August 1985

August 1985

SPAN 2 The Thinking Man's Rock Star

by Ken Emerson

7 Stretching the Span

by Albert Rosenfeld

8 Never Too Old to Learn

12 A Gallery of Americans

by Mal Oettinger

14

Dr. Kanwal Gambhir and the Stuff of Life

by Norma Holmes

16

Exchanging Experiences

by Vichitra Sharma

19

The Corporate Prophet

by Randall Poe

23 Pop Goes Architecture!

by Jonathan Z. Larsen

28 Paul Newman, Salad King byA.E. Hotchner

32

Rambling in New Orleans

by Vasant Kumar Bawa

34

The City That Care Forgot

by S. Frederick Starr

37

On the Lighter Side

38 Focus On ...

40

"India Enthralls Me"

by Aruna Dasgupta

41

Sharing a Passion

by Martin A. David

Madam Governor

by Marge Runnion

44

Resonances of a State Visit

46

Mission Recovery

47

An Indian in Orbit

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Mal Oettinger

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Oasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Photographs: Front cover-courtesy Paul Newman. Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha. 2-3-Benno Friedman. 5-Ebet Roberts.

8-9-Dean Abramson. 16-17-Avinash Pasricha. 23-Ezra Stollerl Esto. 24-25-Bob Adelman. 28 top-Douglas Kirkland/Sygma. 31Ebet Roberts. 32-36-illustrations

by Mario Miranda. 38-R.K. Sharma. 39 top-Martha Swope. 40-Avinash Pasricha. 41-ŠPhilip Pavliger. 45-C. Hightower. 46-NASA. 47 right-Avinash Pasricha.

Inside back cover and back cover-NASA. Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this maga¡ zine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by Raj Kumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs.25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: When 'it rains pop corn, Paul Newman pours charity. The superstar donates all profits from his food empire to deserving charities. See page 28.

Back cover: Astronauts Dale Gardner (left) and Joseph Allen end their successful mission to salvage stray satellites in space on a light note by putting up a "For Sale" sign. See story on page 46.

It's my penultimate Saturday as editor of SPAN, a monsoon afternoon when the threewheeled scooters ply the streets of Delhi like gondolas in Venice. Makes one feel like Pro spero at the end of The Tempest, saying farewell to his magic and preparing to leave his blissful island.

The concept of "the SPAN family" may sound mawkish to outsiders but it is immensely nurturing to us who work here. Accomplished professionals edit this magazine, produce its sterling graphics, assure that its production meets high standards and search for articles to please its readers; they work in a sometimes chaotic universe. At its best the magazine is produced in the atmosphere of the newspaper office in Citizen Kane, when Orson Welles and his colleagues were enraptured with the excitement of puttmg out a newspaper. Many of SPAN's staff have been with the magazine since its inception (wow! a quarter-century ago) and none of them has lost creativity or enthusiasm. Pupul Jayakar said that the Indian craftsworker is not "a mechanical turner-outer of objects ..•. Each one is a creator and he can work in collaboration with others." That is certainly true of the artists, editors and writers who work for this magazine.

The reason SPAN folks have not become stale is the responsiveness of the magazine's readers--a wonderfully demanding lot, frequently writing to get more information on some facet of an article that particularly interests them, pointing out some error of syntax that mischievously ran the gauntlet of our editors unscathed, or a picture that was flopped inadvertently. Sometimes they tell us about their own experiences in relation to some article that ran in SPAN. I have found that the letters we receive from readers reflect an l.IDusualdegree of thoughtfulness and a touching measure of warmth.

India is rich in writers and my four years here have been immeasurably brightened by those who have agreed to become adopted members of the SPAN family by writing for the magazine. I would like to mention a few among the many superb contributors whose work I have admired. A.G. Noorani's series on the U.S. Constitution is to me a masterful blend of social conscience, legal scholarship and lucid exposition. Jacquelin Singh's literary reflections never fail to charm me. I've enj oyed the elegance of Nayantara Sahgal, P. Lal, T.K. Mahadevan and Darshan Singh Maini. I'm glad we have published articles on Indo-U.S. ventures by Malini Seshadri and the literary criticism of Thomas Palakeel, perhaps SPAN's yOl.IDgestauthor, who began by submitting unsolicited manuscripts. Wild and whimsical artists like Mario Miranda and Mickey Patel are a delight and an ornament to the magazine.

Our revels now are ended. I will leave SPAN and India to take up editorial duties in Vienna, Austria. India and many of its people have been woven into my life and have enriched it innneasurably. I remember the vitality and generosity of subscribers I have met in Calcutta, Delhi, Madras, Bombay and other cities. Their suggestions for SPAN resulted in some of our best articles, I believe. I enjoyed meeting journalism students, one of whom would always ask, ''Why does SPAN print propaganda?" I would answer that we try to print the truth and are aware that we cannot encompass all truths, that we try to present a favorable image of the United States, consonant with truth, because on the whole I believe in that image. India does not lack sources that present criticism of America. I've seen magazines that proclaim friendship for Indian readers and then naughtily bore them. SPAN prefers to try to allow a variety of Americans to present themselves and their ways of life with exuberance and good humor.

It doesn't seem like four years since my predecessor, Jacob Sloan, welcomed me in this very page. Time passes quickly when you're having fun. They have been memorable years, and I hope my successor, Warren McCurdy, who joins the SPAN family this month, will relish the job as much.

--M.O.

The Thi ¡ng Man's Rock Star

by KEN EMERSON

Successfully straddling the two worlds of pop music and avant-garde, David Byrne heads a band that makes quirky, intellectually intriguing rock-and-roll.

Peroxide and black leather. The elevator at Manhattan's Hard Rock Cafe is crammed with members of rock groups trooping their colors. A live radio broadcast has just ended, and musicians are descendingCheap Trick, loan lett's Blackhearts, and, pressed against the back of the car, a rail-thin man whose short, dark hair makes him look at once adolescent and ascetic. His somber designer suit may be high fashion, but the ballpoint pen protruding from its breast pocket is definitely high-school nerd.

Clearly, he doesn't belong in this gaggle of pop notorieties. But, out on the street, two young women squeal and one asks for his autograph. Nonplussed but polite, he scribbles "David Byrne" and hastens into the night.

A few weeks later, on a bright March afternoon, no one at the Brooklyn Museum appears to recognize the 32-year-old lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of the rock group TalkIng Heads, even though he is gazing up at a life-size cutout of himself.

The white silhouette is part of a construction, entitled "Heads Will Roll," by Robert Longo, one of the young artists lumped together as Neo-Expressionists.

A museum is as likely a place for Byrne to be found as the Hard Rock Cafe, because he straddles two worlds: pop music and the avant -garde.

Over the course of 10 years and 7 albums (an eighth, as yet untitled, is scheduled for release soon), the Talking Heads have evolved from austere minimalists into exuberant eclecticists. In the process, they have established themselves as the most consistently imaginative white rock band in America, whose highly stylized presentation owes more to the visual arts than to the gaudy theatrics of pop performance.

It's a thinking man's band that makes rock-androll intellectually intriguing in a way it has

seldom been since the late 1960s, when professors were applauding the poetry of Bob Dylan and explicating the ironies of the Beatles.

Byrne's lyrics have, from the beginning, shuttled between the cerebral and the surreal, with side trips into the schitzy. In the very first song he wrote, "Psycho Killer," the protagonist talks to himself in formal French because, Byrne thought, "it seemed a natural delusion that a psychotic killer would imagine himself as very refined and use a foreign language to talk to himself."

Alone at his desk (above), David Byrne could be writing lyrics for an opera. With his group, the Talking Heads (right), the accent is on rock. The Heads are, left to right, Jerry Harrison, Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz.

The incongruity of introducing French "I think there's no contradiction beinto what otherwise might seem B-movie tween my doing Knee Plays and doing material is typical of the Talking Heads. pop songs with Talking Heads," says Byrne.

Because their work is so complex and Indeed, his ability to work both sides of the quirky, they are not superstars. Although street, to jaywalk, as it were, across the lines one of their albums, Speaking in Tongues, dividing high and low art, artistic integrity has sold slightly more than a million copies and commercial popularity, makes Byrne in the United States, they usually sell half emblematic of a new generation of creative that many. (Compare those figures to 9.5 talent we've grown used to labeling, for million for Prince's album PurpLe Rain.) want of a better tag, Post-Modernist.

But Talking Heads' audience has steadily On a cold afternoon in a small, cluttered expanded, and, recently, still more converts Greenwich Village rehearsal studio, the have been won by Stop Making Sense, a Talking Heads are practicing songs for their Talking Heads concert film, directed by next album.

Jonathan Demme, which received the "It's so much fun to be able to relax and National Society of Film Critics award for just play," says Tina Weymouth, 34, putting best documentary of 1984. It has dissemi- down her bass guitar during a break, "withnated an indelible image of Byrne, his eyes out feeling you have to be avant-garde all popping and his Adam's apple bobbing to the time. We spent so many years trying to the beat as he performs an elephantine yet be original that we don't know what original agile dance in an immense white suit. is anymore."

Byrne, independently of Talking Heads, Indeed, the songs the band has just run has another audience as well. In 1981, the through, occasionally consulting notebooks choreographer Twyla Tharp presented an and scratch pads for the chord changes and lyrics, do sound surprisingly straightforward 80-minute dance, "The Catherine Wheel," set to an original score he composed and and, at times, even old-fashioned. One "has the merry jingle of late 1950s rock-and-rollperformed with a variety of musicians.

In January, at New York's Public Thea- . even if its disconcerting lyrics are about a ter, Byrne put on a performance piece, woman who literally levitates out of her "The Tourist Way of Knowledge," at a suburban backyard. Another song slips in a benefit for Mabou Mines, the avant-garde little country-and-western sentimentality. theater troupe. Wearing a cardigan right out "The drugs of the Eighties," jokes Chris of Father Knows Best, Byrne narrated a Frantz, 33, from behind his black drum kit. slide show, depicting a cross-country vaca- "Sex and corn." He punctuates the wisetion, with a deadpan reading drawn, in part, crack with a drum roll. In addition to being from a diary he had written as a lO-year-old. the drummer and offstage comedian of the Byrne has also just released an album, group, Frantz is Tina Weymouth's husband Music for the Knee PLays, music and texts he and the father of their 2-year-old son, has composed for avant-garde theater direc- Robin. tor Robert Wilson's epic opera, the CIVIL The Talking Heads seem intent but rewarS. Called Knee PLays because they laxed as they put musical flesh on the bare function as "joints" between the op- bones of the demonstration tapes Byrne has era's longer scenes-Wilson used similar recorded at home. Byrne, who reads music devices in Einstein on the Beach, his cele- "only with extreme difficulty," usually roughs out these tapes with his voice and brated collaboration with the composer Philip Glass-these brief pieces are scored guitar and a rhythm box, an electronic defor brass ensemble and owe far more to vice that can be set to repeat any¡ desired contemporary avant-garde "serious music" drum beat. Byrne originates nearly all of Talking Heads' songs, but their arrangethan they do to rock-and-roll.

"We are watching someone realize a ment and execution are definitely collavery deep talent," says Glass. "It's highly borative.

"I know what the chords are," says Jerry unconventional, and that makes it interesting. I think he will be writing music that Harrison, 36, as he hesitates among several everyone is going to have to think of as electric keyboards. "But I've got to change concert music, and not just the Talking the end, where it vamps out."

Byrne, dressed down in a navy turtleneck, Heads." (Byrne, as well as pop songwriter Paul Simon and performance artist Laurie jeans and moth-eaten slipper-socks, empties Anderson, is currently writing lyrics that with chopsticks a plastic container of bean Glass intends to set to music for an album sprouts, tofu and noodles, then picks up his guitar once again. of songs.)

"Did you like that when I held one note?" he asks after improvising a guitar part.

"Sounded like DeBarge," Frantz volunteers, referring to a' popular black band.

"B ut if it sounds like someone else ... " Byrne trails off dubiously.

The Talking Heads have sounded like nobody else from the very beginning, when they started playing together at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Born in Scotland, Byrne was reared, from the second grade, in Baltimore, where his father, now retired, worked as an electrical engineer for Westinghouse. In high school, he was something of a comic rebel, running for student office one year on a platform to "get the jukebox back in the cafeteria and eliminate faculty advisers. I came pretty close," Byrne says with a chuckle, "but I never won, ever."

Like most teenagers in the 1960s, Byrne fell under the spell of rock-and-roll. (The Beatles' "Day Tripper" is the first single he remembers buying.) For the fun of it, he began playing guitar in a local college coffeehouse, performing rock songs in a folkmusic style and "comedy things-I'd play aggressive songs on the ukulele."

When it came time for college, Byrne hesitated between art and technical school, "because I was interested in the ideas of science and matt(-;;nd I saw no difference between that and art." Byrne settled on RISD in 1970, but transferred after a year to a Baltimore art school before dropping out of college altogether.

He returned to the school of design to visit his friend, Chris Frantz, still enrolled there. Together, they formed the Artistics (a k a the Autistics), "a ragged, loud rock band," in Byrne's words, to play school dances.

By 1975, they were sharing an apartment in New York with Frantz's girlfriend, Tina Weymouth, another student from the school of design, and working as a trio under the natI1e Talking Heads. Tina Weymouth had perfutmed in a hand-bell-ringing group at the 1964 New York World's Fair and had taught herself the guitar, but she had never played bass. "The whole idea of an unaccomplished bass player," she explains, "was that David and Chris could mold me. I already shared many of the same concepts, intellectually. " Some of those concepts were pretty rarefied. Byrne explains that he became "fascinated by conceptual art. In particular, there was some that just used language.

there was a certain applying of the way you make decisions about paintings to songs."

The music of the Talking Heads' early days had a stiff, twitchy beat-a cross between a goose step and Saint Vitus' dance.

Byrne squawked his vocals like a chicken whose neck was being wrung. It was difficult to tell whether he was Angst-ridden, ironic or simply inept.

"My singing doesn't sound as much like a screech as it used to," Byrne says today.

"It was never intended to. When we began, I found that I could hear myself above the noise better if I sang in a higher pitch."

Some Talking Heads songs were funny, with Byrne sounding like a lovesick chemistry student who had been in the laboratory too long. Others were mystifying:

David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, winner of the American National Society of Film Critics award for the best documentary of 1984.

They'd just write a statement on the wall, and other ones would put out little pamphlets. There was a group called Art & Language that just talked all the time in print. And I thought that was pretty much the ultimate in refining and eliminating all the superfluous stuff in art and being left with nothing but the idea. Which seemed to me an extension of the notion of art that established itself in the early part of the century-the whole notion of something being modern, of modern art, of the Bauhaus and all those kinds of things. That seemed to be taking it to its logical extreme, which made perfect sense to me."

In the beginning, recalls Frantz, their New York audiences "were painters and writers, almost exclusively." And when, in 1977, they added a musician with more professional experience on keyboards and guitar, Jerry Harrison, he was an architecture major from Harvard.

But the Talking Heads did not necessarily consider their music art, as opposed to rock-and-roll. "We crossed that line a long time ago," Tina Weymouth says. "We said, -'Look, we know we're in a sleazy business.

We're not going to call ourselves artists.'"

Still, as Harrison explains, "because everyone in the band had studied visual arts,

As the heart finds the good thing The feeling is multiplied Add the will to the strength And it equals conviction As we economize Efficiency is multiplied To the extent I am determined The result is the good thing:'" "I'd been reading a lot of books about systems theory and management theory," Byrne says, "theories about how the structure of a business can be like that of an organism. And how the creative process can be broken down into almost a computer flow chart. So I started looking at music and the structure of words that way." Why? He scratches his head. "I'm not sure. It's a philosophy that tends to be very mechanistic, and I found that fascinating for a while. I was trying to see, I guess in some vain hope, if there was an underlying rational basis for everything. " Talking Heads conformed to no one's idea of a rock-and-roll band. "When we were playing clubs," Byrne says, "the typical rock stance was aggressive-black leather and shades and all that. We were deliber'ately going against that."

Talking Heads also dispensed with that oldstandby, sex appeal. "I must say I think it's just not in me," Byrne says, "to flaunt sex on stage. It's probably my upbringing, but it's something I've never been able to bring myself to do.;' Indeed, the group rejected all the conventional wisdom-and razzle-dazzleabout rock-and-roll stagecraft and just stood there, stock-still, wearing unprepossessing T-shirts or alligator shirts. "We • "The Good Thing" by David Byrne.Š 1978Bleu Disque Music Company Inc. All rights reserved.

Inc. & Index Music,

threw out the idea of costumes, of lighting, of any kind of movement or gestures on stage," Byrne says.

The uncompromising severity of Talking Heads' early performances created an excruciating intellectual tension without providing the emotional release traditionally associated with rock-and-roll.

You left a concert feeling high, all right, but it was not the high of catharsis; it was the hyperventilating rush of an anxiety attack.

The Talking Heads' musical sophistication, as well as the way they created songs, began to undergo a transformation when, on their second album, they started working with Brian Eno as their producer.

Brian Peter George St. John de Baptiste de la Salle Eno is an eccentric Englishman who was a founding member in the early 1970s of the British band Roxy Music. He is not a musician per se; ideas are his instrument, and those are far-ranging.

To him, the whole world, from Third-World folk songs to the clangor of modern industry, is musique concrete, raw material to be dissected, distorted, juxtaposed and reassembled in the recording studio. "It was like taking the songwriting process," Byrne says, "and exploding it into its different components."

Gradually, over the course of three albums, Talking Heads and Eno packed more and more components into the music.

They went as far afield as Africa and the Middle' East, incorporating exotic percussion and polyrhythmic interplay. Closer to home, they adapted the synthesizer squiggles and heavy-bottomed basslines of contemporary American black funk.

The words as well as the music seemed to dart in all directions. Some songs were improvised; others were cryptic collages. "It was a period," Byrne says, bemused, "when I was coming to accept the idea that rational thinking has its limits."

As the songs became denser and ever more danceable, they burst out of artists' lofts and college dormitories and onto the blaring "hot boxes" of city streets. The music eventually became so complex that four musicians could not play all the parts on stage, and the group recruited as many as half a dozen other musicians-guitarists, keyboard and percussion players and backup singers, black as well as white-to accompany them on tour.

"In a sort of sociological way," Jerry Harrison says, "I felt there was a growing racism in the United States and that, in a very quiet way, we made this big point. We were both male aod female, black and

white, on stage, having fun, no one in a particularly subservient role, and no one drawing attention to it."

The results were liberating. When the expanded group performed live, says Byrne, "the excitement or release that I thought was possible from music became reality. It became impossible not to dance around to it on stage, very hard not to have some sort of good time. Here was the way out of a dilemma that we'd put ourselves in, where the songs were perceived as being more and more about personal Angst. Here was music that was proposing a solution to things like that."

"But, of course," Byrne says selfdeprecatingly, "I didn't notice that until we were doing it. Looking back, it's like we rediscovered the wheel."

David Byrne's SoBo loft is tidy "Iowtech": stackable, gunmetal gray chairs, slate table tops on Erector Set supports.

He shares it, and a rented house in Los Angeles, with his companion of three years, Adelle Lutz.

Half-Japanese and halfAmerican, Adelle Lutz, like her sister Tina Chow, once modeled. Now she is a jill-ofall-trades in the American performing and video arts.

On the gray industrial carpet in the main room, which combines working, cooking and dining space, are strewn hundreds of Polaroid pictures: architectural details, fragments of graffiti and posters, close-ups of fruits and vegetables in street-market bins.

Some of the pictures are arrayed in rectangular grids on brown wrapping paper.

"I'm just moving them around," Byrne explains, "and seeing if anything happens."

Trusting intuition and improvisation within a rational though arbitrary structure like a grid seems to be Byrne's standard operating procedure. He cites the piecemeal evolution of "Once in a Lifetime," from the 1980 album, Remain in Light, the last Talking Heads record produced by Brian Eno. The song's dramatic shifts also make it a highlight of Byrne's recent film Stop

Making Sense.

"It started with a guitar riff that I played for the band," Byrne remembers.

"It's in there, in the chorus, but you would never pick it out." That and "another little guitar lick," plus a rudimentary bass part, were all they had to go on.

"And then, in the process of recording, we played. alternately, eight bars of one riff and eight of the other riff. Later, we added other rhythms and instruments on top of those, until the whole thing was just packed

where creativity, or new things, come from. with stuff," Byrne continues. or scrambled or "And we'd play with switching things in From being misunderstood and out. So that let's say, if you had eight rearranged. " Tina Weymouth would concur, although different parts playing continuously, we'd she puts it more wryly. Talking Heads' say, 'O.K., for these four bars, you'll only hear those four, and then, when it comes to music, she says, is like "that New Yorker these four bars, we'll switch those four off cartoon where a man on a sofa says to the and switch these ones on.''' , woman beside him, 'Yes, I know I'm just Such composing could only occur in the one long line of cliches, but I put them together in a really interesting way, don't modern recording studio.

"It's trial and error," Byrne admits. "I you think?' We're taking cliches and hoping had written some words, but they weren't that, since we think they're funny, maybe working. Brian sang a melody of the chorus, other people will, too.

"Like David in his big suit. He takes the nonsense syllables. And I said, 'Make me a cassette of this arrangement with your nonmost obvious thing, and people all go, "Genius!

Genius!'" sense singing in the choruses.'

The origins of the huge white suit that "And then I went home and played it very loud. I'd been listening to some Byrne dons for a couple of numbers in Stop preachers on the radio. I played [the cassetMaking Sense are not obvious to most te] very loud and adopted the character of a viewers of the movie. It is the most memorable prop in the film and the focus of its preacher and kind of spontaneously spurted advertising.

"That was my choice," says out the lyrics that became the verses. I'm Byrne. "It makes a big statement that the not sure how it came about. At some point, band has accepted the idea of theatrical I just hit upon the water stuff."

The verses Byrne hollers are increasingly artifice. " frantic questions-"Where is that large Byrne describes the genesis of the suit: automobile?"

"What is that beautiful During dinner in Tokyo with Adelle Lutz house?" "Am I right? .. AmI wrong?"and a friend, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, Byrne was wondering how to stage that undermine the certainties and rewards of bourgeois life. Each is rhetorically introTalking Heads' upcoming tour.

Lehl, duced, as if from the pulpit, by the phrase, according to Byrne, "said something like, "And you may ask yourself." "The water 'Well, you know, in the theater, they say that everything should be a little bit bigger stuff" is a vaguely tribal-sounding chorus, than real life.' So I said, 'Well, of course! I'll chanted by the band: be sort of Mister Man, but a little bit Letting the days go by bigger.'

So I drew on a napkin a big let the water hold me down square, which I thought was like an icon of Letting the days go by Mister Man., water flowing underground "I also guess, since we were in Japan, it Into the blue again had a similarity to a lot of their costumes. It after the money's gone made the head look tiny, and the costume Once in a lifetime became this whole kind of set." water flowing underground. * Byrne's ideas often spring from such Byrne says that, in retrospect, the water sketches. From the bookshelf behind him he seems to him "a symbol of submission, of 'takes a red plastic looseleaf notebook and letting go. In that sense, it's both life and starts to turn the pages, onto which are death. It's a death that implies a rebirth or a affixed little pencil drawings, eight by thirresurrection of some sort. So the answer teen centimeters, opposite typed dialogue becomes, 'Don't worry, give up, and then and camera directions. It is the script he has you'll discover the answer'-or something written for True Stories, a feature-length to that effect. It's a very Islamic or Buddhist film he plans to direct later this year. kind of attitude, which has its similarity, I "The original drawing~ were pretty abguess, with the fundamentalist Christian stract ideas." He turns to a sketch of a plate religions. " laden with peas and two unidentifiable A guitar lick here, a radio sermon there. lumps. Below it is another sketch, an angled Synthesizers and jungle drums. It's the view of glass. "I wanted to do a dinner scene wrenching out of context and mixing and where the food gets rearranged into diffematching that appeal to Byrne. "I feel that's rent shapes on the table and a glass of milk lights up. The food is treated as an abstract. * "Once in aLifetime"

by David Byrne & Brian Eoo. Š 1980 Bleu Disque Music Company Inc. & E.G. Music Ltd. All righ,ls reserved.

(Text continued on page 31)

STRETCHINO THE SPAN

Medical researchers in America are well on their way to achieving both a longer lifespan and an old age that is not decrepit. The goal is not to find the Fountain of Youth, but to permit the individual "to die young as late as possible."

Can we start senescence-the aging process-on its way to obsolescence?

At any previous moment in scientific history, that would have been a ridiculous question. Yet the virtual abolition of old age as we have always known it has become the goal of a number of working gerontologists-specialists in the study not just of geriatrics, the infirmities of the human elderly, but of the aging process itself, in all species ..

The possibility of extending our years of useful vigor still does not attract much serious public discussion. We have learned to scoff at all the failed attempts, from before Juan Ponce de Leon's 16th-century quest for the Fountain of Youth in Florida to the purveyors of "monkey glands" and other frauds in modern times. And for all the present American interest in fitness, many adults remain persuaded that "devoting one's life to keeping well is one of the most tedious of ailments,'; as the 17th-century French essayist La Rochefoucauld put it.

The gerontologists' goal-to permit the individual "to die young as late as possible"-is apt to be dismissed as just another tiresome sign of what social critic Christopher Lasch has called our "culture of narcissism."

Nonetheless, we are approaching a more detailed understanding of senescence. Scientists have long established that there is nothing immutable about the lifespan of a givenspecies.

This was proven during the 1930s, when Clive McCay of Cornell University showed that rats would live a third longer if their diet were kept balanced but held to near-starvation levels.

Today, gerontologists believe that progress toward interfering with the aging process can and is being made.

While nothing like an anti-aging vaccine is in prospect, the mechanism of aging' is becoming clearer, thanks to the rapid advance since the 1930s of gerontology and its associated sciences-biochemistry, cell biology, molecular genetics, immunology, endocrinology and the neurosciences.

The effects of aging are familiar: the progressive loss of hair

and teeth, the wrinkling and shrinking, the stoop and shuffle, the fading of hearing and sight. Inside, the lungs' maximum capacity declines (by 40 percent at age 80), and the heart pumps less efficiently as accumulated cholesterol and other debris gather on artery walls. The defenses against infection and stress begin to wither away, connective tissue stiffens, the sex urge becomes less insistent and the memory less reliable.

The standard charts illustrating this decline us.ually begin at age 30, the presumed peak of health and vigor. But most gerontologists now agree that, physically, the peak years end during the early twenties; some argue that they end at puberty.

The chief debate now centers on how aging takes place.

Even gerontologists used to joke that there were as many theories of aging as there were people seriously studying it.

Given the number and diversity of "events" that occur in the body's cells, organs and systems, the directions that investigation can take are almost limitless. In an aging organism, virtually every deteriorative change can prompt other types, in a "cascade effect." Thus, almost any type of aging change can be parlayed into a whole theory of senescence.

Most of the theories involve (a) a process of "wear and tear" on the human machine over time, or (b) the idea that we have "clocks" ticking away within us that are genetically programmed to dictate the manner and rate at which we age and die.

But if one theory turns out to be right, the others need not be wrong. A unified view of aging is slowly emerging that may encompass just about all of the theories, each explaining part of the process.

There are several wear-and-tear theories: "Garbage" accumulation. As cells age, they have a harder time disposing of their wastes. Some of this "garbage" is a fatty substance called lipofuscin, which accumulates especially in those cells that in adulthood no longer divide, such as brain and muscle cells. Eventually, lipofuscin may take up as much as 20 percent of a cell's available space. Think of the cell's working molecules as (Text continued on page JO)

Never Too Old to Learn

When Eugene Lynch of Oakmont, Pennsylvania, retired 10 years ago as an electrochemical engineer with Gulf Oil Research and Development in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he and his wife Dorothy decided they would devote a good portion of their time to study and travel. They enrolled at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, for a week of courses offered under the auspices of Elderhostel, a nonprofit organization that coordinates an international network of low-cost education programs for the elderly. The Lynches each paid $180 for tuition, room and board. There were no other charges.

The Lynches heard about Elderhostel

through their daughter, Catherine, second of three children. "Catherine is very active in the American Youth Hostel movement, and encouraged us to try Elderhostel," says Eugene. "We love traveling and we are always looking for new ways to explore places."

Elderhostel has expanded rapidly from 200 students at its inception in 1976 to more than 70,000 today. It offers a wide range of liberal arts and science courses at 700 universities and institutions in 10 countries. Students typically spend one week taking three courses from such diverse selections as creative writing, Canadian beekeeping, yoga, paradoxes in physics and Celtic culture. There are

no grades or tests, no prerequisites.

The Lynches decided to study art appreciation, opera and ecology of the Maine coast. "It was our first college experience in 50 years and we were very excited," says Dorothy, a seasoned traveler who accompanied her husband on many overseas assignments for Gulf.

"Our courses offered just the right combination of physical adventure and intellectual stimulation."

In the evenings, students may attend concerts, plays and sporting events on campus, provided free of charge by the universities. Many of the students visit archaeological sites, make boat excursions and take city tours as part of their

courses. These activIties promote close relationships and friendship among the students and enhance the study program.

During their week's activities, the Lynches met more than 40 other Elderhostelers from New York, Indiana, Colorado and Arizona.

Teachers are as enthusiastic as the Elderhostel students are. Ray Kenneally, who has taught art appreciation to Elderhostelers for six years, says, "I look forward to it. I think we get as much out of it as the students. I'm eager to learn what my students have to say. They've been out in the world and they each bring something unique to the class, which often ends in applause."

0

The University of New England's education programs for the elderly offer just the right combination of physical adventure and intellectual s~imulation, say students Dorothy and Eugene Lynch. The courses include boat trips to study the coast of Maine; nature photography; and art appreciation classes which lead to animated discussions.

S ••-HETCHING

THE

SPAN waiters in a nightclub trying to get across a dance floor that grows increasingly crowded: Service would get slower and finally might come to a standstill. Most gerontologists now view this phenomenonas a result, rather than a cause, of aging.

Cross-linkage. The body has many large molecules that perform indispensable functions. The so-called blueprints of life, the genes, are made up of m<)lecules of the nucleic acid DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid); other sizable molecules are proteins, including hormones and enzymes, and those that make up cartilage, tendons and other connective tissue. As the cells go about their complicated business, these molec~les keep bumping into one another and sometimes become attachedcross-linked.

The body can repair these mistakes, but its ability to do so decreases with age. The linked molecules can stop vital biochemical cycles in cells, cause bottlenecks on critical molecular assembly lines (such as the ones on which amino acids are made into proteins), stiffen connective tissue and create other forms of havoc. While this process doubtless contributes to aging, most gerontologists now believe that, like lipofuscin accumulation, cross-linkage is more a consequence than a cause.

Free radicals. In the course of normal oxidation-part of virtually every cellular process-small, highly charged pieces of the interacting molecules are often left over as by-products.

They are called free radicals. Because each of these has an electron yearning to unite with the first molecule that comes along, free radicals can cause molecular collisions.

Such collisions are heavily involved in all sorts of injury to cells, including the damage to the heart muscle that continues after a heart attack and to nervous tissue after injury to the brain or spinal cord, and various forms of radiation damage.

Free radicals also seem to be a cause of cross-linkage and lipofuscin accumulation. The free radical theory, put forward in 1954 by Denham Harman of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, has gained a great many adherents.

Somatic mutation. The genes in somatic cells-all those in the adult organism other than sperm and egg cells-were long known to be vulnerable to "point" mutations caused by the impact of, say, a cosmic ray or a potent chemical. The late Leo Szilard, .as he turned his attention from physics to biology during the 1950s, hypothesized that such "hits" accumulate over the years to impair the genes, causing the decline of cells and, ultimately, of the whole organism.

This theory has had its strong advocates. Nevertheless, the genes, once we began to understand them at all, turned out to be much more complex than originally thought. They coil and "supercoil" into complex configurations; the irreversible unraveling of these structures is suspected to be instrumental to the aging process. Also, DNA is now known to have a self-repair capacity. The decline of this capacity, as observed in living cells, constitutes another theory of aging.

Error catastrophes. Once any organism, including a human, is full-grown, one of the main functions of the DNA in its cells appears to be directing the manufacture of new proteins to be used for renewing the cell's own substance or for export as, say, hormones. In carrying out this "protein synthesis," the DNA's instructions are copied by another nucleic acid that carries the message into the main body of the cell; there, with the help of enzymes, the appropriate amino acids are strung together to

form the desired protein.

The fact that cells that keep dividing must continue to copy and recopy their genetic instructions suggested a Xerox model of aging to Alex Comfort (who is a respected gerontologist as well as the author of the popular Joy of Sex books). After many copies, a genetic message gradually fades. Even in cells that no longer divide, errors occur as the cell renews itself, and mistakes are made in the activities that depend 011 it. The cell can usually rectify such mistakes. But if it does not, and a crucial molecule is impaired, some important job does not get done. That, as Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has noted, can lead to further errors-and ultimately to what he calls an "error catastrophe" that can result in the cell's death. The error catastrophe theory does not now have many adherents, but it has spurred much fruitful thinking.

The decline of immunity. Roy Walford of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) argues that an important cause of aging is a breakdown of the immune system. For instance, in early adulthood the thymus (the gland in the upper chest whose hormones stimulate the white blood cells needed to fight infection and cancer) has already begun to shrink. As life goes on, the immune system loses some of its ability to recognize and attack bacteria and other invaders, as well as incipient cancer cells. The immune cells may also begin to attack the body's own healthy cells, leading to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and certain kidney ailments.

As for the "clock" theories, they assume that aging is genetically programmed, that a built-in "timer" exists. But where?

The cellular clock. One school of scientists holds that there is a timer in each cell. During the 1960s, Leonard Hayflick, now at the University of Florida, demonstrated convincingly that cells have a finite lifespan. In laboratory experiments, for instance, he was able to prove that one type of cell will divide into two only about 50 times before quitting. Even if these cells are frozen after 30 divisions, stored away, and then thawed, they will still divide only about another 20 times. Hayflick has also shown that the controls for this "aging under glass," as he calls it, are in the gene-bearing nucleus of each cell.

The brain clock. Other researchers hold that the aging timer is in the area at the base of the primitive brain housing the hypothalamus as well as the pituitary, the gland that controls the release of hormones. W. Donner Denckla, formerly of the Roche Institute and Harvard, believes that the pituitary begins at puberty to release a hormone, or a family of them, that causes the body to decline at a programmed rate. This "aging hormone"-which has not yet been isolated and thus proven conclusively to exist-hinders the cell's ability to take in thyroxine, the hormone produced by the thyroid gland. Thyroxine controls the metabolic rate in the body's key cardimrascular and immune systems, whose failure is involved in the diseases that kill most older persons.

Denckla's theory is backed by experiments with thousands of rats. He has found, for instance, that injections of the extract of ground-up pituitaries cause young rats to age prematurely.

Older rats that have had their pituitaries removed and been given thyroxine injections (along with critical steroid hormones) have shown "young" characteristics in several areas,

including fur growth, and in their cardiovascular and immune systems.

Could Hayflick and Denckla both be right? They could be, and I think they may well be.

Doubters may ask: If a brain clock controls aging, how could it affect cells like those that Hayflick has experimented with in the laboratory? A likely answer is that there is a cellular clock as well, though perhaps mainly intended as a fail-safe back-up mechanism.

Another question: Since almost anyone of the wear-andtear theories can account for nearly everything that happens in aging, why postulate a genetic clock?

There are a number of answers. All creatures seem to have evolved a "species-specific" lifespan. A shrew will live, say, a year and a half, while a Galapagos tortoise will go on for a century and a half or more. If aging was just a matter of random wear and tear, would we not expect to see, now and then, a shrew that is 150 years old? Or a Galapagos tortoise that dies of old age at one and a half? But we never do.

Or take cells in tissue culture. Normal cells have a finite lifespan; they age and die at roughly the "Hayflick limit." But cancer cells are immortal; they do not age. If cancer cells are exposed to the same conditions as normal cells, how is it that the normal ones age and the abnormal ones do not? The apparent answer is deeply ironic: Cells do have an aging clock, but cancer somehow stops it.

Gerontologists do not want to stretch out, Tithonus-like, the years of senility. They want to increase the vigor of the later years. Some would also like to retard, stop, or even, in some respects, reverse the aging process (as Denckla seems to have done in his rats).

It is now common in.the laboratory to retard aging and to extend both the life expectancy and the lifespan of animals, as McCay did in the 1930s. The lives of fruit flies, fish and other cold-blooded creatures have been extended by keeping them in a cooler-than-usual environment. At the National Institute of Aging's Gerontological Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland, Charles Barrows has combined this technique and the McCay low-calorie stratagem. Working with rotifers-tiny pond-dwellers with a normal life of 18 days-he added another 18 days up front by restricting their calories. Then he added 18 more days to their mature period by cooling the water they lived in. Result: a tripled lifespan.

Seeking other life-extending techniques, investigators have used various antioxidants (to fight the damage caused mainly by free radicals), immune-system boosters and suppressors and temperature-lowering drugs. Old and young ~dts have been joined surgically tail-to-shoulder so that they share a common circulatory system; the older rats age more slowly. Skincells of old mice that have been transplanted to young ones easily outlive their original host. Evidently, the cells acquire something that keeps them vigorous.

Can aging in humans be slowed, if not stopped entirely?

The hormonal brain clock, if it exists, could be counteracted by inhibiting the hormone-not an easy task, but by no means impossible. And if the cellular clock is found, it could be adjusted through genetic-engineering techniques.

A number of possible antidotes to wear and tear in humans are being studied. Vitamins C and E, glutathione, beta-

carqtene and selenium are among the antioxidants that may curb free-radical damage-and offer protection against cancer as well. The thymic hormones offer promise as immune-system boosters. A steroid called DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), abundant in the bloodstream, may have potential as an aginginhibitor and as an antiobesity, antidiabetes, and anticancer drug.

Meanwhile, researchers have hopes of producing lipofuscin scavengers, drugs that delay mental decline, and enzymes to replace. those that diminish with age. More can be done with diet: UCLA's Walford is working on adapting McCay's low-calorie technique for use with adult animals, including humans.

At present, most medical research is aimed at specific diseases. The juvenile ailments, such as childhood cancer and juvenile arthritis, are believed to be largely genetic in origin, but most adult disorders simply come with age. As it happens, many of the techniques that retard aging in laboratory tests, such as calorie restriction, also seem to retard cancer and other degenerative diseases of adulthood. Surely the simplest way to deal with those diseases would be to deal with aging itself. After a heart by-pass, for instance, the hardening-of-the-arteries process that prompted the surgery goes right on as before. To go on pouring money into by-pass operations, or kidney dialysis, or nursing homes instead of trying to alter the aging process makes as much sense as it would have made, say, for the March of Dimes to have thrown all its resources into buying iron lungs instead of helping Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin develop their polio vaccines.

Many argue that even if we can extend vigorous life, we should not. Consider the personal, social, ethical and political problems that would arise. If people were to live longer and in ever greater numbers, continuing to consume and perhaps reproduce, what-they ask-would happen to Social Security and insurance premiums? Would the global shortage of resources and our problems with pollution worsen? Would we have to put age limits on parenthood or consider the Huxleyan notion of requiring a license for parenthood? What would happen to creativity -and progress without the continued influx of new idea~-and opportunities for young people to put them into action? Could longer lives lead to gerontocracy? To conflict between younger and older generations?

We must indeed give our most serious consideration to such possibilities. But we should also consider the consequences of not doing anything about aging. Though some scientists speak of actually extending the lifespan, that prospect is not yet with us. What society does face is the probability that the pattern of the final stage of life can be changed from decrepitude and dependency to something much healthier. Is such an outcome really to be deplored? In obeisance to what ethical doctrines should we condemn the elderly, now and forever, to continue to suffer the ravages of senescence? And condemn our societies to continue to bear the resulting burdens? Will we really choose to supplement the genes' tyranny with our own?

0 About the Author: Albert Rosenfeld is an adjunct professor at the

University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. A former science editor of Life and Saturday Review, he is currently preparing a new edition of his 1976 book on aging research, Prolongevity.

A Gallery of Americans One of the great pleasures of being editor of SPAN is getting letters from readers. One of the great agonies is answering these letters. Some time ago' Edward Gomes of Bombay wrote us with an intriguing request. He said: "I meet many Americans. There was a group from. the English Speaking Union and students of S.S. Universe, the floating university. But being conditioned by movie and TV stereotypes, their conversation did not go beyond [the following]: "A research doctor from Cincinnati said where he is from and I asked him, 'Have you seen the film The Cincinnati Kid?' The next was from Texas and the talk was about l.R. from the Dallas TV series.

"All these people come out here and hope that we know more about their places and out comes nothing. We have heard that they exist but that is all. Will you change this area of ignorance through SPAN? " ... Let us have answers to: What is a redneck? What did the guy mean when he said, 'I am a Southern good old boy. '?

What is the competition between the East and West ('Don't listen to that guy, he's from the East!')?

"What do they hold in high esteem?

What do they hold close to their hearts?

What are their profiles?

"If you could paint a picture; create a perspective and put the pieces in this jigsaw, I not only will have something to say, i will not say the wrong things in my ignorance .... " Mr. Gomes has given us a tall order.

But we can try to point out some of the ways Americans view their fellow citizens from other parts of the country. We should note they usually have a jaundiced view tinged by intense rivalries.

The common canards about stiffnecked New Englanders, rednecked Southerners, freebooting Westerners and laidback Californians have approximately the same currency (and perhaps the same germ of truth) as the character stereotypes one hears in India about Bengalis, Punjabis, Kashmiris, Goans, etc.

During four years in India, I have met meek Punjabis, Goans with no musical talent, unshrewd Kashmiris and Bengalis who were not aggressive intellectualsbut not many.

Ethnic humor was once a staple in the

United States. Jokes abounded in vaudeville about the immigrant groups, called greenhorns, who came in large numbers from Poland, Ireland, Germany, China, Scotland and supposedly brought with them easily distinguishable ethnic characteristics. The melting pot soon began to dissolve the more tasteless aspects, but regional U.S. stereotypes are still a source of fun.

Let me begin with some disclaimers: I'm simply telling you what these myths are, not validating them. I am riddled with my own regional prejudices. I come (originally) from Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is known for its coalmines (outlanders expect all residents to wear peaked caps with electric lights on them in case a mine collapses under their homes and they are suddenly plunged into the sunless abyss). It is also said to be the city where all American dirty jokes come from (that may be true; by the age of 18, I had heard them all). Also it is known as a city people come from, not to.

Since I was born and raised north of the Mason-Dixon line, which runs through Maryland and was roughly the separating point in the Civil War, I am a Yankee to Southerners, who believe that Yankees have no charm, no manners, are ruthless and frequently mendacious.

Educated in New England, I am seen by Westerners as part of the Eastern Establishment (snobbish, arrogant and a woolyheaded liberal), and as uptight and pretentious by Texans, Californians and other Sun Belters.

Having lived in Washington, D.C., and worked for the government, I am seen by

byMALOETIlNGER

most Americans as a pointy-headed bureaucrat with a briefcase attached to my arm, a too-tight three-piece suit and a reckless passion for spending money.

You can see why I'm eager to get some of my own back by describing my fellow Americans who disdain me. Let's do it region by region.

NEW ENGLAND: They come from a long line of witch burners, of course.

Folks in Maine are terse and uncommunicative; they delight in giving wrong directions to strangers (whom they define as anyone who has been in the state less than three generations). New Hampshire is a bit like Brigadoon: it only comes to life once every four years, in February when the Presidential primaries are held.

Massachusetts folk, particularly Bostonians, are overeducated and speak with an impenetrable accent. They speak only to the Cabots and the Lodges (firstfamilies of yesteryears) anyway. Rhode Island is such a small state that anyone taller than five feet must be a basketball player. Connecticut, whose only industry is insurance, is a suburb of New York City, and home to Yale University, which is attended exclusively by wealthy playboys (or so it was said when I was at Harvard; what Yalies said about us is not fit for a genteel magazine).

MIDDLE ATLANTIC STATES: New Yorkers are rude criminals, by and large,

who dance the night away on the Great White Way, spending money they got on Wall Street. They break queues, heads and, the hearts of aU who come there seeking fame and fortune. New Jersey is full of professional gangsters and some truckdrivers and factory. workers. Atlantic City is Las Vegas with coats and ties and saltwater taffy. Pennsylvania is polluted with belching Pittsburgh steelmills and crafty lawyers from Philadelphia who may sue me for libel for even mentioning them.

THE SOUTH: Folklore about the South is a virtual industry. Cruel tales of degenerate rednecks have been perpetuated by such writers as William Faulkner with his foul Snopes family and Erskine Caldwell with the feckless Jeeter Lester and his brood. A redneck should be an honorable designation; it simply refers to what happens to one who frequently works in the sun. Similarly, a "good old boy" sounds jolly enough. But in a pejorative sense, these terms describe bullies who guzzle beer and chomp on fried chicken, ride motorcycles and brawl with broken bottles as weapons of a Saturday night. They love auto racing and hunting possums. Southern ladies are demure to the point of prudery and lace their dissertations with such phrases as "I swanee," and "well, I never. ... " Southerners are intensely patriotic (though they tend to view today's armed forces as an extension of the Confederate Army and their cars bear decals of the Confederate flag, which is also frequently tattooed on their arms or chests). In the Southern mountains, folks pick guitars and fiddle up a storm while swilling homemade moonshine whiskey from illegal stills they maintain in the forests; they are rude to intruders in lofty Elizabethan prose.

THE SOUTHWEST: This territory encompasses Texas (as if anything could encompass Texas). The people there are weatherbeaten sons and daughters of the desert and prairie who think in big terms, big as all outdoors. They are taciturn in the extreme, which is just as well since their accents can't be understood by other Americans anyway. They prize their independence. Westerners provide the bulk of America's folkloric iconsfrom Marshal Dillon to J.R. Ewing, from William S. Hart to John Wayne. They

take no guff from anyone.

There is a proud Spanish and Mexican heritage in the Southwest, whose sons and daughters are capable of cooking and eating the hottest chilly-fired food this side of Madras. This Spanish influence is reflected in place names such as Rio Grande (Big River), San Antonio (Saint Anthony) and Las Vegas (You Lose, Sucker).

THE MIDWEST: Contrary to what was written by H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, this section of the country is not inhabited entirely by go-getting boobs marked by an ingenuous boosterism. True, people in Chicago seem to move like an old-fashioned speeded-up movie, but they are propelled by winds of almost hurricane force. Some Midwesterners may feel they have a patent on propriety and the homesplJn virtues that the pioneers brought with them, but in fairness, this is a sign of stability, not necessarily priggishness. They maintain the pioneer spirit of being open and friendly and welcoming strangers with great effusive informality. The penalty they pay for this is that other Americans consider them as bland as vanilla ice cream and store-bought white bread.

THE WEST: It's not true that there are no people in Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas, but the comparatively few residents don't loom very large in American folklore. This low profile attests their canniness. The great northwestern states of Oregon and Washington are believed to be inhabited entirely by lumberjacks, airplane manufacturers and outdoorsy enthusiasts who fish for salmon from birchbark canoes. California has established itself as America's glamour state, home of movie stars and a species of individuals who worship the sun and remain surrealistically apathetic (this attitude is called "laid-hack"). They laze in hot tubs, live in fancy motor vehicles and spend a lot of time inventing lifestyles that eventually infect the rest of the country. Alaska has the reputation o'f being a land of hardy individualists with a high tolerance for cold weather. Since oil was discovered there, citizens not only pay no state income taxes, they share in the bounty of the state. Understandably, they feel their current population is exactly at the right level. Hawaiians are viewed by their fellow Americans as folks who wear loud

shirts and grass skirts and surf a lot. Since their islands are as close to romantic paradises as any place in America, Hawaiians are invariably victims of envy.

*

*

*

The late comedian Lenny Bruce used to end his act by asking, "Is there anyone I haven't offended?" The portrait so far has been focused on the warts that Americans seem to detect on their fellows.

What is good about Americans, "what they hold close to their hearts," in Mr. Gomes' phrase, is similar I feel to the best qualities displayed by Indians. They have a natural feeling for hospitality and welcome strangers from other countries warmly. They have a strong pride in their neck of the woods and will go out of their way to show someone what is notable and enjoyable about the place they live. Most Americans have a sense of humor and can laugh at themselves (unless the joke cuts too close to the bone). The cliche that Americans are materialists with no instinct for spirituality is largely unfounded. There is an underlying decency and generosity that reveals itself most frequently in the acts of individuals, but also in the policies that Americans establish through their laws. Flareups of prejudice and intolerance make the headlines, but they are newsworthy precisely because Americans have learned to respect the rights of minorities and of strangers who settle in the United States to begin a new life.

Television has drawn the United States together as perhaps no other force has.

Regional stereotypes are perpetuated by some comedy and soap opera series, but TV has also produced many points of reference and common experiences that contribute to the homogeneity of a sprawling country. Politicians campaigning for national office know that whatever they say in one part of the country will be heard everywhere, and this fact restrains an appeal to narrow regional prejudices.

People retain a healthy skepticism that sometimes reveals itself in irreverence.

Candor is prized (except by advertising agencies and salespersons). Visitors are often surprised by the pervasive honesty-lost objects promptly returned, for example.

And as my answer proves, Americans have an unquenchable thirst for generalizations.

0

Dr Kanwal Gambhir and the

Stuff of Life

A young man who came to the United States from Ludhiana more than two decades ago is today winning accolades from international medical institutions for his research in insulin.

Basic medical research is an unending quest for Dr. Kanwal Gambhir, associate professor of medicine and director of endocrinology laboratories at Howard University in Washington, D.C. That quest has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and will affect millions yet to come. Yet the answers he has found do not satisfy him.

Gambhir has devoted much of his life to the study of "The Stuff of Life": The erythrocyte, or the common red blood cell.

"What happens to that cell determines what happens to every part of the body it inhabits," he says. "The red cell delivers oxygen, governs growth, health, the metabolism of the organism. And, much of its work has to do with an insulin-blocking enzyme within it which controls how the body uses insulin.

Insulin regulates all human growth," Gambhir points out.

That knowledge places him on the cutting edge of a largely unexplored scientific field of inquiry: The relationship of insulin to the presence and control of the cancer cell. "Through insulin research, it is possible to regulate growth of cells. Cancer is nothing but the proliferation of growth-uncontrolled growth of the cell," Gambhir explains.

Gambhir, working with associates at Howard University, first isolated the insulin-blocking enzyme. It was but one of many discoveries and achievements that prompted the Howard University College of Medicine in November 1984 to give him its faculty research award for the productivity and quality of his research. The award sits in its original cardboard packing near the top of a half-meter-high stack of framed awards and honors, still in their boxes, in a remote corner of his

bare-walled office in the Howard University Hospital. He sees the plaques as something not relevant to his work. He hasn't found the time to take them out of their boxes.

But his face is aglow at his own measure of success-a sheaf of letters on his desk. More than 125 medical institutions, universities and clinics throughout the world have sought his assistance and are implementing his findings, or even duplicating his work. These include many of the most prestigious American institutions: The National Institutes of Health (NIH); Public Health Service; Yale University School of Medicine; Northwestern University Medical School; Georgetown University Center for the Interdisciplinary Studies ofImmunolo,gy; Stanford University Medical Center; and the Mayo Clinic among others.

A letter of appreciation to the Howard University College of Medicine from Lorna Linda University College of Medicine, where Gambhir was a visiting professor in 1984, explains Gambhir as he cannot explain himself: "We have a research laboratory studying the characteristics of human erythrocyte insulin receptors. Two original publications from Howard (by Gambhir) were helpful to carry out pilot experiments. ¡It was essential to know extra details to carry out the assay efficiently and accurately .... Dr. Gambhir took time out from his busy schedule to help us. Dr. Gambhir is the pioneer in erythrocyte insulin radio-receptor assay."

But one of his most treasured letters is from an eighth grade student in Bismark, North Dakota: "Our school has just had its annual science fair, at which I won first place for my project on

insulin receptors. I will now compete in the district fair, and later months of pregnancy, and should also help explain why would like to improve my project. I read in Diabetes, July 1978, diabetes sometimes disappears and sometimes remains permanently after delivery. an article by you on human erythrocyte insulin receptors.

The second year of the project saw an even greater ... Would it be possible for you to suggest a test I might breakthrough.

In determining how to regulate insulin recepdemonstrate to give my project more depth?" tors, Gambhir and his associates isolated an insulin-inactivating Gambhir sent the student research materials he thought enzyme in human red blood cells. Meanwhile, Gambhir's teachers could use to help her implement the project along with his [Gambhir's] home telephone number. For Gambhir the studies have led him to a related research project on insulin letters are, as he views it, "evidence that I have lived as an receptors in the prostate cell membrane and their regulation of individual. " the proliferation of prostatic cancer cells. "If we know how Gambhir joined the medical faculty of the Howard Uni- insulin, insulin receptors and the insulin-inactivating enzyme versity School of Medicine in 1975. His first task was the work with other hormones at the cell level," says Gambhir, creation of endocrinology laboratories for the medical school. "not only diabetes, but many cardiovascular diseases and the proliferation of cancer cells can be controlled."

The laboratories of Dr. Jesse Roth, renowned endocrinologist Gambhir is one of three sons born before partition in at the NIH, had pioneered a technique for the study of insulin receptors in lymphocytes (white blood cells). The Roth assay Chaniot, now in Pakistan. The family migrated to Ludhiana, and test required 500 cc of blood to extract leukocytes, the cells where he, three sisters and his two brothers grew up. The family lived in a single room, and the boys were educated in from which all studies of insulin receptors were then derived.

In need of equipment and facilities, Gambhir and Dr. government schools, where Gambhir excelled. He subsequently attended the Punjab Agricultural University on scholarships, Juanita Archer, a colleague of Roth's, sought alternative methods of developing an assay for insulin studies. "If white where he distinguished himself in biochemistry. His two cells can have insulin receptors," Gambhir reasoned, "why mentors, Dr. G.S. Ranhotra and Dr. D.S. Wagle, former cannot red blood cells, which come from the same parent cell, exchange students who had completed their doctoral studies at have them also?" The studies of Archer and Gambhir estab- American universities before. returning to Punjab, urged the lished that the simple red blood cell can indeed be used to study young scientist to apply as an exchange student for postgradureceptors. Thus, one of his first achievements at Howard was to ate work in the United States.

In 1963 Gambhir accepted a teaching assistantship at the assist in the development of an assay which refined the work of Roth's group at NIH. The discovery triggered queries world- University of Arkansas. In 1970 he began doctoral studies in wide from, among other countries, the Soviet Union, Iran and clinical biochemistry at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he was graduated in 1973. In 1974 Gambhir Belgium.

An assay permitting research on the simpler red blood cell, married Davinder Behri, a native of New Delhi. He credits her rather than an expensive derivative, revolutionized the field of with much of his later success. "I could not have achieved what medical research. Use of red cells required less equipment, less I have without my wife," he says. "She has been a major and patient, allowing me to have a career in blood and was far less expensive. What had once been a field of partner-tolerant inquiry for just a few was flung open to even the smallest medical research." laboratory. Yet Gambhir's conclusions, while of enormous On completion of his doctorate, Gambhir came to Howard importance in themselves, only intensified his curiosity. "If an University where, in 1975, he joined the faculty of the enzyme can be identified, can it not be controlled?" he department of medicine, which was beginning to construct endocrinology laboratories. reasoned.

He recalls the discipline of his parents, especially his In 1980 Gambhir and a team of Howard scientists began a study of insulin receptors in diabetic and nondiabetic pregnant mother's, as a stabilizing force that still governs his life and women. During the first year of the project, Gambhir studied work. "When I grew up, my parents were very religious. My when and how insulin receptors in human red blood cells mother would not give me anything to eat before I went to the change in number and/or ability to seize ins~lin molecules temple. I still thank her very much. She kept my head straight." during the normal and diabetic patients' cycle.

Gambhir is a God-fearing man. He believes with deep faith that "You must do your work right in order to reach Him. Whatever Insulin, in fact, regulates the growth of the fetus, Gambhir observed, since insulin controls the amount of oxygen available you do, you do for Him. That's all. I feel it's everybody's responsibility to contribute a little bit, whatever one can. So within the body. Scientists have confirmed that approximately that's why I am doing what I am. You can be anywhere in the 20 percent of normal women, during pregnancy, can develop world and still contribute. I have tried in as many ways as gestational diabetes and remain diabetic if insulin receptors are not regulated, says Gambhir. His studies had an immediate and possible to make sure I leave behind some proof that I existed."

What of his future work? "I want to continue trying to far-reaching impact on medicine itself: "It may be possible to understand the red cell, how the enzyme works, and how a red predict accurately the prediabetic state of 80 to 90 percent of cell works in the functioning of insulin. I don't think I will have the people who may develop diabetes," Gambhir says. Once the answers in my lifetime," he smiles. Colleagues, however, the at-risk diabetic is identified, diabetes can be thwarted predict he will.

0 through diet and exercise.

The findings from the research, Gambhir points out, help in designing more effective therapy to reduce an overabundance About the Author: Norma Holmes is a SPAN correspondent in of insulin (hyperinsulinemia), which commonly occurs in the Washington, D. C.

Exchanging Experiences American Students In IndIa

On the last day of their fortnight's adventure in India, three American schoolchildren and three American teachers celebrated at an artistic farewell party at the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in New Delhi by making elaborate and artistic rangoli. They had not seen simply the tourist's India but had stayed with Indian families and shared their experiences in Agra, Jaipur, Rishikesh and Hardwar.

"They shared the Indians' food, clothes and almost everything else," said Timothy Plummer, director of the education and communications department of the Asia Society, New York, which sponsored their visit.

The students won their passage to India in a demanding essay-and-painting contest that attracted more than 100,000 schoolchildren, aged 9 to 16. The winners and their teachers as Seenleft to right in the picture at top: Kevin Glenn, 16; teacher Marianne Arcadipaile~Todar; Greta Shternfeld, 16; Enilda Mejias, 14; and teacher Rikki Asher (who created her vision of India in the drawing directly below her picture). The third teacher was Mark Gura, shown with his rangoli and Mrs. Banerjee of the Vidyalaya in the center picture.

The students and teachers came from New York City: Brooldyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. Rikki Asher, who studied Tibetan mandala paintings and symbols of Indian art for her master's degree, said, "For a long time I've had images of India in my mind. I had read Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi during my school days. I used to love to recite Tagore's 'The Gardener.'

India lived up' to all my expectations."

Greta Shternfeld (lower left) enjoyed both the marvels of antiquity and the modernity of New Delhi. She said she considers it her mission to educate fellow students about India.

She plans to be a fashion designer and hopes to make use of "the riot of colors and vibrant designs I saw here."

Marianne Arcadipane-Todar (bottom left) was impressed by the artisans in Jaipur and Agra. "Their artistic excellence and sheer intelligence took me by surprise.

I never knew I would find a genius in a small hut In Jaipur."

Mark Gura recalls, "I sat for two long hours on the bank of the Ganges at Hardwar.

Those conchshells blowing and bells tingling in the temples all around you make you feel so happy. It's an unusual feeling that can be felt but not described."

The Asia Society plans to sponsor a trip by Indian students and teachers to the United States in November under the same program. 0 â&#x20AC;˘

â&#x20AC;˘

Indian Educators

in America

Every year nine or ten educational administrators, selected from all over India, are given an opportunity to experience for themselves the comprehensive approach to higher education in America. This unique experience lays out before them the basic philosophy of American life-an emphasis on individual excellence. The entire education system is geared toward this objective. School and college curricula are fully responsive to the needs of the individual, and the community the system serves with the student at the center.

This six-week tour of a dozen institutions spread across America is conducted annually under the Fulbright fellowship program and caters to principals of colleges, registrars of universities, controllers of examinations and finance officers of universities. The program is conducted among each of these disciplines by rotation each year.

Recently, in New Delhi, principals of nine colleges from such places as Manipur, Tiruchirapalli and Ranchi went through an orientation program before leaving for the United States. Interestingly, this program was supervised by none other than their Indian counterparts from other colleges; they had been on the fellowship earlier and had come down to the city from Amritsar, Bangalore and Dharmsala to share their experiences with the group.

Though among those selected for this year, there were a few who had been to America during their student days, there

were others who had never been out of India and were understandably not sure of what to expect. But all have introduced innovations in their respective colleges as a step forward to make college life more fruitful for students.

Dr. Indu Dhan, 47, principal of the Ranchi Women's College has to cope with pressures of admissions, applications for residential accommodation, transfers and so on as her college is the only institute of higher education in this Bihar mining belt, comprising mostly tribalso Dhan, who taught history for 20 years before becoming the principal, and who belongs to the Munda tribe, feels that there is too much emphasis on the liberal arts. "Employment is a big problem there," she says. "The curriculum is geared neither to meet the community needs nor to the job market. The only kind of jobs young people are getting are in banks as new branches are set up in remote areas. Now even teachers find it difficult to get employment," she says. She is eager to study the scope and pattern of community colleges in America and to learn how they reflect the aspirations of the neighborhood population.

For Dr. S.D. Chand, 46, principal of the Ewing Christian College, Allahabad, the tour is like "first going to a hospital as a patient and then returning to it as a doctor." Several years ago, he had studied for his Ph.D. in zoology from the North Dakota State University and then "being a student, I was on the receiving end of all the facilities." Now as an administrator, his perspective of looking at campuses is different.

A principal since 1974, Professor D. Swamiraj, 47, of Bishop

EXCHANGING

EXPERIENCES

continued

Heber College, Tiruchirapalli, has tried to update the old curriculum and introduced new subjects, some of which perhaps are offered only in his college.

Among the changes he has ushered in is the reopening of an institute which functioned in the late 1930s and subsequently was shut down. He has also introduced job-oriented and socially relevant courses. The institute offersanM.Sc. in environmental science, a B.Sc. in library information, documentation science, a postgraduate diploma in social service administration while the M.Sc. in pure mathematics has been altered a little to include operational research in computers. Similarly, English courses at the graduate and postgraduate levels now include mass communication and journalism in the syllabus. "In America, the needs of the economy, agriculture and industry, have a far greater impact on educational institutions, but in India academic pursuits are completely unrelated to practicality," remarks Swamiraj.

When he travels through campuses in Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas, Atlanta, Florida, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., the professor has definite plans. "I want to see community colleges, meet the people in these neighborhoods to study their effect. I want to understand how the cooperative programs work in colleges, under which a student is required to spend some time in academic work and the balance in a neighboring industry."

Swamiraj has already introduced a few opportunities for his students to make some money on the campus and thus continue their education. Such students can work part -time in the library.

Similarly, some pin money can .be earned by helping in the maintenance of campus lawns and gardens.

Located in a predominantly tribal area, with 97 percent of the students from tribes, is the coeducational institute Churachandpur College in Manipur.

It offers undergraduate courses in arts and science. T.S. Gangte, 46, the principal of the college, says, "Most students opt for science courses; only when they fail to get admission there do they choose the arts." For more than 20 years, he has taught sociology. Now he is looking forward to seeing the American institutes of higher learning he has heard so much about. Specifically, he is eager to see the structure of power and responsibilities of the faculty and the principal. "The orientation course has given us some idea of the vast powers the principals enjoy and have autonomy in decisionmaking."

What makes the American higher education system so unique? The general impressions and observations of the principals who talked during the orientation program and had been on this fellowship earlier were that in America, the education pattern has been so arranged that it aims at independent, self-reliant work and not so much on the availability of jobs. "You can choose the course you want, study at the pace you want and at whatever age you are."

American life in fact is a continuous process of education.

"If you run into a dead end in a career; you go in for retraining in an area which you think will raise your earning power, through a job or through selfemployment. Self-employment

is preferred by local students and as a result they are more interested in what the course teaches rather than whether it is recognized," says Dr. Atma Ram, principal of the Dharmsala Post Graduate College.

Recounting her impressions, Professor C.N. Mangala, principal of the N.M.K.R.V. Women's College, Bangalore, says that her visit had opened up a new dimension to higher education. There were many simple aspects which could easily be incorporated in our own system and enrich the academic environment. "Student services are almost ignored here. We think our responsibility is over when a student finishes college.

But in America, for decades institutions keep in contact with the alumni. Even after 80 years, a student's records are available in the college."

Mangala says that students' welfare departments there also arrange counseling, guidance and testing for employment.

The alumni associations are very active, as students also keep in close touch with their colleges.

Former students' reunions provide fundraising, publicity for the alma mater, recruitment and advice to college authorities and faculty.

Every aspect of campus life that directly deals with students is supervised by the students themselves. Hostels, catering, sports complexes are all run by the students.

Professor S. Ahlawat, principal of B.B.K. ,DAV College for Women, Amritsari recalls that all institutions on an American campus had their lunch hour at the same time and the same menu catered to all. Students did all the serving as there was no "Class IV" employee concept there. She was also impressed to learn that even when a student for some reason remained absent from a class, he or she could quickly catch up with the rest with the help of cassettes and other audiovisual material prepared with the lecture. "These were as dear as a class lecture."

A highly useful development in the American higher education has been the emergence of community colleges visiting which was an extremely rewarding experience for the fellowship holders. "Every topic becomes a matter of interest and everything becomes a case for study, whether it is a series of lectures on 'how to face death' or courses in cosmology, astrology, plumbing, automobile repairs, carpentry; the list is endless. All these are taught in these colleges," says Mangala.

Some of the fellowship holders on their return to India have tried to make changes in the environment and the academic structure of their own colleges.

Whatever the problems faced while trying for quick changes in the Indian higher education context, it is obvious that each trip by academics at this level helps. No matter how small the change that is made, as manifestly many changes have been, each one leads to a demonstration effect. In years to come, the principals say, we can optimistiCally look forward to India's higher education institutions becoming more flexible, giving those who wish to simultaneously pursue a career and an academic course such opportunities.

D About the Author: Vichitra Sharma is a senior correspondent with The Hindustan Times in New Delhi.

The Corporate Prophet

John Naisbitt, who parlayed his powerhouse book Megatrends into a lucrative new-wave corporation, grips the lectern as if he were about to perform 50 quick push-ups. When the last of nearly 600 business executives have found their $335 seats in the East Ballroom of the New York Hilton, Naisbitt begins his "Seminar for Our Times."

Naisbitt has emerged as a kind of eco-socioevangelist, but he has not come here to comfort perplexed souls. The times, he warns, "are a-changin'," and those who don't get hip to the "New Economy" will find themselves not only late but sorry. The bottom line in his speech this morning is the message of his new book, due out later this year, which many say will be another smash. It runs as follows: • The corporation, as we know it, is being not simply remodeled but "reinvented."

• The New Economy is being driven not by traditional industrial companies but by modern entrepreneurs, working both inside and outside big firms. The new entrepreneurs are creating virtually all of today's new jobs.

• A prolonged shakeout is in process, but the survivors (those who have successfully reinvented themselves) will join a heavenly throng that Naisbitt calls "the Fortunate 500."

• "Top-down, pyramidal, authoritarian" firms are giving way to a "networking style of management, where people learn from one another horizontally, where everyone is a resource for everyone else."

• Although the unemployment rate appears frozen at 7 percent plus, Americans are headed for full employment as early as 1986. The new key to future corporate success hinges not on capital or technology but on how well companies deal with new-breed employees, their most critical resource.

Naisbitt, now a prophet with his own social-forecasting firm, The Naisbitt Group, speaks from experience in business and government. He has been an executive at IBM and Eastman Kodak and a special assistant to President Johnson, to John W. Gardner when he was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and to Dr. Milton Eisenhower when he was head of the Commission of Presidential Scholars. As for entrepreneurship, Naisbitt's Megatrends has now sold more than five million copies in

The entrepreneurial upsurge, claims John Naisbitt, has created a New Economy and a network style of management without bosses.

17 countries, and became number one in Japan last year at a time when Americans were devouring books on Japan as if they were fast food. The Naisbitt Group, meanwhile, 'has grown from a staff of 8 five years ago to more than 50 today.

Naisbitt has long been in demand as a public speaker, but Megatrends opened new doors. (President Reagan has invited him to tell all at one of his famous patio lunches.) Naisbitt now delivers more than 135 speeches a year, mostly to major corporate groups all over the world at a price of $15,000 per speech; he turns down many more invitations: Still gripping the lectern, Naisbitt tells the audience, "The age of denial is over."

Meaning: There is growing acceptance of one of his mightiest megatrends, that America's old-line industries are rapidly giving way to a computer/information society. "We have ceased to deny that our industrial base is going away as we begin to release our energies to deal with the problems and opportunities of the New Economy.

"The New Economy is overtaking the old. The New Economy has been creating about two million jobs each yearfor the last 12 years. The problem is we have been losing so many in the industrial sector. But now this New Economy is accelerating. In 1983 we created four million brand-new

jobs. In 1984, we are adding five million new jobs. In the 1950s, at the height of the industrial period, we were creating new companies at the rate of about 93,000 a year. Today we are creating more than 600,000 new companies a year. What is new this time around is that women are creating as many as one-third of these new companies. " "By 1986," he continues, "more people will be leaving the work force than entering it, and for the rest of this century there will be terrific labor shortages.

We're going to have a lot of competition for employees. This seller's market will mainly drive the reinvention of the corporation. People who have a choice are not going to work for the old hierarchical companies where everyone has a superior and an inferior. It is corrupting to the human spirit. It served us while it was appropriate but the new model companies are democratic and they are not hierarchical. We're going to get change because there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity. In the new information society, the creative edge is the human resourc~ and the competition for this resource is going to get fierce. " While this event has the up-tempo pace of a new-time gospel meeting, Naisbitt does not sermonize. He speaks in the logical form of the memo, not the manifesto, which has undoubtedly helped him reach major business audiences. As Winston Churchill said: "Tone, sir, is everything. " While Naisbitt is low-key, he is a striking presence who commands attention.

He is 55 but looks much younger. His carefully cut beard links up with perfectly manicured hair to form a regal strawberry-blonde helmet. Naisbitt looks as if he would be extremely successful making urbane commercials.

(He appears, in fact, with a dapper eye patch as the Man in the Hathaway Shirt.)

Naisbitt is a living testimonial to one of his megatrends-America's fervent embrace of physical fitness. Like the new corporate models he praises, he is lean but not mean. He jogs five to eight kilometers a day and has been doing it for the last 15 years. He meditates daily. He does not eat red meat nor drink coffee, living on chicken, fish, barely cooked vegetables and "a lot of white wine."

As Naisbitt begins to punch home the 14 critical factors (see box) that are forc-

ing corporations to change, he makes it dear that he is speaking not of certainties but of PBIs-"partly baked ideas that have been in the oven only a little while."

Quickly, Naisbitt begins to cite his list of new corporate models, firms that are alreaqy reinventing themselves. Among the giants, he cites Hewlett-Packard and 3M. Then he points to People Express, the fastest-growing airline in history; W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of an all-weather material called Gore- Tex and a company that has no bosses and no titles; New Hope Communications, a successful publishing firm that pays its employees 25 percent more than the going rate and vows that "we only do business with people who are pleasant." He singles out Jan Carlzon, the head of SAS, the Swedish airline: "When he was a very young man, he took over the management of the domestic Swedish airline. In a very short time he brought about something of a miracle by turning it around into a profitable operation. The three countries that owned SAS were so impressed¡ by that performance that they asked him, young as he was, to become their president. In a single year, he turned SAS around from losing $18 million to making $54 million.

In a single year, SAS became the number one airline at the expense of the likes of Swissair and Lufthansa. He did it by turning the organization chart upside down. Young Carlzon said, 'This must be a customer-driven company; and, if we really believe that, we must put those people who deal with the customers in charge of the company and support them.' He said he didn't want to do things 1,000 percent better; he wanted to do 1,000 things 1 percent better. Good advice for us all."

On this day Naisbitt shares the platform with his cowriter, Patricia Aburdene, who is also his wife. On stage, they wait in carefully choreographed sequence to make their points.

Naisbitt:"It appears that the Eighties is the decade in which we will deal with the issue of comparable worth: equal pay for comparable work. Why should a carpenter be paid more than a nurse? The answer, of course, is that at least until recently carpenters have always been men and nurses have always been - women. I am not talking here about the government. I'm talking about the mar-

ketplace. Companies in America don't have to deal with it, but in a seller's market, companies that do deal with it are going to attract the best people and especially the very best women."

Aburdene: "Comparable worth is something we are just beginning to hear about and that we're going to learn a lot more about, John. I know you hate to give the unions credit for anything, but it's interesting to note that they are taking a lot of initiative in comparable worth and are trying to negotiate it and build it into their negotiations. It's almost as though private companies have a choice.

They can learn about comparable w6rth and put it into place in their own companies or they can have it put on them by

Naisbitt has identified 14 major factors propelling the reinvention of the corporation. They are: 1. Human resources have become the decisive competitive edge in organizational growth. "We have always known it or given it a lot of lip service, but now we have to understand it at a deeper dimension, and it involves developing a new respect for the individual. " 2. The United States is moving rapidly toward full employment, marked by increasing competition for employees. The two major reasons: "The new economy that is overtaking the old is accelerating, and the number of people entering the work force is declining dramatically as we assimilate the last of the baby boomers."

3. Middle management is being whittled away, largely because of the computer.

"Middle managers have served largely as passers and processors of information up and down the corporate hierarchy. With computers taking over much of this function, the pyramid will be squished down."

4. Managers are becoming less and less "order-givers," and more and more "facilitators." "The big challenge of the Eighties is the retraining of managers."

5. The specialist is gradually giving way to the generalist. "I have always thought that narrow specialization was detrimental to human growth potential, and some recent studies show that your IQ actually goes down in the process of getting a Ph.D." 6. There is a shift away from hired to contract labor for a wide variety of services.

7. A diversified menu of work styles is evolving, including flextime, job-sharing, full-time cyclical jobs and sabbaticals. "Onefourth of us now work in these heretofore

the unions," she says forcefully.

Naisbitt sees vast economic turmoil ahead, a prophecy that appears to make him joyous. He implies that many companies have destruction seeded in their genes.

"We are in for' a long shakeout period," he says. "Most new companies will fail. Thousands of computer, software and cable companies will go under.

That's the good news as we move through the New Economy. It is a measure of the vibrancy of the period. We have only to recall the early part of this century, when we first started to build automobiles. In all, we created more than 2,300 automobile manufacturing companies. There was a long shakeout period, and we

unconventional arrangements, and that proportion will gain during the Eighties."

8. Authoritarian-style management is yielding to networking. "The baby boomers grew up on the networking style in the antiwar movement and the women's rights movement, and are now carrying that style into the business community."

9. The controversial issue of "comparable worth"-equal pay for equal work-will finally gain respectability in the Eighties.

10. Many companies will revamp into "confederations of entrepreneurs," unleashing both entrepreneurship and its corporate version, intrapreneurship. "The last time there was such an entrepreneurial boom was the last time we changed economies, when we moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy."

11. Quality will become the new corporate watchword, as customers grow more and more reluctant to discard old produ~ts and replace them with new ones. "Across the board, top to bottom, people are very concerned about quality: They are looking for permanence in a time of change."

12. Companies will pump increasing amounts of time and money into the health and education of their employees. "'By investing more in these areas, the company expands what has become its chief asset."

13. Old-fashioned intuition is making a society-wide comeback. "It is getting a new respectability in the corporate world run by the numbers for so long. And this is about to catch up with the business schools."

14. The newly emerging human values "don't have anything to do with being nice to people." They are a recognition that "human beings will make or break your company."

-R.P.

ended up with only a handful. Given the nature and character of the new information/electronics economy, we will end up with thousands of companies but we will go through thousands and thousands to get there."

A notable feature of Naisbitt's meetings is that they don't evoke the perfunctory business questions usually asked by people trying to convince themselves that they are still awake.

"Sir," an executive begins, "we are being very nice to all of our people. In fact, we are applying all of the rules in your book. We're going out to lunch with them, we have a swimming pool, and so on. Now they want flexible hours and this and that. But there is no end to what they want. Where is it going to end? There may come a time when we're priced out of the market because we're spending so much time and money on our own people. Is there a limiting factor here?"

Naisbitt smooths his beard and peers out at the thin man standing in the middle of the ballroom floor. "I notice that it's 'They want,'" he answers. "What we're talking about is a company where people make a commitment, where people take personal responsibility for the success of their company. If everyone does that, there is no 'we' and 'they.' It's people making sacrifices as well as exerting effort as part of an institution they have a shared vision about."

Naisbitt is followed to the stage by his good friend George Gilder-the author of WeaLth and Poverty, which has become a handbook for many of the United States' supply-side devotees. The book was widely praised by, among others, President Reagan (for whom Gilder has written key speeches).

Gilder, who is bright, blunt, and boyish, runs his hand through his ruffled hair and quickly explains why conventional economists "missed" the latest economic recovery: "The reason I could predict the roaring Eighties and the economic revival we are currently undergoing, while all my brilliant debating opponents were predicting a new economic depression and long-term stagnation, was that it was clear to anybody who went to Silicon Valley or even read Megatrends that we were undergoing a tremendous entrepreneurial upsurge. Even in the pits of the 1982 recession, which was serious and unnecessarily deep, venture capital was surging, new technologies were

emerging at an unprecedented pace, and new business starts were occurring at a rate about twice as fast as in 1977. People who don't believe we are undergoing a transformed economy should just contemplate the statistics."

Scoring points with his hands like a boxer, Gilder proceeds to run down the recent surge in new business starts and venture capital. "Venture capital has grown by a factor of some 200 since the mid-Se~enties. After the capital-gains tax cut of 1978, we had $570 million in venture capital. By 1983, $4,100 million was raised. This is a real transformation of the U.S. economy."

Gilder echoes Naisbitt's theme that the old economy is being inexQrably changed by new-breed entrepreneurs.

Gilder, whose latest book, The Spirit of Enterprise, is a paean to the entrepreneurial spirit and its impact on economic growth, tells the seminar audience: "What entrepreneurs make and manage, not what economists measure, is the real economy."

He goes even further:¡ "It is the entrepreneurs who know the rules of the world and the laws of God. They overthrow establishments rather than establish equilibrium. They are the heroes of economic life."

At lunch, Naisbitt brings on a real-life hero, 44-year-old Donald C. Burr, the founder and chairman of People Express Airlines. The audience is clearly ready for Burr, a relaxed and earthy man whose unorthodox airline has registered very unorthodox growth-100 percent each year since it was created in 1981. Burr explains the inner workings of People Express.

"The old classic model of owners and workers, where you had to beat the hell out of the workers so the owners' could get even richer, is breaking down," he says. "There's a whole new system being built. It says there is a garden out there that has a public in it. You look at the profits and give a little to the workers, a little to the managers and the owners, and leave a little bit for the customers and the community. And leave a little left over to buy new planes if anybody finally makes a plane worth buying."

All People Express employees must buy stock in the company. "Ownership of the rock is our highest value," says Burr.

"If you walk in to work tomorrow morning you must buy 100 shares of stock if you are a customer-service manager and 200 shares if you're a flight manager. The general managers have 100,000 shares

and the managing officers have 150,000 and up." (Burr is one of seven managing officers. ) The pilots at People Express are called "flight managers" because when they are not flying they are recruiting, training, answering phones, or working in a variety of other jobs. Burr, a pilot himself, says: "It's a terrible thing to waste a pilot. Most of them are very guilty people at other airlines because they don't work much.

They work a few hours, go home, and drink beer. In no way do they satisfy their potential. So they are guilt-ridden and unhappy. At People Express, we offer them the opportunity to get with it, and most of them do and really like it."

All day, during coffee and Diet Coke breaks, young Naisbitt Group entrepreneurs do a brisk business in the corridors, signing up executives to receive Naisbitt's three chief information products: The Bellwether Report, a $357-ayear monthly dossier on'latest happenings in California, Florida and Texas, the three states that, Naisbitt says, are now setting trendsfortheother47; The TrendReport, a $1,250-a-year quarterly that runs about 100 pages and tracks social, political and economic developments across the country; and John Naisbitt's Trend Letter, a four-page biweekly memo in which Naisbitt personally updates "the mega trends transforming our lives." At $98 a year, the Letter is the most popular publication, with more than 10,000 ~ubscribers.

When the seminar is over, many of the executives stand in small clusters, replaying what they have just heard. As I leave, five well-tailored men and an equally well-tailored woman are engaging in a civilized debate by the escalator. They are pondering whether their own companiesare ready for the New Economy.

As far as I can make out from eavesdropping, the vote is five to one that neither they nor their organizations are in shape for the future. Intrigued, I ask one man, the personnel director of a firm that makes computer software, to size up the day for me. "This is heavy-duty stuff," he says. "But I just wonder if those-guys aren't moving in too fast a lane for me."

Some consultants accuse Naisbitt of being entirely too upbeat and surefooted in slippery times. "Utopian" is the word used by William P. Dunk, a New York management adviser who deals with giant and small companies, and who is a longtime Naisbitt-watcher. "The real value of Naisbitt's thought is to make us all begin to understand that we are heading toward

a vastly different type of corporation," Dunk says. "He seems to have one thing very right-namely, that new enterprises in all sectors will have to focus more and more intently Oil, their labor, which means people. What isn't at all clear is whether this new imperative necessarily leads to the benign, utopian arrangements implied by Naisbitt, which suggest that human beings will work and live harmoniously in cooperative systems that go beyond even Plato's Republic. ,; Many critics also question the basic research methodology Naisbitt uses to ground his prophecies. Naisbitt makes it clear that he is not a futurist. "'A sort of social forecaster," he calls himself.

"What I do is try to figure out what is going on right now and report on it right now," he tells me, seated in his office in the Georgetown section of Washington, D. C. "All of us are trying to find out what is going on but I have the luxury of working on it full-time. It may sound as if I'm talking about the future because people are always instructed by the past. But I talk about what is going on now. The real key is understanding the present."

Naisbitt's forte is "content analysis"which means that Naisbitt and his staff consume more than 250 newspapers daily, analyzing all stories, dissecting them into 13 major categories, and then crunching them into 200 subcategories.

The process yields "trends,:' which sometimes blossom into "megatrends."

Critics or no critics, Naisbitt and his views are heavily in demand. His list of clients forms the very heart of corporate America, including IBM, United Technologies, Atlantic Richfield, General Electric, Merrill Lynch, AT&T, Sears, Safeway and Security Pacific. But despite his prominence, he remains an enigma to many. Just why has Naisbitt, who, one executive said, "says noth~ng that bright people don't already know," such a foothold in corporate guruland?

"These are my folks," Naisbitt answers. "I know the corporate culture. I have been in business most of my life and have been an entrepreneur for 15 years.

This is the prism through which I see everything. Companies ask me to speak because I am one of them. Many academics, on the other hand, are perceived as antibusiness. I'm not. I am absolutely wall-to-wall probusiness." D About the Author: Randall Poe is the News Director of The Conference Board, publishers of Across the Board magazine in New York.

GOES ARCHITECTURE!

by JONATHAN

Z. LARSEN

When the rallying cry of Modern architects was "less is more," Robert Venturi, now called the spiritual father of Post-Modern architecture, declared, "Less is a bore."

As they pull into their driveway in suburban Philadelphia, the most famous husband and wife team in architecture, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, are greeted by an unusual sight. Their son, Jimmy, 13, is sprinkling Ajax across the flagstones leading to the front door. It seems that the flagstones are covered with moss, and get dangerously slick in the rain.

Jimmy, using teenage logic, has determined that the foaming cleanser may be just the right remedy. Whatever his parents may think of tracking chemicals into the house, it becomes clear from the ensuing, very polite exchange with Jimmy that Venturi, 59, acknowledged by colleagues to be the spiritual father of Post-Modern architecture, and Scott Brown, 53, a prominent urban planner, are not total masters of their home environment.

It is not until Jimmy shows up with a stray cat at the back porch, where Venturi is trying to relax over a martini, that the father's impatience shows. While Scott Brown is in the kitchen discussing dinner with the cook, Venturi explains to his son with a trace of exasperation that he wants peace and quiet. As Jimmy disappears around the corner of the house, Venturi

gazes across his broad, closely cropped lawn, sips his now watery martini and talks of the increasing pressures at work. At this moment, the firm has on the drawing boards three university buildings, including the exterior design for Princeton's molecular biology lab; two major city planning contracts, in Austin and Memphis; a museum in Austin; a primate house and a children's educational exhibition building at Philadelphia's zoo; and an enormous $55 million, mixed-use building in downtown Baghdad. There are also three new lines of furniture, not to mention flatware, tea services and china.

"Deadlines! Oh, incredible, just incredible," frets Venturi.

To make things worse, his managing partner of 20 years, John Rauch, has been on semisabbatical. Venturi's time is apparently at such a premium that he can't, or won't, be troubled to button down the collar points on his blue dress shirt. They seem Above: one of Robert Venturi's early successes was this modest house that he built for his mother in Philadelphia in 1964. Two decades later Philip Johnson used the idea of a gabled facade and broken pediment in his famous design for the AT&T building in Manhattan.

to lift off at rakish .angles, flying buttresses going nowhere. His tweed jacket and chino pants are wrinkled after his 12-hour day, so that the overalL effect, rounded off by graying hair and bifocal glasses, is quintessentially professorial.

"We have this theory," he says, speaking of himself and his wife, "that to be ten percent better, you have to work one hundred percent harder. It is very hard to deal with that, especially when you are parents of a teenager. We are doing the impossible, kind of, and that is what leads to the tension you see."

Scott Brown has now returned to announce that Jimmy has inadvertently managed to tree the cat. A graceful woman with an easy smile and a South African accent, she says of the resulting tranquillity, "Maybe it's just as well for the moment."

Picking up on the discussion of the onerous work load, she adds, "We can't have a holiday place somewhere else. Our lives aren't like that. We don't have a house on Nantucket. This is it.

This is our weekday place and our regeneration."

The house that Venturi and Scott Brown live in-a large three-story manor built in 1911-seems to mirror perfectly the ordered chaos of their lives. Venturi himself likes to describe it as "the last gasp of Art Nouveau bourgeois grandeur"; to Scott Brown, it's "something out of a Berlin suburb." She adds with obvious relish that most architect colleagues who come to visit are horrified.

No doubt they are, not so much by the'house itself, which is very spacious and comfortabie, but by the fact that Venturi and his wife have never modified it. No pristine minimalist spaces have been carved out of the interior, no skylights punched through the roof, no additions built from their own designs.

Then, too, there is the furniture. It is neither auction-quality antique nor avant-garde modern. Most of the sofas and chairs and tables came in a bulk purchase from the late Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City-$5 for the living room sofa, $300 for the rest. As for the objets d'art, they range from camp to Duchamp: a Desert Inn sign from Las Vegas under glass, a ceramic cherry'pie, an African fetish doll.

But for all the clash of styles and apparent casualness, the Venturi home is about as much a statement of their aesthetic as is-or was-Philip Johnson's famous glass home in New Canaan, Connecticut. The Venturi-Scott Brown house is the Johnson house stood on its roof. Instead of simplicity and austerity, there is a crazy quilt of styles and rich indulgence; instead of cold materials and spare furniture, there is warmth and plenty. Instead of forced order, there are the inherent contradictions in found objects and popular culture. In other words, instead of the glass boxes of the Modern architecture of

the mid-20th century, there is the historical potpourri and eclecticism of Post-Modernism.

Post-Modernism may have been a movement whose time had come, but architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, among others, believes "the chief opening gun of the revolt" was Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. The slim little book took careful aim at the shibboleths of Modern architecture arid the glass box that had become their apotheosis. To the design establishment, it was like Martin Luther nailing up his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg.

Whereas the rallying cry of the Moderns had been "less is more," Venturi shocked one and all by announcing: "Less is a bore." Instead, he argued for "a messy vitality," with hybrid styles and levels of culture working together; rather than rejecting 2,000 years of building, he called for heavy allusions to and reinterpretations of history. Perhaps most shattering, he knocked architects off their soapboxes or, rather, off their Eero Saarinen pedestal tables; instead of the architect as commissar of high culture, Venturi suggested that architects could learn from, and even use, the vernacular American culture so many of them despised. In his introduction to the book, Yale's noted architecture historian Vincent Scully proclaimed it "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923."

The indignation among the architectural elite seemed in direct proportion to Venturi's obscurity. Although age 41 at the time of publication, he was just getting started in what he now calls "an old man's game." The son of an Italian immigrant father who became a relatively prosperous food and produce merchant, young Robert was sent to private schools in Philadelphia. That, he says, was because his mother did not want him pledging allegiance to the flag. Both parents had become Quakers, and Venturi's mother was an admirer of Norman Thomas and the Fabian socialists. Exceptionally bright, Venturi graduated summa from Princeton, stayed on for a degree in architecture and finished off with two years at Rome's American Academy. After practicing under Louis Kahn, he struggled to establish his own partnership. "I was not a good salesman," he admits .."I did not have good connections, I was timid." He began writing Complexity, he says, because "my ideas were bigger than my opportunities, it was as simple as that."

By the mid-Sixties he had a few buildings of his own, the largest of which, a nursing home in Philadelphia, was itself very controversial. One critic claimed it had "all the charm of a union headquarters." Venturi justified its oddest feature, a huge, fake television antenna on the roof, as "a symbol of the aged, who spend so much time looking at TV." (Mercifully, perhaps, the antenna has fallen down.)

The most successful of his projects, in fact, had been built for his own mother on Philadelphia's Main Line-a small house that received modest attention when it first went up in 1964, but which has since become something of an architectural icon.

Probably its.most striking feature was a roof line that is open at the apex, or, in architectural terms, a broken pediment. It is worth noting that the most famous design of the Post-Modern era is Philip Johnson's AT&T building in Manhattan, just finished this year. It is a skyscraper with a broken pediment, giving it the silhouette of a Chippendale highboy. Venturi's admirers were quick to point out that in 1968, Venturi, in a typical salute to vernacular culture, had written admiringly of a motel sign "with the silhouette of a Chippendale highboy."

By the Seventies, the ranks of Post-Modernism included such notables as Charles Moore, Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern and-better late than never-Philip Johnson himself. As the intellectual interpreter of the movement, Venturi has seen his fame increase along with his commissions, but he has not totally dispelled the bitterness and jealousy that remain. Ten years after the publication of Complexity, his supporters in the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AlA) recommended him as a fellow of the Institute. The AlA refused. The snub so enraged the venerable architect, 'Professor Scully, that he in turn rejected the medal and honorary membership the AlA intended to award him, explaining: "I cannot in good conscience accept an award, however welcome, in the same year that the most impohant architect of my generation is denied a fellowship."

In the thick of all this controversy, of course, was Denise Lakofski Scott Brown. Born in Rhodesia, she lived from the age of 2 to 20 in Johannesburg, where her father was a developer. Then she moved to England to complete her studies in architecture and in 1955 married Robert Scott Brown, an architecture student she had known back in South Africa. They studied in Rome and then found their way to the United States in 1958. Nine months after settling in at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Scott Brown died in an automobile accident. (She now rides in but refuses to drive a car.)

Denise Scott Brown met Robert Venturi in 1960, when both were teaching at Pennsylvania. "Some people say Bob married his graduate student," she says with resentment. "It's a lie."

There was an almost instant sharing of ideas and interests, which grew into a seven-year "platonic" relationship. As early as 1964 her name appeared along with Venturi's and Rauch's ona characteristically whimsical proposal for a fountain in Philadelphia; two years later her contributions were duly acknowledged by Venturi in Complexity.

By that time, Scott Brown had moved to the West Coast, where she set up the first interdisciplinary urban design program at UCLA. Once established, she invited Venturi out to speak to her students. It was during this trip that she showed him a town she thought he had to see-Las Vegas. Out of that visit came a book and a marriage. "We started falling in love in Las Vegas," says Scott Brown. The wedding took place in 1967, and the book, Learning from Las Vegas, was published a year later. Written with Steven Izenour, a former student of Venturi's and now a senior associate in thei,r firm, Las Vegas enlarged on the themes of Complexity and was, in large measure, an homage to the honky-tonk.

The first year of the marriage, Venturi's firm was in such a state of crisis that Scott Brown pitched in to help. For free. The next year, she was not only paid but also made a partner. Sort of. "They said, 'We can't put your name on the firm. We've just had a name change [to Venturi and Rauch] and we can't withstand another,'" she recalls. Ten years later, when the partnership moved to its present offices in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, Scott Brown's name went on the letterhead.

The Manayunk office of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown is what one might expect-a little funky, slightly cluttered and very unpretentious. The neighborhood itself is ethnic and untouched so far by boutiques or urban renewal. The old brick mill building in which Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown do business is an irregular shape, following the irregular grid of the streets.

The firm occupies all three floors, and its 35 or so employees

constantly have to move from one floor to another via fire stairs bedroom, living room and library. "We used the house as a at either end of the building. Venturi, who has never been guinea pig," says Venturi. One of the floral designs ended up athletic, says it is the only exercise he gets. The firm's man in across the entire facade of a Best Products catalog showroom motion, he goes from drawing board to drawing board, offering outside Philadelphia. "Someone called it the ugliest shower "crits" and ideas. "Bob has the greatest hand-eye talent of his curtain in Bucks County," jokes Scott Brown. generation," says senior associate Izenour. "The level of critThe couple experimented with another floral patten; boricism is immensely high. It is like a game of very fast, very rowed from a found object-a tablecloth one of their architects good tennis." inherited from his grandmother. The so-called Grandmother On this particular day in the office, any number of projects fabric is now available in a line the firm has recently produced are on the drawing boards, up against deadlines of one urgency for Knoll Furniture. Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown is curor another. Venturi is in the firm's conference room with rently designing two additional furniture lines, and judging Izenour and Vaughan, discussing a preliminary concept for the from Knoll's Venturi products now on the market, they may Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin. There seems to be a have tapped a rich vein. debate over the plan of the galleries and concept of the The entire line consists of a huge stuffed sofa, which Scott windows. Venturi, his button-down shirt unfettered as always, Brown says "is meant to be almost like clouds that you sit on," a is saying, "There is nothing wrong with a room with light coffee table, a dining room table and nine chairs. Since Venturi coming from the side. It is done all the time." Izenour raises a and Scott Brown believe that there is never a single, "correct" point about the shape of the rooms, arguing for symmetry. solution to a design problem, it seemed appropriate that they They both doodle for a while on the yellow onionskin in front of would produce not one chair but nine, each an interpretation of them. To Izenour, who has headphones slung around his neck, a historical style: Queen Anne, Chippendale, Empire, Art Venturi says, "I still think that is a good room ..1don't have your Deco, Sheraton, Art Nouveau, Gothic Revival, Hepplewhite' prejudice against the annoyance of asymmetry." and Biedermeier. With the various finishes and laminates Venturi doodles some more, and, as he does so, talks of a available, and the option of a seat cushion, the number of bay window "sort of thing" at the ends of certain walls. Izenour permutations reaches 100.

The chairs fetch between $880 and $1,320, not very expensuggests that such an area might be a place for sculpture.

Venturi isn't so sure. "It might be the kind of place where you sive in the world of designer decor. But how will they do? say, 'I don't want any art, I want to look at the view.'"

"We're not sure yet," a Knoll executive recently told a design Two floors below, Denise Scott Brown is reviewing a "test magazine. "This is kind of a curve ball." strip" for some renderings of her urban plan for a 25-block It seems slightly strange that not one of the Venturi-Scott section of Austin, due to be shown within a month at a Brown chairs has found its way into their home. They have, as Manhattan exhibition of women artists. She is not too happy they point out, 83 chairs in all manner of styles, and now they with the colors, or with the birds depicted flying above her have even designed a chair for the period of their house-Art Nouveau. If Venturi and his wife do not rush to sit in their own tree-lined avenue. "They look like bats," she says.

Venturi appears and soon is delivering a "crit" of a drawing chairs, is it also possible that they don't always follow their own for a proposed office building in New Hampshire. The render- preachings? Architect Charles Moore once quipped, "Venturi has celebrated McDonald's Golden Arches, but I'd take a bet ing is a sophisticated one, in that the building is represented twice-the second time in the reflection of a pond just in front he has never eaten a Big Mac." (He has.)

For promoters of low and middle culture, Venturi and Scott of the proposed site. The reflection is indicated by wiggly lines.

Too wiggly, Venturi thinks. He draws an even more exagger- Brown sometimes backslide into highbrow taste. Although ated wiggle and says to Ann Trowbridge, the architect over- their son listens to The Police, David Bowie and Michael seeing the drawing, "That's just awful, because it makes this Jackson, they themselves much prefer Verdi, Mozart and Bach. [the real building] look very stiff."

The same evening their son, Jimmy, treed the cat, his parents Trowbridge writes in the margin, "less wiggle." Venturi told a story that illuminates the contradiction. It seems that then suggests that the lines indicating the refle~tion might be every summer the family takes a vacation in Venice. One broken, and draws in little vertical strokes severing the con- summer, Jimmy, then 7, and his maternal grandmother were tinuous wiggly lines. "Oh, in other words, really draw the line," sitting in a hotel lobby when an American couple and an she says. Venturi, delighted by this wordplay, says, "Yes. I Australian couple began to talk in voices that were designed to would really draw the line." be overheard.

"They were saying how awful Italy was," reports Venturi.

One of the main tenets of Post-Modernism, at least as practiced at Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, is that of the "This man was saying, 'The best thing myoid man did was to "decorated shed." Venturi became convinced that the possibili- migrate to America. This country is terrible, it's dirty and ties for contemporary architecture lay far less in the manipula- falling apart. If this city fell into the canal, it would be O.K. tion of the shape of a puilding than in the decoration of it. He with me.' And his wife said, 'Yeah, I'll take Las Vegas for a argued for an architecture that "encourages ornamental surface vacation.' And Jimmy went up to them and shook his finger and over articulated form, pattern over texture." It was perhaps not said, 'You should be ashamed of yourselves.' " unexpected that he and Scott Brown would soon come around In other words, even a kid who enjoys Big Macs knows enough to draw the line, as it were, between Venice and Vegas. to the notion of pure decoration, forget the shed.

0 Over the years, Venturi and Scott Brown did.make changes His parents? They were delighted. to their house, but the changes were ornamental rather than structural. Each summer, live-in architecture students ("We About the Author: Jonathan Z. Larsen is aNew York-based free-lance have an ersatz extended family," explains Scott Brown) would writer. He has worked as an editor at Time, Life, and New Times stencil various floral and Pop patterns on the walls of the magazines.

Paul Newman (with wife Joanne Woodward, at left) has turned out a few more hits-sauce, pop corn, salad dressing. The superstar and Hotchner (the author of this article) formed a food empire that gives all its profits-millions of dollars-to charity. The recipes are Newman's own.

I have been asked many times how Paul Newman, who knows a great deal about acting but absolutely nothing about business, and I, a writer who knows even less, became tycoons, and in the food business yet, as competitive and cutthroat an industry as you can find.

The answer is: we did everything wrong. We did just the opposite of what the experts told us to do, confounded the negativism of Those Who Had Been Burned, got under way with virtually no capital in the bank-a couple of bumbling amateurs trying to fish with no bait in a sea of sharks.

That was in 1982. In two years we sold 10,403,100 bottles of Newman's Own oil-and-vinegar salad dressing, amounting to $8,669,254 in gross sales. In its first 16 months of existence Newman's Own Industrial Strength Venetian Marinara Sauce sold 4,047,060 jars, totaling $6,070,592. Our total profit from these two products was approximately $2.5 million, every penny of which has been given to deserving charities: SloanKettering Cancer Research, Lahey Clinic, New York Foundling Hospital, Society to Advance the Retarded, Jacksonville Wolfson Children's Hospital, Harlem Restoration, and many others, We are told that we are the only corporation in the world that gives away all of its profits and starts with zero dollars in the bank on the first of each fiscal year.

And now we are introducing a new product-Newman's Own Oldstyle Picture Show Popcorn-which we hope will substantially swell our charity profits.

After searching for the perfect kernel for more than two years, we finally have a new hybrid corn that was especially grown to suit Newman's educated popcorn palate.

What started us off on the great food adventure? In his unique way, this is how

Newman summarizes our emergence into the salad-dressing business: "Why? Why market this all-natural, no-nonsense, kick-in-the-derriere dressing?

In a word-the neighbors. For years, at Christmas, old pal Hotchner and I bottled this concoction for friends. The acclaim was deafening, the repeat orders staggering. This year they chained us to the furnace until we brewed thirty gallons-a prisoner of my own excellence. Enough, I said! Let's go public!"

Of course, it is one thing to want to put a bottle of salad dressing on supermarket shelves, but quite another to get it there, and to that end Paul and I consulted a bevy of food experts. We met with the top people of a big marketing company who advised us to invest a half-million dollars and test the product in "key" shopping plazas all around the lJnited States. Another big food executive told us that the salad-dressing competition was so keen our only chance was to sell our bottles by mail order. And then there was the financial consultant, his desk covered with statistical charts and summaries, who informed us convincingly that- we should be prepared to lose $1 million in the first year of operation.

We digested all this, and Newman spoke my mind: "Hotch," he said, "I'll tell you what-let's test-market it by inviting some of our friends to come over and sample it along with the dressings of all our competitors, using unmarked dishes. Then let's fly right in the teeth of the competition and try to get it in the supermarkets, to hell with mail order.

And I think we should put up $40,000 instead of a million-how about it?"

We shook on it, and set up a corporation that we called Salad King, with Newman as president and me as vicepresident and treasurer. Now, before I go any further, I suppose I had better fill you 4

in on how we got immersed with salad dressing in the first place. As long as I can remember, Newman has been rejecting so-called house dressings and concocting his own mix. Captains, maitre d's, and sometimes the restaurant owners themselves would scurry around to assemble Newman's ingredients. When we first ate at -Elaine's, one of New York's "in" restaurants, virtually all the waiters and Elaine her_self gathered round as Paul blended and tasted the ingredients that had been brought to him from the kitchen.

All well and good until that day, a few years back, when Paul came over one afternoon to watch a football game and said, "I've got a neat idea for Christmas presents- I'm going to give all' my friends bottles of my salad dressing.

They're always asking me for the recipe, so I'll fill up all the empty wine bottles I've been saving and play Santa Claus.

Good idea, huh?"

"Great-they'll love jt," I said naively.

"When can we start?"

"Start what?"

"Making the dressing. I figure you and I can do it in an afternoon-how about tomorrow?"

As devious as Tom Sawyer, he is. It took us eight hours of steady labor to mix it, bottle it, cork it and wrap it. But Newman's friends were delighted, and it was a ritual Paul and I followed every Christmas after that, each year taking longer than the year before, as the list of requests for "Newman's Own Salad Dressing" grew longer and longer.

But finally my sagging back cracked under the mounting pressure. It was the year that it took us three days of sweatshop labor down in Newman's cellar to turn out enough bottles to satisfy his list, by then three pages long. And at the end of the third day, Paul stood in the center

of the cellar surrounded by all those filled bottles and suggested that we do anothe~ 100 bottles and put them up for sale in local food stores.

That was how it started, innocently enough, but over the next several months Newman was driven by his desire to market his dressing. Scarcely a day passed without Paul's calling from some unlikely place to discuss a newly discovered source for the perfect olive oil, the perfect red-wine vinegar, or the perfect mustard that he constantly sought. He phoned me from race-tracks in between races, and from mobile dressing rooms while shooting Absence of Malice and The Verdict.

That's when I said, "Listen, Paul, we've been friends for 20-odd years [some of them really odd], and I wonder why you're so fixed on marketing your dressing. I ask you, would Clark Gable sell salad dressing? Would Tyrone Power? Humphrey Bogart? Isn't it a little tackyi" "It's all-natural," Newman said, a touch of pique in his tone. "Just look at the labels on all these other dressingsfull of gums, preservatives, chemical additives-that's why. And there's something else."

"What?"

"If we are successful ... " "Yes?" "I'll tell you then.".. .

So we started operations by finding a little marketing company in â&#x20AC;˘ Port Washington, New York, s~ll our product, a modest bottler in Boston to bottle it, and with a total of $40,000 as the entire capital of Salad King, Inc., we set up our headquarters in a little office in Westport, Connecticut, that we furnished with Paul's poolside furniture-in fact, his desk has a beach umbrella over it. My wife, Ursula, takes care of the office with the assistance of a bookkeeper, and Paul's wife, Joanne Woodward, lends her talent and support on those special occasions when we introduce a new product.

When our spaghetti sauce made its debut at a Manhattan press party, Joanne sang with splendid voice a spirited spaghetti song that I had written for the occasion, and she is prominently on view on a poster that comically depicts the birth of Newman's Own salad dressing. She also took an active role in the development of both the salad dressing and spaghetti sauce, helping to determine taste and consistency.

We do not advertise (until this day we

to'

haven't spent a penny on advertising the salad dressing), but within a month after our first bottle of Newman's Own had reached the shelves we had repaid the $40,000 and the orders were rolling in.

And so was the mail, grateful letters from people who welcomed all-natural food: Yamazaki-cho, Tokyo, Japan

Machida-shi

Dear Mr. Newman, I will introduce myself first of all. My name is Yuko Ohkawa. I am a Japanese and 17 old. I put your dressingNewman's Own-on the salad. It is very tasty. Salad dressing is tart in Japan. But yours is tasty, so I feel very tasty.

I was gave it by my sister. She bought it in Los Angefes. I used one of two bottles.

It is not sold in Japan. So I am moving to America.

Yours truly, Yuko Ohkawa It was at the end of our first year of operation, poised by then to introduce a second product-Newman's Own Industrial Strength Marinara Sauce-that Paul revealed his other reason for being in the food business: "Philanthropy," he confided. "We have $920,000 in profit that we can now give away to needy causes. You should be paid something for all the time you put in running our operation, but as for real profit, let's give it all away to them what needs it."

Because we have so little overhead, we are able to generate a 17 percent pretax profit, five times the food business average of 3.3 percent. What started out as a lark has become, to our everlasting amazement, a burgeoning food empire.

We have six factories in the United States, our own trucking network, and we are widely distributed in such faraway places as Australia, Japan, Canada, Puerto Rico, Guam and England.

Philanthropy has also been the objective of our spaghetti-sauce business, which has generated its owl! deluge of consumer mail, as gratifying as the profits we give away: Dear Paul Newman: In a world where they ram advertisements down our throats day after day, and in a world where the majority of those advertisements miss by a mile, here comes a product that makes us laugh when we read the label for one thing.

Then the next thing we notice is we don't get it crammed down our throat on

TV and radio. Thank God! My next thought was, "Another celebrity thinking we'll buy it because we like him as a star." Ha! I thought, not I! But then recently instead of picking up my once-every-three-months Ragu or whatever is on sale, I decided to give ole Paul Newman a break and picked up your Industrial Strength specialty. Bein'g a gal who shrinks at all the preservatives, I did a double take at that label, Mr. Newman, and when I opened that jar I couldn't believe what I was seeing! What Ragu and some of the others say they have in their sauce (you have to carry a magnifying glass to see it) you put in yours! I've never seen real chunks of tomatoes, big slices of mushrooms-and that taste!

Wow! An honest man, I said to myself!

Wait till my Italian sister-in-law sees this!

Thanks, Paul Newman, for putting a product on the market you must be very proud of. I sure feel good about buying it and feeding it to my husband. You've restored my faith in human nature. Yes, Helen, there is an honest manufacturer out there! Yahoo!

Respectfully, Mrs.Helen Fox Santa Cruz, California One of the things that makes Newman successful, as an actor as well as a food entrepreneur, is that he doesn't take himself seriously, as witnessed by his lurid account of the origin of his spaghetti sauce: "Working twelve-hour days ... hungry ... arrive home, deserted by wife and children ... cursing! Scan the cupboard-one package spaghetti ... one bottle marinara sauce ... run to kitchen, cook-junk!

YUK! Lie down, snooze ... visions of culinary delights. ... Venetian ancestor tickles my ear, tickle, tickle ... sauce talk ... MAMA MIA! Dash to vegetable patch ... yum yum ... boil water activate spaghetti ... ditto the sauce slurp, slurp .... Terrifico! Magnifico! Slurp! Carumba! Bottle the sauce! ... Share with guys on streetcar ... ah, me, finally immortal!"

Who really knows about immortality?

Spaghetti sauce and Butch Cassidymaybe both of them will make it. 0 About the Author: A.E. Hotchner, Paul Newman's friend and business partner, is a playwright and author. His books include Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, Looking for Miracles, Doris Day, Sophia: Living and Loving and Choice People: The Greats, Near Greats, and Ingrates I Have Known.

The Thinking Man's Rock Star .continued from page 6 element," he says.

Byrne flips to three sketches of gesturing hands.

"This came from a book of journalists' photos. Those are Nixon's hands, making a speech. ~" "I put those sketches up on the wall, until there was a waIlful. They had nothing to do whatsoever with any story or character ,so they could be moved around and shifted anywhere. So I moved them on the wall until the whole thing seemed to flow in some kind of logical shape."

Only after deciding, for economic reasons, to set the film in Texas, a right-towork state, did Byrne begin to worry about a plot. "And then I got a lot of ideas for characters out of tabloid papers.

Like, we've got a husband and wife who think of themselves as happily married, but they haven't spoken to one another in 30 years.

They spoke through their children, and then, when the children left, they hired a live-in maid and spoke through her."

There are times David Byrne could use someone to translate his talk into down-toearth terms. There's a shyness to him that he seldom overcomes except when performing. Like the levitating woman in one of his new songs, he seems to drift easily into a world of his own. Sitting in his loft, speaking softly and sometimes haltingly, he becomes animated only in order to entertain an idea, never to express an emotion. All the systems and information theories, all the orderly grids, seem to be elaborate defense mechanisms.

So do his lyrics. "It became harder," he acknowledges, "to write about things that struck a chord in myself, and I felt most comfortable doing that by speaking in a very ambiguous way. If I said exactly what I felt, because of-I don't know-my inabilities as a singer, it would com.e across as corny or kind of flat. And so I find that the way to say things that seem to touch me is, at least until recently, to put them into a kind of language that in most cases isn't narrative or literal. " This acute self-consciousness is the source of much of Byrne's appeal. When he careers about the stage, he gives an audience the vicarious, giddy thrill of watching a wallflower suddenly pop a lampshade on his head. (Indeed, at one point during Stop Making Sense, Byrne performs a wacky dance with a floor lamp.)

As Tina

Weymouth points out, Byrne used to be terrified of making a fool of himself. "Now," she says, "he has found out that if he falls down, people love it. So he uses it."

To feel awkward and anxious and yet to be in control is an admirable triumph of the will, but one that takes its toll. One nearly this is always scents in Byrne's music-and what makes it exciting-a whiff of scarcely suppressed hysteria. As the painter Robert Longo says, "His images have the appearance of normalcy, but there is also insanity inside it."

Tina Weymouth tries to explain the loony alienation lurking in Byrne's songs.

"A lot of times people will say, 'Ah, yes, David is echoing strains of Proust and Camus and Orwell,' and they'll attribute this great modern insight to him. And, true, he's read those things. We all are influenced by those things. But to think that he's calculating, in the sense that he's observing Western man in alienation from himself, that he's outside of it, observing it and putting it into an art form to characterize it, is crazy.

"I think that's really how David feels.

I'm not saying that David's completely bonkers, but," she hesitates, "he really is.

He's adapted to his situation.

He's not making a social criticism. He thinks it's all very funny.

"David is-it's a very good quality, actually, for someone doing what he's doing-like a sponge, like an adolescent who continues to absorb what's around him.

Psychologists, I guess, would call it a 'loose ego' or something."

What absorbs Byrne most these days are the avant-garde arts, in which, he says, he has rediscovered the same thrill he derived from rock-and-roll as a teenager.

His involvement with Knee Plays for Robert Wilson's the CIVIL warS is more than just musical. Indeed Wilson, who has little use for rock-and-roll, was originally interested in Byrne's stage presence. "I liked the intimacy of his performance," he says, "the humor, the coolness. In order to be really hot on stage, you have to be cool."

Drawing in part on the traditions of Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku puppet theater, Byrne and Wilson, assisted by Adelle Lutz, developed the concepts for these 13 three- to six-minute dreamlike tableaux inhabited by dancers in white smocks manipulating puppetlike constructions.

Byrne also wrote texts, by turns humorous or gnomic. "I thought that if I ate the food of tl;1e area I was visiting," begins Knee Play 4 (Social Studies), "that I might assimilate the

point of view of the people there. As if the point of view was somehow in the food."

Byrne composed the score for brass ensemble on a digitalized synthesizer called an Emulator that enables one to duplicate and record the sounds of any instrument.

Then he had it notated. On the tapes he used to mix the album, one could still hear an occasional baffled interjection from the musicians, mostly moonlighting members of the band from The Tonight Show. Echoing everything from the harmonies of Bulgarian folk songs to the marches of turn-of-thecentury New Orleans, they are redolent of the repetitions of Philip Glass, but their brevity and jazzy playfulness distinguish them from run-of-the-mill minimalism.

Byrne's adventures outside the group, as well as occasional differences within it, make the future of Talking Heads uncertain. The band is a cooperative venture, but inevitably Byrne receives most of the attention, which just as inevitably creates considerable strain. Frantz and Weymouth have eased some of it by forming another band, Tom Tom Club, whose 1981 hit, "Genius of Love," sold more copies than any Talking Heads single to date. Jerry Harrison has nearly finished his second solo album.

"In the beginning," says Byrne, "we were like a family, but eventually it becomes more like a business, a creative business. I kind of wish we could all be as close as we were years ago, and we all to some extent keep struggling to return to that. But, at the same time, I love all these other things that I'm involved in. The ideal would be that the band is one thing that we all do, and that we can all do other things."

The fate of Talking Heads is as unpredictable as the reception of their next album.

Certainly the down-home accordion and pedal-steel guitar they plan to add to a couple of songs will surprise listeners accustomed to their urban funk. Maybe, says Byrne, "I have gone the long way around and come to accept almost the conventional song structure as a valid way of working."

Chris Frantz puts it in simpler terms: "I think David really wants to sing. He wants to croon. And we've found out that Tina and Jerry are very good singing harmonies with him. They sound very sweet. So we can express a sweetness that we never expressed before ... touch people in a different way."

"It has something to do," Tina Weymouth concludes, "with discovering the unsleaziness of rock-and-roll."

0 About the Author: Ken Emerson is the articles editor for The New York Times Magazine.

Rambling in New Orleans The exotic romance of New Orleans ("NuWALnz" to natives) has inspired prose and poetry over the ages because the city invokes sentimental nostalgia. The following articles show that The Big Easy is a city impervious to change and facile generalizations.

It is not a,n unmixed pleasure to revisit a place where one has lived, after a gap of several years. One tends to look for aspects of the life of the place which one remembers from the past. In Bombay, London and Paris, for instance, one is often disappointed to see that a cherished landmark has disappeared or that new buildings have risen to obscure a view which was remembered with particular nostalgia.

Revisiting New Orleans after 18 years is in many ways an exception. It is true that new buildings have come up and parts of the city are almost unrecognizable. But other parts of the city are practically unchanged.

The Freret bus still connects the Tulane campus with the fleshpots of the French Quarter. A friend I knew as a young lecturer in anthropology is now at the top of his profession, but still remembers a modest house where I lived on Zimpel Street in 1953. The St. Charles streetcar rumbles along Carrolton Avenue, although the fare has gone up a little from the seven cents I used to pay. A new library and other new buildings on Freret Street make the campus unfamiliar, until I wander into the old Graduate School building and find that little has changed there since the early Fifties. Black and white residents continue to be neighbors in the modest frame houses that cluster the area between Broadway and South Carrol ton Avenue. The stadium still dominates the attention of Tulane students as well as its graduates. The Quarter seems little changed, although the bars and restaurants I used to visit, like Lafitte's and Pat O'Brien's, are now impossibly crowded. This may be, however, because I revisited New Orleans just before and during Mardi Gras-a time when many of my friends now prefer to go underground in order to avoid crowds of noisy visitors.

There must be some reason, however, why I felt more relaxed in New Orleans than in any other city in North America, and I visited quite a few, from New York to San Francisco and Montreal to Acapulco. Was it just nostalgia for my student days or was there something more to justify this partiality for New Orleans?

No doubt the answer lies in a combination of many things. I was fortunate enough to have had a circle of friends many of whom knew each other over a period of many years. Some have moved away from New Orleans but still correspond with some members of the circle. A house in which I had lived in Burdette Street had been sold, but the new owner was able to put me in touch with the former owner, to whose family I had been close.

It was strange to meet a member of the Tulane faculty after 18 years to be told that of course we had met before; so I had been

away, had I? The lady who ran the laundry was willing to sew a button on a coat for me for no extra charge, a thing one could hardly imagine in New York or Washington. I know few cities where there is this combination of small-town intimacy and the bohemian sophistication of life in the Quarter.

While a student at Tulane University, I made a brief visit to a town called Natchitoches, Louisiana, to speak about India at the North Western State College. Two things about my visit remain in my memory to this day. The first was a thatched mudhut built on the grounds of an old French plantation house by slaves who had come from Africa. This, I was told, was a rare example of a house built in the African style in the United States. The second was, I noticed, a wooden strip with cloth hangings suspended from the ceiling of a plantation house. It was intended to be pulled by a slave, who sat outside the room and controlled it by a rope. As I had seen an extremely similar contraption in actual use in my grandparents' home in Punjab during my childhood before electricity was introduced, I was curious to know more about it.

When I asked the name of this fan I was told that it was called a "Pankha"; this is the Hindustani word for fan. Evidently the French colonials had brought it with their possessions from India. .

The basic culture of New Orleans and of Louisiana state is Latin rather than Anglo-Saxon. The English, Irish and Germans who came to the state in 1803 were entering not a wild and unsettled country like the Midwest or Texas, but an area whose cultural patterns had already been formed. New Orleans was thus culturally more akin to the Caribbean Islands with their peculiar admixture of African, French, Spanish and native Indian traditions than to the rest of the United States. The French patois spoken by the blacks of New Orleans was said to be akin to the Haitian Creole language, which was a modified form of the French spoken in France. The "Cajun" people of Louisiana, on the other hand, were descendants of the "Arcadians" who had come down the Mississippi from Canada and brought to French a totally different twist.

There is another aspect of the Latin tradition which is not often remembered, and that is the comparative absence of racial feelings between blacks and whites. While the French and the Spanish were not unused to the practice of slavery, they attached less importance to the concept of race than did the Anglo-Saxons. Whether this could be ascribed to the Catholic faith as against the Protestant, or to the warm temperament of southern Europe, or to some other factor, is difficult to guess.

While segregation can never be justified or even condoned, its

cruelties were less evident in an area like New Orleans. The racially segregated restaurants, buses and streetcars which existed when I was in New Orleans in the early Fifties had not completely wiped out the sense of human contact which still existed between black and white neighbors in many parts of New Orleans. I once noticed a black and a white lady talking to each other on the streetcar quite naturally across the barrier of the sign which said "For Colored Only." It would have been difficult to visualize such a scene in the North.

My own experience with the racial problem was somewhat frustrating. Due to my olive complexion, I was usually taken to be Mexican. Since Mexicans and American Indians were officially "white" by race, I was not-allowed to sit in the colored section of the streetcar, and I found it difficult to meet blacks socially.

During my second visit, I noticed that, although segregation had ended, the seats in the St. Charles streetcar still retained the small metal strips and holes which used to hold the "For Colored Only" signs. These signs used to be moved forward or backward to provide for a variation in the number of white or colored patrons. According to rumor, in the Sixties the "For Colored Only" signs were appropriated by fraternity houses of Dillard, the black university in New Orleans; blacks were now excluding whites from some of their institutions, in retaliation to generations of white prejudice.

There seem to be two major developments which have taken place in regard to the role of the blacks in the United States since I was there in the early Fifties. The first is the increasing recognition of the concept of equality and its application to the blacks. The major decisions of the Supreme Court banning segregation in the public schools and in universities were evidently a major factor in this change.

However, the civil rights movement of the late Fifties was a product of Southern institutions and traditions. The leadership provided to the movement by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was very much a product of the Southern Negro tradition, with the church as its motivating force.

The second major change in the role of the Negro in the United States has been the product of leaders who came out of Northern ghettoes rather than from Southern rural communities. The militant leader Malcolm X was born in a small town in Michigan, and his first exposure to urban life was in Boston. The Black -Power movement, with its strong assertion of the Negro personality and its rejection of the early ideal of integration with the whites, has not been as influential in the South as in the North.

New Orleans, while a part of the South, is also the product of a tradition of racial mixture and easygoing camaraderie, which seems to be a survival of its Latin and Caribbean heritage. Because of this background, as my anthropologist friend put it, "There is a tendency for a protest meeting to turn into a carnival." Instead of Afro hair styles and brightly colored daishiki (which is something like a kurta), there was still' an acceptance of the coexistence of different communities, although not yet on a footing of complete equality.

There is another aspect of New Orleans life which has contributed to its position as a city retaining a unique charm.

Unlike most American cities, it has very few areas that can be described as slums. I had the privilege of going through parts of the city with the distinguished New Orleans architect, Professor Bernard Lemann, and it was interesting to see that even the areas where poor people live consist largely of small, singlestory houses, set slightly away from the road and from each other. Many areas of the city are still mixed areas in the sense

that blacks and whites live next door to each other. One of the most attractive is ColiseiIm Square, the core of the lower Garden District. Here, new buildings readily mix with the old.

New Orleans, thus, has become a rare and harmonious blend of the old and the new. It has become a many-spoked hub of the Americas, a role never visualized by its founder, Jean Baptiste Ie Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, in 1718. The city has also become the focus of many activities-medicine, culture, shipping, manufacturing, tourism and travel.

New Orleans was a French colony from the early 17th century. It became a French crown colony in 1731 and was ceded to Charles III of Spain secretly by his cousin Louis XV in 1762. The Spanish ruled from 1766 to 1803 when it was given back to France. In the same year, New Orleans and the entire Louisiana territory were purchased by the United States for $15 million at a ceremony in the' Cabildo.

Streets of the Vieux Carre, site of the original settlement, exist today essentially as they were laid out by Adrien de Pauger, Bienville's engineer. The architecture is European, created by the French and Spanish colonists and their descendants, the Creoles. Most buildings of this area have distinctive iron lace balconies that are constructed around a patio.

One of the reasons New Orleans has retained its unique housing pattern in the heart of town is because many people like to live in the city, unlike other metropolises where people move out to the suburbs. The comparative absence of suburban sprawl is a product of the traditional unwillingness of the New Orleans resident to move out of the city. Much of the renewal in the uptown area, I understand, is private and spontaneous.

People buy houses in town and restore them, as they are cheaper to heat and clean than the old mansions, and more comfortable than the new blocks of low-cost public housing. An important contributory factor here is undoubtedly the comparative absence of major industries in New Orleans with its accompanying pollution, influx of labor, and the inevitable urban expansion and congestion.

A few American city planners are coming round to accepting a new theory known as the "neighborhood approach" wherein old neighborhoods, narrow streets and small landholdings are not ruthlessly torn down to make way for large-scale development. The planners feel that these old sections of town retain some of their old values, and are desirable as residential, business and social units. Instead of tearing down, the planners advocate restoration and renovation.

Studies are being done by architects and others, which try to assess the sense of psychological loss that people feel when they are torn away from surroundings to which they are accustomed.

In this respect, a city like New Orleans is especially worthy of study, as it consists of a series of neighborhnods that relate to each other, while each serving its own residents. In fact, a student of Professor Lemann's had undertaken such a study when I revisited New Orleans.

It is important for us in India to realize that in many respects those parts of the United States which have retained their preindustrial patterns of life are today in a better position to face the shocks of urban life in the last quarter of the 20th century. The qualities which cause New Orleans to retain its vitality are the same qualities which enable the older Indian cities like Jaipur, Hyderabad and Lucknow to retain a leisurely pace of life which has almost disappeared in highly industrialized and overcrowded cities like Calcutta and Bombay. 0 Vasant K. Bawa is the Director of the institute of Development and Planning Studies, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.

About the Author:

The City That Care Forgot

by S. FREDERICK

Is New Orleans really The City That Care Forgot? Is it truly The Big Easy, as the travel posters proclaim? Or could these labels be applied just as accurately to Newark, San Jose or Toledo?

Lawsuits over false advertising can be messy, so it is high time these questions are answered, soberly and scientifically.

Health statistics are called for-computerized print-outs covering every man, woman and child from Chalmette to River Ridge. Reams of them. Such data should be readily at hand since Louisiana has virtually free medical care for anyone needing it, a legacy of Huey Long.

"What, if anything, is really different about New Orleanians, physiologically and mentally?" Presented with this query, a respected local epidemiologist instantly shot back, "Diabetes and pancreatic cancer." And so they are. But upon closer inspection, these diseases turn out to be problems throughout southern Louisiana, not just in The Big Easy.

Perhaps such data are too general, too lacking in real-life detail.

Fortunately, the state of Louisiana maintains a series of neighborhood mental health clinics throughout the Crescent City. (The nickname comes from the curve of the Mississippi River at New Orleans.)

Hundreds of clergymen are also in daily touch with their parishioners and hear their problems.

Together, the clinicians and clergymen probably have the most down-to-earth ')l-, . practical knowledge ...-:::1'4:r' "b.,. . of mental and spiritual health in The Big Easy.

Visits to mental health clinics and churches have produced only such subjective impressions as the following, from the director of a clinic: "Sure, there are differences, but they're only what you would expect. People here drink a lot.

Hypertension is low because folks tend to act out their problems." Big deal.

These various impressions were tantalizing for one thing, however-their utter inconsistency. "New Orleanians have absolutely the same mental health problems as people in any other large American city," one priest claimed. "No better, no worse." "This place is an asylum without walls," declared a staffer from a clinic.

Obviously, then, multiple opinions must be sought, and from all the leading authorities. So our advisers drew up a long

STARR

list of bona fide experts, people who are said to spend their days immersed in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. A questionnaire was prepared; forms were duplicated. At last, science would either uphold or debunk The Big Easy theory.

But expert Number One was out fishing in Terrebonne Parish with expert Number Three when our interviewer called.

Expert Number Two was not back from her weekend, while experts Four through Eight were all still at lunch when our interviewer showed up for his three o'clock meeting. Expert Number Nine was involved with an office party, which the interviewer joined, thus missing his scheduled meetings with experts Numbers Ten and Eleven, both of whom, meanwhile, had left messages saying that they left work early that day.

Expert Number Twelve was at an emergency meeting of the Saint Joseph's Day parade committee in his neighborhood, an urgent session that had been called to decide whether the band should precede or follow the children with flowers.

Perhaps one day it will be possible to get a more definitive answer on whether New Orleans is really The City That Care Forgot.

New Orleans is built on mush, literally. The recipe calls for 65 meters of the best alluvial soil washed in from Minnesota, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Then soak the soil in water from the same sources to form a smooth, stratified pudding. No bed of granite lies beneath this, either. Instead, there is a layer of compacted sand just hard enough, with luck, to support a building.

These formidable obstacles have, until recently, imposed a welcome modesty on New Orleans architects. Until the past decade, the boldest attempt to tackle the mush problem was made during the 1850s, when the U.S. Custom House was planted on the bank of the Mississippi River on submerged bales of cotton. Such bales were appealingly organic and indigenous, and marked the outer limit of grandomania in architecture-until now.

The pudding problem has finally been conquered with a lOO-ton American crane equipped with a Vulcan 80 C pile driving hammer. Cotton bales now give way to 60-meter-long prestressed concrete pilings, each capable of bearing a 400-ton design load. Enough of these concrete fingers driven into the earth can support the 53-story Place Saint Charles, New Orleans' answer to the World Trade Center in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Nature prescribed certain building types, certain clothes, certain foods, a certain way of life. Human beings-at least those who wished to survive-accommodated themselves to these demands the way ancient Greek playwrights accommodated to the demand that only three actors occupy the stage at once. By recognizing the limits and working creatively within them, New Orleanians built something unique.

The limits do not exist now. Much to the relief of megalomaniac architects, nature no longer calls the tune. But, one might wonder, is the music of the new Poydras Street really worth singing?

Some practices from the past live on in New Orleans because they have been labeled as traditions. Such are the reeling steps performed by the flambeaux carriers in the nocturnal carnival parades. The floats themselves are now pulled not by mules but by tractors, which foul the air rather than the street. And they are not, well, mulish. But the way is still lit by sputtering flambeaux, carried proudly aloft by black sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of those who carried them in the past. And the dance step that these sweating flambeaux carriers perform is nothing less than the cakewalk, frozen in tradition since the 1890s.

Many other local practices persist through unconscious habit.

Thus, on Mondays, New Orleanians eat red beans and rice. They have done so for centuries. Professors of nutrition have written dissertations in praise of this simple dish. And well they might. Alone, each element is hardly worth discussing. In tandem, they shoot vitamins and proteins into your body like grandma's cod-liver oil. Chaurice, the hot local sausage introduced by the Spani::uds, just adds flavor.

The one-two punch of beans and rice entered the local cuisine because of the summer heat. Both the beans and the rice could be dried and safely stored. The ham bone and sausage were smoked. As a result, this was one of the few dishes that one could eat in the steamy summer without fear of poisoning.

Beans and rice are also easily prepared, the perfect dish for wash day, which was Monday.

There are no longer any such reasons for eating red beans and rice. Refrigerators enable us to eat safely any dish in any season. Home washing machines destroyed the Monday work ritual and wiped out the National Washboard Company in the process. There is no practical necessity for eating red beans and rice anymore, unless you're hooked on them.

Many New Orleanians are addicted, and so they continue to boil up their beans and rice out of sheer habit. To meet the demand, even the most impersonal supermarket chains are forced to stock whole aisles of beans and rice. The Winn-Dixie store in Saint Bernard finds it virtually impossible to move Boston lettuce, broccoli and artichokes. But it sells beans and rice by the ton. And Tabasco sauce. And chaurice. An expert on the local food industry estimates that 350,000 servings of beans and rice were being offered up each week in the early Eighties. That's four times as many as in Boston, which pretends to the title of Beantown.

Water Amidst all the frivolity, don't make the mistake of thinking that New Orleanians take nothing seriously. They do, and like the ancient Greeks, they begin with the fundamentals: earth, fire, water and air.

Actually, earth can be dismissed, since in New Orleans it is largely mixed with, and frequently submerged under, water.

Fire, however, is a constant threat in what remains largely a wooden city. Twice, in 1788 and 1794, the central district of the city went up in smoke. Even today, neighborhood life is frequently punctuated by the roar of sirens and the acrid smell of burnt wood. Conflagrations were so common during the 19th century that a veritable army of volunteer fire departments was formed. So important were these organizations that they became pioneers in the social-service field, providing members with everything from family insurance to funerals with bands.

It is water that is most feared.

First, there are the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, both of which are held back by high earthen levees. Then there is rain, constant rain, some 130 centimeters of it each year: high by any standard.

Since the city lies below sea level, every drop of this rainwater '0., must be pumped up and out. So must sewage, but through a separate system. New Orleans has four times as many canals and covered culverts as does Venice.

And there is a series of somber brick pumping stations, where huge locally designed screw pumps palpitate night and day.

And, too, there is the threat of hurricanes, for New Orleans lies directly on their most heavily frequented line of march.

When Hurricane Camille crashed onto the nearby Gulf Coast in 1969, the tidal waves washed heavy modern coffins out of the ground, just in time for low barometric pressure to pop them open and hurl the corpses into the treetops. This occurred at Pass Christian, New Orleanians' most favored seaside spa.

The levees along Lake Pontchartrain are being raised to discourage some future hurricane from driving the shallow waters of the lake into downtown New Orleans. But no one who watched roofs being ripped off and mighty oaks uprooted when Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965 thinks that such measures can do more than limit the damage. In the end, the city's fate is in the hands of powers it cannot control.

That, presumably, is the reason many people threatened by Camille decided to devote their last hours to partying before the cataclysm hit. A few of these good folk even survived.

Communications It is said that New Orleans is not a news town. In one sense it's not, for it supports only one daily paper, the nobly titled Times-Picayune. Actually, the name of the paper is far grander even than this. When the English Crown swallowed Wales and Scotland, it added the royal titles of those provinces to its own; for the same reason, New Orleans' one newspaper bears the full title of The Times-Picayune/The States-Item. As in so many other American cities, the paper's masthead reads like a list of martyrs on a memorial.

The death of all but one city-wide daily paper does not alone prove that New Orleans is a bad town for news, nor does the fact that New Orleans imports fewer copies of highbrow news publications per capita than do most sizable American cities.

Rather, such facts remind us that in New Orleans newsprint can scarcely compete with the proverbial backyard fence or the

more modern telephone line for sheer speed and depth of local coverage. "We don't have to read the paper to find out what happened," a local savant explains. "We read the paper to find out who got caught doing it."

Whether or not the Big Story is in the news, it is carried instantly over the lines of South Central Bell. In connection with the planning of a new ballet company a few years ago, a large and particularly important meeting was held. Somehow the newspaper managed not to cover it. But never mind. Within a few days, Times-Picayune columnists were alluding to the "well-known" meeting without elaboration, confident that the meeting was, in fact, well-known.

The telephone in New Orleans may constitute the most sophisticated cable news network in the entire country. It matters little that grossly erroneous stories sometimes go unchecked or that people who should know better repeat them.

In the long run, the system is self-correcting.

And there is a long run. Edgar Degas, the French painter, spent time in New Orleans with his mother's family in the 1870s. So did his brother, Rene, who, in addition to becoming a cotton broker, made off with a neighbor's wife, America Olivier. It goes without saying that the local papers never reported this caper. But over a century later, when the name Degas came up at a local dinner party, an octogenarian present rued that it was "such a pity that Rene brought shame on himself and his family." That was still news. His brother Edgar's daubings on canvas were not.

Dancing Each week the Metroplex Want Ads appears in Orleans and neighboring counties- "parishes" as they are known in Louisiana. Its "Lonely Hearts" announcements cover a full page, between household effects and used cars. These four-line ads are like notes in bottles tossed out on the civic waves. In these, the lonely specify all the interests they are seeking in the Perfect Mate. A careful statistical examination of the qualities specified in the ads over many months reveals a most curious phenomenon. The preferred inclinations include walking, sports, watching TV and just plain relaxing. But heading the list, way out in front of everything else, are dancing and dining.

No local would be surprised by this. As early as 1743, a French officer wrote the folks back home that New Orleanians

spend all their money on balls and feasting. When President Jefferson bought Louisiana, the first challenge that the new American government faced was to convince New Orleanians that their public balls would not be discontinued. And one of the first fights under the new regime broke out over the question of whether French or American dances would lead off the weekly assemblies.

Some 80 establishments offered public balls during the 19th century. French Creoles danced; Anglo-Saxons danced; blacks danced; new immigrants danced; "Creoles of color" danced; everyone danced. They still do, except on Bourbon Street, New Orleans' famed honky-tonk strip, where "they" are not locals.

Even when the city is smothered by summer heat and when the humidity is at levels that would produce a downpour anywhere else, the sweaty revelers at Munster's Dance Hall uptown on Laurel Street are jumping and gyrating. And Stella Scott, born on a plantation near Saint Martinville and now a resident of Bienville Street, loves nothing better on Saturday night than to dine in the Quarter, have several martinis, and then dance to the music of street troubadours. Mrs. Scott is 93.

Boosterism Until recently, no list of the public attitudes of New Orleanians would have included boosterism. Quite the contrary. The little public bragging that occurred in the Crescent City ran to negatives: the worst weather, the most crime, the most corruption, the worst drivers, and so forth.

Now an entirely different mood has set in. Particularly among the young and upwardly mobile, boosterism is in fashion: New Orleans is on the move; New Orleans is aggressive, progressive; New Orleans will even surpass Atlanta, Dallas, Houston.

Remember Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, pounding on the big bass drum as he led the parade touting his hometown of Zenith?

Babbitt has now moved South, and New Orleans is the Zenith of the Sun Belt.

It is easy to criticize the new boosterism as being somehow inappropriate to the ethos of the Crescent City. But those who make this particular claim take too short a view of things. They forget that the "new" banner waving is not new at all, that it flourished during the flush decades before the Civil War, when the city experienced its best days. The old homes and warehouses being so lovingly restored today are monuments to the boosters and hucksters of the past. Like it or not, the men who founded family dynasties in the 1820s would feel more at home here among the new Babbitts of today than among many of- their own descendants.

The pendulum will no doubt keep swinging back and forth between boosterism and Schadenfreude, the Germans' untranslatable word for pleasure taken in the misfortune of others.

New Orleans will continue to be the greatest and the worst, depending on the fortunes of whoever is doing the evaluating.

And just as surely, most people will continue to disbelieve the exaggerated claims on both sides.

Which would be a great misfortune. For New Orleans beyond all doubt possesses the most handsome neighborhoods, the sweetest citrus fruits, the best joke tellers and the nicest 0 people in the country, if not the world.

About the Author: S. Frederick Starr, a former secretary of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, is president of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. During his stay in New Orleans as vice-president of Tulane University, he helped found the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble.

ON

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--"You are a leader of men. You are brave, handsome, strong and popular with the ladies.

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Reprinted

with permission

from The Saturday Evening

of BFL and MS, Inc.

©

Post Society.

1985.

a division

BATTLING MALARIA WOMEN AT WORK CALLING

Dr. GHOSH

Recently India participated for the first time in a Worldnet program. Worldnet, a television satellite network of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) in Washington, D.C., permits journalists and scholars in Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East to interview key U.S. Government officials and experts on global issues in unrehearsed, uncensored news conferences.

On July 10, five days before the World Conference on Women convened in Nairobi, Kenya, USIA set up a Worldnet program in which Maureen Reagan, head of the U.S. delegation and daughter of President Reagan, answered questions and shared views on the conference agenda with journalists in Bangkok, Bogota, Brussels, Cairo, Caracas, Lagos, Manila, Nairobi and New Delhi. The interviewer from India was Neerja Choudhury, a correspondent of The Statesman, New Delhi.

She was linked to the World net through the studios of Doordarshan.

Asked to define her delegation's goal at the conference, Ms. Reagan said, "We will pursue a course of positive, constructive action on all areas of concern to women, to devise strategies for the continuing advancement of women through the year 2000."

team ef scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington has successfully extracted an ingredient from a common plant, artemisia annua, that may prove effective against malaria, mankind's most common single cause of disease and death.

Although most drugs currently used against malaria are based on the quinine structure, the derivative of artemisia annua (dubbed artemisinin) does not at all resemble the old standby quinine. "Artemisinin is unusual for a plant compound," says Dr. Daniel L. Klayman, head of the team. "It has a peroxide unit that provides an important part of the activity." The compound's apparent ability to oxidize part of the parasite, he says, will provide fresh insights into new drug designs.

"For our work in artemisinin," says Dr. Klayman, "we are indebted to our colleagues in China who found references to artemisia annua in their ancient medical texts. After years of research, they identified the plant's antimalarial activity in 1979. " The new drug has been found extremely effective against cerebral malaria. An often fatal variety characterized by coma and by large numbers of parasites in the patient's blood, cerebral malaria is rampant in many parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Chloroquine or quinine treatment can bring the patient out of a coma in two or three days. Chinese physicians, however, reported rapid lowering of the parasite count and emergence from coma within 12 hours after treatment with artemisinin or one of its derivatives.

Artemisia annua, a common plant sometimes grown for its aromatic oil, can be readily and inexpensively propagated in modest soils, according to Dr. Klayman. "And extraction of artemisinin, contained only in the leaves and flowers of the plant, is comparatively simple. We are also working to simplify it even further. Most developing countries can extract artemisinin through their own efforts. Ofcourse, we will help them if they need help."

Many countries have shown interest in growing the plant, says Dr. Klayman. They include India, Nigeria, Egypt, Argentina, Turkey, Romania, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Canada. "In fact, there have been many inquiries for seeds from Americans who want to grow the plant so they can enter this field, which they think is going to be very profitable eventually. Soon, I think, the pharmaceutical industry will become interested."

Dr. Klayman cautions that at least two years of preclinical studies will be needed, however, before artemisinin can be used for treatment.

The Walter Reed Institute, which is supported by the U.S. Government, is engaged in the chemical treatment (chemotherapy) of diseases. In addition to its malarial project, it is also doing research in such worldwide diseases as trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis and leptospirosis. "We maintain very close contacts and share our findings with research institutions around the world," says Dr. Klayman.

In the past decade, American women have successfully made inroads into hitherto male-dominated areas.

Women recipients of business management degrees are up from 5 percent to 25 percent, in law studies they have jumped from 8 percent to 33 percent, and the number of women owning businesses (sole proprietorships) has gone up from only 3 percent a decade ago to 26 percent today.

Along with this has come¡ the phenomenon of more and more women supporting the financial and administrative aspects of the commercial theater, traditionally a role undertaken by businessmen.

Some of the most popular theatrical productions in New York in recent years have been produced or coproduced by women entrepreneurs.

The best-known women pro~ucers for the New York stage are the team of Elizabeth McCann and Nelle Nugent who, in the eight years of . their collaboration, have mounted the successful shows Amadeus, Nicholas Nickleby, Dracula, Mass Appeal, The Elephant Man, The Dresser and Mornings at Seven.

In the 1984-85 season, McCann and Nugent produced their first musical, The Leader of the Pack, which is drawing packed houses on Broadway. Terry Allen Kramer's musical, Sugar Babies, continues a successful tour around the United States and Fran Weissler's revival of the musical Zorba has been playing to full houses in a number of American cities.

An Indian doctor was part of the medical team of outstanding doctors who performed an operation that commanded international attention: the operation on President Ronald Reagan to remove a malignant colon growth at the Bethesda Naval Hospital on July 13.

Cdr. Bimal C. Ghosh of the U.S. Navy Medical Corps was born in 1931 in Calcutta and earned a medical degree from the Calcutta National Medical College in 1961 and an M.S. from the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, in 1966. He came to the United States in 1968 and spent a year of surgical residency at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois. From 1969 to 1972, he worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York where he was selected for the Meller Award for his outstanding work in cancer surgery.

Between 1972 and 1980, Dr. Ghosh served on the staff of the University of Illinois Medical Center, later becoming the associate chairman of Cook County Hospital's Division of Surgical Oncology. In 1980, he joined the National Cancer Institute as head of its Surgery and Clinical Investigations Branch.

Three years later, Dr. Ghosh joined the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where he is head of the Division of Surgical Oncology. He is also a professor of surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Dr. Ghosh is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the American Radium Society, the American Cancer Research Society and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. He is also a member of the European Society of Surgical Oncologists, and the International Laser Society.

Dr. Ghosh has done basic research in cell biology, carcinogenesis and laser surgery, and has published more than 70 papers in the United States and overseas.

He is married to Dr. Luna Ghosh, associate professor of pathology at the University of Illinois. They have two children, a 12-year-old son, Shuvo, and a 9-year-old daughter, Reni.

The Spruce Goose, the world's largest aircraft, celebrates its 40th birth anniversary this year. The mammoth all-wood seaplane, built by the legendary U.S. aviator and entrepreneur Howard Hughes, is so large that a DC-1 0 jetliner can fit beneath each wing. The aircraft, fitted with the largest reciprocating eight engines each rated at 3,000 hp, was originally designed as a transport during World War II. It could carry 750 troops and two 30-ton Sherman tanks. However, it flew but once-on November 2, 1947. The Spruce Goose has attracted over a milliQn visitors since going on display in May 1983 at the Hughes Flying Boat Dome in Los Angeles.

Under a new agreement, the United States will provide India $80 million for a national social forestry project. The agreement was signed

by M. Peter McPherson, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and K. Shankar Bajpai, India's Ambassador to the United States, in Washington, D.C., on June 26.

The World Bank is also expected to contribute another $165 million to the $330-million project. The balance, $85 million, will be funded by the Government of India and the four participating states-Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.

The project aims at strengthening India's initiatives in meeting the country's longterm forestry needs. Recently, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi announced that the country would increase tree-planting activities fivefold to reforest 5,200,000 hectares of wasteland every year.

The agreement will raise incomes and employment among the rural people of the four Indian states by increasing production of timber, fuelwood, fodder and other forest products. It will also help to arrest erosion of the natural environment caused by deforestation.

Increased population and demands of a growing economy have resulted in indiscriminate felling of trees.

I

~India Enthralls Me' "Shukriya," she says to the waiter who brings her the mango juice. "Mmmmm, badia. Bahut badia, " she sighs with plea7 sure, sipping the cold drink on a hit summer day. Adjusting her lehanga, she puts her feet up on the sofa to make herself more comfortable.

And leaning back she examines the mehendi on her hands as she talks of Harvard, where she was graduated in comparative literature and religion; of The New York POSl, where she worked as a journalist; of the off Broadway show she worked in; of the American musical groups she sang with; of campaigning for Mondale-Ferraro and, earlier, for her father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during his run for senator in New York.

Maura Moynihan, born and bred American, is "very very much in love with India."

(Part of that campaigning for Senator Moynihan among the Indian community in New York was in Hindi, a language Maura is proud to befairlyfluent in.) "I sometimes wonder how American I am," she laughs.

"I am a pukka shakahari, an absolutely pure vegetarian.

An American who doesn't eat hamburgers! And I just learned to drive a car last year (she's in her late 20s).

Hamburgers and cars-they perplex me!

"But nothing has ever perplexed me or befuddled me about India. India," she says, "enthralls me." It began to cast its spell on her when she first came to live here in the early 1970s during her father's tenure as American ambassador to India.

And it has continued to do so in her frequent trips to this country "on work and holiday." The last holiday, which began in Tamil N adu earlier this year, ended with her teaming up with old friend Rajeev Sethi to work as project coordinator for the Indian mela that formed part of the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival and was an extension of Aditi, the Festival of India exhibition (see SPAN July 1985).

Maura sat in on the practice sessions, sometimes joining in a song, playing with the children, or just chatting with some of the 30 craftspeople and artisans who form the mela. "They are all my friends, I feel part of their community. I'm getting them to teach me their songs and dances and

I've introduced them to American jazz," she says. "In Washington, I'm going to stay with them in Georgetown University. I'm going to take them around.

They'll have a couple of holidays there.

I'll take them sightseeing, shopping, maybe for a picnic in Virginia. I'm going to take them to ,our home in Georgetown for a dinner. And I'm arranging for some breakdancers to come and exchange trade secrets with some of the acrobats from Rajasthan."

As part of her job, Maura put the mela participants through an orientation course-telling them what to expect in America, from the toilets to the metro, to cushion the inevitable culture shock.

And did India ever present a culture shock for Maura?

"Never," she says emphatically, playing with her bangles.

Her first image of India, she says, was formed by "the beautiful Indian wife of my father's friend, sociologist Nathan Glazer. Lochi Glazer is from Nagpur and she is exquisitely beautiful and full of laughter. As a child I used to be fascinated by her flowing silk saris and glittering jewels. She enchanted me-and the rest of the country was' certainly not a disappointment.

"One of my greatest joys still is getting into a train and just traveling anywhere in India, staying in dharamsalas, trekking, exploring. My brother and I had some fantastic times."

Mama finished her schooling at the American International School in New Delhi, and then went back home when her father's tour of duty as ambassador here was over. "But the rest of the world is so dull after India. There is no place quite like it. Once you fall in love with India, it is a lifetime commitment."

And so Mama keeps coming back-to "the extraordinary friendliness of the people here ... the tremendous sense of community and kinship ... the acceptance

and generosity that's so much a part of the Indian people's spirit. .. the fascinating music, art and literature .... " She learned Odissi on one trip and worked on a village project during another.

Maura has studied India-at first hand and academically too. She took a course in Indian studies at college and has read Nehru and Gandhi. "Nehru's Discovery of India is one of my favorite books," she says. She has been fascinated

by Indian religion and philosophy.

She has "genuine admiration for the miracles that India has accomplished in industry, in economic growth, in agriculture."

Maura's love for India has never glossed over its poverty-or romanticized it. If anything, it has made her determined "to contribute something to India, to bettering the lives of a few people. I'm not naive enough to think that I can transform the world, but I've learned so much from India that I'd now like to reciprocate.

I don't want to be a passive observer. I want to do something. " For the next few years, she plans to make India her base. This year will find her busy working for some more Festival of India projects like the Golden Eye, but after that, she is eager to "work in an Indian village, preferably doing some craft and development work."

And then? She laughs, "Who knows?

But my long-term goals do include international relations, politics, teaching and writing. My father has been my model. He has changed his career many times but the thread of continuity in his life has been the ideas and the themes that he has worked for."

One thread of continuity for her will be India. "It will always be one of my homes. I just have to keep coming back here." In a rare moment of groping for the right words, she pauses. Then smiles and says, "India is like eating a 24-course banquet.

The rest ofthe world is fast food. " 0

refreshing and twinkling smile. way journey ~hen she met a Yodh sits her students down Swedish medical student who and drills them on some of the became her husband. (They are 34 basic mudras or hand posi- now divorced.) tions. She pronounces the name She also discovered modern of each mudra carefully as she dance in America. "I lost my shows it. "Tripataka" -she heart to modern dance-,raises her flat hand with the especially to Martha Graham ring finger bent downward at because she was so pretty."

In Connecticut, Yodh met the second joint, the thumb tip pointed palmward and the the woman she considers one other fingers perfectly straight. of her most important teachThen she continues: "Padma- ers- Tanjore Balasaraswathi. cumtum, Padmakoshum .... " "When she arrived here in The 20 neophytes sitting 1962, four of us went and sat at before her try to imitate both her feet and said, 'Teach us.'" the words and the hand posiYodh, who has also studied the Manipuri dance style of the tions.

"Didn't any of you practice?"

Assam region, worries that she asks-the plaintive cry of many young dancers have no teachers everywhere. respect for classical dance Yodh finds her classes chal- forms in hercountry. "They are lenging. Her students usually trying to innovate but have not range from dance majors seen what the dance looked like through anthropology students when it was kept pristine," she to musclebound athletes. moans.

According to Yodh, ethnic "They don't understand the dance is offered by UCLA to reason behind the style. When I give the general student populawent home it horrified me.

Bare feet slap rhythmically tion experience with foreign cul- They're mixing different styles. against the hardwood floor. tures and with other ways of We do have to evolve, but some Hands sweep through the air in movmg. of the old stuff is very good."

"For me, it is an opportunity Although she is a performer an ever-changing series of precise shapes. The scene' is one of to share my passion for the art as well as a teacher, Yodh says the on-campus studios used by and something about my coun- plans for the near future inthe University of California at try," says Yodh, who has been clude only a few private "salon" Los Angeles (UCLA) dance a member of the UCLA dance concerts. department. The students are; department since 1976. "I try "My right knee and I have being taught steps and gestures to emphasize that there is more 'differences' so when I prepare from what may be the oldest to the dance than the exotic use a program it is arranged to suit it is my body now." recorded dance technique in of hands and face-that human history. It is the classical also connected to the literature However, the knee problem Bharatanatyam of India and its and the poetics of India. doesn't stop Yodh from rhythms and movements have "Even if students don't be- teaching full time or from being been passed down, almost un- come dancers, they go away "an eternal student." She reable to recognize Bharatachanged, for centuries. cently studied Balinese mask The teacher is Medha Yodh, natyam and perhaps to know dancing and is planning to take a diminutive woman wearing a when it is good and when it is Egyptian dance classes too. traditional Indian sari. Yodh, bad."

"So I can become culturally Although Yodh speaks Of free to shimmy," she explains. who was born 57 years ago in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, believes dance as her passion, it was the "I don't believe that only a naBharatanatyam to be, in her study of biochemistry-in which tive can do native forms. One words, "a magnificent tool to she has a Master's degree-that should be able to transpose center human beings, to give brought herto the United States. one's mental capacity to do them an inner sense of being "I have a proper Brahmin these things. and to teach them focus, poise, background," she says, "I grew "Of course," she adds, "it discipline and the integration of up in British India and I was may take all your life."

0 different arts. I¡ think it de- expected to learn the arts, to go velops character. into the sciences and to travel About the Author: Martin A. David "Of course, you know I'm abroad." is a writer for the Los Angeles not biased," she adds with a Yodh's travels became a one- Times/Calendar.

Sharing a Passion To Medha Yodh, teaching Bharatanatyam in an American university offers "an opportunity to share my passion for the art and something about my country."

Madam Governor The chauffeur-a state policeman in plainclothes-wheeled the small green Plymouth out of the traffic, nosing slowly toward the entrance to the annual Vermont Farm Show in Barre. He drove quickly to the head of the line. A parking attendant, noticing the nondescript auto, sauntered over to give the intruder whatfor and leaned on the window. "The Governor," murmured the driver. The attendant straightened to something like attention. In the cramped backseat of what passed in unpretentious Vermont for an official limousine sat slender, blue-eyed, 51-year-old Madeleine Kunin, who giggled. "Isn't this fun?" she whispered to a companion. "You have to remember this is still a bit new to me."

Indeed, as Governor Kunin entered the Barre Auditorium-surrounded by exhibits of hay, honey and homemade bread-there was enough newness that day to go around for everybody. The first woman governor in the state's history, only the third Democrat to hold the post since the Civil War, and a European immigrant who wasn't even born in Vermont, Kunin just three hours earlier had replaced the state's agricultural commissioner with her own appointee. The farmers were not overjoyed. The new man had lived in Vermont only 12 years, and the agricultural purists just did not consider him one of their own. Kunin mingled with 300 dairymen and their wives, tucked into a hearty country lunch and delivered a speech that she felt drew a lukewarm response. As she slipped back into the little green Plymouth for the IS-minute ride back to the state capital she was thinking abou.t having dismissed the commissioner. "I felt like such a meanie," she lamented.

Still, Vermonters admire spunk and determination, which may be why Kunin's election defied all Yankee laws of logic. Her inauguration as governor this year inspired a celebration the likes

"People seemed to feel a sense of history about my being the state's first woman governor," says Madeleine Kunin of Vermont.

of which hadn't been seen in decades in Vermont's small (population 8,241) capital city of Montpelier. Traditional morris dancers performed in the statehouse lobby, chamber musicians played Handel's greatest hits on the floor of the House of Representatives, and horses bedecked with bells pulled sleighs on the statehouse lawn. "People seemed to feel a sense of history about my being the state's first woman governor," says Kunin. "I was amazed at how deep that emotion was."

Many of the nation's politicians are amazed at Kunin herself, who emerged from last November's election in what had been called the "Year of the Woman" as the lone female to win such high office. With Kentucky's Martha Layne Collins, she is one of the only two current women governors and only the fourth elected in U.S. history whose husband had not previously served. Intense, intellectual and reserved, Kunin is a feminist who wants to hit the right balance between loyalty to her sex and overemphasis on feminism. She already has appointed a record number of women to state jobs, and two members of her five-person cabinet are women. "The object is to be who you are," she says. "If being a woman is a factor politically, it's usually not because of a conscious bias, but because women are a novelty:" Born in Zurich, Switzerland, to a German businessman and a Swiss mother, Kunin and her brother landed in the United States in 1940, speaking no English. Her widowed mother had decided that even Switzerland was no longer safe for a Jewish family like theirs.

By an odd coincidence, she spent her first 10 years in America living in Geraldine Ferraro's district in Queens. [Readers will recall that Ferraro contested the vice presidential position on the Democratic ticket last year.] Kunin's mother managed to support her family as a seamstress, French tutor arid baby-sitter.

"Somehow I got the feeling at an early age that I had to do something important

with my life," says Kunin. At her inauguration she evoked memories of her mother and her "limitless dream of what this country could offer her and her children." (Both have done well. Kunin's brother, Edgar May, won a 1961 Pulitzer Prize for reporting and is now a Vermont state senator.)

Kunin became the first in her family to graduate from college, with a history degree from the University of Massachusetts and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. But then, she recalls, she found the world was not desperate for women journalists. "One editor told me that the last woman he hired had been raped in the parking lot," she says with obvious disbelief. "And that was the end of the interview." It was also the beginning of the politicization of Madeleine Kunin.

"I wasn't exactly a conscious feminist then," she says, "but I felt the unfairness." Stubbornly Kunin kept on job hunting and finally landed a job with the Vermont Burlington Free Press. Marriage to her physician husband, Arthur, soon followed, as did four children, who put Kunin's career on hold for eight years. But in 1970 she and her family went to Switzerland for a year, and the old feelings of "wanting my life to make a difference" were revived. "I saw that Geneva had a woman mayor," she says, "and I thought, 'The women here don't even have the right to vote in national elections yet, but they're doing more than American women.' I came back ready to go."

Two years later Kunin won her first political race for a seat in the Vermont legislature. She stayed for three two-year terms, plugging for human services, education and protection of Vermont's countryside. In 1978 and 1980 she was elected lieutenant governor, but when she made her first try for governor, in 1982, she was soundly defeated. Last fall she tried again-and won.

"You have to build your credentials as

a candidate, not just as a woman," she says of her political progress. "You also have to be willing to exercise power.

We've been educated to be mothers, peacemakers, but we must learn that we can't please everybody."

Kunin might add one further word of advice to women politicos: Choose for a husband a warm, outgoing doctor who enjoys cooking and campaigning. During Madeleine's campaign last fall, Dr. Kunin, 59, handed out leaflets and carried a sandwich board on the streets of Burlington .. At governors' conferences, he attends the wives' meetings, and at home he pitches in with the housework.

"As a boy, I always cooked and helped bring up my three younger brothers," he says. "It's just no big deal." Adds Madeleine, "He has his own career and a sense of purpose, and he's genuinely excited about what I do."

The governorship has come at a good time in her family's life, Kunin says. Her three eldest children, aged 19 to 24, are away at college or working. Daniel, 15, is a public high school sophomore in Burlington. Since Montpelier boasts no governor's mansion, the Kunins live modestly in nearby Burlington in a modern house they helped design 15 years ago.

Although Kunin is sometimes criticized for being too aloof (says one loyal Democrat, "She's so Swiss."), she delights in the occasional absurdities of campaigning. Last fall she was visiting the elegant Woodstock Inn. "I was shaking hands with everybody ,in sight," she recalls. "At the door a guy came walking in dressed in work clothes. I grabbed his hand and said, 'Hi, I'm Madeleine Kunin and I'm running for governor.' He said, 'Hi, I'm running from the sheriff.' And," she chuckles, "he really was. The blue lights were flashing outside." It was one vote Kunin may not have won-but if not, she will doubtless keep trying.

0 About the Author: Marge Runnion for People Weekly magazine.

is a reporter

Resonances of a State Visit India and Rajiv Gandhi took center stage in America when the Indian Prime Minister visited the United States in June on a five-day state visit. He received a welcome that, according to The Washington Post, America extends only to very special guests. Not since Queen Elizabeth's visit to the United States nine years ago, the paper said, Washington has laid out the "silk" carpet as it did for the Prime Minister and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi.

The U.S. Congress bestowed a rare honor on the Prime Minister by inviting him to address a joint session of the House. The American media gave Prime Minister Gandhi and the 18-month-long Festival of India, which he formally inaugurated on June 13 amidst glittering ceremonies at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a coverage that was both extensive and enthusiastic and warm.

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's five days in the United States were enough to change the direction of nearly four decades of uneasy relations between the world's two largest democracies.

The young Indian leader not only got along famously with the septuagenarian American President in a 30-minute private conversation but also managed to impress even the most skeptical and hard-bitten of Washington's power brokers.

The visit laid a solid foundation for improved ties between India and the United States.

-Jack Anderson and Joseph Spear, The Washington Post For the U.S., Gandhi's visit represented an important step forward in the Reagan Administration's policy of gradually improving ties with the world's largest democracy. The approach stresses both highlevel dialogue and a broad range of projects 'in business, culture and science.

By all accounts, Mr. Gandhi's visit as his nation's leader has delighted American and Indian officials who said that, despite difficulties, the United States relationship with India now stood on a firmer footing.

-Bernard Weinraub, The New York Times It was good to have Rajiv Gandhi, India's new Prime Minister, in town. His manner was winning and his approach to the United States relatively sympathetic. As often as it is said, it remains true that the democratic character of the two countries is mutually gratifying and gives them an advantage in working out the subtle and not so subtle tensions between them.

-The Washington Post As citizens of the largest democracies in the world, the people of India and the United States need to understand each other far better than has been the case.

Mr. Gandhi is eager to modernize India's stolid, heavily state-controlled economy. Mr.

His address to the Congress was carried live on cable television and public radio, and excerpts from it were featured on the evening news of the nation's television networks. He also appeared on NBC's Meet the Press as well as on ABC's Nightline and PBS's McNeill-Lehrer Report.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, National Geographic and many other magazines published special articles on India and the Festival to coincide with the Prime Minister's visit. Time and Newsweek featured his visit prominently. In fact, there was hardly any publication of consequence that did not cover the event.

The following sampling of comments gives an idea of the wide interest the Prime Minister's visit and the Festival of India generated throughout the United States.

Gandhi represents youth and countries, deserves our supvigor in a nation where more port.

-Robert S. McNamara than half of the people are under age 21. The U.S. should (former World Bank president), do all t:hat it can to help Mr. The Washington Post Gandhi in his quest.

Rajiv Gandhi's visit to the -The Christian Science Monitor U.S. is attracting more than ordinary interest .... Mr. GanBehind the reporting of the dhi deserves a warm U.S. welvisit by Prime Minister Rajiv come for many reasons, not least because he represents the Gandhi is another important story, and one that has not been world's biggest democracy.

- Wall Street Journal sufficiently told: the story of India's substantial economic Rajiv Gandhi's visit to the progress ....

U.S. reinforces our common In general, India managed its with the . world's interests economy prudently and carefullargest democracy.

Those inly throughout the prolonged terests make for a meaningful recession that plagued the global economy .... The country has relationship.

- Washington Times achieved a yearly growth rate of 5.1 percent, quite close to the Tall and stocky, Gandhi reptarget of 5.2 percent set in its plan covering the five years to resents a new, younger image for India. A soft-spoken man March 1985.

The better life that Rajiv who grew up in the Beatles he's India's Gandhi wants for India's poor, generation, and envisions as well for the youngest Prime Minister and impoverished peoples of other the first who grew up after the struggle for independence from Britain.

- Anita Katyal, Lorrie Lynch, USA Today

The Festival of India, the largest cultural exchange between two countries, continues to draw large crowds and raves. The extravaganza cost $12 million of which the Indian Government is paying one-fourth. The remaining threefourths will come from a combination of support by U.S. private businesses and cultural institutions involved in the Festival like the Smithsonian Institution and the Ford Foundation as well as many Indian organizations.

The vastness of the undertaking is mind boggling. The Festival, to be shown in 90 American cities in 37 states through the end of 1986, encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, dance, films, music, theater, costumes, crafts, science, architecture, design and seminars and symposiaand even an elephant weekend at the Bronx Zoo. The event includes 50 films, 100 scholars, 228 craftspeople and performing artists, and 2,500 artifacts and works of art.

Aditi makes a terrifically The Festival is an unprestrong case for India's claim to cedented nationwide celebration of one of the world's most the best and most versatile ancient and vibrant civiliza- ,craftspeople in the world.

-John Holmes, tions.

The Washington Times - President Ronald Reagan

If you can discipline yourself to hear their music the way the Indians do, you can take a big step toward aesthetic nirvana.

And even if you can't uncover all its mystical pleasures, the sophistication and tonal brilliance of Indian music makes listening to it an intriguing experience.

-Jerry Ford, The Washington Times Magazine

This $12 million megafestival, sparked by a 1982 agreement between the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Ronald Reagan, is viewed as a major landmark in Indian-U.S. relations. It is diplomacy waged with sitars, Rajput paintings, saris, Maurya sculptures and even an Aditi, the word for an Indian "celebration of life."

-The Christian Science Monitor Of all the exhibitions included in the mammoth Festival of India, none comes close to capturing the flavor and spirit of the traditional lifestyle than Aditi.

When the Indians call the Aditi exhibit "a celebration of life," they mean it literally.

Every piece in the collection is somehow linked to one of the various stages of the Indian life cycle. It is not merely a huge arts and crafts exhibition, but rather a folklife festival showing of one of the strongest and most vivid lifestyles in the world ....

Jugglers, dancers, musicians, sculpture, paintings and artifacts from India are in museums all over town, and a giant mela ....

And besides these temporary visitors from India, Washington has a lot more things Indian. The Potomac may not flow into the Ganges, but, with a little imagination, you can see the Pink Palace of Jaipur and even a mini-version of the Taj Mahalright here. You can also meet the characters in Kipling's Jungle Book, watch the old Indian game of polo, even learn conversational Hindi-all without leaving town.

-Weekend (The Washington Post) In India, it is like a fairyland for a designer. You can create magic; you can get anything you want there.

-Fashion designer Anna Weatherley The jewel in India's musical crown is the raga.

There will be many ragas played during the Festival of India, which got its musical sendoff in the Kennedy Center ....

The Festival of India will have people oohing and aahing and saying what great beauty there is.

Besides learning more about the sensitivity and gentleness of the people, there is also a serious side of the Festivalconferences and seminars like "India 2000: The Next Fifteen Years," "India's Democracy," "The Canvas of Culture: Rediscovery of the Past as Adaptation for the Future" and "The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on the Lives of Women in India and the United States."

-Amy Swerdlow (professor at Sarah Lawrence College and coordinator of the women's conference)

The many conferences and seminars represent the first major attempt to change in a massive way American opinion or misperceptions about what India is about.

-Stephen Huyler, author of Village India This exhibit ("Yankee Traders and Indian Merchants") provides people with a sense of connection that goes back 200 years. I feel that as I walk around this hall tonight. Many people today forget this connection between the two countries. They forget that many New England merchants made their fortunes in India.

-Stanley Tambia, professor of anthropology, Harvard The Indian mela is wonderful. It is the most wonderful gift India could have given the United States.

-Nora Fisher, curator of the Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art, New Mexico I'm delighted that it is wor~: ing. You know it feels just like, a mela in India.

-Elizabeth Moynihan ~ (wife of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former U.S. Ambassador to India)

An Indian in Orbit India and the United States have been cooperating in space research ever since India entered the space age in 1963, when it established the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station in Kerala. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's recent U.S. visit will give this partnership a new thrust. A joint statement issued at the end of the visit emphasized the value and importance of "joint endeavors in space science, space flight and the practical application of space systems and technologies."

One of the most successful early bilateral space programs began in 1975 when the United States gave India free use of the ATS-6 communications satellite for one year to conduct the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE). The largest project of its kind in the world, SITE demonstrated how space technology could be utilized to fight illiteracy, improve agriculture, communications and health through beaming television programs from the satellite to people living in remote, inaccessible areas of the country.

The SITE program led Indian space scientists to design and develop their own state-of-the-art multipurpose communications Indian National Satellite (INSAT); which has given the country new capabilities in communications, weather forecasting a,nd remote sen.sing.

INSAT18, manufactured by Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto, California was hoisted into orbit by the space shuttle in 1983, whence it assumed a geostationary position through the controlled firing of its own retrorockets. INSAT 18 has linked almost the entire country as never before through telephone and television.

The satellite's ability to forecast weather was manifested recently when it sent photographs of an impending tornado a few days before it actually hit Bangladesh in May this year.

The most recent example of Indo-American cooperation was the Spacelab 3 mission of the space shuttle, which included an Indian experiment (Anuradha) on cosmic rays.

As part of another exciting joint venture, an Indian specialist will fly aboard the shuttle in 1986, which will launch INSAT 1C into orbit. Two payload specialists, both scientist-engineers, have already been selected for' the mission. They are Nagapati Chidambar Bhat of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Bangalore, and A. Radhakrishnan of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Trivandrum.

An Indian in Orbit

continued

"We had more than 400 volunteers for this upcoming shuttle mission," says U.R. Rao, head of the Indian Space Research Organisation. "We first narrowed down the list to 15, and then after some very rigorous medical and other tests, we finally selected the prime. payload specialist and a back-up."

The two Indian spacemen will be further medically examined by doctors of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). "We anticipate no problems as we have used the NASA guidelines for the selection of payload specialists."

After the medical examination, the spacemen will receive intensive training in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Hyderabad (where the Indian earth-tracking stations are located). Later they will undergo another 16 weeks of training under NASA supervision in the United States" "Although the primary responsibility for releasing INSAT 1C from the shuttle will be the crew's," says Professor Rao, "the payload scientist will be of help in making sure that all the satellite's systems are in order. Therefore, it is very important that we train our payload scientists in the actual working of INSAT 1C and the check-out console, which will also be aboard the shuttle."

In addition to the launch of INSAT 1C, the shuttle mission will provide a rare opportunity to the Indian spaceman to conduct scientific experiments in earth sciences and life sciences. "We hope to have about eight to ten experiments on this mission, and we are making sure that they all are of practical value," says Dr. Rao. One of the experiments will study the geophysical features of the Indian subcontinent through remote sensing techniques and another will investigate the phenomenon of lightning. In the life sciences, a series of joint experiments by ISRO and NASA have been designed to examine human behavior, in particular biological behavior, in space. "We also hope to include some yoga exercises forthe payload specialist to study yoga's effect on the human body in space."

However, Dr. Rao says, the time available to the astronauts and payload specialists to carry out the experiments is very limited, and they may not be able to conduct all of them. "First, one cannot work as fast as one can on earth. Second, and more important, their primary job is the launching of satellites-and there¡ may be as many as four in this mission-which is a very tricky task requiring great precision."

Dr. Rao is hopeful that the Indian payload specialist will be able to carry Indian food with him on the 1986 shuttle mission. "If Indian food gets accepted on the microbiologicallevel by NASA, then not only the Indian astronaut but his American colleagues too can relish it."

Another area in which future bilateral space cooperation might be useful is in the possible retrieval, as the accompanying story illustrates, of the now-defunct INSAT 1A. Launched in 19~2, the satellite could not fulfill¡¡its promise because its solar panel could not be released. D

MisSion

Recoverv

continued

marked the world's first salvage operation in space and was seen by millions of television viewers. In recovering the stray satellites and bringing them back to earth for refurbishing, the shuttle once again demonstrated its versatility as an orbital work station.

The twin sa"tellites, Palapa and Westar, were stranded in the wrong orbits when their onboard booster rockets misfired.

Discovery's five-person crew recovered the 544-kilogram satellites from orbits 360 kilometers high during an eight-day flight, the 14th mission of the space shuttle program.

Mission commander Frederick Hauck and pilot David Walker carried out a series of delicate, precise maneuvers on the shuttle needed to rendezvous with the satellites, orbiting earth at 28,160 kilometers an hour in the same trajectory, some 1,100 kilometers apart.

Specialists Allen and Gardner spent nearly 12 hours each outside Discovery's cabin to snag and stow the errant satellites into the shuttle's cargo bay. Using jet-powered backpacks (which had been successfully tested during Challenger's February 1984 trip to enable astronauts to venture outside their craft without safety lines-see SPAN July 1984), they took turns flying 11 meters from the shuttle to snare each slowly-spinning satellite with a grappling device and haul it in. From inside the cabin, specialist Anna Fisher-the third American woman in space-directed the shuttle's remote-control mechanical arm, helping Allen and Gardner to stabilize their positions as they moved the satellites into position. Allen first retrieved Palapa; two days later Gardner captured Westar. Together, they berthed the cylindrical, 2.7-meter-high satellites for the trip back home.

The salvage mission was conceived and planned by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) and Hughes Aircraft Company of Long Beach, California, builder of the lost satellites, in consultation with a group of insurance underwriters. The insurance companies assumed ownership of the satellites after paying loss claims totalling $180 million to the original owners-the Government of Indonesia for Palapa and the Western Union Corporation for Westar. They also paid $5.5 million to NASA for part of the mission cost and $5 million to Hughes for recovery equipment and satellite-control assistance prior to retrieval. The insurers hope to recover part of their losses by selling the satellites in the open market after refurbishment.

These financial arrangements, of course, are dwarfed by the technological achievements of the recovery mission." As Jesse W. Moore, NASA's chief of shuttle operations, said soon after Discovery landed at its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, "This is a historic day in the American space program.

The mission showed the ability of the astronauts and machines to accomplish a wide range of tasks in orbit."

Facing page, clockwise from top left: Discovery's remote-control mechanical arm lifts Joseph Allen and Palapa, the satellite snared by him, over the cargo bay while Dale Gardner waits below to help in the berthing operation; Allen holds Palapa while Gardner sto~s docking device; Gardner installs berthing bracket on the satellite; Allen stabilizes Palapa as Gardner works on equipment for securing it.

Echoes in Hannibal One hundred years ago, Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) immortalized his home town of Hannibal, Missouri, as the quintessential American midwestern small town. This picture story recalls the town he knew in his boyhood and shows it as it is today.

It's coming true-again and again. For Henry Cisneros, the first Hispanic to become mayor of San Antonio. For Rinaldo Gonzalez, a former Cuban insurgent who came to America 20 years ago and is today a successful accountant. For Vietnamese immigrant Phil Trinh, who is chairman of a bank in Southern California. And for hundreds of other immigrants and minorities who have worked hard and made it to the top in the United States.

India Fever in America Films about India, the Festival of India and Rajiv Gandhi's visit have brought India Fever to a high pitch in America, reports an American living in Bangalore. On her annual visit home, she was beseiged for Indian recipes, travel information and tales of her experiences in India.

Brilliance in the Bronx Bronx High School of Science has produced three Nobel laureates and more Westinghouse Talent Search winners than any other American secondary school. Educators from all over the world come here to study "the city-supported school that works."

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