Class Notes - September 8, 1999
Class notes features
Charles P. "Pete" Conrad '53, the third man to walk on the
Moon, died July 8 from internal bleeding several hours after a motorcycle
accident in California. Conrad, shown posing in front of lunar-excursion
equipment, studied aeronautical engineering at Princeton. After joining
the Navy in 1953, he became an astronaut in 1962. His feats included circling
the Earth for eight days in 1965 on Gemini 5; reaching an altitude record
on Gemini 11; spending seven hours and 45 minutes on the Moon's surface
with Alan L. Bean for the Apollo 12 mission, which he led in 1969; and setting
a record 28 days in space as commander of Skylab 2, the first manned space
station.
The joy of giving back
Martin Dale '53 helps students' dreams to flower
Winston Churchill once said, "We make a living by what we get;
we make a life by what we give." Martin A. Dale '53 is a prime example
of what he meant.
Dale, a resident of Incline Village, Nevada, and Longboat Key, Florida,
has endowed programs that allow Princeton students and recent graduates
to spend a summer or a year pursuing projects close to their hearts. In
place since 1992, the summer awards provide students entering their junior
year with $3,000. This summer, 10 took advantage of the grants, for example,
to master traditional sewing and quilting, produce a gospel CD, and teach
English in Egypt.
"My original idea," says Dale, "was that the summer awards
would enable students to probe some talent or vocation besides what they
were pursuing academically, which may have been suggested by a parent or
mentor, to give them a chance to find within themselves some other interests."
In addition to endowing the summer awards, Dale planned to leave money
in his will to create a postgraduate fellowship program. But he so enjoyed
"having a fingerprint on the lives of these totally extraordinary people"
that he decided to initiate the program "while I was still alive."
Established in 1997, the $20,000 annual fellowships have underwritten
three projects. Cyrus Etemad '97 used his grant to document in text and
photographs abandoned military sites for a possible book and exhibition.
Mora Stephens '98 used hers to turn a short story she wrote about a homeless
girl into a film.
This year's winner, Chinese national Fei Fei Li '99, is traveling to
Tibet to study the relationship between western health care and traditional
folk medicine.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Dale attended Princeton on a William H. Cane
Scholarship, earned a master's at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
and served as the U.S. diplomatic representative to nearby Monaco.
Now 67 and semiretired (he's a consultant for several multinational corporations),
he enjoys giving his money away. As for his second wife, Lee, and his four
children, two of whom (Charles '78 and Gregory '81) attended Princeton,
"It's not my philosophy to leave them significant sums even if I had
it. The expectation of a large inheritance has destroyed a lot of people-I
was truly advantaged having to make my own way."
He believes that people should do as he does, tithe. "You don't
have to be wealthy, or have lots of spare cash, or give money for a building
or an endowed professorship to make the gesture of giving back. These awards
I give are the major accomplishment of my life. Nothing touches me as truly
significant other than the influence, small as it may be, I will have had
on so many young people. I just do my little pollinating and know that the
flowers are blooming."
-Leslie Aldridge Westoff
Psychological autopsy
Forensic psychiatrist Harold Bursztajn '72 acknowledges ambiguity
in lawsuits
Two malpractice suits involving informed consent show how forensic psychiatrist
Harold Bursztajn '72, M.D., evaluates complex situations. In one, Meador
v. Stahler and Gheridian, Bursztajn testified in favor of a woman who had
a Caesarean-section procedure against her wishes, followed by serious complications.
She had signed a consent form, but Bursztajn, associate clinical professor
in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, argued that her
doctors in fact did not get her informed consent. A jury awarded her $1.5
million. In another case, Drewry v. Harwell, he testified in favor of a
doctor who performed what a patient came to consider an unwanted hysterectomy
and abortion after she had given informed consent. In this episode, a "psychological
autopsy" of the decisions made by the patient and doctor convinced
Bursztajn that the doctor had acted properly. A jury agreed unanimously.
Two cases, similar issues, but Bursztajn followed the facts and context
in different directions. In the first case he supported a patient's right
to make health-care choices, while in the second he protected a doctor's
ability to make choices given a patient's consent.
"If we don't have informed consent both as a clinical practice standard
and a potential defense, we don't have a respect for persons that's necessary
for medical practice," he explains. Evidence, rather than ideology,
guides him in these and other aspects of his work; sometimes he is retained
by the plaintiff, sometimes by the defense.
Bursztajn describes his work as "not helping people win but achieving
a just resolution by my ability to be both effective and ethical at the
same time. My job is to go beyond the adversarial relationship and try to
understand a case deeply enough so that ambiguity can be acknowledged and
people can reach a settlement." A vast majority of cases on which he
consults are settled before going to trial. (Bursztajn's Website, www.forensic-psych.com,
defines a forensic psychiatrist as "a physician who integrates clinical
experience, knowledge of medicine, mental health, and the neurosciences
to form an independent, objective opinion.")
At a December speech at Harvard before 300 doctors, Bursztajn urged the
audience to maintain "mutual respect" with patients even under
trying circumstances, and guard against unconscious "abandonment"
of patients by not returning their phone calls or being late for appointments,
for example. Besides respect, justice is another concept that Bursztajn
often mentions. He credits his "love of freedom and justice" to
his parents, Polish Jews who were surviving members of the Resistance in
the Lodz ghetto. Twice, he recalls, ghetto doctors saved his father's life,
and their actions strongly influenced Bursztajn's career choices and perspective.
The family moved from Poland to New Jersey in 1959. At Princeton Bursztajn
was a University Scholar and wrote his thesis on Wittgenstein and Husserl.
He attended Harvard Medical School, and now serves as codirector of the
Program in Psychiatry and the Law at the Harvard Medical School Department
at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Bursztajn maintains a private
practice in Cambridge as a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and primary care
physician. His wife, Patricia Illingworth, J.D., is a professor of ethics
at Northeastern University and they have an eight-year-old daughter, Zoe,
whom he describes as "both a wonderful joy and a teacher."
-Van Wallach '80
From Apples to Zen
Jane Hirshfield '73 talks about her poetry with Bill Moyers on a
PBS special
The Poet
She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb's
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not, she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair-
Let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.
-Jane Hirschfield
As a senior at Princeton, Jane Hirshfield '73 won a student poetry competition
sponsored by The Nation and, as her prize, had one of her poems published
in the magazine. She might have tried to cash in on the honor by applying
quickly for the graduate school fellowships that could have launched a full-time
teaching career.
Instead, Hirshfield spent the next year working as a laborer on a farm
in Rocky Hill, New Jersey, driving a tractor and harvesting apples, peaches,
and pumpkins. Not exactly the expected path for an academic star who finished
Princeton in three years.
Hirshfield has no regrets about her year of getting dirty. She loved
forging what she calls the "connection to the earth" that eluded
her during her childhood in Lower Manhattan. Establishing that link gave
her something in common with the generations of lyric poets for whom land
has served as an eloquent muse-most notably, in recent years, the Nobel
laureate Seamus Heaney.
Over the past several decades, Hirshfield has taken other professional
gambles. She spent eight years as a full-time student of Zen Buddhism and,
perhaps most daringly, avoided the tenure-track teaching career that has
become the primary means by which serious American poets support themselves.
All those risks have paid off for Hirshfield, a resident of Mill Valley,
California. At 46, she has written an essay collection and four books of
poetry that include The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997) and Alaya
(The Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series, 1982). She has also edited
Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women
(HarperCollins, 1994), an anthology that has sold more than 35,000 copies,
remarkable for a book of poetry in the 1990s. And she deserves part of the
credit for two of the best-selling books on spirituality of the 1990s, Thomas
Moore's The Care of the Soul and Soul Mates, which she worked on as a free-lance
(or, as she prefers, "outside") editor.
This month Hirshfield collects another honor. She joins two dozen poets
(including Galway Kinnell '48 and Paul Muldoon, director of the Creative
Writing Program at the university) who will read from and talk about their
work on "Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers," which airs Sunday,
Sept. 26, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on PBS. At an undetermined date later this
year Moyers will host a series of nine half-hour programs that will include
other conversations with some of the poets, all filmed at the Geraldine
R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey.
Poets often shy away from such appearances on television, viewing them
as a distraction from their work. But Hirshfield speaks enthusiastically
about "Fooling with Words," which she hopes will draw people back
to lyric poetry and its great themes of love, loss, and transience.
"Lyric poetry records our fidelity to the life of this earth,"
she says, "even as we know that it will inevitably be lost."
-Janice Harayda
Renovating an inner city
John Hatch '84 cares about Trenton's future
When John Hatch '84 was an undergraduate majoring in architecture at
Princeton, he saw no reason to go to New Jersey's capital, despite its proximity.
Today he is a leader in the restoration of one of Trenton's historic neighborhoods
and in the city's redevelopment through promotion of the arts.
Not long after completing his master's in architecture at the University
of Virginia, Hatch found the combination of work he sought-"preservation,
work in cities, and good design"-in the Trenton architecture firm Clarke
Caton Hintz. Now a senior associate with the firm, he has worked on projects
as varied as the city's minor league baseball park and the redevelopment
of the defunct Roebling steel factory complex.
When he first looked for housing in Trenton in 1988, Hatch, who grew
up in Brooklyn, admits that "at first, all I could see were the negatives."
His second impression was far more positive: he found neighborhoods such
as the Mill Hill Historic District, right in the shadow of the Mercer County
courthouse and state government buildings. Several spurts of restoration
efforts in the previous two decades had made a start, but by the late 1980s
momentum in Mill Hill had flagged.
After living in an apartment in Mill Hill, Hatch and fellow architect
David Henderson decided to buy a rundown century-old rowhouse in the neighborhood
and restore it themselves. Their victories over collapsing walls and caved-in
ceilings cemented their commitment to Mill Hill.
In 1995, when the city announced plans to raze a dilapidated Mill
Hill rowhouse on which it had foreclosed, Hatch, Henderson, and Mike and
Debbie Raab, also Mill Hill residents, foreseeing an unattractive gap as
well as a dangerous precedent, incorporated as Atlantis Historic Properties
and persuaded the city to sell them that property and three others. Hatch
and his partners restored and sold all four properties, and they continue
to work the same magic on other dilapidated houses.
Hatch's latest project, Trenton Makes, is a partnership with Henderson
and yet another Mill Hill neighbor, Roland Pott. This second development
company is renovating several historic buildings in downtown Trenton to
create an arts center complex incorporating a cafe, bookstore, performance
space, galleries, and offices. The first phase of the project, the Urban
Word Cafe, opened six months ago.
Hatch sees these two projects in Trenton as "a small thing in the
overall picture" of the city but emphasizes that "part of our
purpose is to let people know about Trenton. One of the problems with cities,
I think," he says, "is that too often people look at them as places
to get something out of."
-A. Melissa Kiser '75
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