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Sacramento State University Magazine for Fall 2009 the Front: 2 President Gonzalez: we’re dangerous | the masthead 3 the Opener: untitled photo by Samuel Morse People: 4 Rezhe Peiglaghi by Craig Koscho; photos by Sam Parsons 6 Sarah Springly jumps every day.

7 Africa: the prequel 8 They smoked pipes | Ibrahim Franks Visuals: 10 September 28, 2009: Run for the Cure by Mary Weikert 12 May 6, 2008: campus spot by Student Shooter 14 November 12, 2008: Serna Plaza by Mary Weikert Destinations: 16 Student Mary written by Robert Vance; photos by Pepjin Vandjoor 19 Mr. Sutter’s beer by the Staff; photos courtesy of Capitol Brewing Words: biography 21 Freeman Dyson: the civil heretic by by Nicholas Dawidoff with photography by Eugene Richards Special section: College of Health and Human Services 29 Update: Alumni in Government Records: 33 A super-human 20 34 the photo tells the story: Causeway Classic 36 Alumni notes 40 George Raya 42 the calendar the Back: 43 Lia Robertson: we met this student on the Quad

Sacramento State: fall’09

We’re dangerous

I

n my conversations with our friends in the Sac State community, I am often asked about how we are dealing with the current state of the economy.

I tell them that our resolve to serve our students is stronger than ever and that we have plenty of positive news coming from our campus.

That’s the kind of thing college presidents say when asked about such issues. College presidents are supposed to calm the waters and lead their communities in strong predictable growth.

But this is not the nature of growth.

The president’s message should set the tone for this particular issue of SSM and address the matrix of issues dealt with or the recurring themes appearing in this issue. If this message doesn’t closely correspond to what follows, it will create unnecessary dissonance within SSM. So, think of this space as a place to explain the TOC at a high level. The headline is a key message, and should be short and punchy - grab their interest on a page that most assume is a recurring snooze. Why? Because if this message is not engaging, what follows will match that impression, or have to fight against it. The image of the president should also match the rest of the book. Suit and tie is fine sometimes, but the president is an engaged actor on a stage that’s broad and deep. Why does he have to be presented so passively? He’s a star (pictured here as the party animal he is) that is needed as part of the communications firmament of the university. His photography should match the depth and breadth of his impact on his sphere of activity.

Growth is chaotic. It’s a lot like change, which you may have heard about recently. Thanks to the hard work of several dedicated faculty and staff members, our budget is in better shape than many would expect. In fact, the prudent fiscal decisions we made over the last year have left us with a much smaller challenge to overcome now. We continue to move forward with the construction of a brand-new residence hall, called American River Courtyard, and the student-approved Recreation and Wellness Center. Both are slated to be ready to serve students as scheduled.

Our campus also is broadening its reach in unprecedented ways. In the process, we are changing what it means to be a member of the Sacramento State community and creating a great deal of pride on campus. Our campus also is broadening its reach in unprecedented ways. In the process, we are changing what it means to be a member of the Sacramento State community and creating a great deal of pride on campus.

In January, the College of Business Administration launched the Sacramento Business Review in partnership with the CFA Institute. The new, independent analysis focuses on the earned Fulbright scholarships to work overseas. Every connection like this we make gives our students greater opportunities for cultural understanding and global learning.

This is about five hundred and fifty words give or take a few. Call it 575.

Good ideas are sticky. We are united by world-class educational opportunities and unparalleled learning experiences, by the fact that we are making a difference in local neighborhoods, walking the halls of government and succeeding on the global stage. Each of us is stuck in a life of danger, transcendent learning and teaching, constant care, and continuously revealed joy. Onward!

lexander Gonzalez A President

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Sac State Magazine: Fall ‘09 is published by the Office of University Advancement at California State University, Sacramento for alumni & friends of the University.

president Alexander Gonzalez vice president Carole Hayashino university advancement

associate vice president Gloria Moraga public affairs

director of strategic communications Ryan Chin public affairs

editorial staff executive editor John Kepley writers Brian Berger Ryan Bjork J.D. Fox Laurie Hall Perry Hartline Craig Koscho Kim Nava Christopher Neuschafer Svetlana Tsiberman Michael A. Ward graphic design Karen Booth Scott Olling Terry Veiga photography Steve McKay Sam Parsons Bob Solorio Mary Weikert cover photo Sam Parsons alumni notes Dawniela Hightower Linda Scott Printed on recycled paper; produced using a carbon neutral process.

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People

Find, evaluate, assess; award.

Reza Peigahi is recognized with Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Award

by Craig Koscho; photos by Pepjin Vandjoor

R

eza Peigahi exemplifies that librarians no longer fit the stereotype of people who sit at a desk among dusty book shelves answering questions about the Dewey Decimal System. These words hare here.

The People section is composed of a series of articles, each smaller than the proceeding story. The subjects are faculty, and friends of the university, and current students. A half-page photo of the subject in his environment, and an information graphic or graphic-bearing sidebar will represent this subject in an engaging fashion.

An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach them research skills and information literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

His instruction usually consists of one-time sessions of about an hour requested by another teacher. Much of the material is general information, covering semi-transparent catalogue

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systems and basic databases, but Peigahi also gets into specifics, explaining where information can be found for that teacher’s particular course.

Because students are now raised with access to plenty of information on the Internet, they may think they already know how to get around starship functioning computer databases, but there’s more to doing actual research than typing three words in Google, Peigahi says. “I don’t think they understand the nature of scholarship.”

Students need to be critical consumers of what they find, evaluate the information and determine the author’s expertise in the subject. This is about 900 words total in this story.

Peigahi also guides the students through Sacramento State’s own databases, where students will find some of the best sources of scholarly, verified information. And perusing the library’s data banks is convenient. “They don’t even have to walk into the building,” Peigahi says. “Probably 85 percent of what they need to do they can do from home, in their pajamas.” All it takes is the student’s SacLink account.

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for university libraries, but they need to more aggressively position themselves as teachers and information educators. Once libraries become more actively involved in the students’ development, they become more important to the university. “They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says. Because students are now raised with access to plenty of information on the Internet, they may think they already know how to get around computer databases, but there’s more to doing actual research than typing three words in Google, Peigahi says. “I don’t think they understand the nature of scholarship.”

Students need to be critical consumers of what they find, evaluate the information and determine the author’s expertise in the subject. The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education. “It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to be up on the stage with the other recipients.”

An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach them research skills and literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

Peigahi also guides the students through Sacramento State’s own databases, where students will find some of the best, in their pajamas.” All it takes is in teaching students how to find, evaluate the student’s SacLink account.

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for university libraries, but they themselves as teachers and information educators. Once libraries become more actively involved in the students’ development, they become more important to the university. “They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says.

The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries

Library, modern

Libraries are measured by particular numbers. These are interesting numbers, by definition, and they lend themselves to some sort of interesting info graphic.

Here is presented a particular type of infographic built from an arbitrary set of ideas - a wall of books, symbolizing an amount of discreet objects, a set of statements which are the headings in an infographic, followed by the important numbers in parenthesis.

This column which you’ve been reading is where these notations would be described and given their relative importance the idea noted above that being that libraries have interesting numbers associated with them. The writer will find it important to work out firsthand what the numbers are then work with the infographic artist to make a compelling item that fits exactly into the desired space.

About 140 words fit here. — John Kepley

in delivering a college education. “It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to be up on the stage with the other recipients.” An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach them research skills and literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for university libraries, but they position themselves as teachers and become more actively involved in the more important to the university. “They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says.

The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education. “It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to be up on the stage with the other recipients.”

books and publications on hand (1234567)

searchable catalogs (1234)

reference screens (38578+)

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People

Jump. Every day.

Sarah Springly has jumped every day for seven years. She has pictures to prove it.

by Craig Koscho; photo by Sarah Springly.

S

arah Springly exemplifies that librarians no longer fit the stereotype of people who sit at a desk among dusty book shelves answering questions about the Dewey Decimal System.

An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach them research skills and information literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

His instruction usually consists of onetime sessions of about an hour requested by another teacher. Much of the material is general information, covering semitransparent catalogue systems and basic databases, but Peigahi also gets into specifics, explaining where information can be found for that teacher’s particular course.

Because students are now raised with

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access to plenty of information on the Internet, they may think they already know how to get around starship functioning computer databases, but there’s more to doing actual research than typing three words in Google, Peigahi says. “I don’t think they understand the nature of scholarship.”

Students need to be critical consumers of what they find, evaluate the information and determine the author’s expertise in the subject.

Peigahi also guides the students through Sacramento State’s own databases, where students will find some of the best sources of scholarly, verified information. And perusing the library’s data banks is convenient. “They don’t even have to walk into the building,” Peigahi says. “Probably 85 percent of what they need to do they can do from home, in their pajamas.” All it takes is the student’s SacLink account.

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for

university libraries, but they need to more aggressively position themselves as teachers and information educators. Once libraries become more actively involved in the students’ development, they become more important to the university. “They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says.

State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards.

He works with students to teach them research skills and information literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

This story is about 500 words. Because students are now raised with access to plenty of information on the Internet, they may think they already know how to get around computer databases, but there’s more to doing actual research than typing three words in Google, Peigahi says. “

Africa: the postprequel Ben Jeffers, Steve Hart and Julie Sejins collide with that other continent.

by Craig Koscho; photo courtesy of Steve Hart.

P

eople, as a department, focuses on the alumni and friends of the university with short stories illustrating an aspect of personality or character that the individual subject shares with the core values of Sac State.

These stories should feature current research or events, or significant trends as identified by the alumni or firends of the university.

An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach them research skills and information literacy skills. “That’s in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

Students need to be critical consumers of what they find, evaluate the information and determine the author’s expertise in the subject.

Peigahi also guides the students through Sacramento State’s own databases, where students will find some of

the best sources of scholarly, verified information. And perusing the library’s data banks is convenient. “They don’t even have to walk into the building,” Peigahi says. “Probably 85 percent of what they need in their pajamas.” All it takes is the student’s SacLink account.

His instruction usually consists of one-time sessions of about an hour requested by another teacher. Much of mation, covering catalogue systems and basic databases, but Peigahi also gets into specifics, explaining where information can be found for that teacher’s particular course.

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for university libraries, but they need to more a surreptitious ggressively position themselves

as teachers and information educators. Once libraries become more actively involved in the more important to the university. “They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says. An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one literacy skills. “That’s sort of a jargon term we use in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.”

This is about 400 words. The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in a college education. “It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to be up on the stage with the other recipients.”.

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People

“… got a job.”

Ibrahim Franks is employed as a philosopher. Really.

by Craig Koscho; photo courtesy of Will Franks.

W

They smoked pipes.

Academics are still talking in groups to guys in white coats.

by Craig Koscho; photo courtesy of Steve Hart.

R

eza Peigahi exemplifies that librarians no longer fit the stereotype of people who sit at a desk among dusty book shelves answering questions about the Dewey Decimal System.

An instruction librarian, Peigahi was recognized for his classroom expertise with one of Sacramento State’s Outstanding Teaching Awards. He works with students to teach

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them research skills and information literacy skills. “That’s in teaching students how to find, evaluate and assess information,” Peigahi says. “And to think critically about that information.” Another line helps the fit here and even another line will help as well.

Students need to be critical consumers of what they find, evaluate the information and determine the author’s expertise in the subject. Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education. “It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was about 350 words to completely fill this space.”

Peigahi also guides the students through Sacramento State’s own databases, where students will find some of the best sources of scholarly, verified information. And perusing the library’s data banks is convenient. “They don’t even have to walk into the build-

ing,” Peigahi says. “Probably 85 percent of what they need in their pajamas.” All it takes is the student’s SacLink account.

Despite the world’s embrace of the computer and rush to the Internet, Peigahi believes there will always be room for university libraries, but they need to more a surreptitious aggressively position themselves as teachers and information educators.

Once libraries become more actively involved in the more important to the university.

“They do directly affect retention, student learning and can potentially affect recruitment of both students and faculty members,” Peigahi says.

The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education.

“It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to be up on the stage with the other recipients.”.

ill Franks exemplifies that librarians no longer fit the stereotype of people who sit at a desk among dusty book shelves answering questions about the Dewey Decimal System.

Small stories allow readers multiple ways into the large number of words contained in a magazine, or, suit the amount of time they have in a given session to spend with the book. An informal photo and a catchy headline of the shortest number of words makes the tiny story a must-read for the person with a small amount of time or attention. 180 total here.

The award shows that Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education.

“It was such a privilege,” he says of the award. “It was great to hear. Peigahi is doing his part to increase the role of libraries in delivering a college education.

“It was such a privilege,” he says of the award up on the stage with the other recipients.”.

Untitled by Craig Koscho; showing October - November, 2009, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (sfmoma.org). This art sets the stage for the photographs that follow. Imagry exibited by alumni or friends of the university somewhere in the world (the further afield, the better for SSM and the university) is always available, especially if you ask for it early.

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Images

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September 28, 2009: Run for the Cure by Mary Weikert. The Images section creates mini-posters of shared experiences on the Destination campus and beyond. The large images are balanced by longer text pieces in other departments.

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Images

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May 6, 2008: campus spot by Student Shooter. More at www.studentshooter.com. Beauty on campus - captured by a student.

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Images

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November 12, 2008: Serna Plaza by Steven Student-Camerary. As a department, Images should show the Destination campus.

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Destinations

Student Mary Attending University in China

by Robert Vance; photos by Pepjin Vandjoor

H

er name is Mary. She is only 19 years old but already she has many grey hairs. On Thursday mornings in my freshmen oral English class, she always sits alone in the back of the room. No one ever talks to her; she appears to have no friends. Whenever she speaks, the disdainful expressions that I detect on the faces of many of my other students betrays their true feelings about this different young lady.

“I come from a very poor family in the countryside,” Mary candidly shared with the class recently during a biographical ESL activity. While she appears to be well dressed and healthy, her face displays a certain hardness which is in great contrast to the other very youthful faces in the room. Her family has clearly experienced some hard times.

Mary may not be one of my most popular students but she certainly stands out as one of the brightest. When I observe her during class, I can sense her eagerness to learn English. Not only is she constantly making eye contact with me in class, but she writes down everything that I say. She seems to treasure the chances that she gets to speak in class and she projects to the rest of the class enthusiastically even though her pronunciation is quite poor.

In my estimation, she is a student who wants to ‘get’ the most out of her experience at the university.

“What do your parents do for a job?” I asked Mary recently when I ran into her at school.

“Both of them are farmers,” she replied. “We are peasants.” She made this statement very matter-of-factly and was clearly not ashamed of her family status. When I asked her how far from school her parents lived, she informed that her hometown was just 4 hours away.

“How often do you see your family?” I asked.

“Not very often,” was the reply. “It’s too far away.” Actually, for other students, 4 hours would not be a long trip at all. Some could easily get there on the weekend and return in time for classes on Monday morning. For Mary, however, the cost of a 4-hour train ride could very well be a strain on her parent’s budget.

Most likely, Mary and her parents do not have to worry about paying for the bulk of her tuition. In recent years, the Chinese government has offered much more financial assistance to those in need in the form of loans and scholarships. Like many other good intentions that Beijing has, however, the money does not always get to the students.

“Recently, the chancellor at my university was fired for stealing money from a scholarship fund,” a friend told me this week. “If they aren’t stolen then sometimes they are used for students who really don’t need them.” The school - not the government decides where the money should go and how it should be spent.

Taking out student loans, which is becoming increasingly popu-

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Clockwise, from top left: the measurement of march; Mary; team winners in one of innumerable high school games; Mr. Wei. My proposal for Destinations is that it be a department that can hold any concept of destination: a place to travel to, especially combining distance and education or research; an intention, for growth, for expansion, for rest, for support of any form of learning. Destinations should emphasize the breadth and the depth of Sac State alumni, faculty and friends of the university.

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Destinations lar in China, is still frowned upon by many in the older generation.

“Chinese people pay for something only if they have the cash,” a student stated in a recent class. “We are good at saving money.”

No matter how Mary got the chance to attend University, at least she is here. Many of her classmates in the middle school probably did not have the same opportunity and may never leave the countryside. She is lucky.

If her parents do support her university education even a little bit, they are more than likely making some big sacrifices. A yearly income of less than 10,000 RMB is still common in China, especially in the outlying areas. It is certainly not unheard of for a Chinese parent to take on an extra job while a child is studying.

I believe that my student Mary will do well in the university because she treasures the opportunity to attend. Hopefully, she can find a decent job after she has graduated and help bring her family out of poverty and into a better way of living. I certainly hope so. She - and the millions of others like her - certainly deserve that chance.

From top: reading, waiting for something that’s not indicated here; dorm life makes this guy look like a packrat or at least makes for an interesting photo; keeping in touch via text during a halt in the ranks. A descriptive caption becomes a mini-story, which is a way in for the casual reader. Multiply these opportunities to catch their attention..

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Once, Gilt Edge

Yes, Mr. Sutter made beer, and yes, Mark Twain drank some

by Robert Vance; images courtesy of the author

S

acramento’s brewing history begins with Swiss Immigrant John Sutter, who produced homebrew at Sutter’s Fort in the eighteen forties. Importing his hops from the East Coast he maintained a supply for himself and the residents of Sutter’s Fort. It is unclear how he cultured or imported his yeast, though I would kill to taste what he had goin’ on. Being Swiss, he probably had some good brewing knowledge in his genes, but with primitive setup at Sutter’s fort, I can’t imagine it tasted very good. I’m inclined to think the native people made regional fermented libations of their own, which could have included certain mycological treasures that would have had intoxicating effects slightly different than a bastard lager.

As soon as Miners arrived for the Gold Rush and realized there was no gold, they wanted something to drink. By eighteen seventy nine, there were fivehundredsixty thousand gallons of beer flowing out of Sacramento per year. Between the eight local breweries, a saloon on almost every corner, and acres

of hop fields, beer was big business in Sacramento.

The first brewery, the aptly named Sacramento Brewery, was established in eighteen forty nine. After its success,many German immigrants followed suit, and brought their bounty of brewing lore and lager yeast with them from the homeland.

Steam Beer, using a lager yeast fermented at ale temps due to lack of refrigeration, became the most popular drink of the day. Sacramento was so full of beer that Mark Twain commented that, “you can shut your eyes and march into the first door you come to and call for a drink, and chances are that you will get it.”

At the pinnacle of its brewing history, hop farms surrounded Sacramento. What is now California State University was once a two hundred and forty four acre hop farm. The brewery industry employed many Sacramentans. They worked in the Sloughouse hop fields, breweries, and saloons, and at times they clashed over worker’s rights. At its worst, the confllicts resulted in a bloody mas-

sacre of hop farmworkers by strike breakers. All that would all change with the passing of the eighteenth ammendment.

The industry began to crumble all over the region. Workers lost their jobs and every single legal brewery closed their doors. The local beer industry was never again able to get a foothold in the post-prohibition clydesdale race. The Capitol Brew’s exhibition features some incredible artifacts from the pre-prohibition glory days: brewing and hop-growing equipment, bottles, photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertising. As a brewer and history lover, I felt the nostalgic pull of lost time.

Thankfully, the craft-brewing movement has created a thriving culture of brewing here once again, and our local breweries, Rubicon, Sacramento Brewing Company, River City Brewing Company, and Hoppy’s to name a few, have many devoted and proud followers. Thankfully, the number of homebrewers is also growing by the day, thanks to the local shops Brewmeister and the Original Homebrew Outlet.

Top left: A collection of artifacts from the day. After Sutter’s brewing success, many German immigrants followed suit, bringing their bounty of brewing lore and lager yeast with them from the homeland.

Steam Beer, using a lager yeast fermented at ale temperatures due to lack of refrigeration, became the most popular drink of the day.

Above: John Sutter, in military regalia. At the time of his arrival in California, the territory had a population of only 1,000 Europeans, in contrast with 30,000 Native Americans. It was at that point a part of Mexico and the governor, Juan Bautista Alvarado, granted him permission to settle; in order to qualify for a land grant, Sutter became a Mexican citizen on August 29, 1840 - the following year, on 18 June, he received title to 48,827 acres (198 km²). Sutter named his settlement New Helvetia, or “New Switzerland,” after the homeland of his father.

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Destinations Despite this vibrant economic niche, local breweries are struggling under the weight of recession, rising energy and commodities prices. Time will tell if the Sarcramento region can sustain its beloved beer diversity.

It is unclear how he cultured or imported his yeast, though I would kill to taste what he had goin’ on. Being Swiss, he probably had some good brewing in his genes, but with primitive setup at Sutter’s fort, I can’t imagine it tasted very good.

I’m inclined to think the native people made regional fermented libations of their own, which could have included certain mycological treasures that would have had intoxicating effects slightly different than a bastard lager.

The first brewery, the aptly named Sacramento Brewery, was established in eighteen forty nine. After its success,many German immigrants followed suit, and brought their bounty

Top: Contemporary print of Rhustallers brewery located at 12th and H. Left: At the pinnacle of its brewing history, hop farms surrounded Sacramento.

What is now California State University was once a two hundred and forty four acre hop farm. The brewery industry employed many Sacramentans.

They worked in the Sloughouse hop fields, breweries, and saloons, and at times they clashed over worker’s rights.

Bottom: Front page of the Sacramento Bee. At its worst, the confllicts resulted in a bloody massacre of hop farmworkers by strike breakers. All that would all change with the passing of the eighteenth amendment.

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of brewing lore and lager yeast fermented at ale temps due to lack of refrigeration, became the most popular drink of the day. Sacramento was so full of beer that Mark Twain commented that, “you can shut your eyes and march into the first door you come to and call for a drink, and chances are that you will get it.”

At the pinnacle of its brewing history, hop farms surrounded Sacramento. What is now California State University was once a two hundred and forty four acre hop farm. The brewery industry employed many Sacramentans.

They worked in the Sloughouse hop fields, breweries, and saloons, and at times they clashed over worker’s rights. At its worst, the confllicts resulted in a bloody massacre of hop farmworkers by strike breakers.

At the pinnacle of its brewing history, hop farms surrounded Sacramento. What is now California State University was once a two hundred and forty four acre hop farm. The brewery industry employed many Sacramentans.

They worked in the Sloughouse hop fields, breweries, and saloons, and at times they clashed over worker’s rights. At its worst, the confllicts resulted in a bloody massacre of hop farmworkers by strike breakers. All that would all change with the passing of the eighteenth ammendment.

All that would all change with the passing of the eighteenth ammendment.

The craft-brewing movement has created a thriving culture of brewing here once Rubicon, Sacramento Brewing Company, and Hoppy’s to name a few, have many devoted and proud followers. Thankfully, the number of homebrewers is also growing by the day, thanks to inal Homebrew Outlet. Despite this vibrant economic niche, local breweries are struggling under the weight of recession, rising energy and commodities prices.

Words: biography

Critical biography is important to a magazine’s credibility. A person, particularly one of notable stature, will have a personal history worth knowing about in depth. The reader, especially an academically trained reader, will spend time to find out about an individual for the usual reasons: a life as instruction, as entertainment, as a record of events where they were directly involved, or, as a parallel to their own actual experience. Each element of our target audience will have a compelling reason to read a longish biographic piece. Note that you damage the credibility of the magazine and the publisher when the story reads like a press release or like a puff-piece. Everyone has warts, which are revealed to show strength, especially strength of character.

A long block of text gives the readership a longer period with the magazine in their hands, which gives all the messaging in the book more weight, more impact. If we have an opportunity to engage them, make it worthwhile and don’t blow it by being fake.

The Civil Heretic Written by Nicholas Dawidoff Photography by Eugene Richards for The New York Times

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climatechange denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathemat-

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Words: Freeman Dyson ics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.

These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a

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brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.” (Page 2 of 8) Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the

The Civil Heretic fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson’s own wife, Imme, who, after seeing the film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: “Everything you told me is wrong!” she cried.

“The polar bears will be fine,” he assured her.

Not long ago Dyson sat in his institute office, a chamber so neat it reminds Dyson’s friend, the writer John McPhee, of a Japanese living room. On shelves beside Dyson were books about stellar evolution, viruses, thermodynamics and terrorism. “The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.”

Dyson speaks in calm, clear tones that carry simultaneous evidence of his English childhood, the move to the United States after completing his university studies at Cambridge and more than 50 years of marriage to the German-born Imme, but his opinions can be barbed, especially when a conversation turns to climate change. Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign

occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields.

“Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem.

Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”

For Hansen, the dark agent of the looming environmental apocalypse is carbon dioxide contained in coal smoke. Coal, he has written, “is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”

Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.” Dyson, on the other hand, told me in conversations and e-mail messages that “Jim Hansen’s crusade against coal overstates the harm carbon dioxide can do.” Dyson well remembers the lethal black London coal fog of his youth when, after a day of visiting the city, he would return to his hometown of Winchester with his white shirt collar turned black. Coal, Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.”

These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.”

He says Hansen “exploits” the toxic elements of burning coal as a way of condemning the carbon dioxide it releases, “which cannot be reduced at an affordable cost, but does not do any substantial harm.”

Science is not a matter of opinion; it is a question of data.

Climate change is an issue for which Dyson is asking for more evidence, and leading climate scientists are replying by saying if we wait for sufficient proof to satisfy you, it may be too late.

That is the position of a more moderate expert on climate change, William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, who says, “I don’t think it’s time to panic,” but contends that, because of global warming, “more sea-level rise is inevitable and will displace millions; melting high-altitude glaciers will threaten the food supplies for perhaps a billion or more; and ocean acidification could undermine the food supply of another billion or so.” Dyson strongly disagrees with each of these points, and there follows, as you move back and forth between the two positions, claims and counterclaims, a dense

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Words: Freeman Dyson thicket of mitigating scientific indicators that all have the timbre of truth and the ring of potential plausibility. One of Dyson’s more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure. Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Embedded in all of Dyson’s strong opinions about public policy is a dual spirit of social activism and uneasiness about class dating all the way back to Winchester, where he was raised in the 1920s and ’30s by his father, George Dyson, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith. George was the music instructor at Winchester College, an old and prestigious secondary school, and a composer. Dyson’s mother, Mildred Atkey, came from a more prosperous Wimbledon family that had its own tennis court.

Together they raised Dyson and his sister, Alice, in what Dyson calls a “watered-down Church of England Christianity” that regarded religion as a guide to living rather than any system of belief. The emphasis on tolerance, charity and community — and the free time afforded by the luxury of four servants — led Mildred to organize a club for teenage girls and a birth-control clinic. These institutions meshed uneasily with her patrician Victorian sensibilities. The girls were never, Dyson says, “considered equals,” and Mildred told him with amusement about the young mother who walked in carrying a red-headed infant.

“What a beautiful baby,” Mildred reported saying. “Does he take after his father?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, Mum,” came the reply. “He kept his hat on.”

Winchester is a medieval town in which, Dyson writes, he felt that everyone was looking backward, mourning all the young men lost to one world war while silently anticipating his own generation’s impending demise. He renounced the nostalgia, the servants, the hard-line social castes. But what he liked about growing up in England was the landscape. The country’s successful alteration of wilderness and swamp had created a completely new green ecology, allowing plants, animals and humans to thrive in “a community of species.” Dyson has always been strongly opposed to the idea that there is any such thing as an optimal ecosystem — “life is always changing” — and he abhors the notion that men and women are something apart from nature, that “we must apologize for being human.”

Humans, he says, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival.

All this may explain why the same man could write “we live on a shrinking and vulnerable planet which our lack of foresight is rapidly turning into a slum” and yet gently chide the sort of Americans who march against coal in Washington.

Dyson has great affection for coal and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it. “There’s a lot of truth to the statement Greens are people who never had

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to worry about their grocery bills,” he says. (“Many of these people are my friends,” he will also tell you.) To Dyson, “the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.” That said, Dyson sees coal as the interim kindling of progress. In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.”

THE WORDS COLLEAGUES COMMONLY use to describe Dyson include “unassuming” and “modest,” and he seems the very embodiment of Newton’s belief that a man should strive for simplicity and avoid confusion in life. Dyson has been in residence at the institute since 1953, a time when Albert Einstein shared his habit of walking to work there, which Dyson still does seven days a week, to write on a computer and solve any problems that come across his desk with paper and pencil. (In his prime, legend held that he never used the eraser.) He and Imme have spent 51 happy years together in the same house, a white clapboard just over the garden fence from the stucco affair once inhabited by their former neighbors, the Oppenheimers. On some Sundays the Dysons pile into a car still decorated with an Obama bumper sticker and drive to running races, at which Dyson can be found at the finish line loudly cheering for the 72-year-old Imme, a master’s marathon champion. On many other weekends, they visit some of their 16 grandchildren. During the holiday season the Dysons routinely attend five parties a week, cocktail-soiree sprints at which guests tend to find him open-minded and shy: when friends’ wives give him a hug, he blushes. One of Dyson’s daughters, the Internet vizier Esther Dyson, says her father raised her without a television so she would read more, and has always been “just as interested in talking to” the latest graduate student to make the pilgrimage to Princeton “as he is the famous person at the next table.” Oliver Sacks says that Dyson has “a genius for friendship.”

But the truth is that Dyson is an elusive particle. To Edward Witten it is clear that Dyson has little use for string theory, the cutting-edge “theory of everything” that links quantum mechanics and relativity in an effort to describe no less than the nature of all things. Even so, Witten admits that there is a fever-dream quality to his conversations with Dyson: “I don’t always know what he disagrees with entirely. His attitudes are complicated. There are many layers.” Other people can be similarly intrigued and baffled. When I began spending time with Dyson and asked who his close friends are, the only name he mentioned was John McPhee’s, which surprised McPhee since he said he doesn’t often speak with Dyson even though McPhee teaches nearby at Princeton University. All six of Dyson’s children describe him as a loving, intensely devoted father and yet also suggest that this is a parent with, in the words of his son, George, core parts of him that have always seemed “remote.” William Press said he finds Dyson to be both a “deep” and “magnificently laudable person” and also mysterious and inscrutable, a man with contrarian opinions that Press suspects

The Civil Heretic may be motivated by “a darker side he’s determined the world isn’t going to see.” When I asked Sacks what he thought about all this, he said that “a favorite word of Freeman’s about doing science and being creative is the word ‘subversive.’ He feels it’s rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he’s done that all his life.”

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescopelens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.” It’s a point of pride with Dyson that in 1951 he became a member of the physics faculty at Cornell and then, two years later, moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became an influential man, a pragmatist providing solutions to the military and Congress, and also the 2000 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for broadening the understanding of science and religion, an award previously given to Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — all without ever earning a Ph.D. Dyson may, in fact, be the ultimate outsider-insider, “the world’s most civil heretic,” as the classical composer Paul Moravec, the artistic consultant at the institute, says of him.

Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything.

He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge.”

The Apprentice Scientist “An Esay at Natarril History,” age 6; the last page of a three-page treatise on “Astronimy,” age 5; and a sketch of a passenger-bearing spaceship from the unfinished science-fiction story “Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision,” age 9.. Drawings by Freeman Dyson.

Photographs from George Dyson.

Big Bangs Dyson, far right, helped design an American spacecraft that would be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. He says he “thought of Orion as the solution to a problem.

With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.” Photos: Left: Michael Treshow/Courtesy George Dyson. Right: Jaromir Astl.

Reached by telephone, Hansen sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

When Dyson hears about this, he looks, if possible, like a person taking the longer view. He is a short, sinewy man with strawlike filaments of excitable gray hair that make him resemble an upside-down broom. Every day he dresses with the same frowzy Oxbridge formality in L. L. Bean khaki trousers (his daughter Mia is a minister in Maine), a tweed sport coat, a necktie (most often one made for him, he says, by another daughter, Emily, many years ago “in the age of primary colors”) and wool sweater-vests. On cold days he wears a second vest, one right over the other, and the effect is like a window with two sets of curtains. His smile is the real window, a delighted beam that appears to float free from his face, strangely dynamic with its electric ears and quantum nose, and his laugh is so hearty it shakes him. The smile and laughter have the effect of softening Dyson’s formality, transforming him into a sage and friendly elf, and also reminding those he talks with that he has

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Words: Freeman Dyson spent a lifetime immersed in efforts to find what he considers humane solutions to dire problems, whose controversial gloss never seems to agitate him. His eyes are murky gray, and whatever he’s thinking beyond what he says, the eyes never betray.

with Germany began. Dyson says he can “remember so vividly lying in bed at age 15, absolutely enjoying hearing the bombs go off with a wonderful crunching noise. I said, ‘That’s the sound of the British Empire crumbling.’ I had a sense that the British Empire was evil. The fact that I might get hit didn’t register at all.

A FORMATIVE MOMENT in Dyson’s life that pushed I think that’s a natural state of mind for a 15-year-old. I somehow him in an apostatical direction happened in 1932, when, at age got over it.” At Cambridge, Dyson attended all the advanced 8, he was sent off to boarding school at Twyford. By then he mathematics lectures and climbed roofs at night during blackwas a prodigy “already obsessed” with mathematics. (His older outs. By the end of the school year in 1943, which Dyson celsister Alice, a retired social worker still living in Winchester, ebrated by pushing his wheelchairbound classmate, Oscar Hahn, remembers how her brother “used to lie on the nursery floor the 55 miles home to London in one 17-hour day, Dyson was working out how many atoms there were in the sun. He was fully formed as a person of strong, frequently rebellious beliefs, perhaps 4.”) At Twyford — like someone who would always go his George Orwell, who was flogged, own way. starved and humiliated by masters During World War II, Dyson and bigger boys at St. Cyprian’s — worked for the Royal Air Force at Dyson says he felt brutalized by a Bomber Command, calculating whip-wielding headmaster who the most effective ways to deploy offered no science classes, favoring pilots, some of whom he knew Latin, and by a clique of athletes would die. Dyson says he was who liked to rub sandpaper on “sickened” and “depressed” that the faces of the smaller children. many more planes were going “In those days it was unthinkdown than needed to because able that parents would come to military leadership relied on see what was going on,” Dyson misguided institutional mytholosays. “My parents lived only three gies rather than statistical studmiles away. They never came to ies.

Even more upsetting, Dyson An Inconvenient Film Freeman Dyson and his wife, Imme, differ on visit. It wasn’t done.” Dyson took writes in “Weapons and Hope,” Al Gore’s movie. She wants a Prius. He questions the consensus on climate change. comfort in climbing tall trees, he became an expert on “how reading “The Wonderful Wizard to murder most economically of Oz,” which gave him a first sense of America as a more “excitanother hundred thousand people.” This work, Dyson told the ing place where all sorts of weird things could happen,” and writer Kenneth Brower, created an “emptiness of the soul.”

Jules Verne’s comic science-fiction descriptions of more “crazy Then came two blinding flashes of light. Dyson’s reaction to Americans” bound for the moon. His primary consolation, Hiroshima and Nagasaki was complicated. Like many physihowever, was the science society he founded with a few friends. cists, Dyson has always loved explosions, and, of course, uncovDyson would later reflect that from then on he saw science as “a ering the secrets of nature is the first motivation of science. territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and When he was interviewed for the 1980 documentary “The Day hatred.”

After Trinity,” Dyson addressed the seduction: “I felt it myself, Four years later he entered Winchester College, well known the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to for academic rigor, and he thrived. On his own in the school them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release library, he read mathematical works in French and German the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And and, at age 13, taught himself calculus from an Encyclopedia to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the Britannica entry. “I remember thinking, Is that it?” he says. sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable “People had been telling me how hard it was.” Another day in power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I the library he discovered “Daedalus, or Science and the Future,” would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who said that “the thing that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, minds.” no institutions are safe,” an appealing outlook to Dyson, who Eventually, Dyson would be sure nuclear weapons were the had found his muse. “Haldane was even more of a heretic than worst evil. But in 1945, drawn to these irreducible components I am,” he says. “He really loved to make people angry.” It wasn’t of life, Dyson left mathematics and took up physics. Still, he did all science. On trips into London he spent entire days in booknot want to be another dusty Englishman toiling alone in a dim stores where William Blake “got hold of me. What I really liked Cambridge laboratory. Since childhood, some part of him had was he was a really rebellious spirit who always said the oppoalways known that the “Americans held the future in their hands site of what everybody else believed.” and that the smart thing for me to do would be to join them.”

That defiant sensibility hardened further when the second war That the United States was now the country of Einstein and

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The Civil Heretic Oppenheimer was reason enough to go, but Dyson’s sister Alice says that “he escaped to America so he could make his own life,” removed from the shadow of his now famous musical father. “I know how he felt,” says Oliver Sacks, who came to New York not long after medical school. “I was the fifth Dr. Sacks in my family.

I felt it was time to get out and find a place of my own.”

In 1947, Dyson enrolled as a doctoral candidate at Cornell, studying with Hans Bethe, who had the reputation of being the greatest problem-solver in physics. Alice Dyson says that once in Ithaca, her brother “became so much more human,” and Dyson does not disagree. “I really felt it was quite amazing how accepted I was,” he says. “In 1963, I’d only been a U.S. citizen for about five years, and I was testifying to the Senate, representing the Federation of American Scientists in favor of the nuclear-test-ban treaty.”

After sizing him up over a few meals, Bethe gave Dyson a problem and told him to come back in six months. “You just sit down and do it,” Dyson told me. “It’s probably the hardest work you’ll do in your life. Without having done that, you’ve never understood what science is all about.” This smaller problem was part of a much larger one inherited from Einstein, among others, involving the need for a theory to describe the behavior of atoms and electrons emitting and absorbing light.

Put another way, it was the question of how to move physics forward, creating agreement among the disparate laws of atomic structure, radiation, solid-state physics, plasma physics, maser and laser technology, optical and microwave spectroscopy, electronics and chemistry. Many were working on achieving this broad rapport, including Julian Schwinger at Harvard University; a Japanese physicist named Shinichiro Tomonaga, whose calculations arrived in America from war-depleted Kyoto on cheap brown paper; and Feynman, also at Cornell, a man so brilliant he did complex calculations in his head. Initially, Bethe asked Dyson to make some difficult measurements involving electrons. But soon enough Dyson went further.

The breakthrough came on summer trips Dyson made in 1948, traveling around America by Greyhound bus and also, for four days, in a car with Feynman. Feynman was driving to Albuquerque, and Dyson joined him just for the pleasure of riding alongside “a unique person who had such an amazing combination of gifts.” The irrepressible Feynman and the “quiet and dignified English fellow,” as Feynman described Dyson, picked up gypsy hitchhikers; took shelter from an Oklahoma flood in the only available hotel they could find, a brothel, where Feynman pretended to sleep and heard Dyson relieve himself in their room sink rather than risk the common bathroom in the hall; spoke of Feynman’s realization that he had enjoyed military work on the Manhattan Project too much and therefore could do it no more; and talked about Feynman’s ideas in a way that made Dyson forever understand what the nature of true genius is. Dyson wanted to unify one big theory; Feynman was out to unify all of physics. Inspired by this and by a mesmerizing sermon on nonviolence that Dyson happened to hear a traveling divinity student deliver in Berkeley, Dyson sat aboard his final Greyhound of the summer, heading East.

He had no pencil or paper. He was thinking very hard. On a bumpy stretch of highway, long after dark, somewhere out in the middle of Nebraska, Dyson says, “Suddenly the physics problem became clear.” What Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga were doing was stylistically different, but it was all “fundamentally the same.”

Dyson is always effacing when discussing his work — he has variously called himself a tinkerer, a clean-up man and a bridge builder who merely supplied the cantilevers linking other men’s ideas. Bethe thought more highly of him. “He is the best I have ever had or observed,” Bethe wrote in a letter to Oppenheimer, who invited Dyson to the institute for an initial fellowship.

There, with Einstein indifferent to him and the chain-smoking Oppenheimer openly doubting Dyson’s physics, Dyson wrote his renowned paper “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman.” Oppenheimer sent Dyson a note: “Nolo contendere — R.O.” If you could do that in a year, who needed a Ph.D.? The institute was perfect for him. He could work all morning and, as he wrote to his parents, in the afternoons go for walks in the woods to see “strange new birds, insects and plants.” It was, Dyson says, the happiest sustained moment in his life. It was also the last great discovery he would make in physics.

Other physicists quietly express disappointment that Dyson didn’t do more to advance the field, that he wasted his promise.

“He did some things in physics after the heroic work in 1949, but not as much as I would have expected for someone so off-thescale smart,” one physicist says. From others there are behind-thestudy-door speculations that perhaps Dyson lacked the necessary “killer instinct”; or that he was discouraged by Enrico Fermi, who told him that his further work on quantum electrodynamics was unpromising; or “that he never felt he could approach Feynman’s brilliance.” Dyson shakes his head. “I’ve always enjoyed what I was doing quite independently of whether it was important or not,” he says. “I think it’s almost true without exception if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get ahold of some deep and important problem and stay with it for 10 years. That wasn’t my style.”

DYSON HAD ALWAYS wanted “a big family.” In 1950, after knowing the brilliant mathematician Verena Huber for three weeks, Dyson proposed. They married, Esther and George were born, but the union didn’t last. “She was more interested in mathematics than in raising kids,” he says. By 1958, Dyson had married Imme — he has the brains, she has the legs, the Dysons like to joke — and they settled “in this snobbish little town,” as he calls Princeton. They had four more daughters. All six Dysons describe eventful child­hoods with people like Feynman coming by for meals. Their father, meanwhile, was always preaching the virtues of boredom: “Being bored is the only time you are creative” was his thinking. George recalls groups of physicists closing doors and saying, “No children.” Through the keyhole George would hear words that gave him thermonuclear nightmares. All of them remember Dyson coming home, arms filled with bouquets of new appliances to make Imme’s life easier: an

SSM:f09 | 27

Words: Freeman Dyson automatic ironing machine; a snowblower; one of the first microwave ovens in Princeton.

Beginning in the late ’50s, Dyson spent months in California, on the La Jolla campus of General Atomics, a peacetime Los Alamos, where scientists were seeking progressive uses for nuclear energy. After a challenge from Edward Teller to build a completely safe reactor, Dyson and Ted Taylor patented the Triga, a small isotope machine that is still used for medical diagnostics in hospitals. Then came the Orion rocket, designed so successions of atomic bombs would explode against the spaceship’s massive pusher plate, propelling astronauts toward the moon and beyond. “For me, Orion meant opening up the whole solar system to life,” he says. “It could have changed history.” Dyson says he “thought of Orion as the solution to a problem. With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.” But instead, he lent his support to the nuclear-test-ban treaty with the U.S.S.R., which killed Orion. “This was much more serious than Orion ever would be,” he said later. Dyson’s powers of concentration were so formidable in those years that George remembers sitting with his father and “he’d just disappear.”

One idea pulsing through his mind was a thought experiment that he published in the journal Science in 1959 that described massive energy-collecting shells that could encircle a star and capture solar energy. This was Dyson’s initial response to his insight that earthbound reserves of fossil fuels were limited. The structures are known as Dyson Spheres to sciencefiction authors like Larry Niven and by the writers of an episode of “Star Trek” — the only engineers so far to succeed in building one.

This was an early indication of Dyson’s growing interest in what one day would be called climate studies. In 1976, Dyson began making regular trips to the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the director, Alvin Weinberg, was in the business of investigating alternative sources of power.

Charles David Keeling’s pioneering measurements at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, showed rapidly increasing carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; and in Tennessee, Dyson joined a group of meteorologists and biologists trying to understand the effects of carbon on the Earth and air. He was now becoming a climate expert. Eventually Dyson published a paper titled “Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?” His answer was yes, and he added that any emergency could be temporarily thwarted with a “carbon bank” of “fast-growing trees.” He calculated how many trees it would take to remove all carbon from the atmosphere. The number, he says, was a trillion, which was “in principle quite feasible.” Dyson says the paper is “what I’d like people to judge me by. I still think everything it says is true.”

Eventually he would embrace another idea: the notorious carbon-eating trees, which would be genetically engineered to absorb more carbon than normal trees. Of them, he admits: “I suppose it sounds like science fiction. Genetic engineering is politically unpopular in the moment.”

In the 1970s, Dyson participated in other climate studies conducted by Jason, a small government-financed group of the

28 | SSM:f09

country’s finest scientists, whose members gather each summer near San Diego to work on (often) classified (usually) scientific dilemmas of (frequently) military interest to the government.

Dyson has, as he admits, a restless nature, and by the time many scientists were thinking about climate, Dyson was on to other problems. Often on his mind were proposals submitted by the government to Jason. “Mainly we kill stupid projects,” he says.

Some scientists refuse military work on the grounds that involvement in killing is sin. Dyson was opposed to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but not to generals. He had seen in England how a military more enlightened by quantitative analysis could have better protected its men and saved the lives of civilians. “I always felt the worse the situation was, the more important it was to keep talking to the military,” he says. Over the years he says he pushed the rejection of the idea of dropping atomic bombs on North Vietnam and solved problems in adaptive optics for telescopes. Lately he has been “trying to help the intelligence people be aware of what the bad guys may be doing with biology.” Dyson thinks of himself as “fighting for peace,” and Joel Lebowitz, a Rutgers physicist who has known Dyson for 50 years, says Dyson lives up to that: “He works for Jason and he’s out there demonstrating against the Iraq war.”

At Jason, taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.”

The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.

These days, most of what consumes Dyson is his writing. In a recent article, he addressed the issue of reductionist thinking obliquely, as a question of perspective. Birds, he wrote, “fly high in the air and survey broad vistas.” Frogs like him “live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby.”

Whether the topic is government work, string theory or climate change, Dyson seems opposed to science making enormous gestures. The physicist Douglas Eardley, who works with Dyson at Jason, says: “He’s always against the big monolithic projects, the Battlestar Galacticas. He prefers spunky little Mars rovers.”

Dyson has been hostile to the Star Wars missile-defense system, the Space Station, the Hubble telescope and the superconducting super collider, which he says he opposed because “it’s just out of proportion.” Steven Weinberg, the Nobel physics laureate who often disagrees with Dyson on these matters, says: “Some things simply have to be done in a large way. They’re very expensive. That’s big science. Get over it.”

Nicholas Dawidoff, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of four books, most recently “The Crowd Sounds Happy.”

Special section: College of Health & Human Services • www.hhs.csus.edu Spring 2009

Calling

the Capitol

Home Chris Alvarez

B.S., Health Care Administration, 2005

Update is going green! sacr amento state COLLEGE OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

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Update Spring 2009

College of Health & Human Services California State University, Sacramento www.hhs.csus.edu

our college…

Office of the Dean

(916) 278-7255 Marilyn Hopkins, DNS, Dean hopkinsm@csus.edu Criminal Justice

(916) 278-6487 William Vizzard, DPA, Chair vizzard@csus.edu Kinesiology & Health Science

(916) 278-6441 Fred Baldini, Ph.D., Chair baldinif@csus.edu Nursing

(916) 278-6525 Ann Stoltz, Ph.D., Chair stoltza@csus.edu Physical Therapy

(916) 278-6426 Susan McGinty, EDD, Director mcgintys@csus.edu Recreation, Parks & Tourism Administration

(916) 278-6752 Dana Kivel, Ph.D., Chair bkivel@csus.edu Social Work

(916) 278-6943 Robin Carter, DPA, Director carterr@csus.edu Speech Pathology & Audiology

(916) 278-6601 Laureen O’Hanlon, Ph.D., Chair ohanlon@csus.edu Development Program

(916) 278-6989 College of Health & Human Services Web site: www.hhs.csus.edu Update is published biannually by the College of Health & Human Services.

For more information or to have your news included in the next issue, please contact the Dean’s Office at (916) 278-7255.

Photographers:

Sam Parsons, Creative Services Mary Weikert, Public Affairs Designer:

Scott Olling, Public Affairs On the cover:

Christopher Alvarez (see facing page)

Dean’s Message

A Good News Report

by Dean Marilyn Hopkins Bad news seems to be coming from everywhere, and I don’t want to hear it anymore. I know these are challenging times, but I believe it is important to keep an optimistic frame of mind. In a search for balanced input, I’ve started watching Brian Williams and the NBC evening news. Every show ends with a heart-warming report of everyday people performing acts of kindness and generosity in their community.

The feature, “Making a Difference,” was initiated in response to viewer complaints about negativity in media reporting.

I am not trying to minimize the seriousness of home foreclosures, rising unemployment, state budget deficits and funding reductions that impact education and social services. I understand the concerns regarding melting ice caps in Antarctica and the need to protect our environment for future generations. I even sympathize with basketball fans, like my husband, who lament the Sacramento Kings had their worst season since arriving in Sacramento!

However, this message in Update is my message to you, and I want to emphasize good news that is happening in our Sacramento State community. Like the people featured in the NBC evening news, our faculty, staff and students are making a positive difference in the lives of others and in our physical environment.

4 A member of the Criminal Justice faculty and her cat, Jackson, volunteer I’ve provided a list of some of the activities that show twice a month at Shriners Hospitals for how we are Making a Difference on this page so you Children as a Pet Partner Team with the can get a feeling for the wonderful work we are doing.

Delta Society.

Yet there is even more good news to report.

A drive through campus reveals the huge 4 The Division of Nursing mailed concrete walls of the new Recreation and Wellness more than 30 boxes of holiday gifts to Center. Affectionately named The WELL, the new soldiers in Iraq and collected more than 100 toys for underprivileged children. facility near Hornet Stadium will open in fall 2010. It will feature a fitness center, indoor track, gym and 4 Physical Therapy faculty and racquetball courts, rock climbing wall, massage students provided pro bono services therapy spa, baby sitting center, and new student to uninsured students and neurological health center. At the north end of campus near J patients who exhausted their health Street, we see finishing touches on American River benefits.

Courtyard, a new apartment style housing complex 4 Three undergraduate students from for students. Best news of all is The University FounSpeech Pathology and Audiology will travel dation purchased the CalSTRS building on Folsom to Costa Rica to teach English and perform Boulevard. By spring 2010, the facility will provide health and hearing assessments for local new and expanded space for the Division of Nursing, youth.

Department of Physical Therapy, Department of 4 The Bachelor of Social Work Speech Pathology and Audiology, and Maryjane Association partnered with Loaves and Rees Language Speech and Hearing Center.

Fishes in a Drive to Help the Homeless.

It has been a busy and exciting academic year that 4 Therapeutic Recreation students culminated in May with the Golden Anniversary celreceived a volunteer award from the ebration of the Division of Nursing, a reception to recSacramento County Board of Supervisors for ognize student nominees for the Dean’s Honor Award work at the Mental Health Treatment Center. and Commencement. Stay tuned for more good news reports from our campus. We remain committed to 4 A student in Recreation, Parks and providing excellence in our academic programs and Tourism Administration volunteered to preparing graduates who can assume leadership in a women’s rape crisis center in Africa, and a faculty member from the department roles in their discipline and community.

Making a Difference

raised money for bicycles and helmets for homeless children.

2 | HHS:f09: special section

HHS Alumni in Government Veterans Affairs Residency Program Benefits Nursing Students

T

en Sacramento State students are serving in specialized nursing internships with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, providing them with excellent practical experience and promising career opportunities.

Melissa Burden, Kathleen Kizilbash and Christilyn Magee are three of the students currently in the VA Learning Opportunities Residency (VALOR) program, and all three sing its praises.

VALOR offers outstanding registered nursing students enrolled in baccalaureate programs the opportunity to develop competencies in clinical nursing at an approved VA health care facility while they work on their degrees. Students are appointed on a full- or part-time basis during the summer months and may continue during their senior academic year on a part-time basis.

Sacramento State students can work at the new inpatient hospital near Mather Field or at outpatient clinics in Chico or Redding.

Melissa Burden always knew she wanted a career in which she was helping people.

“I started working in the health care field about 10 years ago as a medical assistant and health care aide and learned that I wanted to be a nurse. I always loved science.”

In VALOR, she works in the emergency room, which is her specialty.

“I enjoy it a lot,” Burden says. “Every patient has a different problem, so you have to deal with all types of body systems, and you’re constantly faced with different situations. It’s exciting and challenging.

“The opportunity for student nurses to perfect their skills in this program is amazing. Just over the summer, I accomplished and repeated so many skills that it really built my confidence and enhanced everything I’ve learned, like inserting IVs,” she says. “We also get to do physical assessment on our patients and have patient interaction—all the typical things you would do in your nursing care.”

Kathleen Kizilbash is making a career change. A former third-party 401(k) administrator, Kizilbash always wanted to work in medicine and finds that nursing complements perfectly her love of science and caring for people.

She worked full time in the VALOR program last summer and will work 100 hours each during the fall and spring semesters.

“The program is a fantastic opportunity to get great experience. I address patient needs as they arise, clean and dress wounds and assess their condition—all on my own, followed by an assessment by the preceptor.

— Kathleen Kizilbash I also do pain management—making sure the medications are adequate and advocatto join the program, I knew that I wanted ing for the patient with the physician if the to get some experience other than clinical meds aren’t working,” she says. “Five days before I graduated,” she says. a week for 10 weeks, I practiced the same “I love it. The nursing managers are great, skills—and they paid me!” and the program has provided us with all Kizilbash says the VA treats VALOR kinds of experiences. We’re really indestudents just like employees. pendent: We are responsible for checking “Except for certain duties, the expectaour own labs and communicating with the tions for us were the same as those of physicians,” Magee says. “We pretty much professional staff,” she says. “The staff is take on the RN role, which isn’t somereally helpful, and the vets themselves are thing we generally get to do in clinical.” fantastic, down-to-earth, tell-it-like-it-is Magee says the experience is both enjoypeople. They always express their appreciaable and rewarding. “Working with the tion and treat us with respect.” veteran population has been great, and the Christilyn Magee, a December 2008 staff treats us so well. It really makes workgraduate, also knew she wanted a career in ing there a lot of fun.” health care.

VALOR Program participants (from left) Christilyn “My nursing specialty, pediatric intensive Magee, Daisy Cho, Kathleen Kizilbash, Logan care, is actually not part of the VALOR pro- Souvannaphoungeun, Jeanne Rozak, Melissa Burden and Dyan Rivera surround a test “patient” gram, but when the opportunity came up

“Except for certain duties, the expectations for us were the same as those of professional staff.”

in a Nursing Division training room.

College of Health & Human Services:f09 | 3

A Generous Gift: The J.R. Needy Foundation

Perpetuating a Legacy

A

recent $30,000

scholarship endowment from the J.R. Needy Foundation is designed to provide two students from the Department of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration each year with scholarships.

The gift reflects the foundation board’s wish to continue the scholarships the Needy Foundation has awarded on its own for several years.

The Needy Foundation was organized in 1985 when Ed Sato, an emeritus professor of recreation and leisure studies, approached former students of J.R. “Shocky” Needy (at left) about creating a foundation to honor the longtime faculty member and department chair.

The foundation was created with three objectives, says Keith Demetrak, one of the original organizers. “We wanted to award scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students in the program, further the linkage between the program and alumni who are practitioners

in the field, and enhance the professionalism of the students and practitioners.

“Scholarships started out at $500, but as tuition increased, we increased the award to $750 and then to $1,000,” Demetrak says. “To date, we have awarded between $35,000 and $40,000 in scholarships.”

“The Needy endowment will be a perpetual gift,” says Kendra Lewis, director of development for the Colleges of Health and Human Services and Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies. “As fundraising for the endowment continues, the impact of one professor on his students will come full circle.

Gifts from former students will help the next generation of learners and recreation professionals, and a proud legacy will be sustained.”

Fundraising efforts continue, and anyone interested in contributing should contact Lewis at (916) 278-2565 or klewis@ saclink.cusu.edu.

The J.R. Needy Foundation Board (left to right): Debbie Walker, Judy Quattrin, RPTA Chair, Dana Kivel and Keith Demetrak

“The impact of one professor on his students will come full circle. … former students will help the next generation.”

— Kendra Lewis

Don’t forget! by binding in special sections from other colleges and departments you share the costs of production and spread the benefits of broad distribution - hence, we win!

4 | HHS:f09: special section

Records

A super-human 20

Sit the gimp seat, bet your shirt and win the Pot: rowing rocks.

by Craig Koscho; photo courtesy of Steve Hart.

H

ighlighting any sport other than football or possibly baseball means using the secret terminology of the sport in the headline to pull readers in, to recognize those who are already in-the-know and to create some interest for SSM’s usual academically bent audiences who care not for sport. Certain alumni seem to love sports though, so, the story should demonstrate some love. Sport your love in this section, with few words, and big pictures of athletes really getting at it.

The whole idea of this type of section turns on fabulous photography. Shooters can really strut their ability to capture movement, drama, to zoom in and pull way back and show the Roman spectacle of a particular sporting event.

These pages should be popular tear-outs or refridgerator wallpaper for prospective students and especially alumns.

SSM:f09 | 33

Records

The Causeway Classic 2009: Hornets and Aggies meet again, and the Hornets won, 27-12, improving their record to 14-8. Sometimes the best photostory isn’t the words or the event—it’s the moment, when we were all there together. That shared moment is alumni development gold: seek it, mine that vein.

34 | SSM:f09

SSM:f09 | 35

Records

Alumni arts happening

Leading with an event that features many distinct alumni is a good approach. Save the single alumni short storys for the next several pages. Why? If you’re a front to back reader, you’re coming out of the larger photography of the Records: sports section and can use a little more people oriented detail at this point in the read; if you’re reading back to front you’ve had a full page personality story (on the Quad) and several smaller single personality stories (Alumni profile, Alumni at it again full page). Having a group focus for this story feels like the right sequence.

Mixing in B&W photography with full color keeps this section visually active. Writing a caption that is a small story creates additional entry points for the readership. An “explainer’ caption/story for the mood-of-the-room photo is an opportunity to expand the reader’s set of concepts for the section.

Barrick, ‘70

Wishorn, ‘69

Gomez, ‘99

Franklin, ‘67

Pajeikley, ‘01

Candid colorful photography captures the mood of the event. Setting a shot list or shot priority for each event will help keep the look of a repetitive section like Alumni fresh and different each publication. For this story, headshots followed by a larger mood-of-the-room shot creates a group event feel.

36 | SSM:f09

Alumni by the numbers

1960s

Stan Barrick, ’67, B.A., Mathematics, ’70, Education Credential, ’75, M.A., Teacher Education, is a professor of learning skills at Sac State where he coordinates the math program for 1,300 remedial math students—about 35 percent of the first-time freshmen. He is also the content co-author of a Sac State website for high school students that gives authoritative advice regarding mathematics preparation for students interested in attending the University. In addition, Barrick oversees an e-learning program for students who completed the Early Assessment Program and are conditionally exempt in their last year of high school. He and his wife, Holly, live in Gold River.

Elizabeth Hurst Jones, ’68, B.A., Social Work, ’75, M.S.W., created the Parent Support Program while employed by Sacramento County in the Department of Social Welfare.

As a counselor and since her retirement, Jones has worked with homeless programs and was a Stephen minister for Foothill United Methodist Church. She reports that one of her cases was ongoing for 18 months, but has proven to be a great success. She makes her home in Cameron Park.

Lee Ferrero, ’69, B.A., Recreation Administration, is president/CEO of the Private Industry Council of San Luis Obispo County, Inc. He is also a member of the Leadership San

Jones, ‘68

Luis Obispo board of directors and has been appointed to the dean’s advisory committee of the Cal Poly State University School of Business. A special first has occurred in the Ferrero family—Lee and Valerie’s first grandchild, John Ferrero Stout, arrived this past fall in Long Beach, Calif.

Bonnie Neff, ’69, B.S., Business Administration, has just completed her 27th year teaching at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento and was honored at Drexel University in Philadelphia, receiving an award during spring commencement for distinguished teaching. She was among four teachers from across the nation to win the honor in this year’s “Behind Every Graduate Award” program, presented to teachers who had steered students toward college and

academic success. At Sac State, Neff’s original career choice was to either be a stenographer/court reporter or an information officer for the United States government. Years ago, a chance fill-in as an economics teacher at a local high school put her on the path to becoming an educator. She lives in Sacramento.

1970s

William (Bill) Enos, ’64, B.S., Business Administration, ’78, M.A., Education, is the president of the Siskiyou County Board of Education and has been the Area 2 Trustee, which includes Mount Shasta Elementary School District, since 1999.

On that board, he served as president for seven years. As a lifelong educator, first as a Sacramento-area teacher, principal and superintendent, Enos moved to Siskiyou County where he later retired after serving as the superintendent of Siskiyou Union High School District. He is also the Region 2 Director of the California School Boards Association, representing Modoc, Siskiyou, Trinity, Shasta, Plumas, and Lassen counties. He and his wife, Lillian, live in Mount Shasta.

Neff, ‘69 (second from left)

1980s

Vito Tomasino, ’83, B.S., Economics, M.A., International Affairs, is currently working for Boeing Aircraft/SSE Inc. in St. Louis, Mo. Recently, his novel Kracek was published and is available at amazon.com, bn.com and other sites. The book tells the story of Captain Viktor Kracek, a thinking man’s fighter pilot, who sees his enemies not as faceless inhuman beings, but as good men and women who simply find themselves on the other side of a war none of them want.

While others see war as an extension of diplomacy, Kracek sees it as a failure of leaders to

resolve their differences with reason. Excerpts can be read on Tomasino’s website, www. vtoma.squarespace.com Jill Jeffers Bissell, ’85, B.A., Liberal Studies, ’85, Education Credentials, is a self-employed clinical psychologist with an emphasis on restoring family harmony. Bissell is involved in training parents who have adopted Ukranian orphans and their caseworkers on how to work with traumatized children. Bissell resides in Sacramento with her husband, John.

Kathleen (Kathy) Sanborn, ’89, B.A., Psychology, is a musician, recording artist and author living in Grass Valley, Calif. She has appeared on dozens of radio stations and her inter-

Ground floor: Health And Wellness Center in ‘08

SSM:f09 | 37

Records

Not your father’s classroom: Santa Clara Hall L433. Running photos across all columns featuring alternating campus interiors/exteriors with a story caption keeps the “By the Numbers” alumni stories active and interesting. Each image can be related to text buried in the alumni text.

This gives us an opportunity to show off campus aspects directly related to alumni interests.

views have been published in many magazines and newspapers, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Her biography is in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women. Sanborn’s new music CD “Peaceful Sounds” delves into controversial topics including war, poverty and homeless veterans in a style that ranges from folksy jazz to adult alternative. For more information, visit www. kathysanborn.com.

1990s

Christopher N. Cruz, ’90, B.S., Criminal Justice, has been employed with the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons since graduation.

He recently relocated back to Markis, ‘92

38 | SSM:f09

the Sacramento area where he is CEO for the Eastern District of California, located in the federal building in downtown Sacramento.

Ronnie L. Cobb, ’92, B.S., Business Administration, is the manager of diversity and inclusive programs for the Kaiser Corporation, overseeing all internal and external diversity programs for the region.

Prior to his role at Kaiser, Cobb served in corporate-level human resource positions at Paychex Corporation for eight years, and at The Money Store overseeing hiring for 42 states and Europe. He started his career in human resources with the State of California and County of Sacramento. As a student at Sac State, he also played on the men’s basketball team. He lives in Sacramento.

Tanya D. Markis, ’92, B.S., Biological Sciences, is selfemployed as a partner in an optometry practice in Grass Valley, Calif. She met her business partner, Diana Holcomb, while attending Sac State. They were both pre-optometry students majoring in biological sciences, and both went on to attend the College of Optometry in Fullerton, Calif. Markis is now married and has a 6 yearold son. She says her practice is doing well and she loves her new home and location.

Henry Kreuter, ’94, M.A., tion opportunities for eligible French, and former Sacrastudents to succeed in college. mento Mascot, the Big Tomato, Among other career positions, has just produced his second he spent three years with fitness video. He has served the University of Phoenix as on the boards of the American the department chair for the Church in Paris and the Spanish graduate education program.

Association of Jeet Kune Do. He Jones and his wife, Brooke, live lives in Santa Barbara where he in Pleasanton, Calif. runs www.maintenanceworkRuben S. Lerma, ’96, B.A., Art, out.com. He can be reached at ’97, Credential (Education Art), hkreuter@gmail.com. has graduated from Officer Jason Jones, ’96, B.A., English, Candidate School Phase III has earned his doctorate in training at North Fort Lewis in educational leadership from Tacoma, Wash., and was comSt. Mary’s College while conmissioned as a second lieutenducting a study in Long Beach ant in the U.S. Army National about effective math teachers. Guard. Lerma was formerly a His plans include speaking at security forces supervisor with conferences and conducting the California Army National large-scale policy research in Guard in San Luis Obispo. He education. Jones and his family has served in the military for six have created the Dwight Jones years. He lives in Sacramento.

Memorial With Kids in Mind Stephanie Parsons, ’96, B.S., scholarship fund in memory of Biological Science, has been his late father and they are rais- hired as project manager for ing money to give to deserving the biological resources and students from Siskiyou County. land management group in the He currently manages a chilCentral Valley/Sierra region at dren’s enrichment program in Environmental Science Associthe tri-cities area of Union City, ates, an environmental consultFremont and Newark, Calif. He ing firm in Sacramento. Parsons says the program “gives back has more than 12 years of to the community opportuniexperience and was a biologist ties for summer enrichment and project manager at Quad for children entering grades Knopf. She lives in Cool, Calif.

4-9.” Jones has taught English Susan List Bassett, ’97, B.A., at the secondary level for three Government-Journalism, and years and worked in a program her husband Kevin Bassett welthat serves disadvantaged comed their son, Jack Walter, students and provides retenon Dec. 7, 2007. She is home

Stan Barrick, B.AA., Mathematics, ’70, Education Credential, ’75, M.A., Teacher Education, speaking at an event recognizing key aspects of university development, enrichment, community involvement or expansion. Stan’s story here in this caption is another mini story, or, additional angle on the story below - another entrance for the average cursory reader.

Alumni appearance event: recognition story Stan Barrick, ’67, B.A., Mathematics, ’70, Education Credential, ’75, M.A., appears in this story, talking about his involvement in things related to these faux science photos below.

The idea here is to create a full-page space within the alumni section (within

Records) to highlight a particular person for a particular reason. The addition of photos below makes this story space very small; the smaller the story space the more likely readers will actually read the copy. The small photo space gives an area to show small jewel-like images that will

heighten interest without being textually informational - another device to create interest with meaning being secondary.

Stan Barrick, ’67, B.A., Mathematics, ’70, Education Credential, ’75, M.A., appears in this story, talking about his things related to these faux science photos below.

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Records full-time with Jack and working part-time providing legislative and research support for a government affairs group. She is a former Assembly Fellow and State Hornet editor-inchief. The Bassett family lives in Gold River.

Michelle Cordova, ’97, B.A., Two-Dimensional Art Studio, has been pursuing her artwork

and has shown her work in sev- Cordova credits her teachers eral Sacramento galleries. She at Sac State for the passion she married in 1996 and moved has for painting: Jack Ogden, to the Greenhaven area to be Jimi Suzuki and Brenda Louie, near the Sacramento Delta, the and for art history, the teachmain inspiration for her work. ings of Catherine Turrill and Since graduation, Cordova has Frank LaPena. She is also an traveled extensively, includArt-o-Mat artist. Art-o-Mat ing journeys throughout The machines are old vending Netherlands, Belgium, England, machines refurbished to sell Wales, Ireland, Italy, and Japan. art the size of a cigarette pack.

She has sold several of these small works at the Crocker Art Museum and in several locations throughout the United States.

Diedra (DeDe) Stirnaman, ’97, B.A., Communication Studies, reports that she is very happily married to Ray, a command sergeant major in the Army.

Stirnaman is a public affairs

Alumni Profile:

George Raya, ’72, Government, UC Berkeley where he made critical can trace the start of his reputation ties to gay activists in the Bay Area. as one of the founding fathers of gay In 1974, he became the first full-time rights to his formative years at Sac gay rights legislative advocate in SacState. ramento.

This space features a smaller photo Raya’s first victory was AB 489, the than on page 39, but has room for “Consenting Adults Bill” authored by more words. What’s the difference?

Assemblymember Willie Brown. The Here you have space for one perreform legalized sex between consonality photo or portrait and a long senting adults and opened the door caption. This acts as a page-within-a- “We wanted to advance gay rights page, so folks who don’t want to look when there were none.” at a story this long will bail out into The passage of the bill was the the small pictures and red-headinged White House in 1977. For the first time paragraphs focused on individual in House. Raya was one of 14 activists alumni. Interspersing photos of chosen to participate. alumni across the spread creates addi“The results of that three-hour meeting tional points of entry for the reader. led to many important federal policy This is the first long block of text changes that altered the lives of gays and the back-to-front reader will experilesbians for the better,” Raya says. ence, and so should be weighted A case manager for the Sacramento accordingly. This subject has a strong County Department of Human Assisportrait, and an interesting narritance, Raya continues to participate in tive. Raya and other club founders causes close to his heart. He is a board received a great deal of support, but member of Capital Gay Rodeo Associalso strong resistance. After taking ation (www.capitalcrossroads.org) and Homosexual Freedom found its place is a member of the Sacramento Parks on the campus. and Recreation Commission.

“Through the club, we worked to Raya says. “I’ve worked on demystify homosexuality,” Raya says. national and state issues, and now I “Our message was we were the same want to work with my neighbors as everyone else.” on concerns closer to home.”

After graduation, Raya attended —Kim Nava

40 | SSM:f09

PHOTO BY justin short

George Raya, ’72: Gay rights crusader

specialist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, headquartered in Washington, D.C. She has volunteered to deploy to Iraq to be the public affairs director of the Gulf Region Division at the Corps’ headquarters in Baghdad. They make their permanent home in Odenton, Md.

first place for feature writsponsored by both Sac State ing for “Cancer as Creator,” a and the Grant Union High cancer survivor’s story; second School District (now Twin place under the best writing Rivers Unified School District). category for “A Mustard Seed,” While in college, she was also a story of a developmentally a point guard for the Hornets disabled man and his struggle until a knee injury ended her in life; and second place for collegiate career. Grigsby and arts and entertainment coverhusband Frank live in Rio Linda age. Garcia’s past accomplishwith Riley, 6, and Tyler, 2. ments include additional CaliDanielle Newton, ’98, B.A., ’00, fornia Newspaper Publishers M.A., English (Creative Writing), awards and Associated Press moved from Sacramento to awards. Garcia graduated Seattle in 2004 and then last magna cum laude and is a Eric (EJ) Renner, ’00, B.S., Recyear relocated to Auburn, Wash. reation Administration, is a spe- member of Phi Kappa Phi and to work at Green River Commucial education teacher, teaching Lambda Pi Eta. She lives in nity College where she works Fairfield, Calif. would lead to students with mid- to moderin the foundation office. ate-level learning disabilities at the job I have David Enns, ’99, B.M., Music the middle school level. Renner Alice Winston Carney, ’98, and Music Management, writes, actually walked with the Class M.A., Communication Stud“I never thought my degree of 1997 at commencement but ies, was recently would lead to officially graduated in 2000 by installed as presithe job I have finishing “my outstanding six dent of Soroptinow…honking units.” He also received his edu- mist International bulb horns under cation certificates in 2006. In of Greater Sacramy armpits and college, Renner participated in mento, a world‘legpits.’” Dave Air Force ROTC in 1990-91 and wide organizahas been on the later was an officer in Assocition of profes“Tonight Show ated Students, Inc. He lives in sional and busiwith Jay Leno,” Fair Oaks. ness women who “America’s Got Roberts, ‘99, Renner, ‘00 work through Andrea E. Garcia, ’04, B.A., Talent” where he Communication Studies (Public service projects was a semi-finalto advance human rights and Relations), is a health and ist, “The Gong Show” which he the status of women. Carney social services reporter for won, and many would lead to Solano County’s Daily Republic. is also a faculty member in the job I have other domestic the Communication Studies At the California Newspaper and overseas media. He’s been Department at Sac State. She Publishers Association awards in half-time shows at NBA, NHL, and her husband, James, live in MLB, AFL, Eurocup ALL-STAR, this past year, she garnered Sacramento. college and minor league Shelia Townsend Grigsby, ’98, games. Enns has also been the emcee at concerts, churches, B.S., Physical Education, ’99 Magic Castle in Hollywood, and ’04, Education Credential, and colleges across the nation. was named Teacher of the He invites you to check his Year at Rio Linda Junior High website, www.davethehornSchool. She has taught physiguy.com. Enns and his wife, Amy, cal education at the school ’99, B.S., Speech Pathology and since 2003. Before that, she Audiology, reside in Colorado spent five years teaching the Springs, Colo. same subject at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High. ExcelRebecca Gardner, ’99, B.A., ling in several sports, Grigsby Government and Humanities, played on varsity teams in has joined McDonough Holhigh school even though she land & Allen PC, a leading Caliwas a freshman and was later fornia law firm representing Renner, ‘00 given a five-year scholarship

2000s

Ennis, ‘90

both private and public sector clients. Gardner is an estate planning and probate associate in its Business Services Practice Group. She is a director of the Sacramento Estate Planning Council, a of Professionals in Estate Planning and a member of the Sacramento Area Special Needs Trust Study Group. She and the State Bar, earned her juris doctorate from the UC Davis School of Law in 2003 after graduating summa cum laude from Sac State. She is a board member of the Sacramento State Alumni and lives in Citrus Heights.

Danielle Roberts, ’99, B.S., Biological Sciences, has worked for the Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff’s Criminalistics Laboratory for the last seven years. Currently, she is a forensic toxicologist who is assigned to the Forensic Alcohol Unit. Roberts is responsible for the blood and breath alcohol programs for both Contra Costa and Solano Counties.

———————————— Consider all text and images in this document as informal placeholders, and not intended for publication. All images and text are copyrighted and are the property of their authors or owners, and are not shown here for reproduction. This document is the product of research into redesigning Sac State Magazine, and is not intended to convey any message about a specific individual or organization.

SSM:f09 | 41

Records: www.calendar.csus.edu

Big Sky home opener vs.

Portland State, Jan. 2

January Athletics. Men’s basketball, Big Sky home opener vs.

Portland State, Jan. 2, Hornets Nest. Tickets at Sac State Ticket Office, (916) 278-4323 or Tickets.com.

Festival of the Arts, Mar. 18–21

Gala

Green & Gold 4th Annual Green & Gold Gala, Feb. 20

December Exhibit. Dorothea Lange, “This Light, This Air: Dorothea Lange’s FSA Photographs of the Central Valley, 1930-1945,” through March 7, University Library Gallery Annex.

(916) 278-4189.

Commencement, Dec. 19–20

Event. Winter Commencement, Dec. 19–20, Arco Arena. (916) 278-4724 or www.csus.edu/commence.

Dorothea Lange Exhibit, to March 7

Dauer Ceramics, to Feb. 28

42 | SSM:f09

Exhibit. Dauer Ceramics Collection, featuring contemporary studio ceramics, through Feb. 28, University Library Gallery. (916) 278-4189.

Event. Lenaea Festival, high school theater competition of one-act plays, scenes, musical solos and other presentations, Jan. 30–Feb. 1. (916) 278-6702.

Athletics. Gymnastics home opener vs. Illinois State, Jan. 30, Hornet Gym. Tickets at Sac State Ticket Office, (916) 2784323 or Tickets.com.

February Event. Green and Gold Gala, Feb. 20, University Union Ballroom. (916) 278-2783.

Dance. Sacramento Black Art of Dance, directed by Linda Goodrich, Feb. 26–March 1 and March 4–8, Solano Hall 1010. Tickets at Sac State Ticket Office, (916) 278-4323 or Tickets.com.

March Event. Festival of the Arts, March 18–21, various campus venues. (916) 278-6502, or www.csus.festivalofthearts.edu.

Lia Robertson: we met this student

on the Quad.

Hometown: San Jose and Placerville, Calif.

Major: Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration. Class of 2007.

Background: Grew up in San Jose, then moved to Placerville and attended Ponderosa High School. Moving from a major city to a rural area gave Robertson an appreciation for the natural areas she didn’t have access to as a child.

Influences: “One of my professors really took me under his wing. He helped me figure out where I wanted to go and opened my mind to some other career options. He gave me the names and numbers of people I could contact for more information, and because of that, I ended up working at the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. And I even worked for the Forest Service for a while.”

Highlight: “I really appreciated the experience of living in such a multicultural area and getting to know students from all kinds of backgrounds.”

Proudest accomplishment: Earning the Senior Recognition Award from her major’s department. “My college education took a lot of hard work, and it was stressful at times, but it’s worth it. I get to work outside and educate people about things that really interest me.”

Destination: Park Interpretive Specialist at the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. “Eventually I’d like to open a nature center in a community that needs one.”

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Festival of the Arts, Mar. 18–21; www.csus.edu/festivalofthearts09. Make the back a surprising, provocative, thoughtfu way into the magazine.