November 1986

BOORSTIN Robust Optimist

November 1986

SPAN VOLUME

xxvn

NUMBER 11

2 Rhyme and Reason

by Jacqui's U.slil'

7

A "Golden Gate" Sampler

8

The Human Imperative An imerview with Daniel J. 8oorst111 by Anthony Uversidge

12

Making Every Drop Count

by Sandy Gru11bug

15 Talking with Saurabh

by Kum1ul Mohan

19

On the Lighter Side

20

Tales Trees Tell

by Jami's S. Trtfil

26 Focus On ...

28 Comedy as Comment

by Ombica Gupta

32

Teleconferencing

by David Grun and Kathlun J. Hansl'll

34

California Schools Absorbing Future Shock

by Jacquelin Singh

37

Business Whiz Kids

by Cynthia Poulos and William Hoffer

42

Protectionism The Perennial Debate

by Don McLeod

45

They Dig Alexandria

by Marilyn Hoffman

Publisher Editor

James A. McGmley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor Himadri Dhanda Assistant Managing Editor

Knshan Gabrani

Senior Editor Aruna Dasgupta Copy Editor Editorial Assistant Photo Editor

Nirmal Sharma Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

Art Director Nand Katyal Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Chier of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulauon Manager

Y.P. Pandh1

Photographic Service

USfS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-Mike Mitchell. Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha. l-R.K. Sharma. 2-3 left top-Kitty Hazuria; right-Jeff Reinking. 9 top-NASA; bottom-Mike Mitchell. 12-8. Fitzgerald except bottom right by Sandy Greenberg. 15-17-Avinash Pasricha. 21, 24-25- Terrence Moore. 22-courtesy Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona. 27 right-courtesy Office of Mayor Charles Royer. 28 bottom-courtesy 20th Century Fox Film Corporation 30-31: Pix# 1.3.6-MOMA; #2- Academy of Motion Picture Art & Sciences; #4-Cinemabilia, New York City. 33-R. Jagannalhan, Photo Division, GOI. 34-Christopher Springmann. 35-Ben Spiegel, National Education Association. 37 top and center-T. Michael Keza!Nation's Business. bottom-Rick Browne/Picture Group. 40 topŠBlack Star; center~ Richard Derk; bottom-T. Michael Keza/ Nauon's Business. 45-47-courtesy Alexandria Urban Archaeology Program, City of Alexandria, Virginia. Inside back cover and back cover-Bob Krueger.

Published by the United States l nforma11on Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

LJ5corSPAN art1dc:s molhcr pul:ilicauons1scnrouraged . exccpl whencopyr1gh1cd. f<>rperrmss1on

\Hiit to the Editor Price of ma.gazmc . one year's "lubscripuon (I? LSSucs} Rs. 2S. ~inttJe copy Rs. 4 For change of address send an old address from a reccn1 SPAN envelope along w11h ne" address 10 Ctrculauon Manogcr. SPAN magazine. 24 Kas1urba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 See change or address lonn on page 48b.

Front cover: Daniel Boorstin. the eminent Librarian of Congress. historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, asserts that it is the human imperative to continue to explore the unknown. See pages 8-ll (Photo by Mike Mitchell) Back cover : A bass violinist pracuces in che solitude of a forest in Aspen for the annual music festival held in this resort town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. See also inside back cover.

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER October was a good month for relations between our two countries. For the first time, an American Secretary of Defense visited Irrlia. Secretary Caspar w. Weinberger met with Prime Minister Raj iv Gandhi, Defense Minister Arun Singh (facing page) arrl a number of other high government officers. The American cabinet official's remarks after his meeting with the Prime Minister suggested that the talks had been productive. "It was a fine discussion arrl we went over all the points that I think are of interest to both sides," Weinberger said. "Arrl I believe it porterrls the development of increasingly warm arrl frierrlly relationships between our two countries and between the military of our two countries."

Last month as well, Ambassador John Gunther Dean released a directory of Irrlo-u.s. Cooperation in Business and Irrlustry, presenting the first copy to Finance Minister V.P. Singh. Documenting the dramatic increase in bilateral trade in recent years, the directory lists a total of 832 existing collaborations between Irrlian and American businesses. In fact , in the past five years, the United States has been Irrlia's principal source of new collaborations, as well as its largest trading partner. Almost 75 percent of those 8 32 joint ventures were established within that period. New Government of India policies and the Indo-u.s.

Memorarrlum of Urrlerstarrling on technology transfer have cut through much of the red tape of the clearance processes arrl paved the way for further collaborations, About half of the collaborative ventures involve high technology , although they vary greatly. The American companies, for instance, range from "Fortune 500" conglomerates to irrlividual entrepreneurs dealing with state-of-the-art technology.

A look at the directory shows that there is also great variation in the origins of the companies. On the American side, nearly every state is represented. In India, 21 states and Union Territories appear, although the greatest number of projects are found in Maharashtra, West Bengal arrl Delhi. In some cases, Indian fions are working with several American entities; in others, companies are focusing on a single product. Transfer of technology is often an important component , but equally noteworthy is the role American business is playing in developing indigenous technological capabilities. Readers will remember the Program for Advancement of Canmercial Technology (PACT) , discussed on this page in September, which puts up venture capital to back joint research and manufacture of new products and processes; this makes the continued growth of our business relationships inevitable. Our two pecples are gifted entrepreneurs, businessmen, innovators and researchers. Nearly 16,000 Irrlian students are studying in American universities; many will return to take up positions in business, industry, government arrl education; those who do not return irranediately are also a vital link in this burgeoning relationship, retaining strong familial arrl often business ties with their homeland.

The importance of our growing bilateral business arrl trade linkages will be reflected in the Irrlia International Trade Fair that opens this month in New Delhi.

This marks the first time in 25 years that the United States is taking part in a big way. Many of the participating American companies are already established in Irrlian partnerships and included in the new register, but a number of others are going to be in the market--arrl not just to sell their wares. Rather, they will be looking for opportunities for long- term collaborations with Indian firms.

- -J. A.M.

Vikram Seth in his dormitory at Stanford University (right) and in Delhi with his family during his visit home in 1981 (below); from left 10 right: brother Shantum, mother Leila, Vikram, sister Aradhana and fat her Premo.

2

It's been the surprise toast of the season in California-a novel in verse by a young Indian student of economics at Stanford University.

Vikram Seth and The Golden Gate are being showered with rave reviews.

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

3

RHYME AND REASON contiiiue<I

T

hat customarily curmudgeonly man of letters, Gore Vidal, asserts on the dust jacket of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate that the book is ''the Great California Novel. " A New York Times review caUed the book "a splendid achjevement," describing it as "a tborougbJy Californian novel, peopled by unmistakably Californian characters."

One reviewer, X.J. Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times, called The Golden Gate "a splendid tour de force"; John Hollander, in the New Republic, topped that by saying the book is "a tour de force of the transcendence of the mere tour de force."

Oddly, perhaps, the recipient of all this praise is not a Californian. nor even an American, and his path to literary celebrity has been anything but conventional. His curriculum vitae contains several surprises.

Seth is a graduate student at Stanford University, California-not in literature but economics; he is onJy some months from completing his doctoral thesis on the demographics of seven villages in China, where he lived for two years.

Explaining why he chose not to study literature, Seth says: "I decided that I'd probably lose my interest in literature if I were to study it. J like putting books down when they bore me. I think that's a fundamental right that a reader has, and of course readers' rights aren't the same as students' rights. Alas, students have to write a paper on something or read every book of Dickens or something like that.

That's a great pity, I feel, because it could easily tum off something that's very interesting, because they've been forced to read it at the wrong time or at the wrong pace."

Seth, 33, was born in Calcutta, lived in India for all but a year and a half of his first 17 years, and didn't set foot in the United States until he was 23. He doesn't even drive, which makes him not exactly un-American but certainly un-Californian. Nevertheless, his novel, The Golden Gate, suggests an intimate knowledge of California mores, from its billboards and bumper stickers to personal ads and pet psychiatrists.

The Golden Gate is filled with details about California that natives sometimes overlook because of excessive familiarity.

About the Author: Jacques Leslie, a former Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent, is a free-lancer based in Northern California.

4

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

Yet Seth emphasizes that it was not his detachment but rather his Jove of California that was most valuable to him in writing the book: "One can't come with a cold and objective eye from outside and then write with affection about a place.

One must have lived years in that place and not just observed for years."

Seth's first language was Hindi, though he believes that English is now his strongest. He speaks in a mellifluous tenor, with a British accent that he absorbed as a student, first at prep schools in India and then at Oxford University. It was only after ills Oxford experience that he decided to continue his studies in the United States. Given a choice among Harvard, Yale and Stanford, he chose Stanford, ''basically on the basis of sunsillne, willch was quite a powerful inducement, considering that England doesn't have very much of it."

Despite living in California for all but two years since 1975, Seth didn't use American spelling until recently. He says be wrote the first draft of The Golden Gate with British usage: "I. was inside the language but not inside the orthography."

The Golden Gate, published in April, is Seth's first novel. He has written two other books: a travel book about hitchhiking through western China, called From Heaven Lake, and a collection of poems, The Humble Administrator's Garden.

"The people who published my travel book rejected my book of poems," he says. "Both the people who published my travel book and the people who eventually published The Humble Administrator's Garden rejected The Golden Gate. It's because each of them wanted me to write another book like the previous one. Well, that wouldn't have interested me. I know some people get into a particular gerue and enjoy it, doing the same thing in a different place or about a different time, but I would have been bored stiff and the reader would have known it."

Having won a Guggenheim Fellowsillp in April, Seth plans to return soon to India for a year or more. He intends to take up the study of Indian classical music, one of bis passions.

The praise that The Golden Gate has won is all the more remarkable considering that it is that rare and arguably anachronistic commodity, a novel in verse. The book consists of 593 sonnets,

From Uls A11ge/es Times Magazinâ&#x20AC;˘. Copyrighl

Š

including the acknowledgments, table of contents and author's autobiographical note. All are written in iambic tetrameter, a meter that has not been fashionable for more than a century. Seth was inspired by Alexander Pushkin's 1831 masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, which uses that poetic form.

With the notable exception of Seth's friend and writing mentor Timothy Steele, who is a poet and teacher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone who read early chapters of the book advised him not to finish it. An aside in The Golden Gate describes how people typically reacted after learning that he was writing a novel in verse:

A week ago, when I had finished Writing the chapter you've just read And with avidity undiminished Was charting out the course ahead, An editor-at a plush party (Well-wined, -provisioned, speechy, hearty) Hosted by (long live!) Thomas Cook Where my Tibetan travel book Was honored-seized my arm: "Dear fellow, What's your next work?" "A novel. .. " "Great!

We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth-" " ... Jn verse," I added. He turned yellow.

"How marvelously quaint," he said, And subsequently cut me dead.

That Seth didn't give up reflects his independence of spirit. Says UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) rarebooks librarian Victoria Steele, who is married to Timothy Steele and knows Seth well, "He doesn't really live by other people's rules in a sense, but it's not that he's pushy or obnoxious or anything like that-ills heart is completely in the right place. He's an incredibly smart person, but he does not take no for an answer."

Now that Seth's book has won acclaim, he has no interest in parlaying its success by writing another novel in verse. Instead , he says, "I'm thinking of perhaps writing a novel in prose."

Judging by appearance alone, one might easily overlook Seth, for he is only 160 centimeters tall , with unremarkable features, a dark complexion and oftentousled black hair. Nevertheless, he projects radiance. Says Grant Barnes, director of the Stanford University Press, for

1986, The Times Mirror Company.

whom Seth worked as an editor for a little more than a year: " He's an exceptionally warm and loving person who seems to transform any group or any group situation just by the force of his charm. His face is an interesting study in itself. H is smile is broad and so e ngaging, a nd yet he's not the sort of guy who goes around grinning from ear to ear all the time. H e's really quite a serious person, but he will break into a smile at the moment when the subject goes fro m the serious to the light."

He is, in fact, a polyma th , a man of great learni ng in varied fields. H e is able to function with sensitivity a nd skill in four vastly different cultures-Indian , English, Chinese and American. "H e is more interested in the world outside of himself than he is in himself," says Timothy Steele. "H e has a healthy unself-co ncern. " Although Seth denies that he is a voracious reader, his knowledge of literature is profound. Victoria Steele says Seth and her husband have both "committed a treme ndous amount of poetry to memory. Whe n one falters the othe r can supply the missing word and so forth. I think they can talk to each othe r in a way they can't talk to anyone else, because no one else is as learned, frankly."

The collaboration between the two men began in 1975, when Seth, prevented from taking a creative-writing course at Stanford because of a scheduling conflict, sought an informal mentor. H e was referred to a teacher who shared an office with Steele, but when Seth paid a visit, Steele happened to be closer to the door, so Seth introduced himself. Steele, who is unusual a mong contemporary poets in that he favors traditional meter and rhyme over free verse, agreed to offer Seth guidance in writing.

Steele's wife, who calls Seth "an extraordinarily lucky person ," says this chance encounte r is typical. "The fact that he was inte rested in poetry and wandered into ¡ the office of the one person in the world who could teach him to write metrically-it's extraordinary. " The two men grew so close that Seth's book is dedicated to Steele, and a book of Steele's poems, soon to be published by Random House (as The Golden Gate was), is dedicated to Seth. Steele's dedication pays homage to Seth by using the stanzaic form that appears throughout

The Golden Gate.

Both men believe that mode rn poetry has foundered because it is no longer accessible to the common reader: It has become, they say, too a rcane, too re mote from everyday experience. Steele, in fact, is writing a history that tries to accou nt for modern poetry's abandonment of conve ntional me ter a nd rhyme in favor of free verse. And now that The Golden Gate has bee n published , some reviewers seem to have assigned Seth the role of single-handedly reviving American verse.

When asked about this, Seth gasps slightly at the tho ught, then concedes that he does not e njoy most modern poe try. " I often don' t unde rstand what's being said , and when I unde rstand it, I sometimes wonder why it's being said at all."

Seth says. "The re is so much poe try that one reads which rea lly doesn't move or e nlighte n one at all. I'm not surprised that people are turning away from poetry. It wasn't like this in the last century, whe n poetry was much more accessible.

So much poetry refers to things which are not within the reach of the common, intelligent, literate reade r."

Seth's views about prose fiction arc similar. "I don't much care for great experimentation a nd knotted language and stuff that the reader bas to wrestle with-as if the writer is in some kind of tangled spasm of inspiration. I feel like saying, 'Cut it out.' T he great writers of the past, whethe r Tolstoy or G eorge Eliot or Jane Austen , were great , clear, fin e writers. I don't get turned on by Finnegans Wake, for instance."

Seth has been confounding convention for a long time, chiefly by allowing his passions, not othe r people's taste or expectations, to guide him . His inte rest in China, for example, blossomed whe n he read translations of Wang Wei, the eighth-century Chinese poet ; he was so moved that he was determined to read Wang Wei in the o riginal. Despite the considerable difficulties of mastering the classical form of Chinese that Wang Wei used, Seth studied the language and eventually was able to read him . Chuang Yin , Seth's Chinese-language professor at Stanford , says Seth was a "fantastic" student. " He has the ability to grasp not o nly the structure of this particular language but the sense," Chuang says. "He has almost the same sense of it that a native has."

Seth's travel book, From Hea ven Lake, is an account of an even more audacious

project: He hitchhiked through Sinkia ng and Tibet in 1981, even though restrictions on the movement of fo reigners in China seemed to rule out such journeys.

In one exploit recounted in the book, Seth, tired of bei ng under the watchful eye of a Chinese guide , was being shown an unde rground irrigation tunnel called a karez. Seth suddenly yelled to him , "See you at the mouth of the karez!" jumped in a nd waded in the darkness until he found a place to exit, 50 meters down the channel. Seth o nly hints that such behavior is unorthodox; the guide, he wrote, was "a little peeved with his illdisciplined charge.''

Seth's passion was once more engaged in an unl ikely way whe n he happened upon two translations of Eugene Onegin in a bookstore. " I took them off the shelf because I thought this was odd-that the same bookstore would stock two different translations. I thought I would at some stage compare them ... on a purely theoretical basis, no particular poetic interest. It was j ust [that] I didn't speak Russian and I wanted to see how the two things would stand up against each other, whether you could really tell visibly that this was the same poet or not. I began reading them, comparing them stanza by stanza, and sudde nly I realized I wasn't comparing them at all. One of the tra nslations [by C harles Johnston] I was just reading- I was reading page afte r page of it, and I couldn't put it down. 1 read it about five times that month , and before I realized it , J thought, ' Let me try using this stanzaic form.'"

In Seth 's hands the use of meter and rhyme is not me rely a gimmick; what he strives for is a fusion of tone a nd substance. In particular, the frequ e nt use of feminine rhymes, which stress a ny but the last syllable of each rhyming word, gives the poetry a more delicate and playful tone than it would have if the rhymes were strictly masculine, with stresses on each rhyming word's finaJ syllable. The sympathe tic, yet mischie vous, slightly mocking tone that the femi nine rhymes provide seems apt for a novel about life among the young a nd educated in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Not all of Seth 's revie wers have appreciated the significance of mete r in his verse . One recent review, in Th.e New York Times Book Review, sought to imitate The Golden Gate by using its stanzaic form . but e ntirely neglected its

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

5

RHYME AND REASON continued

meter: The omission made the review read like doggerel. That error probably reflects the disrepute into which metered poetry has fallen, and the lack of familiarity most modem readers brif!g to it.

The book's plot is set in motion when a friend of John , a young Silicon Valley executive, places a personal ad in a newspaper on John's behalf. Seth says the device occurred to him after he and a friend had a conversation about the advisability of using such ads to find romantic partners. "We were both going through a fairly rough patch, not with each other but with other people, and we just decided that this might be a good idea ." Seth won't say whether he placed an ad himself.

The book depicts a succession of romantic relationships, including a homosexual one, while examining such topics as wine making, cats, the eating habits or pet iguanas, an antiwar demonstration and babies.

Many reviews of the book have i:;ited its focus on yuppies [young urban professionals], implying by their use of the word that such subject matter is unworthy of the grand poetic form in which it appears. Seth argues that of the book's five main characters, only two are yuppies, and he says reviewers do him a disservice by overemphasizing their significance. Moreover, part of the pleasure the book yields extends from the way it manages to treat contemporary subjects poetically. Even a personal ad is far from mundane when rendered in rhyming iambic tetrameter.

Seth says that when he started the book, he did not know how it would end and could not see more than two or three chapters ahead. As he neared completion, he envisioned the sad end that some of his characters would meet and empathized with them to such an extent that he hoped by the time he reached the end, "something else might have intervened."

He wrote much of the book in bed , using "whatever weapon was at hand ," pen or pencil. "Sometimes I would sit in bed with my various papers and notes around me and just write from morning till night and maybe write as many as 12 stanzas a day. At other times I wouldn;t be able to get to more than two lines in two or three days and just then tell myself I really needed a break. " Seth wrote the book in 13 months.

6

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

His bedroom at the Stanford Graduate School dormitory reflects his creative dishevelment, with clothes and books spread about. His disorderliness is legendary: Muriel Bell, who inherited Seth's office at the Stanford University Press , says that while Seth occupied it , it was "a rat's nest. There were file cabinets and stacks of manuscripts and books on every available subject. It was very hard to get from the door to the desk. He's very tiny, so there would be this tiny person behind these great stacks of papers."

Bell says that when Seth's father, a businessman whom she describes as "very dapper," once visited his son at the press, he said "how relieved he was to find that Vikram had at last gotten a job that required a coat and tie." Bell adds that Seth "probably hasn't had one on since he left [the press]."

Barnes, the press's director, says Seth's slovenliness is "part of his tolerance of ambiguity. He's able to move among several cultures and glean the best from them and make use of them and to deal with the ambiguities of situations and thrive on them. I think there might be some truth to the old saw about a clean desk being a sign of a second-rate mind. " Seth's "tolerance of ambiguity" is probably also reflected in his embrace of poetry, at once the most disciplined and the most spontaneous and also the most difficult of writing forms.

Seth says he actually prefers order.

"It's just that things become confusing. I have elaborate filing systems, but somehow none of them work out."

Seth is also something of a legend at the Stanford University Press for the quality of his work there. Barnes says almost all its top editors have had many years of publishing experience before being hired. The selection process includes a test so difficult that "very few people survive'' it, Barnes says.

Seth did not have to take the test to obtain the second-tier position he was originally hired for, but he did so anyway and passed easily. Says Barnes: "That was very unusual, because many people with editorial experience can't pass that particular test. " After a few months on the job, a senior editor whose respoesibilities included the press's prestigious Asian studies list left , and Seth was promoted several grades to oversee it. "His work as a senior editor was brilliant, it was technically compe-

tent, and his authors loved him," Barnes says with some pride.

Seth resigned the post earlier this spring to give himself more time to write and reflect. He also spent a few weeks on a five-city tour promoting the book, a process he found exhausting and apparently unsettling. "The nice thing about this sudden celebrity is that you know that in about three weeks you'll be a nonentity again , so that's at least reassuring," he says quite seriously.

Seth says one benefit of his success is that his parents are "delighted. They've always wondered why I don't produce (A) a PhD and (B) grandchildren , and I think they've always been dubious about these other activities that have taken me off track. I think they're happy that at last what always seemed a somewhat selfindulgent activity is being recognized and paying off. " He is looking forward to being reunited with his family in New Delhi , where his mother [Justice Leila Seth] is a judge.

Random House's hopes for The Golden Gate are reflected in its first printing of 20,000 copies, which company publicist Suzanne Wickham describes as "a tremendous amount for either poetry or a first novel." In mid-May, it reached No. 3 on the San Francisco Chronicle's list of best-selling novels in the Bay Area but had not made any other newspaper or magazine bestseller lists.

Meanwhile, Seth's PhD dissertation languishes. Asked if he plans to finish it, he sounds uncertain: " It would be a real pity if that useful and interesting research were to go to waste, but the trouble is that if I was seized by the scruff, by a novel or something, I wouldn't be able to tell the Muses, ' Go away and come back later.' I don't think that kind of inspiration is recallable."

The Golden Gate seems to cast a slightly harsher light on Seth's attitude toward the dissertation, for he has whimsically inserted into the book a minor character named Kim Tarvesh, which happe.ns to be an anagram of the author's name.

Tarvesh appears at a housewarming party:

... bowed down with the gray futility Of his dank thesis, Kim Tarvesh Ogles convexities of flesh And maximizes his utility By drowning in his chilled Chablis D His economics PhD.

A

~Golden

Gate' Sampler

Contents l 2 3 4

5

Dedication So here they arc, the chapters ready, And , half against my will , l'm free Of this warm enterprise, this heady Labor. that has exhausted me Through thirteen months, swift and delightful.

Incited by my friends' insightful Paring and prodding and ;ippeal.

I pray the gentle hands of Steele Will once again sift through its pages.

If anything in this should grate, Ascribe it to its natal state; If anything in this engages By verse, veracity, or vim.

You know whom l must credit, Tim.

Acknowledgments My debts are manifold and various: First, Stanford University Where, with progressively precarious Nurture, my tardy PhD Has waxed, and waxes, lax and sickly.

Second, to friends who've read this, quickly Advised me to desist and cease, Or burbled , " What a masterpiece!"

Or smoothed my steps with sage suggestion.

Third , to John and Susan Hughes For refuge, friendship , ears, and views.

And, fourth , to you, who did not question The crude credentials of this verse But backed your brashness with your purse.

6 7 8 9 10 ·I I 12 13

The world's discussed while friends are eating.

A cache of billets-doux arrive.

A concert generates a meeting.

A house is warmed. Sheep come alive.

Olives are plucked in prime condition.

A cat reacts to competition.

Arrests occur. A speech is made.

Coffee is drunk', and Scrabble played.

A quarrel is initiated.

Vines rest in early winter light.

The Winking Owl fills up by night.

An old affair is renovated.

Friends meditate on friends who've gone.

The months go by; the world goes on.

Excerpts To make a start more swift than weighty, Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon A time, say, circa 1980, There lived a man. His name was John .

Successful in his field though only Twenty-six, respected, lonely, One evening as he walked across Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss Of a red frisbee almost brained him.

He thought, " If I died, who'd be sad?

Who'd weep? Who'd gloat? Who would be glad?

Would anybody?'' As it pained him , He turned from this dispiriting theme To ruminations less extreme.

About the Author

John looks about him with enjoyment.

What a man needs. he thinks, is health ; Well-paid, congenial employment; A hou.se; a modicum of wealth; Some sunlight; coffee and the papers; Artichoke hearts adorned with capers; A Burberry trench coat; a Peugeot; And in the evening, some Rameau Or Couperin; a home-cooked dinner; A Stilton, and a little port; And so to a duvet. In short, In l.ife's brief game to be a winner A man must have ... oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to Jove.

The author, Vikram Seth, directed

By Anne Freedgood, his editor, To draft a vita, has selected The following salient facts for her: In '52, born in Calcutta.

8 lb. 1 oz. Was heard to utter First rhymes ("cat,·· "mat") at age of three.

A student of demography An~ economics, he has written From Heaven Lake, a travel book Based on a journey he once took Through Sinkiang and Tibet. Unbitten At last by wanderlust and rhyme, He keeps Pacific Standard Time.

. . . Meet Phil-and Paul-Weiss ... Liz Dorati.'' ''Hello." ''A pleasure. " "Say what, PhilThe two of us are throwing a party On Friday night. I !oui.ewarming. Will You join us? Liz has been inviting Horrendous hordes. . .hey, what's that writing?" .. Nothing," Phil mumbles. "Tic-tac-toe....

If Paul can spare me, sure, I'Li go."

"Well, young man , will you free your father?" " Yes," Paul concedes, .. if l can stay With Chuck Lamont when Dad's away. " ...

"Phil, coffee after this?" " I'd rather Split following the Brahms. It's late, And Paul has school at half past eight ...

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

7

hen Challenger exploded in the face of a shocked world, the tragedy destroyed more than seven precious lives and $2,500 million worth of high technology. The catastrophe also shattered the illusion that space travel had become routine- that space was now hospitable to the mothers of small children and not the most hostile and alien environment humans have ever explored. As the image of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) cracked and fell apart, people pondered the hubris that brought down the vengeance of the gods and even wondered if our hopes of voyaging to distant stars might not just be dreams.

Daniel J. Boorstin, fo r one, dismisses such doubts. In his view there is a streak in human nature that cannot be denied, one that forever urges us to explore to the limit and beyond. "We should and will try to go as far as we can," he says. "People's humanity lies in discovering the boundlessness of our powers, which we can never define.

To fail to do all we can do is to fail to be human."

Boorstia should know, for he has spent a large chunk of his life thinking about humanity's ceaseless quest for new worlds to conquer. The eminent Librarian of Congress is a historian and the author of The Discoverers, the popular " history of man's search to know the world and himself." The book embodies Boorstin's belief that the exploring spirit has played a decisive role in shaping human affairs and energetically celebrates "the courage, the rashness, the heroic and imaginative thrusts of the great discoverers" throughout the ages.

Its pages are crowded with the colorful true tales of the discoverers and inventors, the countless Columbuses who have ventured into terra incognita to make the unknown known.

A sturdy, sanguine 69, Boorstin himself is an avid explorer of life, with an insatiable appetite for traveling the outer reaches of knowledge. He is, says friend and biographer of Ronald Reagan, Edmund Morris, "an information machine , obsessively hungry for facts of any kind. He mines every vein of knowledge he comes across, mixing them into strange new alloys of always-surprising conclusions.·· Jim Lehrer, of the well-known TV program The MacNeilll Lehrer NewsHour, says Boorstin is "as interested in new ideas as any man half his age. That's how he stays young. He cares about things he doesn't know about. His educational process goes on and on.''

Whether his enthusiasm is cause or effect, Boorstin has excelled at every stage throughout his life. His only retreat, by his own account, is that he had to give up when he tried to write a novel; and his principal editor and wife, Ruth , adds, he can't dance. A short, pipe-chomping man , Boorstin was born of immigrant Russian Jewish stock in Atlanta. As a young attorney, his father Samuel helped defend Leo Frank. the factory superintendent wrongly convicted of the murder of a young girl. Daniel grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the family fled to avoid the wave of anti-Semitism that followed the notorious case. From this relatively modest launch site, the Boorstin career took off on the same trajectory as an Apollo moon shot. At Harvard by age 15, he was an editor of the Crimson and won the Bowdoin prize for an essay on Gibbon's Decline

W

8

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

and Fall of the Roman Empire, still the book he values most. He studied biochemistry for a while, graduating summa cum laude in English history and literature. A prized double first (two first-class degrees) in law at Oxford, where he went as a Rhodes scholar, was followed by qualifying as a barrister at law in the English courts.

Coming home to get his doctorate in jurisprudence at Yale, he briefly taught at Harvard and became a government lawyer in Washington. But he found that he didn't like practicing law and boldly switched to history. He spent the next 25 years as a distinguished professor of history at the University of Chicago, with trips abroad to teach at the Sorbonne and in Kyoto, Cambridge and Rome. At Chicago, where he joined James Watson (of DNA fame) bird-watching, he built up an enviable record as a historian by writing many books, ending with a three-volume social history of America, The Americans.

The third volume won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Another Boorstin classic is The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America. The book showed bow the media created a new kind of unreality and created celebrities, whom Boorstin wittily defined as ·'people who are well-known for their well-knownncss. ·· In 1969 he left Chicago for Washington to become director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology. Fond o f technology, he reveled in the plows, sewing machines and other artifacts displayed there. In 1975 Boorstin, who calls the invention of the book "the greatest technological advance man has ever made." was tapped by President Gerald Ford for the post of Librarian of Congress. He was confirmed after hearings complicated by concern that he might spend government time writing his books, and since taking office he has kept his typewriter in his study at home.

Despite great risks, man will explore space because, says noted historian Daniel Boorstin, "We are not free not to. That's

The Human Imperative' An in1erview wi1b DANIEL J. BOORSTIN by ANTHONY LIVERSIDGE

From Om111. Copyright ©by Anthony Liversidge and reprinted w11h pernuS<ion of Omni Publications, Int .. Ltd. 1986.

Boorstin clearly enjoys being leader of the 20-miJlionvolume institution, probably the biggest library in the world (the exact size of the comparable Lenin Library in Moscow is unknown). The library, which subscribes to 117 ,000 periodicals, has its mailbags stuffed with a daily average of 7 ,000 books. The cultural post has helped make Boorstin an insider par excellence on the Washington social scene. Typically, be was seated close to President Reagan at the White House dinner for Prince Charles and Lady Diana. His sociability extends beyond serving the Library's interests, for Boorstin loves to catalyze other minds interested in books and ideas. "He's really the unofficial minister of culture," says a writer who owes a multimillion-dollar contract to Boorstin's introductions. Good friends include writer Clare Boothe Luce, The New York Times publisher John Oakes, columnist William Safire, and Supreme Court Justice Byron White , who, in an annual ritual, reads the Declaration of Independence after lunch eYery Fourth of July at the Boorstins' country retreat orr the banks of the Potomac, across from Mount Vernon.

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

9

THE HUMAN IMPERATIV E continued

Interviewer Anthony Liversidge called on him at 8:30 in the morning in Washington , D.C. Snow was falli ng, and it was not a day when most people were bounding out of bed. But Boorstin , who answered his door in sport coat and red bow tie, had begun work hours before. He'd crept down to his study at five o'clock and, equipped with pipe, an old black Olympia typewriter and a wall of reference works, was exploring the mysteries of the pyramids and Stonehenge for his current book in progress, The Creators. Only a fortnight after the Challenger tragedy on January 28 with the pain still felt, it seemed appropriate to ask him fi rst to put the seemingly disastrous setback in broader perspective.

L iversidge: The Challenger tragedy gave pause to many who advocated that human exploration of space should proceed at full throtfle. But you believe, don't you, that "space is the new sea and we must sail upon it," as Presidem Kennedy said?

Boorstin : We are not free not to. As the old Talmudic saying has it, we' re not free to complete the task or to desist from it. That's the human imperative, the Promethean imperative, if you like. If the fire is there, we must capture it. If we get burned by it, well , that is our misfortune and opportunity. Sounds rather corny to put it that way. but I really think so. We are not free to desist from genetic research , space exploration, or archaeological research- which could have been possible. If we had accepted [17th-century Irish prelate] A rchbishop James Ussher's biblical chronology of the creation of Earth , we wouldn't have bothered with archaeology of carbon dating.

But juxtaposing the unprecedented Voyager pictures of Uranus with the Challenger catastrophe, some feel there may be a limit to the distance people should travel physically f rom Earth .

Boorstin : I don't believe there is. That's what people told Columbus! They said you could prove by all existing maps it would be a fru itless expedition. The experts were more right than Columbus about the extent of Earth , as it turned out. But you have to see. The Challenger's critics put it in the negative. Should we risk loss of life in space exploration? I'd put it in the affirmative and say that humanity's greatest need is the need for the unnecessary.

Civilization's progress is the multiplication o f items, opportunities and technologies that are un necessary. Who can tell what their consequences might be?

Isn't there a mythology of space like the mythology of the West in the 1800s which was promoted by the ads of land speculators that painted it as a Garden of Eden?

Boorstin: Actually, at that time maps placed the Great American Desert in what is now the most fertile part of the country. I don't see any reason to treat space as unique . It 's an opportunity for exploration in another dimension, that's all. and it is not the kind of thing we are free to desist from . An unfree society curtails people's freedom to be fu lly human , whether in speech , writing, painting , or space exploration. Those extravagances, perhaps especially exploration, are the sign of our humanity and its fulfillment.

)0

SPAN NOVEMBER 19R~

What was che immediate effect of the shuttle explosion?

Boorstin: The shuttle disaster catapulted people from anonymity to celebrity overnight. In my book The Image , I defined "celebrity" as a person who is known for his "well-knownness. " Now heroism is something else. The Challenger explosion also had the incidental effect of creating a sense of heroism about these people's efforts.

With so many delays and the 24 times the shuttle had gone up , public sensitivity was dulled. People were no longer fascinated by it. The disaster dramatized the risk and the cost in human life. That may have helped to make the space program a heroic effort , not just a technological feat with dozens of people sitting at the controls.

Because they rely more on the decisions of others, are the astronauts less heroic than the great figures of the past?

Boorstin: I bridle at this emphasis on individualism that has dominated American history ; it is si mplistic. The great triumphs of American civi lization have all been triumphs of community as well as individuals. Columbus couldn't have got anywhere without his crew. The pioneers generally moved west in pretty well-organized groups, each with its own constitution . The space program is a communal effort. Yet without the insistence of leaders, who dare to pursue the unknown and to take risks. it would be impossible. I am just beginning to learn about this interaction between the community and the creator. Would Gauguin have painted as he did without the conventions of his time to rebel against? The community provides a resistant medium that gives the creator something to rebel against. The community is part of the resource and the opportunity.

What will be rhe historical impact of the space adventure on society?

Boorstin: We will discover great oceans of ignorance .

We know much less than we think we know about the solar system and the universe beyond.

So it will encourage humility?

Boorstin: Paradoxically. every discovery of a new dark continent increases human arrogance and man's belief in his own powers to know. Yet , as it provides new ter ritories of discovery, exploration adds new territories of ignorance. But man is first more impressed with what he's newly discovered than with the new areas of ignorance. That certainly was true in the case of America. The first efforts were to make all the newly encountered things fit with the previous patterns. As I said before. even the 19th-century maps still had the words Great American Desert written across the body of North America. Now, it took quite some time for people to discover the inaccuracy of that description. The greatest significance of the discovery of America for Western civilization was the realization that if there could be more continents than had been imagined or found on any of the respectable maps, there might also be more of anything and everything else! But humility is a little too theological a word to speak of.

One had the word "hubris" in mind after the shuttle disaster.

Boorstin: In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin listed 12 virtues, each one of which he was going to perfect

in himself for one month. The 13th virtue was going to be humility ; he would imitate Jesus and Socrates. But his afterthought was that if he did accomplish it he'd then be proud of his humility, so it was self-defeating. Such '¡self-liquidating" ideals are, I believe, characteristic of the American experience. America seeks its objectives and opportunities in experience and thereby dissolves its ideals. paradoxically , in the process of accomplishing them. That's quite unlike a society that is based on dogma or apriorism.

Won't the new view of the planet as seen from space inspire social harmony and world peace because it looks so vulnerable and beautiful alone in the universe?

Boorstin: It's not at all clear that knowing more about each other makes people love each other more. I haven't got any simple answers. I don't like this way of putting the question because I believe in openness. I believe the one certainty in history is the unexpected. To be reminded of our inability to predict is itself a wholesome influence. We risk imprisoning ourselves in the instruments of our prophecy. Our tendency to apply the techniques of mathematical prediction , of extrapolation in science, to mankind's experience is dangerous. Science insists on the importance of quantitative techniques. Most historians of science define science's progress as the increasing application of quantitative methods to a quantitative end, and the deriving of quantitative data from experience. That view has also been borrowed by social scientists. But mine is that human experience is incommensurable with quantitative categories.

Doesn't the space advemure enlarge horizons and encourage creativity?

Boorstin: The creative consequences of the space enterprise, just like the consequences of Columbus's voyage, are unimaginable now. Every advance in knowledge has its self-correcting or self-liquidating consequence. Every advance should expose new areas of ignorance. Sometimes a new formula or scientific dogma appears as the most prominent thing in the foreground.

But behind it loom vast new areas of darkness. Those are the most promising areas .

Would you personally accept a ride on the shuttle?

Boorstin: ls this an invitation? I don't know. It takes different kinds of courage to do different kinds of things. I don't know whether I have that kind of courage. I have never confronted it. J don't like to look down from a precipice. I'd probably take it. I don't think that is likely to happen! But why not? Why not? One of my favorite mottoes comes from a wonderful passage in one of Sbaw's plays. T he serpent says to Eve in the Garden of Eden, "Wben you and Adam talk I hear you say 'why?' But I dream things that never were, and I say "why not?'" I think that's a better question: " Why not?" r don't think there is a certain type of person who is a discoverer or a creator. The Discoverers dramatizes the miscellaneousness and unpredictableness of the types of people who would be discoverers. You couldn't tell if it would be a respectable William Harvey [English physician who demonstrated the function of the heart and circulation of the blood) or a half-maniacal Paracelsus [Swiss

physician and alchemist] who would add something.

Many scientists tail off after accomplishing great things, but you are still going strong after five decades of hard work . How do you explain it?

Boorstin: Well , trying to match an accomplishment is a problem of success fo r everybody. As Goethe observed, "Why is it that when a man accomplishes one remarkable thing, the world conspires to prevent him from accomplishing another?" People are hungry for what the discoverer or creator provides them- but they are also envious.

But one doesn't deserve praise. nor is one entitled to feel virtuous, for working at what one wants to do. any more than for falling in love . If you' re lucky enough to love your work. why should you be praised for doing what you can't help doing?

The problem in writing is having something to say. Writer's block is basically thinker's block. If you haven 't anything to say, of course it's going to be harder to write it.

What's the difference between a discoverer and a creator?

Boorstin: The Discoverers was about the search for what is out there: everything o utside of humanity's consciousness-the world. society. the continents, and so on. The Creators is what we make of what's out there. It's all about the arts. The Discoverers stressed that one of the great obstacles to human progress was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. The counterpart in The Creators to tbe mystery of what's out there for the discoverer is the mystery of what one has created. And the creator never really knows what he or she has created.

Have you had any surprises so far?

Boorstin: One unexpected thing l found was that the very idea of creation is novel and does not exist everywhere in the world. The great Greek philosophers didn't believe there could be anything new. Plato and Aristotle both believed that whatever you were making was only a reaching for some ideal existing from eternity.

Yet they were wonderfully creative.

The history of creation is in part the history of humans' increasing awareness of our creative powe rs. But we can be aware of our powers without ever being aware of the consequences. The epigraph of my book The Genius of American Politics is the emptiness of the H oly of Holies in the ancient temple of Solomon . That is in some ways the symbol of my view of history . You're not trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, as some historians and professionals seem to think. Rather you're searching for the boundaries of your ignorance, trying to discover what it is you really don't know.

What is the last sentence in your typewriter this morning?

Boorstin: "And the first signs of man's awareness of himself remain the most enduring." In this chapter, called "The Cities of the Dead," I'm dealing with the beginnings of architecture and with mankind's struggle against his own reluctance to try , or even accept , the new.

Man's first creations started with his efforts to overcome or deny the transience of his life , to reassure himself (Text continued on page 48)

SPAN NOVtMBF.R 19M

Jl

Making Every Drop Count

by SANDY G REENBERG

Science and a sustained water-conservation ethic are helping the city of Tucson, Arizona, overcome its shortage of water.

I . A worker in Tucson, Arizona, installs a pond liner that helps prevent contamination of groundwater by toxic wastes.

The containm ent p onds, being m ade at Hughes Aircraft, are double-lined with sp ecially fo rmula1ed heal-welded high-density polyethy lene that has a life of almos1200 years and is ro1-f ree.

2. Land subsidence owing to overp umpi11g of water from aquifers

is an acute p roblem. A s the watertable declines, and water is not replenished, deep cracks and fissu res slash across the lunclscupe, oflen endangering housing fo undalions. Recurring land-shifts caused by fissures make it necessary 10 frequently repair highway frac1ures and realign rail /racks. By identifying subsidence-prone areas, 1he problem cc111 be minimized or¡ even eliminated lhrough beuer pumping managem enl.

3. R. £. Morrison, manager for environme111al and energy programs, H ughes Aircraft, draws clean water f rom a pipe at the firm ¡s pilot groundwater reclamation facili1y. The sys1em was designed to clean up groundwa1er co111ami11arion from past waste disposal p rac1ices at 1he plant. /1draws ow heavy metals 1hrough an innovative ion-exchange process and strips organic solvents 1hrough an aeration tower. The cleansed wmer re-charged into the aquifer is as pure or p urer 1/1011 the city's high-quality municipal water supply.

Because ofprovisions in Arizonci"s waler rights la ws, the cleansed water is put back into the ground ins1ead of being reused direc1ly.

4. Drought-tolerant flowers are planted ow side Casa def A gua, a water conservation and reuse dem onstra1ion house in Tucson. A s part of the city's water conservation ethic, p eople are advised to adopt low-water-use landscaping m ethods and efficiem drip-irrigation systems that deliver water m ore selectively .

If any place in the United States is learning the value of water and the critical importance of proper management to ensure its continued availability it would appear to be T ucson , Arizona, with its determined water-conservation ethic.

T he south central A rizona city and its e nvirons have been designated a "sole source aquifer" by the U .S . Environmental Protection Agency in recognition of the fact that Tucson is totally dependent on the underground resource for its water needs. T he majority of streams in tpe area are dry through most of the year, with little grou ndwater rising to the surface.

The region has been inhabited for miJJennia, since the first native tribes came here attracted by the life-giving springs of fresh water. rn the 17th century, Spanish missionaries moved in. In 1776 a presidio, or fort, was established near the American Indian village of Chukson (pronounced like Tucson-"too saan"). A steady stream of settlers fo llowed and a permanent city came into being.

The settlers are still coming, attracted in good measure by Arizona 's sunny, dry, healthy climate. Metropolitan Tucson's population is some 620,000 people, more than a ten fo ld increase since the end of World War II. In addition. each winte r thousands of snowbirds, tourists from colder climes to the north , flock to the area to spend time in the desert sun .

And they all use water.

As recently as 100 years ago the watertable was higher than the streambed of the Santa Cruz River , which cuts thro ugh Tucson. The river's bed consisted of a series of verdant marshes. Water flowed year-round along portions of its course, and shaUow, hand-dug wells in t he river provided water for the citizenry. The arrival of the railroad in the 1880s laid the way for pipes and the establishme nt of a water system for the area.

But the growth o f the city and its increasing water needs led to well-fi elds and pumps, and the real beginning of the depletion of the aquifer, the mammoth undergro und reservoir filled by the seepage of rai nfall over millions of years. Ever increasing pumping , much of it after the introduction of the turbine pump in the 1930s, dropped the watertable from ground leve l in 1880 to 43 meters below the surface in 1955. By 1980 it had dropped to 73 meters below ground level , and wate r was being depleted at five times the rate of replenishment.

Increased pumping leads to additional problems. The deeper it is necessa ry to go to mine groundwater, the mo re expensive it becomes to pump it to the surface. A s the aquifer is depleted , water quality may deteriorate, so more and more expensive processing may be needed before the water can be delivered to user . Subsidence-the settling and cracking of the land 's surface- may occur with extensive groundwater pumping. More people, mo re users and more types of uses increase the risk of contaminatio n of the source.

Metropolitan T ucson is not the only region in the United States dependent on groundwater, but its reliance on this single so urce ma kes it unique . T he aquife r supplying the Tucson basin is difficult to replenish naturally, and, at the moment, there simply is no alternative source of water.

A reduced dependency o n mined groundwater can o nly be achieved by reducing demand for water and by increasing the supply from other sources.

Nearly a decade ago the Tucson city council , in an effort to reduce demand , made its first attempt to raise the rates paid for water. The proposed dramatic increase so angered voters that

~PAN NOVEMBFK 198<>

13

MAKING EVERY DROP COUNT conti1111ed

they elected a new council. The new council found it necessary to raise rates even higher.

In 1980, the Arizona legislature passed the Arizona Groundwater Management Act, the fi rst such comprehensive fra mework in the state fo r managing this essential resource.

The T ucson Active Management Area, one of several such areas established under the act, oversees the Jaw's provisions in the city and environs, and throughout a huge surrounding area encompassing more than a million hectares. Agricultural. industrial, municipal and individual uses are all touched by its stringent provisions.

The act strictly Jim its crop irrigation with groundwater.

Industrial users are expected to reduce water consumption to a minimum reasonable for production , and to protect the vital groundwater source against toxic contamination. Municipal inspectors are required to make a reasonable reduction in per capita use of water in their service areas. Before new subdivisions can be constructed, an assured water supplydefined as water of adequate quality to continuously meet the expected needs of the entity for 100 years-must be substantiated, a particularly important provision given the area's projected population growth. Golf courses and other large turf users are required to use effluent (reclaimed sewer water treated by a sewerage plant) to irrigate their expanses of grass.

An umbrella organization , t he Southern Arizona Water Resources Association (SA WARA). has embarked on an extensive information and education campaign, designed to create a water ethic-an awareness of the entire scope of the water problem-in Tucson. Every communications medium is being used to get the message across, to urge people to "Be Water Aware."

Extensive teaching materials have been developed fo r use in schools to help foster a water-conservation philosophy.

Casa del Agua, a water-conservation and reuse demonstration house, was recently opened under the sponsorship of the City of T ucson , the University of Arizona, SA WAR A and a wide range of municipal and business interests. T he Casa (house) is designed to monitor and evaluate the practicality and overall effects of five major components: harvesting rainwater; using gray water (all wastewater that comes from a household excluding toilet and some kitchen sink wastes); using watersaving indoor plumbing fixtures: landseaping, including contouring to capture and use rainwater, drip irrigation, using waterefficient plants, and siting plants to take advantage of their shade and/or evaporation rates for help in cooling; and setting up solar greenhouses.

Concurrently. Tucson awaits an additional source of water.

The Central Arizona Project (CAP), gradually wending its way 525 kilometers across the state, is expected to start delivering water from the Colorado River to the city in 1991.

Authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1968. the giant project has reached beyond Phoenix and construction is now within 75 kilometers of Tucson. Although agriculture was originally the main reason for bringing it into Central Arizona, municipalities and industries are oow expected to be the prime users, and there have been more requests than can be accon:imodated.

First allocations go to the American Indian tribes here.

The arrival of the CAP in Tucson will not mean unlimited water supplies for the city. however. nor wilJ it open the door for a return to less conservative water use. Reduction of the use

14

~PAN NOVfMLll R 1981>

of groundwater is required under terms of the CAP's water delivery contract. And how successful are all the efforts to bring about that reduction?

• Per capita water use within the region, 775 liters per person per day a decade ago, is now about 565 liters per person per day. (CAP allotments are based on 530 liters per person per day for the projected population.)

• Depletion of groundwater sources, five times the rate of replenishment five years ago, has decreased to between two-and-a-half and three times the rate of replenishment.

• Since 1975, Tucson has successfully operated an activated sludge treatment plant, processing liquid sewage for reuse (solid wastes are processed at another plant).

• The city is now constructing a demonstration recharge project, designed to put clean, reclaimed water back into the ground to be pumped out again for agricultural use during peak summer usage periods.

• Landscaping changes are in evidence all over the area. The city has converted the landscaping of its highway medians from grass to rocks and low-water-use plants.

• Homeowners are following the city's lead, replacing lawns with rockscapes and drought-tolerant plants.

• Private resorts are recycling water, redesigning golf courses to use less grass and landscaping with desert plants.

• American Pharmaseal, the largest industrial user of water in the area, which came to T ucson when water was cheap, has gradually cut its water use nearly in half and plans to begin recycling 'up to half of t he water.it still uses. An International Business Machines (IBM) plant, just outside the city, has a totally self-sufficient water and wastewater system.

• Hughes Aircraft has installed sophisticated mechanisms for the treatment of toxic wastes, recovers 75 percent of its wastewater and, with additional modernization, expects to increase that to 95 or 97 percent; this faci lity is unique in the United States, using recycled water in the manufacture of computer chips.

• Agricultural users have continued their search for increased efficiency in irrigation by more precisely measuring water needs. In some cases, kinds of crops being grown have been changed, and experiments are underway to exp lore the feasibility of developing new low-water-use crops. T reated effluent is an alternate water source for agricultural use that bas not yet been fully tapped.

• A voluntary "Beat the Peak" campaign aimed at reducing the peak daily water usage that normally occurs during the hot, dry summer months is the most successful communitywide water management effort in six western states (Colorado, Utah , New Mexico , Nevada, California and Arizona) with partial desert climates. Inquiries about the program have come from all across the country.

More than 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin noted that "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." The Tucson community decided to take positive action before the well went totally dry. Experts say that in about 20 years, as populations grow and new sources of water become harder to find, other cities throughout the American West, and perhaps 0 in other Dations, will be fo llowing Tucson's lead.

About the Author: Sandv Greenberg is a SPAN correspondent in

Washington. D. C.

Tai

g with Saurabh Text by KUMUD MOHAN

Photographs by AVINASll PASRICHA

Talk, talk, talk ... that was the advice the John Tracy Clinic of Los Angeles gave the Mohans in their correspondence course lessons for parents of deaf children. And it worked. Today six-year-old Saurabh, born deaf, has learned to "listen," even speak a bit, and lead an increasingly normal life. In the article overleaf, Saurabh's mother relates his journey from silence to communication.

Whether he's building blocks with Iris friends at school (above) or doing his homework with his mother (right), Saurabh is always bursting with enthusiasm and mischief

TALKING WITH SAURABH continued

ar and I had just learned that our two-year-old son Saurabh (born 1980) was deaf. We were lost in a turmoil of grief, bewilderment and dread. A hundred questions tormented us: What sort of a life would Saurabh lead when he grew up? Would he be safe on the roads?

Would be be able to earn a decent living?

Above all, would he be able to speak?

Or, would he be dismissed as deaf and "dumb" as well?

The future was a towering, blank wall-until the John Tracy Clinic of Los Angeles opened the door for us. The All-India Institute of Medical Sciences , New Delhi, suggested to us (as they do to all parents of deaf children who come to them) that we contact the clinic and take their correspondence course for guidance in bringing up Saurabh. The clinic, described as an education center for preschool deaf children and their parents, informed us in a letter that ¡â&#x20AC;˘very rarely is a person stone deaf." More than 95 percent of deaf people possess residual bearing that can be built upon by a hearing aid and various specialized listening techniques.

Though we never met her, somehow Mrs. Louise Tracy, the founder of the clinic and wife of the late actor Spencer Tracy, became one of the finest people to enter our lives. This wonderful lady had not only taught her own deaf son , John , to speak, but started an organization to help parents of deaf children around the world.

Since 1942, the John Tracy Clinic (at 806 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90007) has been encouraging, guiding and training deaf and deaf-blind people. Its services, including correspondence courses for parents and institutions of deaf people anywhere in the world, are entirely free. Mrs. Tracy died a few years ago , but the clinic is continuing with its excellent work.

We started the John Tracy Clinic correspondence course for parents of preschool deaf children when Saurabh was two years old. The first Jetter put us at ease. Yes, we were told. Saurabh would be safe on the roads. Of course, he'd be able to lead a normal life to a great extent. He certainly wouldn' t be dismissed as deaf and dumb because he

A:

Grandfather Anand Mohan cajoles Saurabh into doing his homework; the sweets on the table are the bait being offered.

16

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

would learn to speak-provided we, his parents, worked very hard.

The 12-lesson course stressed our unique role as parents, molded our attitudes and tapped our potential. In her introductory letter to parents undergoing the course. Mrs. Tracy told us: "All learning for a child begins at birth, and the first four or five years are his greatest learning years. They are the imitative and habit-forming years, and may determine to a great extent his ability to learn later.

What he learns in these early years is dependent almost entirely on his parents-the quality of their insight, love, support and understanding .... Everything they do in front of their child, with their child and to their child contributes to his character and personality, his attitude toward the world and to his ability to communicate."

Communication, as we know, is the basic problem of deafness. There are always two people involved in any communication-whether one talks, listens, writes, reads or lipreads. In the years to come, my husband Amar or I would be this ''other person" for Saurabh . Talking to him productively so as to lead to an understanding of words through lipreading would require immense thought, imagination, ingenuity, faith and humor. "It involves the building up of qualities within yourself," as Mrs. Tracy put it succinctly.

Training Saurabh now became the chief and most challenging project of our lives. TALK. TALK, TALK, was the main message of the John Tracy Clinic, and we tried to fit it into our daily lives.

In fact, we talked much more to Saurabh than to our older son Tushar, who is perfectly normal.

We followed the clinic's guidelines while talking: Be at the child's eye level, speak distinctly at a moderate rate of speed, don't "baby talk." Our day started with a running commentary once Saurabh put on his hearing aid. Taking care that light was falling on our lips, we would say, "Hello, Saurabh, you've woken up.

From top to bottom: A lesson from the John Tracy Clinic's correspondence course emphasizes the importance of talking with the lips always at the deaf child's eye level to familiarize her with lipreading; Saurabh with his best friend and confidant, his pet Babu; Saurabh teases photographer A vinash Pasricha by mimicking his camera actions.

'I HAVE A RED AIRPLANE."

"I'll FLY THE Af RPLANE."

TALKING WITH SAURABH continued

See, it is daylight. Brother is up already.

He is getting ready to go to school. See, he is drinking his milk. Do you want your milk?"

Saurabh would nod.

"Where are your shoes and socks? Go, get them. Found them? Good! Now we'll put on your socks. Here, push your foot in. There, you've put on the first sock.

Now the second sock. Next come the shoes. First shoe, second shoe. You're' ready now. You want to take the dog for a walk? Come, let's take Babu."

Saurabh was probably grasping only a fraction of all that we were saying to him.

But he was picking up the habit of lipwatching as well as associating words with different objects and actions from whatever sounds reached him through his hearing aid. He needed to "see" phrases at least 200 times before he could start using them as his own (unlike a normal child who picks up phrases effortlessly from all the conversation he hears around him and then proceeds to use them).

We used the John Tracy Clinic's ingenious ideas to teach Saurabh lipreading.

"Look, what I've got for you," J said one day to Saurabh, holding a ball behind my back. He looked about excitedly. I brought the ball close to my mouth and stopped abruptly. "Ball," J said in the split second that Saurabh looked up. I did this several times, all the time playing with the ball and talking to him. "What is this? This is a ball; we play with the ball; it is a red ball." Slowly, steadily and surely Saurabh learned the lip movement of the word "ball."

Along with lipreading, listening was equally important. Indeed, a deaf child can "listen" with the help of his residual hearing. The clinic explained how. First 1 struck a drum in Saurabh's presence and showed him how to drop a bead into a box every time he saw me strike it. Later I hid the drum from view and asked him to drop the beads only when he heard me strike it. In about a year Saurabh learned lo show a consistent response to the sounds of a drum, a whistle. a bell and a flute.

From objects. we progressed to the sound of words. The first word was of course his own name, Saurabh. We also learned that deaf people have a far better visual than oral memory, and so pasted the names of various objects at Saurabh's eye level. He learned to read, lipread and to identify the names of these objects

18

SPAN NOVEMBER 19Rh

through carefully listening to us.

However, just knowing words was not enough. We wanted him to develop an inner language-a verbal mind like ours.

So, after different activities, I showed him and read out cards using such phrases as "I had my breakfast," "I had my bath."

Slowly he began to understand that the written form, the spoken form and the heard form were only different ways of expressing the same thing.

Every lesson in the John Tracy correspondence course was a journey of adventure; of learning more about our child, so that we felt greater confidence and joy in his development. The course suggested a hundred little ways of making the best of everyday situations, opportunities and materials available at home.

At the end of each lesson we filled in a questionnaire and sent it to the director of correspondence education at the John Tracy Clinic. She replied promptly with friendly, encouraging and practical advice. Once, when I mentioned that Saurabh 's hyperactivity made him quite unmanageable, she wrote back: "By now you must have read our second lesson's discussion on discipline. We define discipline as teaching-teaching a child to behave in an acceptable way. Give Saurabh time, but say 'no' when it must be said. If you mean it and stick to it, Saurabh will gradually learn to accept the necessary limits or restrictions on what he can do and when he can do it. Back up your 'no' with love: then you'll discover that you feel more confident in saying it.¡¡ We continued the John Tracy course for a year or so. Saurabh seemed to be picking up lipreading. listening and comprehension rather well, but speech was still a distant goal. At three-and-a-half, he had not uttered a single sound beyond his laughter and bawling and an occasional "mum-mum." He only knew how to point at whatever he wanted.

Our lucky break came when we met Wing Commander K.K. Srinivasan of Mysore who had taught his 12-year-old profoundly deaf son, Raja, to speak.

Srinivasan 's method of eliciting speech from a deaf child seemed heartless at first. For every morsel that Raja was offered, he was supposed to say the name of the food item before getting it.

"But Saurabh can't utter a word," we argued. ..Don't worry. it will come. But first of all, you must eliminate signs. Remem-

ber, sign language is the enemy of speech. Just don't allow it at all," we were firmly told.

So, Amar and I learned to keep our own hands in check (really difficult, since hinting through gestures was so much easier) as we set about inducing speech in Saurabh.

For one whole day Saurabh refused to speak, and so got barely anything to eat.

Once or twice he wailed. We were told that the louder he wailed, the better it would be for his lungs and ultimately his speech. We spent a sleepless night. But we were convinced that if we did not make an all-out effort right then, perhaps Saurabh might never learn to speak.

As it happened, after one day of silence, Saurabh broke into all sorts of jabbering. There were no clear words, but his childish chatter was the sweetest music to our ears. Ignoring signs, we responded promptly and encouragingly to whatever he muttered. In a month or so Saurabh's general "mum-mum" was molded to form the first proper word of his choice. "Aam," he said, for mango.

This was followed by "aur aam" (more mango).

At present Saurabh's speech is far from clear. but for the last six months he has been progressing well at a regular school.

"Saurabh is able to communicate easily with other children," says Jyoti Dave, his class teacher at Happy Hours, New Delhi. "He is very concerned about those younger than him. He teaches them to eat their tiffin slowly like himself. And if someone is in trouble, he is the first one to lend a helping hand," she adds.

Saurabh's progress is a tribute to his efforts and to the dedication and sense of commitment of the John Tracy Clinic. To date, more than 58,000 parents have benefited from the John Tracy correspondence course all around the world.

Says S. Ramakrishnan, additional commissioner of police, Delhi, and father of Vijay, a seven-year-old deaf child, "I think the John Tracy course is a must for all parents of deaf children. It gives a clear month to month picture of where the parents and child stand-providing definite guidelines for the future. It's O something one can't get elsewhere."

Aboul the Author: Kumud Mohan is a Delhibased free-lance journalist. She also helps parents of other deaf children to cope with the disability.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

~"Young people frequently feel elated, son. This is perfectly healthy as long as they keep in mind that there isn't any valid reason for it."

Canoon by Joseph Dawes.

Drawing by J 8 Handelsman; © 1986, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc•

...-.-t.. ... I ·; .... · .-

C. 1985 Unovernl Press Syndicate

"Nice crowd."

Rcpnn1cd With permission from Tbe Sa1u«by Evening Post Soclttf.

1 division of Bfl. 1nd MS • Inc. © 1985.

In his heart, Willy knew the ants were being very foolish.

ueblo dwellings in New Mexico, a 17th-century oil painting and the streets of a medieval Russian city may seem to have little in common, but all are being connected by a new-and unexpected-field of scientific research: the study of the annual growth rings of trees. Tree rings were once of serious concern only to woodcarvers and cabinetmakers, but a combination of individual genius, sophisticated analysis and old-fashioned luck have turned them into tools that can be applied in areas as diverse as anthropology and pollution control.

Carpenters from time immemorial must have known that tree trunks have rings, which give rise to the grain in a piece of wood. We find them mentioned by associates of Aristotle, but Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to suggest that as trees grow, they add a new ring every year. Today, we understand that when spring arrives and vegetation comes alive after the dormancy of winter, the cells just inside the bark of a tree start to divide.

They produce large, thin-walled cells that we see as the lightcolored material scientists call earlywood. Later in the season, the growth slows down and the cells get smaller and thicker walled. This so-called latewood looks darker and is what makes up the dark rings in a tree trunk. After the latewood forms, the tree becomes dormant again for the winter and the whole cycle repeats. The result is that many species carry in their trunks a series of alternating dark and light bands, each pair corresponding to a year's growth. These contrasting bands are most evident in

20

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

conifers; distinctions between rings are not as pronounced in most temperate deciduous species and are absent in many tropical trees.

Trees are living archives, carrying within their structure a record not only of their age but also of precipitation and temperature for each year in which a ring was formed. The record might also include the marks of forest fires, early frosts and, incorporated into the wood itself, chemical elements the tree removed from its environment. Thus, if we only knew how to unlock its secrets, a tree could tell us a great deal about what was happening in its neighborhood from the time of its beginning. Trees can tell us what was happening before written records became available. They also have a great deal to tell us about our future.

The records of past climate that they contain can help us to understand the natural forces that produce our weather, and this, in turn, can help us plan.

Application of the study of tree rings began in the early part of this century with Andrew Ellicott Douglass.

Born in Vermont in 1867, Douglass went to Arizona to find a location for a new observatory to be built by his fellow New Englander, Percival Loweli. Beginning in 1901.

Douglass made a practice of traveling out to logging camps near Flagstaff to examine the ring patterns in freshly cut tree stumps. I le was looking for evidence that the 11-year cycle of sunspots had been recorded in these rings. He didn't immediately find what he was looking for, but he did notice that the tree rings appeared to show the same patterns from one area to another. For example, if freshly cut trees in one logging camp had three wide outer rings preceded by two thin ones, the same pattern would be evident in trees cut down in other camps. One could then reason that this pat-

tern indicated two years with bad conditions, followed by three good years. Douglass noticed that the patterns he found seemed to occur throughout northern Arizona.

During the first two decades of this century. Douglass continued to study the patterns in tree rings. The technique he used, now known as crossdating, was based on a simple idea. Suppose you found a particular sequence of growth rings: for example, fat, skinny, fat, fat, skinny, skinny, fat; suppose further that you found this sequence near the center of a tree that was cut down last winter; you know the outermost ring in the tree was formed last year, by counting backward along the rings until you come to the sequence, you could figure out when it started.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the initial fat ring in our sequence was formed 100 years ago, in 1886.

Now suppose we find the

Tales Trees Tell

by JAMES S. TREFIL

Trees remember, and scientists are asking them about everything from historical dates to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Reprinted from 1hc .fo11tl1Sonian magaJ:inc Copyri~hl

Š 1985 James

S. Trcfil

same sequence in the outer rings of an old tree that died long ago. Because we don't know the exact date of the tree's death, we can't just count backward from the outside. We know when our sample sequence started, however, so we can assign a date (in this case 1886) to the first outer ring that matches the similar ring on our initial sample. We could then count inward and establish the approximate year the tree began and count outward to establish the exact year it died (assuming the outer rings are still intact). ln the hands of tree-ring scientists, both of these pieces of information are valuable. The pattern in the rings back to the starting date can, with luck, be matched to that in still older trees, extending our knowledge of these patterns farther back in time. In this way people working with living and dead bristlecone pines have managed to construct a continuous record of tree rings back to about the year 6700 s.c. At the other end of the scale, the date of the tree's death may be very important if the tree was cut down to be incorporated into a structure, for then the rings allow us to assign a fairly accurate date to the building.

As it happens, reading tree rings to date old structures was the first use to which Douglass put his new knowledge. The pueblo ruins of the American Southwest had long excited the interest of archaeologists. Built by skillful craftsmen, many of them had obviously been occupied for centuries and then, for reasons unknown, they were abandoned. Dates for the pueblos as early as 2000 s.c. were proposed. Starting in 1916, Douglass began exammmg wood samples from pueblo ruins, looking at the ring patterns to establish their dates.

By 1929 he had succeeded in putting together a relative, or "floating," chronology. He was able to match up ring patterns

among various logs in the pueblos, allowing him to say which were early an¡d which late, but none of the pueblo patterns could be assigned calendar dates, as none matched up with those from dated trees. By this time the tree-ring chronology for northern Arizona had been extended back to A.D. 1260, so archaeologists could say that the pueblos were older than that, but nothing more. A gap of unknown length existed between the oldest dated tree ring and the youngest pueblo log.

Then, in 1929, on the third "Beam Expedition," when the archaeologists were getting so desperate they offered a $5 bonus to anyone who found a log with 100 or more rings in it, a laborer uncovered the end of a burned log buried in the ground. Douglass quickly recognized the pattern in the outer rings of the log as matching the oldest part of the known treering calendar, and the pattern on the inner part of the log as

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TERRENCE MOORE

Above: Lobes along the top of this 164-year-old cross section resulted from repeated fire damage, 18371904. The remainder of the trunk grew normally until the tree was cut

down in 1981. Left: Decades of good and not-so-good years are revealed in this cross section of a Douglass fir from the Southwest United States.

matching the most recent part of his floating chronology. This single discovery, then , spanned the gap between the known and unknown , proving that the pueblos were inhabited anywhere from the tenth to the 13th century A.O. before being abandoned.

Following the discovery of the "Rosetta Stone" log, the chronology of Pueblo Indian remains throughout the Southwest was quickly worked out.

In the wake of this success, Douglass founded the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, at Tucson, in 1937, which remains to this day the major world

SPAN NOVEMBE R 1986

21

TALES TREES TELL continued

center for this kind of work.

Once the usefulness of tree rings had been proved in the Southwest. scientists elsewhere decided to take the methods seriously. It was really a matter of luck that Douglass started his studies in Arizona , where conditions for the growth of trees are often fa r from ideal. In such a situation, small drops in precipitation or temperature can result in drastically reduced growth for the tree and, consequently, a visibly narrow ring for that year.

In other areas, such as the eastern United States and Europe, tree-ring analysts face a different set of problems. lo 1975, with the support of the Climate Dynamics Program of the National Science Foundation, Gordon Jacoby of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory founded a tree-ring laboratory that has become a major center for the study of American forests on the East Coast and in the northern areas.

"Trees in easte rn forests are closer to each other than in the Southwest," he pointed out.

"This mea ns that competition between trees is more important here , and this can have a marked effect on the ring growth of an individual tree.

Also, in the East the trees are less limited by climate, so there is less variation between rings as the weather changes." In the language of tree-ring scientists , many East Coast trees tend to be less ¡¡sensitive ," and thus show "complacent'¡ growth.

So great did these difficulties seem in l 975 that. according to Jacoby, some exper ts despaired of ever establishing reliable tree-ring chronologies in the East. But, since then, many of About the Author: James S. Trefil is a physicist a1 the Universiry of Virginia and 1he author of several books including The Moment of Creation , Physics as a Liberal Art and

Space, Time, Infinity.

22

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

these difficulties have been overcome, and now chronologies exist for many locations that used to be blanks on the map. Unlike some of their counte rparts in the West , however, these chronologies extend back only 300 to 500 years. The oldest trees in the Northeast (hemlocks) do not get much older than that, and trees that die tend to rot in the moister climate, so that their rings are lost quickly.

Jn places with a long record of advanced civilizations, the use of tree rings can be unexpected and dramatic. For example, the citizens of medieval Novgorod (in northwestern Russia) dealt with the mud in their streets by putting down layers of logs. As each layer sank into the mire, it was replaced, until today there are no fewer than 28 streets stacked on top of each other, dating from A.D. 953 to 1462: a tree-ring paradise. In another case, paintings by such Dutch masters as Rembrandt and Rubens were dated by an analysis of the ring patterns in the oak panels backing the paintings.

But if the use of rings to date archaeological objects was the major task in the first half of this century, the analysis of information about past climates and chemical contents of the atmosphere is fast overtaking it in the 1980s. Perhaps nothing illustrates this application of new sorts of science to the tree ring so well as the continuing calibration of the carbon 14 dating system.

Bristlecone pines are the oldest living tree. They are found in six states in the American Southwest. Gnarled, twisted, stunted , they do not have the grandeur that you might expect to find in an ancient tree , yet the oldest of them , the Methuselah tree, has been adding rings to its trunk for more than 4,600 years. Moreover, in the dry climate of the mountains in which they are

found, dead trees. remain standing for long periods of time, and even when they fall they do not quickly decay. Using crossdating between live and dead wood, it is possible to construct a continuous record of tree rings going back 9,000 years.

Most of the carbon in living tissues (including our own) is the plain. garden-variety stuff called carbon 12 (the 12 indicates that there is a total of 12 neutrons and prntons in the carbon nucleus). Cosmic rays colliding with atoms in the upper atmosphere. however, occasionally produce a mutant version known as carbon 14, which has two additional neutrons in its nucleus. Carbon 14 has the same chemical interactions as ordinary carbon , so a small percentage of the carbon in living tissue will be of this type , with the exact percentage depending on how much carbon 14 is being created at any given time. As soon as the carbon 14 is incorporated , the mutant nuclei begin to decay. The idea is that plants and animals stop adding carbon to their systems when they die, so that from that point on no new carbon 14 is added and the old atoms start to disappear. Provided we know how many carbon 14 atoms were in the environment, then , counting the number left will tell us how much time has elapsed since the organism died .

When this dating scheme was originally proposed , it was assumed that the amount of carbon 14 in the air was always the same as it is today . Based on this assumption, all sorts of organic remains were dated and carbon 14 content became a major tool in archaeology. By the early 1960s, however, problems were developing with the oldest materials analyzed, which dated well into the s.c. era. Carbon 14 dates and dates obtained from historical docume nts differed , often by hundreds of years .

Dressed for the occasion, Andrew Ellicoll Douglass cores a free in Arizona, about 1929.

This was the situation in the late 1960s when C. W. Ferguson at the University of Arizona began attacking the discrepancy with the use of data from bristlecone pines. The idea was that we know the exact year in which the wood in a particular ring was formed, so counting carbon 14 atoms in that ring will tell us how many such atoms there were in the wood at the beginning. It was seen very quickly that the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere in the past was not the same as it is today , contrary to the original assumption. More carbon 14 was being created in the past than there is now, so all the original carbon 14 dates had to be moved back. The dates for the three different periods of construction at Stonehenge, for example, have been changed by several hundred years.

All the uses of tree rings we have discussed so far in this article generally go under the name of dendrochronology (from the Greek dendron: tree , and khronos: time). The hot topic in tree-ring research these days is the field of dendroclimatology: the reconstruction of past climates and climatic events from evidence found in tree rings.

This sort of work is much more complicated than dating,

because it depends on the differences in widths between rings grown in different years.

Given the inherent variability between trees and even within the rings of a single tree, it is much easier to say with certainty that one ring was five years older than another than to assign a precise number to the difference in width between them.

The modern study of dendroclimatology could be said to have been born with the work of biologist Harold Fritts at the University of Arizona in the 1960s. Fritts and his colleagues monitored the growth processes of a small number of trees near Tucson in great detail, covering branches and often entire trees with plastic to determine how much of each atmospheric gas the tree took in and gave off.

After a decade of work, they came to a detailed understanding of the processes that lead to the creation of a single ring on a tree.

The growth of a tree ring isn't as simple as it might appear at first. If last year was a particularly good one for tree growth, for example, the root system of the tree might have expanded more than usual, and this will carry over into this year's growth. Similarly, a bad year might slow down the growth for several years in the future , regardless of the weather in those years. Sorting out all these effects for a system as complex as a living tree was a monumental task, but once it was done the results had as wide a variety of uses as did the establishing of chronologies.

By gathering data from tree rings around the southwestern United States and comparing this with the weather records of the past 100 years, for example, we can see how the tree rings reflect the climate. Then, going back into the period when there was no weather information recorded, we can deduce what the weather must have been

when each particular ring was possible causes of growth de- Atlantis sinking into the sea. formed. 1n this way, Fritts has cline. To find evidence for the LaMarche's date (still disputed developed climate maps of the effects of acid rain, you have to by some archaeologists) is by western United States and the find retarded growth beyond far the most precise thac has northern Pacific (where western what you would expect to see in ever been proposed and agrees weather originates) back to the normal course of affairs. with available carbon 14 dates about A.D. 1600.

Jacoby docs, indeed, see this of artifacts that were caught in At first glance, such an exer- sort of effect in three of a dozen the eruption. cise might seem academic: Who sites he has sampled around Another type of transient cares whether 1678 was dry or New England, but it is absent in phenomenon that tree-ring sciwet? But Charles Stockton, a the remaining nine. entists are starting to study hydrologist who uses tree-ring In some situations, however, seriously is earthquakes. These analysis to study water supplies, tree rings can be used to docu- events can damage a tree by pointed out that this attitude ment the effects of pollution in shaking it violently, and the misses an important point. a very dramatic way. A group damage can result in narrower "When we looked at the pre- from the University of Arizona. rings in subsequent years as the cipitation data for a period of for example, was able to see the tree heals. Gordon Jacoby years, we could see the areas effects of a lead smelter in showed me a core from a ponof drought grow and shrink Trail, British Columbia, on tree derosa pine chat had grown periodically.,. This visual im- growth in Washington State. directly over the San Andreas pression was quickly rein- The growth was well below nor- fault in California . "This was a forced by computer studies that mal when the smelter was happy tree until 1857," he said , showed clear evidence for cy- turned on, but then rebounded pointing to a spot where the clical droughts in the western when the smelter was shut severa l atypical narrow rings United States. The question down a few years later. crowded together. In that year, that concerns dendroclimatolTree rings also record the ex- a major earthquake rocked the ogists right now is whecher or plosive eruptions of large volca- southern California countryside not the droughts occur in a 22- noes. When an event like the where the tree grew. .. If you year cycle, a L9-year cycle or blow-up of Mount St. H elens in can rule out wind, fire, disease (most likely) some combination 1980 happens, large amounts of and climate as the source of this of the two. With a trec-ring- ash and gases are thrown into signal. you can use the tree to derived rainfall record going the stratosphere. There the tell you when the fault was acback more than 300 years, dust and gases block out parts tive in the past. .. With scientists however, they expect soon to of the sunlight that would nor- at the California Institute of sort out the drought cycle. mally reach the surface. This Technology (Caltech) , he is Tree-ring specialists are also can lead to subfreezing temper- starting a study of trees in the getting involved in studying the atures and leave a characteristic neighborhood of his happy pine effects of acid rain on eastern mark called a frost ring on a tree to see if he can supply data fores.ts. ¡'This is a serious prob- growing tree . Valmore La Mar- from past events that would be lem ," says Columbia Universi- che and his coworkers at Ari- useful to people trying to prety's Gordon Jacoby , "but it's an zona recently looked at frost dict the occurrence of eartharea where we have to be very rings in bristlecone pines and quakes. careful. First we have to estab- found that a number of them All of these examples illuslish what is actually happening seemed to correspond to major trate an important point. When to the trees, and only then will volcanic eruptions. The explo- we want to study the informawe be able to think about causal sion of Tambora in the East tion stored in trees, we cannot relations." lndies. which gave rise to '"the restrict our attention to single Jacoby explained that, as year without a summer" in geographical areas or even to trees grow older, the rings be- 1816, left frost rings not only on ¡ single countries. The Internacome narrower. This means the bristlecone pines, but on tional Project in Dendroclimathat it would be very easy to trees LaMarche studied in tology (JPID) is one effort to look at a core, see that the rings South Africa. One particularly move tree-ring studies into the were getting narrower and con- severe set of frost rings occur- international arena. Scientists clude that the tree was being red in 1626 B.c., and LaMarche from many nations have pooled adversely affected by acid suggests that the rings may have ttieir information in an attempt rain-when the real reason for been caused by the destruction to reconstruct past climates the narrow rings was the nor- of the island of Thera (Santor- around the world. Their first mal aging process. One must ini) in the Aegean Sea by a goal seems a modest one, but it also make comparisons with volcano. This eruption might wiJl be difficult to reach. The climatic data to rule out other have given rise to the legend of group, based in Arizona, wants

SPAN NOVtMB E R l'JH6

23

TALES TREES TELL continued

to find the average yearly temperature in the northern hemisphere as far back in time as possible. At the moment, the analysis of the data is well under way.

If they reach their first goal, they might have an important impact on a problem of great public concern : the predicted global heating ("greenhouse effect") resulting from the in- . creased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, an increase caused by the burning -of coal and oil during the past few centuries. The IPID 1 data will extend back to A.O. 1700, well before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when this burning started.

"Without this sort of data base," said LaMarche, "atmospheric scientists may have to monitor temperatures and carbon dioxide for another ten to 20 years before they see unmistakable evidence of warming trends. By then, it may be too late to do anything about it."

The practical significance of such research emphasizes the need for an international effort in tree-ring work. One scientist after another at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research talked of "blank spots on the map ," and all mentioned that the laboratory brings in foreign scientists for training, then sends them out to set up programs around the world. Perhaps someday we will be able to put together worldwide weather maps based on dendroclimatol-

ogy similar to those that now exist fo r the western United States. If so, we will have added important data that are needed to understand how our climate and the living systems that depend on it interact .

Trees remember. And if we are clever enough, we can tap that me mory to give us all sorts of useful knowledge about our past- and our future.

D Bristlecone pines are history books for scientists, accumulating growth rings fo r thousands of years.

24

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

26

FOCUS •••

Honoring the Mahatma The City of New York honored the memory of Mahatma Gandhi when it unveiled a statue of the Father of the Indian Nation at Union Square Park on October 2 to observe the Mahatma's 11 ?th birth anniversary. The historic park is also home to the statues of two American Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and to the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who volunteered his services to America during its Revolutionary War of Independence more than 200 years ago.

The 2.4-meter bronze statue of the Mahatma, the first to be dedicated in North America, is the work of H.K. Patel of Chandlodia, Ahmedabad. It was funded by the Indian community in the United States. Its cost of about $60,000 was underwritten by Mohan B. Murjani, chairman SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

of Murjani International Ltd. Another $100,000 was contributed by Indian Americans to the city's Parks Department for the maintenance of all the statues in Union Square Park.

Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, attended by more than 400 Indians and Americans, New York City Parks Commissioner Henry Stern said, "I can think of no better place to honor Mahatma Gandhi than Union Square Park.

New York opens its heart not only to Mahatma Gandhi but to all of India. It means here that this one part of the sacred soil of New York City will be forever India. And that is as it should be."

In his speech, Indian Consu l General P.A. Nazreth said that it was a proud moment for the Indian community in New York and elsewhere to have the statue " in this most historic park in this most important city.... As a city where immigrants look for freedom and [which is] the home of the United Nations, it is an appropriate place for the message of Mahatma Gandhi to go to all the world."

Another speaker was Bayard Rustin, a 75-year-old American civil rights leader who visited India in the 1940s to work with the Indian independence movement. He said, "Today we are taking a great step by unveiling this statue of Gandhi. We will have in our midst this constant reminder of his life, his thoughts, his words and his deeds."

The statue is the successful culmination of the efforts of Dr. H.K. Chandra Sekhar, a member of the New York City Mayor's Ethnic Advisory Council. For almost three years, he has been pressing Mayor Edward Koch to set up a suitable memorial to the Mahatma in New York.

Making It to the Top Indian Americans are among the most successfu l ethnic groups in the United States. They have made their impact in almost every field-business, education, science and technology and research.

One such Indian American is Potarazu Krishna Rao, a top meteorologist in the nation. A fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in England and a professional member of the American Meteorological Society, he has received numerous awards and has also published more than 50 scientific papers in professional journals. Rao is currently working as a senior editor on a book about the 25 years of weather satellite operations. The 1,000-page document, being published by the American Meteorological Society, will be released by the end of the year.

"There are no good textbooks available on the subject, so it will likely be used in classrooms and by professionals," Rao says.

Recently, he was promoted to director of the Office of Research and Applications, the nerve center of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service.

Rao's office is responsible for analyzing and interpreting the data it receives from NOAA weather satellites on winds, temperature, moisture, infrared and reflected light to predict such phenomena as hurricanes, monsoons and wind-shear.

His office also provides meteorological training for U.S. Air Force and Navy personnel as well as for the National Weather Service. A few years ago, Rao also helped train about two dozen Indian scientists in the operations of the complex meteorology segment of the Indian com munications satellite, INSAT-18.

"Prediction of weather," says Rao, "is a big challenge facing meteorologists." One of the most frustrating tasks is finding ways to integrate conventional meteorological data into mathematical models. However, availability of supercomputers in the United States is now greatly helping in processing these models to make the most accurate and timely weather predictions. "That's what India needs-the supercomputer, " Rao says. India already has a weather satellite, and once it has the supercomputer, Indian scientists "will be able to predict floods and monsoons with much greater precision and save the country great loss in life and propeny."

Rao, who hails from Hyderabad, received his M.Sc. degree from Andhra University in 1952. Soon after, he went to the United States and attended Florida State University for a master of science degree in meteorology, which he got in 1956. He earned his PhD in meteorology from New York University in 1968.

Rao is married to Rukmini, also from Hyderabad. They have two sons, Ramu and Sreedhar. Ramu works as a computer specialist with the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization in Washington, D.C. Sreedhar is a third-year medical student at George Washington University.

Child Power

Grants for India On September 29, P.K. Kaul, India's Ambassador to the United States, and M. Peter McPherson, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) signed an agreement in Washington, D.C. , under which USAID will provide a grant of $7 million to India to buy computers and associated technology from Control Data Corporation of Arden Hills, Minnesota.

The grant will be used in conjunction with a $20 million loan being negotiated with the Export-Import Bank.

The agreement will enable India to lay the foundation for a state-of-the-art technology for manufacture of mainframe computers and should lead to much wider use of computers in Indian industry.

"We believe this is a major step toward furthering the transfer of important technologies between the United States and India," McPherson said, after the signing ceremony. "Future procurements resulting from this initial contract may run to $500 million."

The procurement will be implemented in phases. It will start with the purchase of tha computer systems, followed by the gradual assembly from components, an official of USAID said. Control Data will provide two computers, CYBER 830 and CYB ER 810, and equipment kits to the Electronics Corporation of India to manufacture up to 600 computers over the first eight years of the contract.

Under another agreement

signed in New Delhi September 24, the United States will provide three grants, totaling over Rs. 6 million , for cooperative lndo-U.S. agricultural research programs on egg production, soil classification and fixing nitrogen in legumes.

The first grant of Rs. 2,254,000 has been awarded to two scientists at Banaras Hindu University-Dr. M.S. Kanungo, who will be the principal investigator, and his department of zoology colleague Dr. M.K. Thakur. Under the three-year grant, they will investigate the pattern of reproductive ability of chickens. By studying hormonal changes, the researchers hope to increase the chickens' laying rate as well as extending their egg-producing period.

Recipients of the second grant of Rs. 1,965,880 are Dr. P.K. Sharma and Dr. P.S. Sidhu of the Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana, who will study soil classification in northwestern India. The knowledge gained by their work, it is hoped, will eventually benefit the transfer of crop production technology from India to America.

Under the third grant, which totals Rs. 1,855,000, Dr. A. Salahuddin of Aligarh Muslim University will conduct a three-year biochemical study of the process by which legumes "fix " atmospheric nitrogen; they not only meet much of their own nutrient needs but,also enrich the soil.

The research will create ways and means of maximizing biological nitrogen fixation.

Perhaps no other city in the United States listens to its children as well as Seattle, Washington , does. The city has a unique committee, called the KidsBoard, to address the needs of its younger residents. The KidsBoard, which has 40 members on its central board and another 60 on three neighborhood boards, meets at least once, often twice, a fortnight to examine and suggest ways in which their city of waterfronts and steep hills can be improved.

The KidsBoard has drawn a lengthy agenda of 30 items that need attention to improve the lives of young people. These include support for children's art groups, development of bike routes, more downtown day-care facilities and internship programs for secondary school students. The agenda also expressed the youngsters' deep concern over city plans to redesign the amusement park at Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World Fair and their favorite meeting place.

City officials are greatly impressed with the youngsters' enthusiasm and concern, and are extending them all help.

Speaking at the festivities of a recent " KidsDay, " when children up to age 16 are allowed free entry to many of the city's cultural attractions, Mayor Charles Royer noted that action on seven of the 30 items had already been taken . For instance, he said amidst cheers, that planning for the bike route network had already begun and a program to match youth arts organizations with corporate sponsors was under way.

The idea for the KidsBoard was born two years ago, when Seattle, like many other crowded American cities, started losing its residents to suburbia. Alarmed at this exodus, a coalition of city officials, representatives from the YMCA, Junior League and other community leaders put into place a unique project, dubbed "KidsPlace: a kids' lobby for a vital Seattle," aimed at enticing the youth, and therefore their parents, to stay on in the city. "They listen to us now," says Claudia Benitez, a KidsBoard member. "Before it was, 'You're a kid."'

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

27

Comedy as Comment

by OMBICA GUPTA

Contrary to whar some people think, Allen-have entertained millions of moviemost theorists-literary and philosophical- goers around the world. The hilarious have noted that the tragic and comic do screen exploits of Mack Sennett, Charlie not exist as a dichotomy. There can be a Chaplin , Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, blending of the two genre. Chaplin, more Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and Mae than any other cinema comedian, was able West, plus those directed by Ernst Lubitsch, to evoke both a tear and a laugh. At times Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, George Cukor, Billy Wilder and Woody Allen. they were fused.

-Donald W. McCaffrey, among others, have evoked riotous laughter "Four Great Comedian.• of the Silent among critics and fans alike for generations.

Cinema .. 1n Tht Amtr1r(ll1 Cmtmu Not all of their works had social relevance, but their major films invariably took a From Mack Sennett to Woody Allen, critical look at the follies and foibles of the American film comedy spans more than era from behind the veil of comedy. seven decades. But it is exactly 50 years ago, * * * in 1936, that Charlie Chaplin blended his In The Film Till Now, Paul Rotha flair for the ludicrous with his increasing describes Chaplin's The Circus (1925) as social awareness-evoking both a tear and a "one of the greatest tragedies in the history laugh. "The serious side of the Little of the film and yet ... magnificently funny."

Tramp's character," notes McCaffrey, Even in his City Lights (1931), Chaplin "evolved to the point that some critics called blends pathos with humor to poke fun at the manifestation of 'Chaplin's pathos.'•· the American slum. Yet the critical tone in The film was Modern Times, often viewed as these early films of Chaplin, like The Gold the first definitive comedy film reflecting a Rush (1925), as also Lloyd's The Freshman social malady of an era. Even in his earlier (1925) and Keaton's The General (1927), is films, Chaplin projects himself as the Little expressed perhaps wich only a modicum of Tramp who is always at odds with society. moral homily veiled, particularly in ChapWith his baggy trousers and wobbly walk he lin's case, in subtle Victorian irony-never is continually on the run-fleeing from the quite identifying the malady nor prescribing burly policemen or bullies for whom he is any remedies. But in Modern Times the always easy prey. As film historian Richard Little Tramp identifies the enemy (the Griffith aptly stated that in Modem Times, machine) and fights his lonely battle in Chaplin, for the first time, "left Chaplinland typically Chaplinesque style. that perfect and ventured into the real world" to iden- blending of humor and pathos-a creation tify both the ills and the ill-doers in specific of Chaplin's own. terms: the dehumanization of man by indusComedy, mostly slapstick, pervaded the trialized society. Behind the slapstick and American screen during the silent days of the sentimentality, Modem Times has a film-often referred co as the golden era of strong satirical edge focused sharply on a comedy. It is generally agreed that the era society that pits man against machine. reached its golden summit in Chaplin's The Through the decades American comedy Gold Rush, and remained atop the pinnacle films-from the purely slapstick of the silent in hilarious comfort through its remaining era and the "screwball'' comedy of the years and more. For, both City Lights and 1930s, reflecting the Depression, to the Modern Times, although made when sound subtle and wicty whimsies of Woody was in full flow in Hollywood, were silent films, except for a recorded music score and a few sound effects in the former; and the Facing page, top: The Lil/le Tramp with human voice on a closed-circuit TV, playing Georgia Hale, the dance-hall hostess he loves, of a radio and a record player, and a in The Gold Rush, 1925. Bollom: Donald jabberwocky song by Chaplin himself in the S111herla11d and Elliot Gould, 1he gifted latter. The great Charlie succumbed to the surgeons of M* A •s•tt, 1970, take time off from patching soldiers for some golf. new medium as late as 1940, when he made

his first sound film- The Great Dictator.

"Laughter without a tinge of philosophy," wrote Mark Twain, "is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.'' The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West-all thumbed their noses at society, but alas! "without a tinge of philosophy," which we find in the works of Chaplin and Sennett. Duck Soup (1933), the funniest and the wildest of the Marx Brothers' movies, was at best an antiwar spoof. Mae West's I'm No Angel (1933) never rises above a parody of sex ("When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better"). And W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940; authored by "Mahatma Kane Jeeves" who was none other than W.C. Fields himself), perhaps the best of the lot as a satire, smacks of a Mack Sennett script, yet doesn't quite make the grade.

Romanticism. not satire, was central to the theme of the "screwball'' comedy of the 1930s that made light of the hard days of the Depression. (Hollywood turned to "screwball" as a substitute for the "sex" comedy after censorship was instituted in 1934.)

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night ( 1934) is perhaps the most representative example of the genre. However, the decade came to an explosively hilarious end as the nation laughed with Greta Garbo ("Garbo Laughs," announced the billboards) in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). Witty, satirical and funny, Ninotchka pokes fun at the Russians and communism (she believed she was a "tiny cog in the wheel of Revolution ")-all in good humor.

The sound of war came booming from the American screen, drowning out the sound of laughter. Understandably it was noc a fun time. At home, America saw the war in documentaries (The March of Time) and in the newsreels produced by the Office of War Information. Feature films reflecting the war, and made during the mid- and late I940s-Since You Went Away (1944), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Command Decision (1948), to name a few-singularly lacked the comic spirit. Yet all the serious business of war couldn't dampen the indomitable wit of Preston Sturges. He poked fun at war; and people enjoyed it.

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

29

COMEDY AS COMMENT co11ti1111ed

One of the most gifted and skiUed

Idirectors of comedy films, Sturges, observes Dave Kehr in the magazine Film Comrnent, stuffs ·'his frames with sociological observations." Daring and offbeat, he led his audience to uncontrollable laughter while poking fun at America's most beloved and cherished ideals of wartime military roI mance, mindless heroworship and blind motherlove. In The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), blending satire with the right doses of slapstick, he drove his point home amidst roaring laughter.

Hollywood waited for a full quarter of a century, and a new war (in Korea), to come up with its next intelligent comedy on military nonsense. Robert Altman's M* A*s• H ( 1970) was "a deadly serious farce" that exposed the brutalizing effects of war, not only through gory and bloodspilling sequences but also through a series of hilariously funny episodes woven around a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) somewhere on the Korean front.

A sparse decade for comedy films, the 1950s saw a return to Mae West's style of "hearty, uninhibited sex"-if only a shade more refined and witty-as central to the plot. George Cukor's Born Yesterday ( 1950), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch {1955) and Some Like It Hoc {1959) are by far the best crop of the decade. Both Born Yesterday and The Seven Year Itch project the quintessential dumb blonde, Judy Holliday in the first and Marilyn Monroe in the second, and run them through a series of explosively funny situations, taking random pot shots at men, manners and society. Judy Holliday won an Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of Billie Dawn, who at the end of the film proved that she was not all that dumb. Monroe won the sobriquet "sex symbol" of the screen and retained that image until her tragic death in 1962.

Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960), Eliot Silverstein's Car Ballou ( 1965) and Mike Nichols' The Graduate {1967) rank among the best satirical comedies of the 1960s. a decade otherwise known for its splashy musical extravaganzas-West Side Story (1961); My Fair Lady (1964): The Sound of Music (1965); Oliver (1968). The Apartment showed shades of Ernst Lubitsch, for whom Wilder worked in the 1930s. It is a comedy that takes a serious look at dubious means adopted in the career rat race. A deftly handled Western spoof, Cat Ballou was not quite the comic equivalent of High Noon (1952), but all the same it

30

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

1s a classic parody of the genre with a good measure of the best of Fred Zinnemann and John Ford thrown in-all in fun. As the whisky sodden, has-been gunfighter, Lee Marvin performed superbly in this film, and won an Oscar.

Critically viewed, The Graduate was a serious and sensitive movie with comic overtones. It was a satire on a growing American dilemma: the lack of communication between the generations. It was one of the first major films to deal with the alienation of American youth in the 1960s. In portraying Benjamin Braddock. Dustin Hoffman (in his first major role) "makes an endearing parody of all the sensitive young men who have soulful 'coming-of-age· encounters with older women in more seriously intended movies." notes Ted Sennett in Grear Hollywood Movies.

• * * For Caesar it was only "I came, I saw, I conquered." For Woody Allen it is all that and "I reign" also. No comedian since Charlie Chaplin has made so all-pervasive and overpowering a presence in the world of American film comedy as Allen has-and continues to do. Having made his debut as writer and actor in What's New, Pussycat in 1965, he took to directing in addition to writing and acting in Take the Money and Run in 1969, and since then has made more than a dozen feature films of which all but two are comedies. Like Chaplin he writes, directs and acts in his own films, and bet ween 1980 and 1985, he made five full-length comedy features surpassing the productivity of the Great Master.

In his sense of humor, Allen comes perhaps closer to che Marx Brothers than to any other comedian, past or present. Like Groucho. Woody thrives on gags (''Sex is the most fun I've ever had without laughiog")-even if Allen's are of a more cerebral variety. But the comparison ends there. The unique Allenesque touch of intellectual absurdity indeed sets him apart from all of them. Allen's satirical teeth generally bite at neurotic. intellectual and liberated modem men and women thrown together in the claustrophobic chaos of urban America represented by New York City. Usually Allen himself is the protagonist of his films. His heroes are modeled after Woody Allen. Annie Hall {1977) is largely autobiographical; in Stardust Memories (1980) he portrays himself, the successful comedy star; and Zelig (1983) is the ultimate Woody Allen masquerading as a fantasy character. And if one looks closely, one will find reflections of him in Man-

hattan (1979), Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

Yet Allen has been only a part of the comic pie in American cinema of the 1980s.

Io fact the decade took a refreshingly smiling start with Jonathan Dem.me's Melvin and Howard (1980). a slice-of-life comedy that probes with sympathetic imagination into American blue-collar suckerdoma tribe perennially hooked on TV game shows. Demme 's social concerns, expressed so boldy in his first serious film, Handle With Care (1978), are also much in evidence in Melvin and Howard. Hugely acclaimed by critics, the film won the prestigious National Society of Film Critics' award for the best picture, and won Oscars for actress Mary Steenburgen and scriptwriter Bo Goldman.

Among the comic highlights of this decade have been Sydney PoJlack's Tootsie (1982). which looks at America's preconceptions about women; Harold Ramis's National Lampoon's Vacation (1982). a parody of the American middle class's passion for travel; Ivan Rectman's Ghostbusters (1984), which, among other things, is a highly original view of entrepreneurship; Herbert Ross's Protocol (1984), one of the few comedies about Washington life and protocol (perhaps the only one since Call Me Madam); and, in a surprising shift from suspense to comedy, Brian De Palma's Wise Guys (1986), a film described by its producer Aaron Ross as "Laurel and Hardy Meet the Godfather." Widely different in style and substance, these films have one thing in common-all mix mirth and hilarity with a generous sprinkling of socially relevant wit. The tendency of harking back to slapstick sequences of the silent screen notwithstanding. the main thrust of American comedy film today is to make people not only laugh but also think.

0 About the Author: Ombica Gupta is the chief,

Publications and Graphics, in the Printed Media Services Office, USJS, New Delhi.

1. Diane Keaton ani!Woo dy Allen in Annie Hall, 1977.

2. Lee Marvin as the re-employed gunslinger in Cat Ballou, 1965.

3. Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in The Seven Year ltch, 1955.

4. The Marx Brothers (Groucho,

second from right) in a scene from Duck Soup, 1935.

5. Dustin Hoffman with Anne Bancroft in The Graduat e, 1967.

6 Judy Holliday with Broderic k Crawford (center) and William Holden in Born Yesterday, 1950.

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

31

32

eleconferencing

by DAVID GREEN and KATHLEEN J. HANSELL

When the idea surfaced in the mid-1970s, it sounded like a sure-fire winner. Instead of flying to faraway meetings, busy corporate executives and convention-goers could save time and money by meeting electronically: people in one city would gather in a special room and have televised meetings with people in other cities-even other countries. Such teleconferences, however, didn't really catch on then. High costs and traditional business habitspeople like to do their handshaking in person-prevented the technology from becoming the revolutionary communications tool early enthusiasts had predicted.

Now, however, there are signs that teleconferences may be taking off. No one is predicting the surrender of the gavelthumping convention hall to the video age. But dipping costs and new technologies are boosting the number of companies and groups turning to teleconferencing for meetings , sales sessions and other presentations.

Teleconferencing terminology hasn't yet developed to the extent that there are clear distinctions among its many forms.

However, there are two readily recognizable technical methods of organizing a teleconference: "two-way" and "one-way."

Two-way, or interactive teleconferencing, enables smalJ groups of people in two, or occasionally several sites, to see and hear each other, enabling them to conduct typical business meetings not unlike those held face-to-face. The two-way television signal is transmitted on a variety of media, depending on the distance and availability of facilities. Over a distance of more than a few kilometers the signal is generally digitized and compressed to take advantage of the lower cost of narrower bandwidth channels.

One-way teleconferencing consists of a broadcast to many receiving sites for audiences often numbering in the thousands.

One-way video transmission is almost exclusively via satellite.

Audiences at the receiving sites cannot be seen at the originating site. In most instances. however , comments or questions are relayed via a telephone link, providing some sense of participation for the remote audiences.

The Communications Technology Satellite (CTS) program, coordinated by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1970s, provided government agencies, associations. hospital groups. educational institutions and a few corporations an opportunity to try teleconferencing.

Those demonstrations and experiments were a proving ground for the concept of one-way conferencing.

In the late 1970s, business organizations took advantage of occasional-use commercial satellite time for "special events" one-way teleconferences. An early large-scale conference was conducted by the Ford Motor Company in 1981 to introduce its EXP and LN7 sport coupes to 20,000 dealers and salespeople in 38 American cities. Although moderate by today's standards. this early effort was the largest teleconference to date.

In 1980. Holiday Inn added teleconferencing capability in approximately 300 of its hotels. Since the hotels already had

SPAN f'OVEMBl'R IYl'h

sateJlite reception facilities for pay-TV, teleconferencing was a natural complement in that it could be scheduled during the day when demand for cable TV by hotel guests .was low. Other American hotel chains soon followed suit and today hotels constitute the largest user group of one-way receiving sites.

In 1980 some 50 one-way teleconferences were conducted.

That number reached 300 in 1983, a sixfold increase in three years. The number today is much higher.

Applications of one-way teleconferences vary widely. For example, the American Diabetes Association, supported by the Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company. conducted a nationwide seminar for primary care physicians at 24 sites. In another case.

Herbalife, a natural vitamin and food supplement marketing organization, produced a motivational program for 19,000 people in 35 Holiday Inn sites.

The advantages of these special events conferences are obvious. In an overall sense, teleconferencing could increase accuracy and efficiency for many organizations. First, a meeting conducted several times tends to convey a somewhat different message each time , while one teleconference delivers the same message to all participants. Further, when presenters travel from site to site in a "road show," information is presented in serial fashion. Often the participants in the third or fourth city on the circuit have already heard the story, or some version of it, before the presenters arrive.

Second, well produced television can create powerful and lasting impressions. It also takes less time to travel across town to a teleconference than across country to a face-to-face meeting. Finally, in most cases, the cost per participant in a teleconference is considerably less than the cost of the same meeting held face-to-face. Sometimes, it's less than $100 per participant.

Because special event teleconferences are, first and foremost live television, they generally originate from television studios complete with bright lights, sophisticated audio and video equipment and large technical and production crews.

A number of American business organizations have been creating videotapes for a few years to satisfy corporate communications and educational requirements. Many organizations, however, are not equipped for live television and require assistance from production companies.

Production companies should ensure that the objectives of the meeting are translated into good television. The producer assists in selecting on-camera presenters, helps write the script, consults on visuals, prepares prerecorded segments, arranges for and coordinates production equipment and crew. and manages rehearsals.

Of equal importance to the overall success of the teleconference is its delivery from an originating studio to receiving locations across the country and, to an increasing extent, the world. It is an extremely specialized business and is usually handled by network vendors. Virtually no user organization has the expertise or facilities to professionally execute the task of analyzing and selecting uplink facilities, transmission frequency, satellite time, audio and receiving sites.

Special-event conferences are received in a wide variety of

Rcpnntcd wuh permission ol Saulliu Commumcarimu b.530 Soulh Y<Âť<:mitc, Englewood. Colorado llOJ I I

last August, Doordarshan engaged in one of the most sophisticated teleconferences ever attempted, stretching from New Delhi halfway around the world to Washington, b. C. Employing the facilities of two geosynchro1wus communications satellites for more than 90 minutes, the two-way teleconference allowed cop cardiologists from India and the United Stares to compare notes and exchange ideas almost as if they were together in the same room. The teleconference was edited for television and shown on the national hookup by Doordarshan in September (see SPA N, Letter From the Publisher, October 1986). The photograph was taken in the Doordarshan control room during the live teleconference.

An American panelist is seen talking in the top monitors.

sites. In the early years, transportable terminals offered temporary receiving capability where none existed . As the number of permanently installed sites has grown in the country, temporary receivers are used less in major metropolitan areas.

Hotels currently provide more than half the receiving sites for teleconferences and continue to dominate. They have appropriate meeting room faci lities , food and beverage services and arc experienced in managing the logistics of large gatherings. Approximately 500 American hotels currently have permanent receiving video capabi lity.

Loosely affi liated networks of colleges and universities such as the National University Teleconference Network based at the State University of Oklahoma, provide services to member institutions and may offer sites for third-party users interested in collegiate settings for a teleconference. More structured networks such as Biznet (U.S. Chamber of Commerce) also offer alternatives for teleconference users.

In addition, some broadcasting affiJiates can accommodate teleconfe rences, employing the network normally used for program distribution. Network studios also can accommodate local audiences.

For a teleconference to work, there must be coordination at the receiving site. A site coordinator should gain effective pre-event publicity so the potential audience is aware of the teleconference. The coordinator also should provide an informative introduction when the audience-participants arrive on site.

The te leconference sho uld be designed to promote participation if that is the goal of the o rganizing entity. In many cases, phone lines are used so audience-participants can call in questions . Some call-in segme nts are ad-lib, unstructured , free and open. Others are staged, with questions submitted ahead of time, carefully edited, and responses prepa red. The structure simply depends on the degree of control desired.

If a highly structured approach is used , however, caution is

advised. If the teleconference question-and-answer "appears" preplanned. the audience may perceive it as contrived, even misleading.

Either way, involving the distant audience creates remote "participants,¡¡ rather than mere viewers of a television show. A site coordinator can facilitate this participation as well as manage local promotion of the event, turning a passive program into an active event.

The need for international teleconferencing is increasing rapidly. Because of its proximity and the existence of corporate entities, southern Canada heads the list for non-U .S. receiving and transmitting sites. Prior to agreements signed between U.S. and Canadian providers in early 1984, satellite television broadcasters or teleconference originators in either country had to downlink inside their respective borders, hop across the border by terrestrial means and then uplink again to reach the final audiences. Now, a simple notification of planned transborde r transmissions is sufficient.

Transmission for intercontinental teleconferences is more complex, with communication links established by a U.S. international record carrier (IRC) and a foreign post, telephone and telegraph (P1T) authority through gateway facilities. More than two dozen intercontinental conferences were held in the past year. Networks ranged from relatively simple configurations to accommodate trade representatives recruiting business and industry for a particular overseas location, to more complex networks such as the one that supported the five sites of the International Teleconference Symposium in 1984.

A natural evolution for one-way teleconferencing users is from ad hoc facili ties to permanently installed on-premises networks. As the number of conferences grows, dedicated facilities may prove less costly and more convenient than ad hoc networks.

Hewlett-Packard's (HP) dedicated network provides a model. HP's first conference was held in 1981 using hotel and other ad hoc facilities. In the following year, HP conducted ten more conferences. In 1983 HP contracted with VideoStar Connections to design and install a dedicated network . Today, Hewlett-Packard has permanent uplinks at its Palo Alto headquarters and another Californ ia site, with some 70 receivers at plants and sales offices in America and Canada.

Some dedicated networks include uplink and downlink facilities on premises. Audiences tend to be smaller than in ad hoc situations and video images are normally displayed on television monitors rather than projectors. Most dedicated networks in the United States use Ku-band transmission to take advantage of smaller Earth stations, easier installation and greater freedom from terrestrial interference.

One-way teleconferencing has developed over the past ten years from an infancy of experimental programs in NASA satellites to a youthful period of growth and expansion in organizational com munications. Within just a few years, private satellite networks could grow to include thousands of stations at auto dealerships, brokerage houses, real estate offices, healthcare and educatio nal institutions throughout the United States D and the world .

About the Authors: David Green is the Atlanta-based director of marketing, private satellite networks for VideoStar Connections. Kathleen J. Hansell is a marketing representative for Satellite Business Systems.

SPAN NOVEMBFR l9Hl1

33

CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS

Absorbing Future Shock

by JACOUEUN SINGH

In the spring of 1983 the United States was declared "a nation at risk. " This alarming assessment came from the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) that President RonaJd Reagan had appointed. It was, in fact, the title of their report.

A suspicion that had been growing since the mid-1970s- that the nation's schools were failing to prepare youth for the increasingly competitive future-was confirmed by the 18 university presidents , business leaders and educators who comprised the commission. Unless the whole process of public instruction were turned around, they warned. economic decline would inevitably follow and with it disintegration of the American way of life itself.

Although the issues identified by the commission differ in detail and scope from those currently addressed by the Government of India in its drive for educational reform. some vexing questions are common to both countries and cry out for answers.

How does a society accommodate diversity in an overall framework of unity? How does it ensure that not only the elite but all children receive the benefits of a highquality education? How does it restore status to teachers? How does it make sure that the gifted are efficiently identified and

34

SPAN NOVEMBFR l'JSI>

enabled to reach their fuU potential?

The steady rise of functional illiteracy in the United States' population and the decline in student scores on standardized achievement tests were the main indicators of risk cited by the NCEE report. Added to these were the fact that over half of the gifted children at the time failed to match their tested ability with comparable achievement in school and the complaint of business-leaders and the military that millions of dollars were being spent yearly on remedial education and training programs. Furthermore , the teaching profession seemed able to attract mainly the bottom 25 percent of university graduating classes.

The NCEE findings we re just one of several studies that came out about the same time. voicing the same forebodings.

Its recommendations. too, were similar to those of other reports. They called for a back-to-basics content for everybody, not just the college bound. with English. mathematics. science. social studies and computer science at the core. Two years of a foreign language were also recommended for college preparation.

The commission further advised that more rigorous. measurable standards be applied to student performance and that universities and colleges raise their admis-

What the reports were saying was that the educational system had to take on the job of making all young people literate, both culturally and scientifically. This was a task never before tried 011 a mass scale. And California was going to make the effort.

sion requirements. It called for a longer school day and a lengthened school year. To counter the wave of indiscipline and the lack of respect for the teaching profession . the NCEE report advocated a thorough overhaul of the system. Salary increases, incentive programs to attract top-flight people into the profession , improved methods of teacher selection and training-stressing the mastery of subject matter instead of methodology-and streamlined dismissal procedures for incompetent teachers were the means they suggested. Reform was definitely in the air.

However, educational matters in the United States are not mandated by the federal government. The government may generate debate at the national level and step in in certain areas of particular need, but its role is otherwise limited. The individual states determine curriculum and set their own standards. They also bear the major burden of raising tax money for schools.

The state of California got a headstart in

Under the stewardship of Louis (Bill) Honig, California has taken the lead in the movement for educational excellence in American schools. Test scores are already rising, higher salaries are attracting better teachers; even parents are helping in the effort to give students "a truly rigorous education."

educatio nai regeneratio n, large ly because of the verve a nd style of its leade rship , in the person of Bill H o nig. Elected the state's Superinte nde nt of Public Instructio n in 1982 on the stre ngth of proposa ls that re ma rka bly anticipa ted the " N ation a t Risk" recomme ndations of the fo llow ing year , H o nig almost single ha ndedly put Califo rnia in the vanguard of reform.

To people weary a nd cynical about the way things had bee n going-the collective bargaini ng. decli ning enrollment, shift ing educational philosophies, financial constraints and public indifference- H onig's call for a clean swee p of the curriculum made sense . Enjoying the biggest groundswe ll of grass-roots ro pularity in recent California history. he was able to enlist the legislative support without which cha nges wo uld have been impossible. With in a year of his taki ng office, Senate Bill 813, incl uding broad reform a nd fu nding legislation. was passed. The movement for educational excellence was unde r way .

Turning the system around was not easy.

In the early 1980s, California¡s sprawling education network shared the ills already mentioned with the rest of the nation. There were also the predictable objections raised by those with vested interests in the status quo and/or those hostile to change.

More does not necessar ily mean better, o pponents claimed , in refe re nce to increases in time and conte nt. Some fe lt tha t the proble ms of American society were such that me re cosmetic tinke ring with school curricula would not he lp solve the proble ms that had been produced by such facto rs as the radical cha nges in fa mily structure a nd geographical mobility.

It was fu rthe r feared that support for the new proposals wo uld not last. The time ta ble of political leadership is tuned to two- a nd fo ur-yea r inte rvals, it was pointed o ut, while the timetable of educational change requires lo nger cycles. Still othe r voices of dissent claimed that the special needs of disadvantaged a nd mino rity stude nts were not sufficie ntly take n into account. T hey expressed the fe ar that mo re young people wo uld be forced out of school a ltogether if mo re rigorous require me nts were insensitively applied.

T he debate had a fam iliar ring. In fact , it had its beginnings in the past century. In 1893 a Committee of Ten was constituted to look into the apparent disorganization of the high school curriculum. It proposed that aJI students, whether college bou nd or not, be given a liberal education. This, however, was at odds with the mainstream of educational thinking of the time (under the

influe nce of educatio nist John Dewey) . which held that curricula sho uld be built a round the interests o f the child. By l 918 this philosophy ga ine d suppo rt fro m the Commissio n o n the Reorganization of Seconda ry E ducatio n , a group of high schoo l principals, professo rs of education and bureaucrats. The commissio n's Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education calle d for a n impo rta nt shift in the means and ends of high school education . H ealth , comma nd of funda me ntal processes, worthy ho me members hip , vocation , citizenship a nd ethics were declared to be the ma in objectives of the time . Little me ntion was made o f the school's acade mic purpose. At first , vocatio na l, technical and socio pe rsona l courses were adde d to acade mic subjects.

Late r they re placed them. The ove rriding principles we re social ut ility and efficie ncy.

T he seesa w debate has been going on ever since. The utilita rians domina te d the fie ld in the 1940s; the n the argume nt tilted in favo r of liberal education after Sputnik , launched by the Soviet Union in the la te 1950s, jolted Americans to the realization that all was not well with their educational system. Reforms were urgently needed if the nation was to retain its pre-eminent position in science and technology.

During the 1960s a nd 1970s, advocates

SPAN NOVPMDLR 19kf>

35

ABSORBING FUTURE SHOCK ccntinued

of a student-centered curriculum again held sway. Concerned about what was perceived as academic elitism, students had doubts about authority that caused them to regard with ' suspicion anything imposed from above. Since education is by its very nature authoritarian-the teacher and the taughtadministrators bad a hard time addressing this issue. Thus utility, relevance and free choice became the criteria for curricula. resulting in cafeteria-style educational offerings in. the high schools. When student preferences determined course content, academically demanding courses were predictably passed over in favor of electives; the result was dilution and diffusion. Not so predictably, dropout figures kept rising.

Throughout this philosophical tug-ofwar, traditionalists had been content to educate those at the top without regard to the _welfare of the majority; progressives had all but dismantled the culture , leaving the majority of students with an inadequate education.

What the 1983 reports were now saying was that the educational system had to take on the job of making all young people literate, both culturally and scientifically.

Thjs was a task never before tried on a mass scale. And California was going to make the effort.

Early on, state educationists set targets for the 1986, 1988 and 1990 school years that called for increased emollment in academjc courses, improved test scores, high attendance, lower dropout rates, more writing, more homework and better performance by the college bound.

To hold everyone to account , a revised testing program that included more history, science, literature, writing, and problem solving was devised. Students in grades three, six, eight and 12 take annual achjevement tests; the results are published in the newspapers for all to see. Subsequently, the individual school districts within the state receive profiles of their performance in each of the areas of reform so that they can set their own goals in relation to the. state's effort.

In the drive to attract teachers of high calibre, starting salaries were raised from $13,500 to $20,000 a year. At the same time more rigorous requirements for teacher certification were considered in anticipation of hiring more than 110,000 new teachers that California will need by 1991.

More attention is also being paid now to the role of principals. The trunkillg is that, if principals clearly assume responsibility in their schools for student leamjog, for the

36

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

quality of the curriculum and for the learning atmosphere-and have the leadership skills to inspire teachers to work as a team-then the schools will improve. Accordingly, better selection and training procedures for principals have assumed new urgency. For example, a program is already under way for selected principals who are learning the latest and most effective methods of implementing reforms in fourday training seminars run by the California School Leadership Academy.

Parents, too, are being enlisted into the movement. They are urged , through the media and by other means, to talk with their children about school, read to them and monitor their television viewing. If parents show an interest in their children's progress at school , supervise their homework and encourage them to write- the reasoning goes-they will reinforce the message that education is important. To this end also, parents are asked to provide learning experiences outside school, such as visits to museums and zoos.

An improved curriculum demands improved textbooks. Last year California took the unprecedented step of rejecting eight middle school science texts because they gave inadequate treatment of human reproduction, ethics-especially with regard to environmental pollution studies-and evolution. This move came as an inevitable result of years of publishers making science texts for the middle grades easier and easier in the mistaken belief that students cannot handle more sophisticated material. Moreover, topics upon which . more than one view was held had been skirted around to the point of becomjng unintelligible. Evolution , for example, had become increasingly controversial during the 1970s because believers in the literal truth of the Bible's creation story pressured many of the 22 states with textbook adoption coaes (California is one) to stay clear of Darwin. The result was that students could scarcely understand what the theory of evolution was all about. "The issue is not about religion versus science ," H onig declared. '' It's about the willingness of the education community to stand up for the integrity of the curriculum."

Several facts of life propel the movement's gathering momentum. Projections indicate that by 1995 nearly one-third of all jobs in America will be technical , scientific, managerial or professional, and another 15 to 20 percent of the jobs will be upgraded.

In the process, perhaps 50 to 60 percent of new and replacement jobs will demand

workers with the kind of education previously required only of the college bound.

Unskilled workers will inevitably Jose our in a market looking for skilled labor. Further, the ordinary citizen seems to have been jolted into agreeing that the survival of democracy does indeed depend o n a literate citizenry and requires that a better job be done in teaching civic values. Finally , there is the perceived need to democratize the school system so that not just gifted students receive a quality education.

So far , California's effort seems to have been worth the trouble. Test scores have risen, more money is being spent on the state's 4.3 million schoolchildren and earlier opponents are being won over. Yet, a good deal sti ll remains to be done. Looking ahead. Honig says more money and more commitment from more educators will be needed in the next ten or 15 years if the goals are to be realized. Consistent discipline policies have yet to be adopted, and more ethics instruction built into the learning program. California class sizes, too, need trimming¡; they a re among the largest in the U nited States. In addition , California will need 26,000 new classrooms for 400,000 new students in the next fou r years.

"There's general agreement that if we don't get a strong generation of new teachers, the whole reform movement will come to a screeching halt," asserts H o nig.

Although the average California teacher's salary jumped from $19,836 in 1980 to $29,750 in 1985, the state still falls below the national average , being fifth in the United States. To make the profession increasingly attractive, more money is necessary.

Recently, the Carnegie Corporation gave a grant of $800,000 to Stanford University researchers to develop standards by which to measure teacher competence throughout America. To put the teaching profession at par with medicine and law, the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy has proposed the creation of a national certification board , and recommended that beginning teachers undergo an internship in much the same way doctors do. " We may be setting ourselves up for failure in trying to offer a truly rigorous education to a broad range of students," Bill Honig says, "but to sit back and do nothing is unconscionable. ... The risks of undertaking reform are great, but the risk of doing nothing is greater. " 0 About the Author: Jacquelin Singh, a frequent contributor to SPAN, has written several educational books for children and one novel.

In white collars or blue jeans, American teenagers are becoming successful entrepreneurs by carving a niche for themselves in the business world.

Business Whiz Kids

by CYNTHI A POULOS and WILLIAM HOFFER

Robert L. Dean (top), whose car-rental service grosses $2 million a year, became an entrepreneur at the age of 15.

John Shorb (above, fo reground) bel(an mowing lawns for hire when he was about JJ. Today, at 19, he is the president ofa lawn service that employs five full-timers, four pan -timers and has 120 regular customers.

Keith and Craig Mortensen (right), twins who are playing an exciting role in the information revolution by creating computer graphics fo r a variety of clients in America and abroad.

3US1NESS WHIZ IUDS co111in11ed

S

ix years ago, at the age of 15 , Robert Lewis Dean borrowed $1.500 from his parents, bought a 1972 Cadillac, taught himself how to fix it up and sold it at a profit. Thal venture was the beginning of an entrepreneurial career that has seen him start a business at 16. sell it for $100,000. launch another business-and then launch a series of others.

Dean ts a prime representative of a new crop of entrepreneurs, business whiz kids who are exhibiting a clarity of purpose that belies their tender years.

They come from family environments that range from nurturing to indifferent.

Some find a niche in traditional businesses. while a considerable number have gone into high-tech fields. You might find them in white collars or blue jeans. in an isolated computer lab in Silicon Valley or-like Dean , who is prospering by providing the well-to-do with limousines and chauffeurs-commuting between offices in New York and Washington. his home town .

Some arc content with modest revenues; others-again like Dean, whose gross business revenues will total about $2 million this year-are clearly after big. money.

Some praise the encouragement and support they have received from parents. friends and teachers; others chafe at the obstacles encountered by youth. such as difficulties in negotiating bank credit.

What accounts for the precocity of these young people?

Surveys have revealed that more than half of all entrepreneurs are first-born children, and many are from immigrant families. Some are primari ly motivated by money. but most are driven simply by the desire to shape their own destinies.

Given the individualistic definition of the entrepreneur. all generalizations are suspect.

Certainly, each possesses qualities that one might expect in such an individual: ingenuity. a good intellect , a healthy sense of self. inner drive and purpose. "lt's not luck; it's hard work," says Dean. "If you work hard , you'll be successful-that's what I always say. You can't rely on anybody but yourself.''

Perhaps the most engaging quality of the teenage entrepreneurs is effervescent optimism. Reared in an era of unprecedented exposure to news of disaster, terrorism, holocaust. famine and threat of nuclear mayhem , they nevertheless

38

SPAN Nt~VEMBER 19R6

developed into positive-thinking achievers. They are aware of the obstacles. but they are far more interested in the opportunities.

Says Verne C. Harnish. national director of the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs: "The young entrepreneur is emerging as this generation's hero in America . There's a movement to introduce entrepreneurship at the high school, junior high school and even elementary school level. Society is going through a transition. We're entering an information age."

That brave new world of accessible information makes it easier to jump into life's mainstream earlier. Today·s teenager is fully exposed to a material world.

The basic techniques of business are no longer a mystery rese rved for the initiated. And in addition to traditional businesses, Harnish notes. "there are all kinds of opportunities that weren't there before, and young people are finding that they' re just as competent as their elders to seize them.·· When Robert Dean sold that Cadillac he had fixed up, he saw an opportunity staring him in the face. And he decided to seize it.

He opened Coach House Cars. Inc .. an Arlington, Virginia, antique auto business, and kept his hands greasy as he labored to restore classic American vehicles ranging from a 1942 Packard to a 1957 Thunderbird . He sold the business when he was 17, after grossing $600,000 in a single year.

At 18, he abandoned plans to go to college. He opted instead to open Dynasty Limousine Corporation, offering luxury limousine service to high-powered corporate clients. "'l had a little bit of difficulty at first." he recalls. ·'People weren't sure they wanted to trust their business to a teenager. so l had to use some extra tactics.·· Those included offering special half-price introductory rates. wearing the finest, dark-colored, threepiece suits and bringing a rose to the secretary.

Dean is still doing things with style.

When he persuades a new client to try his service. he often sends a valet along with the driver-at no extra charge. "l Jose money. but I always have a satisfied client," he says. "Once 1 get a client into one of my limousines, he comes back ."

Catching up with Dean is difficult.

Operating under a variety of corporate umbrellas, he owns Town & Country

Reprinted by permission from

Nation·s Business, November 198.S . Co1>yrigh1

©

Limousine Service of Washington, is opening a similar firm in Boston. consults for Town & Country Limousine Service of New York and is in the process of setting up Limo-Net , an international network of individually owned and operated limousine services.

How does he feel about his $2 million revenue level? ··rm far off my goals." he complains.

B

arrv M inkow , of Reseda, Californi;. is also restless. "The first thing people ask me is, 'Did your dad give you the money to start your business?',. Minkow complains. The answer is '·No!" Minkow·s mother. Carole. worked for many years as manager of a carpet cleaning business. As a child. drawn to the world of commerce, Minkow spent considerable time at his mother's office. absorbing fine points of the trade. He came to believe that . by applying youthful vitality. he could build a more successful business than the one his mother ran .

At 15. Minkow started his own carpet cleaning firm, which he called ZZZZ Best Company , in a Reseda garage. Today the 19-year-old businessman has offices in San Diego. Anaheim and Thousand Oaks. as well as Reseda .

Two of his 103 employees are his mother. who quit her previous job to help manage his business, and his father.

Robert. The elder Minkow, out of a job after a career in banking, joined his son's firm to sell to large commercial accounts such as restaurants and hotels.

"We'll do $2 million this year," Barry Minkow says calmly . "And we're a service business , so we don' t have any cost of goods sold. Our $2 million can compare to $40 million for a manufacturing company.

When he can take time away from his business. Minkow teaches a course on entrepreneurship at nearby Valley College. ·' [ try to tell kids that ifs not necessary to work for $3.35 an hour: · he says. '·You don't have to do what everybody else does.·· Minkow recalls that when he was a high school junior he was earning more money than his principal. ··some teachers seemed resentful of me,'' he recalls. "They thought I was trying to beat the system-to demonstrate that you didn 't need an education to be successful. But I totally believe in school. l think it's the greatest thing.··

1985. U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was just that Minkow cou ld not wait for school to proceed along its slow, ponderous course ... You've got to keep it in motion.,. he says, the "if' referring to the endless variety of human pursuits. .. It never stops. You never get satisfied.

You push:· Minkow's push begins each day at 4:30 a.m .. when he heads for two hours of weightlifting at a local gymnasium. By the time his employees arrive for work at 9 a.m., their boss has already put in two hours at his desk-and he will stay there until 8 p.m . at the earliest. "'We"ll franchise, we'll go public. we'll do all those things," Minkow says ... ZZZZ Best is going to be the General Motors of the carpet-cleaning industry. w e·re what the American company is all about."

Spend a few minutes talking with Minkow and you may need to come up for air. The teenage entrepreneur of today is the proverbial youngster in a hurry.

S

ometimes I am bothered because I think I could be doing a lot better, '' says John Herman , a ten-year veteran of the business world . ·Then I remember-rm only 18 years old," he adds with pride.

Herman. who lives in Cleve land , Ohio. was only eight when he began peddling samples of pens. coffee mugs. T- ·hirts and other items left over from his uncle Bob's specialty advertising business in Toledo, another Ohio city.

His early customers were relatives. friends and neighbors. but by the time he was 12 he was corresponding with Cleveland business executives . introducing them to the line of specially items and beginning to build a long-term clientele .

Two years ago, at 16, Herman parted amicably with his uncle to form his own specialty advertising business.

Today he has eight employees and markets a wide variety of premiums, awards, executive gifts and other specialty products to Cleveland businesses. ·'Our clients don't simply buy items,'' he says. "They buy a total service operation.

We warehouse. ship and coordinate all types of specialty marketing programs."

The John Herman Company will show a gross of approximately $500,000 this year. Its president and No . 1 sa lesman recentl y entered Case Western Reserve University , where he is taking, he says, ""business courses and other crazy courses to keep me in touch with other parts of

my life. r vc learned that you have 10 remember that a 101 more is going on in your life than just business.··

A

teenage business often begins modestly but builds with speed. Like many a youngster. John Shorb started mowing lawns for hire when he was in the sixth grade. He concentrated on building a clientele in the affluent neighborhoods of the upper northwest portions of the nation's capital. and. he says, "Every year it kept getting bigger.,.

1n truth. success was not as automatic as Shorb makes it sound. While other teenagers pursued conventional interests, Shorb was teaching himself the art of landscaping, including such basic skills as trimming, weeding and seeding.

By the time he entered high school, he knew how to care for every type of outdoor plant that grows in Washington.

He rose early to work before classes, and he forsook sports after <;chool so he could attend to the needs of his customers' lawns and gardens. When the rest of the family traveled to its vacation home in Maine. he stayed in Wash ington to work.

There is no question in Shorb's mind that the time and effort were worthwhile. Today, at 19, he is president of Northwest Lawn Service. His 120 regular customers contract for services ranging from simple lawn mowing to complete lawn care costing as much as $4CXl per month. He has five full-time employees and four summer part-timers. His gross sales for 1985 approached $125.000.

Within ten years he plans to be operating the major horticultural cen ter in the city.

J

oanne Marlowe also started young.

The eighth child of bandleader Johnny Marlowe, of 1940s fame. she grew up in a Chicago environment that promoted creativity. ·'There would always be music in the house:· she recalls.

This spirit of positive, free expression was stimulated when a marketing executive. for whom she babysat, suggested that she capitalize on her hobby of creating stuffed animals. Under the name of Furfun, Marlowe advertised clever animal patterns in craft magazines.

Whenever she sold a pattern. she would also send the customer an order form for the bits and pieces of unique fabric necessary to make the toy. thereby generating repeat mail order business.

By the time she was 14, Marlowe was

designing clothes for herself and her friends, inspired hy the classic style of the 1940s and 1950s as demonstrated in the work of her longtime idol. Hollywood designer Edith Head. Marlowe·s reputation spread steadily. helping her develop her business into a $2,500 a month enterprise by last summer.

At that point Marlowe realized that the business had grown big enough to require a formal base. On August 30 last year she opened Joanne Marlowe Designs in the exclusive downtown shopping district of Evanston. Illinois , and the 19-year-old designer estimates that the boutique setting will enable her to at least double the size of her business almost immediately .

Marlowe is confidently projecting sales of $60.UOO to $1 l.0.000 over the first 12 months.

Marlowe wowed the audience at a special pre-opening show with a totally new approach to wedding attire: a flower girl entered in traditional white. followed by a bridesmaid in pale pink ; as each succeeding bridesmaid entered , the shade of pink grew more intense until the bride finally appeared, gowned in breathtaking fuchsia. ·'White is so dull. '' moans Marlowe ... I feel that the entrance of the bride should build like a crescendo. She should steal the show."

High-tech is a far more obvious target for the teenage entrepreneur than high fashion.

The full impact of the technological revolution is just beginning 10 be realized, absorbed and acted upon. Young pacesetters are inventing new professions. The combination of endless curiosity. abundant energy and a lack of inhibiting preconceptions makes teenagers ideal candidates to explore the wondrous nooks and crannies of the world of hightech business.

C

onsider the Yid Kid. Thirteen-year-old Rawson Stovall of Abilene, Texas, writes a syndicated column that appears in five periodicals, including the Odessa American, the El Paso Times and Young Person Magazine, a nationwide newsletter for schoolchildren. Furthermore, he has parlayed his print journalism into a regular segment on the Public Broadcasting Service series New Tech Times.

The Yid Kid is a widely recognized critic of video games ... There was nothing on the market to help people decide what

SPAN NOVEMBER 19R6

39

BUSINESS WHIZ KIDS continued

Barry Minkow (right, foreground) employs his parents Robert and Carole (seen in the picture) in his 103employee carpet cleaning company.

Joanne Marlowe (below), at work in her boutique where she fashions clothes of her own design, finds the business world electrifying.

John Herman (bottom) started his own business, which sells specialty advertising items like the ones seen in the picture, when he was only eight.

Today he goes to college and employs half a dozen in his enterprise.

to buy at $30 a go ," he observes. So he wrote four sample columns and sold them to Dick Tarply, editor of the Abilene Reporter News. The Vid Kid was well on his way to success.

As might be expected from someone who spends bis life in the distant galaxies portrayed in video games, Stovall is more int~rested in discussing the future than the past or the present. He plans to attend the University of California at Los Angeles to pursue a career in television production. He can elaborate at length on the research paper he wrote last year comparing the prime time programming content of 1974 with that of 1984.

"I watch a lot of television, but I don't do it mindlessly," he declares. By his analysis, the amount of network time devoted to general drama programming was down from 20 percent in 1974 to 9.8 percent in 1984.

Television execs take note: The Vid Kid predicts an increase in the number of hour-Jong family dramas , but with more humor. He explains that people have a need for more family. He also theorizes about the increase in the number of young people in television: "Kids are becoming more popular because of their innocence and natural sense of humor. " Stovall-whose annual income from his various ventures exceeds $10,000looks , thinks and acts like a young executive. Perhaps the Vid Kid is the quintessential product of the high-tech generation. "He was born this way ," his mother says.

S

ome high-tech products are made , not born, and if your interest lies in robots, Tim Knight , 19, of San Jose, California , is the teenager to see.

He is proprietor of the Robot Center, although he prefers to call his merchandise " probots." If that is not perfectly Clear , you will find a complete explanation in Probots and People: The Age of the Personal Robot, the most recent of Knight's dozen books, published by McGraw-Hill .

Knight delights in showing off his wares. The Robot Center offers everything from the eight-centimeter-high probot Constructicon for $2. 95 to the 60-centimeter-plus Omnibot 2000 for $500. Vehicles ranging from dump trucks to fighter planes can be transformed to take on human-looking shapes. All the bits and pieces flip and fold to entirely

40

change the appearance of the probot.

There are even comic books that describe the adventures of these characters, fashioned after their cartoon shows.

Then there is Petster, a probotic kitten that responds to a call from its humanoid master, as well as a voice-activated teddy bear and a few probots with decidedly unpronounceable names such as Mospeada, Styrikevalkyrie and the redoubtable Blowsuperior. The highlight of the show is Hearoid, which can bring a cocktail upon command.

The human in charge of all this technology is the son of a Crown Zellerbach executive. He became interested in electronics at 13 and within a year founded his own software company. Soon Knight was writing articles and software reviews for 13 periodicals and newspapers, and that success prompted him to author his first book, The World Connection, at 16.

Eleven other books followed. and an additional four are pending. Titles include Graphics and Sounds on the Commodore 64, Graphics and Sounds on the IBM-PC, and Eureka! 011 the IBM-PC. More than 200,000 copies of Knight's books are in print.

This young entrepreneur knowingly caters to the youthful fantasies of his customers at the Robot Center. "Most of our customers are kids or adults who have a child's imagination:' be says. But $150,000 in sales during the first cine months of business is no illusion.

What makes Knight run? "l have an intense desire to be my own boss," he says. " Also. I have a person inside me who is just a little o.ut of touch with reality. That has both helped me and hurt me . On the positive side, it has allowed me to see and do things that others won't attempt. On the down side.

I've made some mistakes, but I won't repeat them. 1 plan m~re carefully now."

T

he role of the teenager in the computer revolution is further illustrated by 19-year-old Silicon Valley twins Craig and Keith Mortensen.

During the 1981 Christmas season.

Apple Computer advertised its Apple II-Plus personal computer with a colorful graphic routine that depicted Santa opening gifts for good little girls and boys.

That computer-art creation put the Mortensen twins on the Silicon Valley map and led to the founding of Mortensen Computer Graphics in 1983. Today the

company creates projects for customers including Apple, Applied Software Technology, Chambered Nautilus Software and International Solutions.

"We want to create computer graphics for the common man," says Keith Mortensen. "like the graphics being done for the George Lucas films."

Lucas is the producer of the Star Wars films, and the twins路 work does indeed seem to be heading them coward a wondrous future. Their electronic odyssey began io the sixth grade when they tinkered with spare machine parts lying around in the family garage. They built miniature robots and determined to fol low up on that success by bu ilding their own computer.

The home-built computer never became a reality, but seeing the twins exhibit genuine fascination with computers. their fathe r bought them an Apple 11-Plus so they could experiment on their own. Their technological aptitude impressed Bobbi Goodson, their computer science instructor at Collins Junior High School in Cupertino, California. Goodson took the Mortensen twins directly to Apple. the company founded by the original Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs

By definition, youthful entrepreneurs are excluded from those informal organizations known as old boys' networks. Therefore, the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs (ACE) was born in 1983. with Verne C. Harnish. a professor at Kansas' Wichita State University. as its national director. ACE established headquarters in an appropriate site. the renovated building in Wichita where, in 1958, Frank Camey.

19, and his brother Dan, 25, founded Pizza Hut. The association now bas chapters on most major college campuses. It publishes a monthly newsletter, has an electronic network so members can communicate by computer and holds a variety of conferences. A national conference in Dallas in March 1985 a1trac1ed 611 young entrepreneurs representing 202 universities and colleges in 41 states and eight countries.

"You need contacts to be successful in business, and that is often the biggest problem for young entrepreneurs," Harnish says. He tries to put them in contact with bankers and others who believe in their capabilities. 路路we call it the Young Persons' Network.,. he says. '路Everybody needs someone to talk to."

computer whiz kid, Steven Jobs.

Believing that the computer field offered unique opportunities for the creative teenager, Apple had established the Apple Education Foundation to promote the interests of young entrepreneurs.

Carolyn Stauffer, the foundation's director, became the personal mentor of the Mortensen twins, showing them how to market their programming skills. The Apple entree led the twins to numerous projects that might have been expected to go to adults.

"We'd get a contract from a software company and go to the owner's house on the weekend to get to know him as friends," Craig Mortensen says. "This helped us understand how he did his marketing and what kind of graphic he wanted."

The twins' work has had varied purposes. For example, the Mortensens designed a mock travel commercial depicting coastal France, with an animated windsurfer skimming across the water. A French software company used it to show travel agencies the potential for computer graphics in advertising. For a Stanford graduate student. the Mortensens developed a picture of a pumping heart indicating the direction of blood flow.

Although they specialize in graphics, they also market their services as general programmers in any of six computer languages. As certified developers for Apple's Macintosh computer, they are developing a variety of high-tech aids for schoolteachers.

The time the twins can devote to such activities is restricted. because they are full-time students, majoring in computer science at California State University in Chico. The tangible rewards are presently limited to roughly $2,000 a year (a maximum of $300 per project). But the intangible rewards for the twins' future are immeasurable.

What separates them from their peers?

Says Goodson, their former teacher: "They see beyond what's happened to them and understand the larger picture.

They have vision."

That is a statement that could be applied to all the teenage entrepreneurs.

They have seen the future-and it is theirs.

0 About the Authors: Cynthia Poulos and Willimn Hoffer are free-Lance wri1ers based in California and Virginia respectively.

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

4)

12

Protectionism

The Perennial Debate

by D ON McLEOD

Although history has repeatedly proved free traders to be right, controversy still rages in the United States on whether protectionism helps economic growth.

Jn the fall of 1928 the great American bubble of peace and prosperity was about to burst, but few dared think it would ever end. In fact, the ambition of the moment was to make the boom bigger and better and forever. I t was in this light that the U.S. Congress set about writing the most disastrous tariff legislation in America's history.

Revisionist economists and historians now say anticipation of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, signed into law by President Herbert C. Hoover in June 1930, had already caused the stock market crash of 1929 and the long, cruel depression that blighted the world throughout the 1930s. Their theory is gaining a substantial following now as the United States looks once again to tariffs and retaliation against the world to make things better at home.

One economist puts it plainly. "The stock market crash and the Great Depression ensued because of the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930,'" says Jude Wanniski. the theorist-consultant and apostle of supply-side economics who has provided much of the economic philosophy of current conservative politicians.

Wanniski has carefully detailed a chain of even ts in the passage of Smoot-Hawley that presents a compelling if circumstantial case for blaming the I930s on the tariff excess of the 1920s. Any historical survey of U.S. tariff policy indicates that protective tariffs have generally been bad policy and worse politics. Almost invariably, they have brought only grief to those who enacted them.

The road to Smoot-Hawley began at the close of World War l, an event that shattered the old order of international relations and world trade. The United States came out of the war a major creditor nation. ending more than a century of indifference to the outside world. And in the peace that followed, U.S. private investment overseas jumped from a prewar $3,000 million to more than $14,000 million by the end of the 1920s.

The war also had pushed U.S. business into new ventures, and when the war was over, the owners. managers and employees wanted to keep their new businesses. From this grew a cry for protection of these ·'infanr· industries-chemicals, dyes , synthetic fabrics and hardware among them. Farmers along with industrialists feared being inundated by cheap produce and product from depressed European labor.

A Republican Congress rushed to passage in the spring of 1921 an "emergency" tariff biU, which outgoing President Woodrow Wilson promptly vetoed. " lf there ever was a time when America had anything to fear from foreign competition . that time has passed." said the international-minded Wilson . "If

SPAN NOVEMB l ' R 19Xt.

we wish to have Europe settle her debts, governmental or commercial , we must be prepared to buy from her."

Few were listening, however , and within a month of taking office, President Warren G. Harding called a special session of the Congress with the exhortation: "The urgency for an instant tariff cannot be too much emphasized. " Congress responded with the Emergency Tariff of May 27, 1921. a makeshift effort that barely satisfied the demand for protection.

However, a later measure, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, set the highest rates in U.S. history up to that time.

Duties were boosted on imports of sugar, textiles, pig iron, rails, chinaware, toys, hardware, chemicals, dyes and lace. The increases ranged from 60 percent to 400 percent. The act also authorized the President to raise or lower duties as much as 50 percent if recommended by the Tariff Commission. T his provision was used 37 times by President Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge.

What resulted was a tariff war that cut seriously into fore ign trade; but the United States was prospering generally, and budding misgivings among commercial interests were genera!Jy unheeded.

If prosperity ensued in spite of the tariffs rather than because of them , few could argue against prosperity. If high tariffs could produce the Roari ng '20s, higher tariffs would be even grander. In 1928 the Republican Party called again for tariff "revision, " ostensibly for farmers, the one blight on Republican prosperity.

Its 1928 platform proclaimed: "The Republican Party believes that the home market, built up under protective policy, belongs to the American farmer. and it pledges its support of legislation which will give this market to him .... It is inconceivable that American labor will ever consent to the abolition of protection , which would bring the American standard of living down to the level of that in Europe."

No sooner had Hoover won the presidency on this platform and entered office than he summoned yet another Congress in special session in the spring of 1929 to make "limited changes in the tariff. " The final result was Smoot-Hawley, the tariff to end all tariffs.

When enacted it would bring increases across the board, principally in minerals, chemicals, dyestuffs and textiles. But some people were expressing doubts. T he American Bankers Association raised objections, as did industries with foreign markets.

The economic community was unanimous; when the presidential signature was imminent, l.028 economists petitioned President Hoover: ·'Our export trade, in general, would suffer.

Countries cannot permanently buy from us unless they are permitted to sell to us, and the more we restrict the importation of goods from them by means of even higher tariffs the more we reduce the possibility of our exporting to them.''

And though President Hoover did not sign the bill until June 17, 1930, Wanniski has written, "the stock market anticipated the act and crashed in the last days of October 1929." He backs up this assertion with a careful tracking of the bill through the Congress and onto the President's desk. After every setback for the protectionists , the next day's headlines revealed a confident surge in the markets. After every advance of the high-tariff legislation , the markets trembled and fell.

Other things fell as well. By the end of the year President

Rcprinccd by pem1i»ion rrom ltt.sighr magazine.

Hoover announced that, despite higher tariffs, Jess money was coming into government coffers and the budget was out of balance. By 1933, as he left office, customs revenues had plunged to $250 million , compared with $600 million in 1929 when rates were lower. At the same time. country after country responded with high tariffs of their own. Within two years, 25 nations had established retaliatory tariffs. U.S. foreign trade crashed from $9,600 million in 1929 to $2,900 million in 1932.

Whatever the causes of the crash and depression. SmootHawley certainly was a contributor and possibly the major reason the slump was so deep and lasted so long.

The telling footnote to this tale is the upswing that followed the election in 1932 of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President.

Roosevelt named free trader Cordell Hull as his secretary of state, and Hull revolutionized U.S. policy with a series of trade agreements to bring down barriers and encourage trade. With the announcement of each success by Hull, the market shot upward , almost in reverse correlation to the dips it took with each progress of protectionism under Hoover Republicans.

The Republicans who had imposed Smoot-Hawley were slow learners, however. Their 1936 platform held firm for protection, complaining that: "The New Deal administration ... secretly has made tariff agreements with our foreign competitors, flooding our markets with foreign commodities."

They pledged to "repeal the present reciprocal trade agreement law. It is futile and dangerous." Even in 1944 the Republican platform called for tariff protection.

This position may well have been political suicide since, after Smoot-Hawley, the big Republican majorities in the Congress were wiped out. In 1932 the Republicans shrank to weak minorities in both houses and lost the presidency for 20 years. Even if there were no cause and effect in the minds of voters between tariff and defeat in this case, the results still follow a definite pattern: High tariffs have been a curse at the polls.

Ironically, it was a mercantilist trade order like the one the world appears to be moving toward today that brought on the American Revolution. Indeed, trade is the United States' most enduring political issue.

In colonial times, Americans traded under the policy of mercantilism imposed by Britain on its empire. The idea was to create a self-contained trade universe. Colonies supplied the mother country with raw materials; England handled the manufacturing and regulated trade. Tariffs protected the empire from competition, and colonists benefited from bounties for raw materials scarce in the homel?nd.

Colonizing for profit had been the motive behind the first settlements in Virginia. The mercantile system was taken for granted as long as it stuck to tariffs for regulation and not for revenue-and so long as the rules weren't too strictly enforced.

It was the imposition of revenue tariffs to recover the costs of the French and American Indian War and to help pay for an army to guard newly conquered domains that brought the split with Britain. The tariff against tea caused the Boston Tea Party [on December 16, 1773 when the East India Company ship's tea cargo was thrown overboard].

The American colonies themselves also had huge war debts to pay, and the costs of mercantilism rapidly began to outweigh the benefit of its protection. le was here that the tariff curse began for the Americans, and the aversion to externally im-

posed customs clung to the government in rebellion.

The Articles of Confederation under which the United States won its independence gave the U.S. Congress all power and authority to wage the war but withheld the power of taxation to pay for it.

The first national tariff was enacted in patriotic fervor on July 4, 1789, under the new constitutional government (which did and does allow the Congress to impose tariffs) and President George Washington. It was the first in a series of revenue tariffs, which were the main source of federal income as late as 1924.

Rates under the first tariff averaged eight percent. It afforded some protection for American industry, but this was at first incidental. Rates were raised in 1790. 1792 and 1794 under the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who foresaw the country's industrial potential and wanted manufacturers protected.

Real protectionism, however, did not gain acceptance until 1816, when the world was emerging from the Napoleonic wars and Americans worried for new industries that had grown up to take advantage of the disruption of normal trade from Europe.

For the next 20 years the U .S. Treasury was fat from customs receipts. But by the J830s the agrarian South was beginning to feel the drain of trading its produce for goods made dear through tariffs that raised the price of European manufacture by tax and the price of domestic goods by elimination of competition. As a result, rates were lowered.

The most dramatic reversal came after South Carolina nullified two tariff acts and threatened secession.

An 1828 tariff had raised rates to record highs under the goading of Henry Clay, the senator from Kentucky who dreamed of an "American System," which would protect fledgling industries with high tariffs and use the revenues for new roads and canals to get raw materials from the West to factories in the East. Although this appealed somewhat to landlocked western farm areas, it was devastating to the older coastal colonies of the South, which were dependent on overseas trade. Clay backed down with a compromise tariff in 1833 that lowered most of the offensive rates but retained protectionism as U.S. tariff policy.

The sectional tariff divisions would simmer on into the Civil War. The last reduction of the era came in 1846 when Tennessean James K. Polk was President and moved to ease the burdens of the South and West. [t would be the last victory for free traders for quite a time.

When the Civil War split the nation, the leading voices for moderate tariffs were removed. and the govern ment lurched back to protection. The first of the wartime tariffs was enacted in 1861. In large part the higher customs were imposed to take some of the sting out of internal taxes placed on industry to pay for the war. With northern industrial interests in control of the government, protectionism reigned throughout the war and the Reconstruction that followed. The South's hatred of tariffs burned unabated. Despite dire need. the Confederate government was expressly denied the right to impose protective tariffs or make internal improvements .

It was late in the century before Democrats were strong enough to challenge the Republicans on tariff policy again.

President Grover Cleveland began to question the tariff system when he noted that the government was running huge surpluses

\l'J\N NOVl¡ Ml!I R 191\6

43

PROTECTIONISM continued

while the high tax on trade was keeping prices up for U.S. consumers.

Tariffs were the leading issue in the 1888 presidential election and provided the margin of victory for Republican Benjamin Harrison, who ousted Democrat Cleveland. The tuming point came when the British ambassador in Washington commented that Cleveland wouJd be more friend ly to Her Majesty's governme nt than would Harrison. This was used by the Republicans to argue that Cleveland wanted low tariffs to favor British industrialists over Americans. In a tight raceCleveland actually won the popular election but lost in the electoral college- this issue was enough to decide the o utcome.

The patriotic misfire soon backfired , however, once Harrison took office and began effecting his high tariff designs. The tariff of 1890, named for William McKinley , the Ohio representative and future President, broke the records of 1832.

Among other things , it put sugar on the free list and compensated with a bounty for U.S. sugar growers of four cents a kilogram-producing a depression in t he tropical kingdom of Hawaii that brought on a revolution.

The modern retaliatory tariff- what is meant when the United States talks about what to do with some highly developed nations these days- also was reflected in provisions aimed at Latin American countries that would not lower their rates on U .S. manufactures although their coffee, sugar and other produce were admitted to the United States duty free.

Average duty rates were 49.5 percent.

The curse was soon to strike, however, as the U.S. economy began falling apa rt under the supposedly benevolent protection. The year of the tariff, 1890, saw more labor strikes than any other in the 19th century. Prices also began to rise just in time for the next election. Republicans, who had boasted of a tariff as "protective in every paragraph and American in every line and word," elected only 88 House members, against 235 Democrats and nine Populists, and their once huge majority in the Senate shrank to just eight shaky votes. Among the House members defeated was McKinley. The depression of 1893 followed, and Harrison took the fall, losing to Cleveland in an electo ral landslide.

The Democrats had promised tariff revision in the 1892 campaign , and revise they did, but not necessarily downward.

By the time the bill emerged from Congress, a coalition of eastern Democrats and protectionist Republicans bad attached hundreds of changes, most of them upward. Overall, the tariff of 1896 dropped average rates to 39.9 percent, but high tariffs were kept for big-ticket items such as iron and coal.

Sugar duties were reimposed with rates designed to suit domestic growers, this time bankrupting Cuba's sugar industry.

To top it off, an income tax was enacted to make up for the sure loss of customs reven ue because of high tariffs. But the Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional. (The Constitution was later amended to allow a federal income tax.) Cleveland denounced the whole proceeding as "party perfidy and party dishonor" but let the act become law without his signature.

Republican McKinley became President. There was no need for tariff revisio n at this point , but some people never learn.

McKinley called a special session of the Congress which produced the Dingley Tariff of 1897, which pushed rates even higher than the McKinley Tariff. Average rates soared to 57 percent.

44

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

McKinley was assassinated- though not over tariffs-and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, steered carefully clear of customs controversy. By 1908 thoughtful Republicans were beginning to have doubts about their wedding to high-tariff policy, and their platform that year pledged to revise the tariffs.

When they were through , to President William Howard Taft's outrage, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island asked tartly: "Where did we ever make the statement that we would revise the tariff downward'?" The alleged tariff reform had undergone some 800 amendments in a congressional logrolling derby, all of them raising rates for pet products.

Despite Aldrich's smugness, the act proved disastrous for the Republicans. Party populists. led by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin , marshaled a debate against the tariff, which for the first time dramatized for the public the link between high tariffs and high prices. They failed to beat the bill , but the curse caught the Republicans. In 1910 Republican ranks in the Congress were decimated , and in 1912 the party lost both houses and the presidency.

D emocratic President Wilson Jed the move for tariff reduction. On October 3, 1913, he was able to sign a bill of his liking. It was not free trade, but it was a downward improvement of some scope. More important, it reversed a protectionist policy that had reigned for a half-century. lt lowered average duties by 37 percent to a new level of 27 percent; duties were lowered on 958 items and raised for on ly 86.

The Underwood Tariff Act of 1913 never bad a chance to operate, however, because World War 1 proved a greater barrier to trade than tariffs ever had. Sheltered by submarine packs and the ravages of war in Europe, American industry boomed. It was a desire to hang on to this artificial prosperity that turned the country back to protectionism and on the way to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. But it bad set a model for the future , and Franklin Roosevelt's reversal of Republican policy in the 1930s set the tone for future administrations of both parties.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GAIT}, established in the global reconstruction following World War lI, remains the basic framework of U .$. trade policy under President Reagan. The U.S. Administration is now seeking tariff adj ustments and enforcement reform under GA IT. The idea of reciprocity-basically, the philosophy that one market will only be as free as another- was pursued by Presidents Harry S. Truman , Dwight D . Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During the Vietnam war, President Richard M. Nixon imposed a ten percent surcharge on imports but did not abandon the general principle of free trade.

And now, it appears, the Republicans have become the free trade party, while the Democrats have become the protectionists. Democrat Wilson , speaking in 1913, might have been speaking for Republican Reagan when he said: "We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage, and put businessmen and producers under the stimulant of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical and enterprising. " 0 About the Author: Don Mcleod is a senior writer with Insight.

He was earlier a national editor and reporter with The Washington Times and (for 28 years) political writer for Associated Press.

TheJ Bil

Archaeology, Pamela Cressey has found, is a great way to involve people in what bas gone on in their own communities.

Cressey. city archaeologist of Alexandria, Virginia, since 1977. has helped more than 2,500 Gitizen volunteers become actively involved in digging¡ up, documenting and analyzing their city's colorful past.

The Eastern U.S. city, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., was established in the 1730s by Scottish traders. In the early part of its 250-year history, it was a thriving colonial and federal seaport. And the city's historic core, Old Town, retains the architectural aspect of an 18th- or 19th-century town.

The growth of the city, however, was stunted by a mid-19th-century downturn in the economy, which lasted for decades.

By the time Alexandria's urban pioneers of the 1930s (who are said to have come to the area with the Franklin Roosevelt Administration) discovered the delights of restoration , many of the city's quaint sfructures had sadly deteriorated. But they benefited greatly from the preservation movement that, over the years, has saved and revitalized many of them.

It was not until the last decade that Alexandria became the first city in the United States to develop an urban archaeology program-to begin to explore what lay beneath the sod and asphalt and what was hidden away in historic records and human memories.

Pamela Cressey, hired nine years ago from a university teaching position, had already convinced herself that what she wanted most was a career in public archaeology. She had a degree in history from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and another in anthropology from the University of Iowa , as well as an interest in archaeology dating back to the days when she and her father spent Saturdays in natural history museums in southern California.

College research at colonial sites in Mexico, along with interviews and oral histories with townspeople in New Hampshire , where she taught, not only reinforced this interest but helped her Abridged by permission from The Chr/$(/011 Scle11ce Mom1or. @The Christian Science Publishing Society.

All righu reserved.

lle1anilria

by MARILYN HOFFMAN

In their endeavor to nurture the historical roots of their city, the citizens of Alexandria, Virginia, have begun carefully to unearth and preserve its past. determination to work with the public. " I had discovered," she says now, "that the most pleasure I had came in sharing what I knew with others. I love responding to the natural curiosity of people and seeing the excitement in their eyes when I tell them what we are finding out about our past."

When she told a friend what she wanted to do, the friend hooted, "You're nuts. Who will pay you to do the kind of work you describe?" But shortly afterward, Cressey read a college newspaper advertisement for the position of city archaeologist in Alexandria.

"The minute I saw this city and talked to city officials, I knew this was where l belonged,'' she recalls. Today her staff consists of two otheI archaeologists and one museum educator, plus, at any given tin1e, at least 75 volunteers who are involved in all parts of the program.

Volunteers are given an initial orientation program, after which each decides the area in which he or she wants to work-documentary research , fieldwork, or in the laboratory. A detailed training program, with manuals and hands-on learning sessions, is followed by a period of apprenticeship with an experienced worker. As their knowledge increases,

the volunteers move into more responsible assignments, and some become supervisors of projects.

Right now, volunteers locate sites, take part in digs or excavations, do documentary research, tape oral histories and take photographs. They also do artifact identification and cataloging, feed artifact data into a computer and help set up exhibits.

Volunteers also greet the 60,000 people a year who visit the new archaeological research museum, in a renovated torpedo factory.

The urban archaeology program, which has an annual budget of $117,000 from the city, is part of the office of Historic Alexandria. Special foundation grants have been received for specific research projects, and the city has also appropriated more funds for key events.

Volunteer labor is valued at $60.000 a year.

"Our mandate is to study, preserve, 'interpret and educate," says Cressey, "and that we do with all the vigor we can muster." She does not advocate that citizens start digging in their own backyards, explaining, "Our goal is to maintain things in the ground, because the ground and the things that are in it are our data source, our book manuscript.

We dig only where we feel the material to be excavated has the most value to us. So we are very selective and choose to take pick and shovel only to those sites with the fullest documentary support. We do ask citizens to let us know when interesting objects come to light. however, when they are digging up their gardens."

Excavating an old well may sound simple, she says, but actually it is a very expensive and time-consuming process.

"We have found between 25,000 and 50,000 artifacts in each deep well, most of them waterlogged and requiring special treatment. We estimate that every hour of digging time requires from 35 to 50 hours of preliminary documentary work, plus the lab processing, statistical analysis and storing of artifacts after the dig."

So far, Cressey and her staff of professionals and volunteers have much to their credit, including a historic study of the waterfront, the location of the last remaining section of the old Alexandria Canal and a survey of past merchant and

SPAN NOVEMllER 1986

45

THEY DIG ALEXANDRIA continued

business life through a study of selected sites along King Street.

They have completed a city survey which identifies neighborhoods that have been continuous for . at least 150 years .

Their oral histories and excavations have helped reveal how the people in these past periods lived.

"Most of Alexandria's citizens now feel more connected to the city's past," says Cressey, "and they have a feeling of great pride and of continuing legacy. Knowing how people lived here 200 years ago, and the hardships they endured, gives today's

46

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

residents a different perspective on their own lives. " Mayor Charles E. Beatley, Jr. , says, "Alexandria has made a most effective commitment to history. We were one of the first American cities to establish an Old and Historic District and a Board of Architectural Review. And one of our most vital historical activities today is the Alexandria Urban Archaeological Program."

Citizens of Alexandria assumed a real advocacy role after six city blocks were torn down in an urban renewal project,

and people noticed that the objects being turned up by the bulldozers were a very important part of their past.

The city of Alexandria has continued its preservation effort, not only because its citizens have demanded it through a variety of public hearings, but also because of tourism. A portion of the taxes that tourists pay each year in the city's restaurants and hotels now goes for preservation and the study of history. 0 About the Author: Marilyn Hoffman writes for The Christian Science Monitor.

Left: Blue transfer-printed pottery and dishes used by a family living on King Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D. C., were excavated during a recent dig in the city. Below: King Street, historic core ofAlexandria, still

retains the architectural aspects of an 18th- or 19th-century town with its quaint shops and row-house residences. Bottom: Volunteers in the urban archaeology prvgram excavate an area ofthe for mer free black neighborhood in the Old Town.

The Human Imperative Text continued from page 11

that he and his works are permanent. The pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan temples of Mexico, or Stonehenge in England would be good examples of that.

These very first efforts are those to which we now turn for understanding, whether about the Egyptians, the early Central Americans, or Paleolithic people. Ritual, dance and music are man's attempts to reassure himself of the regularity of experience, that the cycles are going to continue.

The arts originate in man's efforts to overcome his uneasiness about life's transience and the unreliability of nature.

Do you believe that there are cycles of invention, scientific discovery and creativity in human history?

Boorstin: I don't believe in the decline of human nature- no more heroes, no more creators, no more great people. Opportunities change, but I see no reason to believe that all of a sudden after thousands of years on Earth human restlessness and fidgetiness will disappear. Invention isn't always heroic, by the way. Sometimes it is just fidgety. The great inventions of modern times were not necessary, were no more useful than what preceded them. There was no need for television, no clamor from the public saying, "We need television!" When the automobile was devised it was a much Jess efficient mode of transportation than the horse, because there were no roads.

So there is a kind of reciprocal relation between what humans try and what they need and what they think they n~ed and so on. It's not a simple linear movement along the path of biological or spiritual needs.

Is it sacrilege to suggest that we might eventually have a pill to make people more creative?

Boorstin: The Creators will emphasize that creativity is on what I call the "fertile verge," that is, its resources stem from the unfamiliar. Anything increasing human sensitivity and receptivity to the unfamiliar should promote the chances of creation.

Since creativity by its nature is unpredictable, a society that encourages creativity must be hospitable to the unpredictable.

That, indeed, is quite a conundrum!

Much of great literature has been produced in oppressed societies. The novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevski and Turgenev are all products of the czarist regime. That oppressive society granted Count Tolstoy the leisure to work as he did. But a free society,

48

SPAN NOVEMBER 1986

like that of America, increases the probability of the unpredictable. Efforts to keep people's thoughts channeled, as in totalitarian societies, will ultimately fail. The mind cannof be imprisoned.

By allowing communication to escape control and censorship, do you think that personal computers will help disperse oppression in a closed society?

Boorstin: Computers make you energydependent, unlike when you write a Jetter or a manuscript. Authorities could withhold either the machine itself or parts needed for repairs. Certainly broadcasting and other electronic media have caused an important shift by promoting the rise of the undefined audience. With printed books you have a certain number of copies that can be traced or received. But with radio and television you never know who's listening or watching.

We shouldn't, you say, be too skeptical of the advantages of a new invention, since we can't immediately know what they are.

Boorstin: I agree. We never know the uses of it or the consequences of it. When some people first said that Henry Ford was going to frighten all the horses, he replied that if everyone had an automobile there wouldn't be any problems.

That's true for great works of art, too.

How could Shakespeare have imagined Kiss Me Kate [a modern adaptation of Taming of the Shrew]? And the creators of Kiss Me Kate also could not have known what they had created, because there'll be another symbiotic by-product of it.

Our quest for knowledge has led us into enormous difficulties with the unfortunate discovery of the atomic bomb. Is there any solution to that dilemma?

Boorstin: It would be hard to imagine any of man's inventions that could not have "unfortunate" by-products. What about fire? Few things are more destructive than fire. Maybe that was unfortunate. Maybe all civilization was a mistake, as some philosophers have suggested. But we're not at all free to ask that question.

But don't we have to advance in line with what we find out about nature so that our power to destroy doesn't outrun our wisdom?

Boorstin: Most efforts to civilize humans have been based on an arrogance, an assumption that man knows more than he really does know about his future and his powers. Tha~ was true when people tried to suggest the techniques of immunization , which many opposed and which produced deaths in the case of smallpox vaccination.

Many who were against it said: "Who are we

to interfere with the works of Providence?"

The same story is often repeated. It's a parable of people refusing to accept the consequences of knowledge and ingenuil}.

And we can't refuse. We must continue to play with and to try to test these conse· quences. and within the limits of prudence and decency to render them as undamaging and as fruitful as possible for the world in which we live.

When I was director at the Nation~ Museum of History and Technology, oneof our first exhibits was entitled "Do It the Hard Way," from an essay by Rube Gold· berg. This motto is perhaps a name for civilization-finding more complicated ways to do simpler tasks, to satisfy simple needs.

The point is, man is not free not to elaborate his technology. He must pursue the path that he sees but has never followed.

You've written that technology's su· preme law is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else. Do you think the culture of the future will be more and more homogeneous?

Boorstin: New technologies tend to erase di~tinctions of place and time. When you see something broadcast on television, you can't know whether it is taped or live; someone has to tell you . The Creators points out that culture and knowledge grow on the bound· ary between something and something else.

When you reduce this "elseness" to same· ness, you disintegrate the opportunities fo1 art and new knowledge. · You feel the amateur historian has an advantage, don't you?

Boorstin: I probably wouldn't have writ· ten most of my books if I had been properlJ trained as a historian. But I didn't knoi wh<1t the ruts were, and I didn't know where the highway was. And the highway usual!) becomes a rut for any profession. So I ha~ to do what interested me.

Isn't it rather forbidding to come in fror. the outside?

Boorstin: Ah, but my notion is that thert is no outside. There is only an inside, aoc it's for everybody. You're speaking like; professional when you say "coming from tht outside .., I have never felt I was trespassi~ on anybody's territory by writing history. profession usually aims at preserving monopoly and a jargon, and is concern with keeping out competitors, whether la~· yers, doctors, historians, sociologists, yot name them-but not librarians, of course!

About the Interviewer: Anthony Liversidge is frequent contributor to Omni magazine ands cializes in in-depth interviews.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEXT

~UE

Down Washington's MaU In the heart of Washington, D.C., is the National Mall-a threekilometer stretch of narrow road bordered with gardens, monuments and museums and always alive with people. It is the site for festivals and fireworks. concerts and demonstrations; there are open-air plays here in summer while in winter it becomes an ice skating rink. The mall is Washingtonian\' favorite place-for jogging. walking, sightseeing. kite¡ flying-or ju~t taking in a breath of Cresb w.

Women in American Films From Marilyn Monroe to Meryl Streep, the woman in American films has reflected the changing attitudes of society. Until recently the heroines were archetypal stereotypes projected by the "male Mughals" of Hollywood.

But as more women become directors and i.criptwriters, films are portraying a truer, less distorted image of the woman.

Advantage India The Amritraj family and Bntaonia Industries have got together to give India a first-class professional training scheme for tennis. Indian and American coaches (and occasionally players like Rod Laver) are training eight boys in a program that takes care of their accommoda1ion, meals and education-fo r free.

Boston Latin Founded in 1635, Boston Latin is the oldest public school in the United States. Its educational standards and approach to imparting knowledge have remained remarkably consistent, as have the high grades, discipline and the insistence on teaching Latin. Among 1he alumni are R alph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Sam Adams, Leonard Bernstein and Theodore White.

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When notifying SPAN about a change in your address, please attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope in addition to filling out the form below. Since four to six weeks are needed to process a change of address, please let us know about any change promptly.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS FORM NEW ADDRESS (USE BLOCK LETIERS) Name-----------------~

Present Position/Designatio n-- -- - -- - -- Address _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ Pin Code I._.._I_.I_.._..__._.

MAIL TO: Circulation Manager, SPAN 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhl 110001

PROGRAM SCHEDULE SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY

Language

Time (IST)

Meter bands

English

0630-0930

Short Wave: 13.9, 16.9, 19.7, 25.6, 30.8. 41 . 7, 42.1 Short Wave: 19.5, 19.7, 30.7, 30.9, 31 .1, 42.1, 42.2, 49.1 Medium Wave: 190

1830-0030

Hindi

0600-0630 0630-0700

Urdu

2130-2230

Short Wave: 25.4, 31.0, 41 .2, 48.9

0800-0830

Short Wave: 25.4, 31.0, 31.1, 49.6 Short Wave: 19.4, 25.3. 31.0, 41.6

1900-2000 Bengali

48b

Short Wave: 25.4, 31.1, 42.2, 49.8 Short Wave: 13.9, 16.9, 19.8

1~.9.

19.8

0700-0800

Short Wave: 13.9,

2130-2230

Short Wave: 19.8, 25.1, 31.4, 41.5 Medium Wave: 190