December 1990

SPAN There is the oft-repeated tale about the farmer who, before giving instructions to his donkey, whacks him over the head a couple of times with a club "just to get his attention." For almost two years, William Bennett, former chief of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), was the "club wielder" trying to draw America's attention to drug abuse. He used just about any fora he could find-international conferences, television interviews, newspaper columns-to pound away at the dimensions of the problem and to propose solutions.

When Bennett announced a few weeks ago that he would resign effectiveNovember 30 as director of the ONDCP, President George Bush held a WhiteHouse ceremony to praise Bennett for confronting drug abuse "head on." By all accounts, Bennett's pounding got the American public's attention. In practically every opinion poll taken in the United States this past year, Americans said that drug abuse was the country's number one problem. Such recognition is helping to produce results. Recent studies show reductions in the number of casual drug users and in the number of drug addicts in America, and an increase in the interdiction of drug shipments.

The ONDCP is only one cifseveral U.S. agencies engaged in the fight against illegaldrugs. Beginning on page 34 we present a status report by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters on its efforts to curtail production and trafficking of cocaine, opium and heroin.

The problem of drug abuse'is worldwide. It will take unprecedented international cooperation to overcome this scourge that destroys lives, breaks up families and costs countries untold millions of dollars.

Fortunately, such cooperation seems to be well under way. Consider some of the major anti-drug events that took place in 1990: • A meeting in February in Cartagena, Colombia, of the presidents of Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and the United States produced agreements to stem production, transportation and consumption of narcotics.

• A special session of the U.N. General Assembly, also in February, underscored the international community's concern.

• Representatives from 70 countries (including India) attended a conference in April in Orlando, Florida, sponsored by the Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education (PRIDE), a nonprofit organization that has developed a program of timely and accurate information on the economic, social and health effects of drug addiction.

• In London, also in April, world leaders attended a three-day "World Ministerial Summit to Reduce the Demand for Drugs and Combat the Cocafue Threat."

• Even the economic summit of major industrial countries in Houston, Texas, in July, had drugs on the agenda. Discussions centered on blocking the transfer offunds obtained through illegal drug sales and on controlling precursor chemicals used in the production of narcotics.

• Just last month, foreign secretaries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) signed a convention in Male, Maldives, pledging cooperation to combat narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.

Meanwhile, India and the United States continued their longstanding cooperation. In March the two governments signed an agreement that states in part that they share "a deep concern over the illicit cultivation, production, processing and trafficking in illicit drugs in some parts of the world affecting the communities of both countries."

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which has had representatives in India since 1972,continued its training, joint narcotics investigations and information-sharing activities with India.

My own agency, the U.S. Information Service, recently installed at the American Center in New Delhi a comprehensive database of drugrelated information (seepage42). The database already has been used by numerous professionals, students and agencies.

While the problems associated with drugs are enormous, the momentum under way to deal with them is encouraging.

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The Buck Starts Here by Doug Stewart A Role Model-From Mean Street to Wall Street by Jason Zweig Archibald Quincy Jones-Insights on a Sketch Pad by Pratapaditya Pal "Are You Smart? India Is Hard."

Understanding Depression

by Erica E. Goode with Nancy Linnon and Sarah Burke

21

Environment-It

Pays to be Clean

The New Clean Air Act

24 The House That Church Built

29 31 34 37

42 44 45

by Ruth Simon

by Jon Schaffer

by Frank Donegan

Good-Bye Mr. B by Vikram Chandra "Sahaj" Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said A Short Story by Donald Barthelme Controlling the Spread of DrugsA Progress Report Knot for Every Man by Thomas H. Wolf Focus On ...

On the Lighter Side The Many Sounds of Country Music by Ronni Lundy

Front cover: Singer Ricky Van Shelton is among a new generation of country music performers who are preserving the traditions while offering new interpretations of this increasingly popular and quintessentially American musical form. Story begins on page 45.

Back cover: A professional floral designer gives finishing touches to table decorations for a Victorian Christmas at Biltmore Estate, a 19th-century North Carolina mansion, one of several places in America where Christmas is celebrated the old-fashioned way. See also inside back cover.

Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor. Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna· Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti RoZArtist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, Y.P. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services; American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover--eourtesy CBS Publicity. 2-3-© 1989 Kay Chernush. 4-7Avinash Pasricha. 9--Cheryl Klauss. IO-12-sketches by A. Quincy Jones, courtesy Dr. Pratapaditya Pal. 13, 15--eourtesy Leonard A. Gordon. 14--Monojit Chanda. 16Eddie Adams, CBS News. 18-Freeman & Sutton. 2Q-The MIT Museum. 21-Russ Kennedy. 23--eourtesy E.!. du Pont de Nemours & Co. 24-25-Gerald Carr except top left and right courtesy Friends of Olana, Inc., Olana State Historical Site. 27Metropolitan Museum of Art. 28-Gerald Carr. 29-iIIustration by Nand Katyal. 33illustration by Neelkanth. 38-41-iIIustrations by Lane Yerkes. 42 bottom, 43 bottomAvinash Pasricha. 45Ieft-S. Pumphrey, courtesy MCA Records, Nashville; center-Jim Devault, MCA Records; right-McGuire, MCA Records. 46 left-Larry Dixon, Columbia; right-Randy St. Nicholas, Columbia. 47 left top---Kathy Gangwisch; left bottomKen Stiltz; right top---CBS Records; right bottom-Warner Bros. Inside back cover top left-Steve Abramowitz; top right, below left--eourtesy Biltmore Estate; centerSmithsonian Holiday Celebration; bottom--eourtesy Downtown Partnership, Baltimore.

Back cover--eourtesy Biltmore Estate.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 33(6841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price o/magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 30; single copy. Rs, ?

No commonly handled manufactured goods in the United States are more painstakingly produced than are the nation's dollar bills and coins. The dollar bill is made of paper that almost never is destroyed, no matter how roughly consumers handle it.

THE BUCK STARTS

HERE Left: The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing regularly receives a large volume of mutilated dollar notesfor replacement.

Above: Once bills have been identified as counterfeus,heatand humidity are used to decipher latent fingerprints that may lead to the bills' forgers. To isolate fingerprints, a technician sprays notes with a special chemical that will turn telltale prints magenta.

Right center: Blank commemorative coins are dried in a hot. vibrating tub of ground corncobs to prevent scratches and to retain their sheen.

Right: A stack of 10,000 $100 sheets representing $32 million is ready for examining and cutting.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAY CHERNUSH

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing receives mutilated currency of all kinds for replacement.

If it can patch together 51 percent of a dollar bill the bureau redeems it.

Ou'd be surprised at the number of people who do not believe in banks," Gracie Scruggs declares. Scruggs is a supervisor at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C., the factory that makes America's paper money. She is referring to people throughout the United States who hide money in mattresses. She knows they are out there because many of these individuals indulge in a second ill-advised habit: They smoke in bed. Incinerated mattresses arrive regularly at Scruggs's department, the Office of Currency Standards, where, as a free public service, specially trained currency examiners armed with tweezers, butter knives and knitting needles gingerly pick through the debris, searching for redeemable currency.

"We receive mutilated currency of all kinds," says Scruggs. "By 'mutilated' I mean buried, burned, torn, petrified, teargassed, chewed by animals and exposed to the secretions of decomposing bodies." A farmer once mailed in a cow's stomach; the examiners verified that it contained several hundred dollars. The examiners have pieced together money confetti sent in by a man who had hidden his savings in the barrel of a seldom-used shotgun. If they can patch together 51 percent of a bill, they redeem it. Fearful of destroying evidence that can back up their claims, citizens pull up to the loading dock downstairs with the burned contents of entire rooms--desks, filing cabinets and all.

"Even if it's just white ash, you can still see the scroll-work on the paper," says Scruggs. "United States currency is made out of a paper that is never destroyed, I don't care what you do to it."

That's overstating the case somewhat, but the bureau clearly prides itself on putting out a superior product. No commonly handled manufactured goods in the United States are more painstakingly produced than are the nation's bills and coins. Yet few products are handled with such brutal disregard by consumers. Americans would be shocked if a $20 bill tore when they crumpled it into a coat pocket, and they would be outraged if the ink ran when they put it through the wash. Americans expect cash to be durable, plentiful and genuine.

Money-the ticket to the good life, the love of which is the root of all evil-is not normally viewed as a mere manufactured commodity. But to the two huge money factories charged with keeping Americans in pocket money, the United States Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, that is exactly what money is. In many ways the production of cash is like that of shoes or skis or playing cards. Coins and paper money have designreview committees, physical life spans, sudden shortages and occasional factory seconds, although under no circumstances are the latter marked down for quick sale. The money business even has its share of marketing fiascos. There exists a locked storage area that is currently weighed down with 334 million Susan B. Anthony [19thcentury American suffragist] dollars. These coins are too

Y

unpopular to circulate and too valuable to melt down.

In other ways, of course, producing money is not a bit like producing playing cards or shoes. In the case of paper money, the distinctive feature is its markup. A $1 bill costs only two-and-a-half cents to make. A $100 bill costs the same. As a result, security at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is tighter than at a military command post.

The bureau's II-hectare facility has 400 closed-circuit video cameras, several thousand alarms, an army of security officers who make strong eye contact, and a noticeable absence of windows. One of the few high-security areas that does have windows is the engraving department, where skylights let the bureau's 14 engravers work by natural light.

The only newly engraved piece ofD.S. currency issued in the past 60 years was the short-lived $2 bill, introduced in 1976, so the engravers tend to concentrate on other media, from postage stamps to White House invitations, along with keeping currency dies in repair.

"We have the largest in-house staff of engravers here in the country," says Hugh Kasley, the department foreman, a relaxed, avuncular man with impeccably trimmed gray hair.

"If you wanted to make counterfeit money, the best group to do it would be right here." Bank note engravers cut patterns in a little more than a half-centimeter-thick steel plates using antique, hand-held styluses called gravers. Every image is composed of hand-cut dots, dashes and lines.

Vieweq up close, President George Washington on the $1 bill looks like a tattooed Maori warrior. A strict division of labor-some engravers do portraits, some do scrollwork, some do only lettering-makes the handcrafting of competing dollar bills tougher for the occasional "free-lancer" to accomplish alone.

Kasley estimates that just the portrait of President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill took its engraver a good two months to do.

An engraved plate applies ink to paper by a process known as intaglio printing. In a well-guarded basement pressroom, plate-printing foreman Bob Harry leads me up onto a narrow walkway atop one of the bureau's huge presses to show me how it's done. Below us, the press is thumping out a steady cascade of $10 bills in sheets of 32. Four working plates, made from copies of the original engravings, have been wrapped around a spinning drum. Each time the drum turns, three things happen in quick succession: The plates are smeared with hot gummy ink, their surfaces are wiped clean (leaving ink only in

the cuts), then a sheet of paper is squeezed against the plate.

The squeezing amounts to ten or more tons per square centimeter, sufficient to force the ink onto the sheets in sticky, glistening mounds-mounds high enough to let some spenders recognize denominations by feel. As I watch, sheet after sheet of tens, green side up, floats gently down onto a growing stack. It's a lovely sight.

"We're printing over 6,000 million notes a year now," says Harry as we climb down. A small sign on a nearby press reads: THE BUCK STARTS HERE. "In the late 1970s," he says, "we printed less than 3,000 million a year." Inflation has played a part, but Harry attributes the growing popularity of bills to other factors: dollar changers on vending machines, cash-only fast-food restaurants and the hunger of automatic banking machines for crisp new bills. To keep up with demand, the bureau now keeps its 14 currency presses running day and night, often seven days a week.

Harry pulls the top sheet from a 1.5-meter stack of blank currency paper that awaits its momentDf glory. The paper is made specially for the bureau by a Massachusetts papermaker, Crane & Company Inc., and is shipped to Washington by armored truck. Possession of the blank paper by outsiders is a federal crime. Possession of paper that even looks like currency paper is a federal crime.

Genuine currency paper is one-quarter linen and threequarters cotton, with a few tiny red and blue fibers added to the mix to make imitation that much harder. Scraps and cuttings from clothing manufacturers are a key ingredient of Crane's recipe. I comment that the paper, for all the care taken in its manufacture, looks better after it's printed.

"Yeah," says Harry, "it looks a whole lot better after it's printed."

Like all printshops, this one has its share of slipups. Harry recalls the time they printed $1 backs on $5 faces, but the error was caught before the sheets went out. "I can only wonder what the value of those $6 bills would have been," he says. Most mistakes are less dramatic but equally unacceptable to the 176 members of the bureau's examining department. I step into a large room down the hall, where examiners stare at uncut sheets of tens as they flow through the room on conveyor belts. The only person moving is a woman in the back who is busy pulling every fourth sheet as it passes. Earlier, a press crew had run off a load of sheets without noticing a blank patch on one of the portraits of the 18th-century American statesman and Founding Father,

Alexander Hamilton, just behind his left ear. To a collector, the affected sheets are something to die for. To an examiner, they're just junk. The sheets that pass muster are cut down to size; then letterpresses add serial numbers, and Treasury and federal seals.

Spoilage is not, understandably, tossed into a dumpster in the parking lot. Its destination is a bunkerlike concrete room .in the building's subbasement. There, I watch William Moore, a cheerful fellow in grimy work clothes, grab 32-note sheets by the fistful and heave them under a slowly turning drum covered with spikes. The sheets emerge on the other side of the drum in tatters and drop into an enormous well in the center of the room. The walls of the well slant inward to form a funnel down which Moore's security supervisor, Matthew Stevens, is stuffing pulverized currency with a sixmeter pole. Directly below the chute is a waste-fueled boiler, and the room around us reverberates with the roar of its fire.

In 1988,the boiler destroyed close to 2,000 tons of currency and securities, generating enough steam to heat one-fifth of the bureau's buildings all winter long.

The volume of spoiled currency the bureau destroys is small change compared with the amount of worn-out bills that have to be done away with annually. If one made a neat stack of just the $1 bills that are destroyed each year, it would rise to more than 300 kilometers. Each of the country's 12 Federal Reserve Banks regulates the flow of cash in its region, accepting excess or worn-out bills from local banks and doling out notes fresh from Washington as needed. High-speed sorting machines shred any bill on the spot if it is too limp, too faded, too creased or generally too abused to be of further service. The sorters also detect counterfeits (by measuring the iron content of the ink, then examining the brightness of the bill along a particular strip).

Evidence of a crime, counterfeits are not destroyed. Instead, they're sent to Secret Service headquarters in Washington, where two walls of filing cabinets hold four samples of every batch of counterfeit money ever seized. The inventory is growing rapidly.

"Most counterfeiters take a picture of a genuine bill, then make an offset plate from the negative," says Special Agent Pete Smoot at the agency's offices,just down

the block from the White House. Smoot opens and closes drawers of counterfeits as he talks, searching out his favorites among the 13,000 varieties on hand. He hands me a good-looking $20 bill, sharp and crinkly. The cross-hatching around President Andrew Jackson's head is as clear as a window screen. On both sides of the bill, tiny red and blue fibers have simply been printed right on the paper, a little trick that took somebody four separate pressruns. "Some counterfeiters draw them in," says Smoot, "and I've seen bills where the counterfeiters had cut real pieces of thread and tried to glue them on."

Though best known for protecting Presidents, the U.S. Secret Service first set up shop in 1865specifically to combat counterfeiting. At the time, between one-third and one-half of all paper money in circulation was thought to be phony.

That proportion has dropped considerably, but seizures are up nonetheless-way up. Thanks largely to better cameras and better presses, counterfeiting is a growth industry. More than 100 million counterfeit dollars were seized in 1988, more than double the 1975 total. The three all-time biggest busts also occurred in 1988. The largest, $24.3 million, took place in Los Angeles. Back at the agency's offices in a windowless storeroom next to the file room, cardboard cartons of recently confiscated money crowd rows and rows of gray steel shelves. "I can't even tell you how much money is in here," says Pete Smoot. "Zillions."

Smoot has been a Secret Service agent for 17 years, and he obviously delights in the cops-and-robbers aspect of his profession. With the upbeat boyishness of a popular high school teacher, he says things to his colleagues like "When did that caper go down?" In the archive room, Smoot opens a file drawer at random and produces a sorry-looking $20 bill, just a photocopy on cheap paper. "Stuff like this gets passed all the time," he says. From the Reno office, where he worked until recently, he investigated a case where photocopies of $1 bills were turning up in a dollar-changing machine at a Carson City video arcade. Adjoining the arcade was a copy center.

"It turned out a whole gang of little kids were making copies of dollar 1?ills, walking over and putting the copies in the dollar changer, then buying soda and ar-

cade games with the change," says Smoot. A good change machine wouldn't be fooled, he says, but arcades and laundromats often can't afford good change machines.

Slot-machine slugs were another low-tech caper that used to keep Smoot busy in Nevada. "We would catch these guys out in the sagebrush with their Coleman stoves, melting down lead and pouring it into handmade molds for President Eisenhower dollars," he says. Ike [Eisenhower] may not have looked too lifelike, but the slot machines didn't care.

The most exquisite counterfeit money Smoot and his fellow agents ever saw came from an artisan in Thailand named Lee Ah Sin, also known as King Kong, and from a solo artist in Southern California, Marion Williams. Both men used the time-consuming intaglio method of printing.

King Kong, the protege of a Hong Kong master known as Professor Wong, is thought to have passed at least $2.5 million of homemade money before his arrest in 1985.

Marion Williams's tabletop operation was far humbler, producing perhaps $15,000 a year. At the time of his arrest in 1974, Williams was a 77-year-old recluse suffering from cataracts, hernias and alcoholism. "What finally did him in," says Smoot, "is that he took in a boarder who got curious about a locked room in the house. The boarder broke his way in, found all this money and took some that Williams would never have passed-it probably hadn't passed his quality control." The boarder was nabbed right away and promptly squealed on his landlord. Williams's apparatus now rests in a display case with the Counterfeit Division on the seventh floor of Secret Service headquarters.

In it are an old box camera, a container of shoe dye, a bottle of whiskey ("To keep him going," says an agent) and a beautiful $20 bill. Williams's technique was arduous but clever. He would build up photographic emulsions on a small plate of glass until the pattern was almost as deeply etched as a steel engraving. Then, using the shoe dye as ink, he would squeeze glass and paper through an old, handcranked laundry wringer, one note at a time.

The Secret Service investigates coin swindles as well. In the agency's spotless forensic laboratory, technical analyst Jim Brown hands me an 1879 Morgan silver dollar. On its face are two tiny raised letters, "CC," for Carson City. "Without that mint mark," says Brown, "the coin is worth about $17.

With the CC, the coin is worth $2,500." He pops the silver dollar into the vacuum chamber

The bureau's II-hectare facility in Washington, D.C., has 400 closed-circuit video cameras, several thousand alarms, an army of security officers and a noticeable absence of windows.

of a scanning electron microscope on a desktop in front of us. Two luminous, green Cs appear on the machine's video screen. Magnified 20 times, they seem like perfectly innocent, flattop mounds. Brown ups the magnification to 200.

"Look at that," he says. "You already know something's rotten in Denmark." The raised letters now resemble pancakes on a plate: A deep, dark crack runs around the base of the letters. Brown boosts the magnification to 500 and the pancakes appear to pe levitating clear off the plate. Some ne'er-do-well, he suggests, managed to file the mint mark off a less valuable Carson City dollar and affix it to this one.

Quite a scam, I say. "There's a million of them," says Pete Smoot.

As the Carson City coin caper illustrates, a numismatically inclined criminal can make just as much money from altered coins as from homemade bills. For this reason, security at the U.S. government's two factories for general-circulation coins, the Philadelphia Mint and the Denver Mint, is as tight as if they were stamping out gold doubloons, not pocket money. When I visit the Philadelphia Mint, a police officer asks me to set aside not only all my change but also my shoes, my glasses and my wallet before passing through a metal detector. The device is so sensitive that shoelace eyelets, screws in eyeglass temples and magnetic strips on credit cards will all set it off. The idea is to impede anyone from sneaking out with a misstruck penny, or even a penny blank, both of them eagerly sought by collectors.

The Philadelphia Mint has a decidedly unglamorous, blue-collar feel. At one end of the shop floor, blanking presses punch out coin-size disks, like tiny cookies, from long strips of metal alloy. Nearby, the round blanks are heated and rolled under pressure, which gives them rims. At the other end of the cavernous room, dozens of automated coin presses pound the blanks with several tons of pressure, heads and tails at the same time, transforming them into legal tender. At one of the presses, an inspector with a loupe tosses an off-center penny into a bin that's marked CONDEMNED. What sets this factory apart from other assembly-line operations, aside from all the security, is the glinting, gleaming product. As I wander the floor, I'm surrounded by jiggling chutes and swirling trays of shiny treasure.

The factory produces 35 million coins a day. Three-fourths of them are pennies. Doing away with all this penny making altogether might seem like a sensible way to save the federal government some money.

Mint spokesperson Eleanor McElvey points out, however, that pennies retail for one cent but cost the mint only sixtenths of a cent to make. The 50-cent piece, the highestdenomination coin the mint makes, costs a nickel to produce. "We come out ahead with every piece we make," McElvey says. The mint's total return, she notes, which includes income from commemorative coins, proof sets and other collectibles, amounts to several hundred million dollars a year.

A cramped corner studio on an upper floor is the workspace of the mint's sculptor-engravers. American citizens are notoriously resistant to new designs for money, as sponsors of the $2 bill and the Susan B. Anthony dollar quickly learned, so the sculptor-engravers spend most of their time on commemorative and presentational medals. I notice an exception on a tabletop in one corner, a plaster bas-relief of President Washington the size of a dinner plate. Taped to the top is a handwritten sign: FRAGILE! "This is the original model for the 1932 quarter," says Edgar Steever, 77, one of several old-timers in the shop. The plaster model is rolled out every year for a date change, he explains. The final "8" in "1988" had just been scraped off, and a carefully fashioned clay "9" stuck in its place. A series of molds were later taken from this original to yield the new year's working dies.

A more unusual mint heirloom is Peter, a stuffed bald eagle that overlooks the mint's lobby from a Plexiglas case.

According to mint lore, Peter was a domesticated eagle that nested in the mint in the early 1800s, occasionally posing for new coins. He met his end when he caught a wing in a huge coining-press flywheel. By some accounts, Peter continued to pose for coins after his visit to the taxidermist.

The only person still living to have sculpted an entire general-circulation U.S. coin, eagle and all, is Frank Gasparro, who retired as chief engraver of the mint in 1981.

Now 80, Gasparro still does medallion work in an immaculate private studio not far from the Philadelphia Mint. He designed the Eisenhower and Anthony dollars, and he engraved the "tails" sides of both the 1959 penny and the 1964 Kennedy half-dollar.

Gasparro is an excitable man and nothing seems to thrill him more than the subject of coin making. As a 12-year-old apprentice sculptor, he saw a medallion being sculpted and found the experience "more exciting than a baseball game."

When getting change, he has been known to show cashiers the back of a penny and announce he designed it. "They would look at me like I was crazy, so I don't do it anymore," he says. I ask Gasparro ifhe signed his work. "Sure, I'll show you." He fishes around in his pocket and pulls out a penny.

"Here's my 'FG' right here," he says, pointing to the bottom right corner of the Lincoln Memorial. It occurs to me that few other artists in the United States could show me objects from their oeuvre by reaching into a pocket-or a guest's 0 pocket, for that matter. '

AROLE MODEL

From Mean Street to Wall Street The story of New York Stock Exchange floor broker Gail Pankey (right) is testimony to one woman's determination to succeed despite a childhood spent in poverty.

Today, she is showing the way to other disadvantaged children.

At 8:45 every weekday morning, Gail Pankey stows away her handbag, straps on her running shoes and hits the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As head floor broker for New York's Fahnestock & Co. Inc., Pankey is responsible for buying and selling stocks at the best possible prices.

She seizes an order slip and dodges through the crowd to a specialist's post, eager to find out who is buying or selling and at what price. Pankey decides whether to trade now or wait for a better market, then lunges at a tree of yellow telephones to let her clerk know. As Pankey slams the phone back down, a beeper on her jacket goes off, telling her where to go to execute another order. In a flash, she is running again.

On an average day, Pankey will scramble almost 20 kilometers. The numbers can vary wildly, but by 4 p.m. on a slow day, she might have executed 100 trades; on a busy day, 400. Lunch is half a sandwich gobbled down between phone orders.

With roughly 2,500 men and only 200 women, the trading floor is not a place for refined conversations. "When you are as short as I am-just 1.6 meters in my shoes," Pankey laughs, "you can't let yourself be intimidated. It's like having thousands of older brothers, that's all." For her knowledge and professionalism, Pankey in 1985 became one of the stock exchange's 170 floor officials, who arbitrate trading disputes among brokers.

Pankey, 36, lives in a suburb near Princeton, New Jersey. She won't disclose her

salary, but floor brokers typically make more than $100,000 a year-vastly more than she thought she would earn as she was grOWIng up.

Pankey was raised in the slums of Bed. ford-Stuyvesant and Fort Greene in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents divorced when she was four. Until she was eight, her family was on welfare, and several days a week Pankey waited in line inside a cavernous National Guard armory to get government surplus cheese, powdered milk and dried eggs.

Her mother remarried when Pankey was eight, and her stepfather opened a television repair shop il} the borough of Queens. But then he had a debilitating heart attack, and the family returned to the mean streets of Fort Greene.

Soon Pankey's stepfather sank into alcoholism.

Another hardship: Pankey's younger brother, Russell, was born with Down's syndrome. Says Pankey, "Home wasn't exactly Fantasia."

But Pankey's mother, Constantia, was a strict, devout woman who sent her three daughters to a Catholic grammar school and high school, and scrubbed floors to help pay tuition. Pankey summarizes what she learned from her mother this way: "Don't depend on other people for the things that you can do yourself."

When Pankey was 14, one of her best friends died in a hallway, a heroin needle in his arm. "That's when I realized I had to get out," recalls Pankey. Although Pankey

was not a star student at Bishop McDonnell High School, still, as graduation neared, she had the self-confidence to search for work in the world beyond Fort Greene. She thought she would work as a bank teller or a clerk at an insurance com- . pany. But her older sister had a friend who was a trade reporter on the New York Stock Exchange, so, with his help, Pankey went into Manhattan for an interview and got a job as a "squad," or messenger, with the exchange. Her job was to hustle trading slips back and forth between brokers and clerks.

In June 1971, two days after her high school graduation, Pankey became one of the first women to be allowed on the floor of the stock exchange since World War II. "It was a culture shock," remembers Pankey. "It seemed to me that everyone else on the floor had been raised on stocks and bonds since the age of four or five. I had no idea what was going on."

But Pankey watched the ticker tape, learned the ticker symbols, and nine months later moved up, landing herself a new job with the now extinct Mitchel, Schreiber, Watts & Co. There she learned to record trades on a keyboard, and "things started coming together," says Pankey.

After working at several firms as a clerk, and surviving the 1974-75 market collapse, Pankey got her big break. In 1976 she went to work for a smaller firm, Kalb Voorhis & Co., whose head floor broker, William Prager, became her mentor. Over the next

four-and-a-half years, says Pankey, "BiHy [Prager] taught me a lot about the business and how the floor works."

In 1981, at the age of 27, Pankey became a floor broker for York Securities and a member of the New York Stock Exchange.

Four years later she left York and became head floor broker for Fahnestock.

Looking back on her long ascent, Pankey believes her secret lay in never letting herself think her disadvantaged background would prevent her from getting ahead. She says, "A lot of inner-city children simply don't know there's something better out there, that alternatives exist. They just don't know that they don't have to stay in the same area they've always lived in; that they can break away."

Recent research indicates that with middle age, people become less self-centered and more altruistic. Pankey is not waiting for middle age. To open as many inner-city eyes as she can to the opportunities that exist "out there," Pankey two years ago founded the Brokers United for Youth Scholarship Fund. Characteristically, she raised the money herself, blitzing the trading floor with friends to sell fellow brokers raffle tickets at $100 a shot. Last summer the fund awarded its first college scholarships to five high school seniors, one from each of New York City's boroughs.

In another effort to help ghetto kids, Pankey serves on the board of directors of the Clear Pool Camp in Carmel, New York, a summer retreat for poor and

homeless boys and girls from New York City. At least once every summer, Pankey drives a carload of lawyers, doctors, teachers and brokers with backgrounds similar to her own up to Clear Pool.

They spend a Saturday advising the kids on how to fill out employment forms, how to approach job interviews and generally how to conduct '" themselves in busi'" ~ ness surroundings . ...J ~ But perhaps Pan~ key's most valuUJ is able contribution is ~ as a role model. In i:: 1987, after she spoke at the stock exchange to a disadvantaged high school group from New Jersey, the students' attitudes improved markedly. According to one school official, at least one girl who heard Pankey speak decided against dropping out of high school. Another, Nicole Newman, now a sophomore in engineering at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey, recalls: "She really pushed us to do our work."

Says Pankey: "If you can get to onejust one child-it's a milestone. If! can get one kid's eyes to glisten, I can walk away happy." -From small pebbles come big ripples.

0 About the Author: Jason Zweig is a staff writer with Forbes magazine.

ARCHIBALD QUINCY JONES

Insights on a SketchPad In these days of cameras, rarely does a traveler record his impressions of the countries he visits with the humble pencil and sketch pad. But Archibald Quincy Jones, who visited India in 1962, did just that. The American architect, who died in 1979, has left behind a legacy of paintings and drawings that reveal not just his artistic talents but also his warm feelings toward India.

Jones's architectural designs have been acclaimed by the public and his peers for their sensitivity to the environment.

Although most of his later work was in the design of buildings for American university campuses and office complexes, Jones first gained recognition in residential work in the post-World War II era when America was facing an acute housing shortage. According to a contemporary critic, "His houses set standards of excellence that affected all house design of the period ....A characteristic of these small houses was the simplified structural system which allowed for spatial diversity, in contrast to the usual static box."

Jones's work won him several awards from the American Institute of Architects, including the First Honor Award in 1950.

But Jones was more than an architect; he was an educator, visionary, thinker and artist. And a traveler.

Jones enjoyed sketching spontaneously while he traveled, and whether in a European city, Hong Kong, Mexico or India, he always captured the mood and character of the place with easy fluency and lively charm. In 1962 he and his wife Elaine visited India with Ratan Tata, the scion of one of India's most celebrated industrial houses. Tata had worked with Jones in Los Angeles for six months earlier that year after graduating in architecture from Cornell University,

Ithaca, New York. The two first met when Jones spent three weeks at Cornell as a design critic. Their association with Tata explains why the Joneses visited Jamshedpur (headquarters of the Tata industrial empire), which is not on the usual tourist beat. Several of Jones's sketches of India, in fact, were done in Jamshedpur.

In 1980, a year after his death, an exhibition of Jones's sketches and drawings was organized by the Center for Study oftve American Experience of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (where Jones had been a professor for a decade). Ruth Weisberg, distinguished American graphic artist and printmaker, introduced the exhibition with the appropriate title, "A Participation in Place."

Weisberg wrote, "Quincy Jones's place in the history of architecture is assured by the humanism and beauty of his buildings, their environmental responsiveness and the enduring significance of the reforms he set in motion. Quincy was also an architect for whom drawing was a way. of participating in a place, a form ofknowledge ....He cherished those moments of a trip when he could return to his hotel room and finish the sketches started earlier in the day. One can well imagine how this generous and public man was nourished by these private times."

Gentle and soft-spoken, Jones was a facile communicator, whether through architecture, drawing or words. Explaining his urge to draw, he wrote, "Sketches often show the character of an area quite differently than slides or photographs. One gets involved-in how people live, their culture, customs ....In architecture, the method of communication is visual. By always working at it, you keep your hand in it to

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express yourself graphically. Sketching is fun as well as a constructive way to 'keep one's hand in,' just as it is important to practice the piano every day. By sketching on a trip, I enhance my ability to see and feel the spaces-and this is what architecture is all about anyway.

"It is difficult to say that certain sketches are favorites, but there are some that I do think about occasionally. I am glad, for instance, that I made those of the steel buckets at the Tata Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur, where I attempted to get the scale of the operation .... While I also took slides of the open-hearth firing at night when the contrasts are

Hand Delivery Cart, Bombay, felt tip pen on paper, 21 x 13 em.

Roadside Village, near Bombay, felt tip pen on paper, 18.7 x 17.8 em.

unbelievably beautiful, none of them comes close to the drama and feeling of the sketches of the buckets as viewed against the figure of a human being ....

"Wherever I am-at home or at work or play-I draw every day. I draw at the restaurant while waiting to be served or at the telephone when I am talking or at the theater when I am not with the play."

0 About the Author: Pratapaditya Pal is the senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California.

~~reYou Smart?

India Is RanI."

The author (above) has been a scholar and professor of Indian history for almost three decades.

In this article he writes about how he. became interested in India during his student days and how he came to regard this country as his second home.

H

did you get involved with India? Why do you do India? Do you love India?" For an American teaching and doing research about India over a long period, these questions come frequently from fellow Americans to whom India still seems an exotic and distant land.

And India to many-even with the increased contact and with a large number of South Asians resident in the United States-is still the faraway dreamland of OW

great riches and great poverty, of maharajas and untouchables, of tigers and elephants. So how does one respond, how does one try to contradict or cope with the old and new stereotypes of Indian culture, urban life, and personality?

One way to answer is to tell the mundane story of how one innocently wandered into India as a graduate student at Harvard University more than a quarter century ago and then gradually became enmeshed in complicated relationships with a place and people on the other side of the globe over many years. But even this simple tale takes more than a brief moment to tell and, as one does it again and again to new inquirers, each telling brings up inside all kinds of thoughts and feelings that are much more intricate and subtle than the questioner wishes to hear about. How can one convey that Calcutta is as much a home place as New York, that one is an outsider as well as an insider simultaneously, and that one has a multiplicity of ties a mere linear narrative cannot convey?

I had not thought about India at all before I went to study sociology and then history at Harvard University as a graduate student in 1959. One of my father's closest friends was an Indian resident in New York, Kumar Goshal, but even with him, I had not discussed any Indian subject in detail.

Then at Harvard, for my field of study of comparative societies, I needed to include a complex non-Western society. For my job as a research assistant in sociology, I had been attending some lectures by the anthropologist Cora Dubois. I went to her and asked how I could learn about India.

She said, "Are you smart? India is hard." I did not answer this question directly, but asked for more practical guidance. She pointed me to a course on Indian civilization with Daniel Ingalls. The next semester I took this course and found the subject demanding and the teacher remarkable. I wrote a paper for him that he liked and he encouraged me to go on.

Once I had decided that I preferred some problem about modern India to modern Africa or to modern European intellectual history-other doctoral thesis possibilities-Ingalls sent me to Edward C. Dimock, Jr., at the University of Chicago to learn a little Bengali and more about India. At Chicago there was an excellent South Asia Center and great intellectual stimulation and _support in contrast to Harvard's one-man program. In Chicago I

tried to formulate my biographically oriented study of modern Bengal into a workable research topic.

From Chicago, I went briefly to London, and then flew from there to Calcutta in the autumn of 1963. When I arrived at 4:30 a.m., Dimock, devoted friend that he has always been, was at the airport in the heat and the dust to meet me. Over the next 20 months, with the help of Dimock, and with a small address book full of names given to me by Goshal and another friend, Ranajit Guha, I began to make my way into Calcutta society and research institutions.

By then I was working primarily on the careers and ideas of Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, M.N. Roy and Subhas Bose. Although I continued throughout to work on these men about whom there was vast material, I was never quite satisfied with the focus of this project.

From Calcutta, I went on to work in New Delhi, Dehradun, Bombay and in Pondicherry. I also fitted in some sightseeing and, in 1964, with friends Marcus Franda, Ronald Inden, and a Bengali businessman, I visited Konark. An old Gandhian tried to help us understand the erotic sculpture on the temple: "This is," he said, "everything you are not supposed to do." I felt there were elements of India's past over which a veil had been dropped; that even Indians could not view them clearly any longer.

At the same time that I was doing my work, I was also making a circle of friends and a wider circle of acquaintances.

Through Dimock, I met David McCutchion and Jyoti Datta who became dear friends. They introduced me to others and the network widened and also deepened.

McCutchion taught comparative literature at Jadavpur University, studied Bengal's rich heritage of terra-cotta temples, wrote literary reviews, and did the English titles for some of Satyajit Ray's films. He and I made a brief trip to Santiniketan which I have described in the memorial volume edited by P. Lal after McCutchion's tragic, early death in 1971.

I also began to write a few pieces, some more successful than others. One was an article for Parichoy translated into Bengali about the civil rights movement in the United States. Another was an article about Calcutta, rejected by -an American magazine because there was not enough "American tie-in." I was starting to learn the hard lesson that India had to be related to some vital American concern in order to draw attention.

"I hope that short studies of a number of the pioneers in the growing relationship between our countries might serve to show one and all how much we have shared and how many positive things we have in our linkages."

Below: The author receiving the Netaji A ward for his "outstanding research on India's freedom struggle" at afunction in Calcutta. Right: Talking to Ashim Das Gupta, a Calcutta friend.

After returning home to serve as a Carnegie intern in Indian civilization for a year at the University of Chicago, I worked at completing my doctoral thesis. This proved difficult until I decided to organize it around the theme of the complicated relationship between Bengalis and Gandhi.

I tried to explain the development of this ambivalent relationship with the leader of Indian nationalism and the role that Bengalis had played in criticizing and rebelling against his preeminence. A revised version of my thesis was published as Be/Jgal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940.

After beginning to teach Indian history and related subjects at Columbia University and then at Brooklyn College, both in New York, I continued to do research on the background of the 1947 partition of India, particularly as Bengal was involved and affected. I wrote a long article on the partition, but decided some time later that my time would be better spent trying to write a biography of Subhas and Sarat Chandra Bose than focusing on the partition. I thought that I could manage and carry through the Bose biography better. It has been published this year by Penguin India and will be brought out by Columbia University Press in New York. It is entitled Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose.

During all the years that I have worked on the partition and the Bose biography, I have not spent more than three months at a

stretch in India though I have made several trips to this country over the years. These frequent trips have served to keep me in touch with India. India has come to mean research. It has also come to mean enduring friendships to me.

As the Bose project dragged out over the years, one Calcutta friend began to call me the "Netajiwallah." I accepted that this was a main focus of my work, but not the entire me, just a part. When an elderly Bengali woman asked me if! loved Netaji, I had to answer that I did not love him, but that I respected what he had tried to do for his country. Furthermore, one important reason that I had tracked him here, there and everywhere was because Bengalis and some other Indians loved him so much.

Besides class conflict, I argued, love also had a lot to do with history. However, I tried never to become an unabashed defender of Bose, but rather a sympathetic but detached outside chronicler and analyst.

This project took me to West Germany for the first time. Some Jewish people, including myself, have found this a hard journey to make after the Holocaust. Once there, I had to search out those who had worked with Bose in the 1930sand the early 1940s. I had earlier met a Jewish couple, Kitty and Alex Kurti, who had befriended Bose in the 1930s and whom he had urged to flee from Germany while there was still time. On a number of occasions I had either

one with many American experts on South Asia. Although I have always been critical of my own country when I thought it needed censure, I have found that every American abroad is held responsible for the deeds or misdeeds of his native land.

Faced with this role, I have passionately defended my country when I felt able to do so, and detached myself from policies and actions that I disliked.

A few years ago, I was contacted by British film producer David Boulton, who wanted to make a film about Subhas Bose and the INA [Indian National Army] to go with the Granada dramatization of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. Through the negotiations about my possible participation in Boulton's project, I learned that I was to work for no credit and no pay. I declined his offer and was happy later that I had done so. He produced a historically distorted film and he and I ended up in a controversy over the film in the pages of to mask or reveal my own Jewish identity The Illustrated Weekly of India, which pubto carry forward my interviews with Nazi lished the script. Boulton wanted to make and anti-Nazi Germans of the period. I Bose out to be a simpleminded fascist and must also say that among the younger opponent of Gandhi. Although I did not generation in India, I have found wide- feel called upon to defend Bose, I did want spread ignorance about the ruthless and to make the historical record as accurate as nihilistic violence of the Hitler regime. My I could.

After this, a scion of the Bose family, positive approach to Bose was tested in writing about this period, but I remained Sugata, an excellent economic historian, sure that he was opposed to racism and had wanted to make his own film and I willingly worked with the Germans only because he participated in this project. The film, Rebels Against the Raj, is less technically was so bent on ending the British Raj. Over these years of interaction with In- polished than the Granada film, but, I dians, Americans, and other Westerners believe, more accurate historically and and Asians concerned with India, I have more sympathetic to the Indian nationalist occasionally found myself in the middle of cause. It has been shown on public telea controversy. The details of these argu- vision in the United States and I hope it will ments cannot be recounted here, but each be shown on Indian television too. one seems to me to express one or more of In 1988, The New York Times, my homemy views¡and underlying beliefs, values or town paper, began to publish an occasional series on the homeless in New York City concerns.

During my first stay in India, I became which they entitled, "New Calcutta." On involved in a brief heated exchange with Christmas Day 1988 they published an Barun De over whether M.N. Roy had editorial with the same title and I finally felt lived extravagantly on Comintern rp.oney sufficiently angered to compose a letter to in Europe in the 1920s. I became the de- the editors of this august paper. They pubfender of Roy, De the critic. I was led to lished my critique of their efforts and my wonder just how devoted leftists working defense of some aspects of Calcutta on for a more egalitarian society should live January 7, 1989, under the heading, "It's Bad Enough Without Bashing Calcutta." I their private lives.

Back in the United States during the said in part: Bangladesh war of independence, I became Calcutta has its problems, and I won't excuse them. a defender of their right of autonomy and Besides a vibrant cultural life, it has many living on the then independence and a critic of the poli- streets and serious economic difficulties. But it is ciesof my own government. In this I was at pointless to liken New York to it....

Calcutta's streets, though even filthier than New York's, are safer. Calcutta's new subway, though short, is so far cleaner, safer and quieter than New York's.

Let us try to address the problems of each city, being as mutually supportive as possible, and not just deride the other. Then we might move toward a better or new New York and a new Calcutta.

Through my connections to the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University, I came in touch with the Taraknath Das Foundation. Started by Das, an Indian who had come to the United States in the early 20th century, primarily to help Indian graduate students in America, it was continued after his death in 1958 by his friends and associates. The director, Kathryn Linden, an old pupil of Das, used a table in my office for her work. Then she asked me to become a trustee of the foundation. When she decided to retire, she asked me if I would-with the consent of the trustees-become the director.

I have done this job on an unpaid basis for several years, providing modest grants to about five Indian graduate students studying in America, sending some funds to the Taraknath Das Research Centre at Jadavpur University, and giving small grants to universities in the United States for prizes and lectures on India. For some years, we have also awarded a plaque to an Indian or an American for helping to bring our two countries closer together.

Once my very long book on Subhas and Sarat Bose was complete, I decided to do some small studies of aspects of the relations between the United States and India.

I began with a labor of love, a short biography of my family's friend, Kumar Gosha!. I hope that short studies of a number of the pioneers in the growing relationship between our countries might serve to show one and all how much we have shared and how many positive things we have in our linkages. This project, like the complicated relationship between India and the United States, is still in an early stage.

I feel that-with others from India and America in my generation-I am following individuals such as Goshal, Taraknath Das and others in serving to link our two countries. We bridge-builders of these two distant lands try to speak for each to the other and to dissolve negative and limited stereotypes. The time and circumstances are changed from those prevailing in preindependence days, but the needs for understanding are at least as great in this age of rapid transit between continents. D

Understanding Depression Why do some people get "down in the dumps"-and stay there? Can this be avoided? Researchers are gaining new insights into the causes, kinds and symptoms of depressive illnesses, and devising remedies for them.

It is as if the person Dr. Peter Kent used to be is now buried somewhere inside this man who cannot summon the energy to get out of bed, who lies for hours staring blankly, sighing, his thoughts traveling in bleak circles. Kent's colleagues at the hospital have been told by his secretary that the 41-year-old cardiologist is on "personal leave," nothing more. They have not been told about the psychiatric ward that resembles an exclusive college dormitory, about the faint institutional smell, Monet's vision of Giverny on the wall, the living room where patients play pool or sit smoking cigarettes. They do not know that Kent is, for the moment, spending his afternoons in group therapy and watching television.

Kent's secretary is protecting him from what people-his patients, other doctors, the public-might think. It is very hush-

MIKE WALLACE

hush, his illness. Indeed, we are protecting him, too. We have changed his name in order to write about him, creating a new identity for this altered, sluggish person, the ailing Dr. Kent who finds it painfully difficult to string words into a sentence, who yawns every few minutes and shifts his gaze away, up to the ceiling, over to the daffodils on the table. "It's like being in quicksand," he says. "There's a sense of doom, of sadness."

The need for secrecy is troubling. Kent has not embezzled money, cheated on his income tax or seduced 16-year-old girls. He is not a bad person; on the contrary, his gentleness and quiet concern must be reassuring to patients who are recovering from heart attacks or facing bypass surgery. He is guilty only of having fallen victim to an illness that, because it affects the mind and the personality, is ~till tinged

CBS correspondent

In 1973,Mike Wallace presented a television report called "The Eagleton Syndrome," the story of a highly successful California businessman who, like U,S,Senator Thomas Eagleton, had suffered from severe and disabling depression, "This could never happen to me," the 71-year-old CBS correspondent remembers thinking at the time, Then, 11 years later, it did. Submerged in a grueling five-month trial, listening day after day to claims that he had libeled retired General William Westmoreland, Wallace stopped sleeping, lost weight, experienced phantom pains in his arms and legs, and generally found himself "lower than a snake's belly," Hospitalized for ten days, he was given an antidepressant drug and began psychotherapy, At CBS, the word was that Wallace was "exhausted" or "on vacation," "I was worried about the stigma of the word depression," he remembers. In fact, his colleagues were very understanding, Wallace was soon back on his feet, but it took two years for him to feel fUlly recovered, "Depression is palpable," he says, looking back, "You begin to feel like a fake and fraud, You second-guess yourself about everything," 0

with shame, as if to suffer from it were somehow an admission of poor character, or weak will.

Though it is more common than diabetes, serious depression-the kind that can lead to suicide or land one in a mental hospital-remains in the United States an issue that can unhorse presidential candidates or bind a family in embarrassed silence. There are signs, however, that this view is shifting, that science is at last making headway against fear. Those who have sampled depression's dark offerings are speaking out, describing both the depth and the harrowing intensity of their ordeal.

Most recently, American author William Styron, writing in Vanity Fair, has described his own plunge into despondency, "a veritable howling tempest in the brain," that nearly cost him his life. With each declaration the curtain is drawn back a little further.

There are wider reflections of the changing climate in America. Large corporations, once oblivious to the impact of psychological factors, are beginning to pay more attention to their employees' state of mind, realizing that mental well-being is essential for high productivity and lower medical costs. They have reason for concern: A recent study by the Rand Corporation found that depression can be as disabling as coronary-artery disease or arthritis, with depressed individuals spending more days in bed than those with chronic lung or gastrointestinal problems.

And, perhaps sensing growing interest in the subject, the American media, too, have become expansive when it comes to mental illness. Public television last winter launched a new series, Moods & Music, spotlighting the link between creativity and mood disorders (see page 17). Says

Dr. Robert Hirschfeld, chief of the Mood, Anxiety, and Personality Disorders Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): "People are now recognizing depression as an illness and not a character flaw."

In part, this new-fledged openness rests upon an expanding body of research that in the past three decades has given scientists a much greater understanding of mood disorders-illnesses that will afflict more than 20 million Americans at some point in their lifetime. The treatment of depression and manic depression is "psychiatry's number one success story," says Dr. Frederick Goodwin, administrator of the U.S. Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration and co-author of Manic Depressive Illness, published by Oxford University Press.

A new generation of drugs allows a sophistication and flexibility in treatment that was not possible in the past. One such antidepressant, Ariafranil, also used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, won final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last February. For the first time, American studies are also beginning to reveal how and where psychoactive drugs exert their action on the brain.

Further, scientists have taken the initial steps toward solving the difficult problem of which pharmacological treatments work most reliably for different manifestations of the illness. Experts know more, too,

about the types of psychotherapy best suited to defeating the feelings of hopelessness and paralysis that infuse the depressive state (see page 19).

By far the most powerful lever for changing public attitudes comes from the growing body of work that establishes depression as biologically based, at least in its most disabling forms. Both severe depression and manic depression involve dramatic physiological changes, and the ev:idence points to a hereditary vulnerability that is then triggered by environmental stress. Using high-tech scanners, chemical probes and genetic mapping techniquesthe newest tools of a rapidly developing science-American researchers are starting to fill in the unknowns of an immensely complicated equation, one capable ofleaving the brain, as Lord Byron imagined it in "Childe Harold," "In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."

Mood disorders take many forms, and researchers historically have been hard pressed to draw iron-clad distinctions among types, or even to differentiate reliably between "normal" dips in mood and the psychic transformation that constitutes depressive illness. Confusing the issue further is the colloquial use of the word depression to describe a range of unpleasant, but inevitable, consequences of living. One is "depressed" after a bad day at the office, or the breakup of a love relationship.

"As an experience, madness is terrific I can depressive, composed his Messiah, a work that assure you~and not to be sniffed at," E3!iti~h_ takes almost four hours to perform, in a mere I novelistVirginiaWoolf (below) once wrote to a three weeks-presumably riding on the frefriend.Woolf,author of To The Lighthouse and netic high of his illness. Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, in a letter to a friend, described Orlando, among other works, careened from feverishperiods of writingto weeks immersed in with uncanny precision a type of "rapid bottomless gloom, according to the memoirs of cycling" manic depression in which moods her husband Leonard Woolf. shift precipitously, sometimes within weeks or Neither the novelist's mood swings nor the even days. "The fires of a supreme zest for living . conviction that her work was enhanced by and the most gnawing desire for death alterthem is unusual in creative individuals. Indeed, nate in my heart, sometimes in the course of a mood disorders seem to have a predilection for single hour," Mahler wrote. artisticvictims,and the listof painters, composAmerican poets Anne Sexton and Robert ers and writerswho suffered from depressionLowell, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and American phoor, even more commonly, manic depressionis a long one. "Creativity involves making tographer Diane associations between unrelated ideas," says Arbus all fought KayJamison, associate professor of psychiatry the demons of at Johns Hopkins University School of Medi- mental disintecine in Baltimore, Maryland, and executive gration, and all producer of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Ser- managed to turn vice series Moods & Music. "In a slightly manic the battle to their phase, you can linkthings that before were just creative advanisolated ideas." tage. Far too British composer George Frideric Handel, often, however, who scholars believe may have been manic artists also pay

Clinical depression is at once more intense and longer lasting than the brooding funks that seize everyone from time to time. Of patients hospitalized for depression in the United States, 40 to 60 percent suffer from the disease in its classical form, once referred to as "melancholia."

Submerged in recrimination and self-doubt, these patients lose their appetite, suffer an array of bodily aches, show little interest in sex and awaken in the early-morning hours. They may pace the floor in agitation, or their speech and movement may be drastically slowed, almost as if they had suddenly developed a peculiar and sudden form of brain damage.

Yet this facade of lethargy is deceptive. In fact, says Dr. Philip Gold, chief of the NIMH Clinical Neuroendocrinology Branch, severe depression may be a state of hypervigilance and intense arousal. "Such patients are so overwhelmed and overstimulated," says Gold, "that they just kind of sit still."

Less common than melancholia is a pattern in which the symptoms are reversed.

Patients eat more than usual and sleep for long hours, only reluctantly emerging into wakefulness. In recent years, more and more patients have also been reporting to clittics with still other forms of depression that researchers are only beginning to categorize. In seasonal affective disorder (SAD), despair sets in with the disappearance of the lingering daylight hours of

with their lives,choosing suicide as a balm for their psychic wounds.

The link between creativity and mood disorders is validated by research. Harvard University researchers Dr.Ruth Richards and Dennis Kinney gave creativity tests to 33. Danish patients diagnosed with manic depression or a milder form of the illness. The same tests were given to their relatives. The scientists found that both patients and relatives scored higher¡ than normal subjects. Similarly, in a study of creative writers enrolled in the prestigious Universityof Iowa Writers' Workshop, psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen discovered that 80 percent of the writ~rs had suffered at least one episode of depression or mania intheir lifetime, compared with 30 percent in a control group of lawyers, hospital administrators and social workers. The writers also showed a significantly higher incidence of alcoholism than the other subjects. It is possible, suggests Andreasen, that the sensitivity, openness, adventuresome nature and independent character of creative individuals in some way makes them more vulnerable to mental illness, in partiCUlar mood disorders.

D

summer and persists for as long as short days and the cold winter sun remain. As spring returns, however, patients with SAD feel their energy return. Their desolation lifts, and their lives return to normal.

"Dysthymia," on the other hand, is a chronic, if milder, form of depression that can last for months or even years. Researchers estimate that nearly nine million Americans are locked in dysthymia's dispiriting grip. "It's like a low-grade infection," says clinical psychologist James McCullough of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

At the most extreme end of the spectrum, a depressed patient can cross the border into psychosis. "I heard a voice, a male voice; it was the voice of death," says a 31year-old entertainer, hospitalized for severe depression after she told friends she was afraid she might hurt herself or someone else. "The voice said, 'Hey, kiddo, you know I'm waiting right on the horizon for you.' It was telling me how my body was going to die, trying to catch me off guard.

'Jump in front of that car,' it told me."

Mania shares this departure from reality. Possessed of limitless energy, thoughts racing, manic-depressive patients in the elated phase of the illness may stay up all night, insist they are in touch with creatures from outer space, become uncharacteristically promiscuous or run up thousands of dollars in credit-card bills.

One woman, a business executive, packed her briefcase, put on her best tailored suit and flewto Washington, D. C. Her mission:

To convince the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that a dangerous conspiracy threatened national security. The FBI agents were perplexed. Should they heed the woman's conservative attire and articulate manner or their hunch that something about her tale was not quite right?

The demographics of depression have changed dramatically in the past half-century. Psychiatrist Gerald Klerman of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and epidemiologist Myrna Weissman of Columbia University in New York, reviewing studies tracking fluctuating patterns of illness in ten countries, have found that in developed nations, including the United States, rates of depression increased markedly for postwar baby-boomers-those born in the period between 1945 and 1955-with the incidence peaking between 1975and 1980. This upward trend seems to have been only temporary, however. Klerman's newest data, still unpublished, suggest that as the baby-boom' generation turns 40, "the turmoil is subsiding," the curve sloping downward again. Suicides also declined in the 1980s for babyboomers, Klerman says, and rates of depression for those born in succeeding decades show a similar downward trend.

What accounts for these shifts? Researchers can only speculate. Fiercer competition in the labor force during the 1960s and 1970s, a greater gap between expectations and fulfillment than in previous generations, increased drug use and greater mobility all have been proposed as possible

PATTY DUKE Actress

To many, Patty Duke's "flights of fancy" seemed just another case of show-business eccentricity: A 13-day marriage to a man she had met only twice; a bizarre, rambling acceptance speech at the 1970Emmy awards ceremony, followed by a press conference at which she flew into a rage, abruptly announcing that she was giving up acting to become a doctor. Few suspected that the star of The Patty Duke Show and The Miracle Worker was actually suffering from manic depression.

But for those who loved her, Duke's sudden changes of mood reached far beyond eccentricity. At home, the slightest annoyance set off irrational tantrums, followed by days when she would lie in bed, crying, too depressed to shower or get dressed. Her sons remember nights spent banging on the bathroom door, begging their mother not to kill herself. Finally, eight years ago, doctors diagnosed her illness and prescribed treatment with lithium. Today, in between stage and television appearances, Duke, 43, lectures and educates the public about mental illness-her way of saying thanks "for having been saved from that pit."

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reasons for the increases in the 1970s.Some even suggest that a change in biological factors is at work, but conclusive evidence for any of these theories is not yet in hand.

Nor can experts at present convincingly account for changes in the male-to-female ratio among depressed patients. Women with "unipolar" depression-that is, without manic swings-have traditionally outnumbered men three to one. But Weissman has found indications that men are catching up.

I should have done things differently.

This is one of the thoughts that Peter Kent cannot stop thinking as he eats chicken teriyaki for lunch in the psychiatric ward's dining room, or walks down the long, gray-carpeted hallway. He has a mental image of himself talking on the telephone, listening to his fiancee tell him their relationship is over. He can see himself calling a few weeks later, hearing the whir of her answering machine, her voice saying (impossibly, astoundingly), "You have reached the residence of Mr. and Mrs ...."

There were other things-events that, though Kent did not know it at the time, were leading him toward this spinning descent. Problems in his medical practice.

Arguments with a friend. Indeed, there is the matter of his illness seven years ago, an episode of mania that lasted for several weeks, causing him to believe that a stranger was, in fact, his father in disguise.

Yet none of these things is, in itself, an explanation, a solution to the riddle of "Why here, why now?"

Tracing the origins of mood disorders, illnesses that affect not only behavior and physiology but our very sense of ourselves, is a formidable task. For mind and body are inextricably joined, and everything we imagine, dream, experience or fear is ultimately translated into the firing of nerve cells and the ebb and flow of chemicals in the brain. How do we sort out the events that began internally, in a strip of DNA or a malfunctioning neuron, from those that have their roots in external events: A broken love affair; the death of a friend; the loss ofajob? It is with this conundrum that scientists who study mental illness struggle.

The answers that emerge are always somewhat murky, always two-sided, always a compromise of nature and nurturewhich, after all, work hand in hand.

Yet there are some certainties. Researchers now know that certain forms of mood disorder-specifically manic depression and severe, recurrent, unipolar depres-

Treating Depression A hot bath or some friendly encouragement may be all it takes to banish a normal case of the blues. But the "black dog" of depression, as Winston Churchill once described it, does not respond to jollying, distraction, or well-meaning exhortation. A depressed person cannot merely "cheer up" or "snap out of it."

Yet depressive illnesses are eminently treatable, and with expert assistance-including medication, psychotherapy and in some cases hospitalization-up to 80 percent of patients can get better.

Antidepressant drugs form a cornerstone of therapy for mopd disorders because they work relatively quickly (most show their effects in two to three weeks) and often produce dramatic results in launching patients on their way back to health. Today, doctors have a wider range of drugs to choose from than in the past. More than 20 antidepressants are available by prescription in the United States, and new drugs, with fewer side effects and more specific action, are being tested in the laboratory. Perhaps just as important, professionals are noticing a change in patients' attitudes toward mood-elevating drugs. Says Dr. Daniel X. Freedman, Judson Braun Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles: "You see fewer patients who pit themselves against the medicine, as if their integrity or ability to exercise willpower were at issue."

Antidepressants work by altering the levels of brain chemicals, and different drugs target different substances when they first enter the brain. Scientists are finding that these highly specific effects make some classes of drugs more helpful than others in treating various types of depression. The so-called tricyclic antidepressants, for example, appear more effective in combating the disturbed sleep patterns, apathy and appetite loss of melancholic depression. Another group of drugs, the "monoamine oxidase inhibitors," seem to work well for patients suffering from "atypical depression," that is, eating and sleeping more than usual, rather than less.

Of particular interest to psychiatrists are two drugs that recently entered the U.S. market. Prozac and Anafranil both act principally to increase brain levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that scientists believe plays a role in some forms of depression. Prozac has fewer side effects than most antidepressants, is energizing rather than sedating and has proved much less toxic in overdoses-a boon since antidepressants are often used in suicide attempts. A third drug, Wellbutrin, has a unique chemical structure and fewer side effects than most mood-elevating medications.

For some years, the gold standard in treatment for mania's frenetic highs has been lithium carbonate, a salt that was in use as a therapy for gout in the 1950s when an Australian researcher noticed its quieting effects. Lithium works well for about 70 percent of patients in the manic phase of "bipolar" disorder, and can act as an antidepressant as well. Now, however, two antiseizure

sion-run in families. This fact is demonstrated by dozens of research projects, including a 1986 study that examined the family pedigrees of depressed adults adopted as children and found an increased incidence of mood disorders in biological, as opposed to adoptive, relatives. As Columbia University's Weissman puts it: "Depression is a family affair."

Both depression and mania are also

drugs-earbamazepine and valproic acid-also provide relief for some manic patients when lithium doesn't, and they can be combined with lithium for greater effect.

Yet as effective as they are, psychiatric drugs are far from perfect. All have side effects, most commonly annoyances such as dry mouth and constipation, but in rare cases there can be more serious consequences. Nor does medication work for everyone.

Some people don't respond to drugs; others find side effects intolerable. Experts caution that once you find a drug that works, it's important to stay on it long enough. Dr. David Kupfer, of the Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh, recommends taking an antidepressant for at least four months after the major symptoms of depression disappear. Studies show that this decreases the chance of falling ill again.

Sometimes using any drug is too risky. Elderly patients often react unpredictably to medicine, for example, and sometimes the risk of suicide precludes waiting the weeks needed for a given drug to take effect. In these cases, psychiatrists may turn to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a technique still recovering from the dubious reputation it acquired in the 1960s. ECT has been refined in recent years, and generally works quickly. Like drugs, however, it can have side effects: Patients may suffer memory loss and confusion right after treatment, and there are reports of longer-term memory problems.

Other innovative treatment methods for specific forms of depression have sprung up in recent years. In light therapy, for example, patients sit for a few hours each day in front of very bright, full-spectrum lights, a tactic found effective for sufferers of seasonal affective disorder.

Though medication plays an important role in treating severe depression, few experts would argue that it is, by itself, sufficient.

Indeed, some types of moderate or mild depression may respond to talking therapy alone. The consensus is, however, that in most serious cases drugs and psychotherapy complement each other and are best used jointly. A recent U.S. National Institute of Mental Health study demonstrated that two forms of short-term psychotherapy-eognitive therapy, which helps change negative patterns of thinking, and interpersonal therapy, which addresses problems in personal relationships-are effective even in treating severe depression. They work more slowly than a standard antidepressant, however. Other kinds of brief therapy, including those that draw their guiding principles from psychoanalysis, may also succeed, but they have not yet undergone as much rigorous study. Ultimately, Dr. T. Byram Karasu suggests in the March 1990 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, research on talking therapies may reveal that each has specific strengths, allowing therapists to pick and choose, tailoring psychotherapy to an individual patient's needs.

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accompanied by changes in brain chemistry, though these changes are not fully understood. In the early days of research, scientists thought in terms of relatively simple models of chemical imbalance: Depression, for example, was thought to stem from an insufficiency of norepinephrine, one of many substances mediating the transmission of nerve impulses in the brain.

Now, few experts talk about "too much"

or "too little" of a single chemical. Instead, they believe mood disorders are the result of a complex interplay among a variety of chemicals, induding neurotransmitters and hormones.

How much of this is influenced by heredity? The consensus is that genetic factors are at work, and in the past few years, laboratories all over the world have set out to track down the gene, or multiple genes

acting in concert, that predispose an individual to depression or manic depression.

This search has proceeded in fits and starts.

Discoveries are announced, only to be called into question when other scientists fail to duplicate the findings. Nonetheless, few researchers doubt that genetic studies will eventually yield results.

Even when they do, however, heredity will not tell the whole story. Depression and manic depression appear to be triggered by stress. And in some milder forms of mood disorder, experiencerather than genetics-may play the starring role. Traumatic events clearly are capable of precipitating changes in mood and behavior. In particular, scientists consistently find that being the child of a depressed parent may double or even triple the risk of depression in later life. Parents who suffer from depressive illnesses, these studies indicate, are more likely to be withdrawn, critical, inconsistent and irritable in child-rearing. Their own pain, expressed in this way, may thus become a burden for their offspring. According to a new report, some children in this difficult atmosphere develop intense, exaggerated feelings of guilt-states of mind that then pave the way for dt:;pression and other emotional problems.

Perhaps most devastating is the loss of a parent in childhood, either through death or abandonment. The evidence suggests, according to British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, that those who have lost a parent, especially the mother, are more likely to develop serious psychiatric problems and,

The warning signs of depression: • Persistent sad, anxious or empty mood.

• Feeling hopeless or worthless.

• Loss of interest or pleasure in activities, including sex.

• Sleep disturbances (early-morning waking or oversleeping).

• Decreased appetite, losing weight or eating more than usual.

• Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.

• Difficulty concentrating, remembering, making decisions.

• Irritability, excessive crying.

• Physical symptoms such as headaches, digestive disorders, nausea or chronic pain.

The warning signs of mania: • Increased energy and decreased need for sleep.

• Unrealistic or exaggerated beliefs in abilities.

• Inappropriate elation.

• Increased talking, moving and sexual activity.

• Racing thoughts.

• Impulsive behavior without regard to consequences.

more specifically, to become psychotically depressed and suicidal. Work by University of London researchers George Brown and Tirril Harris demonstrates that women who lose their mothers before the age of 17 are significantly more prone to depression as adults. The crucial factor, Brown and Harris say, is how the father, or parental surrogate, provides for the child: "Inadequate care ...roughly do~bled the risk of depression in adulthood."

Any true understanding of mood disorders must take into account this intricate interplay between psychology and ]:>iology.

Salvador Luria's fluid genius opened up the field of bacterial genetics, won him the National Book Award and made him a Nobel laureate. Yet there was one problem Luria could not solve on his own: Recurrent depressions, beginning in his early thirties, which disrupted his work and family life. Though they lasted only a few weeks at a time, these black moods turned the scientist into an irritable and hypercritical father, a man who brooded over imagined failures. Even his trip to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1969 was undermined with doubts. "I had a feeling of undeserved recognition," he recalls. For years, Luria sought relief from a variety of psychotherapists, to no avail. Then, in the early 1970s, he met a psychiatrist who prescribed adequate doses of antidepressants, medication he still takes, which freed him of his symptoms. "For decades, my life was plagued by an illness whose characteristics make it a source not only of pain but of guilt," Luria writes in his autobiography, A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube. "Depressives feel that it should be up to themselves

to overcome

the depression."

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NIMH psychiatrist Dr. Robert Post and others have done just that in the theory of "kindling," an attempt to explain the fact that episodes of mania and depression appear first in response to some external stress but later seem to acquire a momentum of their own. Repeated low-level stresses, Post suggests, might build up until they trigger a manic swing in mood, much as experimenters can "kindle" seizures in the brain by delivering low-level electrical shocks to cells deep in its inte'rior. Conversely, the brain may becomeprogressively "sensitized" to the effect of environmental stress. Eventually, bouts of illness. may occur without help from outside events.

Such analogies are approximations, hypothetical road maps for an as yet uncharted territory. Yet those who suffer in depression's depths or negotiate mania's precarious heights may count themselves fortunate. Emerging from their illness is not dependent upon perfect scientific knowledge, and tools for treatment are already in hand.

What will happen when he goes home?

Peter Kent's psychiatrist at the hospital asks him this. The nurses who monitor his mood, who cajole and counsel him, who keep track of how much he eats and whether he wakes up at night, ask him this as well. His chances of full recovery are good, but not assured. Perhaps 30 percent of severely depressed patients "get better on antidepressants but do not get completely well," says Dr. Jan Fawcett, chairman of psychiatry at Rush PresbyterianSt. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.

Leaving the hospital, Kent will rest for a while, filling his time with volunteer work before returning to his medical practice. In part, how the cardiologist fares will be determined by other people. His colleagues. His friends. Can they accept a doctor who has become a patient? Kent has his doubts. "They would look at it negatively," he says. "It's best if they dQn't find out." Yet it is possible, though far from certain, that Kent is mistaken and that he will find goodwill where he expects ostracism or disdain. It is possible that the time for secrecy is nearly over, that what Styron has called "Darkness Visible" is, at last, an illness like any other.

0 About the Authors: Erica E. Goode is a senior editor and Nancy Linnon and Sarah Burke are reporter-researchers with U.S. News & World Report published in Washington, D.C.

ENVIRONMENT

It Pays to be Clean

By using new basic raw materials, Du Pont, one of the world's largest manufacturers of chemicals and plastics, has created products that are more environment-friendly. In the process, the company has also become one of the largest and most profitable environmental-services firms. Seen above is Du Pont's New Jersey Chambers Works treatment plant that cleans ,-watershipped from chemical companies as far away as California.

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the n United States, pressure from the environmentalist lobby is "a knife with two edges," says Edgar Woolard Jr., chairman of E.!. du Pont de Nemours & Co. "One edge is vulnerability, and one edge is opportunity."

Du Pont's vulnerability is no secret. Nearly all of the company's $36,000 million in revenues-from chemicals, plastics, oil, coal and fibers-faces some threat from environmentalism, be it

legislation, lawsuits or cleanup bills. Already Du Pont has been forced to pour about $1,000 million into pollution control equipment. The company spends another $800 million a year to operate that equipment. At least $500 million more will be needed to clean up past environmental mistakes. Tack on $240 million in salaries and benefits for 3,000 environmental staffers, and $1,000 million more to begin making substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons, which

some people think deplete the ozone layer. Yes, the vulnerability is there for all to see.

Ou Pont's opportunity lies in the fact that the company has been forced to create, within itself, one of the world's biggest and most promising environmental services firms. It has also had to radically modify its products so they do less harm to the environment. As Bruce Karrh, Ou Pont's vice-president for safety, health and environmental affairs, puts it: "If we can control our own environmental problems, we'll be one of the most experienced companies in the world."

Indeed, Woolard predicts that,Ou Pont's new, environmentally sound products, coupled with environmental services, could account for as much as $8,000 million of the company's annual revenues by 1995.

Consider agricultural chemicals, which pose a major threat to America's groundwater.

Several years ago Ou Pont scientists developed a new generation of herbicides that break down faster and leave fewer residues than the old herbicides. The new herbi¡¡ cides can also be applied in small doses instead of by the bag.

Good for the environment, the product is also bottom-linefriendly: While the agricultural chemicals business in the United States is growing at about three percent a year, Ou Pont has tripled its sales of agricultural chemicals over the past five years, to $1,700 million.

Another good example is auto paints and coatings. This is a $1,200 million business for Ou Pont, and one that is threatened by stiffer U.S. federal air pollution standards. Paintmakers first tried cutting back on the solvents that cause air pollution, but that left cars with a mottled, bumpy finish resembling an orange peel. Now Ou Pont is racing to be the first to introduce commercially in the United States a promising new waterborne technology that uses water instead of solvents to carry the paint to the car surface.

"It's a matter of survival for our customers and for us," says Louis Savelli, director of Ou Pont's finishes division.

In plastics, Ou Pont faces even bigger problems, and Woolard sees even greater opportunities.

So far Portland in Oregon, St. Paul in Minnesota and at least ten other American communities have passed laws that discourage the use of plastic packaging for food and other products unless it can be recycled.

Ou Pont already recycles roughly 450,000 tons of its own polymers in internal waste-reduction programs. It collects another 90,000 pounds of industrial plastic waste from II sites in the United States and one in Holland. Recycled polymers provide half the feedstock for Ou Pont's proprietary Rynite, a tough but flexible engineered plastic used for automotive gear housings and other car parts.

Ou Pont's latest step into recycling plastics is a joint venture with Waste Management, Inc., America's largest garbage company. Waste Management will collect used plastic bottles through its curbside collection program and deliver them to recycling plants, which will then turn the bottles into Ou Pont products. Ou Pont says its polymer technology will allow recycled plastic to be turned into such premium products as heavy-duty garbage bins and snow fencing. "Ou Pont wouldn't be getting into it to make flower pots and park benches," says Frank Aronhalt, who runs the company's plastics waste programs. "Where you have upgraded the polymer and offer a fabricated part, there's more value added and more profit."

The first two recycling plants for the Ou Pont-Waste Manage-

mentjoint venture, in Philadelphia and Chicago, will start running in the near future. Ou Pont expects to have five such plants recycling a total of 90,000 tons of plastics a year by 1995.

Those 90,000 tons equal less than one percent of all U.S. plastics production. But the real significance is that this totally integrates the recycling process, from collection to. reprocessing, to resale to new customers.

"Ou Pont is making the decision to produce new products that did not utilize this material in the past," says Harold Gershowitz, Waste Management senior vice-president.

"That's net new demand." Woolard adds that new programs like this are effective calling cards that help Ou Pont form closer ties with customers such as Procter & Gam ble tha t want to use more recycled ma terial.

Ou Pont executives foresee another lucrative opportunity in environmental services--eleaning up hazardous waste sites, effluents and contaminated groundwater and consulting on regulatory issues and waste reduction programs. These services currently bring in around $100 million a year for Ou Pont. Woolard believes revenues will rise to $1 ,000 million a year by the turn of the century.

The New Clean Air Act

by JON SCHAFFER

On November 15, President George Bush signed the Clean Air Act amendments, thus ending a I 3-year legislative deadlock in attempts to toughen the Clean Air Act of 1970. The sweeping new legislation was passed by the House of Representatives on October 26 by a 401-25 vote and by the Senate on October 27 by an 89-10 margin. "This is an important milestone in preserving and protecting America's natural resources," President Bush said following the Senate vote.

The act will have substantial costs-some $25,000 millionto U.S. industry, according to estimates. It provides new control.measures to achieve air quality standards in polluted areas, creates programs to encourage the use of clean fuels in these areas, tightens automobile emission standards, establishes a program for reducing acid rain and requires a phase-out of the production and use of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer of the atmosphere.

It also establishes a program of training and benefits for workers who lose their jobs as a result of compliance with the Clean Air Act. Major features of the new act include: Air quality standards for polluted areas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 96 areas of the United States are currently far above the federal standard for ground-level ozone-a primary component of urban smog.

To ensure steady progress toward attainment of U.S. federal ozone standards, all moderately polluted or worse areas must reduce smog levels by 15 percent within six years. After that, severely polluted or worse areas would have to make further reductions of nine percent every three years until they meet federal standards.

Air quality standards for "mobile sources." Mobile sourcescars, trucks, buses and other vehicles-account for about half of total smog (ozone) pollution in America's urban areas and

Du Pont took its first tentative steps into environmental services back in the 1970s. The company was pulling out of the dye business, leaving its Chambers Works plant in Deepwater, New Jersey, with a new $45 million wastewater treatment plant and lots of excess Du Pont Chairman Edgar Woolard Jr. capacity.

To utilize the -safer herbicides, bigger profits. plant, Du Pont started seIling wastewater treatment services. Chambers, the largest wastewater treatment operation in the United States, services 1,000 outside customers from as far away as California. The customers bring, by truck or train, tankers of chemical waste to Chambers Works, where Du Pont uses carbon filtration and microorganisms to remove toxins. Into the system goes a mixture of water and dirty chemicals; out comes clean water.

some 90 percent of carbon monoxide polh,l1ion. Beginning in 1995, cleaner auto fuels must be made available in the nine cities with the worst ozone pollution. In some 25 cities with the worst smog problems, automakers must begin producing at least 150,000 cars annually that can run on alternative, nonpolluting fuels.

By 1994, 40 percent of all new cars sold in the United States would have to meet tougher standards for controlling auto tailpipe emissions-a 30 percent reduction in hydrocarbon emissions from current levels and a 60 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions. By 1998, all new cars would have to meet the new standards. Previous tailpipe standards had to be maintained for 80,000 kilometers or five years. That would be doubled to ten years or 160,000 kilometers under the new legislation.

Toxic air pollutants. Chemical plants are the largest source of industrial emissions of toxic air pollutants, responsible for about 35 percent of total emissions. Other major sources are paper, plastics, rubber, auto and primary metals industries. The 1970 Clean Air Act requires EPA to list air pollutants that cause or contribute to death or serious illness and to establish emission standards for these pollutants.

The new law establishes a statutory list of 189 such chemicals and requires EPA to set standards for all categories of major sources-those that emit more than ten tons per year of any single listed pollutant, or more than 25 tons per year of any combination of these pollutants. Over the next ten years, polluting plants must use the best technology available to reduce emissions of the major toxic chemicals by 90 percent from 1987 levels.

Acid rain. Two chemicals, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, are the major causes of air pollution known as "acid rain."

About 50 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions in the United States come from large, coal-fired power plants in nine midwestern states; the rest is produced by other utility plants and industrial facilities. Nitrogen oxide comes from power plants, industrial sources, cars, trucks and buses. Currently, there are no req uirements limiting emissions that result in acid rain.

Woolard recently approved a $300 million expansion of the Chambers Works operations. This will add a 35,000-ton rotary kiln incinerator, which will burn various hazardous waste materials safely. The kiln's advanced emission control equipment will remove any hazardous material from the gases left. The new incinerator's capacity is twice the size required to meet Du Pont's own needs. There is only one other advanced rotary kiln incinerator on the East Coast, and it charges between $200 and $1,200 to burn a ton of toxic liquids.

"We're running an experiment here," says Woolard of the Chambers Works activities. "Ifit works well, I expect we will have regional facilities across the country.

"You see it over and over," adds Woolard. "Smart technical people can find ways to improve products, cut waste and achieve technical advantages at a lower cost than anyone would predict." And the companies that employ and encourage these people will reap not only societal glory but material rewards as well.

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The new legislation seeks to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by ten million tons per year and nitrogen oxide by over two million tons annually by the year 2000. It would reduce these emissions in two phases. In phase one, III utility power-plant units that currently emit the highest levels of sulfur dioxide would have to reduce such emissions by 1995 to a prescribed level per unit of power generated. Plants that buy scrubbing devices to comply with the requirements have until 1997 to meet the new standards.

In phase two, large utility power plants would be required to further reduce their emission levels by the year 2000, although the deadline would be extended until 2004 for plants that use new clean-coal technologies. The act places an upper limit on the total amount of sulfur dioxide emissions that can be emitted from utilities after the year 2000. The utilities must also cut nitrogen oxide emissions by two million tons annually-about 25 percent-beginning in 1995.

Stratospheric ozone protection. The agreement would phase out U.S. production and use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals that deplete the ozone layer. By the year 2000, production of the five most destructive types of CFCs, the three most destructive halons and carbon tetrachloride must cease.

Production of methyl chloroform will also have to end by 2002.

The measure permits limited production until 2004 of methyl chloroform for essential uses, if no safe and effective substitute is available. It also permits limited output of any of the other listed chemicals until 2009, for export to developing countries that are parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol (which established an international program to reduce by half the release of ozonedepleting chemicals by 1998).

For another class of less dangerous chemicals, currently 33 specified CFCs, production levels would be frozen in 2015 and eliminated by 2030. A limited extension is provided for those CFCs used in medical devices.

0 About the Author: Jon Schaffer is a staff IVriter lVith the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C.

Frederic Church's fascination with Mideast architecture is evident throughout DIana.

Intricate stonework surrounds the window and balcony (left) of one of the bedrooms.

Persian-inspired stencils, designed by Church, decorate arches in another room (far left).

etter than any other American artist, Frederic Edwin Church portrayed the 19th century's transcendental view of nature. When the Smithsonian Institution's National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., unveiled its mammoth retrospective of Church's work last year, its galleries were filled with the luminous skies and mystical sunsets that so perfectly embodied the belief that man, nature and the universe are all part of a seamless cosmos tapestry. Impossible to include in that otherwise comprehensive exhibit, however, was one of Church's greatest works: alana, the masterpiece he designed and built as his home.

The Moorish mansion-replete with towers, balconies, arched windows and a colonnade-nestles high above the Hudson River 160 kilometers north of New York City and commands views stretching east to the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and west to the magnificent Catskill Mountains. As the Hudson Valley has filled with shopping malls and highways, alana's 140 hectares of protected land still offer visitors a chance to experience the majesty that inspired the painters now known as the Hudson River school.

"Olana is a vast stage set," says site manager James Ryan, who directs the continuing restoration of the house and grounds for New York State. "Church sited his house and the drives leading up to it to reveal a series of carefully composed landscape pictures." Indeed, standing on the piazza outside his studio on a clear autumn afternoon as shafts of sunlight pierce storm clouds above the Catskills is like viewing a vast Church painting. If the sunsets and details of atmosphere on his canvases seem too sublime to be true, from this vantage point it is clear that Church often simply painted what he saw out his front door.

Perfecting alan a and its landscape of woods, fields, water and sweeping meadows occupied Church for much of his adult life.

"Olana is Church's mind illustrated," Ryan says. The design included three parts: The house, its landscaped grounds, and the vistas from house and grounds. Although he was aided by architect Calvert Vaux, Church designed virtually all the details. He mixed colors on his palette to make sure they would look right when the Hudson Valley light struck them; he designed stencils for the intricate Persian-inspired decoration applied to cornices, doors and woodwork; he supervised stonemasons and worried about the cost of bricks; lie had a swamp drained to create a

B

About the Author: Frank Donegan is a contributing editor to Americana magazine.

large lake and laid out miles of carriage roads.

Then he planted thousands of chestnuts, oaks, maples, birches and hemlocks to frame those vistas and to give his working farm the appearance of a pastoral landscape.

He furnished the house with an astonishing array of objects, most of which are still in place. They included furniture he designed himself, stuffed birds and mounted butterflies from South America, Mexican religious statues, Arabic armor, Shaker rockers, tables and chairs from Kashmir, family heirlooms, a sombrero collection, Turkish rugs, fragments of the Parthenon, Persian and Syrian metalware, and a large gilded Buddha. There were dozens of old-master paintings (sometimes overpainted and "improved" by Church), a life-size marble statue by Church's friend Albany sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, and numberless sketches and paintings by Church and his contemporaries. Perhaps the most famous Church painting at Olana is El Khasne, a glimpse of the ancient ruins at Jordan's Petra through a rocky cleft. Church hung the canvas over his sitting-room fireplace and, according to Ryan, he based the room's color scheme on the painting's hues.

Ryan believes that Church viewed the house as "a distillation of civilization brought to a new Eden-his farm in the Hudson Valley." Recent research by alana's scholar in residence, Gerald Carr, suggests that the name derives from olane-a word that refers to a fortress/treasure house in ancient Persia.

Ryan explains that most of the exotic objects at alan a are no better than tourist quality, suggesting that Church viewed his home not as a treasure house of objects but as a fortress to protect his family and the world culture to which they belonged.

Born in 1826, Church came to the Hudson Valley as the teenaged art student of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River school of painting, who lived directly across the river from where Olana stands today. "Church came from a long line of New England merchants and divines, so his father wasn't particularly pleased that his son wanted to be an artist," Ryan says. "Artists had no social status in those days. They were considered simply mechanics." (In fact, Church, one of the first celebrity-artists in America, became as prosperous as a merchapt prince.) Cole recognized in his young pupil'<one of the best eyes for drawing in the world." Church's father eventually bowed to the inevitable and contributed thousands of dollars toward building Olana ..

Church stayed with Cole from 1844to 1846.

In May 1845, the young artist crossed the river

and sketched it with the Catskills receding in the distance-later his favorite view from Olana. When Church left to seek his fortune in New York, "he was not shy about promoting himself," Ryan says. "He wrote reviews of his own paintings and advertised himself in the newspapers." His panoramic view of Niagara Falls made his reputation when it was exhibited in the late l850s. He developed the revolutionary technique of limiting foreground detail to draw the viewer's eye into the scenea technique he also used when he planned scenic drives around the grounds at Olana.

"He built all his roads at the edges of hills and cliffs," Ryan says. "There is no foreground.

You look out immediately into the view that he wants you to see."

The artist's fame was assured when he exhibited his famous Heart of the Andes in 1859. At the showing, he was captivated by a dark-haired woman from Ohio named Isabel Carnes. In January 1860 the Boston Transcript reported, "Church has been successfully occupied with another Heart than that of the Andes." Given his elevated status-his large canvases commanded several thousand dollars-and the prospect of marriage (which occurred in 1860), Church decided to build himself a country home. In March 1860 he bought a 50-hectare farm that included the slope where he had sketched in 1845. He built a small board-and-batten home that he named Cosy Cottage; it remains on the Olana property along with several of his farm buildings.

In 1867Church bought additional property that included the site ofOlana. He soon began planning to replace his wooden cottage with something more grandiose. The well-known architect Richard Morris Hunt produced drawings for a home that resembled a French chateau. Before accepting them, however, Church took a tour of the Middle East, where he acquired a passion for Islamic architecture.

When he returned he apparently fired Hunt and hired Calvert Vaux, who designed New York's Central Park. Ryan says that Vaux probably provided the technical. expertise while Church did the designing. More than 300 design sketches in Church's hand survive.

Construction began in July 1870. Church once told a friend, "Sometimes the desire to build attacks a man like a fever." His own approach to the job was obsessive if not feverish. He spent his days overseeing workers and nights creating design details, relying on sketches he had made in Beirut and Damascus and on books about Persian architecture. He wrote to a friend, artist John Ferguson Weir: "A Feudal Castle which I am building-under

Heartof the Andes, exhibited in 1859,confirmed Frederic Church's reputation as an outstanding landscape painter. Church first came to New York's Hudson Valley as a teenaged student of Thomas Cole,founder of the Hudson River school of painting. As his fame-and wealth-increased, Church started buying property in the valley and began construction of Olana in 1870.

the modest name of a dwelling houseabsorbs all my time... .! am obliged to imagine Persian architecture-then embody it on paper and explain it to a lot of mechanics whose ideal of architecture is wrapped up in felicitous recollections of a successful brick school house, meeting house, or jail." No detail was too small for his attention. He felt, for example, that ancient Romans had made the best stairs. While in Rome, he took measurements and adapted them for Olana's main staircase, the heart of the house.

By the following summer the walls, composedmainly of rock blasted from the hillside, had reached full height, but the house still lacked a roof. Simply to finish the downstairs woodwork and painted ,decoration took another four years. The final bill was about $65,000. Throughout the construction, Church continued his enormously successful painting career. Three of the four children who survived to adulthood were born during the planning and building of Olana (two children had died of diphtheria in 1865). And he continued to oversee his farm, although he had hired Thomas Cole's son Theodore as his manager. "A typical thrifty Victorian, Church insisted that the farm pay for itself," Ryan explains. He raised hay, oats, rye and corn, and grew apples, cherries, grapes, peaches, plums, pears and strawberries for market. He also continued to shape the grounds into the pastoral landscape he loved. The lake that visitors pass on the way to the house was created from a drained swamp while the house was being built.

Then in 1888, Church decided he needed

more room and began building a large studio wing with an observation tower for sketching and a long porch overlooking the valley. He also added parquet floors and new fireplace fronts to the original house. By the time the studio wing was completed (another three years and $30,000 later), the peak of Church's fame had passed. Younger artists embraced the plein-air style of the French Barbizon school and the impressionists, painting outdoors in a looser, quicker manner. Nevertheless, Church's impressive studio-with its print chest filled with sketches and photos, comfortable couches, statues and pre-Columbian artifacts collected on his travels---eertainly told visitors that he was still a painter to be reckoned with.

Church wrote a friend that he also expected the new studio to be "a very nice apartment for friends on occasion." Because the artist was known for his hospitality, space for visitors was always at a premium. The upstairs contains only two bedrooms and a nursery, which housed his children even as they grew to adulthood. Visiting relatives and friends often had to be sent down to Cosy Cottage. Increasingly troubled by rheumatism, Church continued to paint at Olana until he died on April 7, 1900. His wife had died a year earlier.

Olana today is especially valuable as a historic house because it has remained virtually undisturbed. When he finished the studio wing, Church had interior photographs of the whole house taken, enabling curators to place even the smallest vase or candlestick where it was when Church lived there. Ironically, the survival of the objects and Olana's intricately

painted interiors is owed to Sally Good Church, whose marriage to their youngest son, Louis, was postponed until both parents had died because they disliked her. Louis became farm manager in his father's old age and inherited the property. His wife created a virtual shrine to the artist despite the cold shoulder he had given her, allowing nothing to be changed until her death in 1964. She refused to replace even such anachronisms as the old sheet-copper sink in the kitchen. "That way," Ryan says, "careless servants dented the soft copper instead of cracking the china when they did the dishes. China and upholstery were two of the most expensive items in a home during the 19th century."

The second major figure in preserving Olana was art historian David Huntington.

Ryan explains, "He wanted to do his PhD on the effect of the American landscape on artists. When his adviser suggested that he check out Frederic Church and Olana, he had to look Church up in the encyclopedia because in the 1950s nobody cared about the Hudson River school." Becoming fascinated with Church, Huntington eventually produced the seminal work about the artist: The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era. "David [Huntington] would come to

visit Sally Church, who by that time was a bit foggy and had no idea who he was," Ryan says. "But she'd have him to tea and take him out in the old Packard for drives around the estate. After she bade him goodbye at the front door, he'd go around back, and the servants would let him into the attic to do his research among the family papers."

After her death, the new heirs prepared to auction off the land, the house and its contents. "Everything was all tagged and ready to go," says Ryan. In the nick of time, Huntington formed a group to buy the estate and preserve it. The appraised value of the house and land, including the many Church paintings, was $470,000about the price of a modest Church painting today. A single great work, like EI Khasne over the fireplace, is worth millions. When the rescue committee was unable to raise enough money, New York State bought it.

"That's one of the best bargains the state ever made," Ryan says.

Today Ryan and the Olana staff work tirelessly to return the property to its appearance in 1891, when Church declared his architectural masterpiece complete. Scaffolding seems a permanent fixture as balustrades and balconies are restored, the capitals of the piazza repolychromed, and tower roofs repaired. Striped awnings of taupe and reddish

Framed by the arches of Olana 's bell tower, the spectacular Hudson Valley view of river, mountains, sky and landscape is reminiscent of Church's majestic canvases. He sited the house and the drives leading up to it in a way that progressively reveals a series of carefully composed landscape pictures.

brown, replicas of those used in the 19th century, again shade the windows ofthe south facade each summer. Inside, the walls of the sitting room have been replastered, and stenciling has been restored after extensive water damage from a leaky roof.

One of the most exacting restoration projects involved a small amber window consisting of two panes of glass with a paper stencil between, which Church designed to recall the lattice shutters of the Mideast.

Sponsored by the Friends of Olana, a private nonprofit organization founded in 1971, Pamela Dalton, a local artisan, was commissioned to re-create the intricate paper stencil, which had largely disappeared. Trained in the Danish art of paper cutting known as scherenschnitte, she painstakingly created a

new pattern from a tiny fragment of the original paper and the faint tracings left on the window. After long weeks of work, she was able to make a master pattern; she then cut a new stencil on acid-free paper, even incorporating the intentional imperfections that were found in the original. Today when sunlight shines through it, the window sends its intricate patterns across the gallery just as it did in Church's time.

Despite such efforts, much remains to be done. The exterior restoration of the house will probably not be completed for some years because of budget constraints.

The large cornices under the roof, for example, still lack their original gilding and elaborate stenciling. And the grounds are a long way from being returned to the mix of

ornamental park and working farm that Church designed. Most troubling of all to Ryan and his curators are incursions into Olana's "viewshed." As the Hudson Valley develops and loses its rural character, the views from Olana resemble those that Church saw less and less. Today, for instance, radio towers and cement plants intrude into the south view of the river. Although a series of historic districts and scenic easements protect some areas, the creeping modernization of the landsc:lpe is a continuing threat to Olana's unique character. Without the landscape Church loved, Olana would be just another historic house. For the moment, however, it remains a gem-like Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the consuming passion of a great mind. A visit offers a rare chance to experience the interaction between American art and the American landscape in the 19th century. The best museum in the world would have trouble matching that.

0

Good-Bye Mr.B

by VIKRAM CHANDRA "SAHAJ"

"...what Barthelme wanted for each of his students was what only the most selfless of teachers can want: That the student find a voice and a victory that was truly his own," recalls the author in this tribute to the American writer who died last year.

T

he stories about Donald Barthelme started the moment I told people that I was going to Houston, Texas, to join the graduate writing program at the University of Houston.

He was, of course, an almost iconic figure in postmodern American culture, and his novels and stories-the latter often published in The New Yorker-had influenced a whole generation of writers, who treasured his wit, his whimsy, and his hilarious and completelyunpredictable juxtapositions of language and situation. In the world of writing programs, Barthelme had the reputation of being a good but fierce teacher. There were a lot of workshop stories. There was the story about the writer who featured an annoying infant as a major character. Swinging a booted foot at a smallimaginary object, Barthelme commanded: "Boot the baby."

There was the story about the writer who began reading his story aloud, only to be interrupted succinctly with: "Stop. Burn it."

I heard these stories in Baltimore, Maryland. By the time I walked into my first workshop with Barthelme, in September 1987,I had heard half a dozen more. My first impression of him was that of an Old Testament patriarch, or maybe an 18th-century whaling captain. He leaned back in his chair at the head of the table, fingering his white beard, and had the annoying habit of calling on people without warning. "What did you think of the story?" This, three minutes after you had heard the tight-voiced author read the thing; add to this the sweaty tension of 16 wouldbe writers who were fully aware that they were in the presence of a Great Literary Figure and One Hell of a Good Connection, and what you got was a circus pack of nervous poodles performing for an unpredictable and all-important audience of one.

So there was a lot of writing for Donald Barthelme. Many of the stories that came into class seemed to strain to achieve that precise balance of irony and sadness, all that characteristic brilliant sprightliness that gleamed from the pages of Come Back, Dr. Caligari and The Dead Father. Not surprisingly, most of these stories fell flat on their face: Some were conceited, others cute and almost all boring. No-plot postmodernism is a hard thing to do well; if you were going to try to be Barthelme, in the presence of Barthelme, your words had to get up and fly, because the man didn't let cripples by. He was far from sporting, and sometimes it

"What I think I learnt [from Barthelme) was how to see a word in a sentence, and that sentence in a chapter, and all of it together, and how nothing must be superfluous."

seemed that the floor was littered with small carcasses.

"Are we going to let Mr. Chandra get away with this word?"

Yes, my day came too. For the past year, I had been working on what might be politely described as an epic novel: A melodrama concerned with India and with the colonial 19th-century British in India and the imperial 20th-century Americans in America, narrated mostly by an Indian monkey in the presence of various Indian gods. I had been dreading bringing a section into the rarefied, minimalist atmosphere of the workshop. But I did have to bring my work to class, and as I half-expected, Barthelme didn't like it. The class, following his lead, liked it even less. It was too long, too florid, had too many characters, too much happenedthere was just too much, as it were, language.

So that evening, after a poetry reading at a bookstore, I drank a beer in the parking lot, nursing myself. I trotted out all my usual defenses: The others in the workshop didn't understand what I was trying to do, they were stuck in their brainless minimalist nonsense, gutless irony-addicts that they were, damn all workshops and the stupid idea of writing programs anyway. Then a figure loomed-and he did exactly that-out of the darkness. It was Barthelme, and he leaned on the hood of the car I was sitting on.

"I hope we weren't too hard on you this afternoon."

"No."

"I just want you to work harder."

He was quiet then, and then quiet some more. I tried to think of something to say, and the silence grew and bloomed and ripened, and finally he nodded and walked away. I sat there and tried to figure out how I should react; what he had said was so obviously supposed to be provocative that it seemed stupid to be provoked. I was working hard, damn it; what the hell was he talking about?

Over the next few months, I listened in the workshop, and checked Sixty Stories out of the library and studied Barthelme's technique. Meanwhile, I heard more tales: How Barthelme had helped student writers-Padgett Powell, Olive Hershey, Glenn Blake and many others-bring their work to completion and publication; how Barthelme had leased a copying machine and bought the paper with his own money so that writers trying to survive on a teaching assistant's wages wouldn't have to pay for making copies of stories for workshops; about how he had used his own money to set up an emergency loan fund for writing students.

I was impressed: Here was a writing teacher who seemed to understand the simple truth that what writers need above all to write is money, and was willing to put his out. It seemed he really did want us to write.

So I wrote, and brought another section of the novel into the workshop. He still didn't like it, and I gave up. I mean I gave up trying to please him; this wasn't out of integrity or courage or anything nice like that. It was because I had seen what he seemed to like, and I had read his own writing, and I knew I couldn't write like that. He told a whole story in three pages, and it took me 200 just to get my protagonist born. I was from another place, and I was interested in different things, and that was that.

So I gave up, and after this burden of caring was lifted from me I was really able 10 listen to him in the workshop. What I think I

learnt was how to see a word in a sentence, and that sentence in a chapter, and all of it together, and how nothing must be superfluous-in short, how to pay attention, how to be careful, how to do this so often and so well that you didn't have to think about it. I also noticed that Barthelme's tastes were catholic and that he hardly encouraged Barthelme-imitation and eager-plungingdown-various-literary-dead-ends. There was some very good writing in the workshops, and those stories he nurtured impartially and carefully, with much close attention, encouragement and good humor, whatever their native terrain.

In the autumn of 1988, when I took my last workshop with him, he was recovering from surgery for throat cancer, and his voice .caught sometimes, but he seemed relaxed, content, jovial, almost paternal. We had that happy and rare thing-a really good workshop. Everyone laughed a lot, the criticism was incisive but not murderous, the work was good.

Then it was my turn again, and I distributed a chapter and resigned myself to the usual long afternoon of dodging and weaving. Barthelme came in, sat at the head of the table, and for some reason I remember the sound that his cowboy boots made on the floor. He picked up the stack of pages in front of him and said, "After reading this last chapter ofVikram's, it has become clear to me that this is going to be a major novel, and so I think it deserves a round of applause." And then he started clapping, and they all did, and I was sitting there feeling mostly embarrassment, then, later, a sort of buzzing numbness. I don't think I was able to feel happiness until the next day.

For an unpublished author, writing a long novel is like a long trek across a desert: You do it in small bursts day after day, month after month, year into year. During these times, a small morsel of praise, carefully hoarded, can give you the strength to keep on walking. I 90n't know if my work is going to be major, or even a novel, but in large part because of what Barthelme gave me, I know I will finish it. Perhaps something will become of it, bec:mse Barthelme'didn't stop with money and praise. As he had done for many other students, he started sending my work out to people he knew in New York. A few months later, in the spring of 1989, I got a call from a Big Agent. Barthelme was in Rome on a fellowship, and so I called to tell him. "That's what I thought would happen," he said. "Just finish the damn book." That summer, in July 1989, he died of cancer. .

What happens between a teacher and a student is strange and sometimes combative and full of contradictions. In the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna asks his guru, Orona, what he can give to pay for what he has been taught.

Orona replies, "Promise me one thing: If you ever come against me, you will fight to win." I think what Barthelme wanted for each of his students was what only the most selfless of teachers can want: That the student find a voice and a victory that was truly his own. Barthelme was the most generous of teachers, and this is how I remember him.

D About the Author: Vikram Chandra, whose pen name is Sahaj, is working on his first novel, "Red Earth and Pouring Rain."

Games Are the Enemies of Beaut~Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said A Short Story by Donald Barthelme I was playing Password, Twister, Breakthru, Bonanza, Stratego, Squander, and Gambit. And Quinto, Phlounder, Broker, Tactics, and Stocks & Bonds. All at once. On the floor. It was my move. When I play alone, it is always my move. That is reasonable. I kneel first on one side of the board, then the other. I think a bit, I examine my move to make sure it is the correct move.

I congratulate myself. Then I hobble to the next board, on my knees.

The floor of my study is covered with game boards, and there are boards in the bedroom, the kitchen, the bath. Conestoga, the Game of the Oregon Trail. Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Midway, DDay, V-Boat, Bismarck, and Waterloo. Le Mans. Management, Verdict, and Dispatcher. Merger, the Game of Stock Manipulation in the Automobile Industry. Qubic, the 3-D Tic Tac Toe Game. My move. It is my move when I depart for the office in the morning and my move when I return at night. I move before, during, and after dinner, hobbling from board to board. It is my move when I go to bed and my move when I awake.

I extended an arm in its yellow vinyl smoking jacket. I moved.

Then I hobbled around to the other side of the board to evaluate the move from the point of view of my opponent. A foolish move.

Now I was in a position to destroy myself. Should I destroy myself?

Then the bell rang. It was Amanda. She was in tears.

"Amanda," I said. "What is it?" She was wearing a tent dress, twoply brown canvas with a tent-peg trim. Her eyes were full of sparklers and tears.

"Oh, Hector," she said. "You are the only one who can help me.

Something awful-" "Is it the same old thing?"

The Black Image "Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 17101940," a recent exhibition, illustrates how artists in the United States have depicted black people for more than two centuries-from slavery to full citizenship.

"No," she said. "It is a new thing. It is the wOI\stthing you can imagine."

"Come," I said. "Stay with me. Take this buffalo robe and wrap it around your tent dress. And have a shot of this apricot brandy, and sit down here in this comfortable chair in front of the thermostat. " "I was playing Afrika Korps," she said. "You know Afrika Korps. A re-creation of the famed exploits of Field Marshal Rommel. You command the actual units and introduce the original divisions, brigades, and regiments at the actual time of their arrival, according to the actual historical situation."

"I know. One is given an opportunity to display one's generalship, strategic grasp, and tactical sense."

"Right," Amanda said, knocking back a bit of the brandy.

"Well, when I came home this evening-Hector, I can't describe it!

An entire Army Group had mixed itself up with the pieces from my Water Polo game. And the battleships from Midway have drifted into the Verdict box, and all the stock shares from Merger, the Game of Stock Manipulation in the Automobile Industry, are scrambled up with the counters from Depression, and-Hector, why am I playing all these games? Card games, word games, board games, educational games, and games people play? What is it, Hector? Is there something strange about me? Am I some kind of a creepy nut freak? I seem to spend all my time-" I took her hand with its four-inch orange, yellow, and blue papier-mache Fish & Game Commission ring.

"Amanda," I said. "You are not alone. Everyone is playing these games. Everyone I know." I took her to the window and opened it. We stuck our heads out into the papier-mache night.

"Listen, Amanda."

She listened. "What is that sort of funny thrimp-thrimp sound?

Men versus Women

Editors at Work

If God created man first, He or She apparently took advantage of hindsight when it came to woman. Recent research in a dozen disciplines-from neurology to sociology-indicates that women are in many ways the stronger sex.

Taunton Press is built on the typical American do-it-yourself trait. Its magazines-which teach Americans how to make furniture, build boats, tend gardens, sew clothes-are edited by woodworkers, carpenters, boat owners, gardeners or seamstresses.

21st-Century Pyramid Aircraft designer Burt Rutan has built the ultimate energy-efficient house. Situated in the Mojave Desert in California, the pyramidshaped structure uses such deyices as waterwheels, humidifying pools and thermal mass to k~ep heating or cooling costs at a minimum in extreme desert temperatures.

Thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp thrimp?"

"That is the sound made by the nation's terrific and gigantic electronic computers pulsing," I said. "Of which there are now perhaps thirty-five thousand in use, from sea to shining sea. It is estimated that there will be eighty-five thousand of them in use by 1975. And a substantial portion of these computers are playing games, Amanda, even as you and I. The businessmen are playing Daddy Warbucks games, the Lost Horse game for example, in order to establish patterns that will enable them to mangle the competition. The military men are playing war games, Escalation for example, in order to test the efficacy of alternate responses to the provocations of the enemy. And to make new enemies, for all I know. The scientists are playing scientific games, and some people are playing plain old checkers. And Marshall McLuhan says that games are dramatic modes of our psychological lives, providing release for particular tensions in social groups. And Huizinga says that the play element in culture serves a civilizing function, combining an agonistic principle of competitiveness with a ludic principle, or pure play. And Shub in his Game Theory and Related Approaches to Social Behavior .... "

"Yes," Amanda said, "but what about me? My head is full of Diplomacy, and my heart is full of Careers. And my hands are full of Hoodwink, and my bank account is full of Monopoly money.

I'm exhausted, Hector. I'm tired of playing games. I want-" "I know," I said. "Relax, Amanda. We can lick this thing. Just trust me."

"What do you propose?" she asked, her brilliant aqua eyes full of fondness and eye shadow. "What?"

"New games," I said. "New games, Amanda, to set the turkey of mental excitement flying through the thin air of intellectual irresponsi bility."

"New games?" I noticed that the blood had run out of her face.

But I could not see where it had gone. "You mean people can make up their own games? Isn't that ...hubris?"

"Have another brandy," I said. "Have another brandy and we will play Contretemps, the Game of Social Embarrassment. And Cofferdam, and Double Boiler, and Hubris too, if you like. Listen to the names of these glorious new gamesLeftwards, Gearbox, Dentist's Appointment, and Stroke. We

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will invent them together,.~ear friend."

"How is this game played? Contretemps or whatever it is?"

"I'm glad you asked me that question," I said, "because I know the answer. One starts with a situation, a social situation. One with a potential for embarrassment. One in which one is a bit out of one's depth, so to say. Then the potential is actualized. Imagine for instance that you are attending a lavish reception at the Court of St. James's. You have just converted your holdings in sterling, which were vast, into Siamese baht. In consequence, the Queen's allowance has been cut. You notice that she is wearing last year's tiara. You step up to be presented. You notice that she is staring at you with a funny expression on her face."

"Not bad," Amanda said. "Give me another one."

"Okay. A more elaborate one. You are attending a lavish reception at the Court of St. James's. Present also is Lord Snowdon, husband of Princess Margaret and famous photographer. The editor of the Sunday Times color-that should be colour-magazine is there too. Lord Snowdon has been on assignment for the magazine. He is doing a picture story on-" "The Stones."

"Very good. He is doing a picture story on the Stones. Lord Snowdon is showing his prints to the editor. You are looking over their shoulders. As it happens, you too have recently taken some colour shots of the Stones. With your old box camera."

"Your old box camera that was your great-grand mother's that you found in an old trunk in the attic and that is held together with masking tape," Amanda said.

"Superb. Whereas Lord Snowdon has been shooting with a pair of matched Hasselblads with four-thousand-dollar lenses. You regard Lord Snowdon's pictures over the editor's shoulder. Then you reach into your reticule and withdraw your own pictures.

'These are terrible,' you say, 'but I thought you might just....' The editor gazes intently at your photographs. He drops Lord Snowdon's photographs on the floor. 'By God,' the editor says.

'You mean you ...with your great-grandmother's camera held together with masking tape ....' Lord Snowdon is staring at you with a funny expression on his face."

"Quelle horreurl" Amanda murmured.

"That is Contretemps," I said. "The situations tend to get more

in India.

by their institution.)

SP-80

and more elaborate and horrible. A particularly good game for self-punishment, if that is what you crave. The situation in which youare in the studio of a famous artist, one who paints pitiful little girlswith big eyes, and your own child, come to have her portrait done, refuses to open her eyes at all-that one is rather stimulating, I must say. And there are others. You are on the operating table. You are draped with a white sheet. You have borrowed a kidney from a friend. Now it is time to return it. The doctor-" "More games," Amanda said. "More games and more brandy."

"We could play Broadway Flop," I said. "The Game of Ill-Conceived Musical Comedy. One attempts to construct the particular work least likely to get out of New Haven alive.

A Lionel Bart musical based on The Waste Land, for example.

Titled Wasteland! At the finale, Albert and Lil decide to leaveRats' Alley and make a new start in America. Or we could play Bag, the History of Jazz Game. The object of the game is to bringjazz up the river from New Orleans. Conflict provided by evil commercial-music interests who want to stop the spread of the New Thing. The evil commercial-music interests represented on the board by-" "Squares," Amanda said triumphantly, and I gathered her into my arms. Then we played Famous Last Words, the Game of Deathbed Utterances, locked in a lovers' embrace on the fire ~scape.People down below stood agape, hanging upon the tense exchange between us.

"It is enough," I said.

"Immanuel Kant," she said.

"If there is no question, there is no answer."

"Gertrude Stein."

"This is a fickle and faithless generation."

"Captain Kidd."

"Bertie. "

"Queen Victoria."

"I do not understand what I have to do."

"Leo Tolstoy."

"Hang on to the Matchless; it will make millions again."

"I can't remember, I can't remember!"

"Tabor the Silver King," I said. "Didn't you see The Ballad of Baby Doe?"

"These games are marvelous," Amanda said. "I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial.

These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as-" "Yes," I said. Then we played: Crise du Cinema, in which one improves existing films by supplying new casting and variant endings (Doris Day for Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls; after EI Sordo's band is wiped out, Maria persuades Robert Jordan to settle with her in a nice suburb of Barcelona).

Zen Zen (pointless answers are given to simple questions.

"Where is the Administration Building?" "Ha, ha. Your hat is falling off." Blows are exchanged).

Break the Ball (an accumulation of balls from ba11gamesfootba11s, baseballs, basketballs, tennis balls, cricket balls-is demolished, using a twelve-pound sledge).

"What comes after Break the Ball?" Amanda asked.

"After the Ball Is Over. A fine game played with an empty punch bowl and four hundred overcoats. You attempt to find your overcoat in the pile of overcoats. You are forbidden to use your hands, feet, or teeth. Or anybody else's hands, feet, or teeth."

"Games are the enemies of beauty, truth, and sleep," Amanda said. The brandy was almost gone.

"There remains one more game."

"What is it?"

"Ennui," I said. "The easiest of all. No rules, no boards, no equipment. " "What is Ennui?" Amanda asked, setting it up for me.

"Ennui is the absence of games," I said, "the modern world at its most vulnerable." But she had folded her tent dress and silently stolen away.

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A Progress Report

A U.S. State Department report points to significant developments in international narcotics control, particularly a decline in cocaine prices for producers and an increase in costs for users. It attributes the changes to the Andean Strategy of providing economic, law enforcement and military aid to cocaine-producing countries in Latin America. It says "the coming months will be critical"

in the campaign to dismantle trafficking networks and reduce cocaine supply.

According to the report, the international heroin program, however, is not as encouraging: "Overproduction of opium has kept prices down in the United States and Europe, and the supply of heroin is abundant worldwide." The report also notes "substantial progress in bilateral and multilateral initiatives to curb

narcotics-related money laundering," particularly between the United States and countries with major financial centers.

These findings were published in the mid-year update of the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report issued on August 21,1990.

Here are excerpts from the report's executive summary and its section on money laundering:

Executive summary_ There have been a number of significant developments in international narcotics control since March 1990 that offer some reasons for optimism, particularly in the war against cocaine. The price of coca leaf has substantially decreased at the [source of origin], while the price of cocaine has increased in some major U.S. markets, with purity levels down as well. With new governments in two of the Andean nations-Colombia and Peru-the coming months will be critical if the hemispheric commitment to narcotics is to be sustained and tangible progress made in dismantling trafficking networks and reducing cocaine supply.

The Andean Strategy, which provides additional economic, law-enforcement and military assistance to Colombia, Bolivia and Peru during the next five years, is being translated from concept into reality. The first year of that program has focused on developing the essential elements of security needed to sustain local will. The next phase of our effort continues this support but concentrates far more effort on performance in economic development. Specific agreements are still being worked out with these governments. The outgoing govern-

ment of Peru declined to sign the bilateral agreement for $35 million in U.S. military support to assist the Peruvian government's counter,narcotics efforts. [The new government headed by] President Fujimori has [however] indicated a commitment to continuing the counter-narcotics effort, as well as a willingness to conclude agreements on military assistance as .part of a comprehensive approach agreed to by the four nations at the Cartagena Summit.

There are indications that the year-long campaign of continuing pressure against Colombian traffickers, coupled with interdiction operations in Bolivia and Peru, has helped to depress, until recently, the price of coca. This price drop has resulted in a reinvigorated coca eradication program in Bolivia. Bolivia has fulfilled its eradication target of 5,000 hectares; high participation in the program was fueled by a six-month slide in coca leaf prices. Leaf prices have also dropped in Peru, but fewer legitimate alternatives are available to coca farmers in the Upper Huallaga Valley, complicating efforts to persuade farmers to abandon coca [as a cash crop]. There is also evidence that wholesale cocaine prices have increased in a number of U.S. cities. Given

recent decreases in reported cocaine use in the United States and reported reductions in emergency room incidents involving cocaine, developments in the Andes provide reasons for encouragement.

The greatest enforcement successes undertaken by the Colombian security forces have resulted from their improving ability to execute complex multiservice operations. In May, the Colombian army, assisted by the Air Force, conducted a series of raids at a transshipment site seizing 18 metric tons of cocaine base and HCI [hydrogen chloride]. This was the largest seizure ever in a single operation in Colombia. Such operations launched against fugitive kingpin Pablo Escobar, however, remain plagued by tactical and operational security problems.

Despite violent retaliation from narcoterrorists and resultant calls from some politicians to halt extraditions, the Colombian government has continued to extradite major drug traffickers and money launderers to the United States, an action that Colombian traffickers fear most. As of late July, 11 persons had been extradited to the United States this year. There are indications that Colombia's new government

willcontinue to extradite traffickers. We willcontinue to sustain Colombia's effort through follow-on economic, military and lawenforcement assistance, and trade preferencesas reflected by the recent expedited reviewof Colombia's request for GSP [generalized system of preferences] privileges forcertain exports.

The United States and Mexico continued to cooperate closely on cocaine interdiction.Largely owing to the leadership of President Carlos Salinas de Gotari, the Mexican government has maintained its strongcommitment to battle drug trafficking, and we expect that cooperation betweenthe United States and Mexico will continue to improve during the coming year.

Despite economic problems, Mexico's fundingfor its counter-narcotics campaign remainshigh. Although opium and marijuana eradication fell behind [1989] levels, seizurescontinue at high levels. Since January [of this year], the [U.S.] attorney general's office reports seizing 24 metric tons of cocaine, 301 metric tons of dried marijuana, and 229 kilograms of opiates compared to 14 metric tons of cocaine, 175 metric tons of marijuana and 253 kilogramsof opiates seized for the same period in 1989. The Mexican military also reported seizing almost two metric tons of cocaine and 71 metric tons of marijuana compared to 710 kilograms of cocaine and 75metric tons of marijuana in the first six months of 1989.

Discussions on improving Mexico's response to smuggling along its northern border, drawing upon an experimental interdiction program in Monterrey, promise to increase seizures still further. The U.S. government plans to provide signifi-

cant technical and material support to this creative Mexican initiative, as well as expand intelligence sharing.

The OAS [Organization of American States] Ministerial Meeting on Narcotics, which Mexico hosted in April, took several steps toward stronger multilateral cooperation against trafficking in the hemisphere. Mexico worked closely with the United States and other delegations to make the resulting "Declaration and Program of Action of Ixtapa" a strong, actionoriented document.

The ministers approved "Model Regulations" to control precursor and other chemicals consistent with U.S. law, but more stringent than the 1988 U.N. Convention. They also called for establishment of an experts group to devise model legislation on money laundering and asset seizure.

The Economic Summit in Houston last July discussed the issue of precursor chemicals, and the Summit Seven nations [also known as the G-7-Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States] agreed to establish a task force similar to the organization set up last year to recommend actions against money laundering. Because of recent successful U.S. efforts to regulate illicit chemical shipments, traffickers are now turning to Europe as a source of chemicals.

The international heroin situation is not as encouraging as that of cocaine. Overproduction of opium has kept prices down in the United States and Europe and the supply of heroin is abundant worldwide.

But there were positive developments as well in the first half of 1990. In March, the [U.S.] attorney general announced the indictment of Khun Sa, the Golden Triangle's most notorious heroin trafficker.

The United States has notified the governments of Burma and Thailand of our desire to see Khun Sa brought to justice in the United States for his involvement in drug production and trafficking.

In June, Thai Prime Minister Chatchai visited the United States for talks on a wide range of issues, including narcotics control.

During meetings with President George Bush, [former] ONDCP [Officeof National Drug Controi Policy] Director William J. Bennett and other high-level U.S. officials, the Thai government pledged to increase enforcement efforts against heroin smuggled through Thailand. The Prime Minister announced his strong support foc the enactment of asset-seizure and conspiracy legislation, which was¡ introduced for the first time in Thailand's parliament this spring. Despite the Prime Minister's backing, the legislation did not pass during the 1990 session of parliament.

Building on the modest counter-narcotics cooperation with Laos begun in 1989, contacts with Lao officials in the law enforcement area expanded. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. customs officials, as well as drug officials from other countries, have visited Vientiane for consultations with their Lao counterparts. Lao officials have attended recent conferences, such as the Pacific Rim drug meeting, and [last] June DEA held the first in-country drug enforcement school in Laos funded by the [U.S.] Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM). This training was well received by Laos and marked the first time such an activity had been conducted in Laos since 1975.

An interagency working group, chaired by the Department of State, completed the

During recent months, the narcotics issue has received significant attention from developed countries. As important donors to global counter-narcotics efforts, major industrial nations will play increasingly important roles in narcotics control in Latin America and Asia.

first phase of a study leading to the formulation of a U.S. government worldwide heroin control strategy. The President's National Drug Strategy outlined this effort which will culminate in a better coordinated program for U.S. agencies to meet the possible heroin threat posed by increased production, higher purities and lower prices.

During recent months, the narcotics issue has received increased, significant attention from developed countries. In April, the United Kingdom sponsored a conference on cocaine that brought together world experts to exchange information and strategies for success. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan led the U.S. delegation to the conference.

As important donors to international counter-narcotics efforts, European nations, Canada and Japan will play increasingly important roles in narcotics control in Latin America and Asia. The President's National Drug Strategy sets forth a specific goal that the' Department of State work to establish a consultative mechanism on narcotics among the developed nations.

After lengthy consultations, the developed countries agreed to establish this mechanism. U.S. government officials met in Dublin on June 29 with representatives of the EC [European Community] countries, the EC Commission, Australia, Canada, Japan and Sweden to complete the effort.

These representatives agreed to set up a two-tier structure consisting of regular policy- and technical-level consultations to assist the participating governments in developing strategic plans and programs and to assess progress in combating illegal narcotics trafficking and abuse.

Money laundering. There has been substantial progress in bilateral and multi-

lateral initiatives to curb narcotics-related money laundering. Many of these activities have involved cooperation between the U.S. government (USG) and financial-center countries.

USG and G-7 partners were among the 15 members of the Economic Summit Financial Action Task Force (FATF). This group of more than 100 experts completed its report in April, offering 40 recommendations for national and international action. The report was endorsed by the Houston Economic Summit, with an agreement to reconvene the task force for a second year, again with France in the chair.

We hope to see the task force expanded to include the other nine members of OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] and other financial-center countries in the consensus and to explore in more depth a number of issues including asset sharing.

Cooperation by major partners 9n money laundering investigations has been critical.

We were very pleased to share $1 million in seized assets with Canada and $1 million with Switzerland resulting from this cooperation.

We have been particularly pleased by the help and cooperation of France, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the Noriega investigation. Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have been particularly helpful in our efforts to trace and seize Colombian trafficker Rodriguez Gacha's assets.

Canada, France, [the] Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States cooperated with the Caribbean countries in the June 8-10 Caribbean money laundering conference, hosted by Aruba. The conference approved a critical assessment of the money laundering problem in the region,

and agreed to propose to their governments not only the 40 FA TF recommendations but also 21 action recommendations drafted by a conference working group that are tailored to Caribbean situations. We think it is important that these recommendations address not only narcotics money laundering but also the need for banking infrastructures and regulations and the pervasive issue of narcotics-related corruption.

We look forward to collaboration with our colleagues in the Western hemisphere on implementing the agreement at the Ixtapa meeting of the OAS, where the Inter-American Commission Against Drug Abuse (CICAD) was [given the task of] convening Western hemisphere experts to draft model regulations on money laundering and asset seizure. Given the success of CICAD efforts on the precursor chemicals deliberations, we have high hopes for this new initiative.

[The U.S.] treasury has the lead in the administration effort to reach agreements with major financial-center countries on the recording and sharing of financial transactions data. The administration has identified 21 countries that are now being approached for initial rounds of negotiations.

The Declaration on Narcotics adopted at the Special Session of the United Nations also urged greater cooperation on narcotics money laundering.

The European Community has under consideration draft guidelines on money laundering controls for consideration by its 12 member nations. European governments in and outside the EC are adopting anti-money laundering legislation, in part a response to the U.N. Convention Against Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Some of this legislation is quite innovative.

0

Chest display has been part of male behavior since the Stone Age, when men began hanging beads around their neck.

Men have been sporting some form of necktie for more than three centuries, undeterred by the ridicule heaped on the cravat by fashion, women and the untied man.

Knot

lor Everv Man Text by THOMAS H. WOLF

Illustrations by LANE YERKES

F

ather's Day, July 17: The signal in America for an army of mothers and wives, sons and daughters--even some sweethearts-to march to the store to buy a tie for dear old Dad. Before his Day is over, nearly 20 million articles of neck-wear will have been foisted on American males. It is an outpouring of almost $200 million worth of what may well be love, but just may also be a way for women (who buy 60

percent of all ties sold in the United States) to get even.

The history of the human race is a history of self- torturesuffering to be beautiful, as David Kunzle puts it in his book Fashion and Fetishism. His list of implements of torture primarily concerns women: Chinese foot-binding, tightlaced corsets, narrow shoes, stiletto heels. The only two aimed at men are the necktie and especially the high stiff

collar, a kind of man killer that has long since gone the way of the straight razor and other dangerous instruments. Why does the tie remain?

There are two views of the matter. The old tie school basks in the psychological comfort that comes from knowing one is dressed according to the demands of the day's fashion. Such conformists report actual malaise when they sally forth sans suitable strips of cloth clutching at the neck.

The no-tie school membership has included such varied and worthy members as George Gordon, Lord Byron, romantic poet; Bill Veeck, romantic baseball entrepreneur; Tom Huebner, former city manager of San Antonio, Texas, who came a cropper when he tried to establish a tieless dress code there; and your humble servant, me. Not that a tie is useless. It is quite appropriate for a small number of formal occasions, such as weddings and funerals. It provides entry into a number of expensive establishments, for those who can afford them. And it is the perfect gift: Relatively cheap, quite impersonal, easy to buy, and equally easy for the recipient to dispose of if it is atrocious. What's more, women don't normally wear them, so they can't go rummaging through your closet to borrow one-as sons do.

S

tillin all a tie, my school holds, is ridiculous. It has no practical function. It does not keep the neck clean or warm. It does not keep out the rain. Unlike the fig leaf, it does not even afford a modicum of modesty. There was a time, it is true, when one predecessor of the four-in-hand necktie served as a kind of portable first-aid kit. But today, like lipstick or earrings or nail polish, a cravat, to use its generic name, is nothing more than a fashion accessory.

Alone among the articles of male dress, the necktie bears scant relationship to the size or shape of its wearer's body.

Yet according to experts it is the tie alone that proclaims the size and shape of the wearer's persona. This has been the case for a long time, with sartorial options steadily dwindling. A century ago Oscar Wilde could complain, "I find an evergrowing difficulty in expressing my originality through my choice of waistcoats and cravats." With waistcoats now all but extinct, only the cravat remains for those needing to flaunt some shred of originality or taste-although in these yuppie days a case can be made for the notion that not wearing a tie is a truer badge of originality.

Be that as it may, the language of costume has always spoken of the nuances of taste and class. In her fashion history The Male Image, Penelope Byrde quotes from the British journal Tailor & Cutter of a century ago: "How is it that if anyone describes a man as wearing a red necktie, nothing further need be said; you imagine a horsey individual or a sporting publican with a suit of loud checks, a loud voice, and much jewellery." No less a paragon of propriety than Lord Chesterfield declared, "Most of our young fellows here display some character or other by their (tress."

In April 1949the editors of Esquire magazine restated this notion in somewhat more modern dress: "You may think your face is a permanent fixture-and that in the normal course of things, only age, a hangover, or a punch in the eye can change it-but the truth is that you can do awful things to it with the wrong tie-and-shirt combination." Apparently, it has ever been thus. King Edward VII of England could

have an entire evening ruined by a guest wearing a tie inappropriate to the occasion. That malaise was also reflected on the other side of the Atlantic just as Edward was about to ascend his throne. In 1897, "Sears, Roebuck & Co. (Incorporated), Cheapest Supply House on Earth, Chicago," ran a full-page ad featuring "Hot Weather Neckwear." "An untied man," it announced, "is ever an untidy man."

Recently, John Molloy, who makes a handsome living advising American corporations on appropriate dress for their salesforces, went to great lengths to demonstrate his conviction that a man's tie states "who he is and who he is trying to be." He sent a group of researchers to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan in New York City. Some were wearing what he calls "upper-class" ties; some, "blue-collar" ties; and some were wearing no tie at all. He instructed them to panhandle. At the end of one hour, each man's take reflected his employer's philosophy. The men wearing upper-class neckwear had garnered $34.60, compared with $9.12 for the blue-collar group, and a piddling $8.42 for the tieless.

How and where did the notion of displaying something around the neck-for good or for ill-begin? The answer is that no one knows. The Smithsonian"s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., recently mounted an exhibit entitled "Men and Women: Costume, Power, and Gender." In Men and Women: Dressing the Part, a book associated with the show, Valerie Steele states that no one knows why or where the first human being turned up wearing any article of clothing. "Anthropologists no longer believe that shame or modesty led to the development of clothes," she writes. "In Tierra del Fuego, Darwin observed icy sleet forming and melting on the skin of Indians. Picts, ancient inhabitants of Britain, were found in Scotland by Caesar's Romans running nude."

Chest display, of course, seems to have been part of male behavior ever since the Stone Age, when tribes began wearing beads and bangles. So neckwear has a history that dates back at least 30,000 years. But neckties, more or less as we know "them today, made their first appearance in the middle of the 17th century, probably (where else?) in England. Before this time, gentlemen's shirts came complete with long ends of embroidered lace attached at the collar.

These were knotted at the neck (the original sin) and hung down over the shirtfront. But by around 1650the tatted lace became too bulky to knot, so gentlemen started to wear muffierlike neckcloths separate from their shirts.

At first these were simply lengths oflinen. The cloth had to be folded to a width that would fit around the neck. If you tied it in front, like a scarf, it was called a cravat. If you preferred not to fold the cloth for yourself, you could find material already sewn to fit your neck-like a pre-tied bow tie. It was fastened at the back of the neck with hook or buckle or knot and for some reason was called a stock.

Various theories explain the origin of these rings around the collar-and, not incidentally, your neck. One holds that physicians in the Middle Ages, believing that bodily ills enter through the throat, recommended neckcloths for protection.

Another suggests that a swatch of heavy cloth around the neck served as a kind of shield against sword or spear in battle. Jean Druesedow of the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art supports a simpler

thesis: For soldiers and men who dueled, the neck was a handy place to carry a roll of bandaging material in case of emergency.

The origin of the name "stock" is unknown. The name "cravat" is often reported to have come from the word "Croat," after a group of Croatian mercenaries who fought alongside French troops in the early l600s. Their uniform featured a cloth knotted around the neck. As sartorial rivals, the stock and the cravat were at each other's throats, as it were, for more than two centuries. The cravat, at first worn without starch, tended to bag, sag and roll up in front. To the rescue came George (Beau) Brummell, an officer of the 10th Light Dragoons, which happened to be the Prince of Wales's own regiment. Brummell, according to Claudia Kidwell, curator of the Smithsonian's costume division, "solved the problem with starch and with patience." Every day he laboriously arranged his stiffened cravat-often spoiling several before he achieved a satisfactory arrangement of folds and creases. The result was so pleasing to the Prince of Wales that he had his valets copy the procedure-thereby giving cravats a great boost in popularity. Nevertheless, the stock remained the neckwear of choice among traditionalists until somewhere early in the 19th century.

T

hat the cravat could have remained in contention, let alone eventually won, is difficult to understand, since the stock came ready-tied, whereas the cravat required the mastery of an incredible number of knots. Penelope Byrde cites an 1828 manual by a certain H. Ie Blanc that included 32 methods of tying a cravat, each with its own name. H. Ie Blanc wrote: "When a man of rank makes his entree into a circle distinguished for taste and elegance ... he will discover that his coat will attract only a slight degree of attention, but that the most critical and scrutinising examination will be made of the set of his Cravat...if his Cravat is savamment [cleverly] and elegantly formed-although his coat may not be of the last cut--every one will rise to receive him with the most distinguished marks of respect.. .." Scarcely able to contain his enthusiasm, Monsieur Ie Blanc goes on, " .. .let him speak downright nonsense he will be applauded to the skies; it will be said-'This man has critically and deeply studied the 32 lessons on the Art of Tying the Cravat.'"

Despite the fact that it was only fit to be tied, by the turn of the 20th century, the cravat had driven the stock from the field. Its best-known and most-enduring form has been the four-in-hand, named for the manner in which neckwear was fastened by the coachmen who drove four-horse carriages in 18th-century England. More aristocratic is the ascot, named for the neckwear chosen by the horsey set who frequented the eponymous British racetrack. It was, and is, simply a fancy scarf, often fixed in place with a jeweled stickpin.

Shortly after World War I, royalty again got into the act when the Duke of Windsor began filling the wide space at his shirt collar by tying a big knot. This became known as the Windsor Knot. The way to achieve it (although the Duke himself denied ever using it) is to bring the long end of the cravat back and forth into a half-dozen loops. The resulting knot is large and handsome-and, for many, a source of endless aggravation trying to get it tied right.

Of course, there is also the bow tie, whose name probably derives from the Frenchjabot, the frill on a shirtfront. Not to mention a small number of re~ional specialties like bolo strings, held together with jeweled slides.

Whatever agonies the knots of neckties may have caused men, none can touch the rage and despair that sometimes attends learning how to tie a bow tie. This used to be an important part of an American male teenager's rite of passage-a prerequisite to a boy's first formal prom. Many a father has earned a son's eternal gratitude by standing behind him and (because Dad can't figure out how to tie the bow when he is facing it) reaching around his son's neck to achieve the magic knot while the boy watches in the mirror, certain that this art is far beyond his grasp. In our house, my father made me put my foot on a kitchen chair and practice tying the tie above my knee until, mirabile dictu, it somehow happened. It would be years before I could make it happen easily and even today, although I wear a bow often, I can't achieve an acceptable knot on the first try every time.

Needless to say, the bow has its adherents and its critics.

The former include such well-known American figures as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, civil liberties lawyer Joseph Rauh (who maintains that he can write several legal briefs each year in the time he saves every morning by not having to knot a four-in-hand tie), and columnist George Will. "A great advantage of wearing bow ties," Will has said, "is so no one will mistake you for a lawyer. ...The bow tie wearer is an independent thinker-no wonder lawyers don't want them on juries."

Consultant John Molloy is of a different mind. "If you insist on wearing a bow tie to business-and bow tie wearers are a stubborn lot," he writes, "I suggest that you wear it with the proper accessories: A red nose and a beanie cap with a propeller. ...In general I have found that people believe that a man in a bow tie may lie." (It is an opinion I can understand from an author whose advice to lawyers includes: "When a prosecutor is going to question your client, put him in a very dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a bright red tie-preferably with a difficult to look at, but still elegant, pattern. Put a bright red handkerchief in his breast pocket. The combination will make it quite difficult for the jury to look at him-and the less they look, the less they will remember what he says.")

Bow or otherwise, in the United States almost 100 million ties are bought each year. Strung together, they would go more than three times around the world at its waist. Cravats have served many uses other than those intendedstrangulation, both premeditated and accidental, among them. American actor-dancer Fred Astaire often used a tie to hold up his trousers because, he maintained, he was unable to find a belt sufficiently small. Merchandisers know that ties are purchased largely on impulse, which is why you always see them up front when you enter a store. Women buy the majority of ties but rarely wear them.

It is estimated that the average American male owns between 30 and 40 ties. Usually one or two have important associations, often with family rituals-as a young man quickly discovers when he first "borrows" a pet cravat from his father or brother. Tiecrafters, a New York establishment that specializes in tie cleaning, regularly gets letters from far-

Many a father has earned a son's eternal gratitude by standing behind him and (because Dad can'tftgure out how to tie the bow when he is facing it) reaching around his son's neck to achieve the magic knot.

Anyone stupid enough to tie a tie too tightly probably had trouble thinking in theftrst place.

In the era before neckties, gentlemen's shirts came complete with long ends of embroidered lace attached to the collar. These were knotted at the neck (the original sin) and hung down over the shirt/ront.

flung tie owners, like this one from Australia: "Our daughter cannot be married unless you can make her Daddy's special weddings-tie presentable again." (The secret to spot removal, incidentally, is to get one's four-in-hand tie-note that it requires extraordinary skill to spill food on a bow tie-to the cleaner right after the faux pas, before the gravy oxidizes and becomes an integral part of the fabric.)

About 80 percent of the ties sold in the United States are manufactured within the country. The business adds up to nearly $1,000 million a year. Prices start at about $2.50 and run into the. thousands. A. Sulka & Company, a prestigious haberdashery, annually weaves l8-carat gold thread into a few hundred ties and reports that "they walk off the shelf" at $250 apiece. Not much compared with Countess Mara's line of cravats with real gems on them. They go for up to $5,000 each.

Being tradition-oriented-why else would suit jackets retain sleeve buttons, or trench coats keep epaulets and saber rings?-men tend to favor traditional ties. One of the most popular is the regimental rep, with diagonal stripes on ribbed fabric, connoting membership in a Guard's unit of the British Army. There are only 40 true regimentals, but the demand is so great that an additional 400 can be had that merely seem regimental.

In the same category belong the old school tie and the club tie. A growing number of corporations have worked the company logo into tie patterns. At least 16 divisions of Time Inc., for instance, have logo ties. Within the past few years, something called the "power tie," a field of small blue dots ona pale yellow background (or lately, a beefier red, woven style) has become a best-seller in America, presumably to be worn at "power lunches," though no one seems sure.

A

necktie is not the simple piece of fabric it appears to be," begins the Tie Buyer's Handbook, published by the Neckwear Association of America. It turns out to be a 22-step process starting with the outer fabric and ending with the bar tack, a stitch that neatly fastens the ends of the seams at the back of the widest part of the tie. These days the well-dressed gentleman's cravat is about 135 to 145 centimeters long, and its tip "will just meet-or slightly overlap-the buckle'of his belt," a neat trick in the case of those of us who prefer suspenders. For many non lawyers and other bow-tie devotees the correct width of the bow isjudged to be the distance between the outside corners of the eyes.

From the beginning, as today, new fashions in neckwear have reflected the great events of the day-the Battle of Steinkirk in 1692, for example (surely, you've heard of it).

There, so the story goes, French soldiers, caught by surprise, had to hurriedly twist their uniform's long cravat as they ran into battle against English and Dutch troops. From this came the popular "Steinkirk," a long strip of cloth, wound for its entire length and then passed through the bottom buttonhole of an officer's, or a gentleman's, coat. M'lord might look as though he had a longish rope around his neck but at least the tag end didn't whip in the wind.

The French Revolution played havoc with neckwear, as well as with necks. Because no one wanted to be associated with the aristocracy, the fashionable cravat of the courtiers went into hiding, and neckwear blossomed into the flowing scarves of the romantic poets and the rebellious young.

Nearly 200 years later, bow ties-which had been very popular in the United States at the start of this centuryagain took America by storm, following a somewhat less world-shaking event: Robert Redford's portrayal of Jay in The Great Gatsby.

In the normal ordering of things, however, neckties follow not great happenings, but the fashion set by designers of suits and shirts. High collars attract wide knots. Wide suit lapels dictate wide neckties. At this very moment I am told the extra-wide ties-the belly-warmers of a quarter-century ago-are slouching toward New York to be reborn. I remember them well. My son-in-law, a comedy writer, sent me one of the first five-inch-wide ties that appeared in Hollywood in the 1960s. I thought that it was a gag. I still do.

Now that you know everything you need to know about how neckties were born and how they reached us over the centuries, there is still a mystery. Why do men wear anything at all around their necks? There I can't help you. David Kunzle quotes from art historian Johann Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greeks, published in 1755.

Winckelmann was "convinced that the alleged 'habitual nudity of the Greeks had formed in them a superior taste as well as superior bodies, and that by dint of tight banding of neck, waist, and thigh mankind had succeeded in producing a mentally and physically degenerate race," In Bleak House (1853), Dickens writes of Mr. Turveydrop: "He had such a neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape) and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it seemed as though he must inevitably double up, if it were cast 100se .... As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes."

Ridiculous? A few years ago two researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, reported that the pressure of a shirt collar and tie may interfere with the supply of blood to the brain and thus adversely affect intellectual skills. The Neckwear Association scoffs, "Anyone stupid enough to tie a tie too tight probably had trouble thinking in the first place." But I don't believe it's as simple as that. What is the first thing a man does at the end of the workday? He loosens his tie, just as a lady of an earlier era happily untied her stays.

Is there any conceivable reason that we men should have to wear anything around our necks during summer days when temperature and humidity race to see which can be more oppressive? Fashion decrees it, you say? Yes, but who decrees fashion? One must rise above it like baseball-club owner Bill Veeck, a pioneer protester in this field and a man who was never caught in public with a necktie.

I raise my glass to Veeck and to that glorious commonwealth, Australia. In the official guidelines for embassy personnel, it is written that the safari suit-short sleeves, no tie-is quite the proper garb for Washington, D.C., which the Aussies, bless 'em, consider a hardship post in summer.

So do I. And the more I ponder the history of the modern world, the more I wonder if Karl Marx might not have pulled the whole thing off had he but transposed two letters in the Communist Manifesto and proclaimed, "Workers of the world, untie!"

D About the Author: Thomas H. Wolf, a former vice-president of ABC News, is a television consultant with the Smithsonian Institution.

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Drug Information at Your Fingertips The American Center Library in Delhi recently received a computerized database on compact disc (CD) that provides comprehensive, up-todate information on illegal drugs. The disc, known as the International Drug Library (lOLl. was produced by the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, D.C. American Center visitors may use the disc to search for data on almost any aspect of illegal drugs-production, trafficking, interdiction and law enforcement, as well as prevention and rehabilitation. "You can imaginethe information stored in the CD when you realize that one disc can store 270,000 pages of text-equivalent to the entire contents of an encyclopedia," says Heera Kapasi, director of the American Center Library.

The compact disc is similar to music CDs. But instead of music, it stores data for display on a computer terminal screen in text or graphic form. The system is called CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory).

The IDl contains nearly 6,000 documents organized into four data files-two "Abstract," one "Image" and one "Text." The databases are: Abstract 1. This data file comprises 400 abstracts of drug-related material published between January 19S5 and November 19S9. A collection of public policy documents, they have been selected from the Info South Database at the University of Miami North-South Center in Florida.

Abstract 2. It contains 4,S93 abstracts selected from the drug and crime database of the U.S. Department of Justice's

National Institute of Justice.

The abstracts are of documents published between 19S0 and 19S9.

Images. This section has 399 images-photographs, maps, charts and graphs-contained in 31 documents, whose titles are listed.

Text. It comprises some 350 full text documents ranging from articles to complete books and book-length reports.

Graphics in these documents can be viewed in the "Images" data file.

"The system is user-friendly," says Kapasi. "It requires little training to operate and search for and retrieve information one is looking for on drugs. IDl is specially useful to policymakers, analysts and professionals engaged in various drug-related issues-criminal justice, public health or education." She adds, "In addition to the International Drug Library, we have a number of CD-ROMs on other su bjects."

Among the other titles on CD-ROM in the American Center Library are "Books in Print, September 19S9-0ctober 1990," which contains S40,000 titles and more than 60,000 book reviews; and "Facts on File News Digest, 19S0-SS," a weekly digest of U.S. and international news and clJrrent events.

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Next month a ten-day international experiment will be conducted on Australia's Heard Island in the Indian Ocean to determine whether the "greenhouse effect" is warming our planet.

The Heard Island Experiment will measure the temperature of the world's oceans. Meteorologists believe that the atmosphere and oceans are intimately linked in the climate chain; each influences the other's temperature. If so, any long-term warming of the atmosphere would necessarily lead to warming of the oceans.

The experiment takes advantage of the fact that the speed of sound in water increases with a rise in temperature. This means that the travel time of an acoustic pulse between a fixed source and receiver will diminish at a rate proportional to the warming.

Researchers will lower a special underwater loudspeaker from a ship anchored at Heard Island to a depth of 250 meters. For nine days, it will broadcast an acoustic signal-a pulse of sound at 209 decibels and in frequencies ranging between 50and 70 hertz-along asound axis. A sound axis is a particular layer of ocean water that acts as a conduit for sound and extends through the world's oceans. These signals will be picked up by underwater microphones at various stations located at precise distances from each other, so the sound's travel time will allow its average speed to be calculated. Any significant change in the speed of sound from one segment of travel to another will indicate achange in the average temperature of water.

"Heard Island has been selected for its unique location," American scientist Walter Munk said at a press conference in New Delhi last month. "From there, direct paths extend through each of the world's five oceans, and sound conducted along these paths should be audible to acoustic sensors thousands of kilometers away." Munk, who is professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, San Diego, was in India to deliver a series of lectures on "The Heard Island Experiment" in Ahmedabad, Cochin, Goa and New Delhi.

Every precaution, says Munk, is being taken to ensure that the experiment has no adverse effect on marine life. For example, transmission of coded signals from the island will be shut off fortwo hours after everyone hour of transmission to ensure that marine mammals, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises, which use the waveguide to communicate, are least disturbed. "These creatures will experience a sonic disruption the way we experience the roar of a jet plane, which at takeoff generates about 270 decibels," Munk says. "However, in the nine days that the experiment lasts, they won't suffer harm." Munk adds, "The ten-day experiment is really in the nature of a feasibility test, to see if global warming can thus be measured. If successful, we plan a ten-year future program to extensively monitor ocean climate."

The Heard Island Experiment is being sponsored by several American universities and government agencies, and is supported by eight countries, including India.

American researchers have developeda new class of drugs that promise to r6Jvolutionize medicine.Known as biological responsemodifiers (BRM), the new drugs are natural substances that are part of the body'simmune system.

"Their function," writes Gina Kolatain a recent issue of The New York Times, "is to improve the ability of immune defenses tofight against cancer or infections. Researchers hope that extra doses given as therapy will help stimulate the immune systemwhen its defenses are faltering."

More than 40 BRMs have alreadybeen discovered. The latest of these new drugs, discoveredthis October by a group of scientists, headed by Dr. Krisztina M. Zsebo, at Amgen Inc., a biotechnology firm in Thousand Oaks, California, is

the stem-cell factor (SCF), a substance that stimulates very primitive bone-marrow ce.lls to grow and develop into red and white blood cells. SCF, says Dr. Zsebo, could prove of immense benefit to people whose bone marrows have faltered, including patients undergoing chemotherapy, those who have had bone-marrow transplants and people with AIDS. One other BRM is interferon alpha-2, an immune system hormone. It acts on a variety of white blood cells to encourage them to destroy cells infected with a virus. It also gets inside the infected cells and blocks the virus from reproducing itself.

The research community is excited about these new drugs.

Dr. David Golde of the medical school at the University of California in Los Angeles says, "From my perspective, it is as big a step for medicine as the introduction of antibiotics."

Terri Kent, assistant professor of theater at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, was recently in India as a Fulbright visiting professor. Kent's first assignment was in Madurai where she spent three weeks at Madurai University. "The university has a new M.A. in theater arts," Kent said, "and I helped the students with some very basic training in various aspects of theater, and also got them started on a production of Macbeth."

Kent, an accomplished actress and director, then came to Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, where she conducted a theater workshop and directed students (below; Kent is at left) in the production of Steel Magnolias. The play, written by Robert Harling, Jr., was produced by the U.S. Educational Foundation in India as part of its year-long 40th-an niversary celebrations.

An

Indian

documentary,

Ocean of Wisdom, was telecast

by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service on November 27. The 30-minute film by Rajiv Mehrotra is an intimate study of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, as a monk, as the spiritual and temporal leader of his people and as a statesman for our troubled times.

The documentary follows the Dalai Lama through his daily life in Dharamsala, receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, visiting Tibetan settlements in India, teaching in Bodh Gaya, in Japan, in the U.K.-reaching out to audiences around the world. It also includes rare historical footage from the archives of Tibetans in exile, of ancient Tibet, of the young Dalai Lama in Lhasa, and of his escape and arrival into

exile in India.

Ocean of Wisdom, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, has been produced by Mediart Films, U.S.A. The film's executive producers are Amita B. Preisser and Ted Preisser, and its associate producer is Himangshu Dhanda.

"Working in a girls' college," Kent said, "I wanted a play that was on women. I was intrigued by the script of Steel Magnolias. A feminist play written by a man, it is about the owner of a beauty shop in Louisiana, her sister who works with her and the customers who come there not really to get their hair done, but for some female friendship, for the strength of each other, or to gossip sometimes.

The play is funny and sad, and within a very entertaining framework describes the inner strength of women and what they offer one another. The title very aptly sums up the underlying theme-the frail flower juxtaposed with the invulnerability of steel. The women that the play portrays are vain and physically frail, but their hearts are incredibly strong, and they rely on each other for that strength."

Although the play is typically American, Kent said, "I was amazed to discover how quickly students grasped its universal appeal, how they emoted. I think the greatest thing we all learnt while working on the play is the simple knowledge that basic human emotions transcend all cultures. It was a lesson I had started out to teach and then learnt myself."

Just before she left for New York late last month to resume her teaching, Kent, when asked whether she planned to return, said, "Everyone I met back home who has visited India once, has returned over and over again. I too will. With all its problems, which are many and monumental, India is such a vibrant country-full of vigor and vitality."

-5hampa Banerjee

ON

THE LIGHTER SIDE

"At the market this morning, 1bought afresh melon. 1 ran into Sarah on the way home, and she said, 'What a great melon!' 1put it on the kitchen windowsill, and when Bob came in he said, 'Gee, honey, that sure is a beautiful melon,' and he gave mea great big kiss. Then we sat down to have a drink and watch a little TV before dinner. All of a sudden, this commercial came on showing a housewife buying a melon. A friend stops her and says, 'Wow! What a melon!' Then her husband comes home, gives her a big kiss, and says, 'Some melon, honey!' A tthat point, 1 ran into the kitchen and burst into fears."

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''That guy in room 3401 wants to know when the elevator's gonna be fixed."

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1988 Tribune

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All Rights Reserved.

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GEORGE STRAIT blends frank lyrics with honky-tonk melodies.

BILL MONROE pioneered Bluegrass music during the 1930s.

The voice of American country music has many tones, rhythms and timbres. It encompasses the haunting folk songs of the Appalachian highlands, the caustic plaints of honky-tonk (cheap) nightclubs ,and the refined sounds of big-city cabarets. It can be rough and rumpled, soft and wistful, reflective of wanderings and domesticity.

Diverse and robust, country music is unequivocally American, and fabulously original. It is at once wonderfully accessible and yet elusive-accessible to its millions of fans around the world, and elusive in terms of definition, because it represents so much.

American country music tracks its origins to the rural stretches of Appalachia, a largely isolated tract of mountain country in the eastern United States, whose people generally were unaffected by the industrial growth and urbanization of much of America. Building upon the English and Scottish ballads that their ancestors loved, these people made their own music, with their own instruments-singing about their standard of living, their families, their everyday routines, and their religious faith.

Traveling musicians took country music beyond Appalachia to the Texas panhandle region and the backwoods areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, melding influences and styles along the way. Then, early in the 20th century the phonograph and the radio revolutionized leisure time and spawned an industry in country music.

In 1922 fiddler Eck Robertson made what is generally regarded as the first recording of a country music song. The title was "Sally Goodin." By the late 1920s, the Carter

REBA McENTIRE, moving away from pop influence, has worked traditional elements into her music.

Family-:-Maybelle, Sara and A.P.-and Jimmie Rodgers had begun to record their songs, establishing themselves as pioneers of 20th-century American country music.

The music of these early recording artists was simple in instrumentation and subject matter. Rodgers accompanied himself on a guitar, and the Carters added the fiddle and autoharp. Rodgers, a former railroad brakeman, wrote songs about the common man-his work, his daily triumphs and setbacks. The Carters extolled country life: The pleasures of a family gathered around the dinner table or the power of deep religious faith. Such themes struck a chord with listeners across the United States-a country that, in the post-World War I era, was becoming more urban, more industrialized and faster-paced. Country singers reminded audiences of simpler times and essential values.

In 1925, a Nashville, Tennessee, radio station began a weekly broadcast of live performances by country musicians. In time, that series evolved into the Grand Ole Opry, and Nashville developed into the center of the country music recording industry.

The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly variety program that is presented before a live audience in the Grand Ole Opry House, and broadcast across the United States. As a breeding ground for young, untried talent, and as the place where all country music stars appear at one time or another, it symbolizes the past and present of American country music, and provides hints to its future.

Country music has traveled a long, hard road over the past half-century and more. In the 1940s, the ascending fortunes of country music's early wave had to compete with a Western

The diversity of country music makes it hard to define but easy to appreciate.

It is today more popular in America than any other type of music. influence-popularizeo by such singing cowboys of motion pictures as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. For a time, all of country music was called country-western-or c&w for short-by industry professionals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the arrival of honky-tonk-music created in barrooms that reflected despondency and hard living-and with the rise of Hank Williams as the "king of country," country music was, in the words of country music historian William Ivey, "on a rocket ship to popularity."

Williams captured the imagination of the American public like no country music performer before him. He was the premier songwriter of his day, turning out tunes that were rooted in those familiar subjects-love and heartbreak-but with a dark edge of betrayal and despair. "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Lovesick Blues" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" are among his classics-barroom blues built around the rhythms of 1940s-vintage Western swing.

After his death in a car crash at the age of 29, he became a legend, tragic and revered, as a country music star who appealed to pop music fans as well. He led the crossover effect in musical styles that was taking hold.

Today, country music claims rock 'n' roll star Elvis Presley as a favorite son. He had more than 80 songs on the country music charts. And many of his fellow rockabilly (combining rock beat with hillbilly sentiments) performers-Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis among them-either succeeded as uncompromising country music stars or as crossover artists. But when rock 'n' roll first emerged, it threatened the country music industry as never before, or since.

"Things got pretty grim in Nashville from 1957 to 1959," Ivey acknowledges. "If you looked at country music in 1957, it seemed as if it was over."

But then came the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of rebuilding. The growth that ensued can be credited to the development of the Nashville sound-the blending of country tunes, subjects and sensibilities with pop-music production and vocal style that dominated the country music scene into the mid-1970s. The ideas, the musings, the considerations were country; the treatment of them was pure pop.

About the same time, a new phenomenon-the Outlaw tradition-surfaced, in the personages of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, two crusty characters who decided to circumvent the established way of doing business in Nashville. They used their own bands, with whom they had been touring across the country, rather than employing the regular group of Nashville studio musicians who were the architects of the Nashville sound. The term "outlaw" referred to the fact that they came from outside the Nashville country music establishment, and that they adopted the dress and attitudes of the counterculturelong hair, beards, jeans and flannel shirts-in place of the sequined shirts or two-piece suits and ties that were tra-

ditional wear for country musicians.

In recent years country music has been dominated by a phenomenon called the "New Traditionalism." Although this marketing phrase may appear to be a contradiction in terms, it refers quite purposely and specifically to a determination, by the current generation of country artists, to steer the music back toward its roots, and away from the glitter and artifice that had begun to creep in.

Bluegrass exemplifies how traditions endure. Pioneered in the 1930s,by Bill Monroe, a native of western Kentucky, this rhythmic form of music, originally confined to the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, is played largely on acoustic fiddle, guitar, mandolin, bass and banjo, and features complex vocal harmonies.

A generation later, Alabama-born singer Emmylou Harris, who had cut her teeth on folk music in the 1960s,played a major role in the further popularization of bluegrass, then became midwife to a blend of country and rock that rose in the 1970s in Los Angeles and remains popular.

Harris's decision to eschew pop and rock for the purest form of country is one example of what has been happening.

Another example is George Strait, an artist who came out of the central Texas hill country. His music is a blend of Hank Williams-style honky-tonk---:-with brutally frank lyrics and a barroom sound-and Western swing, that jubilant form of 1930s dance music.

Country music songs still deal with family and work, but against the background of modern concerns. Reba McEntire, for example, sings about the pangs of divorce in "Whoever's In New England." Tammy Wynette has explored a similar theme. And Rosanne Cash confronts the issue of spouse abuse in "Rosie Strike Back."

Today's country music includes the haunting hillbilly whine of Dwight Yoakum with his harshly realistic observations on working-class existence, the sophisticated New York cabaret style of K.T. Oslin, and the time-honored fiddle music of the legendary Roy Acuff, 87, a Grand Ole Opry pioneer, still performing his pure melodic lines bred in the Tennessee mountains, more than a half-century since the 1938 release of his first hit record, the mighty "Wabash Cannonball. " It includes the North Carolina drawls of Randy Travis, who sings guilelessly about life and death and nights in barrooms; the socially conscious exhortations of Nelson and Kris Kristofferson; and the saucy, heartfelt musings of Loretta Lynn about domestic life and strife. It is the country rock sounds of Highway 101, the progressive bluegrass music of the New Grass Revival, and the deep-rooted Cajun fiddlings of Dewey Balfa, with roots in the Louisiana Territory of the 1700s.

Such diversity makes it hard to define, but easy to appreciate. According to a national opinion poll, country music is America's most popular music form. Fifty-nine percent of the U.S. adult population prefers it to other types of music. Today the audience is younger, wider-based and economically more diverse than ever before. In short, country music is American-in the broadest sense of the term. 0 About the Author: Ronni Lundy is a music critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky.

A Merry

Old Christmas

Many communities across the United States celebrate Christmas the old-fashioned way, re-creating Victorian or Colonial era traditions. The mood is set with brilIiant iHuminations in homes and gardens (top). Carol singers stroH about in Dickens-era costumes (right). Organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., offer a peep into Christmas rituals and celebrations of yore with demonstrations of storytelling, ballad singing and candle-making (above right). Some of the most elaborate events are presented in old mansions such as Biltmore Estate, the palatial North Carolina home built by the Vanderbilts, one of America's wealthiest families, in the 19th century.

Christmas celebrations in this 255-room country house hark back to the gala Christmas parties the Vanderbilts hosted at the turn of the century. Preparations begin in July to re-create the lavishness of Victorian times for hundreds of visitors. Special designers work on the banquet table (see back cover). An expert spends 137 hours to create a gingerbread house (above) in the mansion's kitchen. Musicians-from harpists (top right) to choral groups-fill the air with songs of the season. And no matter where visitors wander, the smell of Christmas baking wafts across. The secret? Strategically hidden crockpots of simmering spices. Christmas, indeed, is in the air here.