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Fall 2013 Treasure Hunting What you thought about railroads is probably wrong Living in Emily Dickinson’s House JFK, 50 Years Later Fundraising Success Dan Brown ’86 is one of the best-selling authors of all time. How does he do it?

Amherst Fall 2013

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Page 1: Amherst Fall 2013

Fall 2013

TreasureHunting

What you thought

about railroads

is probably wrong

Living in Emily

Dickinson’s House

JFK, 50 Years Later

Fundraising Success

Dan Brown ’86 is one of the best-sellingauthors of all time. How does he do it?

Page 2: Amherst Fall 2013

IN THIS ISSUE FALL 2013 | VOLUME 66 | NUMBER 1

FEATURES

14 TREASURE HUNTINGINTERVIEW BY RICKGRIFFITHSDan Brown ’86 on reading Dante, scoping out chase scenes and why he’d never writea character as evil as Cruella de Vil

18 OUR HOUSE, EMILY’S HOUSEBY JEAN MCCLURE MUDGEAfter outbidding the A&P grocery, Am-herst sought a tenant for Emily Dickinson’s house, and a family of fi ve moved in. fi

24 FROST + KENNEDYFifty years agohelicopters landed on Pratt Field andPresident John F. Kennedy gave a speech about privilege, poetry and Robert Frost.

28 THE SHORT-LINERSBY ROGER M. WILLIAMS ’56George Betke ’59 andMike Smith ’68 know something that most people don’t: Therailroad industry hasseldom, if ever, been in better shape than it is today.

ON THE COVERPhotograph of Dan Brown ’86 by Asia Kepka

DEPARTMENTS

2 VOICES

4 COLLEGE ROWWAITING FOR THE VAN at Logan Airport STATS on the new fi rst-fiyear classTHE FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN raised $502 millionAND MORE

12 SPORTSFOOTBALL Last yearthree brothers werenursing injuries in the living room. This fall they fought it out on the fieldfi

34 POINT OF VIEWNOTEBOOK DAYS TessTaylor ’00 said she was “being a writer,” but she felt like a fake

36 BEYOND CAMPUSFLYING Randy Davis ’76 has chauff eured wolves,ffffemperor penguins and a Catholic saintDINING Alden Booth ’83and Lissa Greenough ’83own The People’s Pint HEALTH A lawyer and an actor are fi ghting suicide’sfistigmaSECOND ACT How the U.S. Army led Josh Cole’99 to medical school ENERGY Lois Epstein’83heads The WildernessSociety’s Arctic Program

42 AMHERST CREATESTHEATER A new play by Ralph Lee ’57 and Robert Bagg ’57 FICTION Six Years, by Harlan Coben ’84, and The Partner Track, by Helen Wan ’95 NONFICTION A guide-book to air travelBIOGRAPHY Michael Gorra ’79 on Henry James

128 REMEMBER WHENOn Nov. 22, 1963, onesophomore returned from his 11:20 class to hear the president had been shot.

“ I did have classic city determination—a crate of books, a few connections, a lead on a waitressing job in a converted funeral parlor.” TESS TAYLOR ’00 PAGE 34

Page 3: Amherst Fall 2013

ONLINE WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE

MORE NEWS

l PRESIDENT BIDDY MARTIN, who has morethan 6,000 Twitterfollowers, has now added commentary to her onlinerepertoire. Her firstfirefl ection is about free flspeech in academia.

l Trustee Julie Segre’87 was named a FederalEmployee of the Year forresearch that ended a2011 outbreak of a fatal“superbug.”

AUDIO AND VIDEO

l In a speech to newstudents, New Yorker writer and Amherst parentELIZABETH KOLBERT said the state of the earthis much worse than her 2006 book about climatechange described.

l Author and four-time National Magazine Awardfi nalistfi CHARLES C. MANN’76 gave a talk on “1493: Entwining ecology andhistory.”

l Psychology Professor CATHERINE SANDERSONspoke with the Today showabout what does—and does not—make peoplehappy.

l Daniel Diner ’14walked around campusand asked: “What advicedo you have for the freshman class?”

PHOTO SETS

l Browse photos from HOMECOMINGweekend, the CAMPAIGN CELEBRATION and a 1920s-themed FALL FORMAL.

j THE VIEW FROM Emily Dickinson’s bed-room in the 1960s, when a professor and

his family lived in the house. The table and chair are Dickinson family pieces. Page 18

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2 Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Summer 2013 27Illustration by Keith Negley

THE NUMBER KEPT CHANG-ing. Was it 374 years, as Pres-ident Biddy Martin stated inher congratulatory remarks? Or 421 years, as listed on theinvitation? Or some otherfigure?

Any way you tally it, thecollective amount of time notched by the membersof the English department who were formally retiredlast spring is daunting, and a grateful appreciation of theirservice—its quantity and quality—brought scores of former students to the LordJeffery Inn in May to cel-ebrate and thank ProfessorsCameron, Chickering, Gutt-mann, O’Connell, Peterson,Pritchard, Townsend andvon Schmidt.

The teaching careers of the most senior retirees go all the way back to 1958—theyear I and my now middle-aged mates in the Classof 1980 were born. In the America of that distant year,Eisenhower was president,Beatles were pests in yourgarden and Vietnam wasan obscure French colonial struggle. As for Amherst, itwas 900 white males in ties,

AMHERST ENGLISH

BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80

He thought he

was getting away

with something.

But really he

was learning

something.AnAppreciation

Illustratio

AMH

AA

26 Amherst Summer 2013

VOICES

“The maddening mystery—What do these professors want?—reinforced my sense that I didn’t belong. I’m glad the era of English 1 is over.”

THE ONE WHO FELT BULLIEDIt was a pleasure to read about the legacy of English 1 (“Am-herst English: An Appreciation,” Summer 2013). But a statisticaldetail in Rand Cooper’s accurateportrait took me aback:

Yet for every student who felt bullied there were three who felt challenged to rise to the occasion, spurred on by what one student called “this ‘we-are-tearing-you--down-so-that-you-will-put-your-self-back-together’ attitude.”

The quotation, I assume, is from Robin Varnum’s book Fenc-ing with Words. The arithmetic Itake to be Cooper’s, and I take issue with it.

Like Cooper, I had John Cam-eron for English 11 in the mid-1970s. I was the one who felt bullied.

The only thing I knew forsure in the fall of 1974 was: I do not belong at Amherst College. The epigones of English 1 may have “spurred on” some, teach-ing their privileged, entitled, well-prepared freshmen that they weren’t as smart as they thought. The maddening mys-tery—What do these professorswant?—didn’t teach me anything and reinforced my sense that Ididn’t belong.

That sentiment is not uncom-mon among first-year students fiat Amherst, especially now, because (I hope) more studentsarrive at Amherst “less-well-prepared.” I’m glad the era of English 1 is over.

Paul Statt ’78PHILADELPHIA

STRANGE COVER CHOICEStrange choice for the rear cover of “Summer 2013”!

Those of us who survived two wars subject to the draft and have made longtime contributions to the “fairest college” are depicted as none other than fun-loving participants in the annual lighting of the bonfire, whereas current fistudents are shown as serious organicfarmers. This is like depicting the stu-dents of today as gathered around a communal “bong.”

David K. Winslow ’53 BROOKHAVEN, N.Y.,

THEN &

NOWSTICKS

In the 1950s a not-angry mob of torch-wield-ing stu-dents came together for a campus bonfire. This June student in-terns drove tomato stakes into the soil of the “Florida field” (so named for its shape) at Book & Plow Farm, a four-acre operation on college land. The intern-ships allow students to sample the life of an organic farmer (which, if they're lucky, now includes sampling the fruits of this early-summer labor).

1950s College Bonfire

2013Book & Plow Farm

BONFIRE PHOTO FROM AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS. FARM PHOTO BY ROB MATTSON

FOLLOWING THE CABLEI was delighted to read the interviewwith Andrew Blum ’99 about his tracingthe Internet through its sub-surface lab-yrinth (“Behind the Glowing Screen,”Spring 2013). That tends to confirmfimy suspicion that the system is indeed fi nite, with not-unlimited capacity. The fidiscourse jargon suggests otherwise,such as the references to “the Cloud,” where limitless bits of data supposedly can be stored forever. The Cloud actu-ally is, or are, big black boxes tuckedaway in remote buildings, and like everything else eventually will fill toficapacity. When that point of collapse isreached, we may find the fifi rst-class let-fiter gets to its destination quicker. Holdton to your “forever stamps.”

W.G. Sayres ’53 WAYNE, MAINE

ANOTHER SELF-INTERESTED IDEALISTAThe Common, the Amherst-based print and online literary magazine focusingon a strong sense of place, is honored to partner with the visionary AmhersttCollege Press (“Librarians Will Lead the Revolution,” Winter 2013). While t

Page 5: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 3

ACP will publish scholarship and The Common publishesfi ction, essays, poetry and art, fithe two new, idealistic ven-tures share core values that distinguish them from run-of-the-mill presses. Fore-most is the emphasis on ed-iting, which librarian Bryn Geff ert calls “the last great ffffbulwark against slippingstandards.” In 2012, Vanity Fair editorrand Amherst board chair Cullen Mur-phy ’74 told Amherst that every editor tshares “faith in the power of the written word. It’s not just the power to commu-nicate. Even more fundamentally, thevery process of writing is essential to theprocess of thinking.” At The Common, I mentor Amherst student interns in all aspects of the editorial process.

Like ACP, The Common is “at onceself-interested and altruistic.” The

magazine’s self-interest is refl ected in seeking toflbetter understand ourhuman place in the worldwhile training a futuregeneration of readers and editors. The benefit fiof this eff ort, and of theffffscholarly works to be produced by ACP, extends to underserved readers and

thinkers around the world who are ableto access not only quality literature butalso an important ongoing conversation.

Jennifer Acker ’00CAMPUS

eAcker is editor of The Common.

CORRECTIONThe Summer 2013 article on John Potter’68 misidentifi ed the place in which hefispent Thanksgiving during his year at sea. It was Marblehead, Mass.

VOLUME 66, NUMBER 1

EDITOREmily Gold Boutilier(413) [email protected]

ALUMNI EDITORBetsy Cannon Smith ’84(413) 542-2031

DESIGN DIRECTORRonn Campisi

ASSISTANT EDITORKatherine Duke ’05

MAGAZINE ADVISORYCOMMITTEELawrence DouglasDavid Hixon ’75 Ron Lieber ’93Elizabeth Minkel ’07Megan MoreyMeredith Rollins ’93Peter Rooney

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOUAmherst welcomes letters fromtits readers. Please send them to [email protected] or Amherst Magazine, PO Boxt5000, Amherst, MA 01002. Letters must be 300 words or fewer and should address thecontent in the magazine.

WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINEAmherst (USPS 024-280) is pub-tlished quarterly by Amherst Col-lege at Amherst, Massachusetts01002-5000, and is sent free to all alumni. Periodicals postage paid at Amherst, Massachusetts01002-5000 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: ffiPlease send Form 3579 to Am-herst, AC # 2220, PO Box 5000, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000.

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

On Facebook and Twitter, readers commented on stories in the Summer 2013

magazine, including those on Amherst English and the literary love letters on the bathroom walls in Frost.

“Spot-on piece about @AmherstCol-lege English profs and the house stylein current alum magazine. Took many of their classes, back in the day.” TED

LOOS ’91, via Twitter

“There will be a slow line in that bath-room.” JANE HALLING, via Facebook

“The summer issue of the alumni magwas in my mailbox one minute, in myhands the next, & devoured during lunch. Excellent!” GREGORY CAMPEAU

’11, via Twitter

“One alum to another, can I send you a sandwich or something?” KESTER

ALLEN ’97E, responding to Campeau.

AMHERST

SAM

UEL

MA

SIN

TER

’04

RO

B M

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SON

Summer 2013

Five students and a CEOAmherst English ends an era

How to be happy after college

Summer 2013

NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

Henry Bao-Viet

Nguyen ’13

and Lacie

Goldberg ’13

have never

run a hotel.

That’s why one

CEO sought

them out.

Page 6: Amherst Fall 2013

4 Amherst Fall 2013 m Photographs by Jessica Scranton

College Row

news and

views from

campus

Waiting for the VanAs they sat with their luggage in Boston’s international terminal, groups of newstudents began their orientation to college—and to the United States.

Page 7: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 5

NEW FACES U Huddled within a barricade of suitcases at Logan Airport, three new ac-quaintances sat waiting for a ride. Unlike theirAmerican classmates, who’

gd arrive on campus

with full cars and parents in tow, these members of the Class of 2017 had flown into Boston alone.flNow the students—Khishigsuren Jargalsaikhan,from Mongolia; Samantha Tatenda Nyovanie, from Zimbabwe; and Adrian Chan, from

THIS PAGE, clockwise from top: Mia Ólafsdóttir Kaaber ’17 of Iceland gets a welcome-to-Boston hug from Nancy Yun Tang ’14. Tang with Joyce Wamala ’17 of Zimbabwe. Wamala, Kaaber and Luka Matej Devenica ’17 of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pascual Cortes-Monroy ’17 shows his passport. FACING PAGE, clockwise from top: Cortes-Monroy arrives from Chile. Tran Bao ’17 (with Amherst sign) and Nhi Truong ’17 of Vietnam. Jayson Paul ’16 greets Devenica. Takudzwa Taphema ’17 and classmates head to Amherst. Kasope Alesh ’14 waits for new arrivals. For many Amherst students flying to Logan that day, it was their first time in the United States.

MOREe

Page 8: Amherst Fall 2013

6 Amherst Fall 2013

COLLEGE ROW

Hong Kong—were waitingfor a van to campus. The transport is coordinated each year by the InternationalStudents Association and the International Student Life Fellow. On Aug. 22,four shuttles carried 18 new international students fromLogan to Amherst.

But how does such a jour-ney begin? Chan learnedabout Amherst when anadmission offi cer visited his ffihigh school. “I wanted to goto a liberal arts school with need-blind admissions,” he said. “I needed lots of finan-ficial aid.” His two new class-mates nodded in agreement.

“Not very many people from Mongolia go abroadfor school or go to America,” said Jargalsaikhan. “We areonly now starting to know about other schools.”

Nyovanie’s brother wentto MIT and has a friend atAmherst. This friend was apushy guide: “He was asking,‘Did you fi nish your essay fiyet? Your application?’ It wasmotivating to apply knowingthere is someone from your country there.” She liked the liberal arts curriculum, so diff erent from the Britishffffsystem of her country. “Zim-babwe was a British colony,” she began to explain.

“Colonies!” Chan pipedin. They fist-bumped over afishared imperial history.

She asked, “Did you bringnoodles from Hong Kong?”

“No. There is an Asian store near Amherst,” Chan said. “Google Maps. Souseful.”

“Otherwise you could goto China City,” she offered.ffff

“I know, right? I could goto Chinatown.”

“Oh, yes. Chinatown,” she nodded, studiously.

Xiao Xiao ’16, a student

from Singapore assigned to meet this group, blew in andhanded over an envelope fullof cash. “You can get lunch. There is $100. But there is another person coming, so,you know, don’t spend it all.”

Soon they found the other student. Daniel Mariselli, from Peru by way of Florida, wore a purple Amherst shirt.

“Are you going to Am-herst?” Chan asked, perhaps unnecessarily.

“Yes,” Mariselli said. This was to be his fi rst time seeingfithe college. “I met some Wil-liams students and almost got into fisticufffi s with them,” ffffhe said with a smile.

Upstairs, the group spent $48.72 on pulled-pork and turkey sandwiches. They ordered no drinks, having not yet learned the first rule fiof being an Amherst student: When the college gives youmoney, spend all of it. In-lstead, they tucked change and receipts into an envelope and stood chatting in a circle.

“I’m in Stearns,” one stu-dent off ered.ffff

“Wait, you’re in Stearns? I’m in Stearns.”

Jargalsaikhan, not in Stea-rns, gave her dorm. “That’s a good one, right?” she asked.

Sandwiches acquired, they headed down the escalator.

For most of the students at Logan that day, it was their fi rst time in the United fiStates. They’d brought their lives in just a few bags. (Takudzwa Tapfuma, from Zimbabwe, held just one tiny carry-on and a backpack.)

Xiao hustled the group out to a parking lot. A white van awaited. Within moments,they were off on their fiff rstfidrive in America, off to theirffhome for the next four years. ELIZABETH CHILES SHEL-BURNE ’01

14%

45%

57%

First

16 33

CA

About the Class of 2017

Amherst welcomed 466 members to the new first-fiyear class, as well as 13 new transfer students. They are from 40 states and 30 foreign countries. They are Junior Olympians, Irish fi ddle players and cal-filigraphers. There’s even an embalmer’s assistant.

ACCEPTANCE RATE

MOST REPRESENTED STATE

[For the first time in Amherst historyfi ]

[A record-setting percentage for Amherst]

IDENTIFY ASAMERICANSTUDENTS OFCOLOR

RECEIVE AMHERST FINANCIAL AID

FIRSTGENERATION

AGE RANGE

[The oldest new student is more than twice the age of the youngest]

[Almost 18 percent of new students are in thefi rst generation in their fi families to attend college]

CHLO

E M

CKEN

ZIE

’14

Page 9: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 7

SPEECHES U In this year’sconvocation address,President Biddy Martintook on those who question the value of a liberal arts education by describing her own background and the role Amherst plays in reducing prejudice andignorance.

“I’m a little worked up aboutsome of the attacks on liberal arts education and higher education ingeneral,” she told the Class of 2017 in Johnson Chapel. “Calls to keephigher ed accessible, affordable ffffand of high quality are legitimate and have to be heeded, but some of the gleeful proclamations of disruption and demise are perni-cious.”

Like 18 percent of the new class, Martin was a fi rst-generation col-filege student. She said she was raised “in an environment and afamily that feared education be-cause it has the power to changeus.” Because of her experiences, she said, she’s thought a lot “aboutthe benefi ts of education, but alsofiabout what can be diffi cult in it.”ffi

What can be diffi cult, she said,ffi

is “combining the intellectual quality of this community with aneff ort to take better advantage of ffffthe diff erences among us.”ffff

One way to break out of the “prison house of ignorance and prejudice,” she said, is for stu-dents to build not only “bonding”relationships with people who are comfortably similar to themselves but also “bridging” relationshipswith those from other back-grounds.

Citing research by Amherstpsychology professor Elizabeth Aries and others, who have found that white U.S. students from moreprivileged backgrounds tend to do the least crossing of boundaries in their friendship networks, Martinurged all students to use their time at Amherst to resist the “comfort and safety” of insular networks.

“The friendships you form herematter, and they matter not only toyou as individuals or to the institu-tion, but they matter on a muchlarger stage,” she said. “The rela-tionships we build here are experi-ments in the kind of social world we could imagine and would liketo have.” PETER ROONEY

Why Social Networks Matter

President Martin used her convocation address

to counter attacks on liberal arts education.The faculty continues to expand its ranks, adding 30 new members this academic year.The interests of these scholars include:

AUCTION DESIGN: BrianBaisa, assistant professor of economics, studies game theory with a focus on auction design.He is especially interested inwhat economic theory can say about the ways in which goods and services are sold.

SMALL RNA: Yan Qi, assistantprofessor of biology, studies the regulatory roles of small RNAs in cellular stress re-sponse, using the nematode

worm C. elegans. This semester she’s teaching a course in molecular genetics.

TURNING POLLUTION INTO

PRODUCTS: Nicholas Ball,assistant professor of chemistry, develops ways toconvert air, water and groundpollutants into useful feedstocks for chemical synthesis.

PUERTO RICAN HISTORY:

Solsiree del Moral, associateprofessor of Americanstudies and black studies,wrote a book about the

cultural politics of schools in Puerto Rico between 1898 and 1952.

POINTING: Carolyn Palmquist, assistant professor of psychology, studies nonverbal communication—specifically, pointing—in children.

CHINESE POLITICS: Kerry Ratigan, assistant professorof political science, isteaching a course thissemester on power and

politics in contemporary China, and another on collective action and the politics of resistance. Her current research is on health policy adoption and implementation.

RESEARCH

Curious Professors

MEG

AN

RO

BERT

SON

’15

Page 10: Amherst Fall 2013

8 Amherst Fall 2013

COLLEGE ROW

Success Againstthe OddsFINANCE U

In October 2008

Amherst faced a

question that would

shape its plans for

years to come: With

the stock market

plunging and

its own endow-

ment taking a 23

percent hit, should

it abandon its

nascent fundraising

campaign?

The college

chose to push

forward. Almost

five years and more

than $502 million

later, it’s safe to say

the decision was

sound.

“The campaign

was not only

launched during a

challenging time,”

said President

Biddy Martin in

September, “but it

succeeded during

the worst downturn

since the Great

Depression.” The

effort—which con-ff

cluded Sept. 20–21

with a campus

celebration—roared

past its initial goal

of $425 million. The

Party Time

The fundraising campaign ended with a

campus-wide celebration.

CAMPAIGN U The Lives of Consequence campaign officially ffiended Sept. 20–21 with music, lectures, a portrait unveiling and an outdoor party.

The portrait was of Richard Wilbur ’42, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, former U.S. poet laureate and now the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer at Amherst (the same position ffonce held by Robert Frost). At the unveiling in Johnson Cha-pel, where the painting will hang, President Biddy Martin noted Wilbur’s “ebullient and often surprising humor and celebration of everyday things.”

Before reading a series of Wilbur poems, David Sofield, the fiSamuel Williston Professor of English, recalled his “fierce fidoubles tennis partnership” with the poet, their fi ve years of fiteaching together and his belief that Wilbur knows “more poems by heart than anyone else in the world.” He alluded to Wilbur’s experience during World War II, “following combat all the way from south central Italy to France, Germany and Austria.” Sofi eld then read Wilbur’s poem “Terza Rima,” pub-filished in The New Yorker in 2008. r

Later, Wilbur took the stage and read a selection of poems, including “The House” (also published in The New Yorker),rwhich he dedicated to his late wife, Charlee. It concludes:ff“Only a foolish man would hope to find/ That haven fash-fiioned by her dreaming mind./ Night after night, my love, I put to sea.”

The portrait is by Sarah Belchetz-Swenson and was madepossible with the support of Axel Schupf ’57.

Other weekend highlights included a party on the MainQuad with live music, food and games; a keynote address by Amherst trustee Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor best known for his theory of multiple intelligences; and a point-counterpoint conversation on affirmative action between two ffialumni: Bert Rein ’61, plaintiff ’s counsel in the U.S. SupremeffCourt case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, and Paul Smith ’76, who achieved for his clients a landmark victory in Lawrence v. Texas. P.R.

9 THE PARTYFEATURED A

HUGE VERSION OF THE GAME

CONNECT FOUR,IN KEEPING WITH

THE THEMEOF CREATING

CONNECTIONS.

number of donors

was an extraordi-

nary 20,338.

To Martin, the

campaign’s success

is an endorsement

of its objectives:

maintaining need-

blind admission and

financial aid, capi-

talizing upon an

increasingly diverse

student body and

fostering faculty-

student research.

Also noteworthy

are the high num-

ber of anonymous

donations, totaling

more than $138

million (including

separate anony-

mous gifts of $100

million and $25

million), and the

high proportion of

unrestricted gifts,

about 47 percent of

the campaign total,

Martin says.

The campaign

was the responsi-

bility of Chief Ad-

vancement Off icerff

Megan Morey, who

worked with staff ,ffff

trustees and a Cam-

paign Executive

Committee chaired

by trustees Brian J.

Conway ’80, Hope

E. Pascucci ’90 and

Jide J. Zeitlin ’85.

Acknowledging

the severity of the

recession, organiz-

ers did not simply

ask for money: “We

encouraged and

recognized alumni

engagement as a

form of giving,”

Morey says. This

engagement includ-

ed volunteering, of-

fering internships,

attending Amherst

events and interact-

ing with the college

through social

media and on its

website.

“I’ve been hard-

pressed to come

across somebody

who didn’t at some

point connect with

the college in some

way,” Morey says.

“It’s incredible.”

PETER ROONEY

Amherst’s fundraising campaign

roared past its initial goal,

raising

$502M I L L I O N

20,338D O N O R S

W W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W WW W W W W W W W W W

Unrestrictedgifts:

4 7 %

73 PERCENTOF ALUMNI

CONTRIBUTED

← President Martin was one of several hundred at the weekend’s events.

RO

B M

ATT

SON

(2)

Page 11: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 9

Wrongful DeathsA real-life execution is the focus of a professor’s new opera.

FACULTY U What makes for an operatic story? Murder and mayhem help, but just as important are simplicity and timelessness—“the kind of story that strikes an audiencemember as immediately fa-miliar,” says composer Eric Sawyer, an associate profes-sor of music at Amherst.

The Garden of Martyrs,a 2005 historical novel by Michael C. White, has all of those elements. It’s based on the true story of two Irishimmigrants falsely accused,convicted and executed for a murder near Springfield,fiMass., at a time when Catho-lics were a new and threaten-ing presence to many New Englanders.

Sawyer’s latest project is an opera based on that novel. Created with librettist Harley Erdman, it premiered in Sep-tember at the Academy of Music in Northampton, not a mile from the execution spot. The Springfield Symphony fiOrchestra and a coterie of professional directors, per-formers and designers pro-vided the staging.

The opera, like the book,is about Dominic Daley and James Halligan, who werehanged on June 5, 1806, in front of 15,000 eager on-lookers. Many years later,modern forensics exonerated them. The other central char-acter is Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, a priest whoministered to the convicts in their fi nal days. Cheverus fiwas a refugee from horrific fibrutalities in the wake of theFrench Revolution.

Sawyer and Erdman pared

down White’s story to the es-sential scenarios and charac-ters. Then, as Erdman wrotethe libretto, each characterbecame imbued “with a way of speaking, certain rhythms,certain melodic infl ections,” fl

says Sawyer. “The words come fi rst, and they are the fiwellspring of musical ideas.”

In the opera, Father Cheverus’ “fi nal speech,fiwhere he faces a crowd of bloodthirsty people” on be-half of the prisoners, is a mo-ment of “personal redemp-tion,” says Sawyer. “The burden of survivors’ guilt”and a “dark secret from his past” plague Cheverus, who, in this telling, had com-promised his principles to escape a massacre of priestsin France.

The Garden of Martyrs is Sawyer’s second opera. (His fi rst is about the assassina-fition of Abraham Lincoln.) Hehopes this new work stimu-lates discussion on a “story that repeats itself in Americaof newcomers who aretreated with suspicion when

something goes wrong.” Today, he argues, Daley and Halligan would be branded as terrorists.

While the libretto makes no explicit connection to the present, it “reminds us of the danger of biases and preju-dices,” Erdman says—“of the destructive force of jumping to conclusions.”

White consciously ex-cluded himself from the opera’s creative process, and when he heard Sawyer’s music for the fi rst time, hefisays, he “felt chills” at howit conveyed “the suff eringffffand the feelings of my char-acters.” Watching the opera take shape was “almost like having a child,” White says. “I was seeing what came from me originally, but it was made into something wholly new.” ERIC GOLDSCHEIDER

Sawyer conducts during a pre-premiere rehearsal in Buckley Recital Hall.

Performers at a rehearsal for the new opera Garden of Martyrs, composed by Associate Professor of Music Eric Sawyer

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10 Amherst Fall 2013

COLLEGE ROW

Just Like Home

5 The renovated Seligman House is meant to feel like home—if your home has an old ballroom.

The second floor is now a Japanese

and Chinese lan-guage theme house

for 19 students.

The ground floor houses 14 and is open for

Room Draw.

Ten women live on the all-female

third floor.

Seligman House—a dorm on Route 9 that was empty for the past three years—just

reopened after a $7 million renovation and expansion.

Associate Dean of

Students Allen Hart ’82

lived in the building in

1979–80, when it was

Theta Delta Chi frater-

nity. He helped plan

the renovation. “The

guiding sentiments were

to maintain a homey

feel,” he says, “keeping

as much as we could the

sense of a house while

also building an addition

that allowed us to double

the bed count.”

The renovation was

the first in the building’s

80-year history.

There are exposed beams and natural wood flooring. “They kept the nooks and cran-nies and irregularly shaped rooms,” says Dean Allen Hart. “The ballroom with a large fireplace is still intact, while adding a study space and a nice kitchen area.”

Distinctive features include an original fireplace and much of the original wood paneling. Students involved in the plan-ning wanted the building to look more like a home than a dorm, says Director of Residential Life Torin Moore, and they wanted plenty of social space.

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Amherst Fall 2013 11

PUBLICATIONS U The Common is a two-year-old literary magazine that fo-cuses on “a modern sense of place.” Though based inone place—Amherst Col-lege—it has featured workfrom various corners of the world: South African poetry, for example, and translations from Russian and Spanish. This fall, read-ers might notice a slight tilt toward another place: the Middle East.

That’s because its editor,Jennifer Acker ’00, spentthe 2012–13 academic yearin residence at NYU AbuDhabi as a faculty fel-low, where she taught theschool’s fi rst creative writ-fiing workshop. The time inAbu Dhabi also gave her the opportunity to make con-tacts with Middle Eastern writers.

The October issue of The Common includes ashort story, previously unpublished in English, by Jordanian writer Hisham Bustani. Acker says thestory’s “innovative, mod-ern style and preoccupation with the mental landscapeof a woman in a traditionalArabic family” convinced her it was right for themagazine.

In Abu Dhabi, Acker participated in a yearlongworkshop that aimed totranslate Al Karadib, the third novel in a trilogy by Saudi Arabian writer Turki el Hamad (who wasrecently imprisoned for fi ve months for apostasy fifor remarks he made on Twitter). The workshop

included university faculty,students and staff , with ffffAcker often the only na-tive English speaker in the room. Translators workedin pairs in the fall, and then the workshop shifted to agroup translation of a singlechapter of Al Karadib in the spring, doubling their ses-sions in order to complete it. That chapter appears onThe Common’s website this fall and will eventually be in the print magazine.

One of Acker’s main goals in her Middle Easternsojourn was “bringing TheCommon to Abu Dhabi andbringing the Middle East to The Common. It’s an area of literature I don’t know very much about, and there areseveral excellent publishersand translators of Middle

Eastern and Arabic litera-ture.” She also wanted tomeet authors and scholars in the region. “Of course, all of that can be done vir-tually to some extent, butthese two pieces that are appearing in the magazinewould not have come about through virtual eff orts.” ffff

Acker—who was in AbuDhabi with her husband, Nishi Shah, an associateprofessor of philosophy at Amherst—is now contem-plating the possibility of aspecial issue devoted to the Middle East. In the mean-time, she is pleased that TheCommon will serve as “a venue for these authors tobe introduced to an Ameri-can readership and to theAmherst community.” SUE DICKMAN ’89

A Year in Abu DhabiThis fall, readers of an Amherst-based literary magazinemight notice a slight tilt to the Middle East.

Be a Mentor

A new program links students with alumni.

Outside Keefe Campus Center

on Sept. 13, Edith Cricien ’14

was enrolling students in

Pathways, a new mentoring

program that connects alumni

with students in search of

career and academic advice.

To Cricien, the democratic

nature of Pathways resonates.

She says low-income students

can be less adept at lever-

aging social networks and

less likely to appreciate the

importance of connections:

“This is a great way to make

the networking process less

intimidating.”

Alumni can mentor up to

two students a semester. Men-

tors commit to speaking with

mentees—online, by phone

or in person—at least twice a

week for one semester.

“While aff luent studentsff

have generally had access

to this type of guidance,

this program helps level the

playing field for lower-income

students,” says Elizabeth

Aries, an Amherst psychology

professor who has written

two books on race and class

at Amherst.

Alumni can sign up by fill-

ing out a profile at amherst.

edu/alumni/pathways.

Students browse profiles to

choose mentors. Each selected

mentor receives an email in-

vitation to view the student’s

profile. Alumni may either

confirm or decline requests.

Upon confirmation, students

initiate the first contact. P.R.

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12 Amherst Fall 2013

SPORTS

The Brothers O’Malley

Last year they were

nursing injuries in the

family living room, one

brother on the couch and

two on rolled-in beds.

This fall they were back to

fighting it out on the field.

Page 15: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 13Photograph by Rob Mattson

BY BEN BADUA

ON A SATURDAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER, three O’Malleys arrived on Pratt Field. Jake O’Malley is a senior wide receiver on the Amherst football team. His younger brother, Brian, is a first-yearfiwideout. Their older brother, Sean? He’s a wide receiver for Bowdoin, Amherst’sopponent that sunny afternoon.

The family rivalry is not limited tothe three brothers. Their father is BillO’Malley ’84, who played football and basketball for the Jeffs. Their sister, ffffCaitlin ’11, donned the Purple & Whitefor women’s soccer. Their mother, Sue,went to Bowdoin.

“We’re a pretty boring household,”says the patriarch. “The six of us havegone to a grand total of two schools.”

For Sean, Jake and Brian, the rivalry began on their front lawn in Medfield,fiMass., where Sean and Jake playedfi erce games of wifflfi e ball, hockey and fflfootball with neighborhood friends. The problem: there were usually an oddnumber of 11- and 12-year-olds. Thesolution: draft 7-year-old Brian to even things out.

“I remember playing against thesehuge kids, trying not to get hurt but usu-ally ending up crying on the sidelines,” says Brian. “Sometimes I’d agitate Jake, but Sean was my protector. He’d save me from Jake’s wrath.”

Sean and Jake starred for St. Se-bastian’s School in Needham, Mass.,fi nishing their senior seasons with 6-2firecords. During Sean’s first year at fiBowdoin his team suff ered a 13-12 loss ffff

to Amherst. The next season Sean got a fi rst crack at bragging rights against fiJake, hauling in a team-high eight re-ceptions for 64 yards. But the win ulti-mately went to the younger O’Malley; Amherst walked away with a lopsided 38-7 triumph. Wins the next two sea-sons made it three in a row for Amherst.

“It reminds me of the Mf annings get-ting together,” says their father. “Peyton and Eli both want to win. They play hard, but at the end of the game you see them give each other a nice hug and you realize that family is a lot more impor-tant than wins and losses.”

Nonetheless, Jake has not let Sean forget that the wins have been slanted in Amherst’s favor. Jake was the Jeffs’ fffftop receiver last year, catching a team-high 34 passes for 380 yards and two touchdowns. Averaging 11.2 yards per reception, he was one of the league’sbest pass catchers and nabbed a spot on the All Conference first-team.fi

But he’s not the family’s only star. Sean holds the Bowdoin record for longest off ensive play from scrimmage.ffffAnd Brian became the only O’Malley brother to go undefeated during his se-nior year at St. Sebastian’s.

The September on-field reunionfialmost didn’t happen. Sean tore his ACL in a preseason scrimmage in 2012, forcing him to sit out for a year. Jake suff ered an equally devastating injury ffffwhen he closed out last season against Williams: “When I fi rst got cut blocked fiand kneed in the back, I thought I just got the wind knocked out of me,” Jake says. “I sat down and thought I’d catch

my breath, but I didn’t. I knew some-thing was wrong.”

He’d ruptured his kidney. Brian wasthe last to go down, breaking an ankle later that fall. Soon the three were reunited in their parents’ living room,Sean and Jake in rolled-in beds and Brian on the couch.

“These kids have played football for-ever and thankfully for the longest timeno one’s gotten hurt,” says their father.“Then all of a sudden all three are onthe shelf.”

Eleven months later, the Saturday showdown on Pratt Field off ered Sean ffffa fi nal shot at knocking offfi Amherst ffbefore his brothers could claim lifetimebragging rights. The three acknowl-edged one another with head nodsduring pre-game stretches. Their sister made the trip from New York to jointheir parents in the stands.

Which team did the family root for?“Seeing them out there, playing Divi-sion III football on a beautiful autumn day is all we care about,” says a diplo-matic Bill. “The end of last year wastough, so having them healthy and hav-ing fun again means everything. When-ever Amherst and Bowdoin play, my wife and I secretly hope for a 40-40 tie and lots of O’Malleys in the endzone. To us, that would be the perfect outcome.”

To others, the actual outcome waseven better: The fi nal score was 27-11,fiAmherst. Jake had four catches for 42 yards and a touchdown. Sorry, Sean. k

Badua covers sports for Amherstmagazine.

The O’Malleys: Bill’84 and Sue with daughter Caitlin’11 and sons(from left) Jake ’14, Brian ’17 and Sean. Oppositepage: Jake (right) and Brian on PrattField

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14 Amherst Fall 2013

DAN BROWN is not merely a best-selling novelist. His books have sold 200 millioncopies and appeared in 52 languages, making him oneof the most successful au-thors of all time. Among his volumes are four that featureprotagonist Robert Langdon,including 2003’s The Da VinciCode and his latest, Inferno.

In a recent talk in Johnson Chapel, Brown spoke abouthis writing and mentioneda new music compositionby his brother, Gregory W. Brown ’98, that is based on a Catholic mass but replaces sacred texts with writings of Charles Darwin. “So,” said the novelist, whose Da VinciCode drew criticism from theCatholic Church, “I suspect the Vatican may be banging on our door yet again.”

Professor of Classics and Women’s and Gender Stud-ies Rick Griffiths interviewed ffiBrown about such topics as Dante’s vision of hell, writing reluctant heroes and playing cat and mouse with bloggers. INTERVIEW BY RICK GRIFFITHS e

Dan Brown ’86 writes to his own taste, which a whole lot of people just happen to share.

Treasure

Hunting

Brown atop Piazzale Michelangelo, overlook-ing Florence, Italy. Two

prominent sites from his latest novel are visible in

the background: the spire of Palazzo Vecchio and the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore.

Brown was a Spanish major at Amherst.

e

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Amherst Fall 2013 15Photograph by Claudio Sforza

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16 Amherst Fall 2013

Why did you center your new Robert Langdon novelon Dante’s Inferno? On some level Dante called to me as something new and fresh. Yet the Divine Comedy is so filledfiwith symbolism and religion that it felt like solid ground and familiar territory for Langdon. I first firead a watered-down version of Inferno in Italianclass in high school. I remember thinking it felt somodern for something written in the 1300s. It felt startlingly relevant to modern life. The Bible does not say much about hell; it talks about hell in ethe-real terms. Classical mythology talks about hell,but also not specifi cally. It wasn’t until Dante thatfiwe had a codifi ed, structured, vivid vision of hell.fiIn some ways, Dante invented our modern visionof hell.

Now that you’ve lived with Dante as a colleague, rival,inspiration—as your Virgil—what do you see in him that you did not see before?What I didn’t recall from reading Dante originally was this idea of contrapasso, that our life on earthand the sins we commit are relevant to the punish-ments we feel in hell. So, if you are an adulterer on earth—well, guess what? In hell they’ve got some-thing devised for you that’s appropriate to that. The punishment fits the crime.fi

But your Inferno takes on issues—population explo-sion, bioterrorism—that get beyond Dante’s kind of individual responsibility.One of my challenges in writing novels is to takesomething ancient and make it relevant—for ex-ample, to fuse antimatter with the Vatican’s stance on science. In Inferno I came up with the idea of making the villain a skilled genetic engineer who is a Dante fanatic and a Dante scholar. He feels that Dante’s vision of hell is not so much history as it is prophecy. He becomes obsessed with this idea that Dante’s vision of a crowded, dark, hot world of sin and starvation is where we’re headed if we’re not careful.

Is that why so much of the book is about fertility control? I have a sincere concern about world populationand an understanding that the situation is so dire and the mathematics so frightening that whatever solution we fi nd will be drastic. It won’t just be peo-fiple handing out condoms. Mother Nature will find fia way to trim the herd; if we don’t, she will. Seventy percent of the world population lives within 30 miles of the coast, and sea levels are rising fast—aninteresting statistic. In this novel, Zobrist, the vil-lain—or hero, depending on whose side you’re on—argues in favor of fi nding a humane, painlessfiway to handle the situation as a species rather than constantly being in conflict with our planet.fl

How did you become interested in codes and puzzle-solving?My dad is a math teacher and mathematician and wrote textbooks on mathematics. When I was a kid, on Christmas morning when we came down

there were no presents under the tree. There was just an en-velope. We would open it, and it would be a code. My sister and I would decipher the code. It would be a riddle or something that would point to another lo-cation in the house. We’d run tothat location, maybe the refrig-erator, open it up, and there’s another envelope, with another code. These codes could be mathematical or they could be pictures. And eventually, by the

time we got through the whole house and back to the Christmas tree, all our presents had magically appeared. I grew up feeling like codes are fun. The concept of the treasure hunt is one of the oldest forms of storytelling.

There’s the quest for the Golden Fleece, the quest forthe Fountain of Youth.And in both of those, the quest is the story. That’s the same model I used for The Da Vinci Code. The value of the quest is not actually in fi nding thatfigrail; it’s in what you learn in the process of trying to fi nd the Grail, or the Golden Fleece, or the Foun-fitain of Youth, or whatever it is.

You’ve set extraordinary chase scenes in the ceilings and bowels of buildings. That’s very Dante-like. Doyou build models of the buildings?I was in every space that I wrote about in Florence,Venice and Istanbul. After The Da Vinci Code, I was given access to places that—I’m not naïve—I wouldn’t have had access to before. I get lettersfrom curators saying, “Come to Prague—we have an entire plot for you here.” Here’s the irony: I am always trying to write in secret. I don’t want peopleto know what I’m writing about. So I will go to Ven-ice and be interested in St. Mark’s Cathedral, yet Ican’t spend all my time there and ask all my ques-tions about exactly what it is I want to write about, so half the questions I’m asking and half the places I’m going have nothing to do with the book. I take copious notes about things that I know are totally irrelevant. And sure enough, I end up seeing on ablog that somebody at the museum knows exactly what my next novel is. So it’s a little bit of a game of cat and mouse.

Are you ever tempted to go into the blogosphere and correct misinformation anonymously?

l7 AUDIOListen to the

Amherst Reads

interview at www.

amherst.edu/

magazine

“Cruella De Vil madecoatsout of Dalmatian puppies.I wouldnever write a characterthat evil.”

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Amherst Fall 2013 17

I was told a long time ago never to pay attention to your critics or your fans, because you lose both ways. If you read that somebody loves what you’re doing, you become lazy and complacent, and if you read that somebody hates what you’re doing, youcan become insecure and hesitant.

How do you hold people’s attention for hundreds ofpages, over complicated plots?Writing thrillers is a lot like writing music. (I am afailed musician.) A symphony is about structure, theme, tempo, pacing and ambience; all these things are critical to writing a novel. Writing isabout creating tension and release. Can they stopthis virus? What does this code mean? Are they going to get away? If I’ve done my job well, these individual bits of tension will pull a reader through the entire book.

You do monumental outlines for these plots. Do youbuild outlines from the beginning or the end?My outline for Inferno was about 100 pages. I never start an outline without knowing the ending: You’ve got to have something to aim at. Of course,that ending may shift. It’s like building a house: You have a plan, but as you start to get into the nitty-gritty, you might say, “This wall shouldn’t bethere.” But you can’t start building until you knowthe foundation is solid.

Your Inferno is very much about the ambiguities of evil and very hard on the morally neutral. Your herogets called into things; he doesn’t go looking for trouble.You of all people know that the reluctant hero isone of the great archetypes of classic mythology.

Your characters—the heroes, the villains, the help-ers—cross categories quite a bit.I like that gray area between right and wrong. Ithink it’s interesting when characters do the rightthing for the wrong reason and even more interest-ing when they do the wrong thing for the right rea-son. Zobrist is trying to save the world. We mightargue that releasing a virus, like he does, may notbe the best way to do it. Yet you can argue that his heart is in the right place. Cruella De Vil madecoats out of Dalmatian puppies. It doesn’t get muchworse than that. I would never write a character that evil.

What books caught your imagination as a child or college student?Aside from reading a ton of children’s books—ev-erything from Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry all the way up through the Hardy Boys—once Istarted high school and college, I only read clas-sics. I loved Shakespeare and loved reading in

foreign languages—I wasn’t very good at it, but I enjoyed it. At Amherst I read a lot of Borges andGarcía Márquez. After college I was in Tahiti, of all places, and found on a beach a copy of a modernthriller. I really hadn’t read one; I didn’t know the genre existed. This was a very light book by Sidney Sheldon—I mean the lightest of light. I read it and I thought, “Oh my God, this is the Hardy Boys for adults.” I started consuming that kind of litera-ture—the whole Bourne series, a lot of different ffffwriters—and decided I wanted to try to fuse the thriller genre with something more classical: morepaintings, fewer guns.

But you’ve said you read almost no fiction. Why not?I read almost exclusively nonfiction because for mefiit feels more connected to the modern world. I read crazy stuff : Ray Kurzweil, math books, Stephen ffffHawking, books on population control. Those feelHelevant to me. What I hope to do in my books is reo write something that feelsto like a thriller but also eels relevant to real life. fe

Who is your imagined reader?WAs simplistic as this may sound, I write the book Ahat I fith nd interesting, that I fifi nd exciting. I’m writ-fing to my own taste. I choose symbols and codes, in

or plots and locations, that I myself would want toread about. And then I just hope that people share my taste. Obviously you wish everybody loved what you do. That’s just not the way it is.

The standard advice for aspiring writers is to writewhat you know. What’s your advice?The most helpful thing that I could’ve been told as a young writer is to choose a topic that I was con-fl icted about, or that terrififl ed me, or that I’d always fiwanted to know about. Part of keeping readers interested is conveying passion, and it’s hard to muster passion for a topic about which you feelindiff erent.ffff

Have you ever started a project and found it’s a dead end?Sure. I never get anything right the first time. Onfimy keyboard all the keys look fine except for thefiDelete key. The D is gone. It’s just smudged offfffrom hitting it so much. I’ve never started a novelthat I didn’t fi nish, but I’ve started many, many fithreads of plot, or characters, or openings that I’ve discarded. The opening hundred pages of TheLost Symbol were at one point totally diffl erent. Forffffevery one page that I write, there are 10 pages thatI throw out. k

This article is adapted from an interview for Amherst Reads, the college’s online book club. Inferno was theAmherst Reads featured book for September.

Infernofreached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Brown’s outline for the book was about100 pageslong.

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18 Amherst Fall 2013

After outbidding

the A&P grocery,

Amherst sought

a tenant

for Emily

Dickinson’s

house, and a

young family of

f ive moved in.

A OMENT, WHEN EMILY AA n is in danger of AA rwritten, it’s hardAA that 50 years ago AA irtually anonymousAA eral public, includ-AA t old-timers in Am-AA overgrown hemlock AA her birthplace and AA del—an imposing,AA tyle mansion nearAA r of town. The hedge AA o protect her fromAA ing fame, as if sheAA eeping Beauty be-AA ill composing “I’m AANobody! Who are you?” Only

Aa small sign at the entrance told the public that this was“The Home of Emily Dickin-son.” There was no hint that she would one day write fromthis house at 280 Main St., “Home is the definition of fiGod.”

In 1963 the attention of thecollege was chiefly on Robertfl

AOur House, Emily’s House

BY JEAN MCCLURE MUDGE

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Amherst Fall 2013 19Illustration by Hadley Hooper

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20 Amherst Fall 2013

Frost, a favored and frequentvisitor to campus, who had diedthat year. And though some of her work had reached print sinceher death, Dickinson’s full body of poems and letters in their

original version had only beenpublished in the 1950s. By thetime our family moved into her house in the summer of 1965, I remember saying to myself, and then to visitors, “Emily Dickin-son is one of the youngest poets writing today.”

Our arrival was completely by chance. In 1964 the Harvey Parke family, resident in theDickinson mansion for decades,put the house up for sale. Sud-

denly, the A&P grocery company threatened to raze it to build a new store. The Homestead, named a National Historic Landmark in 1962, was never-theless vulnerable. Fortunately,

Archibald MacLeish, poet and former Librarian of Congress, saved the day. Retired in nearby Conway, he convinced Amherst President Calvin Plimpton ’39 to compete with A&P. In shortorder, for $75,000, The Home-stead belonged to the college.

Then the question arose: What to do with it? The college was not in the museum business. All of the Dickinsons’ furnish-ings had left the house when the

Parkes’ predecessors, the Haskell family, had bought it in 1911. There was little debate: It would need to house an alumni or faculty family, and this family would have to be will-ing to open the house to public visits by appoint-ment on certain days.

Who would want to live such a privacy-challenged life, even if there were compensa-tions? (The rent was minimal, and the col-lege would pay for utili-ties.) Invitations went out to distinguishedalumni, including poet Richard Wilbur ’42. But there were no takers. Finally, MinotGrose, the college’s business manager, sug-

gested that my husband, Lew Mudge, chaplain and profes-sor of philosophy and religion, might be interested. Lew and I often entertained large groups of students. With our three chil-dren—Bob (then 7), Bill (5) and Annie (3)—we had been quitehappy living at 31 Spring St., near the Lord Jeff ery Inn, since 1962.ffffBut unknown to the college, I had a background in American studies and a degree in museum curatorship from the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. I was also an avid reader of poetry.

Naturally, I had hesitations: How might we truly have a space of our own within a place that would be open to visitors? I soon learned that the house had a his-tory of being divided. Dickinson remembered “[p]retty perpen-dicular times” in the “ancient mansion,” where she lived most of her life. Her father, Edward, had shared the place first with fihis father, Samuel Fowler Dick-inson, and then with the David Mack family. A legal dividingline ran right down the man-sion’s center from garret to cel-lar. On a quick first tour, I could fisee that long corridors on thefi rst and second flfi oors separatedflthe west, or “public,” side (where the formal parlors and the poet’s bedroom were) from the east side (where the dining room, kitchen, family room and our bedrooms would be).

My youthful enthusiasm at age 30 made the challenge seem manageable, maybe even fun. And so the Mudges signed up for what turned out to be an 11-year stint in Emily Dickinson’s home, and I became its fi rst resident-ficurator.

ALMOST SIMULTANEOUSLY, three projects came to mind. For practical reasons, two took

Who would open her home to public visits? My youthful enthusiasm made the challenge seem manageable, even fun.

Jean and Lew Mudge in 1974 with theirthree children, Bob, Bill and Annie, andtheir chocolate- point Siamese, Jojo,who later delivered kittens in Emily Dick-inson’s cradle

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priority. First, I needed to recre-ate Dickinson’s bedroom/work-room. How could I fi nd furniturefiand objects belonging to the family? Fortunately, next door in Austin Dickinson’s house, The Evergreens, lived a woman who proudly described herself as the“sole Dickinson heir.” She was Mary Landis Hampson, whose late husband, Alfred Leete Hampson, had been co-editor (with Emily’s niece, Martha) of selected Dickinson poems.Through Martha, Mrs. Hampsonhad inherited the Dickinson family real estate and literary properties. A number of Dick-inson family furnishings fromthe mansion remained in TheEvergreens. Mrs. Hampson gen-erously loaned us first a teacup, fisaucer and spoon. We displayedthese on the broad windowsill of the poet’s bedroom, and for some time, they were the sole items to show to the public.

This fi rst loan, and others to fifollow, happened only gradu-ally. Our first encounter with fiMrs. Hampson had not beenauspicious. A few days after we’d moved in, the children and Iwere playing in the large flat area flat the top of The Homestead’s driveway when she emergedfrom the narrow path between the houses wearing a black cape and a black fedora with the rim turned down all around. (Later, she told me these had been herhusband’s.) Beneath the hat I could see her nearly white, Dutch-bobbed hair. So dressedand coiff ed, Mrs. Hampson wasffffunmistakably witchlike. Rein-forcing this impression was theunkempt yard behind her, dark and dense with untended trees and overgrown bushes hiding The Evergreens beyond.

All four of us stopped short and stared. Mrs. Hampson lostno time in greetings but at once

declared: the chil-dren were never to cross the path to her house and grounds! As frozen in place as they, I assured her that would be the last thing I’d let them do. Then, after explaining that we were still unpacking, I invited her into the kitchen for tea. She ac-cepted.

That was the start of a long, off -and-on-againffffrelationship with Mrs. Hampson. A decades-old feud over the division of Dickinson’s manu-scripts between Harvard and Amherst was the long shadow she inherited from Martha that prompted her basic suspicion of us. We represented the college. But at the time, I was unaware of this feud and eager to break down whatever had led her to so fi ercely protect her property. fiAfter several teas, which often stretched into suppers, Mrs. Hampson’s attitude notably soft-ened. In part, that was because I became a sincere convert to her enthusiastic advice about healthy eating. A proud Smith graduate with scientifi c training, fishe was a keen analyst of canned and frozen food labels, among other matters, and a fount of nu-trition tips.

Within months, Mrs. Hamp-son invited the whole family to dinner at The Evergreens. Her house was furnished much as Martha Dickinson had left it on her death in 1943, some of its original draperies rotting on their rods. She had set the dining room table with the household’s best china and glassware, show-ing a level of trust in our children that I had not yet tested.

After dinner she took us into

the library. In no time, she was winding up her collection of multicolored French tin birds, fond purchases from her annual trips to Paris. Once she wound up their keys, fastened them to the door post by their suction feet and released them, the little birds robotically hopped up the 90-degree ascent. When the springs ran down and they threatened to topple, she handily caught them. She repeated the performance several times. It was hard to tell who was having more fun, Mrs. Hampson or us and our kids. Soon after, she ea-gerly participated in recreating Emily Dickinson’s bedroom in the mansion.

Finally, enough Dickinson family furnishings came across the space between the houses to call the mansion “done.” At the same time, a Smith College horticulturalist redesigned the Parkes’ formal garden, and we planted period flowers men-fltioned in Dickinson’s herbarium, poems and letters. Among them were several beds of antique roses, known for their penetrat-ing fragrance. I recall working among them and sometimes sitting down for a moment, like Ferdinand in the children’s book, supremely happy to pause andinhale their deep perfume.

ONLY EMILY LIVES THERE NOW

In the years since Jean Mudge raised her children there, The Homestead has evolved from a residence to a museum. The Emily Dickinson Museum (which also includes The Evergreens next door) is open for tours each year from March to December.In September it celebrated The Homestead’s 200th anniversaryand the museum’s 10th anniversary. That event included anannual Emily Dickinson poetry marathon, during which visitorsmet in the parlors to read all of the poet’s 1,789 known poems.

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The second priority was or-ganizing a group of volunteer guides. My appeal to friends andacquaintances in town quickly brought willing volunteers. David Porter, an English pro-fessor at UMass, and PriscillaParke, who had grown up in thehouse, were joined by some 20 other Dickinson enthusiasts to interpret the poet to the public.They led groups of 12 visitorsthrough the west side of the house on prearranged days. Guests were greeted at the front door and ushered into the front parlors. There they heard aboutthe present nature of the house and leafed through an album of archival photos. They then went upstairs to the poet’s bedroom/workroom. Afterward, on their own, they walked down to the garden.

A THIRD PROJECT WAS LONGER-term. Occupying Dickinson’shouse, I wondered what living here so constantly and so long meant to her. Almost all of her extant poems and letters hadbeen composed here on MainStreet. She might make notesin her upstairs bedroom; or at a second desk downstairs near a conservatory off her father’s ffstudy; or at spare moments, in the kitchen and elsewhere in thehouse. Presumably, she wouldwrite fi nal drafts in her bedroom.fiThese she then stored in her bu-reau. When her mother became a neurasthenic and gave up en-tertaining, Emily and her sister Lavinia quickly became their fa-ther’s hostesses. In part because of these demands, Emily gradu-ally withdrew from town affairs. ffffBy her late 30s, she announced with some surety, “I do not crossmy father’s grounds to any house or town.” Deeply inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she had

become his solitary scholar-poet at home. How did her work re-flect that fact?fl

That question pursued me while Icarried on my normalrounds as mother, curator and newly minted Dickinsonscholar. In 1966 it in-spired me to develop a paper, “Emily Dickin-son and the Image of Home,” for a session of the Tuesday Club,an Amherst women’s literary group begunin the late 19th cen-tury. By 1968 I’d expanded the paper into a book-length piece. An editor suggested I develop its critical context. That meant get-ting a graduate degree. Withinmonths, I’d successfully ap-plied for a Danforth Fellowship to enter the American studiesprogram at Yale. Thus begantwo years of commuting to NewHaven from Amherst, spendingone night a week with another graduate student to fulfill a firesidency requirement. Thisroommate turned out to be aBlack Panther sympathizer whoallowed their meetings to takeplace in the apartment. I oncefound a stash of their guns in the front hall closet.

This excitement fortunately passed quickly, and by 1973, my thesis was done—the original Dickinson paper enriched and extended—and I had a doctoratein hand. Two years later UMassPress published my book. Re-search for the book at a trio of archives—Amherst, Harvard andthe local Jones Library—yielded some surprises. At Amherst, atthe back of a fi le in Special Col-filections, I discovered a blackwooden panel delicately paintedwith a cluster of Indian pipe

plants. Mabel Loomis Todd had decorated the panel for Emily and used it for the designembossed on the volumes of Dickinson poems that she andThomas Wentworth Higginsonedited in the 1890s. Lew took acolored slide of this panel. The photo was soon on a wall in Em-ily’s bedroom.

I also found Dickinson family menus and original recipes of Emily’s. Since she was knownfor her bread and desserts, why not put together a cookbook with photos, old and new, to illustrate it? Together, Lew and I chose what objects to photograph, andI helped him develop prints. We’d converted a bathroom at the head of the back stairs intoa darkroom. Two guides, Nancy Grose and Julianna Dupre, vol-unteered to modernize the reci-pes, and a third, Wendy Kohler, served as business manager.The booklet’s fi rst press run oc-ficurred in 1976, the summer thatLew and I moved from Amherst to Chicago. Thirty-seven years later, there have been nearly 20 editions.

We left Amherst with another project still underway, a docu-mentary film about Dickinson.fi

Jean Mudge worked to bring Dickinsonfamily belongings back to the house.This 1960s view ofthe poet’s bedroomshows her original Franklin stove and,on the lounge, herblanket.

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My collaborator and director,Bayley Silleck, suggested that,for the fi lm’s host, I invite JuliefiHarris, at the time heralded as“a national treasure” for her Broadway role as Dickinson in William Luce’s one-woman play The Belle of Amherst. When Julie performed it in Chicago, I went backstage and introduced my-self, inviting her to be the fi lm’sfipresenter and to visit the Dickin-son house.

As I approached her, Julielooked at me in a curiously pene-trating way. She told me that shehad already been to the Dick-inson house. Then she added, “When you kicked me out!” It was true. As Julie reminded me(before accepting my invitation), she had entered the house years before, unannounced and with-out an appointment, and found her way upstairs to Dickinson’sbedroom. From my bedroom down the hall, I’d heard a noise.Thinking that one of our chil-dren was breaking a household rule by playing there, I arrivedto fi nd a woman standing with fiher back to me, hands on hips, dressed in a miniskirt with knee-high red leather boots. I gestured toward the stairs, accompanied this stranger down and told herhow to make an appointment.

OVER THE YEARS, OTHER VISI-tors of some fame sought out thehouse. These included the poets Adrienne Rich and Allen Gins-berg. An active feminist, Rich took note when I mentioned that Dickinson thought of herself as “Vesuvius at home.” Later, Rich developed that idea in a well-known essay. Ginsberg wasespecially reverential, peering into our archival photo collectionas if his eyes alone were bring-ing each scene alive. His signs of awe might have prepared me for

his question on leaving: “Don’t you think Mick Jagger looks just like Emily?”

But much more than celebrity meetings, my fondest memoriesof The Homestead are those fi lled with a combined sense of fiprivilege and private pleasure. Under its roof and behind itshedge, the hybrid quality of our lives quickly became quite natural: The place was at onceDickinson’s and ours. A one-time prank involving our kids is a good example. The Amherst

Historical Society had loaned usthe poet’s white dress and a wire dressmaker’s form on wheels.The form displayed the dress in her room. One day Bob, our old-est, with the help of his brother,Bill, decided to scare little sis-ter Annie. Bill led Annie into Emily’s room to face the form slowly moving toward them. Bob, inside it and hidden by the dress, inched it across the fl oor, flwhooping ghostly noises. Annie,terrifi ed, ran from the room, fidown the hall and into a group of visitors coming upstairs. Bob and Bill escaped down the east-west hallway.

The coexistence of Dickin-son’s past and our present, of her objects and our family, once intimately involved our cat Jojo, a pregnant chocolate-pointSiamese. We’d bred her with aviolet-point Siamese, in part to illustrate a Mendelian law to the children. One morning I wasawakened by the kids’ cries of surprise. Stumbling out of bed and down the hallway, I encoun-

tered all three of them looking into Dickinson’s cradle, kept outside her bedroom. Nestled in the back of its bonnet, curled up and content, was Jojo, licking her three newborn kittens—two chocolate- and one violet-point.

From all these events, large and small, Emily Dickinson’s claim that “Home is the defini-fition of God” became our own,a feeling only renewed in future houses. And at this distance, delight blends with amusement. Mrs. Hampson stands once

again at the edge of her property, Emily’s representative as the “sole Dickinson heir,” guarding her turf in the spooky garb of, as it turned out, a crusty but basi-cally friendly witch.

“Forever is composed of Nows— / ’Tis not a different fffftime—,” the poet wrote. Invol-untarily, her house of art still haunts me, once again making real the lasting power that, in a diff erent poem, she long antici-ffffpated:

The Poets light but Lamps— Themselves—go out—The Wicks they stimulate—If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns—Each Age a Lens Disseminating their Circumference— k

Jean McClure Mudge is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She fiis the editor of a collection of essays about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. Emerson’s Revolution, that will nbe published next year.

Allen Ginsberg’s signs of awe might haveprepared me for his question: “Don’t you think Mick Jagger looks just like Emily?”

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At the groundbreaking ceremony for Robert Frost Library, Kennedy said the poet hadwarned him “not to let the Harvard in me get tobe too important.” In addition to Secret Service and local police, 250 state troopers guarded thepresident during his visit to Amherst.

“ When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations,” Kennedy said. “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

JOHN F. KENNEDY CAME TO CAMPUS on Oct. 26, 1963, to receive an honorary degree and preside over the Robert

Frost Library groundbreaking. “It was a huge event in thehistory of the college,” says Archives & Special Collections

Director Michael Kelly. “How many colleges get a sittingpresident to come to their groundbreaking ceremony?” In

the cage, JFK gave what historians consider to be his lastmajor speech before his assassination a month later.

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Kennedy rode in a motorcade along

South PleasantStreet with

Amherst President Calvin Plimpton

’39. The visit was a tribute to RobertFrost, who’d read

at Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. After the poet’s death in

January 1963, Kennedy adviser

John J. McCloy ’16 invited the

president to campus.

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Some 10,000 people came to Amherst on a crisp fall day to witness John F. Kennedy’s visit. “There is privilege here,” the president said in an address in the cage, “and with privilege goes responsibility.” The speech was unusual in its passionate support of the arts. “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist,” he said, in what turned out to be one of his last public appearances.

Frost Kennedy

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26

Three helicopters used Memorial Field

as a landing pad. Arriving around 11:30

a.m., they carried Kennedy and his

aides, as well as the presidential seal and

a chair. Kennedy used the chair at the

convocation in the gym. The seal was

aff ixed to the podium.ff

Close to 100 members of the media and 40 members of the White House press staff coveredffthe event. At the convocation, Kennedy andpoet Archibald McLeish received honorarydegrees. Edward “Ted” Plimpton, son of the Amherst president, was 11 at the time andremembers that JFK turned to him and said,“Young man, we have great hopes for you.”

“ The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offi cious state.”

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28 Amherst Fall 2013 Photographs by Christopher Churchill

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A couple of years ago, James Squires

’83, now president of Norfolk Southern,

one of the largest and most prosperous

railroads in the United States, was tak-

ing a course at Harvard Business School.

Chatting with an esteemed professor of

“strategy,” Squires asked, “What do you

think of the railroad business?”

“A dead industry,” the professor replied.

Most of the rest of us would thought-

lessly agree, relying on our fuzzy visions

of rusty locomotives, weed-choked tracks,

and sleepy, musty stations. The far-fl ung

Amtrak system (save the recently profi t-

able “Northeast Corridor” routes) exists

on continual federal life support.

In fact, as at least the strategy profes-

sor should have known, the railroad in-

dustry ranks among the most prosperous

in the country. It has seldom, if ever, been

Short Liners

BY ROGER M. WILLIAMS ’56

Most people don’t realize that the railroad industry has seldom, if ever, been inbetter shape than it is today.The

George Betke ’59 (left) and Mike Smith ’68 are in

an industry whose suc-cess relies on knowing its

markets, watching costs and making nice with

local politicians.

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in better shape than itis now. Says Squires, abit ruefully, “We havebeen kind of fl yingflbeneath the radar.”That also applies to theother four big, U.S.-based so-called Class Irailroads, which are allfreight lines, and to anadditional two based inCanada but operatingin part here. (The ClassI designation is basedon annual operatingrevenue, with the gov-ernment-designatedcutoff point now $463ffmillion. Passenger-carrying Amtrak, al-

though bigger in terms of revenues, is unclassified.)fiIf Norfolk Southern and its running mates are beneath

the radar, two little railroads owned by other Amherst grads are well-nigh invisible. But their proprietors don’t mind that at all, because they, like the big boys, are doing just fine. One of these is Farmrail, a western Oklahomafioperation started by George Betke ’59; the other, Finger Lakes Railway, in New York State, is partly owned by both Betke and Mike Smith ’68.

A major reason for the robust health of the Class I’sis that back in the 1980s, freed from onerous federalregulations, they began consolidating and ridding them-selves of so-called branch lines that had long been a dragon profi tability. Many of those lines were sold for scrap.fiOthers went to guys like Betke and Smith, who were driven by railroad nostalgia, a taste for risk or simply a business challenge.

They joined what is known as the short-line railroadindustry. Five hundred fi fty-odd “short lines” now oper-fiate in 48 states. They range from the laughingly short(one in Texas started with less than a mile of track—and now makes buckets of money) to the relatively hugeGenesee & Wyoming, a conglomerate that runs trainsthroughout central New York State and into Canada. The industry’s average length is about 100 miles; the averagenumber of employees, 10 to 15.

Each short line tends to haul one or a couple of profit-fimaking products to or from one or a couple of good,dependable customers. These railroads rely heavily on knowing their markets, watching costs with a sharp eye and making nice with local governments and thebig railroads with which they have to interface. UnlikeSquires, sitting atop shareholder-owned Norfolk South-ern, their owners need to be entrepreneurs. Says RichardF. Timmons, president of the American Short Line and

Regional Railroad Association, “This business involves a lot of risk, personal investment and hope.”

IN TERMS OF WHAT they haul, Farmrail andFinger Lakes could hardly be more dissimilar. UnderSmith’s day-to-day leadership, the latter has developed a broad and varied customer and commodity base: customers in more than a dozen New York cities andtowns, commodities ranging from grain and potatoes topulp board and propane. Farmrail has followed the op-posite business model. “Ten to 15 years ago,” says Betke, “two-thirds of our business was in agricultural products, principally wheat. Now it’s crude oil,” thanks to a discov-ery in the Anadarko Basin, located primarily in western Oklahoma. The annual total of carloads has been rising steadily, and geologists tell Betke that the basin will fillfimany more cars before it runs dry. He readily admits, “No one, including me, predicted this oil boom. It’s strictly a function of new technology”—the controversial practice known as fracking. Timmons may well be think-ing of that windfall when he observes of his association’smembers, “They need to be very alert to changing popu-lation trends and to the markets for the commodities ffthey haul. They also need to reinvest a lot in infrastruc-ture and equipment.”

Although dedicated overseers of their properties, a great many short-liners do not live within hailing dis-tance of them, and Betke and Smith fi t that pattern.fiBetke sacrifi ces the charms of Oklahoma for a house on fithe coast of Maine that dates partly to 1840 and affords ffffviews of soaring eagles and spawning fish. Smith hasfiNew Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee close at hand, but ambience alone does not explain his presence there. He dislikes both the business atmosphere and the tax rates where his railroad is located.

The partners present something of a personal con-trast, too. Betke, 6-feet-2 and handsome at 75, has an easy manner and a slightly sly sense of humor. His short-line associates esteem his analytical abilities, which come across readily in extended conversation. Smith is shorter and stocky, with an uncommonly firm hand-fishake. He drives an outsized Toyota Tundra as his every-day car, but as a proper executive, he may be observed piloting it, even on hot, muggy days, in a long-sleeved shirt with tie pulled snugly up to his neck.

Railroad owners have probably been as scarce as mor-ticians in the long line of Amherst grads, so you might think two of them in modern times would at least know of each other. But they didn’t until the early 1990s, whenSmith began seeking Betke’s advice on and participa-tion in possible short-line acquisitions. For some time,the Amherst connection still remained unknown. Then, when Finger Lakes became a prospect, Smith says, “George came to my office to talk about it and noticed on ffi

Betke made Farmrail the

country’s first employee-

owned railroad.

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the wall my diploma and some other Amherst stuff.”ffffOld school tie aside, a partnership was attractive.

Their railroad experience diff ered considerably, and ffffso did their strengths. Smith had worked for a series of lines, starting as a lowly track-gang member during undergraduate summers. Betke had been a banker, thena Wall Street analyst specializing in railroads. Pairing Smith’s marketing chops with Betke’s financial acumenfiwas a natural step.

As a high school student in Newark, N.J., Betke hadapplied only to Amherst, drawn by the nationally known“New Curriculum” and, as he puts it, “the forced dis-cipline of taking prescribed subjects in your first two fiyears. That just seemed right to me.” Dismissing his original idea of becoming an architect—“I decided Iwasn’t creative enough”—he felt himself “a little adrift, like a country geek,” and ended up majoring in econom-ics. He worked at campus jobs during all four years, andhe considers the most valuable part of his educationat Amherst “learning to communicate with all sorts of people.” Now, decades later, doing just that with thepeople who work for him is one of his most satisfying preoccupations, and he has carried it far beyond com-munication: years ago, Betke made Farmrail the nation’sfi rst employee-owned railroad.fi

Betke’s version of “employee-owned” fashions him as an employee, albeit one who owns a majority of the stock. His decision to parcel out the rest among theworkers grew out of a “bad experience” with—and division from—his original Farmrail partner: “I said to myself, ‘The real partners in this company should be the employees.’”

The boss puts money in a trust and apportions shares of it according to a formula based on income level and longevity. Vesting comes after three calendar years of

employment. The payouts, Betke says, are based on theindependently determined price of Farmrail stock, and they can be juicy: “One of our people retired with sixfi gures from the trust, a very nice addition to his pensionfifrom the Railroad Retirement program.”

At his father-in-law’s suggestion, Betke sought andlanded his fi rst job in the trust department of a Dallas fibank. Then he went to business school and hooked on as an “institutional researcher” at the young Wall Streetfi rm of Donaldson, Lufkfi in & Jenrette. Five years later fkhe and a colleague set up their own “boutique shop” tohandle the same kinds of business. On his own hook, he got involved in his fi rst railroad acquisition, involving afi

12-mile, southern Colorado line whose freight cars they rented to a long-distance carrier.

Farmrail began to take shape in the early 1980s, whenBetke read that Class I Burlington Northern was shed-ding a bunch of light-density branch lines that were draining capital from the company. “I looked at a mapwith 20 properties on it, and we eventually put together a deal involving private lines plus a state-owned one andeventually bundled them into a holding company, Farm-rail System Inc.” For “less than six fi gures,” Betke leasedfitwo old locomotives and 35 miles of track. (He now ownsthree-quarters of his line’s 340-odd miles; the state of Oklahoma owns the rest and leases them to Farmrail). Betke hired a workforce of “about seven people” and proceeded to build a business shipping principally wheatto terminals at either end of what was essentially a ves-tige of the old and storied Rock Island Line. There the loads connected to larger Western carriers.

MIKE SMITH’S ROUTE to a railroad careerwas entirely diff erent from Betke’s—and diffffff erent as wellfffffrom that of Norfolk Southern’s James Squires. (Squires joined that company as a young attorney and later switched to fi nance, gaining two crucial pieces of experi-fience for his trip to the top of the corporate ladder.) Whilefother summer-vacationing Amherst undergrads traveled in Europe, worked as camp counselors or took supple-mentary courses, Smith opted for manual labor—with crews repairing tracks on the Delaware and Hudson. That would have dissipated the railroad dreams of many a young man, but not this one. He had another motiva-tion, too: “I grew up with railroaders in my family.”

An upstate New Yorker with a public school educa-tion, Smith says he is “not sure what got me into Am-

herst. I played high school foot-ball [in supremely retro leather helmets] but wasn’t recruited.” He majored in political science (“As a student, I was right up there with George W. Bush”) and joined Theta Delta Chi. “Our

house was known as ‘the Gentleman Jocks,’” he says, adding with a grin, “Our idea of diversity was pledging a couple of linemen.”

When Penn Central off ered Smith a postgraduate jobffffas an “operating management” trainee, he snapped it up. “That railroad, which had recently been created in a merger, was a disaster from the start. But I learned a lotthere.” While at Penn Central, Smith branched into mar-keting, and he has stayed with it ever since. He moved to the Boston & Maine, also fl oundering fifl nancially,fias assistant to the president, and with that far-from-overwhelming résumé, he became a consultant to the industry.

What did the eff ort yield? “What amounted to a ‘dirt railroad,’ ” Smith says cheerfully. Dedicated short-liners are undaunted by such conditions.

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The result: a 118-mileline that traverses New York’s Finger Lakesarea, from which itwould take its name toslap on an oval red logo.The purchase involvedsome intricate financ-fiing. Betke stood for a big chunk of it and brought in New York State-based Genessee & Wyoming. Smith plays down his fi nancial contribution: fi“I pretty much just put up the earnest money. But I also put the deal together.”

Doing that required a lot more than convinc-

ing Conrail to sell. It also meant persuading officials in fficounties and towns in the Finger Lakes region that they should stop imposing the property taxes that were cost-ing Conrail $1.3 million and were a major reason why it wanted to shed the small line. “I visited every one of those places,” Smith recalls, “appeared at countless pub-lic hearings and convinced them to let us make [lower]payments in lieu of the taxes. Without that, I told them, the sale would not go through, and the railroad would disappear.” None of the local officials wanted to risk thatffihappening. They accepted the in-lieu-of offer.ffff

What did all that eff ort yield? Smith replies cheer-fffffully: “What amounted to a ‘dirt railroad.’ Track in such poor shape that freight couldn’t run on it faster than 15 miles an hour.” Dedicated short-liners are undaunted by such conditions, and the Smith-Betke tandem recondi-tioned Finger Lakes and gradually made it a prosperous enterprise. “Revenues have been steadily building,” Smith says. “We started at $5 million a year, and now we’re over $12 million.” Profi ts? “We’re solid from thatfistandpoint—but we haven’t taken profi ts at the expensefiof reinvestment. Having worked in the larger business world, George and I agree that, in railroading, you invest in your future. In our case, 20 to 25 percent of our annual revenues go back into track maintenance and upgrades.That’s a lot, but it’s what we should be spending.”

To maintain a good balance sheet, Finger Lakes de-pends substantially on Smith’s marketing skills. “In thisbusiness,” he says, “a lot of marketing is common sense.You’re dealing with equipment, service and rates, and you price and balance them according to what’s important to potential clients. For instance, we do a steel haul of about80 miles, to an interchange with Norfolk Southern. Whatsold the customer on using us, rather than trucks, was that for the ‘gondola’ cars [low-sided and normally open

to the elements] we designed a cover that protects the steel from the weather but lets air move through.”

That satisfi ed Smith’sfi marketing principle of keepinglocal interests foremost in mind. Even more, it satisfied fishort-liners’ constant desire—and need—to competesuccessfully with the trucking industry. Referring to the gondola-car covers, he emphasizes that “the customer pays more but prefers us to trucks, because the steelcomes to him clean.”

Long-distance trucks have long been the bête noire of the railroads. In ways both subtle and blunt, shortlinersof all stripes denounce them at every opportunity. The “Industry Overview” of a 2012 association booklet refers in its second paragraph to “the environmental benefitsfigained by shifting freight from truck to rail.” It goes on totick off some of the fiff xed-cost disadvfi antages shortlinesface with relation to trucks: the deterioration of woodties, the hassle of clearing snow and brush, and the need to fi ll in washed-out track beds “even if only a single fitrain operates on the line.”

That list doesn’t even include complaints about air pollution and traffi c congestion caused by trucks or the ffirailroaders’ biggest gripe: that trucks run on highways paid for by the public, while trains operate on rails andrail beds their owners install and maintain. Not only that, says Smith with great distaste, but because the federal highway fund can no longer pay for our high-ways, “the feds dip into general funds to do it.” Fromlone source or another, the feds spend some $40 bil-lion a year on highways, according to statistics from the Congressional Budget Office. And as if the typicalffilong-haul truck doesn’t do enough damage to the roads, Smith points out, “now we’re seeing milk trucks of up to120,000 pounds tearing ’em up.” Betke sums up the rail-roaders’ view of trucks: “they take advantage of existing markets; we create them.”

(The trucking industry, of course, presents a robustrebuttal. Truckers argue that although rail transporta-tion is cheaper, it can’t provide the level of service—es-pecially quick delivery— customers demand nowadays. That’s particularly true, contends a spokesman for one of the truckers’ associations, for “value-added, goods-producing industries.” Battling on a seemingly eternal front, the industry insists that trucks do not roll expense-free over roads paid for by taxpayers, but instead pay, through fees and fuel taxes, hefty percentages of high-way construction and maintenance.)

MORE THAN ANYTHING, Betke and Smith, as short-line owners, seem driven by a compulsion to runtight ships.They figure that their margin for error is small fiand their resources few, and that they must constantly market themselves and adjust adroitly to changing busi-ness conditions.

Smith repaired rail-

road tracks during sum-

mer breaks in college.

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On the matter of costs, the short-line association as-serts that “average labor and equipment costs for small railroads are typically much higher than for Class I’s.”Track maintenance is a constant, major drain, and lo-comotives, even the secondhand and often old ones theshort lines habitually buy, are expensive. But the asso-ciation’s claim about labor cost seems counterintuitive,because the Class I’s remain heavily unionized whilefew short lines deal with unions. Short-line owners’ anti-union attitudes stem partly from pressure to hold downcosts but partly, too, from the fact that the owners tend to be devoted free enterprisers.

For their part, the numerous unions that organize in the railroad industry—or try to—seem to acknowledgethat it’s a diffi cult task, despite more modest wages andffibenefi ts among the short lines than the Class I’s. For one fithing, says Ron Kaminkow, general secretary of the left-leaning Railroad Workers Industrial Union, “The wholethrust of the short-line industry has been about avoidingunionization. For instance, they don’t want to pay people who are nothing but conductors. I mean a short-line conductor might do that job on the train, then go and help repair the roof on one of the buildings.” In addition, Kaminkow says, “There are guys who just like workingfor the short lines. It’s predictable and in some ways comfortable. You don’t work at night; you make one tripa day—maybe one a week.”

Both Betke and Smith are outspoken on this issue. “Absolutely not!” declares Betke when asked if any of the Farmrail or Finger Lakes workers belong to unions.

“In my opinion, [unions’] presence in the short-line business is evidence of bad management”—meaning bosses who fail to treat their employees well. “The whole staff [of Farmrail] has my telephone number. If they ffhave a problem, they can call me at any time.”

If in the 21st century that seems paternalistic, Betkeis unapologetic. He points proudly to Farmrail’s gener-ous employee benefits, which include medical insur-fiance without individual or family premiums, and to the monthly “Farmrail Teammate” newsletters he distrib-utes to help keep worker morale high. Each summer,Betke goes to Oklahoma to attend the employee picnic.

Richard Timmons, the association president, laugh-ingly recalls one of those picnics he attended several years ago: “George had ordered up a huge barbecue grill. The thing came rolling up on a double-axle trailer, big enough to cook six cows at the same time. I imagine youcould have fi red it up to a thousand degrees. It was one fi

of a kind, believe me.” Betke protests that Timmons isexaggerating, but readily admits to treating the annualpicnic as a very important occasion.

To Betke, his eff orts, from persistent newsletter ffffthrough over-the-top grill, come under the heading of boss-to-worker communication. And that refl ects fla deeper conviction: his antipathy to what he calls the“military command structure” of the Class I roads and their style of “saluting the boss up and down the orga-nizational chart.” Smith seems less driven by a commu-nication imperative but even more committed to opera-tional effi ciency. His goal at Finger Lakes is to run trains ffioperated by a single individual—the engineer.

When asked why, as head of a very Oklahoma en-terprise, he lives half a continent away, Betke offers noffffexcuses. “I don’t look or act like an Okie,” he says with a grin. “I’ve never lived there.” He visits a few times a yearand has graduated from a motel room to an apartment in the town of Clinton. Does he sense resentment on thepart of the local folks? “I really don’t. I think they realizethat I’m doing my best to build a long-term business.”

When he seeks workers, Betke has the dynamics of the local economy in his favor. In Oklahoma, as he putsit, “railroading is a steady job. Farming goes up anddown.” For Farmrail, he prefers Okies off the farm to ex-ffperienced railroad workers from elsewhere: “They have a better work ethic and more discipline.”

Betke has served on the short-line association board for years, and he and Smith frequently lobby Congress and federal regulatory agencies in behalf of short-liners’

interests. Both men played im-portant roles in one of the shortlines’ most important legislativevictories: passage in 2004 of atax credit that freed up money forreinvestment.

Despite that success, Betke professes a weary realism about short-line lobby pros-pects. He laments the built-in disadvantage they face in competing for political favor against truckers: “Thereare almost 4 million truck drivers and—taking large and small railroads together—only 200,000 railroad em-ployees.” No matter. He will keep up the good fi ght from fiMaine and, when necessary, Washington. Smith will do likewise, with added attention paid to New York State pols in Albany.

They will also take continuous satisfaction from confounding both private and public expectations. Says Betke, “Railroads are battered by regulators, we face intense competition and the public often views us as a nuisance. Despite all that, Mr. Harvard professor, we arevery far from dead.” k

Roger Williams has been a magazine journalist since graduating from Amherst. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Betke has the dynamics of the local economy in his favor. In Oklahoma, “railroading is a steady job,” he says. “Farming goes up and down.”

Page 36: Amherst Fall 2013

34 Amherst Fall 2013 Illustration by Javier Jaén Benavides

POINT OF VIEW

Notebook Days

Page 37: Amherst Fall 2013

35

She said she was “being a writer,”but she felt like a fake.

BY TESS TAYLOR ’00

The snow was falling and Brooklyn was, at least for a moment, hushed. Inside the brownstones off 4th Av-ffenue, lights flickered. Snow spun in fland out of shadows. The air smelled like wet wool and cigarettes.

I had just moved into my firstfipost-college apartment. For the last time that day I climbed the crackedwooden stairs to the fl oor-through flI’d found with the friends of a child-hood friend—20-somethings from Milwaukee, none of whom I knew yet. I was splurging on the big backbedroom, the one that came with ajauntily cockeyed armoire, a fire es-ficape on which I could smoke, and aview of an empty lot and Brooklyn’s clock tower.

I was also panicking. It turned out that several of my friends who were going on in the arts had trust funds—not just short-term ones, but hefty sums. Other friends from college werestudying for the LSAT or getting work as consultants. I was liv-ing off lentils and the staffff meal at the funeral-parlor-turned-ffrestaurant. My one nice pair of shoes was wearing out. When people asked me what I was doing I said, “Being a writer,” but I felt like a fake. My heart would race. I’d run to the restroom and wait for the panic to pass. For what claim did I have on this profession? I had the most excellent (and among the more expensive) educations the country could off er, yet here I was ffffcalculating the cost of lentils and calming myself by reciting“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” on subway platforms. I felt absurd.

I went to see a friend of a friend, an older Amherst alumnus, who worked at a fancy literary agency. He asked me what I wanted to write. “Poetry,” I said. He fixed me with a ratherfiowlish stare. “Rather impecunious,” he said back. My heartdropped through the floor. fl

Blindly I kept reading, writing, making lists, making phone calls. That spring some ice cracked. A friend who worked at awebsite offered me a chance to writffff e blurbs. I tracked downthe friend of a high-school fl ame, now a magazine editor. Iflpitched her eight ideas she didn’t want, but she eventually began assigning me stories. I found a job in publishing, thenmore gigs. Eventually I found my way to journalism school. My notebook collection grew.

Somewhere between waitressing and writing blurbs I reas-sembled that senior thesis into a collection of poems that I entered into a competition sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Miraculously, I won. That was a decade ago. Therewere still a lot of lentils and plenty of panic attacks after that.But now, with more than a decade of writing, teaching and publishing behind me, I honor that roving, impecunious self.

These days I have what feels like a normal, even joyful life. I get up each morning and as soon as I can, I get to my desk—though that is harder now that I have a child who needs toeat breakfast and read a book about trains fi rst. On my deskfithere is work to do: I write essays and correspond with writers and editors. I pitch stories. I apply for grants. I plan a class I’mgoing to teach. When I am lucky, I write a poem. When I amlucky, I get lost in a book. My work is work: If someone asks, Itell them, “I am a writer,” and I mean it. k

Taylor is the author of a new book of poems, The Forage House(Red Hen Press). She teaches writing at UC Berkeley and reviewspoetry for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and other publications.

l ONLINE Taylor’s poem “Some Thoughts on the Bergen Street Renaissance,” about her time in the Brooklyn apartment. www.amherst.edu/magazine

I had no plans yet. I had not unpacked my printer. I had norésumé. My futon eyed me balefully from the floor. I was outflof sync with my graduating class. I had taken a semester offffand moved to Paris during my sophomore year, and now I was graduating late. In mid-January 2000, I was settling myself away from Amherst, my parents, my friends. I had a firm no-fition that I wanted to write but only the vaguest notion of howto support myself while I did.

I did have classic city determination—a crate of books, a few connections, a lead on a waitressing job in a converted funeral parlor a few blocks away. I had no sense of how to get published, how to find other writers, how to submit work. Ifidid have an undergraduate thesis collection of poems that I’d written under the supervision of Glyn Maxwell and WilliamfPritchard ’53. If I ate carefully, worked part-time and bought no new anything, I had perhaps three months of financial lee-fiway to look for a job.

Here’s what I knew: Writers read and writers write, and soeach day I tried to do these things. I memorized ElizabethBishop and W.H. Auden poems, and I bookmarked pages with my receipts for pho. I spent days at the New York Public Library. I read Seamus Heaney. I read Charles Dickens. I fi lled notebooks with what I was learning, what I saw, what fiI thought I might want to write about—a bird trapped on the subway, or Irma, the homeless woman who seemed to be beloved in our neighborhood.

Page 38: Amherst Fall 2013

36 Amherst Fall 2013

5 AS A PILOT, RANDY DAVIS ’76

HAS CHAUFFEURED EMPEROR PENGUINS, CELEBRITY WOLVES,

EVEN A SAINT. BUT HIS MOST MEMORABLE

FLIGHT WAS ON 9/11.

Beyond Campusalumni

in the

world

Some Things He’s Carried

COU

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Amherst Fall 2013 37

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

FLYING U Ten Emperor pen-guins needed a lift to California. A few wolves had an acting gig. A Catholic priest, dead since 1888, wanted to see his admirers. On9/11, government experts had to get to New York, quickly.

The man who transported all of them was Randy Davis ’76, alawyer who learned to fl y beforeflhe could drive and is now vicepresident, general counsel and sometime pilot at Phoenix Air Group, Inc., a specialized aviationfi rm based near Atlanta.fi

Davis grew up in eastern LongIsland on a farm with an airstrip, and he got his solo pilot’s licenseas soon as he was eligible, on his16th birthday. At Amherst he was a political science major who concentrated in Soviet aff airs andffffRussian language and literature. He restarted the Amherst Flying Club, worked as a fl ight instructor fland fl ew college President JohnflWilliam Ward to alumni events. Davis made his fi rst transoceanic fifl ight as a sophomore, delivering fla small twin-engine aircraft from Boston to London.

Next came law school atEmory. “I knew I wanted to be an

aviation lawyer,” he says. He went on to a career at a law fi rm, de-fifending airlines (including Delta, Continental and United), aircraftmanufacturers and the aviationinsurance industry.

Then, in 1991, Phoenix AirGroup off ered him a job as gen-fffferal counsel. “I was getting tired of being a full-time litigator,” he says. And the job came with a perk: He could fl y the company’s flLearjets and Gulfstreams on mis-sions around the world. Thosemissions include, among otherthings, government and defensecontract work.

His longest nonstop fl ight forflPhoenix was an air ambulanceevacuation from Atlanta to Gi-braltar. He’s delivered satelliteparts to the space center in Ka-zakhstan several times. After the2010 Haiti earthquake, he flewflCDC emergency personnel tothat country to help. He’s evencarried a 19th-century priest:Some of the remains of St. JohnBosco are kept in a sarcophagusin Turin, Italy. “Every once in a while he does a world tour,”explains Davis, who in 2010 flewflone leg of such a tour.

Then there are the animaltransports. The wolves were

His most satisfy-

ing flights have been

evacuationsof injured military

personnel.

going from Canada to Siberia to be in a movie. Davis chauffeuredffffthe penguins on part of their longjourney from Antarctica to their new home at the San Diego Zoo.“We had to keep it below 40 de-grees in the cabin to keep themhappy,” he says. “There were 10of them, and three chilly animal handlers in winter coats.”

For Davis, the most satisfyingfl ights have been medical evacu-flations of injured military person-nel. “Unfortunately,” he says, “inthis last decade there’s been a fairamount of that.” Overseas, he’scome to the rescue of sick and injured civilian Americans, too:“They’re just so happy to be goinghome.”

His most memorable fl ight wasflon 9/11, when he brought federalworkers—experts in logistics,counseling and mortuary mat-ters—from Alabama, Florida,South Carolina and North Caro-lina to Stewart Air National GuardBase in New York. “They seemedcalm, professional,” he told anAtlanta-area newspaper on Sept.12, 2001. “Everyone was in aweof the magnitude of this event.”For part of that fl ight on a Learjet fl35, Davis and his copilot were the only known civilian pilots in the air east of the Mississippi.

Asked now what the experi-ence meant to him, he points to a comment in the Sept. 12 article: “It’s natural for each of us to wish to come to the aid of others when an epic human tragedy occurs,” he told the paper. “My primary memory of this 9/11 midnight fl ight will be that it was a privilege flto help out in such a direct and immediate manner.”

Davis routinely spends about a quarter of his working life in the cockpit, and he’s pleased to have found a way to combine his legal skills with his piloting skills. What’s left to transport? “I wouldn’t mind some pandas,” he says. “Or a kangaroo.”

Davis flew 10 adolescent emperor

penguins to the San Diego Zoo.

Randy Davis

’76

Page 40: Amherst Fall 2013

38 Amherst Fall 2013

BY RACHEL ACHMAD

DINING U Alden Booth ’83, founder of The People’s Pint in Greenfield, Mass., fidid not drink a single beer during his fouryears at Amherst. He wasn’t interested

g g

in beer at all. What he was interested in was bicycling, and he spent countless hours pedaling around the PioneerValley, never imagining he’d be riding

g

those same roads decades later in search of local purveyors for his own successful brewpub.

After graduating, Booth and his soon-to-be wife, Lissa Greenough ’83, moved to Boston, where Gre-enough gave him the gift that would help determinetheir future: a home-brewing kit. Home-brewing was a quirky, unusual practice in the mid-’80s. As Booth recalls, the one brew kit shop in all of Boston was lo-cated in a garage. But Booth gave it a go and discov-ered he had a taste for beer and a knack for brewing.

Within a few years, Booth and Greenough had re-turned to Western Massachusetts to raise their threedaughters, including Grace ’12. While working at a fi shery, he became friendly with Dan Young, another fibrewing enthusiast. Young had a background in food science, and Booth enjoyed preparing food to ac-company his beers. It wasn’t long before they began to talk of creating a brewery and café in Greenfield.fi

At that time, Booth explains, “Greenfield hadfionly burger-and-fry places. Nothing else.” People

BEYOND CAMPUS

Beer for a Better PlanetLong before local was trendy, a brewery and café inGreenfield, Mass., prioritized the concept.fifi

often drove many miles in search of other options, and that distressed the energy-conscious Booth andYoung. So in 1997 they found restaurant space, and The People’s Pint was born.

Long before local was trendy, the Pint prioritizedthe concept. Franklin County welders and craftsmen created and installed the entire brewing system, and much of the restaurant’s food came from localfarms. “When we fi rst opened,” Booth says, “half the fipeople that came in here were local farmers.”

People kept fi lling the seats, and Booth experi-fimented with ingredients. He’d bicycle to Franklin County farms and haul their produce back to thePint. Diners might be unfamiliar with, say, the chardin their quesadillas—but they usually ate it up.

The Pint also insisted on conscious energy usage. The restaurant has never used any disposable prod-ucts, for example—not even straws. Booth now givespresentations to others in the restaurant industry onhow to achieve small-scale success while practicingconservation of resources.

Finally, there is the Pint’s advocacy work around bicycling. Booth, a bike commuter himself, came up with the Pint’s “Bike to Live” program. All area residents can track the miles they choose to bike in-stead of drive places. With each trip, they earn credit toward Pint gift cards. It’s a program run entirely onthe honor system, and it has dispensed thousands of dollars in credit since its inception in 2003.

As much today as in the beginning, Booth’s suc-cess and his community involvement have a tandem relationship. He now co-owns the Pint with Greenough (Young moved to Michigan, where he now makes hard ciders), and whilethey have no plans to expand the res-taurant, Booth sees an expansion of advocacy work in their future. When asked what’s best about what he does, he answers without hesitation: “Get-ting people to think about alternativesas to how we live our lives.” With a smile, he adds, “The Pint has worked out well as a stage for that.”

Achmad writes for Recipe.com and has worked in restaurants for 20 years.

ThePeople’s

Pint

Home-brewing was a quirky practice when Alden Booth

’83 took it up. Now he and Lissa Greenough ’83 own a

brewery and café.

Local welders andcraftsmen

created andinstalled

the brewing system, and much of the food is fromarea farms.

RO

B M

ATT

SON

Page 41: Amherst Fall 2013

Amherst Fall 2013 39

Suicide’s StigmaA lawyer and an actor have teamed upon a campaign that approaches suicide as the public health crisis it is. BY NAOMI SHULMAN

HEALTH U Joanne Lelewer Harpel ’85 met Geoff rey ffffCantor ’84 the very first fiday she visited Amherst.She was 16, and she could not have imagined they’dcollaborate one day—norwhat they’d collaborate

y

about. “I was just starting to look at

colleges,” recalls Harpel.“And I was an Amherst fresh-

man,” Cantor adds. Harpel crashed on the fl oor of his dormflroom in Pratt, but once she en-rolled at Amherst, the two ranmostly in separate circles. (“Hewas much cooler than I was,” says Harpel. “I still am,” says Cantor. “He is,” she agrees.) Cantor was headed toward a career in the-ater; Harpel had law school in hersights. When they left campus,neither expected they’d be in con-tact again.

But then life—and death—in-tervened. Harpel had just won acoveted position in a corporatelaw fi rm when her brother sud-fidenly committed suicide, leavingher stunned and bereft. The grief,and the taboo surrounding it, spurred something in her. “My mother and I went to a survivor conference about six weeks after Stephen died,” she says. “Even through the haze of all the emo-tions, I had this awareness thatsomeday, this was a field that I fiwanted to get involved with.”

A few years later she startedvolunteering with the AmericanFoundation for Suicide Preven-tion. Eventually she became its senior director of public affairsffffand postvention and began work-ing on a fl edgling publicity project flthat would turn into the Interna-tional Survivors of Suicide Day. “At the time there was really noth-ing—a couple of brochures,” she says. “There were 10 or 11 citiesparticipating.” Under Harpel’s di-rection, programs for the day—in which people gather with otherswho understand their loss—nowtake place in 300 cities and on six continents.

Harpel soon decided to expandthe project, but she felt it needed artistic direction that she could not provide. She thought of her old acquaintance Geoff rey Can-fffftor. In addition to his stage and screen credits—he performed in Side Man on Broadway, on Spike TV’s The Kill Point and in a dozen tLaw & Order episodes, for ex-ample—Cantor had worked on a major ad initiative, Kleenex’s “Let It Out” campaign, specifically fimeant to provoke emotions.

Harpel had a hunch he’d bringcreative juice to her project. Whatshe didn’t know was that right after he left Amherst, Cantor had lost a dear friend to suicide. “ButI’d never really talked about itwith anyone,” he says. “I was very emotional when I spoke about itto Joanne, and I realized this was a cause I could get behind.”

The two have now collaborated

on multiple projects, the latest being a series of interviews inwhich researchers talk about how various factors—biology, psychol-ogy, epidemiology and genetics—relate to suicide prevention. The pair have also gone around thecountry interviewing survivors of suicide loss—a kind of grouptherapy on a massive scale.

International Survivors of Sui-cide Day takes place the Saturday before Thanksgiving. “A big pur-pose of the day is to educate peo-ple about the issues around sui-cide,” Harpel says. “But it’s also to provide emotional support, so people can begin their journey of healing and find relief from somefiof the emotional burden.” The Harpel-Cantor interviews will air online that day, and many com-munities will stage “Out of the Darkness” walks to raise aware-ness of suicide prevention andreduce the stigma around suicide.

“It’s a health crisis,” Cantor says. “Thousands of people die every year, more than from car accidents. I felt that something needed to be done.”

Thirty years ago Harpel and Cantor might have seemed an unlikely pair, but having joinedforces, they are shaking up the conversation and challenging thestigma. In other words, they’reapproaching suicide as the public health issue it is.

Shulman has written for The NewYork Times, Real Simple and other publications.

“Thousands of people die every

year, more than from car acci-

dents. I felt something needed to be done.”

Geoffrey Cantor

’84

Joanne Lelewer

Harpel ’85

n The American Foundationfor Suicide

Prevention held a 16-mile Out

of the Darknessovernight walk in Washington, D.C.,

in June.

KER

RY P

AY

NE

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40 Amherst Fall 2013

BY SUE DICKMAN ’89

SECOND ACT U Josh Cole ’99 is the son of a doctorand a nurse, so it might beunsurprising to learn he’s

g

in his fi rst year of medicalfischool. What is surprising is the path he took to getthere. At 37, Cole is thesecond-oldest person inhis medical school class. He’s also a former U.S.Army Green Beret.

A Russian major at Amherst, Cole worked for an Internet start-up after graduation and internedat the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. All along, he knew he wanted to do some-thing outdoors and adventurous but didn’t know quite what; 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystallized his thoughts.

Early in the Iraq War, Colefound himself arguing about what “we” should be doing andsuddenly realizing that whenhe said “we,” he actually meant somebody else. Cole was then 27 and still of military age. He began to wonder whether this was his“generation’s call to service.” As he puts it, “No matter whether you agree with both wars or any of them, there are people who areover in harm’s way in our name. I started thinking about that assomething I could and maybeshould do.” In July 2004, he en-tered basic training.

Cole enlisted via the 18X pro-gram, which enables those withno previous army experience totry out for the Special Forces. De-spite the diffi culty of the training,ffiCole declared himself too stub-born to quit and continued until

BEYOND CAMPUS

From Basic Training to Medical TrainingHow the U.S. Army led a Russian major to med school—even though he’ll turn 40 before he’s a doctor.

Now back in school,

he is think-ing about

trauma surgery or emergencymedicine as a specialty.

Josh Cole ’99

he’d earned his green beret. His military occupational specialty was as a medic, and for this hespent a year in training, which included working in a hospital trauma unit. This experience gave him his fi rst inkling of a new ca-fireer, a sense of a possible future.

In July 2007, two weeks after he’d joined the 10th Special Forces group in Colorado, Cole was in Iraq. His Special Forcescareer took him on a training mis-sion to Africa in 2008 and thenback to Iraq in 2009 for a second tour, for which he extended hisArmy stay. But at that point hehad to choose whether to re-enlist, and in the end he opted for a nonmilitary life. A postbac-calaureate program at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania allowed him to take all the science classes he’d avoided at Amherst and then apply to medical school.

As for being one of the oldest people in his class at The Com-monwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pa., Cole is sanguine. He doesn’t think about it much,he says, although he does realize

that it gives him welcome per-spective: Compared to younger students, he says, “it’s not that you’re any less stressed, butmaybe you have more experience of being stressed and are able toanticipate it and welcome it asopposed to letting it get in yourway.”

Although he is early in his med-ical school career, Cole is thinkingabout trauma surgery or emer-gency medicine as a specialty. In his trauma unit rotations during his medic course, he was drawnto the “hands-on aspect of doing the procedures, sort of being aplumber or a carpenter exceptwith much higher stakes.” Coledescribes his decision to leave the Army as a “selfi sh” one, but beingfia physician will allow him to servehis community and country in a diff erent way.ffff

Dickman blogs at www.lifedivided.blogspot.com. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post,tSan Francisco Chronicle and Christian Science Monitor.

Serving in the U.S. Army gave Cole his first inkling of a new career.

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Amherst Fall 2013 41

BY BEN GOLDFARB ’09

ENERGY U As the world’s easily accessible fuel reservoirs dwindle, the oil and gas industry is turning to new regions and technologies to extract fossil fuels—anddriving an energy boom in the process. “Even fi

g ve years ago, you heard peoplefi

talking about the possibility of peakoil,” says Lois Epstein ’83, head of The

g yg

Wilderness Society’s Arctic Program. y

“You rarely hear that anymore.”y gy g

Oil rigs now drill in ever-deeper waters, increasing the risk of major spills. Pipelines rupture almost 300 times per year, releasing toxic substances. Hydraulicfracturing, or fracking, has been accused of leaking chemicals and methane into groundwater. Can theUnited States develop these new energy sourceswithout ruining public lands and waters?

If the answer is yes, Epstein might be the person who fi gures out how it’s done. Epstein is a rare breedfiin environmental advocacy: a trained engineer with an intimate knowledge of oil and gas operations. She’s helped develop recommendations for avoid-ing offshore oil accidents, testififfff ed before Congressfiabout fracking and helped guide 2011’s federal Pipe-line Safety Act. A framed copy of that bill hangs inher offi ce in Anchorage, Alaska, bearing thank-you ffinotes from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

For Epstein and others, Alaska, endowed with big

The Frontier as Proving GroundCan we keep extracting fossil fuel without ruining the environment?

oil reserves and the country’s most pristine ecosys-tems, provides a testing ground for the coexistence of energy and the environment. “The conservationcommunity here has accepted that there’s going tobe drilling,” Epstein says. “The trick is to protect themost special places.”

In her offi ce in August, Epstein unfurls a map of ffithe National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an Indiana-sized chunk of oil-bearing land that’s home to wild-life and indigenous communities. Colorful icons speckle the map, denoting where Wilderness Society biologists have identified caribou herds, waterfowlfinesting areas, walrus hotspots and other fauna. A more technically detailed version of this map, she explains, helped the federal Bureau of Land Man-agement identify zones where drilling should beprohibited and areas where extraction could proceedwithout undue harm to the environment. She traces a fi nger across a patch of tundra with comparatively filittle wildlife: “If we’re going to have a pipeline, this is where we could do it.”

Part of Epstein’s job is to convince federal regula-tors to keep oil and gas rigs out of the Arctic Oceanuntil the oil industry has technology to match the re-gion’s uniquely challenging conditions. She’s spent years scrutinizing—and publicly criticizing—drillingplans submitted by industry and approved by regula-tors. According to a congressional report, after theGulf of Mexico spill in 2010, BP collected only 3 per-cent of the fl oating oil. Epstein maintains that in the flArctic’s rough waves, ice fl oes and darkness, copingflwith an accident would be exponentially harder. Yetcleanup plans still rely on skimmers and booms, thesame methods that failed BP in 2010.

“We’re not saying, ‘Don’t do it,’” Epstein says.“We’re saying, ‘Don’t do it until we’re ready.’” Butproceeding with caution becomes harder as oilprices climb.

Like most advocates concerned about climatechange, Epstein would like to see America’s power come primarily from renewable sources rather thanfrom coal, oil and gas. Yet despite advances in windand solar technology, fossil fuels still supply around 80 percent of the nation’s energy. As long as we’reextracting energy from the ground, Epstein wants to be sure we’re extracting it properly.

“The big picture is preventing low-frequency,high-consequence accidents, whether it’s the Chal-lenger shuttle disaster or a mar jor oil spill,” she says. “To do that, you need to create a culture of safety within the industry itself.” The evolution of that cul-ture will have repercussions far beyond Alaska.k

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

“The con-servation

community here hasaccepted

that there’sgoing to be

drilling.”

Lois Epstein

’83

ISTO

CK

Oil pumpjacks at twilight. New

technologies are driving an energy boom.

Page 44: Amherst Fall 2013

42 Amherst Fall 2013

AmherstCreates

artsnews

and reviews

Two ’57 alumni collaborated on a new play full of medieval myth and magic.

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05

THEATER U Magically reborn as a sorcerer-poet, a boy is adoptedby a fisherman and his fiwife and uses his gifts to shake things up in the king’s court. This is

g

the story of Taliesin, the latest from Ralph Lee’s

y

Mettawee River Theatre Company. The play is acollaboration between Lee, who is a puppeteer, and his classmate Robert Bagg, a poet.

The Poet The Poet andandthe Puppeteerthe Puppeteer

The puppets are the creation of Ralph Lee ’57. The script is by poet Robert Bagg ’57.

MIC

HA

EL B

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Amherst Fall 2013 43

The last time Lee and Bagg joined forces, they were seniors in college. Bagg hadtranslated Euripides’ satyr play The Cyclops, and Lee directed the production and created masks for the char-acters. Lee then encouraged Bagg to write a play based on The Odyssey, and together they dramatized its Nausicaa episode.

To date, Bagg’s translations of eight plays by Euripides and Sophocles have been the basis of nearly 70 productionsaround the world. His Oedipusthe King and Antigone are in-cluded in The Norton Anthol-ogy of World Literature. He also publishes original poetry, and he’s at work on a criticalbiography of poet Richard Wilbur ’42.

After Amherst, Lee worked as an actor, mask-maker and designer, creating props andpuppets for Shari Lewis’ TV show and the “Land Shark” figure for the iconicfi SaturdayNight Live sketch. He founded and directed the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, forwhich he won an Obie Award.He became artistic director of the Mettawee in 1976.

Based in Salem, N.Y., and Manhattan, the Mettawee (mettawee.org/wordpress) specializes in shows with “large puppets and visual eff ects that are especially ar-ffffranged for the out-of-doors,”Lee says. “And a lot of theplays are based on myths and legends.”

Early this year Lee wasseeking a writer to script Mettawee’s planned Taliesinshow. “I was really looking fora poet, because it’s all about poetry and inspiration,” hesays. “That’s why I called

Bob.” Bagg decided he owed a favor to the friend who had led him into the world of Greek drama.

Lee and his wife, costumedesigner and founding Met-tawee member Casey Comp-ton, wrote up a scenario, which Bagg fleshed out with fldialogue and lyrics based on existing translations of Welshfolklore and the writings of a real medieval poet who went by the name Taliesin.

They collaborated mainly by phone and computer—Bagg sending drafts from his home in Worthington, Mass., and Lee giving feedback fromNew York, where he was re-hearsing with the actors and creating masks and puppetsout of papier-mâché, card-board and other materials.

The Mettawee took theshow on the road in July, August and September this year, performing on lawnsand in parks throughout New York, Vermont and Massachu-setts—including at the Kō Fes-tival at Amherst. That show took place outside Wilder Ob-servatory, a spot well suited to theater, Lee says: It’s tucked away from the street, the sur-rounding trees enhance the acoustics, and the ground slopes gently, giving the audi-ence a good view.

“And occasionally,” he adds, “some old friends frommy Amherst days will showup.”

This time, it was Bagg whoshowed up, not just as a namecredited in the program but also as a viewer in the crowd.He declared the performance “just about perfect.”

Duke is the assistant editor of Amherst magazine.

SHORT TAKES

by SETH E. FH RANKFF

NEW EDEN PRESS

Actors and puppets from the Metawee River Theatre Company staged Taliesin, the work of two Amherst fraternity brothers, on a lawn at Amherst in July.

Art lovers can feast their eyes on four recent books by alumni: Ar-chivaria and Straight as the Pine, Sturdy as the Oak: Skipper & Cora Beals and Major & Helen Huey in the Early Years of Camp Leelanau for Boys, the Leelanau Schools, and the Homestead in Glen Arbor: Volume One: 1921–1963, both by Michael Huey ’87 (schlebrügge.ed-itor); Aimee E. Newell ’92’s Curi-osities of the Craft: Treasures from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts Collection (Grand Lodge of Ma-sons in Massachusetts and ScottishRite Masonic Museum & Library);and Hina Hirayama ’89’s With Éclat: The Boston Athenæum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston Athenæum). Poetry fans can peruse Hemingway in the Catskills and Other Poems(self-published), by Seth Frank’55, and Incomplete Strangers,by Robert McNamara ’71 (Lost Horse Press). David Willbern ’66brings us The American Popular Novel After World War II: A Study of 25 Best Sellers, 1947–2000 (Mc-Farland), while Hilary Plum ’04’s novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (University of Alabama Press) is a meditation upon the IraqWar. Launa Schweizer ’91 movesher family to France in Home Away: A Year of Misapprehensions, Trans-formations, and Rosé at Lunch (CreateSpace). Professor EmeritusLawrence A. Babb shows us Emer-ald City: The Birth and Evolution of an Indian Gemstone Industry(SUNY Press), and Bob Madgic ’60introduces us to The Sacramento: A Transcendent River (RiverbendBooks). William Rapp ’61 has cooked up Boil, Bubble, Toil and Trouble: An Analytical Exploration of Bubbles—fi nancial bubbles, that is fi(CreateSpace).

Katherine Duke ’05

Feast your eyes on four art books, peruse new poetry and get up to speed on fi nancial bubbles.

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44 Amherst Fall 2013

AMHERST CREATES

REVIEWED BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10

FICTION U Harlan Coben isa writer in the enviable posi-tion of not having to worry about negative reviews. Hisloyal readership snaps up his books (more than 20 novels,

including thenumber oneNew York Timesbestsellers Stay Close, Live Wire,Caught, Long Lost and HoldTight) as fast tt

as he can turn them out, and his shelf space in bookstores around the world is fi rmly ce-fimented. Perhaps the clearest sign of marketplace success:on the dust jacket of his latest off ering, ffff Six Years, his name is twice as large as the title.

If all of this sounds like athroat-clearing prelude to a snobby pan, sorry to disap-point. Coben is great at what he does, and what he doesis write thrillers (an outrightslur in the more tweedy liter-ary demimonde) that actu-ally thrill. Six Years (Dutton)is no exception.

The book is narrated from the point of view of Jake Fisher, a professor of political science at a smallfictional college calledfiLanford that readers of thismagazine may recognize.(There is a Johnson Chapel, a Valentine dining hall and a place in town called Judie’s that makes a killer popover.)

Six years prior to thenarrative present, Jake sat in the back pew of a church and watched the love of his life, an artist named Natalie,marry another man.He swore to leave the bride and groom alone in their new life, but six years later, after he stumbles acrossthe groom’s obituary, he decides to look herup. Easier said than done: nobody at the artist colony where Natalie and Jake met and spent most of their brief relationship seems to even remem-ber Natalie’s exis-tence, and the widow that the dead man left behind is someoneelse entirely.

As Jake becomes more and more ob-sessed with fi ndingfiNatalie, he is drawn into an increasingly complex plot involv-ing bank robbers, themafi a, corrupt police fiand even some of the faculty of the unas-suming college on the hill. Short chapters bear the plot along briskly through a series of well-earned twists and revelations toward a climactic shoot-out, and the book is defi nitely, asfithey say, hard to put down.

The reason it works sowell is Coben’s utter lack

of pretension. (Surely this sounds backhanded, but bear with me.) Capital-L Literary authors often gnash themselves to ribbons over their reluctance to write “entertaining” fiction, but fiCoben has no time for such

self-fl agellation. Jake Fisher flis a fi gure of pure aspiration,fia well-respected academicwho is also 6-foot-5 and builtlike a linebacker, able withequal aplomb to deliver alecture, fl irt with a secretary fland punch his way out of a

A Thriller That Actually Thrills

Harlan Coben ’84’s latest novel is set at a fictional college that might sound familiar: it has a Johnson Chapel, a Valentine dining hall and a place in town that makes a killer popover.

Coben’s utter lack of pretension is the reason his new novel works so well.

CLA

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Amherst Fall 2013 45

moving van driven by armedassailants. He’s got prob-lems, but they’re problems that can be solved with guile and force, and the readerwouldn’t mind having themas well, as long as they led to a similar adventure.

Compare this to the prob-lems of some more literary characters: disenchantmentwith modern life, estranged relationship with mother, family dying from famine,etc. No thanks. Or at least,not while I’m at the beach. When an author tries to tell a fun, fast story and also makelarger allegorical points about the human condition, it can be a disaster. Cobenknows better.

This is not to suggest that his writing is subpar on asentence-by-sentence level;Coben may not care muchfor descriptions of the moon or what it feels like to be ro-mantically depressed (andthank goodness for that) but his action crackles with nary an adverb to be found, andhis writing is largely devoidof the clichés that plague the genre (except for a single in-stance of the phrase “then it happened.”)

Are there formulas at work in Coben’s books? Yes, sure, perhaps more in structural elements and pacing than inplot. But what’s wrong witha good formula? Formulas are why a gun will fire, justfiabout every time you pull the trigger.

Mancusi has a column onThe Daily Beast and blogsat Galleyist.com. His writing has appeared in various other publications.

REVIEWED BY CATHERINE NEWMAN ’90

FICTION U Ingrid Yung is an ambitious,brilliant (and beautiful) Chinese-Americanattorney at a prestigious corporate law firm,where she is poised to become its first minorityfemale partner. To say that Ingrid’s experienceat the firm swings wildly between soaring and sucking is not a spoiler, but it is an understatement. Corporate highsand lows, you’ll learn, if you did notalready know, are different fromffthe highs and lows of, say, buying cheese at Whole Foods or submit-ting a cartoon caption to The New Yorker.rr We are in the belly of the beast.

From the first pages of The Partner Track (St. Martin’s Press), Helen Wan—herself associ-ate general counsel at the Time Inc. division of Time Warner—romances us with power, allthe while revealing the betrayal, bigotry andillusion congealed inside of it. Here is Ingrid, eu-

phoric about the closing of a deal: “I could feel the power and influence that coursed throughthese conference rooms like electrical currentshigh atop the city. ... It was thrilling, the promiseof such a world.”

Indeed. Except that such a world also turnsdout to be, more or less, Thursday night TAP.Ingrid refers to a golden-boy associate as “a smart guy, despite the rich jock pedigree.” She

compares the high-power associatehallway, with its polished brass name-plates, to “fraternity row.”

Sound familiar? I didn’t think so. Although, if you were a woman atAmherst in the ’80s or ’90s, thatdislocated feeling—of crashing a boys-only party—might resonate. All

the more so, I can only imagine, if you were awoman of color.

The novel’s plot kicks into high gear when,after a news-making racist parody at the an-nual summer outing, the firm scrambles to setin motion a “Diversity Initiative”—and forces Ingrid to be its poster girl, even as she works

furiously to close the biggest deal of her career. Until now, the firm’s diversity initiatives have been all about margaritas for Cinco de Mayo, dumplings for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. “We didn’t need [expletive] Dumpling Day in the firm cafeteria,” Ingrid rages. “What we needed was de-coder rings for all of the unwritten rules of survival here.” Suff ice it toffsay that things get ugly, fast, and the racism and sexism that have been simmering below the surface erupt geyserously.

Ingrid leans in to future glory—but her occasional backward glimpses are revealing. She was the kid who brought shrimp toast and scallion pancakes to school for lunch (she now makes a point of eating nondescriptly). She remem-

The Firm

The Partner Track, by Helen Wan ’95, romances uskwith power while revealing the betrayal, bigotryand illusion hidden inside of it.

SIG

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Wan’s debut novel is about an ambitious and brilliant corporate lawyer.

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AMHERST CREATES

It’s Seat Pitch, Not Legroombers, at 10, borrowing a business-letter book from the library to write Sears, at her parents’ urging, about a washing-machine warranty. And she reminiscesabout a girlhood visit to New York City, where, at the apartment building of a wealthy acquaintance, a doorman mistakes her father for a delivery boyand the skyline dazzles her: “Each indi-vidual glittering box of light—like gems strung along a necklace—seemed tome to be a tiny oblong window onto success, acceptance, respect, that is to say, a place in the world.” If you werewondering why Ingrid is so ambitious, so desperate to belong, look no further. But this place in the world turns out to be some costly real estate.

The Partner Track is laced with cor-kporate cultural phenomena and jargon that I found alternately alienating andfascinating, being the kind of personwho might occasionally stuff some-ffone’s wet snow boots with the unreadbusiness section of the Times. I’m suremany women in the corporate worldwill read this book and nod their heads,but I shook mine. Seriously?

Then again, my Town-of-Amherst life is more Portlandia than Mad Men,my curiosity about corporate culture more anthropological than intimate.While I check on the basement fermen-tation of my sauerkraut, someone is ordering the smoked squab at Jean-Georges! While I hold a foot up to themedicine-cabinet mirror to decide between my two pairs of Danskos, someone is checking out her JimmyChoos in an off ice wardrobe! ff

If I have a criticism of Wan’s gripping and delightfully horrifying book, it’sthat good and evil might be painted a little too starkly. Then again, it’s kind of a fairy tale, and you can’t help rootingfor Ingrid to get her Cinderella ending. Not the prince holding out her glass slipper, but Ingrid becoming her own hero, and the world itself turning out to fit just right.

Newman writes an advice column for Real Simple and blogs at benandbirdy.blogspot.com. She is the author of thememoir Waiting for Birdy.

REVIEWED BY PAUL STATT ’78

NONFICTION U I like to read. I also like to travel, and, like many an Amherst alum contemplating a trip, my first stopfibefore setting out is the bookstore.Visiting Sweden? Streetwise Stockholm, maybe a Kurt Wallander mystery, TheRough Guide and Teach Yourself Swedish.

Nobody ever reads up on the airplanetrip itself, because there has never been a Baedeker to the strangely miraculous and uncomfortable world of commer-cial airlines. Now there is. Full Upright and Locked Position (W.W. Norton) re-veals Not-So-Comfortable Truths about Air Travel Today, according to Mark Gerchick. A consultant to some big air-lines and busy airports since he stoppedworking for the Federal Aviation Ad-ministration and U.S. Department of Transportation, Gerchick has writtena companion to air travel that will en-lighten the curious and might even al-leviate some of our pain.

Gerchick’s book is not quite TeachYourself Airline-ish, but he does demys-tify the strange ways airlines mangle language. Passengerswere once called “the people” by fl ight crews; fltoday we are “paying cargo.” What you or I might call “legroom” is “seat pitch” according to the industry. The person responsible for putting your baggageon the plane is called a “thrower.” The thrower never loses your stuff : it’s “mis-ffffhandled baggage.” Overwrought pas-sengers are “the irates.” The crew calls the autopilot “George.” When the flesh-fland-blood pilot (who is still likely to be a middle-aged white man with military training) has to pee, the airline calls for a “physiological-needs break.”

If I were looking to rekindle theromance of fl ight—Gerchick con-flfesses that the thrill is gone for most passengers—I would learn to fly a plane. fl

Even First Class doesn’t seem all that luxurious. But a pilot’s life for me!Watching the stars andthe weather, coolly warn-ing, “We may encounter a little turbulence,” whichis pilot-speak for a tor-nado. Gerchick describesthe “strange duality tothe airline pilot’s mind—poets soaring throughthe skies and, at the samemoment, emotionless engineers.” Those laconic dreamers in the cockpitseem a bit arrogant in Full Upright, which is fi ne by fime. The guy can flyflfl al-most a million pounds of aluminum 10 miles above

Full Upright and Locked Position, by Mark Gerchick ’73, is a guidebook to the miraculous and headache-inducing world of commercial air travel.

LEN

SPO

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Gerchick believes that today’s pas-sengers need to adjust their expectations.

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Amherst Fall 2013 47

Motions of Mind and PlotPortrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, by Michael Gorra ’79, is an engrossing, accessible 2013 Pulitzer finalist.

the earth at 600 miles per hour. If my airline pilot thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room—well, I hope he is. It’s his employers who have made fl ying such aflsad way to travel.

Evidently, for most of the hundred-year history of the aviation industry,there was only one way to make more money: get bigger. Bigger planes, ex-panded routes, new passengers. That’swhy your relative cost to travel kept fall-ing until the 1970s. But the rising cost of jet fuel, which accounts for at least a third of their expenses, forced the bigairlines to look for new sources of rev-enue.

Their key innovation was to see thatwhat we used to called a “fl ight” was ac-fltually a “bundle,” including a hot meal, a cold drink, a movie, baggage delivery and a smiling agent. By “de-bundling”and asking customers to pay à la carte,the airlines could brag that they were“off ering consumer choice” and chargeffffmore.

I always travel in steerage, and Ifinishedfi Full Upright feeling sanguine about the safety of my upcoming Phila-delphia-Stockholm fl ight (although I’mflstill skeptical about the TSA security theater at the airport). But Gerchickcomes to a melancholy conclusion aboutthe industry: “As passengers we need to adjust our expectations. Airlines are a business that is fi nally making a littlefibit of money. The expectation of fl yingflas a pleasant adventure is an anachro-nism. That’s just not the case anymore, especially in coach. If you recognize that fact, it is a bit liberating.”

A bit liberating, perhaps, but I wouldprefer more “fl ights of fancy.” Bringing flmy expectations of fl yingfl down to earthjust seems wrong.

Airline argot for the aftermath of theunfortunate and one-sided encounterbetween a large waterfowl and a jet en-gine is “snarge.” It’s a delightful word and worth reading Full Upright just to learn it, but I wish the airlines were less determined to treat me like snarge, and Gerchick less phlegmatic about it.

Statt is a communications consultant in Philadelphia.

REVIEWED BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10

BIOGRAPHY U Three years after completing his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James published an essay, “The Art of Fiction.” Its claim, considered bold if not silly at the time, was thatfi ction deserved the same artistic footing as poetry fiand painting. It’s easy to forget that, at one time, to be a reader of novels was to be seen as unserious (and certainly unmanly) at best, and indolent or gossipy at worst.

James did not completely disagree: His essay makes a compelling argument for why the novel,

in its Victorian adolescence, had failed to live up to its potential, and where he thought it could be taken. In James’ lifetime, due largely to his own work, the novel would undergo a sea change. Once staid, self-repressing entertainment, novels became modernist representations of the actual human experience.

In his biography Portrait of a Novel (Liveright) Michael Gorra maps the entire web of experiential circumstance and psychological motivation that led to the publication of James’ most famous work. I use the term “biography” loosely, not because the book doesn’t take seriously the job of accounting for the facts of James’ life, but because it does so much more. The book is part character study, part close reading of the text and part travelogue; it’s hard to imagine an angle that Gorra mighthave missed. That the book will become indispensable for Jamesscholars is obvious. What’s more impressive is how engrossing it is for those who have read only a little James, or none at all.

Gorra’s astute observations about James’ work take a backseatto his sensitivity toward the internal machinations of the novelist’s mind. “He can’t help but observe the distinction between that which he knows and thatwhich he can admit that he knows,” Gorra writes. This psychological valence brilliantly mirrors James’ own greatest strength as a writer: his understanding that the motions of the mind are inseparable from the motions of plot. As Gorra weaves his reading of Portrait with his investigation into James’ personal travails, we see ironies emerge from his fi ction when plotted against hisfi life. Gorra writes that James, charged with disposing of the effects of a friend who had committed ffffsuicide (she had most probably been in love with him; James was most probably gay), made the odd decision to rent a gondola and attempt to sink her dresses in a Venetian canal. The sleeves of the dresses fi lled with air, resurfacing “like bal-filoons all around him … horrible black balloons.” It could be a scene straight out of one of his stories, the psychological manifesting itself as the physical.

In “The Art of Fiction,” James wrote: “It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a [novel] shall be in some degree apologetic—shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life ... [but]the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.” With this book, Gorra has shown not only how The Portrait of a Lady competed withthe life of Henry James but also how they refl ected one another, in ways of whichflJames himself might have been only subconsciously aware. k

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l AMHERST READS book club: Coben, Wan, Gerchick and Gorra are featured authors at www.amherst.edu/magazine

Page 50: Amherst Fall 2013

THANK YOU OUTHE ALUMNI SURVEY RESULTS ARE IN!

This spring 42% of Amherst alumni participated in a comprehensive alumni survey conducted in collaboration with a group of highly selective colleges and universities.

Survey responses were analyzed across six generations: World War II (classes of 1938-1949), Post World War II (1950-1967), Baby Boomer (1968-1978), Early Coeducation at Amherst (1979-1986), GenX (1987-2002), and Millennial (2003-2008). Alumni in the five most recent classes received a shorter survey focused on graduate school andtheir careers.

Alumni eagerly shared their responses—three open-ended questions concerning student life and strategic issues, as well as the opportunity to expand on any question in the survey yielded 11,856 responses, equal to 1,100 printed pages!

Evaluating the College: 92% are generally or very satisfied with their Amherst education.Across all generations, alumni found Amherst prepared them well to write clearly and effectively, acquire new skills and knowledge on their own, think logically and analytically, think critically and synthesize and integrate ideas and information. Alumni would like to see more leadership programming for students.

Satisfaction with Undergraduate Education at Amherst College:

Keeping in Touch, Connecting and Engaging with the College: Although electronic means of communication are cited, Amherst magazine is the most frequently mentioned source of college information for all generations.

Undergraduate Experience: Alumni from recent classes are more likely to reportworking for pay while in college, participating in community service, and receiving financial aid from the college.

Survey results will inform the college’s strategic planning process and advancement’sefforts to engage alumni with Amherst. These are two of many ways the survey findings will be used, and featured, over the next several months.

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REMEMBER WHEN

BY DAVID J. GREENBLATT ’66, P’15

“FOUR WEEKS AGO HE WAS HERE. We saw him; we heard him; and we knew him. … Now he is gone.”

Cal Plimpton addressed a grim college community in JohnsonChapel on the evening of Nov. 22, 1963, his voice quivering. The brief speech ended with: “Letus stand a moment in silence, tohonor him; then let us go and dothe work he couldn’t complete.”

JFK’s visit to Amherst a month earlier was exhilarating. Thepreparations were frantic, thesteps of his schedule precisely choreographed. The media and Secret Service swarmed over campus. Three military helicop-ters arrived. Kennedy gave hisnow-archival speech in the old cage. Then the motorcade, the Frost Library groundbreaking,and it was over. JFK departed and returned to work.

I missed the whole thing. In

Upon learningthe presidenthad beenkilled, onesophomore went to his room in North, closed the door and satdown to readUncle Tom’s Cabin.

that era, the football team trav-eled by bus to a hotel in Holyoke on the night before the home-coming game. Purpose: to escape the chaos and sleeplessness of homecoming weekend. We ar-rived back at Pratt Field late that Saturday morning. The Frost ceremony ran long, so the stands were empty at the start of the game. Wesleyan scored on the fi rst two possessions. The standsfieventually filled, and we won.fi

I was raised in Newton, Mass., a few miles from JFK’s birthplacein Brookline. Growing up, I neverknew that a New England accent existed, let alone that I had one. Professor Allen Guttmann was unhappy with JFK’s syntax. “To each question,” grumbled Dr. Guttmann, “he responds: ‘Well, Iwould say that the answer to that would be this.’”

After my 11:20 class on Nov. 22, I returned to North, where an agitated John Swinton King ’66said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” We

crowded around an old radio in classmate Russ Clark’s room. “Is he OK?” I asked. No one knew. Iwent to Williston for a 12:20 math class with a gentle and revered senior professor, Robert Breusch.Midway through, the chapel bells began to toll slowly. In heavily ac-cented English, Professor Breusch said softly, “Well, I think that’senough.” He set down the chalk.

Jonathan Wolpaw ’66 met me at the top of the stairs in North.There were tears in his eyes. “He’s dead.”

I was unprepared, and there-fore vulnerable to the shock and horror and hurt. I pretended not to think about it. With the door to my room closed and locked, I sat down to read Uncle Tom’s Cabinfor American Studies 21. Many hours later I re-emerged, hungry and tired of reading. Bob Lewin ’66 and I walked into a dark and silent town. We found an open pizza place, then moved on to Cal’s meeting in the chapel.

The next morning I took thebus home to Newton. On Sunday I went to Catholic Mass and came home in time to see Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on livetelevision (later my grandmother asked, “Is this bad for the Jews?”).

Over the next few weeks, angry at my own vulnerability, I took steps to protect myself. I tried to picture any and all possible trag-edies, losses and disasters. If such things did happen, at least I would be unsurprised. (To some degreethat system has worked.) On cam-pus, we grudgingly resumed life, but youth and excitement and optimism were done. k

Greenblatt is on the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine, where he is professor of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

© C

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S T U D E N T S | E D U C A T I O

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1500 more alumni are needed to support growing

student interest.

Think Pathways isn’t for you? You are not too young,

or too old, and the life choices you’ve made and

who you’ve become may be just the right match for

an Amherst student.

It’s an opportunity to make a difference in students’

lives – while they make a difference in yours.

Pathways MentoringA little advice goes a long way.

Join fellow alumni and register to be a mentor today!

amherst.edu/alumni/pathways

Amherst Students Need You!

Pathways by the Numbers

370 students and counting

610 alumni and counting

95 current mentoring relationships

Page 53: Amherst Fall 2013

THEN&

NOWFOOTBALL FANS

In 1962,back whenAmherst men took dates to football games, the home team had its best season in a decade. As reported inthe Alumni News, theclincher wasthe Williams game, which Amherst won 7–0 by scoring with 88 seconds left to play.

This fall,studentsand alumni cheered from the stands of arenovated Pratt Field,which has artificial turf and a new fieldhouse, press box and track—not to mention the best fansaround.

1962Pratt Field

2013The firstgame at the renovated field

OLD PHOTO FROM AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES; NEW PHOTO BY JOYZEL ACEVEDO ’15

PO Box 5000Amherst, MA 01002

AMHERST Nonprofit Organization

U.S. Postage Paid

Permit No. 24280

Burlington, VT 05401