alumni profile ’90
Kim Thurman Spirito ’79 is vice president of loss prevention and claims and senior claims counsel for Lawyers’ Mutual Insurance Company in Burbank, Calif. She lives in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., and is a member of Trojan League of South Bay.
1980s Gordon Adams ’80 of Laguna Niguel, Calif., contributed to the recently published book The Wisdom of Walk-Ons: 7 Winning Strategies for College, Business and Life, which tells the stories of three unrecruited college football players who found success on and off the field. Rick Caruso ’80, a USC trustee, presented $10,000 checks to the 2012 Spirit of American Youth Scholarship winners this summer as part of a program his development company, Caruso Affiliated, launched in 2009 to recognize outstanding high school students. He lives in Los Angeles. Owen Newcomer PhD ’80 was appointed mayor of Whittier, Calif., for the third time. He serves as chair of both the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and the League of California Cities’ Environmental Quality Policy Committee, and he continues to teach part time at Rio Hondo Community College since retiring in 2005. Janie Watts Spataro MA ’82 published her first novel, Moon Over Taylor’s Ridge, about a woman who returns home to settle her father’s estate. She lives in Ringgold, Ga., and writes under the name Janie Dempsey Watts.
P H OTO S C O U R T E S Y O F J A M E S L O R D
Susan Straight ’82 is the author of Between Heaven and Here, the final novel in her Rio Seco trilogy. She is a distinguished professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside. Darryl R. Adams ’84 is serving his fifth consecutive term as a school board member in the Norwalk-La Mirada (Calif.) Unified School District. He has served as board president four times, and has been named a Local Hero by the city of Long Beach, Calif., a Citizen of the Year finalist in Norwalk, and a PTSA Honorary Service Award winner
A Life by Design “Intuitive design” — design with a user-friendly feel — is a topic that landscape architect James Lord BArch ’90 thinks about a lot. He’s won national and international awards for designs that successfully mold earth to structures in many landmark green projects. And recently, Lord’s San Francisco-based firm, Surfacedesign — which he founded in 2006 — built the new visitor plaza for the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary. Design is also a way he thinks about his life: the fact that he comes from a USC-strong family (his father was at the engineering school, his mother a staff librarian), and landed on campus during the heady, progressive days of USC’s mid-1980s Architecture program. He remembers his professors as including “modernists who cracked the whip, and then this fresh influx of disciples of Frank Gehry. You also had characters who were more socially oriented, who designed multiple housing, and emphasized that [it] could be elegant. It was a pivotal moment.” Topping off his education was a scholarship to the Artists-In-Residence program at Pasadena’s historic Gamble House, with its coterie of visiting architects. Graduate school in landscape architecture at Harvard followed. Later, he teamed up with architect George Hargreaves, with whom he won a competition for the design of World Expo ’98 in Lisbon on a “denigrated site,” and learned all about environmentally conscious building. Lord also was inspired to enter his architectural team in the competition to design venues for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games — the “first green games.” Lord and his colleagues won, and the Sydney Olympic Park they designed became one of the largest plazas in the world. “But it was a huge toxic site,” he explains. “We were cleaning up everything while building, and putting in things like permeable unit pavers, which allow water to more quickly enter the water table and benefit tree roots. This was the first time pavers were utilized on a grand scale. [They’re] commonplace now.” On another project, a water drainage system for Mumbai’s streets, he worked in tandem with the office of venerated architect I. M. Pei. Today, Lord’s own firm is winning kudos for his challenging latest project. “The Golden Gate Bridge plaza was a former military [site] that had been bare since the Civil War,” he says. “The site was a mess … But this was an icon for the country — we didn’t want a design for a plaza that was going to compete with the bridge.” Lord says he is proud of the praise the Golden Gate project has garnered from often-critical observers such as SFCurbed.com. Describing the project’s intuitive design as built-in “poetry of the plaza,” he considers it to be “like a new living room for the bridge! Now you can spend time there and, literally, watch the fog roll in.” LIZ SEGAL
U S C T R O JA N FA M I LY M AG A Z I N E
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