostered capital growth after World War II. In Catching Lightning in a Bottle, his comprehensive history of Merrill Lynch, Winthrop H. Smith Jr. ’71 provides an inside perspective on the firm from its start in 1914 to its acquisition by Bank of America in 2008. The author—son and namesake of a Merrill Lynch founder—is himself a 28-year veteran of the firm, and he knew all of its CEOs. He left the company in 2002 over disagreements about its future direction.

“The book sheds vital light on two eras,” according to a review in The Economist: “the early years that saw the expansion of the firm and of populist finance, and on the bleak-post-millennial decade when its confidence and vision collapsed along with much of Wall Street’s reputation.”

Cullen Murphy ’74, editor at large of Vanity Fair and chairman of the college’s board of trustees, interviewed Smith—now the majority owner and president of Sugarbush Resort in Vermont—for the online book club Amherst Reads.

FALL 2014

| Interview by CULLEN MURPHY ’74 |

AMHERST

36

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is one of the most iconic names in the history of American business. Can you give a quick portrait of the first four of these people, leaving Smith aside for a moment?

Merrill Lynch began in 1914 as a single-person operation. The Amherst non-grad Charlie Merrill started the firm as a 29-year-old, and then he asked a friend he’d met at the YMCA, Eddie Lynch, to come into the partnership.

The company grew through a series of acquisitions. One of the most important was in 1941, when they acquired a New Orleans firm, Fenner &

Beane. In the 1930s, after Merrill had exited the business, my father and his other partners joined the Chicago firm of E.A. Pierce, and when they came back together in 1940 the Pierce name was added.

What had Merrill and Lynch been doing up to the point when they started the firm?

Charlie Merrill was a marvelous character. As a young man he was an entrepreneur and worked for his dad in Florida. He came to Wall Street because of a girlfriend and got a job through her father. He decided to strike out on his own and convinced Eddie

Lynch to come on and be his partner. In many ways it was an odd-couple relationship. Charlie was a bon vivant, visionary, creative.

Eddie Lynch was in many ways like the governor on a car. He was the check-andbalance. He would talk Charlie out of bad ideas and bring discipline. By the 1920s they had become millionaires at a very, very young age.

It sounds like one of those classic combinations. What about the fifth name, Smith, which you happen to have as well?

My dad graduated from Amherst in 1916 and set off to get a job in Boston,

but he found the firms he interviewed with to be kind of snobby and arrogant, so he made his way to New York and started at another firm—for $7 a week as a runner—until an Amherst classmate said, “There’s this new firm, Merrill Lynch. You ought to go interview there.”

That began a 40-year friendship with Charlie Merrill, first his boss and mentor, then his friend and partner. My father became the managing partner in 1940. He effectively ran the firm for 21 years and was the person who convinced Merrill to come back into the business and start the modern Merrill

FALL 2014

RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Charles E. Merril ’08, left, talking with Winthrop H. Smith ’16 in 1950. “They started with the principle that the client’s interest had to come first,” says Winthrop H. Smith Jr. ’71.

37 AMHERST

“IT WASN’T THE most obvious time to try a new business paradigm. But Merrill and my dad believed they could build trust back in investing.”

FALL 2014 AMHERST

38

“IF WE ARE going to restore the integrity in the capital markets that is so needed, the middle class has to believe they have a chance, not just the 1 percent.�

Photograph by Asia Kepka

You titled your book Catching Lightning in a Bottle.

What do you mean to describe with that phrase?

Stan O’Neal in 2003, when he was chairman, CEO and president of Merrill Lynch.

“I thought he was going to compromise the firm,” says Smith. “I couldn’t believe that one person would so quickly almost bring it down. But he did.”

One of our senior equity executives, Tom Joyce, wrote a letter to the organizers of a reunion we had a few years after I left Merrill. He wrote that our years at Merrill Lynch “were like catching lighting in a bottle.” When I started at the firm we were like the Mets: nobody respected us; we were just emerging as an investment banking firm. Over the next several decades we became arguably the preeminent private wealth investment banking and asset management firm in the world. We were proud to go home and say we worked for a great company that had a soul, as well as one that was extremely profitable and successful.

I’m tempted to take the Mets analogy further. Your book is, for much of its length, a very

inspiring story, but as time goes on it becomes less inspiring. There’s a memorable portrait in the book of Stan O’Neal, Merrill’s CEO and board chairman from 2003 to 2007. You write, “I looked Stan O’Neal in the eye and saw no soul.” His period in charge was a turning point for you, and for the company.

In 2001 I had been asked

by Stan, newly appointed as president, to stay on as vice chairman. It was very tempting to do: it was lucrative; it was prestigious.

I’d hoped to stay there until I retired. But it became apparent to me that he didn’t respect our principles and that he was going to take the firm in a very different direction. In the middle of a sentence I said to him, “Stan, I’m sorry, I can’t work for you.” I stood up, shook his hand and walked out. That evening I had

FALL 2014

Five principles defined the corporate culture of Merrill Lynch in what we might think of as its golden age. What was the thinking behind each?

The first is that the client’s interest has to come first.

Second, Merrill and my dad recognized that this was a business of people.

If you didn’t create trust and respect around your people, how were they going to serve the client’s interest? That culture got to be known as “Mother Merrill,” because the firm was like a family; we helped people in adversity and created a tremendous amount of loyalty. Third, they recognized that you couldn’t operate in silos.

There was a greater whole.

Fourth, by bringing Wall Street to Main Street they were part of many communities, not just New York, Los Angeles and Chicago but also Williamsport, Pa.; Nashville, Tenn.; Burlington, Vt. They didn’t want to just take from the community. They encouraged resident managers to be on the school boards, the hospital boards, to give back philanthropically. The fifth, not least by any extreme, was integrity. Leaders would say, “If you can’t read it on the front page of The New York Times the next day, you don’t do it. You always tell the truth; you always act with integrity.”

39 AMHERST

What was the animating idea behind the company? How did that idea change over time?

Until 1929, Merrill Lynch was primarily an investment banking firm, underwriting securities, largely for the growing retail chain business. When the crash came in ’29, Merrill had deleveraged the firm, deleveraged his clients, so they didn’t get harmed on Black Tuesday the way so many people did. But he was not eager to stay in the securities business. He sold the firm to E.A. Pierce in Chicago.

In 1939 my dad—a partner at Pierce—was concerned the partnership was not going to be able to continue. He had an idea.

He called Merrill and convinced him to take a look at a new business plan.

That plan was to bring Wall Street to the average American. At the time, most people weren’t invested in the market and didn’t know how to invest.

The depression had gone on for nearly 10 years.

There was war breaking out in Europe. It wasn’t the most obvious time to try a new business paradigm.

But Merrill and my dad believed they could build trust back in investing.

They started with the principle that the client’s interest had to come first.

They did radical things: They took brokers off commission. They made research an independent arm from investment banking.

They started the first training program. By allowing the average American to

invest more than just in a savings account, they helped to foster capital growth after World War II.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Lynch, which brought Wall Street to Main Street.

FALL 2014

second thoughts. Had I acted impulsively? But I couldn’t be a part of a firm that was going to get rid of thousands and thousands of people, that was going to cost-cut extraordinarily, that was not going to respect the principles and culture.

I thought he was going to compromise the firm. I couldn’t believe that one person would so quickly almost bring it down. But he did. In 2001 he cut deeply into many of our core businesses. In order to recover the earnings he jumped into highly toxic trading instruments, subprime mortgages, CDOs. He took what was a healthy balance sheet and lowered it to a point where it was almost 36:1 leveraged. He created a silo mentality where people weren’t allowed to challenge one another—where if you challenged you got fired. That culture, in my view, was what brought the firm to its knees in 2007, to the point where Bank of America had to bail it out in 2008.

AMHERST

40

The climactic moment in your book is the final Merrill Lynch shareholders’ meeting. You have a letter from the grandson of Charlie Merrill, and you’ve been invited to speak.

What did you say, and how was it received?

This was Dec. 5, 2008, when Merrill shareholders voted on the acquisition

by Bank of America. It was like a wake, a funeral. When I was called to speak, I read the letter from Merrill Magowan and then talked about what the firm had been, how we had grown, how proud we were to have been part of

“I thought the real story of Merrill Lynch needed to come out,” Smith told USA Today.

He was also interviewed about the book on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV and radio, and Vermont Public Radio.

it. I reminded people that only in 2001 our stock had been at an all-time high, we had record earnings, record return on equity. I said: While I support the merger, this is a day that did not have to come.

I said that this day wasn’t the result of the subprime mess or synthetic CDOs. Those were the symptoms. This is the story of failed leadership and the failure of the board of directors to take action soon enough. I got tough on the directors; I said shame on them for allowing a CEO to consciously and openly disparage Mother Merrill, to throw out the founding principles, to tear out the soul of the company.

Where’s the accountability? I said it’s no wonder that Main Street is learning to distrust Wall Street all over again. How could a board of directors allow a CEO who’d brought down a firm to walk away with a $160 million severance package?

I said there are many parallels today with what my dad and Merrill saw in the 1930s, and that Bank of America and Merrill have a great opportunity to once again rekindle the trust of Main Street. When I sat down the whole room

stood in applause. The meeting was broadcast to Merrill offices around the world, to trading rooms in New York and London. I heard afterward that most people in those offices stood up in applause. It was one of the most gratifying moments of my life.

One can read your book as a parable of something much larger. Where has the industry gone wrong, and where does it need to go in order to go right?

In the 1990s companies’ trading areas became increasingly important and people who were trading for their proprietary book became a bigger part of the firms. Eventually most of the firms were run by traders, not by people who grew up on the client side of the business. There’s a change in the vocabulary: You heard them talking about counterparties instead of clients. Counterparties are adversaries; they are not clients.

That subtle change led to the excess we saw in 2007 and 2008, when all the firms were loaded up on subprime mortgages.

They were overleveraging themselves. They were greedy. That led to problems we are still seeing

today. Wall Street at the top is going to have to be more humble, is going to have to relate more to the average American. If we are going to restore the integrity in the capital markets that is so needed, the middle class has to believe they have a chance, not just the 1 percent.

Not long ago someone gave me a metal pin from the 50th reunion of the Amherst class of 1916. Your father was a member of that class. What do you know about your father’s experience at Amherst?

My dad passed away when I was young so I didn’t have many in-depth conversations with him, but I know he loved Amherst.

His dad had gone there so he was almost preordained, especially since he had grown up in South Hadley Falls. But my dad wasn’t the most distinguished Amherst student.

My mother told me he was probably a B student. He played hockey, managed the baseball team. I do know he was very popular.

He became close friends with his classmate John J. McCloy, who served so many U.S. presidents.

And I know my dad loved going back to reunions. He became a trustee of Amherst, which was one of the highlights of his life. He endowed a chair, the Winthrop H. Smith Professorship of American History, because he believed so strongly in the value of a liberal arts education. k LISTEN TO the full Amherst Reads interview at www. amherst.edu/magazine

43 Rabbi Lisa Gelber ’89 on her path to becoming a single mother 46 Selling Vicks door-todoor was “tough as hell,” says Tom Shepard ’40

ALUMNI IN THE WORLD

Beyond Campus

Photographed by Jen Siska at Stanford University, September 2014

Travis Bristol ’03 studied black male teachers to help explain why they’re underrepresented in U.S. schools.

Fall 2014 Amherst 41

BEYOND CAMPUS

At the Front of the Classroom, Few Black Men African-American men are underrepresented as U.S. public school teachers. How come?

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Bristol aims to improve “not only learning outcomes but eventually social outcomes for people very similar to me.”

EDUCATION U Students of color will soon

Bristol conducted the research—the basis for his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University’s Teachers College—in Boston, starting in 2012. He studied 27 black male teachers in 14 public schools, categorizing each as a “Loner” (the only black male teacher at his school) or a “Grouper” (one of several at his school).

Through two rounds of interviews, Bristol found that Loners felt “socially alone and disconnected from the core mission of the school.” Initially, they anticipated wanting to leave their jobs—but they ended up more likely to stay. Bristol suspects this is because Loners, who generally had more prestigious educational credentials, had joined better-performing schools with better working conditions.

Groupers, by contrast, worked mainly in low-performing schools where, they told Bristol, administrators micromanaged their teaching and they were too often expected to focus on discipline.

By the next fall, all seven Loners remained at their jobs, but nine out of 20 Groupers had left. Some of these moved on to other education jobs; others exited the profession entirely. One quit teaching after watching an administrator frisk students during a statewide exam to make sure they weren’t hiding cell phones.

Drawing from his research, Bristol has published recommendations on the Albert Shanker Institute’s blog. Among them: create opportunities for black high school boys to try out teaching. Despite support and attention for his study—he’s won coveted dissertation fellowships—the Boston district hasn’t yet reviewed Bristol’s ideas, he says. This frustrates him, because he sees the issue as one of national importance.

It’s also personal. Growing up in a poor area of Brooklyn, Bristol had only two black male K–12 teachers. At Amherst, he found his schooling had underprepared him for college, and when he took “English 6: Reading, Writing and Teaching,” he realized his struggles were part of a systemic problem. Bristol felt a responsibility to “improve not only the learning out42 Amherst Fall 2014

JEN SISKA

constitute the majority in U.S. public schools, but teachers of color remain a minority, and, at least in some major cities, their numbers are decreasing. Nationwide, African-American men make up less than 2 percent of public school teachers and have an especially high rate of job turnover.

To understand why, Travis Bristol ’03 undertook one of the largest qualitative studies ever on urban black male teachers.

Travis Bristol ’03 MAJOR: ENGLISH

“One day I will be in charge of the New York City public school system.”

comes but eventually the social outcomes for people very similar to me.”

As he pointed out on NPR’s RadioBoston, previous studies suggest “that having a black male teacher improves learning outcomes for black students.” In addition, Bristol believes, their ideas benefit the entire teaching profession.

Working in two New York City public schools, Bristol developed one such idea, pioneering mentoring programs for young men of color. He left classroom teaching on the expectation that being a researcher with a Ph.D. will better position him to effect broad changes. Now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, he hopes, within a few years, to join the faculty of a college or university.

Beyond that? When Brandon Stanton photographed him for the blog Humans of New York on the day he graduated from Columbia, Bristol declared: “One day I will be in charge of the New York City public school system.”

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

Be Fruitful and Multiply

landing as associate dean at the Jewish Theological Seminary—she was trained to approach dilemmas Talmudically. As she considered the ways in which single women might become mothers, she says, “I did a lot of research into what the tradition says in terms of halacha [Jewish law].”

But eventually, she realized she would have to go her own way, even if it meant breaking some ground. “One can honor marriage without being married,” Gelber decided. “By disentangling marriage and motherhood, we invite ourselves to widen our lens on who can parent and under what circumstances.”

Despite making peace with her decision to become a single mother, Gelber’s struggle was not over; she underwent three rounds of IVF, a miscarriage and the eventual discovery that she probably never would have been able to sustain a pregnancy. She began looking into Ethiopian adoption—and then Ethiopia closed the process to single mothers. Gelber took solace in the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. “I feel in my body what Jacob went through to get what he

She was a single rabbi who wanted to be a mom. People told her, “Don’t worry—you’ll meet the right person.”

BY NAOMI SHULMAN ADOPTION U When Lisa Gelber ’89 first arrived at Amherst, she knew two things in her bones: she wanted to be a rabbi, and she wanted to be a mother.

She had no idea how she’d achieve the first. “I didn’t even have a framework yet,” she says. “I didn’t know women rabbis in any movement of Judaism.” As it turned out, the path to the rabbinate was fairly smooth.

Her journey to motherhood, however, ended up being far longer and more complicated.

MAJOR: RELIGION

“I didn’t know women rabbis in any movement of Judaism.”

Naomi Shulman has written for The New York Times, Real Simple and other publications.

After a years-long struggle, Gelber received the call that a newborn girl was waiting for her. Zahara is now almost 5.

KIM CASSIDY; ABOVE: ELLEN DUBIN ’85

As detailed in the documentary All of the Above: Single, Clergy, Mother, which aired on ABC last spring and is part of the Big Apple Film Festival this fall, Gelber found herself unpartnered in her late 30s—a state of being that is frowned upon in many quarters, including Jewish tradition.

“It goes back to the story of Noah—you’ve gotta be a twosome or something’s wrong,” she says with a wry laugh. “Whenever I’d say, ‘I want to be a mom,’ people replied, ‘Don’t worry—you’ll meet the right person.’ I still want to meet the right person! Ultimately I had to set that expectation aside.”

But first came years of questioning. Having packed intense work experiences into relatively few years—Gelber led a large congregation and worked as a chaplain at a major hospital in Seattle, before

Lisa Gelber ’89

needed. He gets a new name—Israel, ‘the one who struggles’—and I feel like that is my story,” she says. “Jacob holds on and demands a blessing. He wouldn’t let go.”

Gelber did not let go, either.

After a struggle that stretched on for years, she received the call that a newborn girl was waiting for her in Westchester County, N.Y. Gelber named her Zahara. “It means ‘radiance,’ and she is a constant light in the world.”

Now Zahara is almost 5, and Gelber sees that the identities she always knew were hers—rabbi and mother—inform and support each other. “Part of my call to the rabbinate has to do with being able to give people the space to be, without telling them what to think or feel. I’m really honing that practice as a parent. The practice of awareness and intentionality is critical to being both a good rabbi and a good mother. Striving for that internal balance from moment to moment strengthens my potential as a rabbi, and as Zahara’s mom.”

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Solving the Obesity Puzzle A researcher’s latest discovery could be a crucial development in figuring out how to help people modulate their food intake.

By removing a particular gene, Greenberg and colleagues were able to breed mice that ate less and gained less weight.

HEALTH U Obesity is

genetics that makes more than a third of Americans obese. Few researchers are doing as much to crack the mystery as Andrew Greenberg ’77, director of the Obesity and Metabolism Laboratory at the Tufts Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.

Greenberg’s research focus was driven by personal tragedy. His mother, Beatrice, suffered from obesity-related diabetes, an illness that eventually took her life.

Greenberg was working as an endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health when his mother had a stroke. “The reality is we have more food than we need and we exercise less than we should,” he says. “And a lot of us are predisposed to developing obesity and associated diseases such as diabetes—which, as I personally witnessed, can be devastating.”

In 1991, Greenberg made a discovery that would define his life’s work: the identification of a protein, perilipin, that coats the surface of the lipid droplets that store fat within cells. Millennia ago, when food was scarce, perilipin likely helped humans hold onto much-needed fat. The more Greenberg investigated the protein, the more important it seemed to be in modern-day illness.

Obese people, Greenberg soon discovered, produce less perilipin in their fat cells than those who are not obese. Without perilipin to coat the lipid droplets, the fats 44 Amherst Fall 2014

DEB DUTCHER

among the most pervasive epidemics in the United States—and also among the most complex. Scientists are only now beginning to understand the interplay of nutrition, exercise and

Andrew Greenberg ’77 MAJOR: BIOLOGY

His mother, Beatrice, had obesityrelated diabetes.

within those droplets escape into the bloodstream, in the form of fatty acids. There, the fatty acids circulate to muscles and other organs, instigating the insulin resistance that leads to Type 2 diabetes.

“A lot of what I do involves solving puzzles—and by solving puzzles, we can identify possible therapies,” Greenberg says.

Perilipin is a crucial piece in the obesity puzzle. Its discovery has

helped researchers understand how certain antidiabetic drugs, such as a class of medications called thiazolidinediones, work: these drugs increase the body’s production of perilipin.

Greenberg and colleagues recently discovered that another form of perilipin, called perilipin 2, may have the opposite effect: by removing the gene that produces perilipin 2, they were able to breed mice that ate less and gained less weight when presented with a high-calorie diet. This latest discovery, says Greenberg, could be a crucial development in figuring out how to help people modulate their food intake.

Greenberg’s lipid research continues to spiral in surprising new directions. Among his current projects, he’s exploring how the intestine, and the microbes that dwell in it, affect metabolism: “It turns out the intestine secretes hormones and signals to the brain.

If you could affect that pathway, you could tell the brain to feel satiated.”

Ben Goldfarb ’09 is a freelance science writer.

New Grads in the Lab Greenberg’s work has been aided by a succession of Amherst grads who have served in his lab as research assistants.

These include Chen Xie ’09, Ayla Mansur ’11, Kayleigh O’Keeffe ’12 and Defne Surujon ’14. “Success in research is very self-motivated,” says O’Keeffe, who monitored, weighed and performed MRIs on mice. She’s now a graduate student Kayleigh at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

O’Keeffe ’12 As a mentor, Greenberg says, it’s most crucial to instill in young scientists an appreciation for the painstaking pace and rigor of the scientific process. “You don’t make a discovery every day,” he says. “It requires persistence and thoughtfulness.”

For information on how to hire a student through Amherst Advantage, the Career Center’s recruiting program, email oncampusrecruiting@amherst.edu.

COURTESY O’KEEFFE

BY BEN GOLDFARB ’09

Change the Conversation How do you convince people that homelessness can actually end, permanently?

BY MARY JO CURTIS

But when the careers of two of the firm’s biggest clients ended in scandal, a disillusioned Maguire decided to move on. He began a Ph.D. program, until a call from Rosanne Haggerty ’82 interrupted his studies. That call brought him back to public relations— but with a very different kind of client.

While at Amherst, Maguire had worked for Haggerty as a summer intern, assisting in her efforts to find homes for people living on the streets in New York City. Now she wanted his help with a new, national campaign—called 100,000 Homes—that aimed to place 100,000 homeless people in permanent homes within four years.

During his internship “we screened out the really tough homeless,” Maguire says; “they never showed up to even ask about housing.” This new project would take a different approach. It was now the “really tough homeless”—those most at risk of dying in the streets—who would take first priority.

“First-come, first-served makes the least sense,” Maguire says. “It’s not that there’s a dearth of resources, but there’s a learned dysfunction in the way institutions deal with problems.” Wondering if they’d been tackling the problem backward, 100,000 Homes adopted the “Housing First” model created

by Sam Tsemberis. As Maguire explains, instead of trying to treat people’s medical and addiction issues before finding them housing, “what if housing is the solid foundation we need first?”

Armed with this philosophy, the 100,000 Homes team reached out to U.S. cities with large homeless populations, among them Los Angeles, Denver, New York and Nashville. Working with city leaders, they explored better ways of using existing resources by bringing together key players—social service agencies, police, local businesses—and identifying the people whose medical, psychiatric or addiction problems make them most likely to die on the streets. The campaign wanted to get the most vulnerable into permanent, supportive housing as quickly as possible.

LINDA KAUFMAN

HOMELESSNESS U When Jake Maguire ’07 went to work for a political consulting firm after graduation, he knew his job was all about getting clients into the news. That’s how public relations experts shape voters’ opinions of candidates and, importantly, help campaigns raise money.

Maguire talking with the 100,000th person housed through the campaign. “We’ve helped 186 communities house 105,580 people,” he says.

Jake Maguire ’07 MAJORS: AMERICAN STUDIES, BLACK STUDIES

“First-come, first-served makes the least sense.”

But first, says Haggerty, 100,000 Homes had to convince partner communities that homelessness is not in fact an intractable problem. That’s where Maguire came in.

“Jake is our secret weapon,” Haggerty says. “He grasped that this is more of a movement than PR; it’s education, and changing and shaping attitudes. Jake changed the conversation from being about a broken system and status quo to show, through community work, that it’s a solvable problem.”

Maguire now had new clients to promote—the 100,000 Homes campaign and its mission, as well as the partner communities with whom they were housing thousands. He won them media attention through The New York Times, 60 Minutes and NPR. This past June, the campaign reached its goal ahead of time. “We’ve helped 186 communities house 105,580 people,” says Maguire, now communications director for Community Solutions, the Haggerty organization that administered the 100,000 Homes campaign. Community Solutions has a new program, Zero: 2016, whose goal is to end chronic homelessness among the medically at-risk by the end of 2016, and among veterans by the end of 2015.

“People need to develop a more effective response to create a new story; Jake has shaped that new story,” says Haggerty. “It’s all about success, hopefulness and learning.”

Mary Jo Curtis is a Holyoke-based freelance writer.

l READ our Fall 2011 article on Haggerty and the then-new 100,000 Homes campaign e www.amherst.edu/magazine

Fall 2014 Amherst 45

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On the Road

BY WILLIAM SWEET SALES U When a Mississippi farmhand

dipped a finger into the jar of Vicks VapoRub and proceeded to eat half of the contents, a young Tom Shepard ’40 knew he was learning more than just how to sell salve.

“I was dazzled. It was unbelievable,” Shepard says of the incident he describes in his new book, Making the Sale: The Art of Salesmanship. Much of the book is about his days as a salesman for the Vick Chemical Co. in the rural South on the cusp of World War II. Shepard would go on to serve in the U.S. Navy during the war and, later, to become an advertising salesman and eventually publisher of Look magazine. But he says his earliest work experiences, as documented in the book and in the traveling salesman’s letters home, gave him his biggest education after Amherst.

Now 96, he says that time still resonates for him.

Fresh out of Amherst, the New Jersey native opted for a competitive training program offered by Vick.

Starting in Paintsville, Ky., Shepard apprenticed with a veteran salesman who drove in an unmarked truck so they could secretly sell to grocery stores that competed with local pharmacies. Ad placement came in the form of a metal sign they’d ask to hang in a pharmacy; to ensure the sign would not come down soon, they’d screw it into the wall and strip the screw heads.

A sales pitch might include tipping back a surprised customer’s head and squirting his nostril with a dose of Va-Tro-Nol. “I had never been south of Philadelphia,” Shepard says, and he was appalled by the poverty he saw in 46 Amherst Fall 2014

COURTESY TOM SHEPARD ’40

The last publisher of Look magazine recalls his early days selling VapoRub door-to-door in the rural South.

The South was a harsh market for a salesman: miles and miles of travel on dirt roads into tiny communities still reeling from the Great Depression. Sometimes, Vicks was the only medicine people had.

Tom Shepard ’40 MAJOR: ENGLISH

“I knew I had to win, because I wanted to marry the girl, and I wanted a job.”

the South, especially among the African-American population. Sometimes, Vicks was the only medicine people had. The South was a harsh market for a salesman: miles upon miles of travel on dirt roads into tiny communities still reeling from the Great Depression, with just a little sleep between trips.

“The Vick experience was a growing-up experience, immediately. It was just tough as hell,” he says.

“But I knew I had to win, because I wanted to marry the girl, and I wanted a job.”

He did marry the girl (the former Nancy Kruidenier, whom he courted during her days at Smith College, and to whom he remains devoted), and he rose through the ranks at Look until it folded in 1971.

He cast the memoir of his business years as a howto. It looks back over 70 years and millions of dollars in sales, and it includes advice for today’s new graduates. “It’s built around the idea of how you sell a product, but the product can also be yourself,” he says. He concludes with some simple rules: Know your audience. Know your product. Treat your product with pride and your employees with respect.

As he was involved in sales and advertising in the 1960s, the question must be asked: Has he seen Mad Men? The answer is yes, and he says the program is mostly accurate in its portrayal of that period, to a point.

“I mean, they had to make a show of it,” he says.

“We weren’t that raunchy, and we drank, but we didn’t drink that bad. And we went home to our wives, essentially.” k William Sweet is a writer in Amherst’s Office of Communications.

48 A teenager survives nuclear disaster in Chris Bohjalian ’82’s latest novel 52 Professor Ronald C. Rosbottom on life in Nazioccupied Paris

ARTS NEWS AND REVIEWS

Amherst Creates

Photographed by Christopher T. Martin in Tallahassee, Fla., Sept. 14, 2014

In Race Horse Men, Katherine C. Mooney ’04 shows how horseracing intersected with slavery in the American South.

Fall 2014 Amherst 47

AMHERST CREATES

AFTER THE MELTDOWN A young protagonist lives through her own mini post-apocalypse, believing she will be held accountable for the actions of her father, a nuclear officer at an ill-fated plant. | BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10 CLOSE YOUR EYES, HOLD HANDS

By Chris Bohjalian ’82 Doubleday

VICTORIA BLEWER

↓ Bohjalian is the author of 17 books, including many New York Times bestsellers.

Midwives was a 1998 Oprah’s Book Club Selection.

FICTION U The apocalypse that begins Chris Bohjalian’s 17th book, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, turns out to be not so bad after all. The term “nuclear meltdown” is a scary one, a metonym for the worst possible scenario imaginable, but when it occurs in rural Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom at the start of this novel, it’s merely a local disaster. Although thousands of people are displaced, only 19, mostly plant employees, actually die.

Two of the dead, however, are the parents of teenaged Emily Shepard. For her, the cataclysm is fully world-ending. Eluding authorities after the meltdown, she plays out a kind of mini postapocalypse, living on her own in the newly abandoned territory, unwilling to return to society because she thinks she will be

AMHERST READS featured book: www.amherst.edu/magazine

his illness becomes too much to blamed, or at least shamed, ignore, she is forced to abandon for the actions of her father, a him at a hospital. At that point nuclear officer at the plant. His she concocts a desperate plan: drunkenness, as the rumor goes, she will head back into the exclueither caused the meltdown or sion zone, where her childhood hindered his ability to stop it home awaits, irradiated but unonce it had begun. disturbed, a tomb But Emily was all that was. never quite wellShe finds that forBohjalian does placed within socia life of isolaimpressive, wellety to begin with, and she finds that tion suits her, researched work a life of isolation much as it did to bring to life a cult-to-render suits her, much as her idol, Emily diffi plot, in which evit did for her idol, Dickinson.” erything feels real, Emily Dickinson, from the science with whom she of nuclear catastrophe, to the shares a hermetic nature and machinations of a small-town darkly poetic disposition. (“The gossip mill, to the actions of an leaves don’t fall off one by one. intelligent and troubled teenage They fall in drapes,” Emily nargirl (the acknowledgments list rates. “What everyone undernuclear reactor operators alongstands but no one thinks about side child-services specialists). is that the leaves are spectacular But the real achievement is because they’re dying.”) one of pacing and voice. This is Emily tries to make it at a halfa fully mature book, but the way way house, and then as the ward in which Bohjalian accesses and of a low-life who strings girls out animates Emily’s teenager-ness on drugs and pimps them out to should earn him new young fans truckers. Finally, Emily ends up looking for an expression of in a situation that seems to suit their deeper reservations. More her: in an abandoned parking lot, sheltered under an igloo con- than facility in adolescent argot (“Suddenly my mind was filled structed out of trash bags filled with images that raced past like with frozen leaves.

Life within an irradiated trash- a tumblr feed”), what impresses most is Bohjalian’s empathy tobag igloo is not easy, and Emily, speaking in first person, is candid ward that common intuition held by young people: that the adult with the reader about the degraworld was not made for them, dations she must endure in order that the system doesn’t work and to maintain her independence. that if it were to all come crash“There was no code,” she says ing down and they were free to of her interactions with other do as they pleased, that might refugees. “Sometimes we helped not be such a bad thing. each other and sometimes we didn’t.” A guiding principle enNicholas Mancusi ’10 has ters her life and her igloo in the written for The New York Times form of Cameron, a younger and Book Review and many other sicklier runaway whom she feels publications. an obligation to protect. When

“

AMHERST CREATES

PRETENDING THAT EVERYONE FLOURISHED In the 19th-century American South, thoroughbred racing intersected with slavery in important and surprising ways. | BY ALLEN GUTTMANN

→ Mooney brightly illuminates important cultural connections left in the dark by more conventional social histories.

tion vision in that white workers took their proper place in the social hierarchy, a place that was, in fact, below that of highly respected black trainers such as Hark and Ansel Williamson and famously successful black jockeys such as Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield.

Mooney demonstrates the privileged status of African-Americans with equestrian skills.

The breeding shed, she writes, was a rare place in the South “where slave expertise dictated the flow of events.” Little wonder that the virtue most praised by white turfmen was fidelity. They trusted black trainers to take thoroughbreds on long journeys into states where slavery was illegal and flight would have been easy. That this fidelity was less total than assumed became clear during the Civil War, when many (but not all) privileged black horsemen fled to Union lines, where some joined the North’s black regiments. Empirical reality, the brute fact that many black “race horse men” preferred freedom to the easy life, made little impression on those who remained enchanted by the “mystical bond of unbreakable fidelity.”

But the best part of Race Horse Men is not the thesis but its beautifully painted portraits of great black trainers and jockeys, too many to name, and its stride-by-stride accounts of the great intersectional races that seemed to have the entire nation holding its breath. Mooney’s narrative of the famous 1822 contest between Eclipse (North) and Sir Charles (South) is especially notable.

One of the small pleasures of this social history is the appearance of famous men (and, occasionally, women) in unexpected roles. Historians know that Andrew Jackson was a “race horse man,” but how many knew that his opponent in the struggle over the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, was also a turfman? We knew about Henry Clay, but what about the notoriously thuggish, Irish-born Tammany Hall politician John Morrissey and that ill-fated cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer?

Race Horse Men brightly illuminates important cultural connections left in the dark by more conventional social histories. I’ve written about antebellum horse races. Why didn’t I recognize the significance of all those black trainers and jockeys?

CHRISTOPHER T. MARTIN

RACE HORSE MEN: HOW SLAVERY AND FREEDOM WERE MADE AT THE RACETRACK Katherine C. Mooney ’04 Harvard University Press

HISTORY U Race Horse Men has a straightforward and entirely persuasive thesis. The wealthy white Southerners who owned stables of thoroughbred horses—and who owned the slaves who tended and rode the horses—perceived the racetrack as a microcosm of the ideal society. It was “in miniature the hierarchical world they wanted.”

To these antebellum “Cotton Whigs,” black jockeys riding horses bred and cared for by black trainers were “living proof that men of authority and vision could create a dynamic, harmonious community in which everyone flourished.”

There was a caveat. Everyone had to know his or her proper place. “Thoroughbreds,” Katherine Mooney writes, “taught and represented important lessons about the hierarchy permissible within American democracy.” The artist of choice for “turfmen”—horse-racing devotees—was Edward Troye, whose portraits of horses and handlers depicted slavery “as planters wished to see it.”

This vision of the racetrack-as-community survived the Civil War and was important in the postwar restoration of cordial relationships between turfmen North and South. They understood and respected one another. The ideal world enacted at the Gilded Age racetrack differed from the planta-

AMHERST READS featured book: www.amherst.edu/magazine

Guttmann is the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus, at Amherst.

Fall 2014 Amherst 49

AMHERST CREATES

↘ Rooney (center) with his band, Rooney’s Irregulars, and Tim O’Brien (second from left), John Prine (seated, in black jacket) and Nanci Griffith

JIM MCGUIRE

IN IT FOR THE LONG RUN: A MUSICAL ODYSSEY Jim Rooney ’60 University of Illinois Press

MUSIC MAKER Instead of turning into an “alcoholic teacher in a small college” (ouch!), a young guitarist became a pioneering record producer. | REVIEWED BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD ’53

Rooney ran the famed Club 47 and produced the first New Orleans Jazz Festival. He crossed paths with Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan. He then produced and engineered recordings

by Nanci Griffith, John Prine, Iris DeMent, Hal Ketchum and Alison Krauss, winning a Grammy for Griffith’s Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1994.

50 Amherst Fall 2014

MEMOIR U In one sense I have no right, no qualifications, to review this book, since my acquaintance with bluegrass music is confined to an exciting performance I heard Jim Rooney ’60 and fellow artists give at an Amherst reunion. I went to it with less than high expectations, given my commitment to jazz and classical music, and a prejudice against “folk.”

But what I encountered that afternoon in Buckley Recital Hall was an exhilarating introduction to bluegrass, “folk music in overdrive,” as Rooney calls it in this memoir. Why, after this terrific concert, I never went back for more—wherever “more” was to be found—I can’t say. But the result was that many of the factual parts of this book swept right by me: the fellow musicians; the countless tunes Rooney wrote

and the bands he played in; the extensive travels to gigs all over this country and the world.

Rather than list these, I will make note instead of Rooney’s extraordinary early career, beginning more or less when all 6-feet-2, 125 pounds of him is dolled up in “powder blue, pleated, slightly pegged pants,” complete with a clip-on red string tie, to perform “Music Makin’ Mama” and “Honky Tonk Blues” on Jamboree, a live show on a Boston radio station. From Jamboree he went on to a radio show on Saturday afternoons and many concerts at schools and small halls, culminating in a big show at Boston Mechanics Hall in which, sitting in overalls on a bale of hay at the edge of the stage, he once again sang “Honky Tonk Blues.” A career had begun.

But there was a significant interruption of it—or at least an important diversion—when Rooney went away to college (old Amherst) and for a time displayed impressive academic talents. He came from Roxbury Latin School with five years of Latin and three of Greek behind him; he majored in Greek and wrote a senior honors thesis on the plays of Aeschylus. His teacher, handsomely acknowledged in the book, was John Moore, a certified legendary Amherst professor who both in and out of the classroom practiced an inimitable pedagogy.

Rooney calls him the closest thing to Socrates he would ever know. (Others, including this reviewer, will attest to that claim.)

Rooney also mentions a course in oral poetry he took with another inimitable pedagogue, Theodore Baird, a “cur-

INTERVIEW

William H. Pritchard ’53 is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst.

Villains and Maids Wendy Rich Stetson ’91 saw a James Lapine play while at Amherst. This year, she acted in one. | BY SOO YOUN ’96

COURTESY WENDY RICH STETSON

mudgeon,” as Rooney calls him.

Studying with Moore and Baird was the best of two very different professorial worlds, and Rooney was influenced by them enough to go on to graduate school in classics at Harvard, surely the one and only bluegrass musician to follow such a course.

At Harvard he was a section man for a famous course in the epic, taught by another legend, John Finley. Rooney spent a year at The American School of Classical Studies in Athens before deciding that he lacked the requisite brilliance to become a great classics scholar; instead of becoming what he refers to as an “alcoholic teacher in a small college” (ouch!) he resolved to follow his heart, moving into “a life of action” and, it seems, never looking back.

That life of action is the burden of the pages to follow, with their array of music and musicians.

Throughout those pages recurs the name of Bill Keith ’61, the banjo player whom Rooney met as an Amherst undergraduate, and who joined him in the concert I heard on alumni weekend. I would have liked to hear more about Keith, who figures as a steady example of musicianship in the often turbulent world of country music.

Rooney’s account concludes with two photographs from the 37 lively ones that illustrate the book.

One of them shows him receiving a lifetime achievement award in Nashville in 2009; the other shows him dancing with his wife, Carol Langstaff. On the final page he assesses the value of “following my heart,” as he had resolved to do decades previously. Although he knows he’ll be forgotten a hundred years hence, he believes that “the music I helped bring into the world will live on in some way in people’s hearts,” a condition as “close to immortality as I will get.” Which is close enough for him, he concludes, in this very attractive book.

Actor WENDY RICH STETSON ’91 may be the only alum whose résumé lists, as special skills, five dialects: American Southern, Standard British, Irish, French and Scottish. We caught up in late summer.

What are you working on now?

If Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner can be said to have a villain, that would be me. I am in Boston playing Hilary St. George in a new play version of the classic Hepburn/Tracy movie at the Huntington Theatre Company. Hilary is not remotely pleased with who’s coming to dinner, and she gets her comeuppance in the end. It’s a lot of fun.

Is playing a villain a departure for you?

I play a lot of spinsters, lesbians and maids.

But didn’t you play Fortinbras off-Broadway?

It was an ill-fated production of Hamlet at the Public Theater with Liev Schreiber, directed by my former acting teacher Andrei Şerban. I played one of twin Fortinbrases.

I ended up going on as Gertrude for several performances, even though I had no idea I was understudying her. I got a phone call saying, “We heard you’re a quick study—can you go on tomorrow?”

What are you going to say? So I went ahead and did it. It actually has helped me. I always say [any new challenge] can’t be more scary than the Hamlet situation.

Tell me about being in a play with Santino Fontana, who did the voice of Hans from Frozen.

It’s Act One, the new play written and directed by James Lapine that just closed at Lincoln Center Theater. The cast was incredible—it was an amazing and humbling room to be in. When I was at Amherst, I saw and fell completely in love with the musical Into the Woods. James Lapine wrote the book and directed that show, and it was a big part of why I got into this business. Being able to tell that to James Lapine on opening night was a great moment.

Is there a particular role you really want to have?

It’s fun to do contemporary work. I’d like to do a play in jeans, instead of a corset. I’d like to do more Shakespeare. I’ve taught Shakespeare for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival; despite that, I haven’t done a lot of Shakespeare.

Amherst is also where you met your husband, Pete Stetson ’92.

He was a Zumbye. Now he’s a general medicine practitioner and an informatician at Columbia. I like being married to a doctor. He provides free medical care to my actor friends.

And you have a 7-year-old, Cate.

Recently, while watching a video together, she asked if [the actors] were really crying.

I explained that I wasn’t very good at crying before and now I’m a much better crier. “Oh, that’s because you listen to me cry all the time,” she said.

I heard you’re writing a screenplay. What made you want to do that?

Sitting and waiting for the phone to ring is one of the lousiest parts of being an actor. I have taken to heart the idea that I need to create my own work, to be involved in projects over which I can have ownership. And, of course, the opportunity to showcase my awkward teenage years in a coming-of-age film set in the mid-’80s is just an added bonus.

Have I used the word humbling yet? In reference to this entire artistic journey? Humbling.

Soo Youn ’96 is a New York- and Los Angelesbased journalist.

Fall 2014 Amherst 51

AMHERST CREATES

PARIS AS PROTAGONIST WHEN PARIS WENT DARK: THE CITY OF LIGHT UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION, 1940-1944 Ronald C. Rosbottom, Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of French and European Studies Little, Brown

↓ Rosbottom’s book was on the 2014 National Book Award longlist for nonfiction.

NONFICTION U For 50 months, from June 1940 to August 1944, Nazi Germany occupied a vanquished and humiliated Paris.

Ronald Rosbottom’s astute new book takes us inside this strange interlude in the life of the city, when the Nazi swastika fluttered atop the Eiffel Tower. Rosbottom comes to the task not as a historian but as a “storyteller and guide,” one whose goal is to catch “the heartbeat, the intangible rhythms, of life during a period of sustained urban anxiety.”

To that end he consults unpublished diaries and memoirs and interviews two dozen now-elderly eyewitnesses to the occupation.

His literary sources range from Gertrude Stein, to the aristocratic German novelist Ernst Jünger, to Paul Achard’s 1941 book La Queue, which describes the pervasive reality of waiting in line and the culture of gossipy solidarity it sponsored.

Primarily keyed to the French experience, When Paris Went Dark also assays the viewpoint of the German occupiers. Rosbottom explores their ambivalence, the mix of condescension and is persistently psychological. Noting the What was cultural covetousness with collaboration? steep reduction of urban bustle during the which they viewed the city. He he comments that Parisians Being pleasant occupation, quotes from guidebooks that lost “a sensory cocoon that provides a to a German catered to the “camera-toting, feeling of protection.” Citing philosopher officer? Sleep- Gaston Bachelard on the topic of “felicibargain-seeking, question-asking, naively curious Germaning with one?” tous” and “hostile” spaces, he describes speaking visitors” who flooded how sidewalks, restaurants, even bordellos Paris, buying up luxury goods were taken over by the Germans, pushing and mementos—not least of all Hitler himself, Parisians to the margins—literally and metaphoriwho in his lone visit posed for a photo in front of cally—and saddling them with feelings of “spatial, the Eiffel Tower, an image Rosbottom adroitly detactile, and psychological unease.” scribes as “waver[ing] between the sinister and the The effort to trace the effects of military occukitschy.” It was the conqueror as tourist. pation includes a psychosexual perspective; RosWhen Paris Went Dark is a surprising book. Rosbottom asserts that many Parisians felt “a sexual bottom is not interested in merely chronicling the frisson” at the sight of “handsome, virile” German political and historical timeline of the occupasoldiers sunning seminude on riverbanks. Assesstion, but rather in “describing the claustrophobic ing the role played by teenagers in the Resistance, trauma of living in a familiar environment that he comments that a typical adolescent’s “almost has suddenly become threatening.” His approach erotic need to form new affective relationships”

AMHERST READS featured book: www.amherst.edu/magazine

“

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

When the Nazi swastika fluttered atop the Eiffel Tower, what was it like to live in the City of Light? | BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80

aided recruitment. Such observations can border on the eccentric—as when he notes that, amid the overcrowding of public transport, “Parisians of all social and economic classes were aware of the body odor of their compatriots.” This is social history attentive to the fundamentals of mind and body.

A psychological approach complicates the issue of moral reckoning. For Parisians, Rosbottom writes, “[d]aily life was ... a matter of accommodation to unexpected and noxious events.” So when does accommodation cross over into collaboration? When you were gratuitously pleasant to a German officer? When you slept with one? “[T]hese are questions that deserve thoughtful answers,” Rosbottom insists, and his appalled account of the violent reprisals that followed liberation shows just how often, and how cruelly, this thoughtfulness went missing—especially in the brutal scapegoating of women known or rumored to have had sexual relations with German soldiers.

When Paris Went Dark is packed full with historical curiosities. We learn that French teenagers would carry pairs of fishing poles—deux gaules—to secretly signal allegiance to deGaulle; that 85 percent of U.S. GIs were virgins when they enlisted; and that, although Paris resident Pablo Picasso was later happy to imply that he had courageously resisted the occupying Germans, in fact the only trouble he created was when he ate steak on a meatless day (and was fined).

We also learn about realities Parisians tried hard to forget after liberation—most notably, the millionplus letters written to German authorities by citizens denouncing their neighbors, especially Jewish neighbors. Such letters culminated in the mass arrest and deportation of Jews in July 1942, which Rosbottom describes in the most heartbreaking chapter of the book.

Digging deep into personal testimony, When Paris Went Dark strips away the inevitability that history confers upon events. At times the story reads almost like interior monologue, with Paris as the protagonist, thinking out loud—as when Rosbottom evokes the widespread surprise among Parisians at how free of violence the German occupation was at its outset.

“Perhaps it would not be so bad to have the Germans here after all,” he writes. “At least now there was order, precision, and predictability.”

Such perspectives recover the paradoxes of the past, and make the beleaguered city speak. k Rand Richards Cooper ’80 is a former visiting writer at Amherst.

ADAM MCCAULEY

SHORT TAKES

From the commons to capitalism, from mental health to military might, this fall brings a wide array of nonfiction from Amherst alumni. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 David Bollier ’78 will show you how to Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (New Society Publishers), while Rebekah E. Pite ’95 describes Creating a Common Table in TwentiethCentury Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food (University of North Carolina Press).

Next, try Reading Capitalist Realism, edited by Alison Shonkwiler ’93 and Leigh Claire La Berge (University of Iowa Press).

For the ecologically minded, E. G. Vallianatos and McKay Jenkins ’85 point out the Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (Bloomsbury Press), and William W. Buzbee ’82 tells of Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City (Cornell University Press).

John Liebert ’59 and William J. Birnes delve into Hearts of Darkness: Why Kids Are Becoming Mass Murderers and How We Can Stop It (Skyhorse Publishing).

Gary Rhule ’84 is your navigator in Sailing on Broken Pieces: Essential Survival Skills for Recovery from Mental Illness (Morgan James Publishing).

Audrey Fisch ’87 and Susan Chenelle guide educators through Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird (R&L Education).

With various co-authors and co-editors, Andrew S. Erickson ’01 has produced three new volumes: China’s Near Seas Combat Capabilities (U.S. Naval War College), A Low-Visibility Force Multiplier: Assessing China’s Cruise Missile Ambitions (National Defense University Press) and Rebalancing U.S. Forces: Basing and Forward Presence in the Asia-Pacific (Naval Institute Press).

Finally, in between working on issues of Amherst magazine, even I, Katherine Duke ’05, have created a nonfiction book: Kissability: People with Disabilities Talk About Sex, Love, and Relationships (Levellers Press).

Fall 2014 Amherst 53

AMHERST MADE

THE CUP’S GREAT DEFEAT When you make coffee, you pour it into a mug. Ever wonder why?

YOU PROBABLY have a favorite mug. Maybe it says “World’s Best Mom.” Maybe it’s from a craft fair. Maybe it’s 20 ounces, thermal and saves you 50 cents at the coffee shop.

For most of American history, however, until the early 1960s, the cup and saucer was king, while the mug was a

128 Amherst Fall 2014

shaving accessory.

Three Amherst men are responsible for the change.

Robert J. Howard ’45, A. Grant Holt ’47 and John Howard ’49 borrowed $9,000 from their parents in 1949 to start Holt-Howard Associates. In a New York apartment on East 35th Street, they set up shop as a marketer of household consumer goods, starting with

Christmas products.

When their Santa Claus mug sold particularly well in mail order, Holt and the Howard brothers suspected the mug could be more than just a seasonal novelty.

They asked a Japanese manufacturer to make a 12-ounce, straight-sided mug with a C-shaped handle. “We were hopeful this would have an immediate appeal to office coffee

ILLUSTRATION BY Melinda Beck

drinkers, who’d want a meaningful capacity and easy handling,” recalls John Howard in his autobiography. For their first design, they chose the classic Blue Willow pattern.

More shapes and patterns followed, and soon they were giving away display units to any store that purchased 12 designs and 144 pieces.

Mornings would never be the same. E.G.B.

Amherst: Connected

Your Annual Fund gift connects you to current students, to the life of the College, and to a tradition that spans centuries. Gifts are current use and provide direct and immediate support in the year they are given.

The Amherst experience centers on connections.

These connections are intellectual, professional, global, local, and distinctly personal. Each year, new ones are formed that do, in fact, change the world.

There’s no better way to invest in Amherst’s success—or in our community.

Make your gift today: amherst.edu/give

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THEN & NOW

Warriors

Three years after Jane Fonda popularized aerobics with her first home exercise video, students donned leg warmers, tights and short shorts for a workout.

It’s probably been a while since those ’80s alumni have taken aerobics.

More likely, they’ve joined running clubs and yoga studios. At a morning yoga series held during orientation this year, new students practiced their warrior poses in Keefe Campus Center.

1985 Aerobics

2014 Yoga

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