12597 OFC_OBC - Haverford College

Alumni Magazine Winter2003 

Paper 

Trails 

ANDREW SILK’S LEGACY I 

L.A. STORY: JOHN CARROLL 

I 

DAVE BARRY’S RULES

A Natural Fit 

There was a time when prominent newspaper journalists were associated 

with large universities with graduate programs, like Columbia, Missouri, 

Northwestern, and Syracuse. Times have changed. As Dennis Stern ’69 points 

out on page 38, there is increasing specialization in the newspaper business. 

Haverford is not about specialization. In the true spirit of liberal learning, 

the College does not offer a major in journalism or communications (nor 

do Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore, for that matter). There are no journalism 

courses. Even so, Haverford has produced what seems to be an inordinate 

number of journalists for a college its size. Haverford prepares students for 

a lifetime of asking questions, a lifetime of thinking analytically. Haverford 

and journalism are a natural fit. 

Haverford also delivers exposure to Haverford alumni who’ve gone on to 

careers in journalism. The Silk Journalism Panel (see p. 27), is the annual 

on-campus opportunity for the bi-college community to meet 

and hear from journalism’s front lines. 

There’s also some history. Felix Morley ’15, left the editorship 

of the Washington Post, where he’d won a Pulitzer Prize for 

editorial writing in 1936, to serve as Haverford’s sixth president. 

Haverford alumni have claimed four Pulitzers in the past 20 

years: David Wessel ’75 in 1984; Dave Barry ’69 in 1988; 

Roy Gutman ’66 in 1993; and Jack Rakove ’68 in 1997. 

The person who perhaps best represents journalism on campus 

Felix Morley today is director of athletics and associate dean Greg Kannerstein 

(1894-1982) 

’63. Greg uses skills he honed as a newspaper reporter in 

Philadelphia and Montgomery, Ala., to bring us “Scoreline.” While his carefully 

crafted prose keeps the Ford faithful apprised of athletic endeavors, he 

also provides rich reminders of Haverford’s history, traditions, and its connections 

to the world beyond 370 Lancaster Avenue. Greg’s guidance has 

helped dozens of Fords get started on their newspaper careers. Still others 

work for magazines, broadcast media, and other outlets. 

Are newspapers still relevant in this age of the Internet and 24/7 cable 

news access? I hope the stories and profiles we’ve gathered here help 

answer that question. The common thread of a Haverford education pulls 

them all together. In David Wessel’s words, Haverford affords students 

“confidence, it trains them to ask good questions, it fosters critical thinking. 

Haverford is the best journalism school there is.” 

Stephen Heacock 

Executive Director of Marketing & Communications 

Jill Sherman 

Vice President for 

Institutional Advancement 

Stephen Heacock 

Editor, Executive Director of 

Marketing & Communications 

Tom Ferguson 

Production Manager, 

Class News Editor 

Brenna McBride 

Staff Writer 

Hilary O'Sullivan 

Office Manager 

Acquire, LLC 

Graphic Designer 

Contributing Writers 

Dave Barry ’69 

Edgar Allen Beem 

Jude Harmon ’03 

Steve Manning ’96 

Garret McVaugh ’04 

Bob Mong ’71 

Michael Paulson ’86 

Joe Quinlan ’75 

Louise Tritton 

Virtual Communications 

Committee 

Norman Pearlstine ’64, Chairman 

Editorial Advisory 

Committee 

Violet Brown 

Emily Davis ’99 

J. David Dawson 

Delsie Phillips 

Jennifer Punt 

Willie Williams 

Haverford College Marketing 

and Communications Office 

370 Lancaster Avenue 

Haverford, PA 19041 

(610) 896-1333 

©2003 Haverford College

The Alumni Magazine of Haverford College Winter 2003 

23 

FEATURES 

PaperTrails 

27 

31 

16 Crusade for Truth 

The Boston Globe breaks one of the 

most significant stories of our time. 

by Michael Paulson ’86 

23 Taking the Lead in L.A. 

John Carroll ’63 brings quiet leadership 

to the Los Angeles Times. 

by Joe Quinlan ’75 

27 A Legacy in Print 

The Silk family and its tradition 

of journalism at Haverford. 

by Brenna McBride 

DEPARTMENTS 

2 The View from Founders 

3 Main Lines 

6 Reviews 

8 Notes from the 

Alumni Association 

34 

31 Good News 

How the Dallas Morning News is working 

in a crowded media environment. 

by Bob Mong ’71 

34 Paper Chase 

Nicholson Baker ’79’s quest 

to save old newspapers. 

by Edgar Allen Beem 

38 Paper Trails 

Notes from the workplace. 

9 Ford Games 

13 Faculty Profile 

43 Class News 

60 Moved to Speak 

38 

Paper 

Trails 

Haverford Alumni Magazine is printed four times a year: Winter, Spring, Summer, 

and Fall. Please send change of address information to: Haverford College in care 

of Jeanette Gillespie, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041, or via e-mail: 

jgillesp@haverford.edu. 

C Haverford Alumni Magazine is printed on recycled paper. 

On the Cover 

Photography by Acquire, LLC.

The View from Founders 

by Tom Tritton, President 

On Cooperation 

2 Haverford Magazine 

Most of us enjoy the spirit of competition 

we have with other colleges and universities. 

Regular readers of this magazine 

will immediately recognize our indecorous 

lack of restraint in boasting about this 

College. Numerical counts are especially 

attractive when displaying our competitiveness: 

the number of books in the library; the 

SAT scores of our students; the quantity of 

computers on campus, etc. Less quantitative, 

but no less appealing, are the famous 

and accomplished alumni whose stories we 

love to recount in our publications. This 

president is also prone to crowing about the 

scholarly awards, prizes, grants, papers, 

books, and other accolades garnered by the 

faculty. And of course, who can resist the 

outcome of athletic competition as a surrogate 

for determining the better school on 

any given day (FYI: Haverford has won the 

coveted Hood Trophy for four straight years). 

Beguiling as statistics, figures, records, 

victories, and related competitive comparisons 

might be, in the cold light of reflection 

most of us also realize the enduring value of 

cooperation. Franklin Roosevelt had it about 

right when he said: “Competition has been 

shown to be useful up to a certain point and 

no further, but cooperation, is the thing we 

must strive for today.” Or as the Beatles put 

it: “All you need is love.” 

Academic cooperation abounds. Most 

recognizable to alumni (and equally attractive 

to prospective students) is the longstanding 

collaboration with Bryn Mawr 

College. It seems nothing short of miraculous 

that the two colleges manage such a 

thriving cooperation without contracts, 

memoranda of understanding, or other legal 

niceties. Without the slightest doubt, each 

of our well-earned distinctive characters is 

not in the least bit threatened by close partnership. 

We have multiple models: joint 

departments (e.g., French, Career 

Development) where a single unit serves 

both colleges equally; counterpart departments 

(like chemistry, philosophy and a 

host of others) whose dual existence extends 

the intellectual community for students and 

faculty alike; and non-counterpart departments 

(e.g., astronomy, geology, religion, 

art history, among others) that a small 

school might be unable to sustain without 

dividing the tasks. This approach makes so 

much sense and adds so much to the experience 

here that I’m surprised more places 

don’t emulate us. Maybe our Quaker roots 

provide better lubrication for successful 

interaction than those with lesser origins! 

Tri-college cooperation is also important. 

Although Swarthmore is a bit further 

away than Bryn Mawr, we all nonetheless 

realize that there are big gains to be made 

through collaborative projects. We do so 

in Magill Library via a single electronic card 

catalog for the three collections; in academics 

through a unified tri-college online 

course listing; and in technology by sharing 

a high-speed Internet pipe for all our data 

and networking with the outside world. 

Blue Bus service was escalated a couple of 

years ago to facilitate student movements 

among the three campuses. We also realized—and 

it seems so obvious in retrospect—that 

it is more efficient to move one 

faculty member than 15 students, so we 

trade course assignments with faculty on 

the other campuses to enrich student experience 

with new professors (I think of it 

irreverently as “Swaps with Swat”). 

Faculty members with complementary 

interests commonly teach courses jointly. 

We also have some interesting juxtapositions 

of administrators with faculty, who collaborate 

on imaginative courses that would 

be much more difficult for either party to 

create alone. One example that comes to 

mind is Athletic Director Greg Kannerstein 

’63 and History Professor Alex Kitroeff, who 

teach “Sport and Society,” which examines 

the evolution of sport during the 19th and 

20th centuries. As you might imagine, the 

course is immensely popular since it deals 

with the intersection of social change, spectacle, 

and high performance. Another sample 

of collaboration is Provost David Dawson 

and English Professor Steve Finley, who are 

offering a new course through the 

Humanities Center called “Interpretation 

and the Other: Meaning, Understanding, 

and Alterity.” This multidisciplinary course 

focuses on classical perspectives on language 

and meaning, and examines case studies of 

interpretation that embody, amplify, or challenge 

these concepts. The course gives special 

emphasis to the ethical dimensions of 

the reader’s experience, as students are invited 

to ponder literary critic Hillis Miller’s 

hopeful admonition that “literature is the 

most serious and responsible form of writing,” 

for it often seeks to serve “the democracy 

to come.” 

I’ll confess that I have a hankering to 

teach a course some year on science fiction, 

possibly with an emphasis on biology and 

life science in the SF literature. In the spirit 

of cooperation, English Professor Maud 

McInerney (herself a medievalist) and I have 

discussed doing this course collaboratively 

and even have developed a few surreptitious 

ideas for the content and syllabus. Do you 

suppose that the College’s Educational 

Policy Committee will approve? 

Assuming that comparisons are useful, 

I’ll close by noting that, whereas in competition 

we seek to gain an advantage over 

someone else, in cooperation we work 

together. Admittedly, each approach has an 

appropriate time and place. Yet, there is a 

flavor of equity about cooperation that is 

at once both very Quakeresque and very 

Haverfordian—the right kind of training/education 

for students working on 

“peace and global citizenship” or “integrated 

natural sciences” (or for that matter 

for those simply planning to get along 

with others). So, the next time you are on 

campus, please go to an athletic event or 

an interscholastic debate and cheer for 

Haverford to win, but be sure to also go to 

a class and give an even bigger cheer for 

the win-wins of cooperation.

Main Lines 

Admission CD-ROM 

Wins Gold 

Haverford’s Office of Admission recently 

received national recognition for 

its CD-ROM, “A Place To Grow.” 

The disk, which includes an interactive 

video, the College viewbook, links to areas 

of Haverford’s web site, and a printable application, 

was among the winners of the18th 

Annual Admissions Advertising Awards. 

Produced by Barrington Communications 

of Los Angeles, Haverford’s CD-ROM 

won a gold medal in the video viewbook 

category for colleges and universities with 

enrollments of 2,000 students or less and 

was one of only 14 submissions to be 

named “Best of Show,” for “exhibiting the 

highest production standards, creativity 

and professionalism.” 

This national competition is sponsored 

by Admissions Marketing Report, part of 

the HMR Publications Group (www.hmrpublicationsgroup.com), 

which reports 

on marketing news and information from 

across the country in the fields of admissions 

and healthcare marketing. 

A Record Year for 

Admission 

It is taking some heavy lifting to narrow 

the field for Haverford’s Class of 2007. 

Nearly 3,000 high-school students applied 

last year, the largest applicant pool in the 

College’s history. The exact number of 

applicants, 2,981, was nearly 15 percent 

more than the previous year and 6 percent 

more than the previous record. 

Director of Admission Delsie Phillips 

attributes this success to the College’s vital 

network of volunteers, her dedicated staff, 

and her award-winning mini-CD. 

“Our staff and alumni volunteers were 

highly visible,” she explains, “and we traveled 

to as many college fairs, schools, and 

recruiting events as time and money would 

allow. We sent out more than 33,000 CD’s 

and handed them out at every venue. We 

also hosted more groups on campus and 

were able to increase our mailing and e- 

mailing contacts using sophisticated 

recruitment technology. A lot of this can 

be attributed to plain hard work. We are, 

like other institutions, enjoying the beginning 

of a Baby Boom cohort, but that alone 

doesn’t account for a 15 percent jump in 

one year.” 

Whitehead Wins in New York 

On Feb. 1, 2003, John Whitehead ’43, emeritus member of the Board 

of Managers and honorary co-chair of the “Educating to Lead, Educating 

to Serve” campaign, received the Robert L. Payton Award for Voluntary 

Service at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education 

(CASE) District II Achievement and Recognition Awards ceremony 

at Tavern on the Green. The award is given annually to 

“an individual who demonstrates leadership in advancement 

programs, furtherance of the philanthropic tradition, and public 

articulation of needs, goals, and issues in education.” 

Winter2003 3

Main Lines 

Conroy Represents 

Writers’ Workshop 

in Washington 

Frank Conroy ’58 took part in a White 

House ceremony on Thursday, Feb. 27, to 

accept the National Humanities Medal for 

the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop 

— the first university-based organization 

to be presented the Medal. Administered 

by the National Endowment for the 

Humanities, the Medal “honors individuals 

or groups whose work has deepened 

the nation’s understanding of the humanities, 

broadened citizens’ engagement with 

the humanities, or helped preserve and 

expand Americans’ access to important 

resources in the humanities.” 

In 1987, when Conroy became the fifth 

director of the University of Iowa Writers’ 

Workshop, then University President James 

O. Freedman predicted, “his appointment 

insures that The Writers’ Workshop will 

remain the most distinguished program of 

its kind in the country.” 

President George W. Bush stands with the recipients of the 2002 National Humanities 

Medal in the Oval Office on Feb. 27, 2003. From left: Joseph McDade, who accepted the 

award on behalf of Frankie Hewitt of Ford’s Theatre; Ellen Carroll Walton, who accepted 

the award on behalf of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union; Dr. Donald Kagan 

of Yale University; author Patricia MacLachlan; Brian Lamb of C-SPAN; Art Linkletter of 

the United Seniors Association; Frank Conroy ’58, who accepted the award on behalf of the 

Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and Justice Clarence Thomas, who accepted the award on behalf 

of Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. White House photo by Paul Morse. 

Faculty Notes 

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation 

Teacher Scholar Award for 2002 

has been awarded to Karin Åkerfeldt, 

associate professor of chemistry. Only six 

awards were made this year and only one 

other to a teacher at an undergraduate 

institution. 

Professor of Physics Suzanne Amador 

Kane’s article “Quantitative Chirality Measures 

Applied to Domain Formation in 

Langmuir Monolayers” appeared in Volume 

18, Issue 25 of the journal Langmuir. 

Rebecca Compton, assistant professor 

of psychology, contributed “Interhemispheric 

interaction facilitates face processing” 

to the November issue of the 

journal Neuropsychologia. The article 

details the results of Compton’s study, 

which confirms that it is easier for people 

to recognize emotional expressions on 


human faces when the brain uses both 

hemispheres to process the information. 

Richard Freedman, professor of music, 

attended the conference on Music and 

Melancholy, 1400-1800, at Princeton University 

October 26-27. He contributed the 

paper “Listening to Melancholy: Lassais 

un triste coeur and the French Medical 

Tradition.” 

The selection committee for the Mellon 

New Directions Fellowships selected from 

Haverford Laurie Kain Hart, associate professor 

of anthropology, and Michael Sells, 

professor of religion and Emily Judson 

Baugh and John Marshall Gest Professor in 

Comparative Religion. Each fellowship carries 

with it a semester of leave and a $5,000 

grant that may be used to defray research, 

travel or educational expenses related to 

the proposed fellowship. 

Assistant Professor of Peace Studies and 

Anthropology Martin Hébert presented 

his paper “Peace Studies and Popular Culture: 

Addressing Militarism in the Classroom” 

at the Peace and Justice Studies 

Annual Conference, held at Georgetown 

University October 4-6. Hébert also 

attended the Canadian Association for 

Latin American and Caribbean Studies in 

Montreal October 24-26, where he presented 

“From the Exchange of Saints to 

the Zapatour: Pilgrimage as a Political Ritual 

in Rural Mexico.” 

At the Annual Meeting of the American 

Academy of Religion, held in Toronto 

November 22-25, Assistant Professor of 

Religion Tracey Hucks chaired a session 

for the Womanist Group, honoring the 

work of Delores Williams and her book 

Sisters in the Wilderness.

2003 Honorary Degree Recipients 

The College will confer honorary 

degrees on the following four recipients 

during Commencement Day exercises on 

Sunday, May 18, 2003: 

Hafsat Abiola, a Nigerian whose father, 

the elected president of Nigeria, was 

denied the opportunity to form a government, 

deposed by a military takeover, and 

died in prison in June of 1998. Her mother 

worked for his release during the 

imprisonment and was gunned down by 

agents of the military in 1996. Hafsat graduated 

from Harvard in 1997 and established 

an organization memorializing her 

mother’s life called the Kudirat Initiative 

for Democracy (KIND). She has served as 

the president of the International African 

Students Association, as a Fetzer Fellow, 

and on the boards of the State of the 

World Forum and the Special Olympics. 

She currently works on issues of women 

and youth leadership programs, conflict 

resolution and prevention programs, and 

supporting multinationals in developing 

their roles as global citizens. 

David Bourns, head of the Paul Cuffee 

Charter School in Rhode Island. The 

school, named after an 18th-century 

Quaker who spearheaded a movement to 

resettle slaves in Africa, is in its second 

year of operation and has a mission to 

increase the diversity of students pursuing 

scientific and technical careers and 

give them high quality academic training. 

Prior to taking his current position, 

Bourns served as head of George School 

for 21 years and spent his life preoccupied 

with issues of social justice, nonviolence, 

and conflict mediation. He is also 

a Quaker, a sailor and shipbuilder, and a 

furniture maker. 

David Maybury-Lewis, born in Hyderabad, 

Pakistan in 1929. He received his 

bachelor of arts degree from Oxford University 

in 1952. Four years later he earned 

his Ph.D. in anthropology from Oxford 

University and then emigrated to the 

Unites States in 1960 to join the Harvard 

University faculty as a cultural anthropologist. 

His interests encompass cultural 

survival of tribal people and ethnic 

minorities. He has authored several books 

including Dialectical Societies: The Ge 

and Bororo of Central Brazil and The 

Attraction of Opposites: Thought and 

Society in the Dualistic Mode. Through 

his work Maybury-Lewis has chronicled 

the lives of the indigenous peoples of the 

Americas, especially Brazil. Because of his 

contributions to Brazilian social science, 

Maybury-Lewis was awarded the Grand 

Cross of the Order of Scientific Merit in 

1997, Brazil’s highest academic award. In 

the spring of 1998 he was awarded the 

Anders Retzuis gold medal of the Swedish 

Society of Anthropology and Geography 

by the King of Sweden. 

Willie Ruff, hornist and bassist of the 

Mitchell-Ruff Duo. He graduated from 

Yale as both an undergraduate and graduate 

student and has been on the faculty 

at the Yale School of Music since 1971, 

teaching music history, ethnomusicology, 

instrumental arranging, and an interdisciplinary 

seminar on rhythm. He is also 

the Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship 

Program at Yale which brings 

together world-class musicians, college 

students, and young musicians from the 

new Haven public schools. Ruff has written 

widely on Paul Hindemith, Duke 

Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn and has created 

the interdisciplinary “Planetarium 

for the Ear” on the musical astronomy of 

the 17th-century scientist Johannes 

Kepler. He has also written on music and 

dance in Russia, jazz in China, and is at 

work on a book, Six Roads to Chicago 

exploring cultural life in that city. 

Ken Koltun-Fromm, assistant professor 

of religion, traveled to the Association 

for Jewish Studies Conference in Los 

Angeles, December 13-17. He chaired two 

committee meetings: one for the Works 

in Progress Group and one for Aesthetics. 

Naomi Koltun-Fromm, assistant professor 

of religion, presented a paper on the 

oral transmission of Biblical interpretive 

traditions between Jews and Christians in 

third and fourth century Persian 

Mesopotamia at the Association for Jewish 

Studies Conference in Los Angeles, 

December 13-17. She also chaired a panel 

called “Jews and Romans in Society and 

Imagination.” 

Assistant Professor of Anthropology 

Zolani Noonan-Ngwane attended the 

American Anthropological Association 

conference in New Orleans November 20- 

24, where he contributed his paper 

“Anthropology and Changing Geographics 

of Migrancy in Rural South Africa” for 

the panel “New Directions in Southern 

African Research.” 

Robert Scarrow, professor of chemistry, 

was a co-author for the article “The 

First Example of a Nitrile Hydratese 

Model Complex that Reversibly Binds 

Nitriles,” which appeared in Vol. 124, 

Issue 38 of the Journal of the American 

Chemical Society. 

Margaret Schaus, reference librarian, 

has received a $20,000 grant from the Delmas 

Foundation to continue work on 

FEMINAE, a database index on medieval 

women and gender. 

Professor of Philosophy Kathleen 

Wright attended the SPEP (Society for Phenomenology 

and Existential Philosophy) 

annual meeting at Loyola University in 

Chicago, October 10-12. She presented her 

paper “Gadamer Between Hölderlin and 

Heidegger.” 

Winter2003 5

Reviews 

by the Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe 

Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, 2002 

When the Boston Globe began reporting on the child sex 

abuse scandal of Rev. John Geoghan it had no idea that it had 

uncovered what would become the greatest scandal ever to 

rock the American Catholic Church. In August 2001 the Globe 

filed a legal motion to unseal the Geoghan papers 

that were so jealously protected by high-ranking 

church officials. What began as one article 

about one pedophile priest soon snowballed 

into the startling realization that the Boston archdiocese 

had knowingly transferred from parish 

to parish more than 70 pedophile priests over the 

last 50 years. The investigative efforts of the Globe’s 

select staff, including Haverford alumnus Michael 

Paulson ’86, laid bare hundreds of confidential 

memos, letters, and legal documents that incontrovertibly 

attest the culpability of the Catholic hierarchy 

in the pedophile priest-shuffling scandal. At 

the center of the scandal was Cardinal Bernard F. 

Law who wrote warm letters of thanks to priests like 

Geoghan while simultaneously paying out millions in hush 

money to keep victims silent. Law coddled and protected the 

pedophile priests, and showed only contempt and disdain for 

their victims and the victims’ families. 

Betrayal offers a chilling account of how pedophile priests 

gained access to the children they would molest. The Rev. John 

Geoghan became the most infamous example of predatory 

pedophiles who manipulated their proximity to children, and 

the trust that their roman collars afforded them, to repeatedly 

molest the children of low-income, single mothers who 

naïvely welcomed the priests into their homes. Undoubtedly, 

these mothers believed that Geoghan would be the 

father figure that their sons lacked, and more he 

would instruct them in the ways of the Church. 

Geoghan’s depravity knew no limits and he indeed 

instructed his young victims, requiring them to 

recite their prayers even as he molested them. 

Profiles of other priests similar to Geoghan, 

including Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, 

and Ronald Paquin, reveal individual strategies 

that varied one from the other. The common 

denominator is the cold, calculated way these 

pedophile priests used their socio-religious 

status in the communities they served to violate 

the innocence of their victims. 

Perhaps the most disturbing element of 

this crooked story is how bishops intimidated and threatened 

victims’ families who confronted the hierarchy in an 

attempt to remove the pedophile offenders from their parishes. 

The Church’s desire to avert scandal paved the way for repeat 

offenders to seek new prey in fresh parishes where unsuspecting 

parents couldn’t protect their children from the predatory 

pastors. What’s worse, because the victims’ cases were 

settled privately out of court and sealed with legally binding 

hush money, the magnitude of the problem was kept under 

Edited by Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck 

Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American 

Design and Consumption, 1720-1920 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2002 

Long-time Haverfordians sometimes lament the absence 

on campus of such Quaker luminaries as Isaac Sharpless, 

Rufus Jones, and Douglas Steere, believing that exploration 

of Quaker concerns may be lacking without them. Yet, even 

a cursory look at Quaker Aesthetics shows that Quaker scholarship 

and dialogue are alive and well on our campus. Edited 

by Emma Lapsansky, professor of history and curator of the 

Special Collections at Haverford, and Anne Verplanck, curator 

of prints and paintings at Winterthur Museum and an 

associate professor in the Winterthur/University of Delaware 

Program in Early American Culture, this book examines the 

visual evidence for what might be called “Quaker material 

culture.” As written in the preface: “The defining tension for 

Friends is how to live ‘in the world but not of it,’ and their 

relationship to both the creation and consumption of material 

goods is a dramatic manifestation of that tension.” This 

book takes the original approach of looking for evidence of 

this tension in the writings, dress, furniture, houses, portraiture, 

meetinghouse architecture, and professions of 

Quakers in the Delaware Valley, predominantly during the 


17th, 18th and 19th centuries. 

Two introductory chapters set 

the context for this scholarship. 

Readers who are familiar with the 

claim by present-day Quakers 

that “you are likely to receive a 

different definition of Quakerism 

from every Friend you ask” 

will appreciate the difficulty of 

summarizing Quaker beliefs. 

Undaunted, Emma Lapsansky finds in this dilemma a complexity 

and depth that makes the task irresistible. She allows 

that “Quakerism is steeped in a number of contradictory values: 

equality and separateness, intellectual preciousness and 

anti-intellectualism, an emphasis on excellence and a focus 

on humility, an appreciation for high-quality workmanship 

coupled with a ban on ostentation (p. 3),” and is curious to 

see how these play out in the lifestyles of the Quakers 

described later in the book. 

In the second chapter, J. William Frost, professor of

wraps. That is until the watershed events of 2001 that brought 

the Church to its knees, as district attorneys all over the country 

demanded the immediate release of all Church documents 

pertaining to local priests who had been accused of pedophilia 

over the last 50 years. Many church officials, particularly 

Cardinal Egan of New York, resisted the legal demands of the 

state that chastised the Church for presuming itself above 

civil law designed to protect the most vulnerable citizens of 

American society. 

At the end of the day, a crisis that had its epicenter in 

Boston had produced tremors all over the nation. Metropolitan 

areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth, and 

New Orleans soon began reporting similar incidents of Church 

cover-ups. The Globe estimated that more than 1,500 priests 

over the last 50 years have sexually abused tens of thousands 

of minors in America alone. What would happen to the Boston 

Archdiocese would be indicative of a larger trend throughout 

the United States, and even abroad. 

Suddenly, after having dismissed the pedophile crisis as 

distinctly American, the Pope called for an emergency meeting 

of the American prelates in an attempt to reign in an 

increasingly agitated American Church. Many speculate that 

Law wanted to resign, but was forced to maintain his office 

by the Pope who feared the creation of a precedent that could 

be invoked to oust bishops in other dioceses across the U.S. 

Shocked to the core by what can only be described as betrayal, 

the laity of the American Church rose in angry protest to the 

way the hierarchy, particularly the Vatican, was attempting to 

usurp the energy of the people by reaffirming the unmitigated 

authority of the Roman Magisterium. Demanding reform, 

many Catholics insisted that the Vatican reconsider its stance 

on a range of issues from the gender-exclusivity and celibacy 

of the priesthood to the place of homosexuals in the Church. 

With the same desire for preserving power that led to the sex 

scandal, the Pope issued orders banning Catholics from coalescing 

to express dissent with the Church’s teachings and pastoral 

methods. Harvard Medical School faculty, Dr. James E. 

Muller, started a group called Voice of the Faithful in Wellesley, 

Mass., which has gained force and spread to other areas of the 

country where educated Lay people sharply criticize the 

Vatican’s culture of orthodoxy. In prosecuting inquisition 

against groups such as these, the Vatican has struggled to prevent 

a schism in a Church that is increasingly torn over the 

possibility of reform, and the manner in which it should be 

executed. 

An undercurrent of dissent has characterized American 

Catholicism since measures were proposed during the Second 

Vatican Council (1962-1965) that empowered the laity to participate 

more fully in the liturgical and sacramental life of the 

Church. As the laity’s responsibility for maintaining the Church 

increases due to the ever-diminishing number of religious, they 

will expect a greater role in governing the Church. Betrayal 

offers ammunition to those who counter the Church’s arrogance 

of power, revealing how the hierarchy’s culture of secrecy 

reversed the gospel imperative to uplift the weak and humble 

the mighty: A must-read for anyone who cares about the 

future of the Catholic Church in America. 

—Jude Harmon ’03 

Quaker history and director of the Friends Historical Library 

at Swarthmore College, focuses on the writings of George 

Fox, William Penn, Robert Barclay, Rufus Jones, Amelia 

Gummere, and others to trace the evolution of “plainness” 

into “simplicity” in Quaker material culture. According to 

Frost, the commitment to plainness was a denial of popular 

social and religious practices in 17th century Britain and 

America, and included dressing without ornamentation, 

avoiding use of titles in speech, worshipping without music 

or programming, living thriftily, and abiding by the peace 

testimony. He argues that these practices enabled early 

Quakers to identify themselves to one another and to the 

broader society. Later Friends, fearing that the distinctiveness 

caused by these strictures was contrary to the spirit of 

their faith, advocated living by moderation and utility, i.e. 

simplicity. By the 20th century, a wider range of personal 

lifestyles had become acceptable. 

With these thumbnail sketches of Quaker beliefs as a backdrop, 

the remaining nine chapters of Quaker Aesthetics are 

organized around three topics: Quakers as Consumers – reflected 

in the furnishings of Quaker households during the late 

18th and early 19th centuries; Quakers as Producers – expressed 

broadly in the architecture of meetinghouses and residences 

and more narrowly in the ethical and practical struggles of artist 

Edward Hicks; and Quakers and Modernity – a topic eclectically 

illustrated by trends in dress, the art exhibits of Sara Tyson 

Hallowell, and a comparison of present-day interpretations of 

18th-century historic sites. The authors represent a broad, 

impressive range of affiliations with museums, educational, 

and historical institutions. Each chapter is sprinkled liberally 

with quotations from original sources and with plates which 

illustrate details of craftsmanship and style. In short, this book 

is a rich adventure in history, faith, and material culture. 

Quaker Aesthetics will appeal to many members of the 

Haverford community. It provides a succinct summary of 

Quaker beliefs for the layperson. It highlights intriguing details 

about the lives and material culture of prominent Quakers in 

the Delaware Valley, many of whom have connections with 

Haverford College. It illustrates the wide range of practices 

and life choices that fall under the rubric of Quakerism. Finally, 

it gives us the tools to challenge and interpret our own choices 

in light of this history. Of course, that leaves me wondering…should 

I be wearing Quaker gray or Haverford scarlet 

and black? For further reflections on this and other more serious 

topics, I highly recommend Quaker Aesthetics! 

—Louise M. Tritton 

(Resident of 1 College Circle, and 

member of Haverford Friends Meeting) 

Winter2003 7

Notes from the Alumni Association 

Dear Alumni and Friends: 

I admit it—I am a newspaper junkie. 

When I am traveling, I buy the local paper, 

regardless of the locale. When I don’t read 

a newspaper for a few days, I become disoriented 

and crabby. Whether it be the 

sports section, the obituary section, or the 

front page, I find myself constantly gravitating 

to newspapers. They are a source of 

information, inspiration, humor, and serve 

for me as a lifeline between my job and the 

world that surrounds us. 

This love of newspapers is an old one. I 

recall reading Newsday backwards as a 

young boy; after all, the box scores were 

at least as important as the Watergate-related 

headlines. Today, I still read the paper 

backwards, only this time it is the op-ed 

section that is the first to be perused. 

To no one’s surprise, Haverfordians have 

immersed themselves in journalism. Our 

passionate interest in the world around us 

and our intellectual curiosity make us naturally 

suited to the profession. Journalists 

are recorders of history, but they are much 

more. As they inquire and enquire, they 

have become conduits of knowledge, 

spokespersons, and have even been 

deemed “the fourth branch of government.” 

I am pleased an honored to have 

Haverfordian journalists as friends and colleagues, 

and am even more delighted that 

we have the opportunity to read articles 

by or about some of them in this issue. My 

first-year hallmate Kate Shatzkin ’87, and 

my fellow Alumni Association member 

Chris Lee ’89 are featured on pages 25 and 

40, respectively. I first met Joe Quinlan ’75 

when I was a student on some panel; he 

graciously pulled me aside after a meal in 

the Dining Center, and we have been 

friends ever since. Juan Williams ’76 is a 

gem of a human being, and has repeatedly 

spoken to my political science students. I 

recently bumped into a former student 

who told me that Juan’s discussion of the 

media and politics was the highlight of his 

college career. 

These individuals are but a few of the 

many Fords who have distinguished themselves, 

and who have provided outstanding 

copy in this issue of our alumni magazine. 

I hope that you enjoy, even if you 

are not reading the issue backwards! I 

remain, 

Sincerely, 

Robert M. Eisinger ’87 

eisinger@lclark.edu 

A l u m n i A s s o c i a t i o n E x e c u t i v e C o m m i t t e e 

President 

Robert M. Eisinger ’87 

Vice President 

Jonathan LeBreton ’79 

If you would like to nominate 

an alumnus/a for the Alumni 

Association Executive 

Committee, please contact 

the Alumni Office at 

(610) 896-1004. 


Members and Liaison Responsibilities: 

Ty Ahmad-Taylor ’90 

Northern California 

Technology 

Melissa M. Allen ’86 

Southeast 

Eva Osterberg Ash ’88 

[ex officio] 

Sarah G. Ketchum Baker ’91 

Maine 

Paula O. Braithwaite ’94 

New England 

Multicultural 

Heather P. Davis ’89 

Chicago 

Multicultural 

James H. Foster ’50 

Connecticut 

Reunions and Awards 

Michael E. Gluck ’82 

Washington, D.C., lambda 

Garry W. Jenkins ’92 

New York City 

Career Development 

Christopher J. Lee ’89 

Washington, D.C. 

Anna-Liisa Little ’90 

Pacific Northwest 

Regional Societies 

Bradley J. Mayer ’92 

Pacific Northwest 

Communications Committee 

Christopher B. Mueller ’66 

Central U.S. 

National Gifts 

Ronald Schwarz ’66 

Washington, D.C., Metro 

Admission 

Rufus C. Rudisill, Jr. ’50 

E. Pennsylvania 

Senior Alumni 

Ryan Traversari ’97 

New York City 

Student Representatives: 

Karen Vargas ’03 

continued on page 12

Ford Games 

by Garrett McVaugh ’04 

Tino’s Greatest Hits 

Jennifer Constantino ’04 wants more than to be remembered as a great volleyball player 

and a great student-athlete; she wants a volleyball championship for Haverford. 

For Jennifer Constantino ’04, volleyball 

is a way of life. But for the 5’ 11” outside 

hitter from Ridley High in Folsom, Pa., 

there is more to life at Haverford than just 

volleyball. “I’ve never had to choose 

between doing things that I want to do. 

I’ve always had all my options there, and 

I’ve always been able to do whatever came 

across that I wanted to try. I can’t really 

speak for other athletes, but for me personally, 

I’ve found a great balance here at 

Haverford.” These are words from a student-athlete 

who has set the standard for 

balancing the rigors of a challenging academic 

workload with the responsibility of 

being a team leader on the court. Amy 

Bergin, in her first year as head coach of 

the volleyball team, echoed Jen’s sentiments: 

“Most importantly, I believe that 

student-athletes get twice the education. 

Not only are they getting academic lessons 

in a classroom but they are also getting life 

lessons on the court/field. Competitive athletics 

teach one how to deal with pressures 

and competitors. They also learn how to 

push themselves to their limits, mentally 

and physically.” 

Constantino’s commitment to a diversified 

college experience started well before 

she became a student at Haverford. With 

athletic scholarship offers from top volleyball 

schools such as Georgia Tech and 

academic interest from many others, 

Constantino had her options open. She 

came to Haverford because she saw it as a 

place where she would be able to expand 

her horizons in every direction. 

“[Haverford] was just somewhere where I 

could see myself being genuinely happy 

for the next four years, and getting a lot 

out of both academically and athletically.” 

Indeed Constantino, or “Tino,” as she 

Jennifer Constantino ’04 is known as “Tino” on campus. 

is known among teammates and friends, 

was very interested from an early age in 

the small-school atmosphere that 

Haverford provides. A story she likes to 

tell is of her first visit to a tri-co campus 

as a young girl. Her grandmother worked 

in the Swarthmore bursar’s office, and 

Constantino and her family went to visit. 

Upon seeing the campus, Jen told her 

father that Swarthmore was where she 

wanted to go to college. Over a decade later 

the dream had not waned, and when it 

came time to choose colleges Constantino 

was left with a difficult choice. “When I 

went to choose schools, and it came down 

to the last moment, I was choosing 

between coming to Haverford or going to 

our close rival down the road, Swarthmore. 

When push came to shove, I went back 

and re-visited both schools, and I stayed 

with the volleyball team at Haverford one 

more time, and it just felt right here.” 

The choice to come to Haverford was a 

big one for Jen, but it is one that she has 

not regretted. When she came in as a frosh, 

Tino, like many Haverford students, had 

perceptions of Haverford as a kind of 

Utopia. Three years later, she realizes that 

whereas that vision was not the case, it has 

done nothing to diminish the school in her 

eyes. “Even if things haven’t always been 

perfect, I think people have always tried 

to make it as good as it can be, and I think 

that people are passionately involved here, 

and that means more to me than having a 

perfect ‘Haverbubble.’” Jen has been able 

to mold her initial perceptions of the school 

into a pragmatic appreciation of Haverford. 

This appreciation is due in large part to 

Constantino’s excellence in academics and 

extra-curriculars. However, her athletic 

accomplishments have gained her fame 

both on and off campus. In just three seasons, 

she has become the Haverford leader 

in nearly every offensive statistical category, 

including kills, kills per game, attacks, 

Winter2003 9

Ford Games 

attack percentage, points, and points per 

game. Constantino led the Centennial 

Conference with 3.84 kills per game and 

.324 attack percentage in the 2002 season, 

giving her 1,348 for her career. She is one 

of only three players in Haverford history 

to record 1,000 kills in a career. During 

the 2002 campaign, Tino continued her 

success, leading the team offensively in 

attacks and kills. She is also the owner of 

the single-match records for kills with 35, 

which she set as a freshman. During that 

same year Constantino recorded 537 kills, 

a school record. Coach Bergin notes that 

Jen’s offensive success is in her ability to 

understand the game, and the opponent’s 

defense: “She notices many weaknesses of 

the opponent and tells her team. All this 

leads to defenses fearing her. She may not 

be the hardest hitter, but she is one of the 

smartest, quickest, and determined hitters 

on the court. But most of all she has a wonderful 

time playing.” 

She also understands the importance 

of defense, last season leading the Fords 

with 3.87 digs per game, while owning the 

Fords’ record for digs in a match with 38, 

set this past season against Conference 

rival Gettysburg. Bergin again has high 

praises to sing about Constantino, this time 

in the defensive department. “An excellent 

defensive player is one who notices a 

play develop on the other side of the net. 

An excellent defensive player has excellent 

body control to receive hard hits as 

well as soft ones. An excellent defensive 

player knows the offense’s tendencies and 

puts herself in the right position to receive 

the ball. Jen has acquired all of these. She 

may not be the quickest defensive player 

on the team but she reads offenses very 

well which gives her that edge.” 

And her achievements have not gone 

unrecognized. Constantino has been the 

recipient of many awards acknowledging 

her academic and athletic accomplishments. 

She was named to the First Team 

All-Centennial Conference in 2002 for the 

third time in her three-year career. Only 

two other players have ever been so 

named, indicating that Constantino’s dominance 

is on a league-wide level. She has 

also been recognized as a top scholar-athlete, 

being named to the Conference Fall 

Academic Honor Roll. A political science 

and economics double major at Haverford, 

Constantino served as a summer intern to 


U.S. House Representative Curt Weldon 

last summer after serving as a summer 

research assistant to Haverford professor 

Stephen McGovern in 2001. 

In addition to Conference accolades for 

her athletic and academic achievements, 

Constantino was named to the 2002 

Verizon College Division Academic All- 

District II Volleyball First Team. She has 

also been named to the AVCA All-Mid 

Atlantic Region team twice during her 

career, as well as being team MVP in her 

freshman and sophomore years. Jen also 

received the prestigious Archibald 

MacIntosh Award in 2001, awarded to the 

top scholar-athlete in the freshman class. 

Coach Bergin describes Constantino as 

“smart, patient, and feared,” sentiments 

which are surely echoed by all defenses 

throughout the league. 

While Constantino’s statistics speak for 

her as one of the premier volleyball players 

in Haverford history, she has always been 

able to keep her own success in perspective. 

“It’s an incredible honor to be on the 

list of people who have achieved 1,000 kills 

in their career, but I don’t necessarily see 

it as a personal achievement, because for 

every kill that I had in the context of a 

game means that someone on my team had 

a perfect pass, and someone else set the 

ball to me. It was a team effort for everything.” 

The sentiments reveal that 

Constantino’s main goal while at Haverford 

goes far beyond the realm of individual 

statistics and accolades. Her goals lie with 

the success of the team, and the ultimate 

prize of becoming Centennial Conference 

Champions. Her words do not beat around 

the bush: “My goal has always been to win 

the league championship.” These are goals 

which directly parallel those of Coach 

Bergin: “Each year, the program’s goal is 

to win the Centennial Conference and have 

players named to the All-Conference team. 

This should lead to an NCAA berth with 

players on the All-American roster. Our 

immediate goals include the physical and 

mental aspects of the team, which will lay 

the foundation for the program. This program 

should be well-respected and feared. 

Over the long-term, we should be known 

nationwide for our academics as well as 

for our volleyball program. This program 

should be nationally ranked year in and 

year out – we really are on the verge of 

becoming one of the greatest Division III 

Constantino in action on the court. 

volleyball programs.” 

Tino and her teammates have all bought 

into that philosophy, and the volleyball 

program has achieved a level of success 

unparalleled in its history. The Fords compiled 

a 22-10 overall record in 2002, while 

going 8-2 in the league. In the past two 

seasons, they have beaten conference foes 

McDaniel, Gettysburg, and Franklin & 

Marshall for the first time in history. Tino 

is very optimistic about the prospects of 

the 2003 volleyball season. “We have a lot 

of very serious volleyball players, and we 

have a lot of very young talent, so I see all 

our goals becoming extremely reachable 

in the near future.” The addition of Coach 

Amy Bergin to the program has helped 

position the Fords one step closer to their 

goal. The attitude on the team has 

changed, and the players and coaches are 

on the same page. “We have an understanding 

on the team; as long as they 

respect themselves, their teammates, and 

their coaches, everything should fall into 

place. With that said, we have achieved a 

common ground of commitment and dedication. 

I have high expectations of my 

team and they have high expectations of 

me. If we stay on this level, we will achieve 

all goals.” 

Constantino had positive things to say 

about the change at the helm: “We’ve really 

come together as a team, and I think 

we’re all having a lot more fun playing volleyball 

this past season than we’ve had in

the past, and when you’re having fun, 

when you’re playing, you play with a passion, 

and as a team, and everything just 

seems to come together. We’re in great 

shape; we’re learning new things, and I 

think the coach and player are on the same 

page in terms of what they want to accomplish.” 

Having goals is the first step to success, 

but the Fords have taken it one step 

further and acted on those goals. They have 

committed themselves to a strict strength 

and conditioning regimen, both during the 

season and now in the offseason. However, 

despite the physical pain, the player’s 

commitment has been kept in perspective. 

Coach Bergin is clear on her expectations 

from her players, but also ensures that they 

are having a positive experience while performing: 

“The athletes are expected to give 

every ounce of energy, focus, and attention 

during practices and conditioning sessions 

both in and out of season when they are 

at practice . . . all this must be done 

because they want to and enjoy it . . . they 

play the sport because they love it and have 

fun in the process.” 

All of this dedication is a reason why 

the Haverford volleyball program was 

enticing to Constantino when she was 

looking at colleges. She saw that there was 

a lot of potential for the Fords’ program, 

and that it was poised to make strides into 

the future. “When I was a prospective student, 

I saw the talent that was already on 

the team, and got to talk to players on the 

team like Steph Frank and Alisha Scruggs, 

and saw where they thought the program 

was going. So, I think we have followed 

our goals pretty well, and looking back, I 

think we have followed where I thought 

we were going be, and I do see us winning 

a league championship and going to 

nationals, and I’ve seen that since the day 

I first walked in as a freshman.” 

It is safe to say that Constantino has had 

a huge impact on both the Haverford sports 

scene as well as on Haverford life since her 

matriculation here in 2000. She has given 

much of her time and energy as a student 

trainer in the athletic department, working 

closely with other student-athletes. Jen 

is also a very active member of the 

Haverford College Athletic Association 

Executive Board, and has represented 

Haverford at the Apple Conference, a conference 

on issues facing student-athletes, 

for the past two seasons. Jen has also been 

named a co-captain for the 2003 volleyball 

squad, along with Jelyn Meyer. Bergin 

praises Jen’s leadership capabilities: “She 

has earned the respect from all teammates 

and coaches due to her dedication to bettering 

herself as an athlete and a person. 

Her non-stop hunger for learning more 

about the game of volleyball shows that 

she has become one of the most knowledgeable 

players on the court which, in 

turn, forces her to become a better volleyball 

player. She is not a selfish athlete by 

any means. Once she understands one 

aspect of the sport, she shares it with her 

teammates. Having this respect and knowledge 

allows her to love the game even 

more, which brings out such a competitive 

attitude. This is a great attitude toward 

the sport, toward competition, and toward 

her teammates and her coaches. She’s one 

of those players and the type of person you 

want around you; she is a ball of positive 

energy with a smiling face.” 

Over the years, Constantino has become 

a familiar face on the Haverford campus, 

both in the classroom and on the court. In 

both of these areas she has excelled, but 

Jen is the first to admit that it was a team 

effort. Perhaps she sums up her success 

best when she says; “It makes it easy to 

succeed when you know you have people 

who are willing to help you do it. 

In the rare moments that he’s not playing 

Nintendo Mario Kart or working for the 

Haverford Athletic Department, junior 

English major Garrett McVaugh ’04 of 

Hamilton, N.Y., plays varsity cricket, captains 

the College’s golf and ice hockey 

clubs, and deconstructs literary criticism. 

Jen Constantino ’04 in the Haverford Volleyball Record Book - all records held or shared unless otherwise noted 

KILLS 

Match (5 games) 

35 vs. N.C. Wesleyan at St. Mary’s-Md.; 

Sept. 29, 2000 


26 vs. Wellesley at Smith-Mass.; 

Oct. 15, 2000 

26 vs. Kings Point-USMMA; 

Sept. 10, 2000 


19 * vs. Neumann; Oct. 20, 2001 

* 2nd to Jelyn Meyer ’04; 21 vs. 

Muhlenberg; Oct. 18, 2000 

Season 

537 2000 season (.307 attack pct.) 

Career 

1348 2000-02 seasons (.305 attack pct.) 

KILLS PER GAME 

Season 

4.44 2000 season (121 games) 

Career 

4.11 2000-02 seasons (328 games) 

ATTACK ATTEMPTS 


81 vs. Johns Hopkins; Oct. 23, 2000 

(22 kills) 


57 * vs. Wellesley at Smith-Mass.; 

Oct. 15, 2000 (26 kills) 

* 2nd to Jelyn Meyer ’04; 60 at Smith- 

Mass.; Oct. 14, 2000 (13 kills) 


51 vs. Franklin & Marshall; 

Oct. 11, 2000 (15 kills) 

Season 

1320 2000 season (537-132-1320) 

Career 

3414 * 2000-02 seasons 

(1348-306-3414) 

* 2nd to Kristyn Linger ’00 (1017-659- 

3764) - 1996-99 

ATTACK PERCENTAGE 

Match (min. 15 attempts) 

.632 * at Washington College-Md.; 

Sep. 28, 2002 (12-0-19) 

* tied with Jelyn Meyer ’04; .632 vs. 

Ursinus; Sept. 29, 2001 (13-1-19) 

Career (kills-errors-attack attempts) 

.305 2000-02 seasons (1348-306-3414) * 

* 2nd to Steph Frank ’03 (630-113-1685, 

.307) - 1999-02 

DIGS 


38 vs. Gettysburg at Ursinus; Oct. 5, 2002 


27 vs. Michigan-Dearborn; 

Sep. 1, 2001 * 

* 2nd to Steph Frank ’03; 28 vs. West 

Chester; Nov. 7, 2002 


24 * vs. Neumann; Sep. 10, 2000 

* tied with Kristyn Linger ’00; 24 vs. Smith 

at Swarthmore; Oct. 9, 1999 

Winter2003 11

Notes from the Alumni Association continued from page 8 

Senior Class Challenge 

Steve Schwartz, past parent and 

former Chair of the Parents' Fund, will 

donate $10,000 to the Parents' Fund in 

honor of the Class of 2003 if the Class 

can surpass the standing record of 66% 

participation set by the Class of 2001. 

Parents and students are welcome to 

make a contribution online at 

https://www.admin.haverford.edu/online 

-donations/donate.html; for more information 

please contact Elaine Haupt, 

ehaupt@haverford.edu. 

Haverford on the Web 

The Haverford website is a valuable 

resource for alumni. View photos of 

recent events in the Alumni Photo 

Gallery, register online for this year’s 

Alumni Weekend, sign up for e-mail 

forwarding, update your address and 

contact information, obtain Career 

Development information, and see what 

your classmates are up to on your class’s 

own webpage. Visit: www.haverford.edu 

and click on “Alumni.” 

Regional Societies 

Great things are happening in your area! 

“Welcome Freshmen” parties, informal 

alumni gatherings, visits from faculty, 

staff, and President Tritton, campaign 

celebrations, and much more! For 

complete information about these or any 

upcoming alumni events, visit the online 

Regional Events Calendar, accessible 

from: www.haverford.edu. Click on 

“Alumni,” then “Regional Events.” 

This calendar is updated frequently, 

so be sure to check back often. 

Also, the Haverford Alumni Office 

recently has been visiting several key 

cities around the country (San Francisco, 

San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, 

Albuquerque, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, 

Pittsburgh, and Charlotte) 

in an ongoing effort to recruit Regional 

Leaders to host future alumni events. 

Do you have an idea for a successful 

regional event? Are you interested in 

learning how to become a Regional 

Leader? Contact the Alumni Office 

at 610-896-1004 for details. 

LAMBDA List-serve 

LAMBDA, the Alumni Association’s 

network of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, 

and interested alumni, has been 

maintaining an e-mail list-serve. To subscribe, 

send the following message to 

listproc@haverford.edu: subscribe lambda-alumni, 

your name, and class year. 

For more information about this and 

other LAMBDA activities, please contact 

the Alumni Office or Theo Posselt ’94 at: 

tposselt@dc.com. 

Alumni Weekend 2003 

May 30-June 1 

All alumni are invited to celebrate 

Alumni Weekend; classes ending in 

a “3” or “8” will officially reunite. 

Highlights of the weekend include: 

• All-Alumni Awards Ceremony 

• Class Lectures and Discussions 

• Scarlet Sages Breakfast 

• Special Guest Speakers 

• GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) Luncheon 

• Sporting/Recreational Activities 

• Class Dinners and Social Gatherings 

• And much more! 

Detailed information will be 

mailed later this spring. Registration 

information will also be available 

online at: www.haverford.edu. 

AAEC’s Class of 1998 

Challenge 

In an effort to encourage annual 

giving participation by the members 

of the Class of 1998 at the 5th Reunion 

(May 30-June 1, 2003), the Alumni 

Association Executive Committee 

promises to contribute at least 

$50 for every member of the class 

who makes a gift to the Haverford 

Fund by June 30, 2003. 

John Whitehead ’43 

Challenges the Classes 

of 1999, 2000, 2001, 

and 2002 

John Whitehead will match any 

increased gift (any amount above last 

year’s gifts) to the Haverford Fund made 

this fiscal year (July ’02 – June ’03). 

Our youngest alums are the key to 

raising total alumni participation. 

Thank you for your support. 

12 Haverford Magazine

Faculty Profile 

by Brenna McBride 

History… 

and Her Story 

Emma Lapsansky is motivated by her love of the past, 

her present spirituality, and her goals for the future. 

Emma Lapsansky, a faculty member since 1992. 

It seemed inevitable that Professor of 

History Emma Lapsansky would pursue 

her chosen field of study. 

She has been intrigued by the past for 

as long as she can remember. As a child in 

Washington, D.C., her bedroom in her 

family’s Victorian home had a fireplace bordered 

by blue delft tiles; she would look 

at the tiles and wonder about their origins. 

Her house was crammed with books of all 

kinds, tomes owned by her mother, grandmother, 

and great-grandmother, each with 

their own secrets. Her mother shared her 

interest in architecture and historic costume 

with her children, and took them to 

Washington's many museums. 

Lapsansky was also raised in a family 

with deep respect for its own history, and 

she thrived on stories of the women who 

came before her. There was a great-grandmother, 

Patience, who took immense pride 

in having put 10 of her 13 children 

through college (two died in infancy). One 

of Patience’s daughters, an early feminist 

educated at Oberlin at the turn of the 20th 

century, went to great lengths to ensure 

that her personal physician treated her with 

respect. “She always paid him in cash so 

he would never know her first name and 

couldn’t call her Jeannette,” says Lapsansky, 

a self-described “gregarious recluse” whose 

words come swift and easy when relating 

such tales. “He would have to call her Mrs. 

Jenkins.” One time, however, she fell ill 

and didn’t have any cash handy, forcing her 

to pay with the dreaded check. “Thereafter, 

he started calling her Jeannette, and she 

immediately fired him—and told him 

why.” It didn’t matter how he addressed 

his other patients, both male and female; 

she wanted to be called Mrs. Jenkins or 

nothing at all. 

Her family’s stories filled a void left 

empty by Lapsansky’s classroom experiences. 

“I was raised in an African-American 

family,” she says, “and I was always aware 

that when I opened a textbook, there was 

nothing in there about what I knew to be 

true. There was nothing about black poets, 

doctors, or lawyers.” In college she 

endured mediocre-to-poor history teachers 

and thought, “It’s got to be more interesting 

than this.” 

Now, as an academic, it is Lapsansky’s 

job—and pleasure—to show just how 

interesting history can be. Her research 

branches off into myriad directions—family 

and community life, Philadelphia urban 

development, material culture, community 

planning, Quakerism, and American 

social history—but all are rooted in her 

fascination with the past. And all aspects 

of her work are imbued with her Quaker 

spirituality, which she owes, largely, to a 

grandfather’s early influence. 

“My grandfather was a very traditional, 

Drew University-educated, conservative 

kind of Methodist minister,” she remembers. 

“When I was eight or nine, and 

becoming cognizant of religious things, he 

said to me, ‘Let me tell you that heaven 

and earth are not places you go when you 

die. They are states of being you create by 

what you do here.’ Only later did I realize 

that this is not what they were telling us 

in the Methodist church.” 

Her attitude was also affected indirectly 

by her father, who, not wanting to raise 

his children entirely in the city, bought a 

farm to take the family every summer. She 

received much of her “spiritual energy” 

from the farm, witnessing the birthing of 

cows and pigs and the growing of crops 

from the earth. 

“I lived a bifurcated existence,” she 

laughs. “My mother put our Mary Janes 

on us and took us to museums, and my 

father took our shoes off us and took us 

to the farm.” Years later she would complete 

her spiritual journey to Quakerism, 

sending her children to a Friends school 

and joining a local Meeting in Lansdowne, 

Pa., (as well as teaching at the oldest 

Quaker college in North America). 

Following in the footsteps of one of her 

great-grandmother Patience’s sons, 

Lapsansky entered the University of 

Pennsylvania in 1963, where, after a year 

off to join the civil rights movement in 

Mississippi, she received a bachelor’s degree 

in American history in 1968, a master’s in 

American civilization in 1969, and a Ph.D. 

in American civilization with a concentration 

in American social history and 

material culture in 1975. Her dissertation, 

an architectural and sociological study of 

an ethnically and racially diverse 

Philadelphia neighborhood as it transformed 

from a suburb into an urban community 

during the years 1752 and 1854, 

became her first book, Neighborhoods in 

Transition: William Penn’s Dream and Urban 

Reality (Garland Press, 1994). 

“I chose a street in Philadelphia, which 

Winter2003 13

Faculty Profile 


is now South Street but was then Cedar 

Street, that was a border between the city 

and the suburbs, and I talked about its 

transition from being at the edge of the 

city to being absorbed into the city,” says 

Lapsansky. “I wanted to see how it went 

from being green grass—my father’s 

world—to built environment, my mother’s 

world.” She lured that same mother 

into being a research assistant, and together 

the two pored over city directories, 

maps, newspapers, insurance surveys, and 

even the wills of some residents from the 

18th and early 19th centuries. 

The book reveals a distinct contrast 

between public opinion of the suburbs 

then and now. “At that time, the city was 

where you lived if you had the money and 

influence to do so, and the suburbs were 

where people escaped after they had committed 

some crime in the city,” says 

Lapsansky. “The city had no jurisdiction 

over them out there.” She also found that 

neighborhoods did not become segregated 

by race or class until the advent of effective 

public transportation: “It wasn’t until 

the 1880s and 90s that public transportation 

made an attractive suburb, where you 

could live in the country and still get to 

the city easily.” 

While pursuing her doctorate, 

Lapsansky joined Temple University as an 

assistant, and then associate professor of 

history. She remained there until 1990, 

when Haverford came looking for her. 

Later, she would reflect that it was her fate 

to join the College: “Twice, in succession, 

I unknowingly bought houses built by 

prominent Quakers. About 15 years ago, 

long before I even thought much about 

Haverford College, I purchased a house 

built by descendants of Abraham Pennock, 

who matriculated at Haverford in 1843, 

and whose great-niece taught my daughter 

in second grade. That teacher is also 

the niece of the Roberts for whom 

Haverford’s Roberts Hall is named. 

“Our little lives are all in the stars,” she 

smiles. 

If her life was in the stars, then her decision 

to enter teaching was definitely in the 

blood. “My mother was an elementary 

school teacher, all her siblings were college 

professors—my mother’s sister taught 

at Atlanta University and knew W.E.B. 

DuBois,” she says. “The conversation at 

family gatherings revolved around classroom 

anecdotes, and the excitement of 

bringing ideas alive for students at all levels. 

It seemed a good life; it still does.” 

At Haverford, Lapsansky not only teaches 

but also curates the College’s Quaker 

Collection. Housed in Magill Library, it is 

one of the most extensive collections of 

Quaker history in the world. She oversees 

the care and maintenance of 40,000 books 

and several hundred thousand manuscripts, 

and helps meet the needs of the 

few thousand researchers from around the 

world who travel to Haverford each year 

to use the collection’s resources. The staff 

is currently involved in increasing the collection’s 

presence on the Internet. “We’ve 

just hired a two-year person,” she says, 

“whose job it is to set a prototype for how 

we scan and code letters to make them 

available and searchable on the Internet.” 

The goal of Friendship 

Co-op was to serve as a 

model living situation where 

a diverse blend of people 

created an environment of 

sharing and mutual support. 

Within the community many 

races and religions came 

together, gender roles were 

equitably defined, meals 

were shared, and resources 

were pooled. 

Her most recently published academic 

work is the book Quaker Aesthetics: 

Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American 

Design and Consumption, 1720-1920, a 

compilation of essays she co-edited with 

Anne Verplanck, curator of prints and 

paintings at the Winterthur Museum in 

Delaware (see review, p. 6). Released by 

University of Pennsylvania Press in 2002, 

the book of 11 essays describes how 

Quakers have held to their belief in “plain 

living” while actively consuming fine material 

goods. “It’s a way of reopening a discussion 

that began in 1652 about what 

constitutes the outward way of being 

Quaker—what constitutes simplicity, sharing 

of resources, good stewardship, and 

the struggle that the Society of Friends has 

had over the last 200 years to define what 

they mean by that,” says Lapsansky. 

“There’s an essay by me, for example, 

where I talk about presentation of simplicity 

or plainness to a modern world.” 

Other essays discuss the dress, interior 

home designs, and architecture created or 

purchased by Quakers in the 18th, 19th, 

and early 20th centuries. 

Her next accomplishment, due out from 

Penn State Press by the end of 2003, is A 

View to Encourage Emigration: Benjamin 

Coates and Colonization, 1848-1880, a study 

of 19th-century Quaker abolitionist Coates 

as told by more than 100 letters exchanged 

between him and prominent African- 

American and white abolitionists in the era 

of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott 

decision. The letters, purchased for the 

Quaker Collection in 1999, were annotated 

by Haverford students trained in History 

361, “Seminar in Historical Evidence,” 

which requires them to analyze documents 

from the College’s Special Collections. 

“What the letters show are both the big 

ideas and the small people having the big 

ideas,” says Lapsansky, who introduces the 

letters with an essay putting their contents 

in the context of the African-American 

world. She describes Coates as “an interesting, 

complex fellow,” a peacemaker 

within the abolitionist movement and “the 

hub of a very complex wheel” that included 

abolitionists both white and black, conservative 

and radical, and Quaker and non- 

Quaker. 

An ongoing book project for Lapsansky 

(“I’ve been working on this most of my 

life, it seems”) explores a 20th-century

Quaker cooperative in the Powelton Village 

section of West Philadelphia, which thrived 

during the late ’40s through the early ’70s. 

Established by some staff members of the 

American Friends Service Committee, the 

Friendship Co-op was an “intentional 

community,” a group of people who choose 

to live together under a common philosophy. 

The goal of Friendship was to serve 

as a model living situation where a diverse 

blend of people created an environment of 

sharing and mutual support. Within the 

Lapsansky still meets with 

local public school teachers 

to demonstrate innovative 

methods of using historical 

objects in their classrooms. 

And she delights in her 

dealings with her students, 

helping them write their 

papers and theses, 

recommending them for 

internships and graduate 

schools, and involving 

them in her research. 

community many races and religions came 

together, gender roles were equitably 

defined, meals were shared, and resources 

were pooled. 

“They wanted to rehearse living in a 

multicultural community,” says Lapsansky, 

who lived in Powelton Village during the 

last years of the Co-op and counts several 

former residents among her friends. “This 

wasn’t easy in the 1940s, and they wondered 

how world peace could be achieved 

if diverse people could not live together. 

So they worked very hard to create a community 

of people from a variety of cultures 

and backgrounds, and to provide leadership 

equality for them all.” 

Lapsansky has so far interviewed about 

40 former residents of Friendship, and 

most of these interviews were conducted 

during her extensive 1989 road trip 

through the United States, where she traveled 

10,000 miles, pasted stickers from 

each state she visited on the back of her 

Subaru, and had her picture taken in South 

Dakota at the geographical center of the 

country. She is passionate about travel, and 

her role as a historian has allowed her to 

spend at least one night in all 50 of the 

United States and in four continents. She’s 

gone south of the equator in Kenya, and 

taken the train across America three times. 

She aims to visit the remaining continents 

(she needs to see South America and 

Australia, but doesn’t mind missing 

Antarctica) and ride all 30,000 miles of 

passenger railroad track in North America. 

But for now, she’s content to simply travel 

from her home in Lansdowne, 

Pennsylvania, to her office at Haverford, 

where she writes essays and articles for 

such publications as Pennsylvania: A 

History of the Commonwealth (Penn State 

Press, 2002), the upcoming Historical 

Dictionary of America and Encyclopedia 

of Colonial America, and numerous scholarly 

journals. She continues to consult to 

local museums and historical societies. She 

may be interviewed again for historical 

series and documentaries, as she was for 

PBS’ “Africans in America” and “Woman 

of Steel,” the story of 19th-century Quaker 

industrialist Rebecca Lukens. She still 

meets with local public school teachers to 

demonstrate innovative methods of using 

historical objects in their classrooms. And 

she delights in her dealings with her students, 

helping them write their papers and 

theses, recommending them for internships 

and graduate schools, and involving 

them in her research. 

On the home front, Lapsansky plans to 

be married in May to her companion of 

more than a decade, Dickson Werner, who 

is also a member of Lansdowne Meeting. 

She glows with pride when speaking of her 

children: Jordan, a gaffer in Los Angeles 

who’s worked on such films as Murder by 

Numbers; Jeannette (Nette), a fourth-year 

medical student at the University of 

California, San Diego; and Charlotte, a program 

assistant at Breakthrough TV, an 

international non-profit that seeks, through 

popular media methods, to raise awareness 

for social justice causes. And she is 

deeply devoted to her extended family, 

attending frequent reunions and keeping 

a photographic journal that begins with 

her great-grandparents in the late 19th century. 

Emma Lapsansky may have a happy 

present, and anticipate a bright future, but 

a part of her will always be wedded to the 

rich mysteries of the past. 

Emma Lapsansky currently 

teaches or has taught the 

following classes in history: 

Colonial North America 

Surveys the political, economic, and community 

aspects of North America, with 

an emphasis on the areas that became the 

United States and the varieties of peoples 

and cultures that helped shape the convergence 

of cultures 

History and Principles 

of Quakerism 

Examines the development of Quakerism 

and its relationship to other religious 

movements and to political and social life, 

especially in America. Includes the roots 

of the Society of Friends in 17th-century 

Britain, and the expansion of Quaker influences 

among Third World populations, 

particularly the Native American, Hispanic, 

east African, and Asian populations. 

Topics in American History: 

The American West in Fact 

and Fiction (Spring 2002) 

The American western “frontier” has 

caught the nation’s imagination as myth 

and symbol, photograph and painting, costume 

and politics, definer and redefiner 

of gender and race, and technological challenge. 

Through individual and group readings, 

discussion and bibliographic exploration, 

the class pursues the elusive “truth” 

of the American western frontier. 

Seminar on Historical Evidence 

Consideration of the nature and forms of 

historical evidence and of critical techniques 

for handling it; an essay interrogating/exploiting 

material and visual artifacts 

as evidence; and an essay involving 

a “professional” exercise in historical editing, 

to wit: fashioning a critical edition of 

a manuscript source. 

Lapsansky’s publications include: 

Neighborhoods in Transition: William Penn’s 

Dream and Urban Reality (Garland Press, 

1994); Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a 

Quaker Ethic in American Design and 

Consumption, 1720-1920 (Co-editor; 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); 

and A View to Encourage Emigration: 

Benjamin Coates and Colonization, 1848- 

1880 (to be released in 2003). 

Winter2003 15

How the Boston Globe's 

investigative team broke 

one of the most explosive 

stories of our time. 

Crusade forTruth 

by Michael Paulson ’86 


Commonwealth Avenue 

is the grandest of Boston’s boulevards, stretching a 

dozen miles from its beginning at the Public Garden, 

where swan boats ply the lagoon each spring and 

summer, past the Victorian brownstone mansions 

of the Back Bay, through the student enclaves that 

surround Boston University and Boston College, 

and into the swath of suburbs stretching to the west. 

When I was little we used to walk over to 

Commonwealth Avenue each year on Patriots’ Day 

to watch the marathoners go by, clenching the morning 

Globe as we tried to match the numbers on the 

T-shirts to the names of the runners. I must have 

traveled up and down that avenue hundreds of 

times, sometimes driving along the carriage roads, 

sometimes riding the rickety 

Green Line streetcars, but it 

wasn’t until I returned to 

Boston as a reporter that 

I ever noticed, on a rise 

above Comm. Ave., 

barely visible behind 

the shrubbery, the 

Italian Renaissancestyle 

palazzo that 

Boston’s first cardinal, 

William Henry O’Connell, 

had built in the 

1930s as a residence for 

the Roman Catholic archbishops 

of Boston. 

I first entered the mansion on Feb. 

2, 2000, an encounter that was memorable 

mostly because it was dominated 

by an argument – the only argument, I 

believe, that Cardinal Bernard F. Law and 

I ever had. After a career covering politics 

and government for newspapers around the 

country, I had just come back to Boston to 

cover religion for my hometown paper, and 

I was eager and enthusiastic as I could be. I 

had just read Ari Goldman’s book, The Search 

for God at Harvard, in which Goldman, 

a religion reporter for the New York 

Times, described his relationship with 

Cardinal John J. O’Connor of New York. 

I had hoped that Cardinal Law and I 

might similarly develop some kind of ongoing conversation 

about Catholicism in Boston, given his 

status as the spiritual leader of two million Catholics 

in eastern Massachusetts, and mine as the lone religion 

reporter at the largest newspaper in that same 

region. When I entered the house, I was greeted, as 

all visitors to the mansion were, by the sight of a 

red biretta on a silver tray – a visible reminder that 

a prince of the church was in residence. The cardinal 

and I sat at a grand mahogany table that has a 

plaque at the head, where Pope John Paul II sat during 

his visit to Boston in 1979. Staring down at us 

from the four walls were the portraits of all the preceding 

bishops of Boston, and the Virgin of 

Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Americas. 

As our conversation began, I asked the cardinal 

a version of the open-ended question I had often 

asked high-ranking officials – senators, governors, 

and so on – when I started a new beat – “tell me 

how you think my newspaper has done covering 

you in the past.’’ Big mistake. Law, who had once 

famously called down “the power of God” on the 

Globe, snapped something like “I don’t see why I 

should talk about that,’’ and then launched into a 

fond reminiscence of how nice it had been when 

he was a bishop in Missouri and the papers there 

had run explanatory features about Catholic holidays. 

Emboldened either by courage or some kind 

of naïve stupidity, I launched into an explanation 

of current trends in religion reporting – how I 

expected to write less about institutional matters 

and more about what academics called “lived religion,’’ 

about how faith and spirituality affected people’s 

daily lives, but the cardinal sharply cut me off. 

“Who decides that’s what readers want?’’ he asked. 

“Your elite editors?” Fortunately, we were interrupted 

by a phone call, and when the cardinal 

returned, we moved on to safer subjects. 

But over the course of the next two years, the 

cardinal and I forged what I suspect was the best 

working relationship he had had with a local newspaper 

reporter. 

Of course, I wrote plenty of stories he didn’t like, 

and some of the folks around him repeatedly made 

it clear they didn’t trust me, even chastising me for 

failing to refer to the cardinal as “His Eminence’’ in 

phone conversations and “Bernard Cardinal Law” 

in print. The first time I attended a meeting of the 

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the cardinal 

expressed disapproval when I appeared in the hotel 

lobby the night before the meeting wearing jeans. 

(The next year when I showed up, I had contracted 

laryngitis, meaning I couldn’t ask any questions, 

which the cardinal found quite amusing, and, I have 

to admit, so did I.) 

Law made it clear to me that he was uncomfortable 

with a variety of aspects of my job. At one point, 

when I asked him why he was so hard to get on the 

phone, he told me he didn’t like to be quoted in stories 

where he was just one of many voices, espe- 

Winter2003 17

Crusade for Truth 

cially if others were theologians, because 

those kinds of stories didn’t acknowledge 

his special teaching authority as bishop. 

But there were some remarkable 

moments, too. On Christmas Eve 2000, 

Cardinal Law actually stepped out of the 

procession at midnight Mass and leaned 

into my pew so he could whisper into my 

ear how much he had appreciated a 

lengthy and complex story I had written 

about the changing nature of confession. 

And then, in the fall of 2001, Cardinal Law 

accepted my invitation to speak at the 

annual convention of the Religion 

Newswriters Association, which that year 

was meeting in Cambridge. After I introduced 

him, he went on at some length, in 

front of all my colleagues from around the 

country, about what a fair and thorough 

reporter I was. 

A month later, in November of 2001, 

Cardinal Law picked up the phone and 

called me to tell me how much he had 

appreciated a piece I had written after an 

interview with him on the occasion of his 

70th birthday. The cardinal had never 

phoned me on his own initiative before – 

in fact, although he had always been cordial 

and pledged accessibility, he had rarely 

returned my phone calls. But on that day 

he said he decided to call as a “friend,’’ a 

word that frequently signals trouble 

between reporters and the people they 

cover, and perhaps I should have seen that 

at the time. 

I clearly remember the birthday interview 

because it was a Catholic feast day – 

All Saints Day – and the cardinal’s house 

was unusually quiet because most of the 

staff had the day off. The cardinal and I 

had a long chat about his record, and about 

his hopes for the next five years, and I 

remember I asked him about his handling 

of sexually abusive priests, which I 

described in the next day’s Globe as “the 

most difficult issue of his tenure in 

Boston.” This is what Cardinal Law said 

to me then, in late 2001, about the issue 

of clergy sexual abuse: “The act is a terrible 

act, and the consequence is a terrible 

consequence, and there are a lot of folk 

who have suffered a great deal of pain and 

anguish. And that’s a source of profound 

pain and anguish for me and should be for 

the whole church.’’ When I asked him 

about reinstating abusive priests, he said, 

Law, who had once famously called down "the power 

of God" on the Globe, snapped something like "I don't 

see why I should talk about that," and then launched 

into a fond reminiscence of how nice it had been when 

he was a bishop in Missouri and the papers there had 

run explanatory features about Catholic holidays. 

“Any time that I made a decision, it was 

based upon a judgment that with the treatment 

that had been afforded and with the 

ongoing treatment and counseling that 

would be provided, that this person would 

not be [a] harm to others.” 

What Cardinal Law and I both knew 

throughout the fall of 2001, but never discussed, 

was that the Globe’s Spotlight Team 

was quietly but aggressively pursuing an 

investigation into the contemporary and 

historic scope of sexual abuse by priests in 

the Archdiocese of Boston, and into the 

way that Law, his aides, and their predecessors 

had responded to allegations of 

abuse against those priests. We both knew 

that a legal tug-of-war between the Globe 

and the archdiocese over information about 

the church’s handling of abusive priests was 

already underway. But neither of us had 

any idea that the stories that would result 

would set off a chain of events – revelation, 

revolt, and reform – that, in one grueling 

year would lead to the biggest crisis in the 

history of Catholicism in the U.S. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 

The Globe’s investigation into clergy 

sexual abuse in Boston was sparked by a 

routine court filing that contained a startling 

admission: Bernard F. Law, the spiritual 

leader of the fourth largest diocese in 

America, the man who was arguably the 

pope’s closest ally in the U.S. and who 

every day instructed two million 

Massachusetts Catholics on sexual ethics 

and matters of morality, admitted that during 

his first year as archbishop of Boston 

he had given Rev. John J. Geoghan a new 

assignment, in suburban Weston, Mass., 

despite knowing that Geoghan had been 

accused of molesting seven boys. 

Eileen McNamara, a Globe metro 

columnist, was intrigued. “Will Cardinal 

Bernard F. Law be allowed to continue to 

play duck and cover indefinitely?’’ she 

asked in one column. “Will no one require 

the head of the Archdiocese of Boston to 

explain how it was that the pastors, bishops, 

archbishops, and cardinal-archbishops 

who supervised Geoghan never confronted, 

or even suspected, his alleged 

exploitation of children in five different 

parishes across 28 years?” That column, 

which ran on July 22, 2001, was followed 

by another the next week, July 29, in 

which McNamara took on the confidentiality 

order protecting certain documents 

in the case. “The danger is that if the 

church settles before trial – projected to 

be at least six months away – depositions 

of members of the church hierarchy, 

including Law and his closest advisers, will 

never see the light of day. The result will 

be that men who could be responsible for 

the cover-up of criminal conduct will never 

be brought to account.’’ 

Those columns piqued the interest of 

Martin Baron, who had been carefully reading 

the paper in anticipation of his new job, 

starting July 31, as the editor of the Globe. 

“Why did we need to settle for competing 

accounts of documents that were unavailable 

to us?’’ Baron asked. “Why shouldn’t 

they be available to us? Shouldn’t we 

explore challenging the confidentiality 

order that sealed all those documents?” 

Within days of Baron’s arrival, the Globe 

called its lawyers, who began researching 

the prospects for getting the documents 

unsealed. And in August of 2001, the Globe 

filed a motion in court arguing that an 

“intense and legitimate public interest” in 

the sexual abuse controversy and Cardinal 

Law’s “indisputable status as a public figure” 

should be enough to grant the paper 

access to discovery documents. 

The archdiocese fought the Globe’s 

motion as aggressively as it had fought 

every lawsuit by a plaintiff alleging clergy 

sex abuse. The church argued not only that 

the newspaper was not entitled to the doc- 


uments, but also that the paper had no right 

to ask for them – that it had no standing in 

the case. The church also argued that giving 

the Globe access would violate the church’s 

rights under the First Amendment, since 

its relationship with Father Geoghan was 

governed “by canon law and the teachings 

of the Roman Catholic Church.” And, the 

church argued that publication of articles 

based on these documents would deny it 

the right to a fair trial – that the Globe only 

wanted the documents so that “it can continue 

to generate further articles and editorials 

which are potentially prejudicial to 

the defendants.” But in late November, after 

a three-month court battle, Massachusetts 

Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney, 

a product of Catholic schools, ruled in the 

Globe’s favor on every issue. She concluded 

that the paper should have had access 

to these documents in the first place, and 

that the paper had every right to ask for 

them now. And she dismissed the First 

Amendment arguments made by the 

church, saying that clerical status “does not 

automatically free them from the legal 

duties imposed on the rest of society or necessarily 

immunize them from civil violations 

of such duties.” The church appealed 

Sweeney’s ruling, but the Globe won again, 

and in late January of 2002, the Geoghan 

documents were released. 

Well before the documents became public, 

the Globe’s Spotlight Team had begun 

trying to determine whether the Geoghan 

case was an anomaly or an alarm bell. The 

team, including editor Walter V. Robinson 

and reporters Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, 

and Michael Rezendes, uncovered an astonishing 

truth: more than 100 Boston priests 

had been accused of molesting minors over 

several decades. And the church’s own documents, 

obtained by the paper through 

public court files, leaks, and ultimately 

court-ordered disclosures of formerly secret 

church records, made it clear that in many 

of those cases, the church’s bishops had 

knowingly allowed abusive priests to 

remain in jobs with access to children. 

The first Spotlight story was published 

on January 6, 2002, two weeks before the 

court documents were released, showing 

that the church had essentially ignored, for 

three decades, a mountain of evidence that 

Father Geoghan, a supervisor of altar boys 

and friend to single mothers, was a serial, 

recidivist pedophile. He had admitted 

molesting children, and the church knew 

that. Some of his victims had complained 

to church officials, and the church knew 

that. At least one pastor complained, and 

the church knew and ignored that. The socalled 

treatment and evaluation of Geoghan 

was performed by two doctors, one a family 

physician with no experience or expertise 

in pedophilia, and the other a psychiatrist 

who also had no expertise in 

pedophilia and who himself had settled a 

lawsuit for allegedly abusing a female 

patient. 

Another investigative reporter, Stephen 

Kurkjian, two project writers, Kevin Cullen 

and Thomas Farragher, and I joined the 

Spotlight reporters shortly after the story 

broke. Guided by two outstanding project 

editors, Ben Bradlee Jr. and Mark Morrow, 

we have written more than 900 newspaper 

stories, as well as a book, Betrayal: The 

Crisis in the Catholic Church, (see review, 

p.6) about the tragedy of clergy sexual 

abuse in Boston, around the nation, and 

in the world. Our basic findings, supplemented 

by the good work of many other 

reporters around the nation, are now familiar: 

over the last several decades more than 

1,000 American priests groped, fondled, 

masturbated, and raped thousands of 

American minors, violating the law, their 

promises of celibacy, and the trust that so 

many Catholics had placed in their clergy. 

Equally troubling, their bosses, bishops 

who, according to Catholic teaching, are 

the direct successors to Jesus’s apostles, 

repeatedly and knowingly allowed abusive 

priests to remain in jobs where they had 

access to children. My job, as religion 

reporter, was not to chase which priest 

abused which kid, or which bishop knew 

what when, but to explain what this all 

means about the past, present, and future 

of the world’s largest religious denomination. 

The clergy sexual abuse scandal 

opened a Pandora’s box of issues that had 

been percolating in the Church for decades 

– gender, sexuality, power, and authority 

– and those are issues I expect to be writing 

about for as long as I’m on this beat. 

Over the course of the last year, hundreds 

of victims have come forward to tell 

their stories, to their families, to counselors, 

to the news media, and to lawyers. The 

resulting litigation has forced the Boston 

archdiocese to release thousands of pages 

of files, showing that over and over again, 

bishops chose to protect priests even after 

horrific allegations were made against them. 

One priest had seemed to defend incest and 

bestiality. Another was allegedly drunk 

when he fell asleep behind the wheel and 

caused a car accident, killing a 16-year-old 

boy he had allegedly molested a few hours 

earlier. One priest had been accused of terrorizing 

and beating his housekeeper, 

another of trading cocaine for sex, and a 

third of enticing young girls by claiming to 

be “the second coming of Christ.” Those 

priests kept their jobs for years, and in 

many cases, when they ultimately retired 

or were forced out, they were sent sympathetic 

or laudatory notes from Law. 

These revelations have led to unprecedented 

criticism of the church by laypeople 

and clergy. A new national lay group, 

Voice of the Faithful, formed in Boston to 

press for structural change in the church. 

Local priests organized for the first time, 

forming the Boston Priests Forum, and the 

decision in December by 58 local priests 

to call for Law to quit drew attention 

around the world. 

The results are still unfolding, but have 

already been dramatic. Massachusetts and 

other states changed their statutes to 

require that clergy report allegations of sexual 

abuse to law enforcement or social service 

agencies. The Vatican approved new 

church law for the U.S. requiring the 

removal from ministry of all abusive 

priests. The Archdiocese of Boston began 

training thousands of schoolchildren to 

resist and report inappropriate touching, 

and also began training church employees 

and volunteers to respond to suspected 

abuse. Numerous priests and bishops, 

including Law, resigned or were ousted for 

their roles in the scandal. At least 10 grand 

juries around the nation launched investigations. 

And a church-appointed commission, 

headed by former Oklahoma Gov. 

Frank Keating, has begun a wide-ranging 

examination of the scope and causes of the 

sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 

Haverford, I’ve often thought, made me 

a journalist, or at least allowed me to fumble 

my way toward a career in journalism 

in a way that would have been much more 

difficult at a larger university, where student 

newspapers seem to require a certainty 

of ambition that I simply didn’t possess 

at the age of 17, when I arrived at 

Winter2003 19


college, wearing braces, not really needing 

to shave, and thinking that I would 

grow up to become a scientist. I spent 

about half my years at Haverford preparing 

for a career as a research biologist, and 

the other half studying to be a doctor. But 

somewhere in the back of my head I must 

have known neither profession was really 

my calling – I had neither the talent nor 

the affinity for research science once it got 

more complicated than the color separation 

of high school chromatography, and 

the closer I got to medical school the less 

I wanted to go. I don’t remember getting 

much guidance from Haverford officialdom 

– I seem to recall that the career planning 

office had proudly purchased a fancy 

computer program that inexplicably 

advised me and several of my friends to 

become podiatrists. But at some point I 

woke up and noticed that, despite majoring 

in biology, I was choosing to spend 

much of my time and energy on the Bi- 

College News. It was as much of a sign as I 

was going to get. 

I credit a few professors with helping 

me find my way. Hortense Spillers, a 

Haverford English professor who drew me 

into her classroom because of our shared 

passion for Faulkner, forced me to develop 

focus and speed by demanding frequent 

but very short argumentative papers. Bob 

Washington, a Bryn Mawr sociologist, 

infected me with his enthusiasm for 

observing and thinking about trends in 

human society. But mostly I benefited from 

the encouragement of the two editors who 

preceded me at the helm of the Bi-College 

News, Caroline Nason, Bryn Mawr ’84, 

who fostered my love for the craft of newspaper 

writing, and Penny Chang, Bryn 

Mawr ’85, whose reporting zeal and 

courage I am still trying to emulate. I was 

also fortunate to be a Haverford undergrad 

when Leonard Silk, a New York Times economics 

columnist, chose to start investing 

in Haverford journalists as a tribute to his 

son, Andy, a former Bi-College News editor 

who had died in 1981 at the age of 28. 

Leonard Silk helped in several ways, but 

most important was simply by introducing 

those of us who were at Haverford in 

the mid-’80s to two Philadelphia Inquirer 

reporters, Jane Eisner and Bill Marimow, 

who were mentors the likes of which I had 

never seen – they offered advice when we 

didn’t know how to handle a story and 

career counseling when we didn’t know 

The majority of my correspondents have praised the 

Globe for its work, sometimes in extraordinarily 

generous terms. But a vocal minority frequently 

objects, either to individual stories, turns of 

phrase, or to the reportage as a whole. 

how to find a job. And they modeled a 

level of professionalism and passion that 

made this career seem not only possible 

but also desirable. 

I graduated with a bachelor of arts in 

biology, but immediately set about trying to 

find a job in newspapers. For five years, I 

covered local government and regional 

issues for the Patriot Ledger, in Quincy, 

Mass., starting out with the assignment of 

writing at least one story a day about a 

town with one traffic light and the world’s 

largest cranberry bog. Then I went to South 

Texas, covering presidential and local politics 

for the San Antonio Light for 15 

months before losing my job when that 

newspaper closed. For seven years, I 

reported for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 

covering city hall, state government in 

Olympia, and the federal government in 

Washington, D.C. But always I wanted to 

come back to Boston to work for my 

hometown paper, and when a friend at the 

paper called to say the religion job was 

open and to suggest it might be a good fit 

for me, I jumped at the opportunity. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 

In nearly 17 years since I graduated 

from Haverford, I’ve covered a lot of dramatic 

and important stories – a white man 

who set off a furor in Boston by falsely 

blaming a black man for the murder of his 

pregnant wife, a sexual harassment allegation 

that brought down a governor in 

Washington state, the impeachment of Bill 

Clinton and the trial of Microsoft. But I 

have never been involved with a story that 

has resonated so deeply, so immediately, 

and so persistently with readers. Nearly 

three-quarters of metropolitan Boston is 

at least nominally Catholic, and the church 

has long been one of the most influential 

institutions in the state. But from the 

moment of publication of that very first 

story about Father Geoghan, our readers 

have let loose with fury, sadness, and pain. 

Everywhere I go, people want to talk about 

this story, regardless of their religion, their 

age, or their newspaper-reading habits. 

They call, and write, and, some even show 

up at our offices. But mostly they e-mail. 

I’ve received thousands of e-mails from 

readers all over the world, many of them 

quite emotional, filled with personal stories 

of anger and betrayal, of hurt and 

hope. Some readers have become regular 

correspondents – often I don’t even know 

their names, but every few days or weeks, 

they send me a note to tell me they’re following 

my stories on the Internet, and 

want to share their thoughts. Some are 

quite vitriolic, others very kind, and many 

express passionately held beliefs about 

faith, leadership, morality, sexuality, and 

spirituality. 

There seems to be something about the 

ease and impersonality of cybercommunication 

that facilitates a kind of reductionist, 

and often hostile, use of language. My e- 

mail address runs at the bottom of my stories, 

giving readers ready access to my computer, 

and forcing me to develop a much 

thicker skin. The majority of my correspondents 

have praised the Globe for its 

work, sometimes in extraordinarily generous 

terms. But a vocal minority frequently 

objects, either to individual stories, turns 

of phrase, or to the reportage as a whole. 

Some readers seem to view printed discussion 

of certain controversies – such as 

the role of women in the church – as evidence 

of bigotry, and the Globe’s sustained 

coverage of sex abuse is viewed by them as 

a form of ideologically driven persecution. 

I received e-mail messages that were filled 

with invective – “Go fuck yourself, bigot,’’ 

is a prime example – as well as some that 

were cleverer. One correspondent put in 

the subject line of his e-mail: “You’re either 

a Anti-Catholic bigot or an idiot...’’ and then 

in the text box he declared, “…and given 

that you work for the Globe, there’s a very 

good chance you’re both.” 


Perhaps the most sensitive issue for 

readers seems to be the question of 

whether homosexuality played a role in 

this crisis. The Globe has several times 

reported that the preponderance of victims 

who have come forward are adolescent 

boys, and that most experts believe there 

is a higher percentage of gay men in the 

priesthood than in the general population. 

But we have also reported that experts 

agree that there is no link between homosexuality 

and child abuse. The e-mail on 

this subject can be quite tough. “Why don’t 

you tell the truth – that the sex scandal in 

the church is homosexual behavior by gay 

priests,’’ one reader asked me. “You are a 

captive of the gay rights lobby like the rest 

of the politically correct Globe.’’ The 

Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality 

is “objectively disordered,” and a significant 

fraction of the e-mail I receive 

seems to reflect the impact of such teaching. 

A California man wrote me to express 

concern about his own parish priest, saying, 

“We have an openly gay, or fruit, call 

them what you will. I will not let my 11- 

year-old son alone with him for 5 seconds…I 

see no reason…to take a chance. 

I have faith in God – the Father, the Son 

and the Holy Ghost – but not in my parish 

priest.’’ On the other hand, the editor of a 

gay travel magazine has been writing me, 

questioning the basis for a portion of the 

crisis. “Why are “abuse” and “molestation” 

bandied about to describe mutually desired 

activity?’’ he asks. “Sex puritans have trouble 

admitting that adolescents can want 

and pursue sex – they need not be “molested” 

or “abused” in order to have sex.’’ I 

never know quite how to respond to these 

sentiments, but mostly I do so through my 

work, by trying to use a heightened awareness 

of the extraordinarily broad range of 

views of the church’s plight to remind me 

always to be fair and even-handed. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 

The last time I saw Cardinal Law was 

Dec. 16, three days after he stepped down 

as archbishop of Boston. I was seated, along 

with a handful of other reporters, at 

another grand conference table in Brighton, 

this one at a church library just down the 

hill from the mansion. The cardinal, standing 

beneath a crucifix in an otherwise 

unadorned room, stunned the gathered 

news media by declaring, before launching 

into his prepared remarks, “I take this 

opportunity, too, to thank you for your 

courtesy during these years.” The comment 

was so unexpected, and the roar of 

camera shutters so loud, that there was 

actually a debate over what he said, and to 

this day some reporters insist the cardinal 

said “thank you for your criticism.” 

The Globe itself has been criticized, in a 

variety of ways, over the course of this 

extraordinary story. Just a few days after 

the first story broke, a priest who worked 

as an aide to Cardinal Law e-mailed me to 

object to the amount of space – four pages 

– that the Globe had devoted to reporting 

on a key set of documents released by the 

court. “This is incredibly heavy-handed 

and out of proportion to the coverage that 

this story deserves,’’ the priest wrote. We 

did not agree – and neither did our readers, 

who, when polled on the question, said 

they found the amount of coverage to be 

about right. 

A year later, a small group of victims 

complained that we paid too little attention 

to women victims, and declared, in a 

statement I still find difficult to comprehend, 

that “hostility toward survivors has 

been the most consistent feature of (the 

Globe’s) coverage since the scandal broke.’’ 

Our coverage did focus on male victims, 

but not exclusively so, and our focus was 

guided by the reality that every scholar and 

lawyer we interviewed, as well as our own 

reporting, found that the vast majority of 

known victims are male. 

In the world of media criticism, Peter 

Steinfels, a former religion reporter for the 

New York Times, was nearly alone in his 

persistent critique of the sex-abuse story 

in general and the Globe’s coverage in particular. 

He began in February 2002 with a 

column in the New York Times in which 

he seemed to defend the church, writing 

“By and large, Cardinal Law seems to have 

succeeded” in removing abusive priests 

from ministry after adopting a new policy 

in 1993. But that argument quickly crumbled 

– within months of Steinfels’ column, 

Law, under immense public pressure, had 

ousted 27 priests who were still serving in 

2002, despite facing allegations of abuse. 

(Three have since been restored to duty 

after the church decided the accusations 

were not credible.) 

In April, Steinfels wrote in Commonweal, 

a Catholic magazine, that “Horrid 

facts have been mixed with half-truths, half 

understood,’’ and then in September, he 

reiterated his concerns in The Tablet, a 

British Catholic journal, writing, “After 

months of media blitz most Americans, 

including normally well-informed 

Catholics, have a similarly skewed, or at 

least very imprecise, understanding of the 

clerical sex scandal which erupted in 

January – not of the terrible nature of the 

misconduct itself but of its exact scope, 

the time frame when it largely occurred, 

the legal issues involved, and the record of 

how different bishops handled it at different 

times.’’ I have no idea how Steinfels 

could know what most Americans think 

– I have not seen polling on this question 

– but his criticism echoed that offered by 

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the 

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who 

declared in June, “During these last 

months, the image of the Catholic hierarchy 

in this country has been distorted to 

an extent which I would not have thought 

possible six months ago.” Our response is 

simple: our coverage has been fair and 

complete. If bishops have been damaged 

by the crisis, which they certainly have, 

that damage is self-inflicted. We have been 

quite clear that much of the reported abuse 

took place in the 1970s and 1980s, and we 

have discussed how bishops responded, or 

failed to respond, in great detail. And, we 

believe, the results of our reportage speaks 

for itself: the bishops themselves have 

acknowledged by their actions that until 

the Globe started writing about this issue, 

more than 400 priests who were alleged 

abusers were still working in parishes in 

the U.S.; that the church had no national 

policy for preventing or responding to the 

sexual abuse of minors; that bishops routinely 

declined to report alleged abusers to 

law enforcement; and that secrecy was 

often a higher priority than safety. 

A few critics have gone to amazing 

rhetorical lengths in their desire to criticize 

our work. Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez 

Maradiaga of Honduras, who is considered 

a possible successor to Pope John Paul II, 

accused the Globe and other American 

papers of “persecution of the church,’’ 

telling an Italian monthly in June that the 

U.S. media had behaved with “a fury which 

reminds me of the times of Diocletian and 

Nero and, more recently, Stalin and Hitler.” 

And Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law 

School professor with close ties to Cardinal 

Winter2003 21


Law and John Paul II, delivered to several 

audiences around the world a speech in 

which she denounced the Globe for “creating 

a climate of hysteria.’’ In a version 

delivered in Rome last November, she 

declared, “All I can say is that if fairness 

and accuracy have anything to do with it, 

awarding the Pulitzer Prize to the Boston 

Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace 

Prize to Osama bin Laden.” 

Comparisons to Hitler and bin Laden 

hardly seem to dignify a response, except 

for the fact that they come from a top cardinal 

and a Harvard law school professor. 

Perhaps Rodriguez and Glendon should 

consider the words of Rev. Andrew Greeley, 

who in June wrote in the Chicago Sun- 

Times, “No one in the media donned a clerical 

collar and abused a child or a minor. 

No one in the media reassigned a habitual 

child abuser. In fact, if the Boston Globe 

had not told the story of the church’s horrific 

failures in Boston, the abuse would 

have gone right on. There would have been 

no crisis, no demand from the laity that 

the church cut out this cancer of irresponsibility, 

corruption and sin, and no 

charter for the protection of children. The 

Globe did the church an enormous favor.” 

Some church officials seem to agree, 

although the sincerity of their remarks is 

up for debate. Bishop William S. Skylstad 

of Spokane, the vice president of the U.S. 

Conference of Catholic Bishops, told me, 

“A boil has been lanced, and I do feel 

strongly that this is a time of grace for us, 

as painful and difficult as this moment is. 

The fact is that the pain and the hurt were 

there, under the surface, for those who 

have been carrying around this for years, 

and opening this up helps us to minister 

to that situation as best we can, and begin 

the process of healing and reconciliation. 

It’s an opportune moment for us to address 

the issue, and it’s a grace and an aid as we 

look to the future.” And Pope John Paul 

II made a similar point last April, declaring, 

“We must be confident that this time 

of trial will bring a purification of the entire 

Catholic community, a purification that is 

urgently needed (if the Church is to preach 

more effectively the Gospel of Jesus Christ 

in all its liberating force).” 

As I turned to go, he said to me, "Michael, I wish we 

were back in Israel together." A kind wish for a more 

peaceful time, perhaps, when he and I could talk 

about anything other than clergy sexual abuse. But 

an odd wish, too. The Middle East was in the middle 

of its own violent crisis, not exactly a place for a 

peaceful retreat, even for an embattled archbishop. 

My relationship with top church officials, 

which I had worked hard to build, 

has unquestionably been damaged by this 

story. In all sorts of ways, church officials 

have tried to stymie the Globe’s reporting, 

through direct obstruction, such as resisting 

the release of court documents, and 

through criticism, suggesting that the story 

is overblown. In June, just before the bishops 

were to meet, the bishops’ conference 

invited numerous religion reporters to a 

briefing about their draft plan, but the conference 

decided not to invite the Globe, 

claiming there wasn’t space in the room 

for us. After I complained, they offered to 

let me listen by speakerphone, but that 

wasn’t enough for us, so we decided to 

ignore the briefing, found someone who 

agreed to leak us a copy of the document, 

and ran a story in the paper the day the 

briefing was to be held. The bishops conference 

was livid and promised to punish 

the Globe – a spokesman declared in an e- 

mail to me “the Globe shows a complete 

lack of accommodation…which will have 

to be factored into our future dealings.’’ So 

when the bishops met in Dallas, I was 

barred from the room in which the bishops 

sat. I was able to watch on closed-circuit 

TV. Some of my colleagues were generous 

enough to help me get the 

documents and description I was denied, 

so my only real punishment was that I had 

to snack on pretzels, rather than the Dove 

bars supplied to those reporters who hadn’t 

incurred the bishops’ wrath. 

Later that day, the Globe, along with 

each of the other six Boston news organizations 

that had sent crews to Dallas, was 

offered a five-minute interview with 

Cardinal Law – the first time he and I 

would exchange more than a greeting since 

our phone conversation just after his birthday 

seven months earlier. We met in an 

office suite at the Fairmont Hotel, and I 

spent my five minutes asking about his 

plans – he insisted he would not resign – 

and his thoughts about what had gone 

wrong. At the end of our brief conversation, 

as I rose to leave, the cardinal seemed 

to want to talk some more. He asked me 

to tell him what I knew about a deadly car 

bombing that day outside a U.S. consulate 

in Karachi; he had spent that day in meetings 

and hadn’t had time to watch the 

news. And, then, as I turned to go, he said 

to me, “Michael, I wish we were back in 

Israel together.’’ A kind wish for a more 

peaceful time, perhaps, when he and I 

could talk about anything other than clergy 

sexual abuse. But an odd wish, too. The 

Middle East was in the middle of its own 

violent crisis, not exactly a place for a 

peaceful retreat, even for an embattled 

archbishop. And stranger still is that it was 

a mistaken memory: Cardinal Law had 

been accompanied to the Holy Land by a 

Globe reporter years before, but it wasn’t 

me. In the end, for Cardinal Law and me, 

there would be no peaceful journey. 

Michael Paulson ’86, the religion reporter 

for the Boston Globe, can be reached at 

mpaulson@globe.com. He is a member of a 

team of Globe reporters that has written 

more than 900 stories on clergy sexual abuse 

since January 2002 and that co-authored 

Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic 

Church, (Little, Brown & Co.) which was 

published in hardcover in June 2002 and in 

paperback in March 2003. Paulson and his 

colleagues have been honored for their work 

with the Associated Press Managing Editors’ 

Freedom of Information Award, the 

Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, 

the George Polk Award for national reporting, 

the Selden Ring Award for investigative 

reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for 

investigative reporting, and The New York 

Times Company’s Punch Sulzberger Award. 


Taking the Lead in L.A. 

by Joe Quinlan ’75 

John Carroll ’63 has brought egalitarian leadership 

and editorial acumen to the Los Angeles Times. 

And it’s working. 

He may run America’s largest metropolitan daily 

newspaper. He may chair the selection committee 

for the Pulitzer Prizes. He may even be the most 

admired newspaper editor in the country, at least 

by his peers. 

But he doesn’t throw Oscar Night parties. Or have 

PR agents book him on Charlie Rose or “Nightline.” 

Or write big books on the side, at least not yet. 

Try to Google him and you’ll find the pickings 

thin. Perhaps no surprise, since he’s spent most of his 

four-decade career in putting out daily papers in 

Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Lexington, Ky. 

His biggest fans, in fact, are his own reporters and 

editors—all of whom invariably underscore the same 

attributes: his dedication to journalism, especially 

the daily sort that still gets delivered to your doorstep. 

Meet John Carroll ’63, editor of the once-venerable 

journalistic cash machine know as the Los 

Angeles Times. It’s a job he took less than three years 

ago, when the paper was in crisis and when many in 

the news business, smitten with dot-com fever, had 

already written off big city papers. 

Since he speaks so rarely and so reluctantly about 

himself and his career, let’s let him explain how he 

wound up in Southern California… 

“Back early in 2000, I was ready to leave the Sun 

after 10 years. And I was close to accepting an offer 

from Harvard to run the Nieman fellowship program 

for journalists. 

“We’d even done some house hunting up in 

Cambridge, and I was working on the outline for a 

book. 

“At the last minute, I got a call from a member 

of the search committee, who was also a senior executive 

for the Tribune Company, which was buying 

Times Mirror, which in turn owned both the Sun 

and the Los Angeles Times. 

“He asked me to put Harvard on hold and consider 

the Times job.” 

So, the book idea went back in the drawer and 

Carroll shipped west, knowing full well the challenge 

he faced. 

The Los Angeles Times was wrestling with a circulation 

and pricing issues, a controversial incursion 

by advertising types to its news side and a perception 

that meaningful local coverage was less than 

a priority. It was a turnaround challenge of the first 

order. Add internal political struggles—former publisher 

and founding family member Otis Chandler 

openly criticized Times management—and it was 

clear the paper would be no easy fix. 

“People warned me,” says Carroll, “it’s a battleship 

that will take a decade to turn around. The 

bureaucracy will kill you.” 

His soft voice drops down even lower…“I think 

we’ve proven them wrong.” 

Carroll points to tough decisions and management 

changes—10 of the 14 names on the paper’s 

masthead have changed in little more than two years. 

Departments are not only talking together—they’re 

working together. 

“From day one, John was out in the newsroom, 

proving by his actions that he was what we needed…what 

we craved…a real journalist,” says Richard 

Lee Colvin, former Times education writer who now 

directs the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, 

Winter2003 23


Columbia University. 

“He was down in the cafeteria the first 

week, sitting with a real mix of people and 

listening to what they had to say. It wasn’t 

like some politician popping in for a photo 

op.” 

“It may not be a revolution, but it’s the 

kind of shift that actually works best for 

this type of organization,” Carroll reflects 

on his work in Los Angeles. “And our readers 

seem to be noticing the improvement as 

well, and that’s the real test.” 

Simply put, Carroll’s improvements have 

made the paper more readable—and more 

relevant to Southern California. Always 

lauded for foreign and national coverage, 

the Times sometimes paid scant attention 

to local crime, metropolitan and regional 

news. Under its new editor, the paper’s 

Metro section explored Southern California 

with new commitment, resources and smart 

writing. A fading lifestyle section was killed. 

And trenchant Steve Lopez, a former Time 

magazine and Philadelphia Inquirer writer, 

was hired as lead columnist. With Carroll 

in charge, the Times simply seemed more 

connected to Los Angeles. 

And to its staff as well. As Colvin 

remembers, “Years ago, top editors liked 

to keep their distance from the troops. 

They especially liked their private dining 

rooms. Well, John Carroll did something 

that nobody had ever thought of—he made 

the private rooms available to any reporter 

who thought they might need to impress a 

source. It may sound like a small thing, 

but it made a huge impression on the 

reporting staff. He’s a true small d democrat. 

And it’s something that comes through 

almost effortlessly.” 

“John Carroll cares about things that 

are important—things like schools and 

equality and how government deals with 

these issues,” says Chris Lee ’89 a 

Washington Post newsman who interned 

for the editor in Lexington. “He wanted 

his paper to be fair, but also not to be afraid 

of covering tough issues in detail, even if it 

ruffled feathers and even if embarrassed 

some politicians who could cause trouble.” 

The Carroll commitment to tough 

issues was on full view at the Lexington 

Herald in the mid ’80s. The paper revealed 

a scandal-plagued University of Kentucky 

basketball program; its reporters and editors 

defied death threats—even a shot fired 


into the pressroom and a bomb scare—to 

support the investigation. The Herald won 

a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. University 

reforms were put in place. And Carroll collected 

enough material for the book he still 

intends to write. 

Of his own battle of Lexington, Carroll 

recalls, “They don’t have to like you. But 

they do have to pay attention and read you 

if you’re going to be a success. 

“To our pleasant surprise, we actually 

sold more papers than ever during the periods 

of controversy.” 

And though blamed for Kentucky basketball 

being placed on probation, Carroll 

was actually welcomed back last year and 

inducted into the state’s journalism hall of 

fame. 

“It’s been wonderful and amazing to 

track John’s professional growth over the 

years,” observes Loren Ghiglione ’63, current 

dean of Northwestern’s Medill School 

of Journalism—and legendary Haverford 

News editor four decades ago. 

“For a long time, he was a sort of 

strong, but quiet leader at mid-sized 

papers, but now he’s got a much larger 

stage, both with the Times and the 

Pulitzer Committee. He’s right in the middle 

of all the forces that are impacting 

newspapers—the economy and technology 

and diversity and war coverage—you 

name it. I can’t think of a better person 

to be in that position—to set an example 

for all of us.” 

Perhaps the most crucial example for 

Carroll to set is how a savvy manager transitions 

from running established eastern 

papers to supervising coverage for the radically 

diverse city that is Los Angeles. For 

to grow his newspaper, the editor must 

make inroads to new arrivals and those 

who don’t traditionally see the Times as 

part of their L.A. experience. 

Says Carroll: “Here in Southern California, 

we’re really on the leading edge of 

the changing face of America and 

Americans. There are incredibly large numbers 

of emigrants from all over the world 

here. We’ve got well over 100 languages 

spoken. You can drive down the freeway 

and listen on your radio to Lakers games— 

in Farsi.” 

Accordingly, Carroll looks toward a 

newsroom that someday reflects the diversity 

he sees on the streets of Los Angeles. 

The Times already has accomplished much 

in terms of minority hiring; Carroll notes 

that, “Every editorial employee except me 

works for an African-American because 

both the managing editor and editorial 

page editor are black.” 

Placing Latinos is more problematic, 

Carroll says, explaining that “Hispanic promotion 

and hiring are about 20 years 

behind where they should be.” And though 

the Times persists in outreach at schools 

and colleges, it’s Carroll’s view that a generation 

will pass “before substantial 

progress is made.” 

Carroll traces his own social interests 

and concerns back to student days at 

Haverford. Though the son of a prominent 

newsman, he was not active in student 

journalism like classmate Ghiglione. 

“Haverford made a huge impression on 

me—even more than I knew at the time,” 

he says. I remember when I was in high 

school and, through a friend, meeting Bill 

Cadbury, who was a professor and later 

dean at the College. He made a big and 

very positive impression on me, but it 

wasn’t easy for me to get admitted. Frankly, 

I wasn’t the greatest student. And while I 

can’t say I was the last member of my class 

admitted, I was on the waiting list for a 

very long time. 

“My experiences at Haverford have 

served me well, both personally and professionally. 

And it wasn’t just the academics. 

It was, more than anything, learning 

to make a distinction between societal 

rights and wrongs. That’s what Haverford 

instilled in me more than anything else. 

“I think the same thing happened when 

my daughter (Kathleen ’89) was a student, 

and it seems to still be the case today.” 

After graduating, Carroll was hired as 

a cub reporter for the Providence (R.I.) 

Journal, but within a year, he began a twoyear 

stint in the Army. 

“Sometimes I think I would have been 

better off if I had been in the Army earlier 

and then come back to college to finish 

up. I think I was too young to appreciate 

all that I had while I was in college, and I 

think I was a little too old after I graduated 

to take the drill sergeant seriously.” 

Discharged in 1966, the Baltimore Sun 

hired him the young reporter, eventually 

sending Carroll to the Middle East and 

then to the White House during Richard 

Nixon’s first term. 

Though first, he had a war to cover.

“I got to Vietnam at the end of 1967, 

when the war was still going full steam. It 

was totally different from today, where 

reporters are herded into briefing rooms 

and shown videotapes. 

“Back then, reporters went directly into 

combat—we traveled with the troops pretty 

much everywhere—in helicopters and 

on planes and on the ground. That’s the 

way it was done. 

“And my experience was that the troops 

in the field were always glad to see us, to 

share their stories—even if the generals 

back in Saigon were less than thrilled with 

the media.” 

Considering Pentagon media management 

circa 2003, Carroll speaks tersely: 

“They can control the flow a news in short 

war,” he said. “But I don’t think the public 

will stand for such sanitized information 

for very long.” 

In 1972, Carroll made what was perhaps 

his biggest career move, giving up the 

lone wolf, star reporter life to become an 

editor, joining the Inquirer and trading coverage 

of Nixon for a Nixon favorite, Frank 

Rizzo. 

“Anyone who moves inside gives up 

something. When you’re a newspaper 

reporter, there’s that rush you get when you 

pick up the paper and see your name and 

your words; the rewards are both immediate 

and concrete. 

“As an editor—and this is at any level— 

the rewards are both indirect and incremental. 

Other than getting out the paper 

itself, I like knowing that I have a hand in 

the career development of my staff. But it’s 

not something you can tote up at the end 

of the day or even a month. It’s a bit like 

being a teacher, I guess.” 

A lingering irony in Carroll’s newsroom 

career is that his management titles—currently 

Executive Vice President and 

Editor—may sound more bottom line than 

journalistic. 

Said one media critic recently: “Many 

of the people running our big news organizations 

seem more interested in having 

lunch with Warren Buffet or dinner with 

Barry Diller than they do in their own 

product. They seem more intent in being 

seen as media moguls and getting big contracts 

than in serving the reading and viewing 

public.” 

In spite of his own titles, Carroll devotes 

the overwhelming majority of his time to 

The Ford 

Network 

Like many Ford journalists, Kate Shatzkin ’87’s 

career path has been influenced by John Carroll ’63. 

In the spring of 1994, coming off a 

yearlong Knight Fellowship in Law at 

Yale, one of the most prestigious journalism 

fellowships, Kate Shatzkin ’87 was 

poised to resume her career at the Seattle 

Times, where she’d spent four years writing 

about everything from environmental 

issues to food. 

She never made it back. 

As a junior at Haverford, Shatzkin and 

her best friend Lisa Greene (BMC ’87) 

met then-Philadelphia Inquirer journalist 

Bill Marimow and John Carroll ’63, who 

had moved from the Inquirer to the 

Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, at the Silk 

Journalism Panel (see p. 27) at Haverford. 

As Shatzkin, Greene, and Marimow all 

remember it, there was a pointed debate, 

with Carol Leonnig (BMC ’87) joining 

the fray. Marimow was so impressed that 

he promptly hired all three women – who 

worked together on the Bi-Co News along 

with Michael Paulson ’86 – as part-time 

stringers for the Inquirer. 

“Lisa, Carol, Michael, and I all knew 

that we were going to be professional 

journalists when we were together at the 

Bi-Co News,” Shatzkin says. 

Shatzkin’s first full-time job out of college 

was at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, 

Mass., where Paulson had cut his journalistic 

teeth. “I figured if Michael did it, 

I could go there,” she says. “It was like a 

boot camp for journalists, a story a day 

and more if you wanted to excel.” 

Shatzkin and her friends excelled. 

Sixteen years later, Greene works at the 

St. Petersburg Times, Leonnig at the 

Washington Post, Paulson at the Boston 

Globe (see p. 16), and Shatzkin at the 

Baltimore Sun. In fact, Shatzkin’s husband, 

Sun religion reporter John Rivera, and 

Paulson have become friends; the two 

often see each other at the same meetings 

and press conferences. How Shatzkin came 

to the Sun is a testament to friendships 

forged and careers launched at Haverford. 

“John Carroll has been good friend of 

mine,” she explains, “and he interviewed 

me on campus when he worked at the 

Lexington Herald-Leader. He also hired 

me at the Sun and started me on the 

metro desk. I really liked Seattle, but I 

was very interested in court reporting and 

police reporting and I had the opportunity 

to do the prison beat in Baltimore. 

To come here and work for people like 

John and Bill Marimow added an invaluable 

dimension to the situation. I know 

they like to hire good people.” 

Marimow, who became editor of the 

Sun in April 2000, feels he lucked out with 

this particular hire. “Simply put, Kate is 

great,” he says. “Her work ethic is up there 

where the air is rare. She is an extremely 

meticulous, incisive reporter, a fluid writer. 

An excellent person. I was elated to learn 

she was coming here because, truth be 

told, I thought she would go somewhere 

like the New York Times.” 

In Marimow’s assessment, Shatzkin’s 

work at the Sun has comprised several 

challenging beats, including the prison 

beat, the courts and “page one-caliber 

stuff” on nonprofits. One of her early stories 

focused on Jackie Bouknight, imprisoned 

for allegedly covering up the disappearance 

of her son, who’d been abused 

in the foster home system and returned 

to his mother. “I had read about this case 

while I was at Yale and decided to pursue 

it when I got to Baltimore,” Shatzkin says. 

“No one could find the son and Jackie 

made efforts that seemed helpful to the 

authorities, and then she fell silent. She 

ended up pleading the Fifth and the 

lawyers argued that she was protecting 

her son from the foster system. The police 

maintained that the boy was dead. I got 

the lawyers to petition to reopen the case 

and she received due process and won her 

adult’s right to liberty – she got out of 

prison – and some people think she got 

away with the perfect crime. But Jackie 

Winter2003 25


news, leaving business to, well, the business 

types. 

“My own view is that that at too many 

papers, editors are being drawn into business 

planning and are paying way too much 

attention to it. They ought to be editing.” 

Indeed, such views were considered oldfashioned 

in the late ’90s when dot-com 

fever dominated the news business. Careful 

not to gloat, Carroll explains his colleagues’ 

Internet hunger: “People got way ahead of 

themselves. Before the bubble burst, there 

were some influential people who said that 

the website would become the business and 

the paper would fade away. 

“A lot of money was lost before the 

world realized that for now at least, a website 

can work as an extension of a paper 

or magazine, but not as a stand-alone business. 

“We’re all going to be reading newspapers 

for a long time. At least if I have anything 

to do with it,” Carroll adds with a 

smile. 

Author’s Note: 

I first met John 30 years ago as a cocky 

Haverford junior who’d just finished a summer 

reporting stint for the Philadelphia 

Evening Bulletin. His classmate, Greg 

Kannerstein ’63, had introduced us and I 

became one of the dozens of Haverford students 

who benefited from Greg’s journalistic 

pipeline to John, Loren Ghiglione and others. 

Chris Lee ’89, mentioned earlier, is 

another. 

John kindly took me out to lunch, and even 

listened quietly as I talked, I’m sure, way too 

much. He’d just been hired by the most 

admired editor in the country, Eugene 

Roberts, to supervise local coverage for the 

Inquirer, the #2 paper in town. 

I told John my professional goal was to be 

the Bulletin’s city editor when I was 30. He 

reached for a napkin and started scribbling 

a chart with numbers. He looked up, smiled 

faintly, and pointed to the sheet: “Your problem,” 

he said softly, “is that the Bulletin won’t 

be there in 10 years.” 

I gulped hard but kept a straight face. 

After all, the Bulletin was 150 years old and 

its demise was unthinkable. To me at least. 

Nine years later, the Bulletin folded. By 

then, John was editing the Lexington (Ky.) 

Herald. I was in New York, a senior producer 

for national affairs at MacNeil-Lehrer, 

the nightly news show on PBS. When we 

reported the Bulletin’s closing on the program 

that night, I remembered the napkin. 

And I smiled. And I vowed to listen—hard— 

when John Carroll ever talked about the 

media again. — J.Q. ’75 

The Carroll File 

1963 

Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, 

state staff reporter 

1964 – 1966 

U.S. Army 

1966 – 1972 

Baltimore Sun, local reporter, Vietnam 

correspondent, Middle East correspondent, 

White House correspondent 

1972 – 1979 

Philadelphia Inquirer, 

several editorial positions 

1979 – 1991 

Lexington (Ky.) Herald/Lexington 

Herald-Leader, several executive roles, 

including editor, vice president, and 

executive vice president 

1991 – 2000 

Baltimore Sun, senior vice and editor; 

vice president of Times Mirror in 1998 

1994 

Named to Pulitzer Prize board 

2000 – Current 

Los Angeles Times, executive vice 

president and editor 

The Ford Network 

argued that she’d been damaged and abused 

by the foster system herself and served 7 

years in prison, which is longer than many 

people serve for manslaughter.” 

Shatzkin then covered high-profile cases 

on the city court beat, leaving her no time 

to pursue prison stories. This assignment 

was followed by a stint of investigative 

reporting, from 1996 through 1999. 

During that time, she ventured into the 

“arcane, secretive system of lawyer discipline” 

while doing a story on unscrupulous 

lawyers in Maryland. She also did a 

series on chicken producers both on the 

Eastern Shore and nationally. This work 

and her work on the city court beat were 

nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Her current beat, nonprofits as a significant 

sector of public policy, as an engine 

of change and of issue development, fits 

well with her life as a working mother 

(daughter Leah is 2 years old and she’s 

expecting a baby boy next month). “It’s a 


very serious beat about the approaches to 

power and social change,” she says. “Some 

characteristics of nonprofits are like the private 

sector and people want to know why. 

It’s public money but nonprofits are often 

not in public buildings. Lots of the records 

are not made public.” 

Shatzkin still keeps in touch with 

Greene, though their careers haven’t 

crossed paths since their days together at 

the Inquirer. “We still keep in touch regularly 

and check out each other’s stories,” 

Greene admits. “Kate, as you might or 

might not expect from a best friend, has 

been totally supportive of my efforts and 

my abilities as a reporter. It took me a bit 

longer to get to a big paper after taking 

time to get married and have kids, but Kate 

has always encouraged me along the way.” 

A Kansas City, Mo., native, Shatzkin 

found the liberal arts experience she sought 

at Haverford. Courses in art history and 

some English taken at Bryn Mawr rounded 

out her experience. The flexibility of 

doing high-level academic work while 

working for both the Bi-Co News and parttime 

for the Inquirer is an opportunity she 

still relishes. 

“I made some very conscious decisions 

about how I was going to use my time at 

Haverford,” she says. “I was able to do 

things I never would have been able to do 

at a large university. Today, I look back and 

think it’s great that Haverford students work 

hard and know they can do this. I was driving 

to work today and I heard Juan 

Williams ’76 on NPR interviewing Howard 

Lutnick ’83 and Tom Barbash ’83 about 

their new 9/11 book – all Haverford people! 

I’m impressed with journalism tradition 

at Haverford. The liberal arts are often 

undervalued, I think, but they shouldn’t 

be. It’s a perfect foundation for a journalism 

career.” 

— S.H.

A Legacy in Print 

The family of the late Andrew Silk ’76, 

a renowned journalist and social activist, 

encourages generations of Haverford and 

Bryn Mawr students to follow in his 

footsteps. by Brenna McBride 

Andy Mathieson ’05 wasn’t expecting the 

frantic, frazzled environment of a New York 

Times–style newsroom. A hopeful journalist 

who admires humor columnists like Dave 

Barry ’69 and occasionally contributes his own witticisms to the Haverford/Bryn 

Mawr Bi-College News, Mathieson applied for a summer internship with The School 

Administrator magazine to get some experience with a professional, monthly publication. 

He knew the Arlington, Virginia-based magazine, edited by Jay Goldman ’78, 

had a small staff of what Goldman liked to call “three-and-a-half people” and 

approached each issue at its own pace. It met his needs. 

Winter2003 27


During the course of the summer, 

Mathieson assisted the magazine staff with 

copy editing, coded articles to be processed 

by the graphics designer, edited book 

reviews, wrote his own reviews for an 

internally published packet delivered to 

the American Association of School 

Administrators, and started compiling the 

annual index of the year’s articles. He sat 

in on editorial and design meetings, where 

his ideas and opinions were encouraged 

by Goldman and staff. He was sent on 

assignment to cover an AASA talk on 

school safety and drug prevention, where 

he was impressed by school superintendents’ 

ongoing efforts to tackle 

these issues. 

“I was overwhelmed by the array 

of responsibilities and the amount 

of trust the staff had in me,” he says. 

“I didn’t feel at all led around or 

patronized.” He feels privileged to 

have been involved in setting a 

“nationwide agenda;” copies of The School 

Administrator are found in the offices of 

school superintendents and principals 

across the country. And he takes particular 

pride in the September 2002 issue focusing 

on spirituality in schools. He played a large 

role in the production of this issue and, 

Jay Goldman tells him, it has elicited an 

enormous response from readers. 

Mathieson knows that his experience 

wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t 

been able to support himself with a stipend 

from the Silk Fund, instituted by former 

New York Times business columnist 

Leonard Silk and his wife Bernice in memory 

of their son Andrew ’76, a respected 

journalist who died of lung cancer in 1981 

at the age of 28. Andy Mathieson means 

to follow in the footsteps of another Andy, 

a talented writer and committed social 

activist with an unshakable belief in the 

often-underestimated power of the printed 

word to change the status quo. 

Andy’s father, Leonard, had been a 

newspaperman since his high school years. 

At the University of Wisconsin, he edited 

the campus humor magazine and wrote 

music reviews for the New York Times, 

because it was the best way to obtain free 

records. He wrote for his hometown newspaper, 

the Atlantic City Press, and for 

Business Week before joining the New York 

Times as the author of the business page’s 

twice-weekly “Economics Scene” column. 


“From the beginning, we believed that 

being involved in current events was a 

great career path,” says Mark Silk, Andy’s 

older brother, a former staff writer for the 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution who now holds 

a seat at the Center for the Study of 

Religion in Public Life at Trinity College 

in Hartford, Conn. 

Bernice Silk remembers how her husband 

would initiate conversations about 

his day at the Times and about the news 

of the world every evening at the dinner 

table, during Andy’s youth in Montclair, 

N.J. “Andy was a talker,” she says. “He 

Mathieson knows that his experience 

wouldn’t have been possible if he 

hadn’t been able to support himself 

with a stipend from the Silk Fund 

loved to participate in these discussions.” 

Leonard even helped Andy get a summer 

job at the Times as a copyboy. 

“He loved the excitement and gratification 

of seeing himself in print,” says 

Bernice. 

Andy was already picturing a future as 

a reporter, but he planned to major in philosophy 

in college—a program counted 

among Haverford’s best in the 1970s. It 

was more than academics, however, that 

attracted Andy to the College, Bernice 

recalls: “He fell in love with the place, the 

atmosphere, Quakerism, honesty, the 

down-to-earth environment. He met the 

kind of people who appealed to him.” 

One of these people was Juan Williams 

’76, a senior correspondent at National 

Public Radio and former host of NPR’s 

“Talk of the Nation,” and author of the 

bestseller Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil 

Rights Years, 1954-1965. Williams and 

Andy bonded over their mutual interest in 

journalism, and Williams’ admiration of 

the New York Times in general and Leonard 

Silk’s column in particular. “I was originally 

intimidated by him,” says Williams, 

“not only because of who his father was, 

but because he was so clearly focused on 

journalism as a career.” 

Andy joined the Haverford/Bryn Mawr 

News as a writer; his skill and perseverance 

earned him the position of managing 

editor in 1972 and editor-in-chief during 

the 1973-74 academic year. He relished 

the challenges of putting the paper to bed 

every week, and the pressure of delivering 

stories on time. 

These were the years when the News 

served as a breeding ground for some of 

today’s most notable journalists, such as 

Dave Wessel ’75, economics columnist for 

the Wall Street Journal, and Joe Quinlan 

’75, former Emmy-winning senior producer 

for the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour” 

and past executive producer at Time Inc. 

News Media. 

Quinlan is currently the president of 

Q*com, which provides strategic 

advice on a range of media-related 

issues, but he still thinks affectionately 

of the man who gave him his 

first column. At Haverford, he was 

involved in student government, 

working in the public relations office, 

and serving as a Customs person, and 

didn’t feel comfortable committing 

himself to the responsibilities of a regular 

reporter or editor at the News. “But Andy 

came up with a solution,” he says. “‘Write 

a column,’ he said, ‘even if it’s every other 

week, and write about stuff going on in 

the world.’ Thus was born ‘Q and Co.’” 

Quinlan remembers his class as a precocious 

one when it came to journalism. 

“Several of us had already worked at newspapers 

before coming to Haverford, and 

knew we wanted to work in the business. 

But Andy was clearly the best among us, 

both as a reporter and editor. He had such 

a big mind and restless spirit, not to mention 

quick wit, in that little body of his.” 

Chuck Durante ’73, now a partner at 

the Wilmington, Del., law firm of Connolly 

Bove Lodge and Hutz LLP, was editor of 

the paper when Andy began as a reporter. 

He was impressed with the positive 

changes his successor brought with him. 

“The year Andy was editor-in-chief, the 

News broke free of its reliance on the 

stodgiest, least visually appealing elements 

of the New York Times,” he says. “He 

brought a visually imaginative approach 

to the design, and demonstrated an allegiance 

to the basic principles of dogged 

reporting. And as an interviewer, he knew 

how to ask uncomfortable questions in a 

way that was not confrontational.” 

“Andy’s writing had a strong social and 

political consciousness, and showed his 

compassion for all people,” says Juan

Williams. “He understood that he had a 

voice and a power he could express with 

his pen.” 

Dave Wessel and Andy Silk were drawn 

to journalism for many of the same reasons. 

“We wanted to shine light in corners 

of the world, take readers from their comfortable, 

sheltered lives and bring them to 

places they would never go.” And although 

Andy wrote about intercollegiate issues 

such as Haverford’s path to coeducation, 

Wessel saw how he cast his gaze far beyond 

campus. “He was always looking for a way 

to think outside the boundaries of 

Lancaster Avenue.” 

No one anticipated just how far outside 

these boundaries Andy’s thoughts lay, until 

he announced his intention to spend his 

junior year as a visiting reporter in South 

Africa, covering the apartheid situation. 

Of everyone, his family may have met this 

decision with the least amount of 

surprise. 

Mark Silk was familiar with 

Andy’s interest in author George 

Orwell, who had fought in the 

Spanish Civil War and immersed 

himself in the world of that country’s 

poor and disenfranchised. “For 

Andy, South Africa was a way to follow 

in Orwell’s footsteps. In the 

1970s, apartheid was the obvious great evil; 

it made sense that he was drawn to that.” 

Leonard and Bernice Silk had also witnessed 

Andy’s involvement in the Vietnam 

anti-war movement as a teenager, and 

knew of his commitment to combating 

injustice. The Silks themselves had previously 

visited South Africa, and Leonard 

put his son in contact with staff members 

at the Pretoria News and the Rand Daily 

Mail. 

Juan Williams was awed by his friend’s 

willingness to put himself on the line in 

order to get the true story of apartheid and 

its victims. “He considered it the big story 

of our time,” he says. “He seized the opportunity 

to tell stories that would open people’s 

eyes.” 

Upon Andy’s return for his senior year, 

he picked up where he left off with his 

studies and lived in a group house that 

included Chuck Durante. Durante credits 

Andy with introducing him to NPR’s “All 

Things Considered,” and marveled at his 

roommate’s passion for the printed word 

in all languages. “He read journals, papers, 

and magazines not available at most newsstands, 

many from overseas,” he says. 

“He’d be up reading until midnight, not 

just for his assignments.” 

Andy graduated magna cum laude and 

Phi Beta Kappa, and received a prestigious 

Watson fellowship, which would allow him 

to pursue an individual project outside the 

continental United States. It was natural 

that he would return the country that had 

weighed on his mind and soul since he’d 

left. Even though the apartheid conflict 

had now heated to a dangerous degree, 

Andy returned to South Africa to investigate 

working and housing conditions of 

black migratory laborers. 

On Sept. 23, 1977, Andy was preparing 

to leave for the funeral of activist Stephen 

Biko. He had been interviewing residents of 

a squatters’ town called Modderdam near 

Cape Town, and needed to go there to 

Aware that I might reenter the world 

of tumors and platelet counts at any time, 

the trials and setbacks in the world that 

once filled me with anxiety now appear 

to be the most exquisite luxuries. 

retrieve his notes from a friend’s house. Yet 

he didn’t have a permit to enter the town, 

an infraction that brought the police to 

escort Andy home. Suspicious of Andy’s 

desire to keep them away from his room 

and from “personal” items, the police 

searched his desk, drawers, wardrobe, trash 

can, and suitcase. They eventually confiscated 

tapes and notes of his interviews; 

none had been conducted illegally, but several 

sources had wished to remain anonymous. 

Concerned for his subjects’ welfare, 

Andy spoke with a friend who chastised 

him for his secretive conduct. “Either you 

decide to work completely openly, or you 

function like a spy,” his friend told him. 

“If you are caught, you accept the consequences.” 

At the friend’s urging, Andy contacted 

his American consulate and 

arranged to board the next flight out of 

South Africa. 

“Was it right to run, and let others 

straighten out the confusion I was leaving?” 

Andy wondered in an article called 

“Flight From South Africa.” “How could 

I—I, who had been told that I was different 

than other visitors because I felt so deeply 

about South Africa?” Back in the United 

States, he would transform his experiences 

into a book, A Shantytown in South Africa. 

In 1979, he joined the staff of the 

Norfolk Virginian Pilot, where he forged a 

friendship with Jane Eisner, now a social 

issues columnist for the Philadelphia 

Inquirer. “He had a high moral compass, 

and was upset about anything that wasn’t 

right,” says Eisner, who lived around the 

corner from Andy in Norfolk. “At a time 

when the Pilot was going through changes, 

we were the ‘young whippersnappers’ with 

new ideas.” Eisner left the paper in 1980 

to join the Trenton, N.J., bureau of the 

Inquirer, and it was here that she received 

the call from a mutual friend that Andy 

had been suffering from a racking cough. 

He was soon diagnosed with lung cancer. 

He was 27 years old, and 

had never smoked in his life. 

In typical Silk fashion, he 

used his writing as an outlet for 

his pain both physical and emotional. 

He chronicled his tests 

and treatment in a lengthy, candid 

article for the New York 

Times Magazine, where he 

revealed that, despite a favorable 

prognosis, he knew the disease could 

recur at any time. “Aware that I might reenter 

the world of tumors and platelet counts 

at any time, the trials and setbacks in the 

world that once filled me with anxiety now 

appear to be the most exquisite luxuries. 

“I now know what a friend—who had 

seen battle in Iwo Jima—meant when he 

said early in my recovery, ‘One day you will 

look around and discover that the sky is 

more brilliant and the flowers more fragrant 

than they have ever been before.’ ” 

Andy’s optimism in the face of his odds 

redefined the word “undaunted.” He settled 

in southern Connecticut and became 

editorial page editor of the Greenwich Time. 

He married his longtime girlfriend, Nancy 

Perlman. “Andy was prepared to act as 

though everything would be all right,” says 

Mark Silk. “It took a huge amount of mental 

strength to fight through the physical 

hardships.” 

On Dec. 12, 1981, Andrew Silk died in 

New York Hospital. He was 28. 

At first, Andy’s family and friends dealt 

with their grief and confusion in their own 

Winter2003 29



way. Some chose solitary outpourings of 

emotion. Some brought groups together 

to reminisce about the man they had lost. 

And some, like Jane Eisner, turned their 

sorrow into action. In 1982, Eisner and 

her husband—who had been inspired by 

Andy to become an oncologist—visited 

the Soviet Union to meet with Jewish refusniks. 

It was a dangerous time to be in the 

country; they were almost refused 

entrance, and were followed once inside. 

“But we saw it as a fitting tribute to Andy,” 

says Eisner, “who tried so hard to fight 

social injustice.” She wrote a magazine 

story about her trip, and acknowledged 

Andy in her introduction. 

Soon, the Silks and several of Andy’s 

classmates started to circulate ideas for a 

way to more permanently memorialize 

their son, brother, and friend, a way that 

would, preferably, involve his alma mater. 

A group of Andy’s friends, including Juan 

Williams and Dave Wessel, appealed to 

then-president of Haverford Robert Stevens 

to support a program, funded by the Silks, 

that would offer guidance, assistance, and 

advice to Haverford and Bryn Mawr students 

interested in journalism careers. 

“Because neither school had a formal journalism 

course,” says Bernice Silk, “we felt 

like we were providing something substantial 

to the students.” 

“We made it clear to Robert Stevens that 

providing such a program would be an 

important statement about Haverford,” 

says Juan Williams. “He understood that 

what Andy stood for was the best of the 

school’s values, and what the school was 

teaching its young people.” Stevens agreed, 

and plans for the Silk Fund’s initiatives 

began to take shape. 

In the beginning, Leonard Silk arranged 

to bring a cadre of journalists to campus 

during the first few weeks of the school 

year to advise Haverford/Bryn Mawr News 

staffers on the direction their paper should 

take. A variety of reporters from the 

Inquirer (such as Jane Eisner) and other 

newspapers would also meet with students 

at different times throughout the year, 

answering questions and offering career 

counseling. Michael Paulson ’86, now an 

award-winning religion reporter for the 

Boston Globe, was on the receiving end of 

these guidance sessions when he was an 

editor for the News. 

“It was incredibly helpful, and so generous 

of Leonard,” says Paulson. “It was 

inspiring for those who were just starting 

out to interact with successful, skilled people.” 

These campus visits would, in 1984, 

evolve into the annual journalism symposium 

that continues to this day. 

Organized by the Silks (Mark took over 

Leonard’s duties when the latter died in 

1995) and Pam Sheridan, director of public 

relations at Haverford, the event brings 

together a panel of top-flight journalists 

from news sources throughout the country 

to discuss their careers and issues pertaining 

to today’s business of news coverage. 

In the past, members of the panel 

have debated religion and the media, the 

impact of new technology, coverage of 

presidential elections, and tragedies such 

as the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11. 

The symposiums benefit curious students, 

but are also open to members of the 

Haverford/Bryn Mawr communities and 

the surrounding area. 

“The success of the panel is largely 

based on the quality of the journalists who 

volunteer their expertise,” says Bernice 

Silk. “It’s a credit to Leonard and to 

Haverford that they take it so seriously, 

and welcome the opportunity to introduce 

students to journalism in a realistic way.” 

Many of Andy’s closest friends—such 

as Jane Eisner, Dave Wessel, Juan Williams, 

and Joe Quinlan—have been frequent 

guests of the symposium since its first year. 

“It’s always an honor to come back and 

discuss the sort of timely, weighty topics 

that have been chosen over the year, and 

to meet different generations of students 

interested in the craft,” says Quinlan. 

“There’s always a tinge of sadness for me 

personally, because I know what a kick 

Andy would get out of running those discussion 

groups.” 

“Andy lives on through his friends,” 

says Williams. “It’s critical that we who 

knew and loved him can convey what he 

was about, and share his mission of using 

your powers for a greater purpose.” 

“When you’re in your 20s and someone 

close to you dies, it’s a searing experience,” 

says Wessel. “Everyone who knew 

Andy saw his unrealized potential, and to 

see it lost…you want to do something to 

keep the flame alive, prevent his memory 

from vanishing, and encourage future 

Andy Silks.” 

The Silk Fund helps encourage these 

future Andys not only through the symposium, 

but also through a stipend awarded 

to Haverford and Bryn Mawr undergraduates 

who obtain journalism internships 

during the summer. The Fund provides 

for compensation to be paid by the participating 

newspaper, and the stipend supports 

students’ travel and living costs. 

Originally limited to the two newspapers 

that employed Andy, the Virginian Pilot 

and the Greenwich Time, the internships 

can now be served at newspapers, magazines, 

and news organizations across the 

United States. 

“I couldn’t have afforded to work at The 

School Administrator this summer without 

the help of the Silk family,” says Andy 

Mathieson. “I like to think that my future 

career path started in my little shared desk 

space at the magazine, and I’ll always know 

in my heart that it was the Silks who made 

this possible.” 

The first Andy would have beamed with 

pride. 

Andrew Silk Journalism Interns 

1982 Paula Block 

1983 Penny Chang 

1984 Beth Liebson 

1985 Sarah Allen ’87 

1986 Kate Shatzkin ’87 

1987 Thomas Hartmann ’88 

1988 ——— 

1989 Colette Fergusson ’90 

1990 ——— 

1991 Brad Aronson ’93 

1992 Eric Pelofsky ’93 

1993 Aparna Mukherjee (BMC) 

1994 Ellen Chrismer 

1995 ——— 

1996 Abby Reed ’99 

1997 Ryan Isaac ’98 

1998 Daniel Lathrop ’99, 

Jill McCain (BMC) 

1999 Ivan Weiss ’01 

2000 Nicole Foulke (BMC) 

2001 Rekha Matchanickal (BMC), 

Monica Hess (BMC) 

2002 Andrew Mathieson ’05

Good News 

In a chaotic environment of converging 

(and competing) media, the Dallas 

Morning News has established itself 

as a vital contributor to the public 

debate. by Bob Mong ’71 

PHOTO: DAVID WOO/THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS 

It should come as no surprise that my role 

in this newspaper theme issue is to be Dave 

Barry’s straight man. The juxtaposition is elegant. 

He’s older, but his hair is brown, and 

he looks 30ish, while, charitably, I appear 50-plus with gray-white hair. He writes 

humor; I help run a large metro paper. Just the other day, I noticed a Dave quotation 

on a newspaper industry daily calendar: “We newspapers are very big on profits 

these days. We’re a business, just like any other business, except that we employ 

English majors.” Hey, I’m an English major, and I’m big on having a decent profit 

margin. Is there any more to say? 

Winter2003 31

Good News 

Let me begin with a story about having 

the right temperament for this job. I’ll conveniently 

use another editor as an example. 

Deborah Howell is an excellent editor 

who ran the St. Paul Pioneer-Press for many 

years, during which the paper won two 

Pulitzer Prizes. After one of them, she 

walked into her office prepared for her 

readers’ warm accolades. A stack of messages 

welcomed her arrival. Problem was, 

the Pioneer-Press had published the wrong 

snow-plowing schedule in the paper, and 

all over St. Paul people were digging out 

from under what the city tractors 

had deposited on their cars. 

Deborah handled the complaints 

and forgot about the Pulitzer for 

the time being. 

As exhilarating as it often is to 

preside over a big city paper, I’ve 

learned it is wise to maintain a 

healthy dose of humility, even in 

the face of good news about your 

paper. 

A few years ago, the Columbia 

Journalism Review named us one of 

the five best papers in America. 

When I first heard about this, I was genuinely 

elated. We had worked hard for 20 

years to make the Dallas Morning News a 

distinguished paper. We built it person by 

person, department by department into 

something pretty good. Now we were getting 

the kind of recognition we thought 

we deserved. 

But the other side of me was wary. I 

don’t think you can be any good in a job 

like this if you preen and fail to see the 

many problems and deficiencies you and 

your institution have. 

I dashed off a note to the staff congratulating 

them on the ranking and reminding 

them that we are still far from the paper 

we want to be. 

When I started in Dallas in 1979, we 

only had 170 journalists in our newsroom. 

Mediocrity was everywhere. Today, 

we have more than 625 journalists, many 

of them national leaders in their fields. 

Our company believes that there is a 

strong market for high quality journalism. 

Like a college, a good newspaper is the 

sum of its various departments. I believe 

we have generally accepted national class 

departments in sports, business, religion, 


Mexico and South America, science, 

lifestyles and coverage of Texas. Nearly 

two years ago, I challenged our staff to 

become the best in the country covering 

education. We’re not the best yet, but we’re 

making significant strides in that direction. 

Fortunately, our market has been supportive 

of our improving newspaper. In 

1980, our circulation was around 280,000 

daily and 350,000 Sunday. Today it is 

525,000 daily and 785,000 Sunday. I think 

it’s important to note that markets do 

respond to improved content. 

As the world becomes increasingly 

complex, many papers simply haven’t 

taken advantage of the strengths 

they have for providing context. 

Instead, they continue to tell readers 

“what” happened rather than 

“what happened and why.” 

Yet, the competitive landscape 

becomes more challenging each year. It 

is true that every decent newspaper has 

a strong core readership that is loyal to 

that product. But the core reader is aging 

and younger readers are not nearly as 

drawn to newspapers as previous generations. 

Newspapers can’t grow without 

attracting more of these younger occasional 

readers. 

Many of these readers are strapped for 

time and find the morning a tough time 

to read. 

For them, newspapers are also about 

the last mass medium in an era of highly 

targeted media. Newspapers are often 

about common interests and furthering 

community dialogue at a time of specialized, 

focused “communities of interest.” 

More subtle issues challenge us as well. 

Newspapers are perceived by some 

younger audiences as “authority” in a 

world raised to question authority. Much 

has also been written about the link 

between citizenry and newspaper readership. 

As voter numbers decline, so does 

newspaper readership, partly, I suspect, 

because many people care less about the 

civic issues newspapers write about. 

As the world becomes increasingly 

complex, many papers simply haven’t 

taken advantage of the strengths they have 

for providing context. Instead, they continue 

to tell readers “what” happened 

rather than “what happened and why.” 

Go into virtually any community in 

America, and the local newspaper employs 

the majority of reporters on the street covering 

news and issues. If you are a good 

editor, it matters how you deploy those 

reporters. How an editor answers that 

question makes a huge difference in how 

useful the paper is to its readers. 

Journalism at its best is the main 

way Americans gain perspective on 

events from their neighborhoods to 

the United Nations. Good papers try 

to explain what influences are at 

work shaping these events. Poor 

papers, often unwittingly, portray 

situations as one disconnected fragment 

after another. 

For me, newspapers should 

unabashedly be from someplace. 

They should reflect the region where 

they reside. For us, that means putting 

bureaus in east Texas, Houston, 

Austin, San Antonio, the border with 

Mexico, Lubbock and Oklahoma City, as 

well as publishing comprehensive coverage 

in and around Dallas. 

It means placing more reporters in 

Mexico than any other U.S. paper. Why? 

Because Mexico is a local cultural, political 

and business story. By the way, one of our 

most talented reporters in Mexico is 

Brendan Case (Haverford Class of 1993), 

who covers business issues out of Mexico 

and Latin America. 

Brendan is one of many specialists we 

have hired to get at issues with more 

sophistication and nuance. The big issues 

of the day are usually interrelated and 

interdependent. Explaining these issues 

clearly is the hallmark of great modern 

reporting; and specialty reporters with deep 

training often get at the heart of things better 

than generalists can. 

We recognize that there is a large readership 

for deep reporting, as long as it is 

interesting. Newspapers that consistently 

produce content that readers can’t find anywhere 

else will to prosper. But this unique 

and unduplicated news is the most difficult 

content to develop. It requires the col-

lective will and skill of the newspaper driving 

toward this goal. 

To continue to find new audiences, 

newspapers must improve the way they 

cover major issues. You are no doubt aware 

that many books and articles have been 

written in recent years lamenting the way 

the press covers everything from religion, 

the military, higher education, politics and 

big business. 

These real and perceived flaws must be 

taken seriously, but the situation is far from 

hopeless. Take higher education coverage 

as an example. The press and the academy 

have much in common. Both 

have strong First Amendment 

ties. Both live by words and ideas. 

Yet the relationship is often 

strained by university administrators 

who fastidiously avoid the 

press and by newspapers that 

cover higher education superficially 

if they cover it at all. 

Newspapers that reach out to 

universities both through their 

news and editorial page staffs can 

benefit from deeper and richer 

perspectives talented professors and 

administrators provide. At the same time, 

newspapers need to put excellent reporters 

on the beat. 

Trust does not come without effort. I 

have known some college administrators 

in Texas for more than 20 years. The ability 

to pick up the phone and talk to them 

can be invaluable. When we built our science 

staff, it took time before scientists 

would open up to our reporters. Some of 

our writers even had doctorates in the 

same field as the professors we were trying 

to reach. With time and determination, 

honest and enduring relationships 

were built. 

Once in the early ’90s, when we were 

building our religion staff, one well-educated 

woman stood up in a public forum 

and told me she wished we’d stop our 

plans to improve coverage of religion, 

ethics and spirituality. She was afraid of 

how we might mangle such sensitive subjects. 

She wasn’t alone in her concerns 

either. Thankfully, many other readers, 

academics and religious leaders worked 

with us in good faith suggesting ways to 

improve our coverage. 

This kind of informed back and forth 

with readers can provide great benefits to 

a newspaper. Editors must train themselves 

to listen closely. 

Most of our communities are becoming 

more diverse each year. Texas is now 

more than 30 percent Hispanic. Our Asian 

population is growing rapidly. The African- 

American population holds at about 10 

percent. At the Morning News, 45 percent 

of our employees are minority, and we are 

far more alert to our community because of 

this diversity. Our readership is now about 

25 percent minority. 

If our reporters’ sources don’t continue 

to expand to better reflect today’s Texas, 

It is also true that these media are 

converging. It is not uncommon for one 

of our reporters to write for the paper, 

the paper’s Internet site and appear 

on our 24-hour state cable news channel 

– all on the same day. 

we’ll soon be two-dimensional figures in 

a three-D world. Any decent editor understands 

that community discussions can 

help the paper’s coverage. I had been meeting 

with Muslim leaders in the Dallas area 

long before Sept. 11, 2001. The familiarity 

that these often tense meetings provided 

helped us bring more Muslim perspective 

to our readers after Sept. 11. 

It is also important for a paper to keep 

changing and evolving. Our sports editor, 

Dave Smith, is often considered the best 

at what he does in the country. Before coming 

to Dallas in 1981, he had built the 

Boston Globe’s excellent sports section. 

Now, nearly 65, Dave comes to work every 

day with marked up sports pages and an 

enthusiasm to make the next day’s section 

better than today’s. He’s never lost his passion 

for the business or his willingness to 

try something new. 

Since the invention of radio, experts 

have predicted the demise of newspapers. 

Ted Turner even stood up in front of a 

group of newspaper executives 25 years 

ago and said it was nice knowing them, 

but cable television would spell the end of 

papers. With the advent of television, cable, 

the internet, specialty magazines and 24- 

hour news and sports, the nation’s appetite 

for information has only grown (along with 

the advertising pie). Newspapers continue 

to compete robustly in this heated environment. 

It is also true that these media are converging. 

It is not uncommon for one of 

our reporters to write for the paper, the 

paper’s Internet site and appear on our 24- 

hour state cable news channel – all on the 

same day. 

Theories abound on where this is heading. 

But as the quality media compete in a 

world of increasing tabloidization, I don’t 

think the serious folks should give in to 

infotainment, trivialization and 

the noisy, shouting talking heads. 

There will remain a wide audience 

for strong reporting skills, sophisticated 

analysis and accessible context. 

Americans are overwhelmed 

with information and much of it 

is junk to them. Great journalists 

can help them distill and make 

sense of the glut and tangle. 

That’s why we value the smart, 

informed work of specialists like 

Brendan Case. His work in Mexico and 

Latin America helps our readers understand 

why they should care about the 

chaotic economies south of our borders. 

Many of our readers hunger for deeper 

knowledge, and that is why we have 

added Ph.D’s, lawyers, MBA’s and economics 

majors to our staff. Specialists, 

combined with talented generalists, can 

usually get to the heart of issues faster 

than generalists alone. 

Our democracy has been an incredibly 

durable phenomenon, just as a free press 

has been an indispensable partner in preserving 

our open society. The fact that 

today’s newspapers still breathe life into 

our public debate seems like good news to 

me. 

Bob Mong ’71 is editor of the Dallas 

Morning News. 

Winter2003 33

Nicholson Baker ’79’s quest to save old newspapers from oblivion. 

by Edgar Allen Beem 

Nicholson Baker, a tall, scholarly man, balding and 

bearded, is perusing old bound volumes of the New 

York World through rimless glasses when he comes 

across a sensational full-color 1952 article about 

Marilyn Monroe entitled “They Call Her The 

Blowtorch Blonde.” American’s Sweetheart is wearing 

a ruffle bandeau that makes her look like a 

Tahitian princess. Baker is so amused and taken with 

both the image and the title that he immediately places 

the bound volume beneath a quintet of spotlights 

and, using a hand-held digital camera, takes a picture 

of it. The Marilyn layout will soon thereafter 

appear on www.oldpapers.org. 

Oldpapers.org is the website of the American 

Newspaper Repository, the nonprofit corporation 

Baker established in 1999 as part of his campaign to 

save old newspapers from disappearing entirely as 

libraries microfilm and discard them. The other major 

weapon in Baker’s preservationist arsenal is Double 

Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, a book that 

rocked the library world last year with its detailed 

indictment of major libraries—principally the Library 

of Congress—for failing to preserve actual copies of 

the country’s greatest newspapers. 

The American Newspaper Repository occupies a 

6,000-square-foot space on the first floor of a former 

textile mill in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, just a 

short walk across the Salmon Falls River from the village 

of South Berwick, Maine, where Baker lives. The 

rest of the 1848 brick mill building is occupied by a 

thermal underwear company, several other small businesses, 

and some artists’ studios. The repository’s 

large, cool rectangular factory room is filled with 

approximately 5,000 bound volumes of newspapers— 

chief among them Joseph Pulitzer’s World, New York 

Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and the New York 

Times—arrayed on high metal shelves and wooden 

pallets on the floor. Hundreds of institutions own 

these newspapers on microfilm, but that’s exactly the 

problem. The wholesale embrace of microform reproduction 

by libraries and research institutions mean 

that real copies of these newspapers are becoming 

extinct. 

“You can’t get more important urban documents,” 

says Baker, surveying the bound volumes stacked 

before him. “The New York World used to publish a 

million copies a day and now there is only one.” 

Nicholson Baker, forty-five, is an unlikely savior. 

He is not a librarian, historian, archivist, or conservator. 

He is a writer, a novelist, and essayist whose 

peculiar body of writings has in common an almost 

obsessive concern for minutiae. 

“I think of myself as thorough,” says Baker, mildly 

objecting to the use of the word obsession. Okay, saving 

old newspapers is not Baker’s obsession, but it’s 

pretty darn close. 

Nick Baker was born and brought up in Rochester, 

New York, where his father ran an ad agency from 

the basement of the family home. Trained as a bassoonist, 

Baker entered Eastman School of Music with 

the intention of becoming a composer, but in school, 

he recognized the limits of his own musical talents 

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in the November 2002 issue of Down East magazine, ©2002 Down East Enterprise, Inc., all rights reserved. 

Winter2003 35

Paper Chase 

and gave up on a career in music. Inspired 

in part by Frank Conroy’s wonderful 1967 

childhood memoir Stop-Time (in which 

Conroy heads off to Haverford College to 

make a new start in the world for himself), 

Baker transferred to Haverford where he 

fell in love with literature and a bookish 

young woman named Margaret Brentano. 

Baker and Brentano were married in 1985 

and, two years later, Baker embarked on 

his literary career with the publication of 

his first novel, The Mezzanine. 

The Mezzanine established Nicholson 

Baker as the fictional master of trivia, the 

novel consisting as it does of a sustained 

meditation on such things as why straws 

don’t sink in milk cartons and whether 

hot-air blowers are more sanitary than towels 

for drying hands. The entire book takes 

place during the course of a character’s 

lunchtime escalator ride. Baker followed 

his debut with a novel in the form of a 

man’s thoughts while bottle feeding his 

baby (Room Temperature), another that 

explores the inner life and thoughts of a 

nine-year-old girl (The Everlasting Story of 

Nory), a book about the author’s obsession 

(there’s that word again) with writer John 

Updike (U and I), and his bestsellers, a pair 

of erotic novels—The Fermata (about a 

young man who uses his ability to stop 

time to undress women) and Vox (the 

phone sex novel that Clinton paramour 

Monica Lewinsky gave to her libidinous 

boss). 

Both Baker’s novels and his essays are 

characterized by a penchant for taking the 

incidental seriously. Shoelaces, fingernail 

clippers, movie projectors, punctuation, 

the history of the word lumber, putting on 

socks, and picking one’s nose have all come 

in for close texture scrutiny in Baker’s 

work. 

“My books do home in on certain 

details in my life, but that’s what we think 

about,” Baker explains. “I try to put things 

in their true proportions. “ 

Nicholson Baker’s talent, then, lies in 

questioning the unquestioned and paying 

close attention to the unexamined. Microfilming 

old newspapers and magazines, for 

instance, seems like such a convenient 

solution to making these documents available 

for posterity, but, as Baker argues in 

Double Fold, it also results in the loss of 

the real thing if the originals are destroyed 

Both Baker’s novels and his essays are characterized by 

a penchant for taking the incidental seriously. Shoelaces, 

fingernail clippers, movie projectors, punctuation, the 

history of the word lumber, putting on socks, and 

picking one’s nose have all come in for close texture 

scrutiny in Baker’s work. 

and discarded in the process. If there is a 

subtext to virtually everything Nicholson 

has written, it might be the search for reality 

in an over-mediated and intellectualized 

world. 

Baker’s library offensive began in 1994 

with an article he published in The New 

Yorker about the passing of the venerable 

card catalogue from American libraries. 

The New Yorker piece branded Nicholson 

Baker as a crank and a library critic when, 

in fact, he is a great fan of libraries. 

“The library is such a good idea, such 

a good idea,” Baker enthuses. “The 

American people are publishing all this 

stuff and the library is a central place to 

keep what we can’t own individually. Why 

it’s so troubling is that the people who 

inherited this great idea don’t make the 

decisions we thought they were making. 

The idea only works if you keep up the 

things you are collecting.” 

In the course of haunting the stacks of 

libraries across the country, Baker discovered 

the real tragedy was not the passing 

of the card catalogue but rather the discarding 

of books and periodicals by major 

research libraries. Having been attacked in 

academic circles for not properly documenting 

his card catalogue article, Baker 

set about an exhaustive investigation of 

the history and practice of microfilm reproduction 

of newspapers that resulted in a 

370-page book with 80 pages of footnotes 

and references. Double Fold takes its title 

from the test (folding the lower right corner 

of a random page back and forth) that 

many libraries use to determine the brittleness—and 

therefore the usefulness—of 

old books and newspapers. The book is so 

dense with the arcane history of microfilming 

technology and policy that Baker 

believes few of its initial critics within the 

library world had actually read it. Baker 

never suggests that every library everywhere 

should save decades and centuries 

worth of old newspapers. He simply argues 

that some major research libraries should 

maintain actual runs of the newspapers 

that reported the life of the nation as it was 

lived. 

“This is the marrow. This is the historical 

center of the twentieth century,” says 

Baker of the newspapers reposing in the 

Rollinsford Mill. “This is what happened 

and appeared before the public in the daily 

newspaper.” 

Baker acquired most of the American 

Newspaper Repository’s collection in the 

fall of 1999 at an auction of newspapers 

being discarded by the British Library in 

London. After cashing in a personal retirement 

account for $50,000, Baker received 

major grants from the McArthur 

Foundation ($150,000) and the Knight 

Foundation ($100,000) to purchase runs 

of close to 100 newspapers and magazines 

and establish the repository. Smaller contributions 

that have come in response to 

the publication of Double Fold and the 

media attention it has generated have 

helped pay the American Newspaper 

Repository’s $2,000 a month rent. Baker 

estimates that he now has about five 

months’ worth of rent money on hand and 

is in the process of another round of 

fundraising. 

Baker says the primary response he has 

had from libraries is that preserving old 

news papers is an “outrageously expensive 

and near impossible task.” He rejects 

this vehemently. 

“The amount of space newspapers take 

up is not that great. That is a myth,” insists 

Baker. “Newspapers are wonderfully compact. 

They have the money to do this. 

We’re talking about maybe two Best Buys 

[to house a national newspaper repository]. 

The National Endowment for the 

Humanities has spent $115 million on 

microfilming. Most of that money has con- 


tributed to the loss of history rather than 

the preservation of history.” 

Baker also rejects the argument that saving 

hard copies of old newspapers is not 

cost-effective because they sit gathering 

dust for years and get very little use 

“That’s the point,” Baker argues. 

“Research libraries are supposed to hold 

onto things that are little used. That’s where 

all the discoveries are made. That’s where 

the beauties are.” 

In the conclusion of Double Fold, Baker 

makes four recommendations: 1) that 

libraries publish lists of the material they 

are planning to discard, 2) that the Library 

of Congress lease or build a true national 

depository for old books and periodicals, 3) 

that several libraries begin saving current 

newspapers in bound form, and 4) that the 

National Endowment for the Humanities 

either abolish the U.S. Newspaper and 

Brittle Books program, or require that all 

microfilms and digital scanning be nondestructive 

and that originals be saved. 

The universal embrace of microfilm 

reproduction is as true in Maine as everywhere 

else. Though the Maine Historical 

Society is cited in Double Fold as an example 

of a library that saves newspaper originals 

even after it has microfilmed them, 

Maine Historical Society only microfilms 

“historical” newspapers. It does not save 

or microfilm current newspapers. The 

irony here, of course, is that the only reason 

historical newspapers exist is that 

someone saw fit to save them when they 

were new. In the future, thanks to microfilming, 

there may not be any historical 

newspapers. 

Publishers are often to source of a last 

resort for actual copies of their newpapers, 

but, in Portland, the publishers of Portland 

Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram 

stopped binding copies decades ago. The 

publishers of the Bangor Daily News, however, 

do keep bound archival copies of 

their newspaper. The entire run of the 

Bangor Daily News (1899 to the present) 

is kept under lock and key in a specially 

designed 600-square-foot room, but there 

is no access to the public or to scholars. 

“How will people be able to do local 

history in seventy-five years?” says 

Nicholson Baker. “It depends on what you 

keep now. I have made the point that the 

Library of Congress is not going to do it. 

We’ve got to be responsible for our own 

local libraries.” 

Predictably, Nick and Margaret Baker 

have become active in their local library 

and historical society since moving to 

South Berwick in 1998. They are helping to 

inventory the local holdings, and Margaret 

is compiling oral histories from some of 

the elderly people she meets through volunteering 

in the Meals on Wheels program. 

The Bakers and their two children, 

Alice, now fifteen, and Elias, now eight, 

moved to South Berwick from Berkeley, 

California, largely, says Baker, in search of 

affordable housing in a quiet town where 

he could write without distraction. They 

purchased an old dairy farm on the edge 

of the village based on the sole criteria that 

Nick, 6’4”, be able to fit through the doors 

on the second floor. 

“We just liked the sanity of the place,” 

says Baker of the move to South Berwick. 

“It’s turned out to be a really good decision. 

I love it here.” 

Ironically, the quiet, writerly life 

Nicholson was searching for along the 

Maine-New Hampshire border has largely 

eluded him since the publication of Double 

Fold. “It’s made me a more public kind of 

writer than I’d prefer to be,” says Baker of 

the publicity and debate engendered by 

Double Fold. “That’s why I’ve deliberately 

stayed away from living in big cities.” 

Since Double Fold was published, Baker 

has been in constant demand to speak 

about and defend his position on saving 

old newspapers at meetings of the 

American Library Association and the 

Bibliographical Society of America, and at 

libraries from Boston to Seattle. Typically, 

his speeches take the form of a slide show. 

His slides from the World, for instance, 

graphically make the point that nineteenth-and 

early twentieth-century newspapers 

were far more colorful, lively, and 

creative than newspapers today, a point 

that can be lost in grainy black microfilm 

reproduction. 

“When people see what I’m referring 

to,” says Baker, “when they see pictures of 

the originals and pictures of the microfilm, 

it’s the pictures that convince people.” 

While Baker does not think his old 

newspaper crusade has made any difference 

at all in the policies of the Library of 

Congress, he does believe Double Fold has 

raised public and professional awareness 

of the value of preserving authenticity. 

“The notion that to get a good digital 

copy you have to destroy the original is 

now being questioned,” he says. 

Since Double Fold was published, Baker has been in 

constant demand to speak about and defend his position 

on saving old newspapers at meetings of the American 

Library Association and the Bibliographical Society of 

America, and at libraries from Boston to Seattle. 

Though he is a private man somewhat 

uncomfortable as a public figure, Baker 

says, “I do like the kind of low-level muckraking 

I do,” and he plans to continue it. 

His current plan is to write fiction and nonfiction 

in alternating years. His new novel, 

A Box of Matches (Random House) came 

out in January. 

As to the future of the American 

Newspaper Repository, Baker hopes it will 

move out of the Rollinsford mill in the not 

too distant future. He is currently seeking 

a permanent home for the old newspapers 

he rescued from oblivion. 

“I can’t be the keeper of the nation’s 

newspapers,” says the writer from South 

Berwick. “I’m hoping this whole thing will 

have a happy ending and become part of 

a big research collection.” 

Winter2003 37

Notes from the WorkplacePaper 

Eye of the Storm by Steve Manning ’96 

How I covered the DC sniper story – and how the story took over my life. 

The first call was broadcast over the 

police scanner in the middle of a slow 

Thursday morning— a woman shot outside 

a post office. Two minutes later another 

shooting came across, a man found dead 

nearby, killed with a single shot. I called 

my editor. Probably a murder-suicide, she 

said, call the police, get the basics and 

work up a short story. All I got was a busy 

signal from the police. After ten minutes 

a third person was dead. By the time I got 

on the road, driving as fast as I could, the 

toll was up to four. 

For most of that hectic day I still 

thought the story would last just a few 

days, another example of senseless violence 

that sparks some outcry from the 

public but soon fades from memory. But 

it quickly turned into much more, a story 

that spiraled into a major media frenzy 

and prompted pervasive and palpable fear 

in the community. For me, that day began 

what would be three weeks of nearly nonstop 

work, stress, and excitement. It tested 

my skills as a reporter, forced me to 

take a hard look at the ethics of my profession 

and challenged my personal limits 

in a way that few things have. 

I’ve spent two years covering the two 

Maryland counties that border 

Washington for the Associated Press. As 

a one-person bureau, I write about all topics 

— business, transportation, politics, 

education. Crime isn’t high on that list, 

and most areas, especially Montgomery 

County where the shooting spree began 

Oct. 2, have few murders. My beat usually 

doesn’t attract much attention from 

national press, and only draws heavy 

media attention when there is a quirky 

crime or natural disaster. 

But what would be dubbed the 

“sniper” shootings stood out. The victims 

were of all races, had no connection to 

each other and were engaged in everyday 

tasks when they were killed, like pumping 

gas, mowing the lawn, or sitting on 

a public bench. Everyone felt like a target— 

people avoided gas stations and 

school locked their doors and pulled 

classroom blinds tight. 

Coverage on the first day was heavy, 

but grew rapidly that weekend as more 

people were shot in Washington and 

Virginia. The parking lot of the Montgomery 

County Police Department in 

Rockville, home to the multi-agency 

sniper task force, became a mini-camp of 

satellite trucks, tents set up by television 

crews, cables snaking across the pavement, 

and a podium stand that sprouted 

new microphones each day as the story 

grew. The weather seemed to go through 

a year’s worth of seasons, heat at first, 

then growing cold and driving rain. I 

nearly lived out of my car, filling my back 

seat with clothes I might need for any 

forecast, a stack of notebooks and books 

of maps. 

Often we were killing time, huddling 

under what shelter we could find to avoid 

the rain, smelling the inescapable odor 

of exhaust from the TV trucks mixed with 

the sickly sweet scent emanating from the 

banks of porta-potties set up nearby. That 

boredom was punctuated by the chaos of 

the shootings. I would drive to the scene, 

continued on page 42 

Smarter Hiring Dennis Stern ’69, Vice President, Human Resources, The New York Times 

“When we covered Jack Coleman’s inauguration at the Haverford 

News we thought of that special 24- or 28-page issue in terms of 

New York Times coverage. We had the text of his speech ahead of 

time, we prepared a profile, and we had it all ready on the day of his 

inauguration. Our mission was to turn the News into a campus 

version of the Times. 

“The precursor to my move away from the editorial side of 

things happened when I hired the first commissioned advertising 

sales rep for the paper. We paid him commission 

and gave him housing as part of the deal 

and he did a great job for us and helped our 

budget tremendously. 

“After Haverford, I attended law school at 

NYU and pursued what was the typical path 

for journalists – working for the AP, then for 

small newspapers before moving up to larger 


papers. I worked in the Times’ news department for 15 years 

before I became vice president for human resources in 1997. 

“The biggest change today is defining the competition. It used 

to be the crosstown paper but today it’s 24-hour cable, radio, 

magazines, the Internet. Our salespeople are up against an entire 

array of things. There are a lot of specialists now, too, which didn’t 

used to be the case. We were all generalists. At the Times we 

have a physicist, three physicians, and a host of lawyers on staff. 

It’s a broad definition of diversity but it’s something 

we really pursue here. It’s smarter hiring, 

hiring attuned to how a person will affect 

things. Four years ago we hired a guy from 

the Marine Corps. He did publications work 

there, not your typical newspaper reporting 

experience. We’ve come to think of that as a 

diversity hiring.”

Trails 

compiled by Steve Heacock 

Inside the Beltway 

Dave Espo ’71, Chief Congressional Correspondent, 

The Associated Press 

“I’m the chief congressional correspondent for The Associated 

Press. Rather than commute to a newsroom every day, I have a 

desk in the Capitol—a building with history around every corner, 

yet a modern-day workplace for members of the House and 

Senate. 

“I’ve worked for the AP since 1974, in Washington since 1977. 

I’ve covered mostly Congress and politics, with other assorted 

Washington stories in the mix. That adds up to six White House 

campaigns; one congressional Republican revolution; one presidential 

impeachment (and trial); one recount; 20 or so State of 

the Union addresses; one anthrax episode; and, most recently, one 

spectacular fall of a Senate majority leader. 

“My interest in journalism and coverage of government was 

nourished at Haverford in an era of Vietnam and Presidents 

Johnson and Nixon, at a time when mistrust of authority was a 

growth industry. The FBI, always on the lookout for subversive 

activities, recruited an on-campus informant. I’m not sure how 

much useful information the government got, but the Bryn Mawr- 

Haverford College News had plenty of wonderful material once we 

found out. 

“My first job out of Haverford was at a small daily paper in 

south-central Idaho, the Twin Falls Times-News—for no reason 

other than someone gave me a job there. I worked for the Times- 

News for three years, then got an AP job in Cheyenne, Wyo. After 

a year there, I transferred to Denver. Then-President Ford liked 

to ski in Colorado, and for two years in a row, I got the assignment 

of going to Vail to sit outside in the cold while the president 

skied during the day and went to cocktail parties in the evening. 

One day, one of our White House reporters broke his shoulder 

skiing, giving me the opportunity to get on the wire. I transferred 

to Washington a few months later.” 

Advancing 

the Arts Debate 

Debra Auspitz ’00, Arts Editor, Philadelphia City Paper 

MICHAEL T. REGAN 

“As an English major at Haverford with a minor in creative writing, 

I interned with the City Paper to basically rule out journalism 

as a career. I thought I’d hate it and go into teaching instead. I started 

working here the day after graduation and three years later, I’m 

the arts editor for an alternative weekly in a great city for the arts. 

I was born and raised here and I’m a diehard fan of this city — my 

parents own the Famous 4th Street Deli, so I grew up in the thick 

of things around lots of Philadelphia people. 

“In this job, I can see how some people see Philadelphia living 

in the shadow of New York — especially in theatre and the visual 

arts. But more and more artists are choosing Philadelphia. For one 

thing, it’s vastly more affordable. But there’s also a thriving, vibrant 

arts community here. There’s a ton of angst and people out there 

every day working and fighting. The City Paper has limited space 

and resources to further the arts debate in this community, but I’m 

glad I’m helping the debate along.” 

Winter2003 39

Paper Trails 

Multimedia Man 

David Wessel ’75, Deputy Bureau Chief, 

The Wall Street Journal 

“Working on the News at Haverford really 

showed me how a paper could play a role in 

the community. I came from a high school that 

was one-third black. Haverford had far fewer 

black students. When they confronted the 

College in 1975, I became a conduit between 

the black students and the paper. One high 

point of my collegiate journalism career: a report 

on dining services double-charging students 

for meals. Barry Zubrow ’75 did all the work 

and wrote a report. I wrote about it for the News 

and got all the credit. It taught me how much 

mileage you could get from bringing someone’s 

else’s work into the public light. I still get a kick 

here at the Journal when we get credit for something 

when all we did was take the time to read 

some esoteric material expose it. 

“I write about the economy, not so much in 

a ‘news sense’ but in terms of what forces are 

in place now and how they will affect how our 

kids and grandkids will live. Sometimes I wonder 

if this business will last long enough for me 

to retire from it, but we have a fairly strong franchise 

and a successful website which will be 

our future, I think. Things have changed so 

much in recent years that a reporter’s job is 

entirely different now. I do a column and 

respond to reader e-mail on our website. 

I appear on CNBC, as do many of our reporters. 

Our work ends up on radio, on television, on 

the Internet, and in print. It’s multimedia now. 

The luxury of waiting for deadlines is gone. 

This new environment has its own tensions. 

“Norm Pearlstine ’64 said that the half life 

of a scoop is shrinking. It’s harder to break news 

in tomorrow’s paper because there are so many 

different outlets for news. We’re much more 

like 24-hour journalists now, much more like 

wire services. The pressure now is to offer more 

then just a story. You need to deliver analysis. 

What does it mean? We have to offer something 

you can’t get from TV. 

“There’s not a profession more 

appropriate for a liberal arts 

education than journalism. 

Haverford gives students 

confidence, it trains them to 

ask good questions, it fosters 

critical thinking. 

Haverford is the best journalism 

school there is.” 

From Hot Lead to Computers 

Turk Pierce ’61, Assistant Wire Editor, Lancaster New Era 

“I came into the newspaper business through sports. My first job was working 

for the NCAA Statistics Bureau in New York. I was drafted by the Army, 

though, and it wasn’t until I got out that I started looking for a sportswriting 

job. I found a paper in western Pennsylvania, Ellwood City, where they had 

an opening for a reporter. I was sports editor within 18 months. 

“I’ve had a number of different jobs in this business over 38 years. I’ve worked 

for seven different papers, all of them afternoon papers. Here in Lancaster we have 

a unique situation with a morning paper, an afternoon paper, and a Sunday 

edition with three separate staffs. 

“There’s been technological change in the business, obviously. I started with 

hot lead and pencil editing and now we’re paginating everything 

by computer. Amazing. Computer skills have become 

preeminent and editorial departments are doing it all. That 

kind of work and those kinds of skills are not always compatible 

with the editorial temperament. 

“One trend I’ve noticed is that where newspapers used to 

report on happenings, we now report on people’s reactions to 

happenings. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” 

The Haverford Connection 

Chris Lee ’89, National Staff Writer, The Washington Post 

“When I was a junior, Greg Kannerstein ’63, knew I was interested 

in journalism and suggested I do a summer internship with John 

Carroll ’63 at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I liked it so much I repeated 

the internship the summer after I graduated. That fall I went to 

the Kennedy School at Harvard for a degree in public policy. When 

I graduated in 1991, the Herald-Leader had a hiring freeze, as did 

many other newspapers. I got lucky, though. The Dallas Morning 

News, which had offered me an internship in 1989, hired me as a fulltime 

reporter in a suburban bureau in Plano. I was cranking out 

four to five stories each week, sometimes more. It was a chance to do a lot of writing 

quickly. After two years, I was able to move to another suburban bureau in 

Arlington, and a year after that, in 1994, I moved downtown, where I wrote about 

the Dallas school system. Bob Mong ’71 was the managing editor when I applied to 

the paper in 1991, although I didn’t know that until I had started the interview 

process. I’m sure the Haverford connection didn’t hurt my chances. 

“In 1995, I moved to the City Hall bureau, where I covered city issues and the 

mayor. Then it was on to the Austin bureau in 1998 to cover the Texas House of 

Representatives, social services, and Texas A&M. I was sent to A&M when the 

student bonfire collapsed in 1999, killing 12 people. I spent a week covering it. 

On occasion I would fill in for reporters covering Bush on the 2000 presidential campaign 

trail, and in 2001 I moved to Washington to cover Congress in the Morning 

News D.C. bureau. 

“Last September I moved to the Washington Post. I cover federal agencies and 

federal employee issues. The beat is about public policy and public management. 

Is government working? Should it turn to the private sector more for services? 

How is the Department of Homeland Security coming together? I grew up in 

Columbia, Md., reading the Post, so this is a real opportunity for me. 

“If it weren’t for Greg Kannerstein and John Carroll, I wouldn’t be a journalist 

now. Everywhere I go, I run into Fords in journalism and it amazes me that people 

coming from such a small college are so well-prepared for this career even 

though there are no formal courses or a major in journalism at Haverford.”

Oysters in the Office Danielle Reed ’91, 

Real Estate Columnist and Writer, The Wall Street Journal 

“I always knew I’d do something with writing. I had an English professor at 

Haverford—a visiting professor from Malaysia—who was very inspiring. Even though 

I received my undergraduate degree from The American University of Paris, I spent 

two years at Haverford and consider it to be my alma mater. My father (Thomas A. 

Reed ’65) and brother (William T. Reed ’89) both went to Haverford, and my mother 

(Gail Simon Reed ’64 BMC) went to Bryn Mawr. 

“I went to France junior year and stayed on for various reasons. After 

teaching English in France, I moved back to New York. I got a job with 

the New York Observer and started a real estate column, ‘Manhattan 

Transfers.’ Then, the Journal called and I spent three years covering business 

travel for the Weekend Journal section. I moved to the Daily News 

and had a real estate column for six months when the real estate writer 

for the Journal left. So I came back and I’ve been here ever since. 

“I write the ‘Private Properties’ column, which some describe as real 

estate gossip, though each piece is researched and reported. I also write 

‘House of the Week,’ an expanded look at upmarket homes around the country, as well 

as features for the section. I get fun projects. It’s service journalism and it’s fun—I don’t 

know too many offices where there are oysters coming in for taste testing. Our readers 

enjoy it. Investment bankers tell us they read the Weekend Journal section on Fridays and 

consider it their reward at the end of the week.” 

Taking it Outside 

Don Sapatkin ’78, Outdoors Writer, The Philadelphia Inquirer 

“I was miserable at Haverford during 

my junior year, cramming and procrastinating 

and I just took a year off to assess 

things; I freelanced for a local paper at 

home in Brooklyn. Then I interned at the 

Wall Street Journal and was a stringer for 

the New York Times. That year off was 

significant for me. At Haverford, I had 

the freedom to do that, and I came back 

and had a positive experience. 

“I worked as a reporter for 

papers in Trenton, N.J., and 

Wilmington, Del., before I 

came to the Inquirer in 1987. 

At that time, the Inquirer was 

one of the best papers in the 

country, the best of the ‘second 

tier’ papers like the 

Chicago Tribune, the Miami 

Herald, the Boston Globe. 

I was a floating editor, 

moving from bureau to 

bureau, covering for 

people on vacation. 

I did a stint on the 

Saturday night 

city desk and 

then moved 

onto the New 

Jersey staff before becoming editor of the 

Weekend section. Best job I’ve ever had. 

I had lots of freedom, lots of control, not 

feeding into a vast set of editors deciding 

what goes on the front page. We redesigned 

the entire section and I had the 

power to promote and push the cultural 

agenda a bit. 

“After seven years on the Weekend section 

I became the health and science editor 

for three years before becoming the 

outdoors writer. Returning to reporting 

after 17 years as an editor has been 

almost like a mid-life career change – 

I’m having fun, much more confident 

and, frankly, better at it! Hunting and 

fishing is part of my assignment, but 

it’s also about hiking, scuba diving, 

how land is used. How policy 

affects outdoor activity. In 

Switzerland, so many more 

people hike and are healthier 

than we are. Some of 

that has to do with history 

and geography, but it also 

has to do with policy. They 

have trail systems, paths, and 

bike racks everywhere. It’s a 

different approach.” 

The Dean 

Loren Ghiglione ’63, Dean, 

The Medill School of Journalism, 

Northwestern University 

“We had a great staff at the News when I 

was at Haverford. Greg Kannerstein ’63 was 

an important staff member, and Norm 

Pearlstine ’64 succeeded me as editor. There 

was no journalistic training, of course, no advisors. 

I started to invite journalists in to speak, 

people like A.J. Liebling from The New Yorker, 

Vic Navasky from The Nation, Ed Folliard of 

the Washington Post. They helped us think 

about what we were doing. 

“One of my summer internships was at the 

Claremont (Calif.) Courier. It was such a valuable 

experience to see this intensely local paper 

getting national awards for presenting the news 

in a community. I really saw clearly how people 

played a role in the community and could 

change the course of discussion of the issues. 

“Journalism has been my life. I’ve been editor, 

reporter, publisher, and owner at various 

points–my wife and I started or bought some 

20 newspapers over the years. I was president 

of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. 

I started the journalism program at Emory and 

was director of the Annenberg School of 

Journalism at USC before coming to 

Northwestern. One of my challenges here is 

to raise money to support the school and to 

develop programs. 

“Technology has had a tremendous impact 

on the way we get news now. More and more 

people are getting their news on the Internet. 

NPR is more influential and the cable networks 

offer more and more news. The boundaries are 

blurring between news and entertainment. Is 

Larry King a journalist? Jesse Ventura is new 

on CNBC. Who is a journalist? People are, 

more and more, feeling that they’re their own 

journalists. They create a mix of news for themselves 

on the Internet, television, and radio.” 

Winter2003 41

Eye of the Storm continued from page 38 

trying to avoid police roadblocks, grab anyone 

witnesses I could find to figure out 

what happened. Then we would all wait 

on the police to tell us if the shooting was 

linked to the others. 

Coverage of the story exploded Oct. 7, 

the day a 13-year-old boy was shot outside 

his school in Bowie, Md. The snipers had 

struck the part of society that was most 

vulnerable and prized, its children. 

Montgomery Police Chief Moose cried on 

camera that day, a display of emotion that 

would later make him loved nationwide, 

a tough cop with a heart. After that, the 

story reached a feverish pace. Cable news 

channels carried every press conference 

live, and network anchors hosted their 

shots from the police parking lot. 

Photographers and reporters lived with 

their police scanners and chased down 

every report of shots being fired. I once 

spent a whole morning at a flophouse 

motel with a handful of other reporters for 

what was likely the most intensely covered 

drug shooting in years. 

The scene at the police station became 

almost circus-like. Geraldo Rivera showed 

up and Playboy had a full-time reporter 

covering the story. Patrick Buchanan, now 

a talk show host , came one day, looking 

out of place in his trench coat and briefcase 

among the rest of us in raincoats and 

jeans, crowded around for a press conference. 

John Walsh shot an episode of 

“America’s Most Wanted” from the parking 

lot standing in front of a police cruiser. 

Foreign press poured in — walking 

through the parking was to hear a jumble 

of languages, British, Spanish, German, 

Quebecois. When the story got slow, 

reporters started interviewing each other, 

working on stories about how crazy the 

scene had become. People drove by just to 

see the media encampment. The police 

eventually handed out press passes to the 

parking lot — I had number 40 of about 

1,400 that were given out. 

Competition was intense, as we all tried 

to get whatever piece of information that 

could put us ahead of the pack. The authorities 

gave out little information publicly, 

meaning most reporting and breakthroughs 

came from sources. Dozens of agencies 

were involved in the search — the FBI, several 

local police departments, the Bureau 

of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the state 

police. Even the White House kept tabs on 


the investigation. Leaks came from all over, 

as did unsubstantiated rumors. The media 

hysteria created intense pressure to be first 

with a piece of information, to break a story. 

I would often spend the start of each day 

trying to verify or shoot down news that 

was in the New York Times, CNN or the 

Washington Post. Much of the information 

turned out to be true, but too often 

reporters went with information they got 

from a single source, breaking a cardinal 

rule of journalism that you must at least 

try to verify a tip before using it. Some news 

turned out simply to be wrong. 

Covering the story became a delicate, 

contentious, and often maddening dance 

with the police. Authorities didn’t want to 

give out much information and tip their 

hand, fearing the sniper was watching television. 

But they ran into a press corps that 

was hungry for any bit of information, any 

scoop that could put them ahead of the 

competition. Press conferences were laden 

with hostility on both sides of the microphone. 

Chief Moose rarely answered a 

question with anything more than a “it 

would be inappropriate for me to comment.” 

But by not giving out any details about 

what they knew, the police, in a way, 

fomented public fear about who was doing 

the shootings and when they might strike 

next. Authorities said they didn’t want to 

create tunnel vision by putting out FBI profiles 

of the suspects, but then they put out 

composite sketches of a white box truck 

and van they thought might be used in the 

crime. Police were flooded with tips about 

white vans thereafter, while the blue 

Chevrolet Caprice allegedly used by the 

snipers slipped away from crime scenes 

unnoticed. 

We also hotly debated the decision by 

a local television station and the Post to 

report on a tip that a tarot card reading “I 

am God” was found at the school shooting 

scene. The station and paper got a lot of 

criticism from the police, who said it hurt 

their attempts to start a dialogue with the 

shooter. That may be true, but reporting 

that information also gave the public a 

much stronger sense of whom they were 

dealing with, afforded them some picture 

about what was until then a faceless terror. 

It was also an incredibly intriguing story. 

I often had to remind myself of that as 

I tried to make it through the seven-day, 

80-hour weeks I worked that month. It 

was a physically and emotionally demanding 

story to cover. I would go to bed at 

midnight after a full day, not knowing if I 

would be called three hours later to chase 

a shooting. I often fiercely guard my private 

time, but would feel guilty if I went 

out to dinner, or relaxed. The story was 

also filled with tragedy — I spent much of 

my time hunting down relatives of the victims 

and going to funerals. I was supposed 

to pepper them with questions about their 

lost loved one as they struggled with their 

still-fresh grief. I understand why this is 

necessary, to humanize the story for readers, 

to personalize it. But I also wonder 

how newsworthy it is to broadcast someone’s 

anguish to the whole world, as if that 

couldn’t be just assumed and we could give 

them the privacy they usually want. 

Nevertheless, covering the shootings 

was one of the most extraordinary things 

I will ever do. I went into journalism in 

part because I wanted to see history being 

made first hand, to be a part of the life that 

goes on around me. It was also tested my 

capabilities, pushing me past my comfort 

zone and ultimately making me a better 

reporter. I learned how to be resourceful 

and pushy if necessary. I woke people up at 

5 a.m., called a police chief on his personal 

phone, developed sources. A lot of this was 

hard for me, by nature I don’t like to bother 

people. There are still limits that shouldn’t 

be crossed, but I also learned it is up to 

me to push boundaries. That’s what the 

public needs to learn the full truth. 

Journalism was never my dream job — 

I never wrote for the Bi-Co News or 

interned at a newspaper in college. I never 

had formal journalism training since 

Haverford offered little, an oversight in my 

opinion. But Haverford did give me an education 

that you can’t learn in four years of 

journalism school. In many ways I’m a true 

liberal arts product — my interests are 

broad and I resist finding a niche. I discovered 

that’s an asset for a reporter, the 

ability to think with an open mind, to look 

at all angles. You have to be able to think 

and digest information quickly, to learn on 

the fly. That’s perhaps what I value the most 

about my work, the license to explore, to 

satisfy my curiosity, to learn. 

Steve Manning ’96 is a writer for the 

Associated Press in Maryland.

Class News 

Send your class news by e-mail to: classnews@haverford.edu 

29 For news of John Rodell, see 

DEATHS. 

35 For news of Woodruff J. Emlen, 

see DEATHS. 

For news of Richard Munn Suffern, see 

DEATHS. 

37 For news of Marshall C. Guthrie, 

Jr., see DEATHS. 

For news of Roy Haberkern, Jr., see 

DEATHS. 

For news of Herbert W. Taylor, Jr., see 

DEATHS. 

39 Charles Rankin writes, “I continue 

to enjoy Haverford in many ways. At 

Alumni Homecoming in the fall, attending 

student classes, attending Campus 

Arboretum Association affairs, see one soccer 

game a year, and exercise on perimeter 

track. Moira and I continue to visit England 

and Scotland each year.” 

40 John M. Lindley, Jr. writes, “My 

wife and I are proud great-grandparents of 

John M. Lindley V, and Aliza Lindley; ages 

two and six months.” 

42 T. Canby Jones writes, “When 

Friends Association for Higher Education 

returned for its 2002 gathering at Wilmington 

College, in June 2002, Canby was 

honored as one of FAHE’s founders in 

1980. I was delighted to receive and 

respond to a letter from classmate Jack 

Elliott.” 

49 James Buckley writes, “F. Thomas 

Hopkins and I celebrated our birthdays 

together with Grace and Doris at Pat 

Roche’s summer home on Lake Naomi in 

the Poconos. Pat is the widow of Robert 

Roche ’47.” 

Julie Edgerton, wife of C. Willis Edgerton, 

Jr. writes, “We moved down from The 

Landings on Skidaway Island, Savannah, 

about seven to eight years ago. We are now 

living in a retirement community, Cypress 

Village, that also includes assisted living 

and skilled care, and is right next to the 

Mayo Clinic (thank goodness) because 

Willis has Parkinson’s, and has had this 

lousy, nasty disease for over 13 years. He 

has slowed down considerably—cannot 

walk as well, has other complications, but 

his spirits are still good. In the meantime all 

his expenses are very costly and therefore 

we are laying low.” 

Tom Fleming writes, “Now chairman of 

Kirkbride Hospital, the oldest psychiatric 

hospital in the U.S., started in 1850 by 

Pennsylvania Hospital. It was formerly 

known as the Institute of Pennsylvania 

Hospital—just older than Friends Hospital, 

also in Philadelphia.” 

F. Thomas Hopkins writes, “Retired from 

cardiology practice in 1996 and moved to 

the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Have continued 

to enjoy photography and racing 

Lightning Sailboats as well as cruising our 

Sabre 38 in the Chesapeake Bay. Have 

enjoyed many diverse activities at Washington 

College in Chestertown. Am now 

on the executive council of WC-ALL 

(Washington College Academy of Lifelong 

Learning) where I schedule visiting speakers. 

The multiple attractions of a small college 

town are plentiful and rewarding.” 

Ellis Singer writes, “Four Haverfordians 

of the class of 1949: Al Hume, Dewitt 

Montgomery, Ellis Singer, and Bob 

Wingerd (Bill Gorham is deceased) will 

celebrate their 50th reunion of the University 

of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 

Class of 1953, in May of 2003.” 

For news of Hal Whitcomb, see note on 

Scott Kimmich ’51 

50 John Doane writes, “Marian and I 

celebrated our 51st wedding anniversary 

last summer. I volunteer at Lancaster General 

Hospital one day per week; sing in four 

choirs or choruses; play tennis on Thursdays; 

serve on the board for Quest (an adult 

education program for seniors); helped to 

elect Ed Rendell as governor; officiate at 

track meets in the spring and rake leaves 

in the fall. Both spouses are in good health 

except for a touch of arthritis.” 

Lester Dragstedt writes, “I acquired four 

new grandchildren on this day in 2001 by 

adoption, bringing our total to 11! All are 

doing very well and so are we.” 

Thomas Thornton writes, “We continue 

to travel (Europe and India) and enjoy 

retirement, but I also still teach two courses 

at Johns Hopkins and do some writing on 

foreign policy matters.” 

51 John Hume writes, “Still working 

part time medico-legal issues, occasionally 

locum tenens psychiatric in-patient hospital 

care.” 

For news of Arkady Kalishevsky, see 

DEATHS. 

Scott Kimmich writes, “I recently visited 

my old buddy Hal ‘Whit’ Whitcomb ’49 

in Aspen, and in the process found out that 

three years ago, at the time of his retirement, 

he had been lauded and honored by 

his fellow citizens as an inductee into the 

Aspen Hall of Fame. I never will forget 

accompanying him on night calls to his 

patients back in 1965. One was a badly 

dehydrated baby and Whit rigged up an 

intravenous electrolyte solution and fed it 

through a vein in the baby’s foot right then 

and there. Such hands-on intervention and 

dedication to patients was his hallmark, 

and he had a huge following.” 

For news of Alexander Busch Milyko, see 

DEATHS. 

Winter2003 43

Class News 


53 Paul Moore writes, “We just got 

back from a month and a half in France. 

We also toured Spain and England and had 

a great time.” 

54 Christian Hansen writes, “I made 

my first trip to Vietnam in April 2002 with 

Operation Smile. We helped 150 children 

with cleft lips and cleft palates. Our Child 

Health Project in Haiti continues with support 

from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I’m 

retired from my full-time work in child 

welfare. I am currently involved with disturbed 

adolescent boys in Newark, N.J. I 

valued taking part in that panel on patriotism 

and pacifism on Alumni Day.” 

John Rettew writes, “Still spending my 

retired time volunteering for Chester 

County Council, BSA, and the Episcopal 

Academy on the alumni board of managers. 

Episcopal Academy Alumni Society 

honored me with the Alumni Community 

Service Award last spring.” 

55 R. Duff Masterson writes, “All three 

of my children, Nina, Colin, and Dennis, 

are currently living in Colorado. Nina just 

had her first child, Sabina, on April 5, 2002. 

Colin has three children. Dennis is studying 

to be an executive chef.” 

56 Walter Langsam writes, “I continue 

to teach art and architectural history at 

the University of Cincinnati as an underpaid, 

adjunct, associate professor, while 

giving innumerable (it seems) lectures and 

talks, usually on Cincinnati-area architecture, 

but also tours to English castles, 

country houses, and gardens in 1997 and 

1999. My award-winning, best-selling 

book, Great Houses of the Queen City 

(Cincinnati Historical Society, 1997) is currently 

being reprinted, and I am midway 

through writing a more comprehensive 

and scholarly book on, Significant Architecture 

of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, 

due in 2005. I have co-authored an article 

for the Cincinnati Art Museum on ‘Art- 

Carved Interiors of the Cincinnati Area’ 

and am contributing to a national biographical 

dictionary of African-American 

architects active in the first half of the 20th 

century. My daughter Thea, who was graduated 

at the top of her class from the Indiana 

University Law School in Bloomington, 

served a year as an appellate clerk for 

Judge Berzon (9th district) in San Francisco 

and this year is again a clerk for Judge 

Ambro (3rd district) in Wilmington, Del. 

My partner, Russell J. Speidel, whose usedbook 

store has survived thanks to the Web, 

and I continue to play an active role as gay 

men in the mainstream Cincinnati-area 

cultural and social world. In spite of the 

city’s notorious problems, we still enjoy 

life here tremendously.” 

From left to right: George Parker ’60, Malcolm Kaufman ’60, Gerald Levin ’60, 

Bob Miller ’60 and Tom Miller ’60. Bob Miller’s obituary appears on page 56. 

57 Phillip Forman writes, “I semiretired 

from the University of Illinois at 

Chicago on June 1, 2002. I’m now emeritus 

professor in the College of Medicine and 

the School of Public Health, and dean emeritus 

of the College of Medicine. I will continue 

to teach health policy and the U.S. 

health care system, on a part-time basis.” 

58 For news of Harold E. (Pete) Musser, 

see DEATHS. 

59 William Comanor writes, “I seem 

to be working as hard as ever: teaching economics 

at both UCSB and UCLA, carrying 

out various regional projects and publishing 

articles, as well as a book that hopefully 

will be out next year; and also consulting 

and testifying for lawyers on different 

types of litigation. I also have a 10 year old 

to care for. Life is busy but I am enjoying it 

all and there is surely no time to retire.” 

Frank Lyman writes, “I am retired but am 

doing some consulting, writing, and teaching 

in education. I’m concerned about the 

overemphasis on testing and ‘accountability’ 

in American education. Members of 

our generation have put too much effort 

into the enterprise to watch this retro 

movement passively.” 

60 Paul Blackburn writes, “On October 

first I retired from the Foreign Service 

after a 40-year career in the U.S. Information 

Agency and the State Department. My 

service in Japan, China, Thailand, and 

Malaysia, covering 24 years in total, allowed 

me to deepen a lifelong interest in East Asia 

that took root when I studied under Hugh 

Borton ’26 and Milton Sacks at Haverford 

and Mel Kennedy at Bryn Mawr.” 

Jack Shepherd writes, “Spent six weeks 

back at the University of Cambridge 

researching food security and famine issues 

for a course I am teaching in ’03 at Dartmouth. 

Still teaching there as a full professor 

and director of Dartmouth’s Africa 

foreign study program.” 


At Malcolm Baldwin’s ’62 horse farm, from left to right; James Meyer ’62, William Parker 

’62, Malcolm, and William Erb ’62. 

Norman Woldorf writes, “Norman closed 

his private practice (ENT) and works part 

time at the Lebanon Veterans Administration 

Hospital. Also is a second-grade volunteer, 

as per example: ‘What do you do 

when you are swallowed by an elephant?’ 

Answer: ‘Jump up and down until you are 

all pooped out.’” 

61 Andrew Stifler writes, “Nicole 

(Nicky) H. Perry and I were married at Sky 

Meadow State Park on May 20, 2002, and 

are residing in Upperville, Va., where I have 

joined the board of America’s oldest outdoor 

horse show.” 

62 William Erb writes, “As Malcolm 

Baldwin was unable to attend our 40th 

reunion, Jim Meyer, Bill Parker, and 

myself visited him on his horse farm in 

Fayetteville, Va., in July.” 

Stephen Lippard, the Arthur Amos Noyes 

Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology, was presented 

with the Basolo Award for recognition of 

work in inorganic chemistry by Northwestern 

University last October. Lippard’s 

work on the mechanisms of metal compound 

interactions led to a better understanding 

of the role of the cancer treatment 

drug cisplatin in causing DNA distortions. 

Author of more than 550 journal articles 

and two textbooks, Lippard holds several 

U.S. and foreign patents. 

63 Putnam Barber writes, “Jossey-Bass 

has published Accountability: A Challenge 

for Charities and Fundraisers (no. 31 in the 

series, ‘New Directions for Philanthropic 

Fundraising’) edited, with an introduction, 

by me. I’m also moderating the plenary 

session on the topic of accountability at 

the annual meeting of the Association for 

Research on Nonprofit Organizations and 

Voluntary Action, in Montreal, in November. 

In September, I spent three days in Beijing 

consulting with the Chinese NPO Network 

on the design of an accountability 

system for the newly emerging nonprofit 

organizations that people are forming 

throughout that country. The University 

of California Press will publish Marching 

on Washington: The Forging of an American 

Political Tradition by my daughter Lucy 

Grace Barber ’86 before the end of 2002.” 

64 Murray Levin, a partner with Pepper 

Hamilton LLP, recently made a presentation 

titled “Iraq: The Question of 

Whether to Go to War” to students and 

faculty of Gettysburg College. Mr. Levin 

also was a guest on “Philly LIVE: Your 

International Connection,” a live call-in 

television show on WYBE-TV. He was 

interviewed and fielded questions about 

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 

and the outlook for military action against 

Iraq. 

Don Reinfeld writes, “Last summer I 

attended the Violin Society of America’s 

bow-making seminar at Oberlin College, 

an opportunity to exchange ideas with two 

of France’s leading makers and other 

accomplished bow makers and violin makers.” 

65 Alan Bentz-Letts writes, “Continuing 

a tradition learned at Haverford in the 

’60s, my wife and I joined anti-war marches 

in Washington, D.C., in both April and 

October 2002. It was good to see many college 

students (33 percent) in the march as 

well as us gray-hairs.” 

Frank Popper writes, “In 1992 Anne 

Matthews, a Princeton English instructor, 

published Where the Buffalo Roam (Grove 

Press, 1992) a book about the work I and 

my wife Deborah Popper (BMC ’69) have 

done on the land-future of the Great Plains. 

In 1993, the book was one of the four finalists 

for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. 

The University of Chicago Press 

has just published a second edition, with a 

long updating chapter on how our ideas— 

particularly our vision of a Buffalo Commons—have 

gained strength and credibility 

over the last decade, plus a foreword 

by the University of Kansas’ Donald 

Worster, one of the nation’s leading environmental 

historians.” 

Eugene Sarver writes, “I am the writer of the 

currency forecast section of the monthly 

Executive Trade Report of Maersk Sealand, 

the world’s largest shipping company ($25 

billion), while continuing to conduct training 

programs for the Agency for International 

Development of the U.S. Department 

of State.” 

69 Bert Kritzer published the fourvolume 

Legal Systems of the World: A Political, 

Social, and Cultural Encyclopedia 

(ABC-CLIO, 2001). His daughter, Naomi, 

published her first novel, Fires of the Faithful 

(Bantam, 2002). 

Winter2003 45

Class News 


Mark Shimoda writes, “Life stays busy. I 

am enjoying working with Asian nonprofit 

organizations like the Japanese-American 

Citizens League, Asian Roundtable, 

and Boulder Asian Pacific Alliance. I enjoy 

working with other Asian Americans and I 

believe in the causes of each organization. 

I am glad I can help Haverford College.” 

Chris Snyder writes, “My younger son, 

Ben, graduated from Haverford last May.” 

70 Eric Richter writes, “Have found that 

the second year after my wife’s death is harder 

than the first. My father, Louis (Class of 

’28) died in September. He was 95, so I guess 

he got his money’s worth out of life. I’m currently 

managing a group of 130 quality personnel 

at Boeing Satellite Systems. My oldest 

daughter is graduating from Stanford 

University in 2003. My other daughters want 

to go to a better school…maybe Haverford?” 

73 Thomas Travisano has a book to 

be published, titled The New Anthology of 

American Poetry, first in a series of three 

volumes. Its aim is to be the most balanced, 

inclusive, and comprehensive 

anthology of American poetry ever published. 

Tom is the co-editor, and the book 

is published through Rutgers University 

Press. 

75 Jeff Rossman writes, “I am heading 

into my 10th year working as the director 

of behavioral health at Canyon Ranch 

in the Berkshires, in Lenox, Mass. I live 

with my wife and two children Gabriel 

(11) and Grace (7) in Egremont, Mass.” 

Mark Werner writes, “With both our kids 

at college (Haverford and Brandeis), my 

wife Arlene Isaacson (BMC ’76) and I are 

empty nesters and settling into a new stage 

of life. So, this past fall, I spent three weeks 

working as a volunteer on an Israeli military 

base, which was a very rewarding 

experience. And best of all, our kids 

thought it was ‘cool.’ ” 

77 Stephen Hilbert writes, “Good 

friends, our 2002 has been a bittersweet 

year. Our second child Aaron, 13 years old, 

was killed in a school bus accident along 

with two of his friends and a teacher. My 

sincere gratitude to my MA-HA buddies 

Jon Evans, Adam Goodman ’84, and Scott 

Burns (Scott attended the funeral with Peg) 

for their condolences. Our loss is deep but 

we were consoled by hundreds of family 

and friends for which we’re grateful. We 

have moved on, this time to the Catholic 

Relief Services program in India, one of the 

biggest in the CRS world and challenging. 

The cultural opportunities are enormous. 

Ford Highlight 

In July, Paul Denig ’74 returned from a 

year in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he 

directed the public affairs office for the 

reopened United States Embassy. Denig 

worked closely with the Yugoslav media 

to help them understand the activities and 

assistance programs the U.S. was implementing 

in their country, such as those 

run by the Agency for International 

Development, the Department of 

Agriculture, and the Department of 

Commerce. “We wanted to assure the 

media—and through them the country’s 

citizens—that the U.S. was helping them 

to rebuild their country,” says Denig, who 

is fluent in Serbian, the language of 

Yugoslavia. 

It was Denig’s responsibility to send out 

press releases, answer any and all media 

questions (“My cell phone rang constantly”), 

and arrange interviews with officials 

and ambassadors. He oversaw the 

revival of exchange programs with the U.S., 

like the Fulbright Program, the Ron Brown 

Fellowship, and the Hubert Humphries 

Fellowship. He was also instrumental in 

establishing a variety of initiatives to 

smooth the country’s path toward democracy. 

With his encouragement and organization 

of programs, Serbian Supreme 

Court judges committed themselves to 

learning English on a daily basis, in order 

to better understand texts and publications 

on American law and judicial practice; 

eight judges traveled to Washington and 

Boston to learn more about the American 

judicial system at the federal and state levels; 

and the Ministry of Education began 

a civic education program for the country’s 

youth. “This is especially important 

for the democratic future of Serbia,” says 

Denig. “If young people don’t understand 

how democracy functions, how can they 

participate in it?” 

Now back in Washington, D.C., Denig 

directs the State Department’s Foreign Press 

Center, whose goal is to give the foreign 

media access to American newsmakers. As 

director, Denig manages efforts to convey 

both American policy and the social, economic, 

and cultural context in which the 

policy is made to resident correspondents 

Paul Denig ’74 directs the State 

Department’s Foreign Press Center. 

from various countries, organizes briefings 

for foreign reporters with key officials at 

the federal, state, and local levels, and 

arranges special reporting tours for journalists 

covering topics spanning the gamut 

from the American electoral process to volunteerism 

and the future of NATO. The 

Foreign Press Center thus plays a vital role 

in the dialog between Americans and citizens 

of other countries around the globe. 

– B.M. 


Early-season Colorado snow (left to right): Eric Mowrey ’77, Katherine Mowrey, Jon Beers ’77. 

We welcome visitors to join us in our 

exploration of what India has to offer. MA- 

HA to Jon, Peter, Scott, and Adam.” 

Eric Mowrey writes, “Jon Beers came to 

visit me in early November this year. We 

had some early-season snow and went 

snowshoeing. I live in Winter Park, Colo., 

at 9,000 feet.” 

78 For news of Douglas WoodBrown, 

see BIRTHS. 

Donald Vaughan ’79 

79 Jordan Kerber was recently appointed 

chair of the department of sociology and 

anthropology at Colgate University, where 

he is an associate professor of anthropology 

and curator of collections in the Longyear 

Museum of Anthropology. 

Richard Schwab writes, “I am an associate 

professor of medicine at the University 

of Pennsylvania. My clinical and research 

interests are in sleep disorder. We have four 

children: Amanda (15), Robert (12), Jessica 

(8), and Allison (1).” 

Barry Schwabsky writes, “This summer 

and fall I published four major new essays: 

‘Painting in the Interrogative Mode’ in Vitamin 

P: New Perspectives in Painting (London: 

Phaidon Press Inc. 2002), ‘The Voice 

Estranged’ in Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation 

(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary 

Art/London: Merrell Publisher 2002), 

‘Art, Film, and Video: Separation or Synthesis?’ 

in The Undercut Reader: Critical 

Writing on Artists’ Film and Video (London: 

Wallflower Press 2002), and ‘Alighiero e 

Boetti: The Desire and Pursuit of the 

Whole’ in When 1 is 2: The Art of Alighiero 

e Boetti (Houston: Contemporary Arts 

Museum 2002).” 

Steven Simon writes, “I have recently been 

promoted to executive vice president of 

Clear Channel Entertainment Music 

Group. We are the world’s largest promoter 

of live entertainment. I now live in Wayland, 

Mass., with my wife Beth and children; 

Lauren (5) and Tommy (3) in the 

house we built…” 

Donald Vaughan has joined Burns and 

Levinson LLP Real Estate Group as a partner. 

He focuses his practice on real estate 

matters, including the representation of 

lenders and borrowers in permanent, construction, 

and leasehold financing transactions. 

His experience includes commercial 

mortgage-backed securities transactions, 

residential real estate sales, acquisitions and 

development; and estate planning and 

administration, primarily with real estate 

as a major asset. 

81 Alexander Neubauer writes, “My 

wife and I found a babysitter for our two 

kids and went to the wedding of great friend 

and classmate Alan Klein, who married Lauren 

Ezrol on Wave Hill, in Riverdale. Classmates 

Joel Posner, Michael Racke, Gerald 

Lance, and Robert Feitler joined us for a 

wonderful time. Alan has hit it big!” 

Ted Love recently became president and 

chief executive of a new, yet to be named 

pharmaceutical company. This new company 

is the product of the merger between 

Hyseq Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Variagenics 

Inc. and will attempt to combine their 

two respective expertises of drug discovery 

and diagnostics. Love, former president 

and CEO of Hyseq, was also previously 

senior vice president of development 

at Advanced Medicine (now Theravance) 

and in senior management positions in 

medical affairs and product development 

at Genentech. 

James Seale-Collazo writes, “Back in Puerto 

Rico for good, starting my dissertation 

research: an ethnography of a Protestant 

school in Puerto Rico.” 

82 For news of Jack Schulman, see 

BIRTHS. 

84 For news of Beverly Ortega Babers, 

see BIRTHS. 

Winter2003 47

Class News 


Steven Begleiter, a senior managing director 

at Bear Stearns & Co., Inc., has been 

appointed to the firm’s management and 

compensation committee. The management 

and compensation committee is responsible 

for overseeing the policies and running 

the day-to-day operation of the firm. 

David Clanaugh (Mataczynski) writes, “I 

married Tracie Ironside and relocated to 

Duluth, Minn., in May 2000. In one fell 

swoop I became a husband and dad, as Tracie 

had adopted an infant from Calcutta, 

India, in 1995. Mari, who is seven, had a 

baby sister (Helen Charlotte) on Feb. 4, 

2002. I worked for the Duluth YMCA as the 

grants, evaluation, and training coordinator 

for the Mentor Duluth program before taking 

time off as a stay-at-home parent. I 

resumed employment as manager of an afterschool 

and nutrition program (Kid’s Café) 

at the Damiano Center in central Duluth.” 

85 For news of Timothy Choppin, see 

BIRTHS. 

For news of Paul Fehlner, see BIRTHS. 

86 For news of Steve Albert, see note 

on Amy Brenner ’88. 

Dan Albrecht writes, “Settling in at Shelburne, 

Vt. My two girls are keeping me 

busy, as is my second year of graduate 

school at the University of Vermont. Just 

started a part-time job as assistant to the 

Select Board for the town of Charlotte. 

Love to hear from any Fords, send a note 

to deseneca@200.uvm.edu.” 

For news of Lucy Grace Barber, see note 

on Putnam Barber ’63. 

Molly King writes, “After taking a leave of 

absence last year, I am now back teaching 

and coordinating the Spanish program at 

Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School 

in Cambridge, Mass. During my year, off 

I had the chance to travel and study in Italy, 

Chile, and Argentina with my husband, 

Rob Hoyt.” 

Suzanne Mazurczyk writes, “Back in MBA 

school; thinking of opening a healthy fastfood 

restaurant. Any Fords visiting the Jersey 

shore feel free to give me a call.” 


87 Richard Espey writes, “I am now 

teaching science at the Park School in Baltimore. 

My playwriting career continues 

to have modest success; this past year has 

seen professional productions of my plays 

in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington, 

D.C.” 

For news of Michael Goretsky, see 

BIRTHS. 

Rebecca Stanton Hyde writes, “It’s been a 

hectic two years since my last update. In 

2001, I was promoted to manager of training 

and development for the entire University 

of Utah (not just the hospital).” For 

further news, see BIRTHS. 

Anne Valinoti writes, “I am practicing 

internal medicine in Bergen County, N.J. 

Guy (Barile) is on the faculty at Columbia 

in the department of ophthalmology.” 

For further news, see BIRTHS. 

88 Amy Brenner married Scott Zucker 

(Columbia ’92) at the New York Botanical 

Garden on Sept. 21, 2002. Fords in 

attendance included Liz Shapiro and Steve 

Albert ’86. Amy and Scott met through an 

executive leadership program that explores 

important issues facing New York City. 

For news of Robert Burke, see note on 

Michael Petrone ’89 in BIRTHS. 

Seema Byahatti writes, “I am currently living 

in the Boston area working as an EMT 

physician. I plan on attending the reunion 

in 2003 with Marla Head Kohlman and 

Patricia McIntosh.” 

Mark Gabuzda writes, “I’m now living in 

San Diego having made the move out here to 

the West Coast a few years ago. I’m an assistant 

professor of medicine at UCSD. It seems 

I’ve acclimated rather well since it doesn’t 

even strike me as odd that it’s 84 degrees and 

sunny on this mid-November day! I’m gearing 

up to join a group for the wedding of 

Stu Brown in Jamaica in early December. 

Then it’s back to being a ‘SoCal Dude.’” 

For news of Mary Kunkemueller, see 

BIRTHS. 

Don Lee writes, “I passed the CFA (Chartered 

Financial Analyst) level 3 exam in 

June and will be awarded the CFA charter 

in November this year. Many colleagues 

in the investment community are often 

surprised when I tell them that I studied 

history in college. Haverford College taught 

me how to think critically and laterally, the 

most valuable skills you can have in any 

job; this is the beauty of a liberal arts education.” 

Todd Levine writes, “I am living in 

Phoenix, Ariz., where I practice neurology. 

My wife and I have three wonderful children 

who occupy the vast majority of our 

time. I learned how special my friends from 

Haverford were this year—as Jay Stokes, 

Dave Wong, and Stu Brown came out to 

visit me when I was quite ill. Hope to see 

everyone this year at the reunion.” 

Laura Epstein Rosen writes, “We are slowly 

but surely adjusting to life in the suburbs 

with two kids! Matthew is almost five 

and Talia is almost two. Between the two of 

them and commuting into the city to work 

part-time at my psychology practice, life 

is very full but good. Looking forward to 

the reunion in May.” 

For news of Michael Rubin, see BIRTHS. 

Gail Silver writes, “On Sept. 1, 2001, I was 

married to Bayo Odutola, an intellectual 

property lawyer here in Ottawa. He 

obtained his bachelor of civil law degree 

from the University of Lausanne in 1990. 

Fords in attendance included Sarah 

Robertson and Holly Coryell (with her 

husband Peter Smith).” For further news, 

see BIRTHS 

89 Diane Castelbuono writes, “It was 

great to attend Amelia Kohm’s wedding in 

Chicago in September with fellow Fords 

Jovi Cruces and Andrew Painter.” For further 

news, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Joe Crownover, see BIRTHS.

Jennifer Dieringer writes, “ I am living in 

the ‘Happy Valley’, Northampton, Mass., 

where I practice housing and family law 

at Western Mass Legal Services. I recently 

celebrated Chris Lee’s new position reporting 

for the Washington Post and had an 

excellent weekend hanging out with Laura 

Price, Peter Nelson, and their kids, Cali 

and Jasper, who are almost as tall as I am. 

I’d love to hear from Fords in the area or 

passing through. jdieringer@wmls.org.” 

For news of Anthony Durso, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Zinkoo Han, see BIRTHS. 

Ken Moberg was married to Karolina Hope 

Graber (Bates ’95), in July 2002. Ken is finishing 

a post-doctorate at Harvard, after a 

Ph.D. in molecular biology at M.I.T. 

For news of Rebecca Cole Moore, see 

BIRTHS. 

For news of Michael Petrone, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Erica Baron Pretell, see 

BIRTHS. 

For news of Kristina Rask, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Bobby Rue, see note on Jeremy 

Edwards ’92. 

Michael Sheriar writes, “I’m now happily 

married four years to Mani Sheriar and 

have a fantastic 2 1/2-year-old boy, Skylar. 

When Mani and I got married we changed 

our last names- long story- you may 

remember my last name was Rehl. I’m currently 

a holistic health care practitioner in 

Berkeley, Calif., doing bodywork, Pilates, 

and nutritional therapy using muscle testing. 

Life is fabulous…” 

90 Colette Freedman writes, “My first 

play, ‘First to the Egg,’ was produced this 

year. Saw Mark Hudis’s taping of ‘That ’70s 

Show.’ He’s brilliant.” 

For news of Noah Guynn, see note on Jeremy 


For news of Jennifer Sherwood, see 

BIRTHS. 

Judith Wolf writes, “I am now living with 

my family, Lior (5) and Ezra (2) in 

Northampton, Mass., where my husband, 

Justin David, serves as a congregational 

rabbi. I am pursuing my painting, as I have 

for the past several years.” 

91 For news of Owen Belman, see 

BIRTHS. 

Jennifer Meltzer Goswami, was married 

on Oct. 26, 2002, to Vineet Goswami, in 

Teaneck, N.J. A Hindu ceremony was performed 

on Nov. 9, 2002, in Delhi. Jennifer 

is the pediatrics department administrator 

at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New 

York. Mr. Goswami is an account executive 

for Konica in New York. 

For news of Mark Kibel, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Randy Kravis, see note on 

Justin Warner ’93. 

Yngvild Olsen writes, “I am currently in the 

second year of my three-year fellowship in 

general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins. 

We’re going to be staying in Baltimore for a 

while so any Fords who want to visit, please 

call us!” For further news, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Emilie Heck Petrone, see note 

on Michael Petrone ’89 in BIRTHS. 

For news of Danielle Reed, see BIRTHS. 

James Reingold writes, “I continue to 

enjoy hosting and subsequently mentoring 

students who are interested in medicine.” 

For further news, see BIRTHS. 

Aruna Chandra Spencer writes, “On Oct. 

19, 2002, David Spencer and I were married. 

We are both practicing law in New 

York—I at Chadbourne & Parke LLP and 

David at Sullivan & Cromwell—and live 

in downtown Manhattan.” 

Robin Albertson Wren writes, “Robin and 

Jono send greetings from Charlottesville, Va. 

where life is good. Kayli (4 1/2) and Colby (1 

1/2) keep us moving and laughing.” 

92 Douglas Berkson writes, “On Sept. 

1, 2002, I married Sara Cooper in Newport, 

R.I. We had a weekend-long affair 

with many Fords in attendance. Our wedding 

and honeymoon were incredible, and 

married life (in NYC) is great so far.” 

For news of Amy Levenstien Chamberlain, 

see BIRTHS. 

Jeremy Edwards writes, “I remain in D.C., 

as the dean of students at the Edmund 

Burke School. My summer ‘Amtrak tour’ 

allowed me to see Josh Byrnes and his wife 

Charity, along with Thad Levine ’94 in 

Denver, as well as Noah Guynn ’90, Shanna 

Abeloff, and Brad Evans in California. 

The summer program I help run, Sports 

Challenge, continues to allow me to hang 

with former Fords—most recently Joe 

Rulewich ’94, Liz Koster ’04, Campbell 

Palfrey ’01, KJ Saunders ’98, Bobby Rue 

’89 and Matt Duffy ’03.” 

For news of Chris Hunter and Larry Mass, 

see BIRTHS. 

93 Michael Anderson writes, “I was 

married on Sept. 21, 2002, to Laura Zirkle 

(George Mason ’98) in a beautiful outdoor 

ceremony in Tarrytown, N.Y. My sister Hallie 

Anderson ’98 was a bridesmaid, and 

William Ings, Jonathan Farley, and Karim 

Nanji were groomsmen. Also honoring us 

with their presence were Aaron Ambrad, 

Stewart Bosley, Pamela Smoluk Wade and 

her husband Tom, and Hilary Cohen ’99. 

We missed Sarah Ings, but she had a pretty 

good excuse! Laura and I are living in 

Manhattan, where Laura is an event coordinator 

for a speaker’s bureau representing 

media personalities and former politicians, 

and I am still enjoying practicing 

law representing magazine and newspaper 

clients.” 

For news of Jill Chelimer, see BIRTHS. 

Matthew Fitzgerald writes, “I completed 

an Ironman triathlon in September 2002. 

As you might imagine, it was really hard, 

but also quite rewarding.” 

For news of Bradley Katcher, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Erik Midtskogen, see BIRTHS. 

Winter2003 49

Class News 


Virginia Dukes Tolany writes, “Bill and I 

are still living in Austin. I stay at home with 

Connor (2) and Adriana (almost 5); I also 

teach natural childbirth classes. Bill and I 

spent much of the past year developing and 

producing a board game we call ‘Dibs’. It’s 

only in stores in Texas, but you can always 

buy it online at www.playdibs.com. As a 

long distance alumnus, I was fortunate this 

year to see a lot of Fords at Jessi Kurland 

Byers and Mark Byers ’95 wedding in New 

York City. And I also get to see a Ford locally 

now that Lauren and Steven Meyers 

have moved to Austin.” Editors Note: 

“Dibs” was reviewed in the Fall 2002 issue 

of Haverford Alumni Magazine. 

Justin Warner writes, “I’m happy to 

announce that I was married to Courtney 

Birch on Oct. 13, 2002. Courtney is the 

choral and musical theater director at Sidwell 

Friends Upper School in Washington, 

D.C. My sister, Kara Warner ’01, was a 

bridesmaid in the ceremony, and Randy 

Kravis ’91 did triple duty as an usher, reader, 

and singer for our first dance. Also present 

was Auysha Muhayya ’95 who teaches 

with Courtney at Sidwell—and of course 

my mother, Kay Warner, who works at 

HC’s new Integrated Natural Sciences Center. 

I’m still writing assorted things, teaching, 

and performing with my improv 

group, Washington Improv Theater. If 

you’re in D.C., come check us out—our 

info is at www.dcwit.com.” 

94 For news of David Bloomfield, see 

BIRTHS. 

For news of Charlie Bonnell, see note on 

Jen Bonnell ’97. 

For news of John Dollhopf, see BIRTHS. 

Max Kalhammer writes, “Over Thanksgiving 

my wife (Valerie Briggs from Dallas) and 

I will celebrate our first wedding anniversary. 

We live in Reston, Va., and I work at 

Booz Allen Hamilton. We were at Kwame 

Nyongo’s wedding in Nairobi this summer.” 

Todd Kerner will be graduating next June 

with an M.D. 

For news of Thad Levine, see note on Jeremy 



For news of Matt Rendle, see note on 

Christopher Rosselli ’95. 

For news of Joe Rulewich, see note on 

Jeremy Edwards ’92. 

Pete Swarr writes, “I’m continuing my 

stint as a Damn Yankee in Nashville. I’m 

in my fourth year of the combined internal 

medicine and pediatrics residency at 

Vanderbilt University. Next year, just to 

round out 26 years of formal education, 

I’ll stay on as chief resident in internal medicine. 

My party this weekend included 

Hiram alumni Jeff Middleton who finished 

his MBA at Owen this year, and Dan 

Cohen ’95 who keeps me entertained with 

road stories, as he travels across the country 

as lead guitarist for country star Brad 

Martin. Yes, I’ve caught myself saying ‘fixin’ 

to’ and ‘bless her heart’ more than once.” 

For news of James Taft, see note on A. 

Heather Liske ’95. 

95 Elson Blunt writes, “Doing well, 

still teaching at Sandy Spring Friends 

School in Maryland. Now teaching physics 

and astronomy, playing cello, and singing 

in a nearby chorale.” 

For news of Mark Byers, see note on Virginia 

Dukes Tolany ’93. 

For news of Dan Cohen, see note on Pete 

Swarr ’94. 

For news of Ray Lei-He, see BIRTHS. 

For news of Zeke Hart, see note on Elizabeth 

Jackson ’98. 

A. Heather Liske writes, “Paul Secker (UC 

Berkeley ’95) and I were married in Hudson, 

Ohio (my hometown), on June 17, 

2002. We met in 1998 when I returned to 

my alma mater to teach English—Paul was 

already there teaching mathematics. In the 

meantime, Paul and I have relocated to the 

Boston area; Paul continues to teach mathematics 

at the secondary school level and 

I am completing an M.A. in English at 

Middlebury College (Bread Loaf School of 

English). And a quick post-Haverford 

update: After graduating, I worked in NYC 

at a small college textbook publishing company 

for two years, temped in Boston for a 

year, and taught high school English in 

Hudson, Ohio, from 1998-2002. In other 

Ford news, just a few weeks ago I met up 

with a group of alumni in New York City— 

Clara Henderson (working as an assistant 

district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s 

office), Mary (Beth) Gerlough ’96, Laura 

Driscoll Taft, James Taft ’94, and Allison 

Ruddock ’96, all of NYC. Late on a Saturday 

night in the East Village, the English 

majors of that group drank a toast to 

Woodside Cottage and its faculty.” 

Mike Metz writes, “I am amazed to realize 

I’m in my eighth year of teaching. It 

was never a career I planned on, but I’ve 

found a home in the Chicago Public 

Schools and the kids and their families 

keep me coming back. The south side of 

Chicago has treated me well, affording me 

connections with both the University of 

Chicago and Museum of Science and 

Industry where I write curriculum in my 

spare time. Besides continuing to play soccer, 

I’ve begun a new hobby as a spoken 

word performer, and appear semi-regularly 

at several open mikes and poetry slams 

around Chicago.” 

For news of Auysha Muhayya, see note 

on Justin Warner ’93. 

Christopher Rosselli writes, “I graduated 

from law school in May and started practicing 

corporate law at Alston and Bird in 

Atlanta. I enjoy seeing Matt Rendle ’94 

from time to time.” 

Eric Sasson writes, “I’m still living in 

Boston with my fiancee, Debbie, and working 

at a Cape Cod summer camp for kids. 

All of that is about to change though: Debbie 

and I are getting married in May 2003 

and then moving to New York. She’ll be in 

school for a Psy.D. and I’m looking for 

another job in the world of camping.” 

For news of Josh Weinstein, see BIRTHS.

96 Rebecca Levene Agnew writes, 

“John Agnew and I have had a very busy 

year so far. I finished my M.D./M.P.H. at 

Johns Hopkins in May and started my residency 

in internal medicine at the University 

of Colorado at the end of June. John 

is currently writing his dissertation in neuroscience 

and will start his post-doc at the 

University of Colorado early next year. Our 

biggest news is that our daughter, Elizabeth 

Bailey Agnew, was born on Oct. 18, 

2002. She weighed 7 lbs., was 18.5 inches 

long, and is keeping her parents very 

busy! One of her first visitors in the hospital 

was Alix Joseph who is living in Fort 

Collins, Colo.” 

Rachel Levine Berger writes, “I am living 

and working in New York City. I was 

recently married in June to Jeff Berger. 

There to celebrate with us were Jordana 

Rubel, Elaine Maher, Mony Hamilton, 

Karen Kingsbury Tannenbaum, Mike Tannenbaum, 

Faith D’Lamater, Tara Steeley, 

and Grey Cecil. I am a second-year resident 

in internal medicine at Mount Sinai 

Hospital in NYC – working hard and loving 

the city.” 

For news of Mary Gerlough, see note on 

A. Heather Liske ’95. 

Jennifer Loukissas writes, “In May of 2002 

I graduated from Duke University with a 

master’s degree in public policy and moved 

back to Washington, D.C. I accepted a position 

with the National Institutes of Health 

as a presidential management intern. At the 

NIH I am working with a number of different 

institutes and offices, mostly in partnership 

development, dissemination of 

information to the public and scientific 

community, and outreach activities.” 

For news of Allison Ruddock, see note on 

A. Heather Liske ’95. 

97 Jen Bonnell writes, “Hi all! I’m still 

living in the ’burbs of New York and working 

in the city. This past fall I was promoted 

to editor at Puffin Books, a children’s book 

division of Penguin Putnam, where I work 

on several original novels and series for 

kids and teens. It’s a lot of fun! In addition 

to editing children’s books, I’m also an 

author! My first book, DIY Girl: The Real 

Girl’s Guide to Making Everything from Lip 

Gloss to Lamps (ISBN: 0-14-250048-8) is 

a craft book for teen girls coming out from 

Puffin, June 2003. My brother Charlie Bonnell 

’94 and Sharren Bates have just bought 

a house with an honest-to-goodness backyard. 

Charlie’s band, Cooper Dalton 

(www.cooperdalton.com) is just finishing 

up recording their next album, and will 

probably be playing in the NYC area soon. 

I’m in close contact with Aimee Slater and 

Natasha Heflin ’99, and I just saw Miles 

Refo ’99, Hall Cannon ’99, Kellie Grogan 

’99 and Brian Stein ’99 at Nat and Aimee’s 

bowling party. Last summer, Robin Harley 

flew out from California and we went to 

the reunion along with Rebecca Spieler 

Trager and Julie Wolf. A couple of weeks 

later, Aimee and I trekked down to D.C. 

along with Julie and several other Fords 

for Rebecca’s wedding to Eric Trager.” 

John Morgan writes, “I wanted to write to 

let you know about my recent adventures. 

In October, I obtained my chemistry doctorate 

from the California Institute of Technology 

in Pasadena. My general focus has 

been organic/organometallic chemistry, 

building on the excellent base that Haverford’s 

chemistry department provided. 

Next, I’ll be heading overseas to England 

for a postdoctoral appointment at Imperial 

College, London. Ultimately, I am hoping 

to get a job at a primarily undergraduate 

college like Haverford (If I could be 

so fortunate). Caltech continues to have a 

strong presence with my colleagues Daniel 

Paik and Andrew Ewald. It was unexpectedly 

great to enjoy such a strong Ford 

influence in my graduate studies all the 

way across the country.” 

For news of Jeanne Reilly, see BIRTHS. 

At the wedding of A. Heather Liske ’95 and Paul Secker. From left to right; Lisa Gardner ’96, Anne Kenderdine ’95, Tamara Richman ’95, 

bride and groom, Mary (Beth) Gerlough ’96, David Arbury ’95, Mariya Strauss ’95, James Taft ’94, Laura Driscoll Taft ’95. 

Winter2003 51

Class News 


98 For news of Hallie Anderson, see 

note on Michael Anderson ’93. 

David Braun has received a National Science 

Foundation Grant and a Fulbright- 

Hayes Grant to complete his research in 

Kenya for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Rutgers 

University. 

Andrew Clinton writes, “Joyce Kelley and 

I are still in graduate school in English at 

the University of Iowa, making steady (but 

slow) progress in our program. We are 

both teaching two undergraduate classes 

this semester, and we’ve recently passed 

our comprehensive exams. We’re still keeping 

busy with our musical interests as well. 

In other exciting news, after six years 

together, the two of us will finally be getting 

married in June 2003! Contrary to 

popular rumor, we haven’t eloped (yet). 

Best wishes to all, we can’t wait to see 

everyone at the reunion!” 

For news of Cynthia Gage, see note on 

Emily Tuckman ’99. 

Evan Goldman writes, “Doster Esh and I 

had a brief visit with the President on the 

South Lawn of the White House as he disembarked 

Marine One. The President was 

returning to the White House from Camp 

David.” 

Erin Herward writes, “I am excited to have 

moved to Alexandria, Va., in August 2002. 

I am teaching first grade at Saint Agnes 

Catholic School in Arlington. After spending 

my entire life in Pittsburgh (save my 

time at Haverford) it is great to get to know 

a new city. I especially like seeing my old 

Haverford friends in D.C. – Christina 

West, Dara Bongarten, and Shira Ovide.” 

Elizabeth Jackson writes, “I moved back 

to the East Coast this summer (from Denver) 

to begin my MBA at the Tuck School 

of Business at Dartmouth. Fellow Ford 

Zeke Hart ’95 is up here with me and I 

had the pleasure of catching up with his 

sister and my fellow classmate, Sofia Hart. 

I hope to make it to the reunion, but we’ll 

see how finals work out!” 

Doster Esh ’98, President Bush, 

and Evan Goldman ’98. 

Maria Lemos writes, “I recently went to 

Mike Shipler ’99’s wedding and saw lots 

of HC and BMC alums. It was great to see 

everyone.” 

Brian Murphy writes, “I started graduate 

school at the University of Virginia, in 

American history.” 

For news on KJ Saunders, see note on 

Jeremy Edwards ’92. 

Andrew Thompson writes, “I moved back 

to the Boston area a few years ago and am 

now happily in my third year teaching history 

at Newton South High School in Newton, 

Mass. I’m living in Cambridge.” 

For news of Alexandra Wolf, see note on 

Benjamin Sprecher ’99. 

Joanne Wood writes, “I married Alexander 

Wood ’99 on March 30, 2002. I have 

started my residency at the Children’s Hospital 

in Philadelphia.” 

99 Matthew Benedict is in his first 

year at Villanova Law School. 

For news of Hall Cannon, see note on Jen 

Bonnell ’97. 

For news of Hilary Cohen, see note on 

Michael Anderson ’93. 

For news of Kellie Grogan, see note on 


For news of Natasha Heflin, see note on 


For news of Miles Refo, see note on Jen 


For news of Mike Shipler, see note on 

Maria Lemos ’98. 

Benjamin Sprecher would like to 

announce his engagement to Alexandra 

Wolf ’98. 

For news of Brian Stein, see note on Jen 


Emily Tuckman writes, “I am in New York, 

producing and directing “A…My Name is 

Alice,” which I also directed in college; 

posters painted by Catherine Behnke, as 

well as career counseling college students 

at MCNY. I am a bridesmaid in Sarah 

Byrne’s wedding on Nov. 3, and frequently 

see Cynthia Gage ’98, Emily Kelton, 

and Allyson Livingstone, all living in New 

York.” 

Katharine Westfall writes, “Hi everybody! 

I’m living in Cambridge, Mass. I’m teaching 

English 9 and American Lit. at Weston 

High School in Weston, Mass. I’m also 

coaching middle school girl’s basketball 

and high school track. Go Cato! I love 

being back in the Boston area, especially 

because I can get track updates from Marc 

Chalufour, who lives across the river in 

Brighton. I also hang out with Jessica Hurt 

who is living in Brookline and doing her 

amazing science thing at Harvard.” 

For news of Alexander Wood, see note on 

Joanne Wood ’98. 

01 For news of Campbell Palfrey, see 

note on Jeremy Edwards ’92. 

For news of Kara Warner, see note on 

Justin Warner ’93. 

02 Jose Martinez entered the United 

States Army Reserves (Infantry) out of Fort 

Benning, Ga. He is currently a middle school 

social studies teacher in Orlando, Fla. 


Births 

Connor Burke and Ben Petrone, sons of 

Michelle and Robert Burke ’88 and Emilie 

Heck Petrone ’91 and Michael Petrone ’89. 

78 Douglas WoodBrown announces 

the birth of a second child, also a daughter, 

Ainsley, on Nov. 13, 2002. 

82 Jack Schulman writes, “I would 

like to announce the birth of my son Jason 

Louis Schulman on July 9, 2002. Jason is 

named after my beloved father, Louis 

Schulman, who passed on March 8, 2001. 

Jason and his Mom, Lisa Schulman (married 

on July 22, 2000), are doing great and 

together with our dog Chelsea form my 

wonderful family. Professionally, I am still 

a partner in the corporate department of 

Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman LLP 

in NYC.” 

84 Zachary James Babers was born 

Oct. 13, 2002, to Beverly Ortega Babers 

and Alonzo. He joins their first son, 

Cameron, who is 5 years old. 

85 Timothy Choppin writes, “My wife 

(Diana Diel Choppin, BMC ’87) and I just 

had our third daughter, Julia Noelle, born 

May 9, 2002. She joins big sisters Katie (7) 

and Carly (4), and she certainly keeps us 

on our toes!” 

Paul Fehlner writes, “We are pleased to 

announce the birth of our fifth child, Kaj 

Fehlner Jensen, on May 25, 2002. He joins 

Christian (15), Callie (13), Luke (11), and 

Andie (7). Not to mention the three border 

collies: Tess, Scout, and Blaze.” 

87 Michael Goretsky writes, “Our 

second daughter, Abigail Jane, was born 

Nov. 5, 2001.” 

Rebecca Stanton Hyde writes, “On Oct. 1, 

2001, my husband and I welcomed our 

first child, Benjamin Lloyd Shane. Due to 

some pregnancy complications, Ben had 

to come four weeks early, but he weighed 

in at 6 lbs. and was 18.5 inches long. The 

only lasting effect of his prematurity seems 

to be his sleeping schedule (or lack thereof). 

Thank goodness he’s so cute!” 

Anne Valinoti writes, “Guy Barile and I 

are delighted to report the birth of our third 

child, Christopher Francis, on April 12, 

2002. As of this writing, his brothers 

Nicholas (7) and Joseph (3) still like him.” 

88 Mary Kunkemueller and Roger 

Wallach (UVA ’91, brother of Chip Wallach 

’86) are proud to announce the birth of 

Audrey Wallach in November. She joins big 

sister Emily, who was born in September 

1999. 

Michael Rubin writes, “My wife Renee and 

myself announce with joy the birth of our 

third child and first son, Nathaniel Meyer, 

on Sept. 26, 2002. Baby and mom are doing 

well.” 

Gail Silver writes, “On April 17, 2002, we 

happily welcomed our twin offspring, 

Sonia Silver Odutola and Nelson Silver 

Odutola into the world. I continue to work 

as a patent agent at the firm Marks & Clerk 

here in Ottawa, and am enjoying family 

life immensely.” 

89 Diane Castelbuono writes, 

“McCorry Jane was born on Dec. 5, 2002— 

big sister Helen and big brother Owen are 

cautiously eyeing the competition.” 

Joe Crownover and Jennifer Langdon welcomed 

their daughter Taylor Langdon 

Crownover on March 8, 2002. Joe is a 

human resources consultant with Shell 

Trading Company and serves on the Writers 

in Schools and Amigos de las Americas 

nonprofit boards in Houston. 

Thomas Charles Reilly Stern, son of 

Jeanne Reilly ’97 and Jason Stern. 

Anthony Durso writes, “New addition to 

the family: Dante Culmone-Durso, born 

June 13, 2002—happy little guy, still does 

not sleep through the night. Still working 

on Maui, visitors welcome.” 

Zinkoo Han writes, “Gaye Han was born 

to Hyeon Shil and myself on Sept. 7, 2002. 

Her older brother Ogun is quite happy to 

have a sister. Both of our children were 

born in Turkey and have Turkish names.” 

Rebecca Cole Moore writes, “My husband 

Randy and I gave birth to a happy, brighteyed 

boy on July 4, 2002, and are enjoying 

parenthood immensely.” 

Michael Petrone and Emilie Heck Petrone 

’91 had a baby boy, Benjamin, on Aug. 30, 

2002. He weighed 8 lbs. 3oz. He is fast 

becoming buddies with Connor Burke, son 

of Michelle and Robert Burke ’88 born 

Aug. 13, 2002, as they hang out together 

in N.J. 

Sonia Silver Odutola and Nelson Silver 

Odutola, children of Gail Silver ’88 

Winter2003 53

Births 

Erica Baron Pretell writes, “Our son, 

Marco Alexander, was born Oct. 5, 2001. 

Big sister Sofia is now three years old.” 

Kristina J. Rask writes, “We welcomed our 

second daughter, Carolyn Jayne, on March 

4, 2002. Big sister Julia is a wonderful 

helper and really enjoys her new playmate!” 

90 Jennifer Sherwood writes, “My 

husband and son Benjamin (2 1/2) welcome 

our new son, Jory, born in September 

2002. I’m still living in Dallas doing a urology 

residency.” 

91 Owen Belman and his wife Andrea 

announce the birth of their son, Joseph 

Wister Belman, born Nov. 17, 2002 in Singapore, 

where Owen works for Marakon 

Associates, management consultants. 

Mark Kibel writes, “I am happy to write 

that on Nov. 27, 2002, at 11:30 a.m., my 

wife Shari (BMC ’92) and I welcomed our 

second daughter Aliza Alexandra into the 

world. Aliza weighed 8 lbs. 10 oz. and was 

20.5 inches long with huge eyes and little 

hair! Her big sister Adena cannot stop kissing 

her. We are all very excited!” 

Yngvild Olsen writes, “Josh, Sam, and I 

also just welcomed another addition to our 

family. Isak Karl Grova Sharfstein was born 

Sept. 13, 2002 and is growing fast.” 

Danielle Reed writes, “Julie Helene Beatrice 

Baty was born on March 10, 2002. She 

already has her heart set on becoming a 

member of the Class of 2024. I continue 

to report for the Wall Street Journal. My 

real estate column, ‘Private Properties,’ 

appears in the Weekend Journal section 

every Friday. I would love to hear from fellow 

Fords who reside in or are passing 

through the New York area.” 

James Reingold writes, “On May 1, 2002 

Jill and I welcomed Michelle Anne Reingold 

into the world weighing in at 6.5 lbs. 

She is named after Jill’s late mother.” 

92 Amy Levenstien Chamberlain 

writes, “On Sept. 28, 2002, my husband, 

Desmond and I were blessed with the 

arrival of our son, Noah.” 

Chris Hunter and Larry Mass gave birth to 

another son, Noah, on Feb. 21, 2002. Big 

brother Ben is thrilled to have a playmate. 

Julie Hélene Béatrice Bâty, daughter of Danielle Reed ’91 and Jean-Philippe Bâty. 

93 Jill Chelimer writes, “Alice Chelimer 

Johnson was born in July 2002, and 

is looking forward to seeing Haverford at 

reunion time.” 

Bradley Katcher and his wife Melanie 

Bernitz are pleased to announce the birth 

of their first child, Daniel George, 6 lbs. 

14 oz., on June 7, 2002. 

Erik Midtskogen writes, “Audrey and I 

added Katrina to our family on Jan. 15, 

2002. She and our two-year-old son, Jan, 

love to play together and we love to 

watch.” 

94 David Bloomfield writes, “On Feb. 

25, 2003, my wife Dawn Dailey Bloomfield, 

gave birth to our beautiful baby girl, 

Caroline Nicole Bloomfield. Caroline was 

born 8 lbs. 20 inches. Caroline is a happy 

addition to our family.” 

John Dollhopf writes, “ I would like you 

to know that our son, William Harold Dollhopf, 

was born Dec. 16, 2002.” 

95 Ray Lei-He writes, “My wife Jane 

and I just had our first kid. Our baby 

daughter Emma was born on Nov. 3, 2002 

and weighed 6 lbs, 11 oz.” 

Josh Weinstein and his wife Jennifer (BMC 

’96) welcomed their third child, Sibelle, 

on Oct. 31, 2002. 

97 Jeanne Reilly writes, “My husband, 

Jason Stern, and I are pleased to announce 

the birth of our first child: Thomas Charles 

Reilly Stern was born on May 28, 2002. 

We are currently living in Fair Lawn, N.J.” 


Obituaries 

29 John S. Rodell passed away on Nov. 

17, 2002, at the age of 94. 

35 Woodruff J. Emlen, died of heart 

failure on Dec. 31, 2002. Mr. Emlen was a 

retired bank executive who helped Japanese 

American students enter colleges and 

universities after they had been held in 

World War II interment camps. He worked 

with the National Japanese American Student 

Relocation Council, visiting interment 

camps and helping students who were 

detained by the U.S. government during the 

war. The council found colleges and universities 

willing to admit detainees and 

helped the students settle in at their new 

schools. Mr. Emlen, a member of the Religious 

Society of Friends, also traveled to 

North Africa and France to help refugees of 

the Spanish Civil War. Following his years 

at Haverford, Mr. Emlen earned his MBA 

from Harvard. He worked as a banker at 

Germantown Trust Co. in Philadelphia and 

Guaranteed Trust in New York before 

becoming senior vice president with the 

Bank of New Jersey in 1971. Mr. Emlen 

retired in 1978, but later that year he joined 

James M. Davidson & Co. in Wayne, Pa. as 

an investment advisor. He retired from that 

position in 1987. He served on the boards of 

the Germantown Friends and Friends Central 

schools and the American Friends Service 

Committee, where he was the board 

treasurer. He was a member of the Haverford 

Monthly Meeting of Friends and was 

part of a goodwill team of Quakers who visited 

Vietnam in the 1960s. In addition to 

his wife of 60 years, Elizabeth Black Emlen, 

he is survived by a son and two daughters. 

Richard Munn Suffern died on Oct. 20, 

2002. After graduating from Haverford, Dr. 

Suffern received a Ph.D. in classics from 

Johns Hopkins University in 1941, and a 

bachelor of divinity degree from New 

Brunswick Theological Seminary, in 1944. 

He began teaching at the Biblical Seminary 

in New York (now the New York Theological 

Seminary), while still a seminarian 

himself, during the war years. For close to 

20 years he taught Church History and 

New Testament Greek at Biblical. As a seminarian, 

Richard was the student pastor at 

the St. Nicholas Collegiate Church in Manhattan 

and during his years of full-time 

teaching at Biblical, he was a frequent supply 

pastor at churches throughout Paramus 

and Passaic. In 1957, he became the 

stated supply pastor of the Church of the 

Covenant (Reformed Church in America). 

He served the Church of the Covenant 

until 1970. For the next five years, Dr. Suffern 

served as the stated supply pastor of 

the Trinity Reform Church. He concluded 

his formal pastoral responsibilities by serving 

as stated supply pastor at English 

Neighborhood Reformed Church and 

again at the Church of the Covenant. The 

career of Richard Suffern was characterized 

by a passion for the study of the Bible. 

This ranged from the study of Biblical 

archaeology to the study of the English 

Bible. His interest ranged from the philological, 

studying classical and biblical 

Greek, to the psychological. He touched 

many people from around the world 

including missionaries, ministers to be, 

and mentored many informally in the 

things of spiritual and physical health. Dr. 

Suffern was predeceased by his first wife 

Eugenia Gibson Suffern. He is survived by 

his second wife, Helen Schwenker Sloyer, 

his daughter Marylise Munn, two sons, 

Richard Winslow and Edward William 

Bertholf and many loving grandchildren. 

37 Marshall C. Guthrie, Jr., died on 

Dec. 26, 2002, in Christiana, Del. Mr. 

Guthrie was born in the Panama Canal 

Zone, the older son of Dr. Marshall C. 

Guthrie, the commanding surgeon of the 

Canal Zone, and Harriet Harding Guthrie. 

He was raised in Chevy Chase, Md. After 

graduating from Haverford College, he 

earned a Master’s Degree from the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology. He began 

a lifelong career at the DuPont Company 

in Wilmington, Del. Trained as a chemical 

engineer; he spent his later career with 

DuPont managing Dymetrol, a polymerstrapping 

product that he helped to bring to 

an international market. He retired in 1979. 

Mr. Guthrie was an active Episcopalian and 

deeply involved in Immanuel Church, The 

Highlands, and Delaware Episcopal Cursillo. 

At Immanuel, he served variously as 

senior warden and member of the Vestry 

and was a long time choir member. He was 

a member of Contact, an emergency hotline, 

and was committee member for Troop 

398, Boy Scouts of America. After moving 

to Cokesbury Village in 1995, he served as 

president of the Men’s Club and participated 

in the University of Delaware’s Lifelong 

Learning Program. Mr. Guthrie was 

preceded in death by his wife Elizabeth 

Zeisberg in 1968 and his wife Patsy Mayerberg 

Pollock in 1988. He is survived by his 

brother, Eugene Harding Guthrie ’46, four 

children, and four stepchildren. 

Roy Haberkern, Jr. died on June 13, 2002. 

After attending Yale Law School, where he 

was awarded the Order of the Coif, he and 

his classmate Carlota “Tota” Garfias, were 

married. He went into the Air Force and 

served at Wright Field, where he was awarded 

the Legion of Merit and retired as a major. 

Roy joined the New York law firm of Millbank, 

Tweed, Hadley and McCloy and represented 

his commercial and bank clients 

around the world. He retired in 1980 after 

serving as the firm’s senior partner for many 

years. During this period, Roy was active in 

his church and community. He served as 

president of the Garden City School Board 

for 14 years. Upon his retirement, he 

returned to North Carolina and bred and 

showed registered Polled Herefords at Old 

Holler, the family farm near Germantown. 

In 2000 he moved to Salemtowne, the Moravian 

retirement community. Roy was a lifetime 

member of the Home Moravian Church 

and served on the board of trustees as well as 

on the board of Salem College, where he 

continued his ongoing active participation 

in public and religious education. He is survived 

by his wife Tota and their four sons, 

Roy ’65, Richard, Charles and John. 

Herbert W. Taylor, Jr., died on Sept. 26, 

2002. He was 85. Born in Haverford, Pa., he 

graduated from Haverford College, like his 

father, Herbert W. Taylor ’14. Later he studied 

at the University of Pennsylvania and 

received a doctorate in chemistry from Rutgers 

University. He retired in 1981 as a patent 

agent for Bristol Myers Co. after 30 years. 

He was a member of Park Central Presbyterian 

Church, Onondaga Golf & Country 

Club, Century Club and Gyro Club. He is 

survived by his wife of 60 years, the former 

Elizabeth Emack and two daughters. 

Winter2003 55

Obituaries 

51 Arkady Kalishevsky, 78, died on 

Nov. 18, 2002, of a pulmonary embolism. 

Kalishevsky was born in Novi Sad, 

Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United 

States with his parents in 1949. He received 

a master’s degree in business from the 

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

He spoke seven languages, a skill 

he used as the coordinator of international 

licensing for GlaxoSmithKline. Kalishevsky 

traveled around the world, negotiating 

the rights to sell pharmaceuticals 

overseas. He is survived by many friends. 

Alexander Busch Milyko, died on Sept. 6, 

2002. He attended Columbia University’s 

medical school, doing his internship in 

Cooperstown, N.Y. He served as a Captain 

at Otis AFB in Cape Cod, Mass., and later 

relocated to West Hartford, Conn., where 

he started a private family medical practice. 

During the next 20 years, in addition 

to raising his family and building his practice, 

he sang in the Men & Boys Choir at 

St. James Episcopal Church, built home 

electronics from kits, returned to his childhood 

hobby of sailing, and learned how to 

build and fly radio-controlled model airplanes. 

He also worked for 15 years as an 

assistant medical examiner. Alex and his 

wife Louise moved to Albuquerque, N.M., 

in 1981 where Alex joined Lovelace Health 

Systems internal medicine department. 

They took up square dancing, and when 

he retired in 1991, he picked up golf clubs 

that had lain idle since his days in the Air 

Force, a hobby that he enjoyed thoroughly 

for the rest of his life. The biggest change 

in their lives came when they purchased 

their first RV, and began to travel all over 

the U.S. and Canada, square dancing and 

golfing as they went. They eventually 

joined two RV clubs, meeting lots of new 

friends and enjoying group outings, as well 

as their solo adventures. Retirement also 

gave Alex more time to read books and 

write letters, and he eagerly embraced the 

technology of e-mail to stay connected to 

friends and relatives. As with much of his 

professional life, his personal life was full 

of the joy of knowing people…and of 

being a healer. 

58 Harold E. (Pete) Musser died on 

Dec. 3, 2001, after a long illness. 

In Tribute 

Robert S. Miller ’60, a native and longtime 

resident of Lexington, Ky., died on 

Aug. 18, 2002, at the age of 64, after a twoyear 

battle with cancer. His pallbearers 

included classmates Jon Collett, Malcolm 

Kaufman, Gerald Levin, Thomas Miller, 

George Parker, and Brownlow Speer. He 

attended the Kenwick School and University 

High School in Lexington. After graduating 

from Haverford, he won a Fulbright 

Scholarship to study European history at 

Oxford University. Miller later graduated 

from Harvard Law School, and returned to 

Lexington in 1964, to raise a family and 

practice law at his family’s firm, Miller, Griffin 

and Marks. 

Miller’s early years as an attorney were 

marked by his strong social conscience and 

desire to seek civil rights for all Americans. 

He participated in planning the historic 

“March on Washington,” led by Rev. Martin 

Luther King, Jr. in 1963. Later that 

decade Miller drafted the charter of the 

Lexington/Fayette County Urban League 

and served as its organization’s first director; 

he drafted the charter of the Lexington 

Human Rights Commission and served 

as one of its first Commissioners: and he 

served as a director of both the Lexington 

Deaf Oral School and the local chapter of 

the National Conference of Christians and 

Jews. What was amazing, yet typical about 

Bob Miller, is that his two children, who 

loved and admired him more than anyone 

else, did not know the level of his involvement 

in the civil rights movement until 

they started to dig around. 

Miller distinguished himself at the bar, as 

an expert on equine and real estate law, 

writing several review articles on these topics. 

In 1994, Miller served as a Special Justice 

of the Supreme Court of Kentucky and 

helped draft the opinion that approved the 

establishment of family courts. For 17 

years, he served as a bar examiner, and ultimately 

the chair of the Kentucky Board of 

Bar Examiners, where he helped to shape 

the next generation of Kentucky attorneys. 

In recognition of his career of service, 

scholarship and integrity, Miller was 

awarded the Chief Justice’s Special Service 

Award on June 13, 2002. 

Miller was long active in Kentucky politics, 

serving as an alternate delegate to the 

Democratic National Convention in 1976 

and a grassroots organizer and speechwriter 

to local and state politics, including 

Lexington Mayor Jim Amato. Miller’s political 

activism in recent years mostly constituted 

support of his family: his wife of 

38 years, Penny May Mullens Miller, a professor 

of political science at the University 

of Kentucky; his daughter, Jennifer, an 

attorney and former aide to President Bill 

Clinton and Vice President Al Gore; and 

his son Jonathan, the Kentucky State Treasurer. 

Miller was a man of passion, principle and 

faith. He loved art, architecture, classical 

music, and most of all nature. In his later 

years, he became an ardent conservationist, 

helping to protect Red River Gorge 

from flooding plans, and planting literally 

thousands of trees in the Lexington area. 

Bob Miller led, not through strong words, 

but his soft-spoken example. He lived a 

life that mattered. 

—Thomas A. Duff ’60 


Friends of the College 

Elizabeth (Betsy) Prior Denis, 92, died on 

Dec. 7, 2002, at Bryn Mawr Hospital. She 

was born on Sept. 6, 1910, in Hartford, 

Conn. She was a graduate of Emma Willard 

School, Troy, N.Y., a member of the Class of 

1932 at Wellesley College, and a graduate 

of the Yale School of Music. She was married 

to Reid Marsh Denis who preceded her 

in death in 1996. Mr. Denis was a Littauer 

Fellow with a master’s degree in public 

administration from Harvard University. 

During WWII, he served in the Secret Intelligence 

Division of the Office of Strategic 

Service. Thereafter, he worked for the Central 

Intelligence Agency and at various times 

served in Germany and Japan. Betsy accompanied 

him on these assignments.For over 

40 years, the Denises resided in Great Falls, 

Va., at their beloved home known as Thistle 

Hill. For many years, Betsy supported 

and volunteered at The National Cathedral, 

Washington, D.C. Among numerous gifts 

to the Cathedral, she helped finance the 

rebuilding of the Chapel organ in the College 

of Preachers and donated the hand 

blown, clear glass, leaded inner window 

designed by the noted artist, Robert Pinart. 

The window is located in the northwest 

Tower. She also served as the volunteer in 

charge of the Visitors Center until 1989 

when she and her husband moved to The 

Quadrangle, a retirement community in 

Haverford. Music played a central theme in 

her life. She was a skilled violinist and 

pianist and at one time worked in the music 

Elizabeth Prior Denis 

department at The Library of Congress. 

While living in Great Falls, she played in 

the McLean Chamber Music Group and 

sang in a local choir. She continued her keen 

interest in music at the Quadrangle and 

Haverford College where she loved to attend 

concerts. A Steinway grand piano, which 

she recently gave to Haverford College’s 

music department, is currently being used 

by students and faculty for private lessons 

and master classes. She and her husband 

collected works of art. Though not professional 

collectors, they had a keen eye and 

sense of refinement. While traveling abroad 

they acquired paintings by Otto Mueller 

(German, 1874-1930), etchings by Emil 

Nolde (German, 1867-1956) and Marc Chagall 

(Russian/French, 1887-1985), lithographs 

by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881- 

1973) as well as many calligraphy panels 

and Japanese painted scrolls. After her husband’s 

death in 1996, she gave many of these 

items to Haverford College, the Harvard 

University Art Museum, the Philadelphia 

Museum of Art, and the Davis Museum and 

Cultural Center at Wellesley College. Both 

Betsy and her husband loved gardening. For 

over 40 years, they planted and nurtured 

flowers, shrubs, and trees on their 12-acre 

wooded property, Thistle Hill. Before selling 

the property in 1991, the Denises 

arranged for the transplantation of over 30 

specimen shrubs and trees, at their own 

expense, to the gardens and grounds of The 

National Cathedral. Betsy’s love of green 

and growing things, as well as her sense of 

stewardship for the environment, was 

reflected in her generous support of The 

Nature Conservancy in Virginia and Pennsylvania. 

She was a member of Haverford 

College’s Arboretum Association since 1991 

and during the last year initiated the planning 

of a new Japanese Garden at the College. 

Betsy is survived by her son-in-law, 

Gary Wayne Orendorf, and two granddaughters, 

Jennifer Megan Orendorf and 

Lauren Elizabeth Orendorf of Brooksville, 

Fla., as well as a nephew, Allen Wilcox Prior, 

Jr., of Fairfield, Conn., and a niece, Ann 

Prior Wickham, of Tucson, Ariz. She was 

predeceased by her brother, Allen W. Prior, 

and her daughter, Debbie Orendorf. Betsy’s 

family and many friends at Haverford College 

will always cherish her graciousness, 

gentle spirit, generosity, and love of life. 

Mary E. Dunbar, wife of Francis E. “Dixie” 

Dunbar, and mother of Ceil Dunbar-Oertel, 

died on Jan 30, 2002. Mary worked in the 

library and her husband at the physical 

plant during the ’70s and ’80s. Her daughter, 

Ceil, is currently the assistant to the 

director of non-academic scheduling. 

Aden Daniel Eyster died on Nov. 10, 2002. 

He was a senior control systems designer 

for ISTECH Inc. in New York, for 15 years. 

He attended Haverford in the late 1950s 

and was a 1966 graduate of Franklin & 

Marshall College. He is survived by his 

wife, Lucy Romig Eyster, and a brother, 

James. 

Laura Hogenauer Hallett died on May 5, 

2002. Mrs. Hallett was the widow of Nelson 

Hogenauer ’28, widow of George Hallett 

’15, sister-in-law of Eugene Hogenauer 

’34, Edward Hogenauer ’29, Howard 

Hogenauer ’24, and aunt of Irwin 

Hogenauer ’33, David Hogenauer ’55, 

Daniel Hogenauer ’64 and Daniel 

Hogenauer, II ’93. 

Mark Lipman ’81 writes, “I was enormously 

saddened to learn of Albert Dillon’s 

death. I have struggled to find words 

worthy of this fine man. I first met Al on 

the first or second day of my senior year 

at Haverford in the fall of 1980. I was 

returning to the tennis team after a twoyear 

absence and Al was beginning his 

coaching career at Haverford College. I had 

already heard a bit about Al. My teammate 

Richie Marks ’81, who was from the 

Philadelphia area, said Al was a good guy 

and a good player. Dana Swan, then athletic 

director, who hired Al, said he had an 

interesting background: in addition to his 

tennis qualifications, Al had spent time in 

Mexico teaching children. At any rate, I 

walked into Al’s office and introduced 

myself. I remember thinking that he looked 

much younger than I, and that he had a 

pretty good handshake. I had a great experience 

on the team that year. To a large 

extent, it was because of Al. Put simply, Al 

was just a great guy. He loved tennis and 

people and his passion for both was infectious. 

When I think back over 20 years to 

my days on the tennis team senior year, 

my most vivid recollections are not of 

matches, won or lost, or even of my interactions 

with my fellow teammates. My 

Winter2003 57

Friends of the College 

most vivid recollections are of Al: playing 

sets with him, drilling, talking (about anything 

and everything), and visualizing his 

smile and laugh. Al had this wonderful 

quality about him-he was very optimistic 

and positive about people and life without 

being naïve. Al’s style as a coach, like his 

personal demeanor, was not overbearing. 

When it came to giving advice, he picked 

his spots. If you paid attention, however, 

or played him, you realized that Al was a 

true student of the game. His gentle 

reminders, custom tailored to my own 

game, still resonate (“Don’t get too predictable 

on your first serve; come to the 

net a bit more”). Al was a great teacher, 

and taught by example. At a time in my 

life when tennis had stopped being fun, 

Al, because of his boundless enthusiasm 

and passion for the game, reminded me 

what a wonderful game it was. No one 

who competed against Al failed to notice 

how much he enjoyed winning. After playing 

Al, win or lose, when he shook your 

hand, looked you in the eye, and said, 

“good match”, you knew he meant it. By 

being a good sport, Al taught good sportsmanship. 

A black man in the white world 

of college tennis, Al must have had some 

negative experiences, but he never manifested 

any bitterness. Al appeared to have 

no rough edges. If he had a mean bone in 

his body, I never saw it. He liked most people, 

was nice to just about everybody, and 

just about everybody liked him back. Tennis 

now just seems like a game with a racquet 

and a ball. But in college, it seemed 

more important. A good coach could make 

a difference, and Al was and did. He sure 

made a difference in my life, and I regret 

not telling him so. I assumed I had plenty 

of time.” 

Edgar Smith “Ted” Rose, Jr., died on Nov. 

5, 2002. Rose joined the faculty of Haverford 

College in 1956. He taught in the English 

department for 26 years, retiring as 

departmental chairman and the Francis B. 

Gummere Professor of English Literature 

in 1982. He previously taught humanities 

at the University of Chicago for 11 years 

and lectured on music and literature and 

collaborated on An Introduction to the 

Arts, published by the University of Chicago 

Press. Rose graduated summa cum 

laude from Franklin & Marshall College. 

He taught piano privately and performed 

concerts locally for two years before attending 

Princeton University, where he earned 

a master’s degree in English literature and 

his doctoral degree in 1955. When he 

retired to Lancaster County, he again 

played the piano and gave concerts. He is 

survived by his wife, Jeanne E. Thomas 

Rose, and two daughters. 

Daniel Matthew Stone passed away on 

Sept. 13, 2002, at the age of 59. He received 

a B.A. in social science from Saint Paul’s 

College and was the first African American 

to be awarded the National Woodrow 

Wilson Fellowship Award. This allowed 

him to study at Haverford College for one 

year before he transferred to Bryn Mawr 

School of Social Work and Social Research 

where he graduated from in 1966 with a 

master’s degree in social services. Daniel 

began his work at the Thomas Jefferson 

Hospital as a clinical social worker in the 

Community Mental Health Department 

and 1970 he became director of Community 

Education for the Northeast Community 

Mental Health Center. A year later, 

he became mid-Atlantic representative for 

the National Council on Aging. From there 

he began his work with the City of 

Philadelphia and from 1980 to 1988 he 

was appointed director of Adult Services 

Division, deputy commissioner of Human 

Services, and deputy managing director of 

the City of Philadelphia. 

In 1989, he moved to Virginia Beach, Va., 

to accept a position as the director of Social 

Services for the city. There he worked on 

numerous projects including, Neighborto-Neighbor 

Mentorship and Mothers in 

Transition, to make his welfare reform a 

success. He also was a member of Omega 

Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated and he was 

awarded an honorary doctorate of humane 

letters from Hope Bible College and Seminary. 

Daniel’s faith in the Lord guided his 

work, giving him the sincerity, compassion 

and strength to spend his entire life 

both professionally and personally serving 

others and making significant contributions 

in the field of human services and 

human relations. He is survived by his wife 

Charity Louise Hodge, two daughters, 

Tasha Nikole Stone Gaodette and Kary 

Allen Stone and one granddaughter. 

Alla Tomashevsky Wright passed away on 

Oct. 9, 2002. She was the wife of the late 

Willard Moore Wright, Jr. ’34. 


Haverford College 

Jamie Columbus & Bruce Segal © 2003. 

Skating House at 

the Duck Pond 

R EFLECTIONS A MONG F RIENDS 

Reunion 

May 30 - June 1, 2003

Moved to Speak by Dave Barry ’69 

My Newspaper Career 

I got into newspapering because I was an 

English major. This meant I had experience 

writing long, authoritative-sounding essays 

without any knowledge of my topic, which 

is of course the essence of journalism. 

I wrote my first real newspaper stories 

for the Haverford News, although perhaps 

“real” is not the correct adjective for these 

stories. The way I wrote them was, first, I 

would get an assignment from the editor, 

Dennis Stern. For example, in 1968, Dennis 

assigned me to do a feature on the opening 

of the Ardmore office of Richard Nixon’s 

presidential campaign. I accepted this 

assignment, fully intending to go to 

Ardmore, in person, and interview real 

humans. But what with one thing and 

another, I never made it to Ardmore, which, 

I should point out in my defense, is located 

several hundred yards from the Haverford 

campus, and even farther in cold weather. 

So when the deadline arrived, I would 

sit in my dorm room and pound out a story 

based loosely on my concept of what I 

might have found if I had done actual 

research. I would turn this in to Dennis, 

who would sigh and print it as a humor 

column. Dennis later got a job with the 

New York Times, although I am not saying 

I should get ALL the credit. 

I myself did not wind up at the New York 

Times. I wound up at a competing newspaper, 

the Daily Local News of West Chester, Pa. 

As its name suggests, the Daily Local News 

covered local news and came out daily, unless 

you counted Sunday as a day. 

The Daily Local News was stricter than 

the Haverford News about making you 

physically do your assignments. Thus I 

spent many hours sitting through municipal 

meetings wherein local officials would 

discuss issues such as sewage, zoning, 

street signs, sewage, budgets, storm drains, 

and of course sewage—the issues that, 

although not glamorous, are the “meat and 

potatoes” of local journalizzzzzzzzzz 

Sorry. I nodded off there, as I often did 

in the meetings I covered. But this did not 

prevent me from writing massive, fact-filled 

stories that ran in the Daily Local News, 

usually under real “grabber” headlines like: 

BOARD AIRS SEWAGE PLAN. Eventually 


it began to dawn on me that nobody was 

reading these stories. For all anyone cared, 

I could have inserted sex scenes (“Municipal 

Wastewater Treatment Facility Supervisor 

Brett Barton moaned as the voluptuous yet 

buxom female County Commissioner 

Renee LaSpume gently traced her fingers 

over his huge, massive, throbbing, 

LiftMaster 3000 pump, with the fully integrated 

non-return valve”). 

This experience taught me the First 

Realistic Rule of Journalism, which is: 

1. THE FACT THAT JOURNALISTS 

CONSIDER A STORY IMPORTANT 

DOES NOT MEAN THE READERS WILL. 

A good example is the ongoing crisis in 

the Middle East, which everyone in journalism 

agrees is very important, and thus is 

often the subject of front-page stories, which 

the vast majority of readers skip over on 

their way to sports, the crossword, the part 

where they tell you who Jennifer Lopez is 

currently married to, etc. A newspaper could 

identify Jerusalem as the capital of Illinois, 

and few, if any, readers would notice. But if, 

God forbid, the same newspaper were to 

accidentally omit the horoscope, the phones 

would erupt in a fury of calls from outraged 

Capricorns, Libras, Neptunes, etc. 

Speaking of mistakes: Another thing 

I’ve learned from my years in the newspaper 

business is that virtually all stories contain 

errors. This is because of the Second 

Realistic Rule of Journalism, which is: 

2. REPORTERS NEVER REALLY 

HEAR WHAT A SOURCE IS SAYING, 

BECAUSE THEY’RE FRANTICALLY 

TRYING TO WRITE DOWN WHAT 

THE SOURCE JUST SAID. 

The simple fact is, most people talk 

much faster than most journalists can write; 

also, most journalists have terrible penmanship. 

So we have a lot of trouble getting 

quotations right. Historians now believe 

that the newspapermen at Gettysburg seriously 

misrepresented President Lincoln’s 

address, which – according to Lincoln’s own 

recently discovered diary—was about the 

importance of dental hygiene. 

In theory, when reporters make mistakes, 

they are corrected by editors. But in 

real life, this often does not happen, 

because of the Third Realistic Rule of 

Journalism, which is: 

3. EDITORS AND REPORTERS ARE 

BITTER ENEMIES WHO DO NOT 

WORK WELL TOGETHER. 

Editors hate reporters because reporters 

sometimes get to leave the newspaper building; 

whereas editors have to sit front of 

computers all day and eat cafeteria food 

often containing hairs that did not originate 

on the editors. The editors get even with 

the reporters by ordering them to perform 

impossible feats of journalism. Like, an editor 

will notice that it’s Hitler’s birthday, and 

order a reporter to get a quote from Hitler’s 

mother. And the reporter, after making a 

few phone calls, will inform the editor that 

Hitler’s mother is dead. And the editor will 

heave a weary sigh, indicating that this is, 

in the editor’s opinion, a very weak excuse, 

and then order the reporter to find some 

experts (editors believe in experts) to find 

out what Hitler’s mother might have said, 

if she were still alive. And the reporter, bitter 

and resentful, will get some college professor, 

somewhere, to say something (professors 

will talk about anything) regarding 

Hitler’s mother, and of course whatever it 

is will be quoted incorrectly in the paper. 

Don’t misunderstand me: I love the newspaper 

business. It has enabled me to go for 

decades without a real job. For the last 20 

years I’ve been at the Miami Herald, which 

covers one of the weirdest regions in the 

galaxy. The Herald is actually a fine paper, 

although it really doesn’t matter if we report 

the news of South Florida accurately or not, 

because nobody will believe it anyway. 

Of course, I don’t have to worry about 

accuracy, because years ago I stopped pretending 

to be a real journalist. Now I 

openly make everything up, as I learned 

to do many years ago, at Haverford. So 

don’t try to tell ME that a liberal-arts 

degree has no value. 

Submissions for Moved to Speak can be sent to Editor, Haverford Alumni Magazine, 

370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041 or via e-mail to Steve Heacock at sheacock@haverford.edu

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