Class Notes - May 19, 1999
Class notes features
Rob Carlisle '44 commemorates an uncle
in poetry
A year ago, Rob Carlisle '44 wrote a poem about his uncle, Robert Granger
Benson '15, who enlisted in the Army during World War I and was killed near
Bordeaux when he was run over by a truck. Before writing the poem, part
of which is excerpted below, Carlisle gleaned information about his uncle
from several relatives, including his cousins David Benson '37 and David
Ackerman '47. In recent years, Carlisle has published four long narrative
poems, of which the most recent is "Eye of the Glider: Shadow on Cape
Cod," which, according to Carlisle, deals "with the alarming risks
to the Cape's environment posed by unbridled development." The New
York Times ran an excerpt of "The Uncle I Never Knew" last
November. The town of Passaic, New Jersey, where Benson lived, has a fountain
dedicated to his memory which was given by Carlisle's grandmother.
The Uncle I Never Knew
I never knew you, Uncle --
you had come and gone (at only
26) before I came to be..
But memories murmured through
descending decades...
They called you "Benny," Uncle,
at the Hill School and at Princeton,
where you wore your temper with your
pads for football..As a student, tackling
academics never pumped your pulse, and
when the Class of '15 graduated,
you sat on the sidelines, after
tripping over several finals..Suiting
up for one more term, you had another
tryout, and they let you join the team...
And then your father had a job for
you at his Bayonne refinery -- you
grubbed along the bottom in the pressure
still plant, at the crude stills, in
the laboratory
· · ·
The war turned out to be the
making of you, Uncle..
Brother Byron had a family, and
could not answer Mr. Wilson's call to
serve the nation in the war that had to
end them all..You heard the trumpet,
you enlisted..That was in November
1917. Louise was pregnant..
Private first class was your grade, a
stevedore battalion your assignment,
and you sailed for France on Christmas
Day aboard a ship of solitary
strangers studying the
sullen sea...
Along the peaceful Gironde River,
on the war-choked docks of Bordeaux,
you the football guard stretch every
muscle on the raw pine crates and
cosmolined equipment..Not one German
shell will shatter here, but every hour
breeds emergencies..The sweat work never
sleeps, and orders fly: dig deep in
freighters' holds to haul out
instruments of death...
· · ·
October 18, Uncle: there is talk of
peace talks, but the Meuse-Argonne offensive
grinds along, and in the depots, at the
docks, no soldier gets away with
sloth..Fatigue is captain..Days blur
into nights and yet another day, and
you the Master Engineer are bleeding
energy..The C.O. knows a tourniquet is
needed..So they write you up a pass to
leave the post for R & R at
Aix-les-Bains...
Through night shroud, through the tumbling
clouds of mist, near home at last, you
walk the country road alone..A ride would
make the journey toward reality more
sociable and quicker..Trucks, like lumbering
circus elephants, loom up and pound on by..They
cannot see the black shape at the roadside..
But, the once-and-always athlete, you leap
high to reach a running board..You slip..You
fall..A mammoth rear wheel rolls across you..
Screams that even truck roar cannot
bury..Now the spark, so bright these months,
is gone...
Then they buried you among the U.S.
dead, across the Gironde from Bordeaux, in
Carbon Blanc, a short walk out of city's
clamor into silence..Afterward, the base's
gears spun 'round again, but sorrow could not
sleep..The leaves of Fall were brown and
dry..The wheel had turned
once more...
"The Uncle I Never Knew: Robert Granger Benson 1892-1918"
is available from Rob Carlisle, Box 316, Chatham, MA 02633.
Same time next year
In praise of off-year Reunions
My 25th-reunion blazer is draped over the back of a chair in the library.
The black-banded Panama sits on a table nearby, its brim being reflattened
after the depredations of Saturday's 95-degree P-rade. I don't want to put
them away just yet, for truth be told, I'm feeling a bit flattened myself.
Not depressed, but a little bit down.
It's a feeling that began the moment my wife, Emily, and I headed out
of town after the walk back from Pardee Field. Twenty-five minutes later
we pulled into our driveway. If there hadn't been deadlines to meet, we
would have stayed longer. But I know I would have felt the same letdown
regardless of when we departed. What I didn't know was that I would feel
this way at the end of my 26th reunion, an "off-year" if there
ever was one.
The 25th is the Big One. It is a life event comparable to being admitted
to Princeton. In both cases, thick packets of information and instructions
are mailed out, while not insubstantial checks are mailed in. (The 25th
was worth every penny, but we still refer to my jacket as the "thousand-dollar
blazer.")
I had stopped attending Reunions after the fifth. Talking with fellow
20-somethings was not of great interest, particularly when the conversations
were informed by an undercurrent of that old undergraduate competitiveness.
I'm sure people were more interesting in their 30s, but by then I was out
of the Reunions habit.
But the 25th changed how I felt. At first we weren't going to go. Fortunately,
common sense prevailed, and we sent in the money and signed up. It was a
wonderful experience. In fact, it was more than that. Like enrolling in
Princeton as a freshman, it was in every sense a new beginning.
That's the point I want to make here. Men and women who are 47 years
old are much more interesting than those who are 27 or even 37. They tend
to know who they are, what they're good at, what they have achieved, and
what they have no desire to attempt. The competitiveness rooted in the insecurity
of youth has mellowed with age. And they have a lot more stories to tell
than their younger selves ever did.
When the information came about the 26th, Emily and I didn't hesitate.
The Class of '72 dinner? Never been to one, but why not? Same with the other
events. The cost was small, we didn't have to travel, and we already had
the outfits.
You can't really compare the 25th and the 26th, though having a blazer
and a hat does tend to put you on a different plane than those who have
yet to celebrate their own quarter century. For example, I usually try to
smile at strangers in general, but I found that such expressions were even
more warmly received by those in other classes who also sported blazers.
It's almost like being part of a club within a club -- a club of elders
whose members look on benignly as the youngsters progress.
Once you are admitted, you always belong at Princeton. But once you've
had your 25th -- which is to say, once you have returned and received your
"new clothes" as Chaucer professor D.W. Robertson used to say,
you really are different.
Is a post-25th off-year reunion any more fun than those of the quinquennial
variety? I don't know. I've only got a sample of one to go by. But I will
say that in the more relaxed atmosphere of the 26th, I made an important
discovery: I realized that I don't know even half my classmates. That may
be completely unremarkable. But I'd never thought about it before.
At the 25th I was too busy trying to make sure I got to see the classmates
I already knew. But at the 26th, in addition to the pleasure of getting
updates from old friends, there was plenty of time to get to know whoever
happened to return. And their spouses. And their kids.
People in general are interesting. But Princetonians tend to be more
interesting than most -- as are the spouses they attract and the kids they
bear. I know that whenever Emily and I encounter a particularly unprepossessing
grad of any year and wonder what the Admissions Office could have been thinking,
we remind ourselves that "there's always a reason." As we have
discovered time and again, the person's special light may be hidden deep
beneath the proverbial bushel, but there's a flame in there someplace.
Of the 872 members in the Class of '72, 335 returned for the 10th, 270
for the 15th, 271 for the 20th, and 425 for the 25th. As is predictable,
far fewer returned in the off-years. This means that there are hundreds
of men and women who don't know what they're missing. They've either never
been back or, like me, formed a youthful impression of what Reunions were
all about that is hugely out of date.
It also means Emily and I have years of satisfying human interactions
to look forward to. As I scan my class roster, I feel as though I have a
shelf of fascinating books I can look forward to reading in the coming years.
Of course, even those of us who live nearby can't come back every year.
But I'd like to suggest to my classmates and others that whenever possible
you arrange any East Coast business or personal affairs in such a way that
you're within easy striking distance of Princeton during Reunions. You'll
find it an unexpectedly enjoyable experience. And if it's an off-year, so
much the better!
-- Alfred Glossbrenner '72
Alfred Glossbrenner is the author of over 50 books, including
The Art of Hitting .300 (with Charley Lau) and the forthcoming
About the Author: 125 Delicious Profiles of the Best-loved, Most-read Novelists
of All Time.
Call of the wild
For Rick Curtis '79, Outdoor Action is what life's about
Ask Rick Curtis '79, since 1981 director of Princeton's acclaimed Outdoor
Action Program, about his first backcountry experience and he'll tell you
he hated it. "When I was 16, my brother Ben ['76] took me backpacking
in the Adirondacks. It rained for four days, and I was sick the whole time."
That may have been an inauspicious beginning to a career spent in outdoor
education, but it was a beginning nonetheless. "When I got to Princeton
in the fall of 1975," says Curtis, "Ben, who was a senior, was
involved in the one-year-old Outdoor Action program. I met lots of OA leaders,
and they were the most interesting and engaging individuals I had met at
Princeton." He did not go on his freshman trip, but after that, he
says, he went on every single OA trip he could. "I was an OA junkie."
He became an OA leader during freshman year, and spent the following summer
honing his outdoor skills in the Oregon Cascades with the Pacific Crest
Outward Bound program.
Since then, he has led wilderness trips and given instruction in backpacking,
whitewater canoeing and kayaking, sea kayaking, winter camping, cross-country
and Telemark skiing, and rock climbing, as well as developed and led workshops
in experiential education, safety management, wilderness medicine, and first
aid. All this in the course of taking Outdoor Action from an original 100
participants to the immensely popular program of today, which yearly offers
about 200 trips, lectures, workshops, and other activities to more than
3,000 undergraduate participants and 450 trained student leaders.
The Frosh Trip, which drew 115 participants in 1974, now attracts more
than 600 students -- over 51 percent of the entering class. And the trip
is actually many trips. This year, for example, says Curtis, "We had
67 different trips with eight to 10 freshmen and two or three upperclass
leaders on each trip. We went all over the mid-Atlantic. There were five
trips in Shenandoah National Park, four in Maryland, eight in the Delaware
Water Gap in New Jersey, and 12 in the Catskills."
The OA program, now celebrating its 25th birthday, originated as the
Frosh Trip program, says Curtis, "to help people adjust to being at
Princeton, to ease the transition into college, and to help students make
new friends." It continues to offer students, he says, "an opportunity
for personal growth," because being in the outdoors is "a very
immediate experience. You are concerned about staying dry, being warm, getting
fed, hiking to your next campsite. You have very immediate goals, and everyone
has to work together to accomplish these goals."
In addition, he says, "OA opens windows to see inside yourself.
Whether you are camping, on the high-ropes course, rock climbing -- you
must deal with personal and group challenges, but you have the support of
the other members of the group and the OA leaders." It is important,
Curtis believes, "to reflect on your outdoor experience and find ways
to make connections to the rest of your life."
As an undergraduate psychology major, Curtis was planning to go to graduate
school and become a clinical psychologist. "All through high school
I had done volunteer work in hospitals," he says. "But I didn't
want to go to medical school. I wanted to work with people at a more social
and emotional level." In a journal he kept during senior year, he noted,
"If I could do anything, what would it be? Being director of OA would
be really cool, but that will never happen."
Never say never. After graduation, Curtis was in Seattle, working in
an intensive-care unit, training to be an EMT, and kayaking the whitewater
of the Skykomish River (kayaking is his "passion"). He was invited
to become interim director of the OA program in 1981 and was named full-time
director in 1983. For many years a program of the Office of the Dean of
Student Life, OA in 1996 became a part of the Princeton Blairstown Center,
with which it now shares quarters in the Armory.
An outgrowth of the OA program has been Curtis's book The Backpacker's
Field Manual: A Comprehensive Guide to Mastering Backcountry Skills
(Three Rivers Press, 1998), which has sold more than 25,000 copies. The
manual is a refinement of the spiral-bound Outdoor Action Leaders Manual
-- itself a regularly expanded iteration of "about 25 pages of information
stapled together in 1987." The Amazon.com Website review calls it "invaluable
-- the most comprehensive backpacking guide available." Curtis is also
the master builder of the OA Web page, which not only includes information
on programs and trips but also links to more than 600 outdoor resources,
national and international (www.princeton.edu/~oa/).
The Friends of Outdoor Action has honored Curtis with the 1999 Josh Miner
'43 Experiential Education Award (Miner is a founding trustee of Outward
Bound) for "outstanding leadership in the fields of experiential or
outdoor education." Not bad for a kid who hated his first backpacking
trip.
-- Caroline Moseley
Creating the NFL's Website
It's a far cry from Charles Dickens
While most of her peers were taking their first tentative steps up the
corporate ladder, Ann Kirschner *78 was holed up in Firestone Library reading
Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Who could have guessed this doctor of
English literature would be known, two decades later, as the person who
shepherded the National Football League into the Internet Age? Her creation,
nfl.com, is the thirdmost visited sports site on the World Wide Web: Three
million users sample its blend of player profiles, news, video clips, and
analysis each month, while every Sunday during football season a halfmillion
people click on the site in the middle of a particular contest to get continual
updates on realtime game statistics. Want to know how many times your team's
quarterback has thrown to his favorite receiver? Nfl.com puts the answer
at your fingertips.
"We're the most popular singlesport address on the Web," notes
Kirschner. "I'm a very proud mama! Those statistical updates represent
my greatest moment in the NFL. When I went to the press box for the first
time and saw teams of statisticians punching numbers into computers, I naively
asked, 'Why can't we just enter the whole thing live onto the Internet?'
The trouble was, these statistics were never intended to be used in real
time. It took two years to work out all the kinks."
Now Kirschner faces a new Internet challenge: She was recently hired
by Columbia University to work the same Website magic she brought to pro
football. "Basically, Columbia wants to explore new ways to project
themselves into the new media," she says, "possibly including
online courses. I'd also like to make certain university entities are more
accessible to the public. Columbia's Earth Institute, for example, is a
leading source of climate information. We're now exploring ways to expand
its reach via the Internet."
The cutting edge of cyberspace is a long way from the literary landscape
of Victorian England, but Kirschner is accustomed to venturing through uncharted
territory. "I've never had a job that someone had before me -- I've
had to invent every job I've ever worked at," she says.
Often that's meant reinventing herself, as well. Following grad school,
Kirschner was lured into the business world by a Westinghouse/Group W ad
for a job writing franchise proposals in the new field of cable television.
When satellite television appeared on the horizon, Kirschner realized immediately
that it represented the "next big shift" in communication.
"Several of my cable-TV colleagues and I got together, threw our
American Express cards on the table, and started a satellite television
company," Kirschner says. "The biggest obstacles were legal --
trying to get permission to broadcast signals to various locations."
This challenge led to an additional role, as a fledgling Washington lobbyist.
Her efforts contributed to the passage of the Satellite Home Viewer Act
of 1988. "Our sweat and hearts are in that bill," she says.
After selling the business, Kirschner spent two years as a consultant,
with extra time for her family (she and her husband, neurologist Harold
Weinberg, have two daughters, Elisabeth and Caroline, and a son, Peter),
before getting the call from an old cableTV friend who was now working for
the NFL. It was time for yet another reincarnation.
"Before I started at the NFL, I'd never been to a football game
in my life -- in fact, I was pretty indifferent to spectator sports,"
she recalls. "Now I'm an enthusiast! Football has drama, it has spectacle,
and it's a live experience. There's something very interesting about sharing
in that communal energy and spirit ...it's the same reason we go to the
theater."
That love of community continues to drive Kirschner's interest in the
Internet. When her son was hospitalized recently, she helped him set up
an interactive Website at his bedside that allowed him to receive greetings
and encouragement from around the world -- then reported on the experience
in The New York Times. "Digital never felt so warm," she
wrote.
This passion doesn't necessarily mean Kirschner will be doing the cyberthing
20 years from now, though. "I'm always interested in what's new and
what's different," she says, laughing. "When I go back to speak
to groups at Princeton about combining a Ph.D. with a business career, I
tell them that my education prepared me for nothing, and for everything.
Sometimes I chuckle about the idea of running into my younger self, coming
out of the library 25 years ago, and explaining what I've ended up doing.
I think that person would have looked at me and said, 'You're crazy!'"
-- Royce Flippin '80
No walk-a-thons in Kazakhstan
Volunteerism doesn't exist in former Soviet states
The Soviet Union may have collapsed in 1991, but within its former borders
the inertia of totalitarianism continues to fuel the perception that only
dictators, not citizens, can make a difference in public affairs. This became
clear to me during the year I spent teaching in Kazakhstan as part of Princeton-in-Asia.
I spoke with many residents about their own outlook for the economy and
perceptions about citizen initiative and volunteering. This giant and remote
land deep within former Soviet Central Asia is blessed with natural-resource
wealth, namely, tens of millions of barrels of proven oil reserves. Yet
despite billions of dollars of foreign investment, the vast majority of
people in Kazakhstan remain poor and unenthusiastic about their futures.
You don't see much volunteering in Kazakhstan, and the blood drive, charity
bake sale, and walk-a-thon are unknown. It is not a country like America,
where people band together to address social ills. So why the difference?
Certainly money is an issue. With an average salary equivalent to $200
per month in Almaty, the bustling former capital, residents of Kazakhstan
have little disposable income to donate to charity. But this doesn't fully
explain the aversion to volunteering, or the giving of one's time and effort.
Clearly there is something more deeply rooted. After 70 years of communism,
citizens are used to depending on the government. When I asked a group of
Kazakh university students why the streets of Almaty were so dirty and litter-strewn,
their response was "because the government doesn't have enough garbage
trucks." The idea of organizing a group to clean up the town was inconceivable.
One Kazakh student told me that "Soviet" people were accustomed
to waiting in line for everything -- bread, pension checks, and cures for
social malaise. However, the successor regimes of the former USSR can no
longer afford to provide basic public services traditionally furnished by
Moscow, and as a result citizens now live with a crumbling and poorly maintained
infrastructure, a drastic reduction in support for the arts and culture,
and increased violent crime. Locals now turn to private industry, the new
powers-that-be, to compensate. Multinational firms have responded with money,
but this has led to a polarization in which only government and business
have power and the influence of people is notably absent.
I argued to local students that just as this passive reliance on the
all-powerful state was an acquired phenomenon, self-reliance, too, could
be learned. At the Kazakhstan State Journalism Academy, I spoke with a class
about the media as a catalyst for positive social change. The future journalists,
however, gave an uninspired forecast for their profession. "The media
is an ineffective device to make change," I was told, since the President's
family owns nearly all of the country's television and radio stations. "If
you criticize the government, they will shut you down and throw you in jail,"
another student lamented. "But they can't throw all of you in jail,"
I contested, "not all 17 million of you."
From speaking with other Almaty residents, I gathered that the years
of depending on the government had led to a new kind of complacency: one
arising from the belief that a simple economic reversal of fortune would
automatically trigger social and political solutions. "Once the oil
starts flowing," I was assured by students, taxi drivers, and vegetable
vendors, "the rest of our problems will disappear."
"But look at us," cautioned a violin teacher at the Almaty
music conservatory. "We're supposed to be a rich country with all this
oil, but what has this oil done for me?" He hadn't been paid in four
months. What has the oil done for the impoverished Kazakh countryside, where
in the town of Zhambul, residents have resorted to eating stray dogs in
order to survive? I, too, hope that one day oil brings prosperity to the
people of Kazakhstan. Until then, however, I hope they realize the potential
of another untapped, powerful resource they can use to start tackling problems
today: themselves.
-- Edgar Chen '97
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