Stevenson Alumni Magazine Spring/Summer 2010 by Stevenson School

Non-Profit Org U.S. Postage

3152 Forest Lake Road, Pebble Beach, CA 93953

PAID Salinas, CA Permit No. 467

ALUMN I M AGAZI N E

JUNE 4 – JUNE 6, 2010

Paul Saffo weighs in on what’s to come.

GOLFING LEGACY STRETCHES AROUND THE WORLD and back to Pebble Beach.

ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Things may have changed, but Stevenson spirit is forever.

STEVENSON SC HO OL

Don’t Miss Reunion Weekend

FUTURIST’S CRYSTAL BALL OFFERS NEXT LEVEL INSIGHT.

Stevenson Alumni

SPRING/SUMMER 2010

SIP, READ & DISCUSS WINE, BOOK & ART REVIEWS

ALUMNI AT LARGE Find out the latest on fellow alumni. Pebble Beach Campus, 3152 Forest Lake Road, Pebble Beach, California 93953 Carmel Campus, 24800 Dolores Street, Carmel, California 93923

tel (831) 625-8300

tel (831) 626-5200

www.stevensonschool.org

fax (831) 625-5208

fax (831) 624-9044

info@stevensonschool.org

infoecc-8@stevensonschool.org

VIEW FROM THE BACK PORCH

SHINE IN THE FILM BUSINESS.

KRISTOFFER POLAHA, BOB STEPHENSON & SYLVAIN WHITE make their mark in Hollywood.

Reunion Weekend 2010 Things may have changed, but Stevenson spirit is forever. FRIDAY, JUNE 4 – SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010

We’re kicking off the 2010 Reunion Weekend with a delicious cookout on Wilson Field

Extra gifts help Stevenson’s

to break the ice and get mingling. Your family is welcome too. On Saturday, we roll

students immediately by providing

back the years with a presentation titled “Catching Up: Stevenson through the years

scholarship aid, faculty salaries,

and looking ahead,” followed by tours, a chapel service, lunch, reception, class pictures,

books, and by supporting athletics,

reunion dinner, and the ever-popular after party at 9:30 p.m. Sunday morning starts with a tasty breakfast, morning prayer and departures at 11 a.m.

clubs, and other campus activities.

REPRESENT YOUR CLASS IN THE INAUGURAL ALUMNI REUNION CHALLENGE! Help your class win one of the three following awards: Most attendees at Reunion Weekend ••• Most new supporters of the Stevenson Fund ••• Highest class participation in the Stevenson Fund

Every gift counts The Stevenson Fund (831) 625-8354 www.stevensonschool.org/giving

A LUM N I M AGAZI N E

Christian Cevaer ’88 lines up his putt on the 9th green during the third day of The European Open at The London Club in Ash, Kent, southern England, on May 30, 2009.

PHOTO BY GLYN KIRK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Read the whole story on page 30.

FEATURES 24 ONE-ON-ONE WITH FUTURIST PAUL SAFFO In this exclusive Q&A story between SF Chronicle business reporter James Temple and Paul Saffo, you’ll learn how Stevenson changed Saffo’s life trajectory. With degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Stanford, Saffo is now a Stanford professor, ABCNews.com columnist, and regular advisor on trends in technology, economics, and politics.

30 THE STEVENSON GOLFING LEGACY After interviewing four decades of top-ranked alumni golfers, Golf Digest’s Mark Soltau discovered that Spyglass Hill Golf Course was clearly the home-course advantage both then and now. What’s more, the annual AT&T Pro-Am brought the best golfers in the world to Stevenson’s backyard for the ultimate in inspiration and exposure to the pro circuit.

38 STEVENSON ALUMNI SHINE IN HOLLYWOOD Variety Magazine’s Peter Debruge tracked down numerous alumni to find out how they ended up in the film industry. From director to actor to editor, each story uncovers their journeys with impressive achievements along the way. For many of them, their passion for showbiz began with school plays at Stevenson’s Keck Auditorium.

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DEPARTMENTS 3 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 4 LETTERS

60 VIEW FROM THE BACK PORCH Frank Stephenson reminds us to

always find joy in the journey.

5 CONTRIBUTORS 6 OUR LEADER 7 ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT

Stevenson alumni shine with their exceptional personal achievements.

11 CAMPUS NEWS

Teamwork and motivation help students reach outstanding goals and accomplishments.

14 SPORTS WRAP

Athletic ability, work ethic, and a positive attitude combine to make a successful athletic program.

16 FACULTY NEWS

Stevenson faculty continue to inspire peers and students.

18 THE PIRATE REVIEW

An impressive collection of artists, authors, and vintners.

46 ALUMNI AT LARGE

Stevenson alumni share the latest in their lives.

60 16

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the Stevenson Alumni Magazine! In this age of email, websites, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other quick communication tools, is there really room or time for a full-length feature magazine? With a nod to our namesake Robert Louis Stevenson and his timeless storytelling, we believe there is. After studying alumni publications of our peer schools, talking with many of you, and weighing the school’s communication needs, the editorial team decided that this magazine must achieve four goals: • Reflect Stevenson’s unique history and diverse student and alumni body • Compete successfully for the attention of our readers • Coordinate effectively with other Stevenson communication tools • Focus on truth, fairness, and good stories rather than institutional spin The story of Stevenson is one of change and adaptation, but the essence of Stevenson endures and can easily be found in the lives and experiences of those who have come and gone through the Del Monte Forest. We chose to highlight some of those alumni within a new menu of sections, including the Alumni Spotlight, letters to the editor, Alumni at Large, and The Pirate Review, which this month showcases the work of two Stevenson authors, two Stevenson vintners, and two Stevenson artists. We have also engaged professional writers from related industries to pen the feature story articles found in this issue. Check

out the contributors list to learn who interviewed Paul Saffo, who tracked down the story on golf at Stevenson through the years, or who caught up with the Stevenson alumni making their mark in the film industry. To keep the magazine interesting, we chose a clean, up-tempo style inspired by our friends and marketing partners at Burghardt-Doré Advertising. However, we maintained a focus on Stevenson people, their connections to other alumni, and to the school. Frank Stephenson’s widely read View from the Back Porch finishes the magazine and helps keep us grounded in the Stevenson tradition to “do our best.” We hope this Stevenson Alumni Magazine increases conversation between the school and you, and you and other participants in Mr. Ricklefs’ great adventure in learning. Like the Stevenson campus and the school itself, the magazine is a work in progress. It will grow and improve with your participation and feedback. We want to listen to your stories, read your reviews, applaud your accomplishments, share your milestones, and hear your voices. We look forward to hearing from you. Jeff Clark Director of Advancement & Editor

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

LETTERS

Robertson’s Mayan Studies Program at Stevenson, provided us Spring Break ski weeks at Squaw Valley, and counseled hundreds of us on college placement. Frank did all of this and much more with integrity and loyalty to this community that he has loved, nurtured, and guided for 50 years. For this we are all very grateful. 2008/2009 Annual Report

Brian D. Call ’74

Coach Thayer: I just received a copy of the latest Stevenson Alumni e-Newsletter and saw the good news about the cross-country team winning the CCS championship for the first time since ’88. Congratulations, that’s a great accomplishment and brings back memories of our ’87 championship and subsequent 2nd place finish in the state championship. What a great time that was and an amazing surprise for us all at that time to have achieved so much that was unexpected. Those were grueling days, but the training was worth every drop of sweat. Some of my fondest memories of Stevenson are from that cross-country team, our camaraderie and our surprising success, so thank you for being such a big part of that.

Frank and Barbara Keith

Hope you and your family are doing well and I wish you all the best.

Congratulations, Coach Thayer: Great to hear the RLS men’s CC team has captured the title! I know the effort and devotion it takes to keep the wide breadth of talent running at their best over the long season. It takes a special coach and a focused group of guys to pull off that feat. I ran from ’79–’83, and graduated before the first championship, and would have loved to have that memory to look back upon. I was fortunate enough to get the MVP nod for 2 or 3 years back in the ’80s. In those days we ran the trail where Poppy Hills is now. I think my best time was 17:47 over the 3.2-mile course. I hope the guys are basking in their accomplishment, something they will look back upon proudly for many years to come. It is not the glamorous sport that gets much attention, so most of the guys and girls subjecting themselves to turned ankles, skinned knees, countless hours of training in the cold Pebble Beach mist and drizzle are doing it for the love of the accomplishment of just plain finishing. With your coaching, your men have not just finished the season, but finished on top. Way to go, Pirates! Congratulations on a job well done! Chris Ledford ’83

Best Regards, Thank you for including the welldeserved story on Frank and Barbara Keith in the Annual Report. Reading it makes me look back at my four years at Stevenson (1970 – 74), and one word that always comes to mind is “gratitude.” I have always been most grateful for all that Frank Keith has done for Stevenson over the past 50 years. Frank introduced many of us to Pre-Columbian Studies through his support of Merle Greene

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Mark Pocock ’88

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! With such diverse alumni, your personal stories and experiences embody the school’s mission to lay the groundwork for a fulfilling life. Hearing about your personal achievements and life experiences lets us share in the rich and exciting lives of Stevenson alumni. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.” So turn on your computer, and shoot us an email! Please email your letters to the editor, personal stories and high-resolution images (300 dpi) to alumni@stevensonschool.org.

Dear Mr. Stephenson: Last spring, I read on the Stevenson website about the passing of General Clarence Harvey. I had the privilege of taking General Harvey’s Algebra II class in the 1971-1972 school year. When I learned of General Harvey’s passing, I wrote to you of some of my experiences in General Harvey’s class. A recent conversation with a friend brought to mind General Harvey’s class again. As I recall, in the 1970s, there was much discussion in academic settings regarding the “relevance” of certain classes. Most of the discussion occurred on college campuses, but some filtered down to the secondary school level as well. The relevance of academic curricula was a topic of discussion in the media, and, as a result, became a topic of discussion around our family’s dinner table. This was due in part to the fact that my father was an academic administrator at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and our dinner table often featured professors and other administrators from the school. They were interested in my opinions, as

to a certain extent, I was a representative of the younger generation that, at the time, was questioning the relevance of certain classes as a mandatory part of any academic curriculum. I do not recall any resolutions occurring as a result of those discussions, but I am sure that the relevance of certain classes, such as Algebra, was questioned.

variable, and was sometimes a number, but did not have to be. The unknown variable that I might be searching for could be a concept, a piece of missing information, or the blank in a numeric equation. However, I have found that the application of General Harvey’s algebraic principles could usually help me find “x” regardless of its nature.

Recently, I was having lunch with a friend and client of mine who is a real estate developer and builder. I am a commercial lender with a community bank in Virginia. In the course of our conversation we began discussing whether, now that we were in our mid50s, we used the information that we were taught in our high school classes in any regular manner.

I do not know if any discussions regarding the relevance of certain classes still occur. In retrospect, I find that some of the most enduring and practical lessons that I received from my academic experiences came from the classes in which such results were not expected. Such was the case with General Harvey’s Algebra II class. I entered his class seeking only to survive the year. I find that today I still use the principles that he taught so well. And I often use them in unexpected areas.

My friend indicated that he often used geometry on a regular basis, in order to help him in his building projects. I admitted that I was often called upon to solve for “x” and in so doing relied on the lessons that I learned in General Harvey’s Algebra class. I also mentioned that “x” was always an unknown

I hope that you will accept the enclosed small donation to the school in his memory. Sincerely, John G. Wales ’73

CONTRIBUTORS MARK SOLTAU

PETER DEBRUGE

JAMES TEMPLE

Golf Digest Contributing Editor

Variety Magazine Associate Editor

San Francisco Chronicle Technology Business Reporter

Mark Soltau joined the San Francisco Examiner in 1981, where he covered golf for 16 years. Mark left in 1997 to become the National Golf Writer for CBS Sportsline.com. In 2002, Mark was hired by Golf Digest as a contributing editor, a position he currently holds, and has written extensively about Stevenson alums Bobby Clampett, Christian Cevaer, Rob Grube, and Mina Harigae.

Peter Debruge is a features editor and film critic for Variety, where he covers everything from the comedy beat to Comic-Con, foreign pics to sprocket operas (to borrow some “slanguage” from the Hollywood trade paper’s insider playbook). His writing on film has appeared in such outlets as Creative Screenwriting, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, Life, IndieWire, and The Miami Herald.

James Temple is an award-winning reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, who has been covering business in the Bay Area for more than a decade. His writing has appeared in Wired, Bloomberg Markets Magazine, and the San Jose Mercury News. He’s a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

COMPLETING THE PLAN: JOE WANDKE STEERS THE STEVENSON SHIP TO GREATNESS.

The average tenure of independent school heads in today’s world is between five and six years at one school. It is no small feat then, that next fall Joe Wandke will begin his 28th year as the leader of Stevenson School. For perspective, among the 1,216 independent school heads in the United States, Joe has one of the top-ten longest tenures at the same school. The story of Joe and Marilee Wandke’s time at Stevenson is not simply one of duration. It is more about what the school has become while holding on to the values and mission created by founder Robert Ricklefs and continued by the second headmaster, Gordon Davis. Joe and Marilee arrived at Stevenson in 1983 at a perilous moment. The heavy inflation of the time had put the school in a fiscal spiral, postponed the realization of the visionary master plan to build out the campus, and produced an operating indebtedness approaching $1 million. Joe was up to the challenge, restructuring the business operations and conceiving a plan not only to retire the debt but to

STEVENSON SCHOOL

build an operating plan that would save the school from such troubles again. The plans were uncomfortable to some and not without controversy becuase they were daring and dramatic measures. But the red ink disappeared. The debt was retired. Faculty compensation was overhauled and worked into the top ranks of NAIS schools. The long-deferred physical plant improvements began and momentum was created. Coach Wilson Hall opened in 1987 followed soon after by the new Silverado Hall. Also in 1987, Joe helped found the “Church in the Forest” using Erdman Chapel, and he accepted the gift of Briarcliff Academy in Carmel, from Mr. and Mrs. Alan Shugart, which today has become Stevenson’s Carmel Campus. In 1993, Willametta Keck Day Hall was dedicated and in 1999 the completion of Atwood Hall ushered in a new era for Stevenson’s residential program. Most recently in 2003, the Rosen Family Student Center opened and serves as the physical and functional heart of Stevenson’s Pebble Beach Campus.

Joe has achieved this with the help of a dedicated and talented faculty and the generosity of friends of Stevenson who have invested their philanthropy (the endowment has grown from $450,000 to more than $21 million since Joe arrived). Joe Wandke has challenged all of us at Stevenson to be even more than we imagined possible. He continues to imagine great things for Stevenson and in the next few years will work to complete the master plan, which began when he first came to the Monterey Peninsula. Lead on, Joe.

ALUMNI

SPOTLIGHT

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“At RLS, we both wanted to be doctors and joked about opening up a practice together in the future. We’ve come full circle, and I’m very grateful for what we’ve achieved together, along with our business partners.”

– Farrah White ’94

Bryan White ’93 and Farrah White ’94 at the Orbit Baby office.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI

SPOTLIGHT

Get the inside scoop on fellow alumni whose unique paths led them to exceptional personal achievements.

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Beth Ann Simpkins ’00 On her page in the 2000 Spyglass she wrote, “I’ve had a wonderful time.” Fast forward to 2010 in New York City, Beth Ann Simpkins ’00 was interviewed by The Village Voice about her life in cooking and her work with executive chef Nate Appleman at A16 in San Francisco, then opening an A16 in Tokyo, then opening Appleman’s latest creation, Pulino’s Bar & Pizzeria, in New York. The wonderful time for her continues at the corner of The Bowery and East Houston Street. It’s not clear when it all started, but while studying for a BFA at University of the Pacific, Beth Ann spent her junior year in Florence. When she returned she was dismayed by what her sorority sisters considered good food. She knew she wanted to become involved in cooking, and upon graduation from UOP with a BFA in studio art, she headed to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco for 16 months, became involved in the slow-food movement, and got a volunteer job on Saturdays at A16, where (close your eyes) she “got to butcher a lamb and got totally hooked.” She did a culinary externship in France, in a Michelin-rated kitchen, but found it taking her in the opposite direction from where she wanted to go. All she could think about was A16.

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Her four-month visit to Japan was as consulting chef in the establishment of an A16 restaurant in the Mitsubishi Building in the Marunouchi District in Tokyo. She was pretty much the voice of her company there, and for the first couple of weeks — until a translator was provided — she was working with an entirely Japanese kitchen crew she struggled to communicate with. “It was challenging in ways you can’t imagine,” but everything worked out well in the end. It was her baptism in opening restaurants. As for Beth Ann’s favorite pizzas, while there’s nothing like the classic margherita, she particularly enjoys Pulino’s breakfast pizza with bacon, sausage, white cheddar, and eggs. And beyond pizza? She’s looking forward to finding some good steakhouses and New York soba noodles, her favorite food in Japan.

Original article from The Village Voice. To read more about Beth Ann, go to:

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While many people associate Pulino’s pizzas with Appleman, their development and execution have been largely overseen by Beth Ann and Ruth Kaplan. They head Pulino’s pizza program and in their view, A16 and Pulino’s pizzas are completely different, from the ovens they use to their dough and choice of toppings. “We’re a kitchen,” she says, “where everybody’s opinion matters, and when we hired our line cooks we told them if you have an opinion, we want to hear it.”

BETH ANN’S FAVORITE PIZZA? While there’s nothing like the classic margherita, she particularly enjoys Pulino’s breakfast pizza with bacon, sausage, white cheddar, and eggs.

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http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/archives/2010/03/chatting_with_b.php

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From AP chemistry class partners in ’92 to dynamic business duo, Bryan and Farrah’s Orbit Baby products have made the celeb A-List.

Bryan White ’93 & FarrahWhite ’94 The Orbit Baby concept was born in 2002 as a way to bring intelligent, modern design to family life and travel. Bryan and Farrah partnered with close friends and cofounders Joseph Hei and his wife Vivian. Joseph and Bryan had worked together at IDEO, a world-renowned product design firm in Palo Alto. As new parents, they experienced firsthand the lack of innovation and quality materials in the car seat and stroller market. Car seats in general were hard to use safely, and infant gear seemed to become obsolete with little thought for upgradeability. The team rapidly started prototyping and testing ideas with parents and pregnant couples, working out of their garage, which they set up as a prototyping workshop with a small office space above in the attic. For more than three years the team researched the market in great detail and was finally able to secure the funding needed to bring the product to market. Farrah, who received her MBA from Santa Clara in finance/marketing management, led the charge on setting up the financial and business systems that would serve as the foundation for four years of massive growth. In the years that have followed, Orbit Baby has become a Hollywood favorite and is often seen on the pages of the celebrity magazines with famous users such as Jennifer Garner, Halle Berry,

Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon, and Toby McGuire. The company has also been featured in numerous magazine and television shows, including a storyline on The Office and a recent article in Fast Company. Their team has grown significantly and Orbit Baby now makes its home in a large two-story building with a distribution center onsite, a long way from the days of the garage. Orbit Baby products, which include more than 26 SKUs, are sold in more than 10 countries worldwide.

Often seen on the pages of the celebrity magazines, Orbit Baby has become a Hollywood favorite and was even featured in a storyline on The Office.

Bryan and Farrah, who met in AP chemistry class at Stevenson in 1992, have been married for 12 years and have two children, Ethan (8) and Ella (3). “People tell me all the time that they could never work with their spouse, but the truth is we have a very similar vision for the company and love being together at work,” Farrah explains. “At RLS, we both wanted to be doctors and joked about opening up a practice together in the future. We’ve come full circle, and I’m very grateful for what we’ve achieved together, along with our business partners. It’s beyond what I would have ever imagined all those years ago in chemistry.”

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI

SPOTLIGHT

Ben Eichorn ’01 After graduating from Whitman College in 2005, Ben Eichorn ’01 and Stevenson classmate Marcus Pearson ’01 took a sixmonth hike through Central and South America. When Ben returned home, he decided he wanted to do something that would influence people’s eating habits for the better. For the past four years he has worked as assistant garden teacher at The Edible Schoolyard (ESY) (www. edibleschoolyard.org), a thriving one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, a public school for grades 6, 7, and 8 in Berkeley, California.

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The idea has taken root and spread across the country and around the world, even to the White House, and the Chez Panisse Foundation that Waters started in 1996 helps support it. Ben was raised in Big Sur, where his family has been growing fruits and vegetables for more than 25 years. While a student at Whitman College, he wrote his senior thesis on the potential for programs modeled on the Edible Schoolyard to positively impact academic achievement.

Gabe Georis ’96

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It all began with chef, author, and food activist Alice Waters, who in 1971 opened Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley and offered her customers a single, fixedprice menu that changes daily and uses only foods in season. She started the ESY project in 1994 in collaboration with King Middle School teachers and community members, and by 1997 more than an acre of asphalt was cleared and cover crop was planted, and the school’s unused 1930s cafeteria kitchen was refurbished to house the kitchen classroom. Since then, more than 3,000 students have graduated from the Edible Schoolyard with the skills and knowledge they need to make lifelong, healthy choices about what they eat.

After a number of years sharpening his restaurateur chops at Carmel’s well-known Casanova restaurant (part of the Georis restaurant dynasty), Gabe opened Mundaka — a tapas-centric restaurant in downtown Carmel. The name Mundaka was inspired by a surf town in the Basque region of northern Spain where Gabe studied and surfed. The menu is anchored in the conventional recipes of Spain with unique flavors and food combinations that have wowed foodies and food critics alike. With its groovy decor of reclaimed materials and Gabe’s welcoming personality, it’s like a dinner party every night at Mundaka. 10

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He is passionate about issues such as food access and food security as well as the renewal of our ancestral American food traditions. Currently Ben is designing a consulting business for institutions interested in growing food onsite for consumption in cafeteria-type food programs. Potential clients include schools, businesses, restaurants, hospitals, and prisons. The company is called Know Your Lunch (www.knowyourlunch.com); he will launch it this summer. Ben believes that the more visible the production and preparation of our food becomes, the wiser our food choices will be. FOOTNOTE: The 10 handsome 3-by-8foot beds comprising the Stevenson Organic Garden west of Lindsley Science Center were built and donated to the school by the Eichorn family: Peter, Janie, Ben, and Lizzy ’07.

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C A M P U S & FA C U LT Y

Sophomore Wilderness Expedition The annual Sophomore Expedition is now 16 years old and has been a part of the Stevenson experience for about 900 alumni, 20 percent of our former students. Begun in 1994 by then-English teacher Peter Fayroian, who was hired to create the program, “Expo” takes about 80 students into the wilderness on a

NEWS

50-mile trek that includes moving from place to place eight times in 10 days and being in one place, alone, for a 36-hour solo. This year 61 sophomores, 21 junior and senior co-leaders, and nine adults left on February 26 for Henry Coe State Park and spent 11 days moving over tough elevation changes, camping at a new site each night, and enduring five days of rain to create lifelong memories and confront and overcome physical and emotional challenges. This is Expo’s second year at Henry Coe Park; the Ventana Wilderness, its former home, is taking longer than expected to recover from the fires of

two years ago, and the work that will be required to restore trails may in fact be prohibitive.

Photography teacher Cole Thompson has been part of every expedition and remembers that in the early days, an attraction for students considering the program was getting out of winter term final exams. The spring break was shorter then, and part of the benefit of the experience was its length. Today, students leave the morning after finals and get back early enough to enjoy a weeklong Continued next page...

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

CAMPUS

NEWS

Continued from previous page...break before the beginning of the spring term. Another change, from Cole’s perspective, is that co-leader training is much more extensive and student leadership receives greater emphasis. Science teacher Bob McCormick heads the program now and concurs. The student co-leaders become so capable at running everything, he says, that the adults are freed from the daily requirements to become observers of the larger scene that unfolds during the course of the expedition. This gives the well-qualified student co-leader the unusual ability to lead extended outdoor trips at a young age. Bob finds this to be an immensely important and rewarding growth opportunity for young leaders.

Alex Welton Ready for the Next Chapter With mentoring from historian Shelby Steele, Stevenson senior Alex Welton wrote Dawn, a 316-page novel set in war-torn Eastern Europe. He wrote the book, he said, “to prove to myself that I could. I enjoy the creative process.” It hasn’t found a publisher yet, but he’s looking for one.

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The assumption is that someone who doesn’t take a day away from writing and research for nine weeks has some unusual characteristics. One would be focus, another would be endurance, but for a 16-year-old, like Alex was when he completed the first draft, another would have to be passion. In addition to completing Dawn, Alex is an “A” student who played three years of interscholastic tennis and two years of water polo, became an Eagle Scout at age 16, has a weekly radio show at KSPB, and has composed several piano and orchestral pieces that were evaluated by acclaimed Hollywood composer and Stevenson parent Alan Silvestri. “He’s one of those kids you hear about before you actually have him (in your class),” said David Schmittgens, his English teacher. “He’s as advertised.” Alex is working on a second novel, set in 1940s China, but he isn’t limiting himself. He sees himself as a multidimensional storyteller. “I have many mediums through which I would like to express them,” said Welton, whose latest passion is photography.

The Class of ’17 does it again! For the fifth straight year, the class of ’17 (now 5th-graders) participated in the annual Carmel Sand Castle Contest held in September at Carmel Beach. In years past the kids have won a youth award, but this year they earned an award in the adult category, winning the Novice Award. The theme of this year’s sand castle contest was “Doghouses and Playhouses.” The kids threw in their ideas and collectively decided and designed their own version of a “Snoopy’s Doghouse” complete with Snoopy lying on top of his domain. Congratulations to the 5th grade for working together as a great team!

SCIENCE GURUS Inspired by a dark and wet after-sunset stroll from Silverado to Day Hall, brothers Jimmy and Michael Lin from Taiwan launched a science project that garnered 1st runner-up to the Grand Prize at the Monterey County Science and Engineering Fair. Their project also received first place in the Applied Mechanics & Structures division, a special award from the American Public Works Association, the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, and the Award from the United States Army and Air Force. They represented Monterey County at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, CA the week of May 9–14 and the California State Science Fair in Los Angeles, at USC, May 17–18. Jimmy, a sophomore, and Michael, a junior, developed a system to take energy from the sprinklers and put it into lighting applications along the wet Silverado and Day Hall sidewalks. They not only watered the lawn in front of Day Hall but also used the water to power turbine generators, which created electricity. And the system recharges itself. Both Michael and Jimmy plan to become mechanical engineers.

Six Seniors Named National Merit Finalists for 2010 The National Merit Scholarship Program is an academic competition for recognition and scholarships that began in 1955. Approximately 1.5 million juniors take the PSAT test each year and 15,000 are chosen as finalists. Stevenson’s six finalists, Andrew Lu from Saratogo, CA, Melissa MacEwen from Los Altos, CA, Catherine Wang from Seoul, South Korea, Alanna Weisberg from Elk Grove,CA, Alexander Welton and Sam

Wilcoxon, both from Carmel, represented the most by any school on the Monterey Peninsula. In addition, seniors Hillary Merry and Tyler Woods were selected as Outstanding Participants in the National Achievement Scholarship Program honoring academically promising African-American high school students, scoring in the top 3 percent of the 160,000 students who requested consideration.

ROBO-PIRATES In December 2009, Stevenson’s Carmel Campus middle school robotics team performed well in the second round of competition and advanced to the First Lego League (FLL) Northern California Championship in January. The team had previously advanced through the first round in the fall, which was held at Google.

Stevenson team members demonstrated both poise and focus during the tournament. The children improved their score on the robot game from 180 at the Google tournament to 295 and made significant strides in their project as well. The judges’ feedback specifically stated, “Wonderful project! Well implemented.”

Talented Wordsmiths Win State Writing Awards Four Carmel Campus students (Chloe Reimann, Eli Meckler, Emily Termotto, and Matthew Ganeles), recently received California Writing Awards. The student work was evaluated by a panel of California teachers, professors, writers, and literary professionals who gave only 160 awards.

chosen as one of five students in the state to be nominated for the “Five American Voices” Award, which honors the best in show in any category and any grade level, 7-12. His poem was forwarded to the Scholastic Writing Awards for national judging.

Matthew Ganeles, a 7th-grader, won the highest award, a Gold Key, for his poem entitled “Raking Hay.” Matt was also

From left: Emily Termotto, Chloe Reimann, Matthew Ganeles, Eli Meckler 2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

CAMPUS

NEWS

SPORTS WRAP

College Sports Scholarships

Debra Lee

Josie Felix Kyle Miller Dana Prelsnik

Four Stevenson seniors from the 2010 class have signed scholarship letters of intent to continue their athletic careers in college. Kyle Miller from Pacific Grove signed to play tennis at the University of California, Davis. Kyle led the Stevenson Boys Tennis team to the CCS quarter finals last year. He currently ranks #7 in the USTA Northern California Section Boys 18’s Singles. Megan Volpano from Salinas will attend Boston University and play softball. When

Burning Rubber At the State Championships in Fresno, the Stevenson Boys Cross Country team placed 11th out of 24 teams in division IV, and the Pirates were the thirdstrongest team in Northern California, placing ahead of rivals Carmel and San Lorenzo Valley. James Silvestri led the Pirates, placing 26th overall (out of 200 runners in the division IV race) and 8th in Northern California, for division IV in a time of

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Megan Volpano

asked what excites her most about BU, she said, “Playing for a school that has a good softball team and balances softball with education.” Dana Prelsnik from Pebble Beach has signed on to play softball at the University of San Diego, and she’s obviously happy with her choice. She explained, “You have to like the school. I wouldn’t have gone to any school just for a scholarship.’’

16:27 for the 5k course. Other members of this outstanding varsity team were Martin Barshai, Alex Farmer, Eddie Lu, Tobin Paxton, Andreas Spanos, and Sam Wilcoxon. According to Coach Thayer, the 2009 runners achieved the best team time of these six-man Stevenson squads, which means that collectively they are

Josie Felix who lives in Pebble Beach, will sign in April with UNC-Greensboro. She wants to try something new for college, get away from California and go to another area of the country, and also continue to do something she enjoys (pitching a softball). In addition, Debra Lee from Singapore will continue her golf career at Brown University. Brown and the other Ivy League schools are NCCA Division I but do not offer athletic scholarships.

the fastest cross country team in the school’s history (at least since 1987).

DOUBLE THE VICTORY Stevenson freshmen tennis players Ben and Mason Vierra celebrated the new year by upsetting the 3rd- and 4th-seeded players at the USTA Winter National Tennis Tournament in Tucson, Arizona. This Level 1 national tournament brings together the top 128 ranked players in the nation, and the twin brothers finished 7th and 8th in the tournament without having to play each other. Mason Vierra

Ben Vierra

A SLAM DUNK Senior basketball sensation Brian Bhaskar, who led the Mission Trail Athletic League in scoring this year, was named MTAL Most Valuable Player after a vote of the league’s coaches. He shared the league’s top honor with J.T. Harper of Pacific Grove. Brian’s athletic abilities, work ethic, and positive attitude contributed to the success of the boys basketball team this season, and his leadership was recognized by the league coaches. Sophomore Chris Jaeger was named to the all-MTAL Defensive Team. Photo by Asher Vandevort ’12 2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

FA C U LT Y

NEWS YOUNG NAMED TO HALL OF FAME Athletic Director Jeff Young was inducted into the Northern California Lacrosse Hall of Fame at an awards dinner in San Francisco in February. This honor was awarded by the Northern California Lacrosse Foundation, a Regional Chapter of US Lacrosse, to those “...who by their deeds as players, coaches,...and by the example of their lives, personify the great contribution of the sport of lacrosse to our way of life.” In the spring, Coach Young was also named a California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Model Coach in recognition of his holistic approach to coaching and the positive influence he has had on his teams and the entire athletic program at Stevenson School. CIF governs high school sports in the state of California. The CIF Board wrote the following citation in honoring Coach Young:

From Company to Classroom Bruce Dini, Stevenson class of 1977, had been in banking and the financial sector ever since he graduated from the University of the Pacific and earned his MBA from Golden Gate University. He was not too sure he was quite ready to exit the investment business, but the opportunity presented itself when his company was merging with a larger one in 2006. Bruce was fortunate enough to be able to take a step back and think about what he really wanted to do next. That reflection confirmed that he had always enjoyed working with kids, starting with work at the Stevenson Summer Camp after graduation in 1977. So in the fall of 2008, he started working on a teaching credential and began substitute teaching. A wildly successful long-term substitute teaching gig at

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“During his 30-year tenure at Stevenson School, Jeff Young has coached countless numbers of outstanding young men and teams in football and lacrosse. He has more than a half dozen Santa Cruz league championships in lacrosse, the most recent coming in 2009. Although his teams have won on numerous occasions, winning is something that Young does not stress; rather he pushes his athletes to work hard, to be the best person they can be, and to win and lose with equal grace and humility. No matter where or when Jeff is asked to serve, he willingly does so and is not only effective in those leadership roles, is a delight to work with in any regard. A man of integrity and heart, Jeff’s life is a model for all to follow.”

Stevenson last spring sealed the deal. Bruce accepted the school’s offer for a full-time faculty position this year teaching history and coaching. Even though he and brother Paul, class of 1975, are both alumni, and Bruce has lived in Carmel for the past 21 years, he feels like he is back home. Welcome home, Bruce.

Sketching Vijay Singh Steph Pratt sketching Tom Brady

THE ART OF GOLF Steph Pratt, Stevenson’s Visual Arts director, teacher, resident faculty member, and accomplished artist, was featured in a television news report by local NBC affiliate KSBW-TV in February. For several years, Mr. Pratt has sketched celebrity and professional golfers as they played in the annual AT&T National Pro-Am Golf Tournament. The AT&T is played each February on three courses: Pebble Beach, The Shore Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club, and in our own backyard at

A Spring Baseball Classic We know spring has come to Stevenson when Dan Powers ’77, economics teacher and man of many talents and passions, appears at Assembly in his camel hair overcoat and fedora; and with a ball, bat, and catcher’s mask to recite “Casey at the Bat.” Written by Earnest Lawrence Thayer in 1888 while he was working at the San Francisco Examiner, it’s been referred to as a classic, embodying, as it does, hope “that springs eternal within

MAKING HISTORY Spyglass Hill Golf Course, where students are just a few steps from the 18th tee. Mr. Pratt also takes advantage of the location to bring his art students to the golf tournament to practice the fine art of drawing and painting human forms in action. There they can work on their technique and rub shoulders with celebrities and professional athletes.

History teacher, dorm parent, and coach Justin Bates ’99 not only led the varsity soccer team to its best season in 25 years (12-3-3), he recently recorded six episodes from early American history for the History Channel website. According to team captain Jerre Foo ’10, “Coach Bates has helped Stevenson soccer turn a big corner. He believes in us, understands us, and appreciates all the other demands on our time and the role soccer plays in our lives. We respect him and we give him everything we have; and this year that’s been a lot.”

each human breast,” fear, anticipation, and disappointment in the only truly American game that is, literally and figuratively, timeless. Dan has been doing this for the past 20 years, playing every part to perfection: from the arrogance of Casey to the decisiveness of the umpire to the emotion of the crowd. And this year, Dan’s 11-year-old son Brad joined him on Factor Stage. They played their roles and said their lines like vaudeville superstars, and entranced students, faculty, and visitors with their actions and antics.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

The

PIRATE

REVIEW

Introducing a collection of alumni artists, authors and vintners whose creative instincts generated a wide range of impressive work. From international literature to award-winning wine, we invite you to sit back and enjoy reading more about these unique alumni. The Pirate Review provides an opportunity for alumni to share their work and create a forum.

“VIEWS”

A New Perspective from photographer Winston Boyer ’72 In the world according to Winston Boyer, a good photograph transforms the ordinary and shifts the viewer’s reality to offer a new perspective. To accomplish this, Boyer has used the flexibility inherent in digital photography and has gravitated toward a painter’s technique — combining light, perspective, and composition — to create images characteristic of paintings, images that fall between the real and surreal. In his new series “Views,” Boyer has taken long panorama pictures with a digital camera and compressed the perspective. The result is a photograph

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that makes available to the viewer all the real information captured by the photographer in a format that could be described as Gothic and “otherworldly.” Compression has always been one of a painter’s tools; even in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” the mountains in the background are distorted in a way similar to what Boyer is playing with in this newfound perspective. Winston studied cinematography and art history at Monterey Peninsula College, San Francisco State University, and UC Santa Cruz. He considers color photography his medium and uses the Cibachrome printing process and Giclee Pigments Prints to produce his fine arts prints. His work is in the permanent collections at the Chicago Art Institute, The Brooklyn Museum, The Corcoran

Gallery, Crocker Museum, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He has had one-man exhibitions in Massachusetts, New York, and California; and he has participated in group exhibitions in Paris, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Carmel. His book American Roads was published in 1989 by Little Brown/Bullfinch Press. He has done commission work with CBS Sports, Yachting, Cyclist Magazine, Southern Accents, and others. He lives in Big Sur with his wife and works in both fine art and as a commercial photographer (www.winstonboyer.com). He is represented by Gallery Sur in Carmel (www.gallerysur.com ).

“Miya Ando’s refined, subtle works of rolled steel, made of sheets of burnished and chemically treated metal, are also a must-see for anyone interested in postminimalist contemporary art.” – Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times art review, March 5, 2009

Miya Ando ’91 and her

8-FOLD PATH

According to the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, the impermanent nature of form means that nothing possesses essential, enduring identity. Such is the nature of Miya Ando’s work — always shifting, constantly varying, yet materially constant, biographically concrete. Miya Ando is Japanese and Russian, a descendant of Bizen sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu, and was raised among sword smiths turned Buddhist priests in a Buddhist temple in Okayama, Japan. Now living in New York, she continues the tradition of her ancestors by using the materials and the techniques of the sword smith in

contemporary forms. Ando primarily works with steel, this material being the support, both conceptual and physical, for infinitely varying formal compositions consisting of subtle surface additions, subtractions, and transformations. Philosophically rooted in the Kyoto school of thought, in particular the writing of Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, her work is minimal, reduced, and could be placed somewhere between Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anges Martin, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Mariko Mori. Miya Ando’s work comes to us from the very distant past, ushering into the present a new form of transcendent beauty. When Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society opened its meditation center to make teachings of the Buddha

available to all, they asked Miya, a practicing Buddhist herself, to work on the center’s focal point. Miya’s grid of four steel canvases measuring four feet each is a metaphor for the Dharma Wheel and the 8-fold path. She describes it as a “wide open piece of work with the opportunity for the viewer to go anywhere within the field.” Miya earned a BA degree in East Asian studies at UC Berkeley and entered a master’s program at Yale in the same area in 1998. In 1999 she apprenticed to Master Metal Smith Hattori Studio in Okayama, Japan; and in 2010 she received a Certificate of Completion from the Public Art Academy of Northern California.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

The PIRATE

REVIEW

PRAIRIES AND SAVANNAS IN MICHIGAN

Rediscovering Our Natural Heritage

Coauthored by Joshua G. Cohen ’91 Hardly anything in nature is more exciting and challenging for naturalists than something at once characterized by terrifying fire, extreme sites, rare plants and animals, and stunningly beautiful landscapes – all of which are features of Michigan’s prairies and savannas. In this beautifully illustrated, readable, and insightful book, the authors tell the story of Michigan’s prairies and savannas. Focusing on the natural communities and their biota, the authors emphasize the key properties and processes that naturally create, maintain, and restore the continuum of wet and dry prairies and savannas. Especially valuable is how private landowners and individuals can work effectively to restore this diverse Michigan community heritage. I highly recommend this book as an essential resource for everyone interested in nature, natural history, and how interactions between physical and biotic features determine the range of communities

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from prairie to forest. — This review by Burton C. Barnes, Professor Emeritus, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan

dynamic systems, the plants and animals they support, the ecological processes that sustain them, and current efforts to restore them.

Prairies and savannas are a rare and unique part of Michigan’s natural heritage. Once occupying a significant portion of Lower Michigan’s landscape, these dynamic and varied communities have nearly vanished, along with numerous species that rely on the habitats they provide. The little that remains is threatened by habitat destruction, invasive species, and rapidly closing canopies. This book gives a complete understanding of these

Joshua is an ecologist with Michigan Natural Features Inventory and serves on the editorial board of Natural Areas Journal as a plant ecology editor. He graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a BA in history, and from the Duke University Nicholas School of Environment in 1999 with a master’s of environmental management. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Martha and their children Esther and Sebastian.

The PIRATE

REVIEW

HAPPINESS: A HISTORY Darrin M. McMahon ’84

good, as Mr. McMahon nicely puts it, was more important than feeling good. For Herodotus and his contemporaries, happiness was not a ‘subjective state’ but a ‘characterization of an entire life that can be reckoned only at death.’ ”

Review excerpted from “The Economist” “(In) Darrin McMahon’s excellent history of happiness his central argument is that the modern idea of happiness was an invention of the Enlightenment. The idea of heavenly felicity came down to earth, says Mr. McMahon, during the 17th and 18th centuries. ‘Happiness, in the Enlightenment view,’ he explains, ‘was less an ideal of godlike perfection than a self-evident truth, to be pursued and obtained in the here and now.’ In 1776 America’s Founding Fathers declared ‘the pursuit of happiness’ to be one of man’s inalienable rights,” along with life and liberty.” “Historically speaking, this was a radical change. For the ancient Greeks, happiness was largely bound up with notions of luck and fortune. Any man, however high and mighty, could be brought down by a twist of fate. The important thing, therefore, was not to seek happiness for its own sake but to live virtuously. Being

“Later, Christianity would play down fortune and fate while holding out the promise of eternal happiness in the next life. With the Enlightenment, the idea that God was happiness morphed into the idea that happiness was god. By the 1840s the distinguished Scottish curmudgeon Thomas Carlyle was complaining: ‘Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, ‘happy’.’ It is good that Carlyle did not live to see the self-help section of any big 21st-century bookshop, its shelves groaning with bestsellers like Infinite Happiness, Absolute Happiness, Everlasting Happiness, Compulsory Happiness, Happiness Is Your Destiny and Find Happiness In Everything You Do.” “Carlyle was right to suspect that the new doctrine of happiness tended to raise unrealistic expectations, and his perception is still spot-on. Living standards and life expectancy are better than ever and a multi-billiondollar pharmaceutical industry provides chemical solutions to gloomy moods. But are we really any happier now than we were in Carlyle’s day—or, for that matter, in Herodotus’s?”

“Mr. McMahon sensibly does not try to define happiness and, in presenting the theories of great figures of the past, he does not take sides between them. He does, however, show particular sympathy for the views of John Stuart Mill. ‘Those only are happy’, Mill reckoned, ‘who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.’ ” Darrin is Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University; he was the speaker at Stevenson’s commencement in May 2009. He earned BA and PhD degrees from UC Berkeley and Yale, respectively, and lives in Florida with his wife Courtney and their son Julien. His first book, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity was published in 2001 by the Oxford University Press.

Darrin M. McMahon ’84

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

The PIRATE

REVIEW

CHAD MELVILLE ’89 COMES FULL CIRCLE WITH Chad Melville graduated from Stevenson in 1989 and went on to attend the University of Southern California. He worked with his father at Melville Vineyards and now, with wife Mary, has started Samsara. Samsara is a Sanskrit word meaning the eternal cycle of life. The world we live in now; one of passion, oneness and harmony. This idea is key to the philosophy of Chad and Mary’s Samsara wines. Chad and Mary produce limited releases of Pinot Noir and Syrah from micro-sites within carefully selected vineyards. “Farming is a metaphor for many of life’s most important lessons. Though it is our propensity as humans to do so, farming teaches us that there are elements occurring in nature that are far beyond our control. After I apply my knowledge and passion to the vineyard, I must then surrender my efforts to a causality

SAMSARA

about which I have little say. Within this struggle, the lesson of humility is learned,” Chad explains. Chad and Mary truly believe that they are winegrowers, not winemakers — that is, that all of the important work is done in the vineyard and there is little handling or manipulation once the fruit reaches the winery. That includes the use of whole clusters in their fermentations, which lends a spiciness to the wines that Chad and Mary particularly like. “Stems help to absorb the overt fruitiness of wines. To us, too many California wines are simply about fruit and lack the complexity that we hope to impart to our wines.” The resulting wine is an interpretation of the tenuous balance between the power of nature and elements beyond our control, and the human desire to reach perfection.

“The 2007 Syrah Verna’s Vineyard exhibits a dense black/purple color as well as notes of graphite, charred herbs, black raspberries, blueberries, new saddle leather, and earth. Ripe, full-bodied, rich, beautifully textured, and pure, it should provide plenty of pleasure over the next 6–7 years.”

93 points – Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate #184 “Bright purple. Drop-dead sexy aromas of blackberry, boysenberry and black olive, with sexy Asian spice and floral qualities adding complexity. Deep, focused and spicy, offering vibrant raspberry, cherry compote, allspice and cinnamon flavors, with silky tannins lending support. A nervy spine of minerality adds cut to the long, vibrant, peppery finish. This is a superb value.”

93 points – Josh Raynolds, International Wine Cellar #147 “Complex, with a mix of spice, wild berry, blackberry, pepper, tobacco and vegetal sage flavors, full-bodied and balanced, gaining depth and persistence on the finish. Drink now through 2016. 220 cases made.”

90 points – James Laube, Wine Spectator www.samsarawine.com

STEVENSON SCHOOL

The PIRATE

REVIEW

TALBOTT VINEYARDS A FAMILY AFFAIR WITH ROBERT SHARPE TALBOTT ’66 Robert (Robb) Sharpe Talbott grew up in Carmel Valley working in the family business, the Robert Talbott Tie Company. He also traveled with his family on buying trips to Europe where, while visiting the vineyards in the Burgundy region of southern France, the Talbott family developed its interest in wine. After graduating from Stevenson, then Colorado College, where he majored in fine art, Robb returned to Carmel Valley in 1972 and resumed work with the family tie business. A nature lover and a believer in hard physical work, Robb built his own cabin on a remote piece of land high above the Carmel Valley floor. He heated the cabin with a wood stove and erected a windmill to provide electricity. This remarkable property would one day become the acclaimed Diamond T Vineyard, named after an antique “Diamond T” commercial truck Robb had restored.

In 1981, Robb married and soon began a family that would grow to include the Talbott’s three children: Sarah Case, Robert Logan (who attended Stevenson with the class of 2002), and Kalin Hart. In 1982, Robb launched Talbott Vineyards with his father Robert Talbott Sr., Robb planted the first grapes on Diamond T Vineyard and began designing the winery the family would soon build in Carmel Valley. Since the first vintage in 1983, Robb has overseen the day-to-day operations of the winery, taking on many roles, including sales and marketing responsibilities. He remains an active manager, traveling across the country for in-person sales calls. In what little free time he has, Robb can often be seen riding his Triumph with son Logan along the winding roads of Carmel Valley.

Tasting Highlights “Hot weather is white wine weather, and while your first options might be to uncork a crisp Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, or Albariño, a rich, smoky Chardonnay can also fill the bill for grilled fish or chicken or just about anything else off the grill.” 2007 Logan Chardonnay “Hard clove, cedar, ripe pear and apple flavors are pure, focused, intense and concentrated, gaining depth and richness on the finish.”

89 Points – James Laube, Wine Spectator, July 20, 2009 www.talbottvineyards.com

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

FROM STEVENSON TO SOOTHSAYER

STEVENSON SCHOOL

PAUL SAFFO’S HISTORY AT THE SCHOOL HELPS HIM PEER INTO THE FUTURE BY JAMES TEMPLE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS REPORTER

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

EFORE PAUL SAFFO WAS A STUDENT AT STEVENSON SCHOOL — AND WELL BEFORE HE WAS A RENOWNED TECHNOLOGY FORECASTER OR FOUNDING CHAIRMAN OF THE SAMSUNG SCIENCE BOARD — HE WAS AN UNRULY KID WHO NEARLY FAILED THE SEVENTH GRADE. SURPRISINGLY, IT WASN’T A RIGID SET OF RULES AT THE PEBBLE BEACH CAMPUS THAT ENABLED HIM TO TAP INTO THE DISCIPLINE AND FOCUS NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE WHAT HE DID, BUT THE SCHOOL’S AIR OF INDEPENDENCE. “If you could handle responsibility, people just kept handing you more freedom,” he says. That includes people like Warren Long, the Stevenson biology teacher who shared his love of rock climbing and took him on trips to the sheer granite walls of Yosemite National Park. Or people like Merle and Robbie Robertson, the husband and wife Stevenson duo who organized a trip to Guatemala that inspired a deep interest in archaeology and anthropology that colors his approach to forecasting to this day.

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After graduating in 1972, Paul went on to earn degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University. Today, he’s a consulting associate professor at Stanford, a columnist for ABCNews.com, and a regular adviser to foreign governments and corporations on trends in technology, economics, and politics. He says the responsibilities, honors, and achievements that fairly clutter his curriculum vitae all share a common thread that runs back to his high school years, and the risk taking and intellectual

curiosity that Stevenson’s teachers inspired in him. Paul sat down with James Temple, the technology reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, to discuss his time at the school, the most transformative trends under way today, and what life will look like for today’s Stevenson students. SF CHRON: How did Stevenson School influence what you would go on to achieve? SAFFO: In my case, RLS (the earlier name of the school) really did save me. My kindergarten teacher wanted to hold me and all my friends back. And I almost failed out of seventh grade. So like many students who went to RLS, it really did change the trajectory of my life. The key was independence. It was a place that encouraged you to take responsibility, but in a way that there was a safety net at the same time. If you screwed up, someone would pick you up, dust you off, and get you back on track. Experiential learning and risk taking wasn’t institutionalized then, it just

sort of happened. It was very much an outdoor school before that wasn’t fashionable. In my class, I had a bunch of classmates who were out surfing every afternoon. A day student friend and I went scuba diving every day in the winter. There was structure, but it really was encouraged to go out and do stuff on your own. SF CHRON: Corporations turn to you for your read on where world events are leading us. What’s occupying your thoughts most today; what are the most exciting areas of change? SAFFO: Everybody always feels that the period they’re alive in is the most extraordinary moment in history. That’s simply because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. But even when you filter that out, this is a remarkable time. Sometime in the last year and a half, the global population shifted from being majority rural to majority urban. It’s not like that hasn’t happened lately, it’s just never happened before. We’re really deep into unexplored territory as a species and we’re facing extraordinary challenges.

SF CHRON: How should we address climate change?

society, the debate is becoming steadily more polarized.

SAFFO: The debate has not really even begun. We know climate change is happening, there is unprecedented scientific agreement that it is anthropogenically caused. That leaves the debate of what exactly do we do. There is one camp, call them the engineers, who say we need to engineer our way out of this problem, we need to do mega

The most important change we need to make is to take the future seriously. For all our fascination with the future, the hardest part of my job is that most people still don’t take the future seriously. We’re caught in a sort of anti-Buddhist forever present, where people have lost a sense of history and lost a sense of the future.

“EVERYBODY ALWAYS FEELS THAT THE PERIOD THEY’RE ALIVE IN IS THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY MOMENT IN HISTORY. THAT’S SIMPLY BECAUSE WE DON’T KNOW HOW IT’S GOING TO TURN OUT. BUT EVEN WHEN YOU FILTER THAT OUT, THIS IS A REMARKABLE TIME.”

And some of it is disheartening. I was at RLS when the first Earth Day happened (in 1970). So a lot of these issues were very clear back then. In my work as a forecaster, I first did work on global climate change in 1984, and it had been known for at least 10 years in the climatology community before that. So, one does have a sense of frustration that there are these clear, long-term issues that we’ve seen for decades. Human society has an amazing capacity to defer finding solutions to things until we’re right up against the rocks.

projects, place solar shades (into orbit), and sprinkle iron filings on the Pacific to sequester carbon. And the other side, call them the druids, are folks who say ‘we need to unwind our society a bit, we have to go light on the land, we have to have less impact.’ Neither side has the complete answer. There’s a middle road, but unfortunately like everything else in our

SF CHRON: The tech industry is a highly fragmented and fast-moving marketplace that continually fails to conform to expectations. How does one go about predicting its future to a degree of specificity that is useful for consumers, investors, or corporations? SAFFO: I have heuristics and methodologies, but at the end of the day, it’s really applied common sense. The secret to my job is that technological change is actually extraordinarily slow. It only seems fast because

“ WHAT YOU’RE GOING

TO SEE VERY QUICKLY HERE, AND BY QUICKLY I MEAN IN THE NEXT NINE MONTHS, IS NEW MEDIA TYPES THAT ARE NATIVE TO THE iPAD THAT WOULD NEVER MAKE SENSE VIEWED ON ANY OTHER SCREEN.”

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

THE MOST IMPORTANT CHANGE WE NEED TO MAKE IS TO TAKE THE FUTURE SERIOUSLY. FOR ALL OUR FASCINATION WITH THE FUTURE, THE HARDEST PART OF MY JOB IS THAT MOST PEOPLE STILL DON’T TAKE THE FUTURE SERIOUSLY. people don’t see the antecedents and the indicators. The gating factor is that change occurs at the speed of human thought and behavior, and in a world of stubborn people that can be very slow indeed. So most technological change occurs in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. You have a period of rapid change, and then you reach a plateau where things are meta-stable. But even during that stable period, the technological termites are eating away at the foundations and before you know it you’re off in another period of change. A lot of people, when they look at my work, say “Gosh, it must be hard when you’re wrong.” I say, “No, I’m wrong most of the time, that’s not the hard part. What hurts is when I’m right and I can’t get people to pay attention.” SF CHRON: Speaking of technological termites, after months of building excitement, Apple finally introduced the iPad. What’s the significance of this device? SAFFO: You have to separate the iPad as product, from the iPad as a first of a new category. It’s not a substitute for a laptop, though it will start eating into that market. The right term for it is “media tablet,” and I think it’s as big as the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Before the Macintosh, mice were things that only existed in research labs like (the

STEVENSON SCHOOL

Palo Alto Research Center). The irony is the company that introduced the mouse is now in the process of turning the mouse into a marvelous peripheral that fewer and fewer people will use. If you look at a 10- to 20-year timeframe, we’re going to look back and say, “This is the moment at which the mouse and the keyboard began to head off into the sunset.” What’s really changing, if you think about the computer revolution, is the ratio of how much stuff you put in and how much you get out based on what you put in. When laptops first arrived, you were doing 80 percent input and 20 percent output if you were lucky. As time went on with the Web and other developments, we shifted to the point that you’re putting in less and less, and getting out more and more. Today, you can put a piece of haiku into Google and get a vast result of options or you can do a single click and watch an entire movie. So you don’t really need a keyboard. In that sense what we’re going to do with the iPad is what we’ve always done when we have a new technology: We pave the cow paths. We do some old thing in a new way. The iPad is going to start by porting over all the stuff we’re doing with laptops: movies and text and Web surfing. But what you’re going to see very quickly

here, and by quickly I mean in the next nine months, is new media types that are native to the iPad that would never make sense viewed on any other screen. New media devices always lead to new media forms and new media experiences. SF CHRON: You’ve talked about how the power of the nation-state is being challenged by newly emerging institutions. Who are these players, and what does their rise to power mean? SAFFO: The (United Nations’) passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s for the first time in modern legal history gave individuals rights in public international law. It allowed nongovernmental organizations to become players on the international stage. So you have things like Haiti today, where we essentially just had a humanitarian coup. Forty percent of the Haitian (gross national product) is donor money from NGOs, and nation states are playing only a secondary role. But the big shift is going to be from nation-states to city-states. What we’re seeing is that city-states are becoming the new locus of social, economic, and

SAFFO’S OLD-FASHIONED, BOUND JOURNAL IS WHERE HE CAPTURES IDEAS, ESSAY FRAGMENTS, AND ODD OBSERVATIONS. THIS HABIT BEGAN WITH HIS UNDERGRAD FIELDWORK AND, ALTHOUGH LOW-TECH, ALLOWS HIM TO MIX SKETCHES AND TEXT QUICKLY.

political activity, both actual city-states like Singapore, but also de facto city-states, like Silicon Valley. It has a degree of independence from the state of California, and an economic impact that is global. The big problem in the U.S. today is that there is no longer a single, common American dream. Go into Fremont, California, and find a flag-waving, rabid American patriot, and ask him what it means, and he’ll tell you about how his family came from Mumbai and how they’re living the American dream in Silicon Valley. Now go down to South Carolina and ask a guy in a pickup truck and he’s got rather a different view. The United States is breaking apart and really the only question is: How does it come apart?

SF CHRON: So where does that leave us? SAFFO: Interesting times. For parents, once upon a time, their kids went to school in the same town they were raised in and they worked in the same town. Eventually they moved as far as the capital city of the state, and then to the other side of the country. In the new norm, parents will not only be unsurprised but will hope that their kids get good jobs overseas. Globalization will

so blur the boundaries that America’s best and brightest will be competing for jobs abroad. The kids at Stevenson today are the first generation who will spend a significant amount of their careers as expatriates. Learn more about Paul Saffo’s experience exploring the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change by logging onto www.Saffo.com for interviews, articles, journal entries, and more.

TO HEAR PAUL SAFFO’S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT THIS YEAR’S GRADUATION, VISIT US ONLINE FOR THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION. We are very pleased to have Paul Saffo as our commencement speaker at the Pebble Beach Campus graduation on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For those who can’t attend, his speech will be available online at www.stevensonschool.org/saffo.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

STEVENSON’S GOLFING LEGACY THRIVES WITH HOME COURSE ADVANTAGE BY MARK SOLTAU GOLF DIGEST CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

©Evan Schiller. Pebble Beach®, Spyglass Hill®Golf Course, Pebble Beach Resorts®, and their respective underlying distinctive images are trademarks, service marks and trade dress of Pebble Beach Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 30

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Stevenson School never sought to become a golf power, it happened naturally. Close proximity to several of the world’s best courses, notably home track Spyglass Hill Golf Course, hasn’t hurt. Since 1977, the Pirates have won 23 Mission Trail Athletic League, eight Central Coast Section and six Northern California boys championships. Since 1999, the girls teams have captured four MTAL and two CCS titles. Graduates include Bobby Clampett ’78, Christian Cevaer ’88, Mina Harigae ’08, David Morgan ’99, Rob Grube ’04, Kyle Gentry ’02, Sydney Burlison ’08, Nathan Smith ’02, Emily Talley ’08, and Stephen Sparolini ’99. Clampett was the catalyst in the mid-1970s. Athletic director Wally Goodwin, also the basketball coach and former golf coach, sensed something special in the Monterey native and took him under his wing. “We played in several best-ball tournaments together as a two-man team,” Clampett said. “He was a great, great encourager and always looked for ways to enhance what I was doing.”

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in Cary, N.C., Clampett became a golf commentator for CBS and TBS, and hopes to resume his playing career on the Senior PGA Tour. He will always be grateful for the opportunity to groom his game at Spyglass. It provided a home course advantage to say the least. “It became a joke when other schools would come to play us,” said Clampett. “Most of us on the team could break 40 regularly for nine holes. These other high school kids would come and play Spyglass for the first time and could rarely break 50. Needless to say, we were never beat.”

PERHAPS CLAMPETT’S PASSION FOR GOLF WAS MOST EVIDENT WHEN FOUND DRIVING BALLS OFF THE COAST OR CHIPPING THEM THROUGH THE GOAL POSTS.

“Gordon Davis, the head master, was also a big supporter. When others in the administration didn’t want me to skip the 11th grade, he made it happen. He also didn’t get mad at me the time he caught me hitting wedges through the goal posts on the football field. He actually stayed and watched a while and left saying, ‘Just replace the divots when you’re done.’ ’’ Each winter, Clampett and other Stevenson students galleried the Bing Crosby/AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. After all, Spyglass was just a sand wedge away from the school and access was free. “I would always watch the Crosby,” said Clampett. “One Wednesday, I headed over to the Monterey Peninsula Country Club Shore Course to watch Wally Goodwin and professional Ken Still. They were playing the old 16th – now the 17th hole. A friend and I walked three miles to the course with our books. As soon as I got there, Wally dropped a ball and said to Ken, ‘You have to watch this kid Bobby Clampett hit the ball.’ The shot was 200-

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plus yards uphill with a 3-iron that was 4-degrees too upright for me. I wasn’t warmed up at all and proceeded to hit the ball 6 inches fat and advanced it 50 yards. ‘Ya, some kind of swing,’ Ken laughed.’’

Cevaer’s path to Stevenson was considerably longer. He was born on the island of New Caledonia and learned the game from an instructor in Tahiti. “He got me and others to dream about playing the PGA Tour,” said Cevaer. “I told my father I loved golf and wanted to play more.” When the family moved to France, only one high school offered golf. Fortunately for Cevaer, his father had a contact in Los Angeles who knew about RLS. Christian knew the Monterey Peninsula was a golf mecca and convinced his father to send him for summer school in 1984.

“It became a joke when other schools would come to play us. Most of us on the team could break 40 regularly for nine holes. These other high school kids would come and play Spyglass for the first time and could rarely break 50. Needless to say, we were never beat.”

Little did Still know that Clampett would become a threetime All-American at Brigham Young University in 1978-80, twice winning the Fred Haskins Award as the nation’s top collegiate player. Clampett was low amateur in the 1978 U.S. Open, won the 1978 and 1980 California State Amateur, and won the 1978 World Amateur medal. He turned professional in 1980 and played on the PGA Tour for nearly 20 years, winning the 1982 Southern Open. Now living

“I immediately fell in love with Stevenson, Spyglass and the surrounding area,” he said. “I was a clueless, young foreigner. Coach John Powers saw me hitting practice balls on the lacrosse field, which you weren’t supposed to do, and told me to stop.”

PHOTO BY BOB THOMAS/GETTY IMAGES

BOBBY CLAMPETT LINING UP A PUTT ON THE GREEN AT THE BRITISH OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP IN TROON, SCOTLAND, JULY 1982.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

CHRISTIAN CEVAER IS SOAKED IN CHAMPAGNE BY HIS COUNTRYMEN AFTER WINNING THE EUROPEAN OPEN AT THE LONDON GOLF CLUB ON MAY 31, 2009 IN ASH, ENGLAND.

CHRISTIAN CEVAER PICTURED IN THE 1987 SPYGLASS.

“As soon as I finished the round, I went straight to the hospital to get stitches,” Cevaer said. PHOTO BY WARREN LITTLE/GETTY IMAGES

Cevaer caddied for several amateurs in the AT&T and made the most of it. “I got to see the professionals up close and earned good pocket money for a high school student,” he said.

Cevaer and his teammates shagged balls on the Spyglass driving range to earn playing privileges. The group was a melting pot of players from East Oakland to Germany. Cevaer followed Clampett’s lead and took lessons from instructor Ben Doyle of Carmel Valley. His game steadily improved. One of his goals was to win the Northern California High School Championship, and in 1988 he did. In the morning, Stevenson won the team title at

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Monterey Peninsula Country Club, and in the afternoon, Cevaer won the individual crown. The latter proved painful. He was 2-under par through eight holes. After hitting his second shot on the ninth hole, he reached down to pick up his bag and the strap broke, resulting in a long gash on the little finger of his right hand. Bleeding profusely, Cevaer nearly fainted, but refused to quit. Holding his pinky finger upward to slow the bleeding, he birdied the next hole and shot 66.

Cevaer was recruited to Northwestern by Goodwin, but chose Stanford instead. He won the Pac-10 Championship as a freshman and senior – the latter reunited with Goodwin as his coach, then returned to France for a year of military service before turning professional and joining the European Tour. He’s been a regular since 1995, winning twice, most recently the European Open in 2009. “Stevenson was the perfect fit,” said Cevaer, now living in Switzerland with his wife and two children. “I’m very thankful to my parents for allowing me to leave home at such a young age to pursue my passion.” Harigae didn’t travel far, growing up in Monterey. But she quickly made her mark on the national golf scene, securing firstteam Rolex Junior All-American honors

three times. She still holds the lowest girls’ round in American Junior Golf Association competition, a 62 at the Polo Junior Golf Classic.

MINA HARIGAE PLAYS AN APPROACH SHOT DURING THE FINAL ROUND OF THE NEW ZEALAND WOMEN’S OPEN AT PEGASUS GOLF COURSE ON FEBRUARY 28, 2010 IN PEGASUS, NEW ZEALAND.

“The success that the past girls and boys golf teams had was definitely the big factor that attracted me to RLS,” she said. “Golf seemed to be a big sport there and I wanted to be part of the experience.” Like Clampett and Cevaer, she took advantage of her front row seat to the AT&T tournament. “Every year I snuck on to Spyglass for a few hours to watch,” said Harigae. “I even had some teachers cancel class so that we could go watch. I mainly went to watch the pro’s hit and observe their game. I guess it’s the golfer in me.”

KYLE GENTRY ROLLS IN A PUTT FOR THE 2001 SPYGLASS.

“I still talk to a group of friends I had at Stevenson because we were a close knit group,” Harigae said. “Whenever we are all back in town we get together and have a good time.”

Clearly, she paid attention. Harigae accepted a scholarship to Duke, where she played one year before turning professional. As a rookie in 2009, she competed on the Duramed Futures Tour, posting three victories and led the circuit in money earnings. She’s now a first-year player on the LPGA Tour.

PHOTO BY MARTIN HUNTER/GETTY IMAGES

A four-year honor roll student at Stevenson, Harigae won fourconsecutive California Women’s Amateur Championships (2002-2005), the first at age 13. She was stroke play medalist in the 2006 USGA Girls’ Junior Championship with rounds of 74-64, won the 2007 Women’s Amateur Public Links, and played on the 2008 U.S. Curtis Cup Team.

Smith, now an exempt player on the Nationwide Tour, grew up in Santa Cruz and spent two years at Stevenson, lettering in golf, basketball and baseball. He was a twotime All-American at Duke, graduating with a degree in cultural anthropology in 2006.

“My friend at the time and fellow competitor Kyle Gentry first introduced me to RLS,” said Smith. “What initially attracted me was a combination of topnotch academics as well as a powerhouse golf program. It was my dream to attend a top-level academic university and I felt going to Stevenson would help me achieve that goal. Being able to compete on a golf team with the

resources and competition level that RLS possessed was an added bonus.” Smith played on the European Challenge Tour last year. He still reminisces about walking down the hill from school to see pro golfers at Spyglass. “It was pretty cool having that tournament a stone’s throw away from campus,” he said. “I would go down during my free periods to watch, hoping to be there someday. I remember the coolest thing that happened was when Sergio Garcia gave me his ball after he finished a hole. Even though I don’t care for him as much anymore as a fellow competitor, I still have that ball. It’s pretty cool now to be competing against so many of these guys I grew up watching out there at Spyglass and even cooler beating them.” After a fine career at Stevenson, Sparolini graduated in 1999, with the Pirates winning the NorCal title. He then played four years at SMU, racking up wins in the San Francisco City Championship in 2004

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

PHOTO BY MAX MORSE/GETTY IMAGES

ROB GRUBE WATCHES A CHIP SHOT ROLL TOWARD THE 9TH HOLE DURING THE THIRD ROUND OF THE LEGENDS RENO-TAHOE OPEN AT THE MONTREUX GOLF & COUNTRY CLUB ON AUGUST 2, 2008 IN RENO, NEVADA.

and the Monterey City Championship in 2005. “Playing golf for RLS was an incredible experience; we were able to travel all over California playing some of the best– courses that the state has to offer,” said Sparolini, now in the investment business in San Francisco. “Some of the best memories were the van trips and spending time with the team off the golf course. We definitely had a good time but took our golf serious as well.” Talley, a sophomore at the University of Colorado, earned all Big 12 honors and was MVP of her team in 2009. She has already posted seven Top 10 finishes. “To this day, I still pinch myself,” she said of having Spyglass as her home course.

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“That course is famously difficult and just being able to practice there every day was awesome! I always tell the story and whoever is listening gives me the ‘Are you kidding’ look. I love it. I met some pretty cool people out there. Some of the autographs I received were from Annika Sorenstam and Adam Scott. That was pretty surreal.” Grube enrolled at RLS in 9th grade. A visit with his father sealed the deal. “I feel sorry for prep schools out East,” said Grube. “It wasn’t a fair fight. On the day I visited, it was 75 degrees and sunny with no wind. As a pasty winter-worn Midwesterner, I was naively under the impression that Pebble Beach enjoyed great weather all the time. It didn’t hurt that my dad and I played Spyglass that afternoon, either.”

Powers also had a huge impact on Grube. “Mr. Powers was a local legend,” Grube said. “He had coached the RLS team for 30 years. In his time, he won six NorCal titles. I don’t know if anyone has calculated the number of golfers he sent to Division I golf programs, but it was easily in the 20s. I can’t imagine there are too many high school golf coaches who are more decorated.” Powers also taught English and Latin. “He wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill high school teacher either,” said Grube. “He was extremely erudite. In fact, he spent his summers at Yale working with a group trying to revive Latin as a spoken language. He could recite Chaucer and Tennyson off the top of his head. This one

SYDNEY BURLISON DRIVES AT THE 13TH HOLE DURING THE SINGLES MATCHES IN THE 2007 JUNIOR SOLHEIM CUP MATCHES HELD AT BASTAD GOLF CLUB, ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2007, NEAR HALMSTAD, SWEDEN. Burlison, who now plays for Stanford, played with Harigae and Talley on the 2008 Stevenson team. That team finished second in the state of California.

“League matches scheduled on a stormy day were some of my fondest golf memories,” said Grube. “Spyglass is intimidating enough if you have played it 100 times like we had. But can you imagine what it must have felt like to play Spyglass for the first time in 30 mph winds? I think we won a lot of matches on the first tee.” He also cut class during AT&T week. “I would go to the driving range to watch the players I admired hit balls,” he said. “It was always humbling and inspirational. I would walk Spyglass and say to myself, ‘I can’t believe Vijay Singh just reached one in two.’ The celebrities I could have cared less about. I wanted to see Jim Furyk play a perfect nine or Tom Pernice hit a great wedge into 17. The girls would say, ‘Did you see Justin Timberlake’s pants?’ I would say, ‘Did you see that bunker shot Luke Donald just hit?’ “

“When I arrived as a freshman, I wasn’t the best golfer in the world,” said Grube, whose best finish as a pro was a tie for 14th at the 2008 Reno Tahoe Open. “Kyle Gentry and Nate Smith were both nationally ranked juniors. Every time we played my first year, they and Spyglass used to beat me like a drum. It was a rude awakening. I said to myself, ‘These guys are serious out here.’ In fact, there were a lot of great players when I arrived other than Nate and Kyle. Our team was comprised of four juniors and me. I was ecstatic just to make the varsity. From the get-go, our team’s talent combined with Mr. Powers’ leadership instilled in me the importance of golf at RLS. We were here not just to compete but to win. Everyone took it seriously; our results reflected that commitment.”

PHOTO BY DAVID CANNON/GETTY IMAGES

A two-time team MVP, Grube won the league, Central Coast Section, and Northern California individual championships in 2003. He earned a scholarship to Stanford, where he was a four-time All-American and two-time Academic All-American.

One bond that all Stevenson School golfers share is pride. It’s evident in every conversation.

Talley agreed. “I think it is awesome how great RLS was and is and always will be in golf,” she said. “I played No. 3 for my high school team and No. 1 for my college team; that’s saying how stacked we were our senior year. And Mina, what a star. She’s doing amazing as a pro and Syd (Burlison) is just kicking butt, too. I was so lucky to be able to watch such amazing golfers.”

PHOTO BY IAN WALTON/GETTY IMAGES

time, the team was playing Spyglass. I hit a poor shot and slammed my club in anger. Mr. Powers walked up to me and recited a passage about desire in what sounded like Middle English. I said ‘What is that, Shakespeare?’ He said ‘No, it’s John Donne.’ I think it was supposed to calm me down, but I had no idea what he had said or who John Donne was. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have understood it even if I had heard it. But that’s the way Mr. Powers was. He wanted you to grow as a person, student, and golfer.”

NATE SMITH LINES UP A PUTT DURING ROUND FOUR OF THE SAS MASTERS AT THE BARSEBACK GOLF & COUNTRY CLUB ON JULY 26, 2009 IN MALMO, SWEDEN.

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L O O H C

S R f E l a T H w AF o H : L A e I h t C e E k a P S sM d a r G n n o e i z s i o v e l aD e T e h t n i e d a . s Gr e i r t s u d n I m l i F & BY

GE EBRU D R E PET E

ZI N MAGA Y T E I VA R I TO R TE ED A I C O ASS

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“Had I made the basketball team and not done the play, my life would have taken a very different course.”

Kristoffer Polaha ’95 stars in the CW’s drama Life Unexpected as Nate “Baze” Bazile, a charming bachelor whose carefree world is turned upside down when the 15-year-old daughter he never knew existed shows up on his doorstep.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Kristoffer Polaha ’95 as Nate Bazile in the CW drama Life Unexpected

Kristoffer Polaha graduated from Stevenson in 1995, but the memory of his first opening night hasn’t faded one bit. It was Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Polaha can still remember the smell of the pine post backstage at Keck Auditorium and the glare of the red stage lights as he mounted the ramp to make his entrance. That play changed his life. 40

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“No way did I see myself as an actor. I was at Stevenson to become an orthopedic surgeon, and my parents were investing some serious cash flow,” he recalls. Fifteen years later, Polaha is still acting, playing a lead role in the CW’s Life Unexpected, in fact. He’s hardly the only Stevenson alum who has succeeded in show business. There are former Pirates working in all aspects of film, television and theater — no small feat, when you consider how unforgiving the industry can be. Cira Sims ’94, works as head of communications for movie star Will Smith’s production company, Overbrook Entertainment. Actor-producer Bob Stephenson ’83, is a primetime fixture, thanks to roles on such shows as Jericho and The Forgotten. Thomas Pearson ’97, is a literary agent at ICM, while friend

Bob Stephenson ’83 with Christian Slater on The Forgotten

and longtime classmate Jonathan Ferrantelli ’97 serves as post-production supervisor on everything from horror movies to Oscar-nominated indies. Everyone’s story is different — some got their start in high school, while others found their way to successful entertainment jobs through a combination of chance and luck later in their careers — but all draw on memories from their time at Stevenson School. H

Stevenson is where Sylvain White ’93, took his first photography course. “I didn’t realize it would lead to a career,” admits the Stomp the Yard director, who recently wrapped the big-studio action movie The Losers for Warner Bros. White grew up in France and transferred to Stevenson School for his junior

year. “I was always kind of the spacey, creative student. I would be in math class drawing,” he says. But Stevenson gave White confidence in his ability, which motivated him to pursue a degree in journalism at Pomona College in Claremont. “It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year that my film professors said I was really skilled and I should consider switching majors,” he says. Instead of abandoning journalism, he added a second major in film and video production, making videos for classes and himself. He started submitting his work to film festivals, collecting a Directors Guild of America accolade for “Urban Short Circuit Mind Scrape,” a short he’d made for $600. “I was planning to go to graduate film school,” insists White, who earned a scholarship to AFI, but backed out at the

On set with Sylvain White ’93

last minute because, “I’d already been competing against grad school students at festivals, and I had the calling cards in my short films that I needed.” He took a job in post-production from a contact he’d made through the DGA Awards, working on a string of TV movies while shooting music videos on the side. It was good practice, but not nearly challenging enough, so White shot another short, “Quiet,” which fetched more awards and the opportunity to make a feature-length movie. Some directors agonize over their first assignment, allowing ego to sabotage their careers before they even get started. Not White. He accepted a pair of straight-to-DVD assignments at Sony, Trois 3: The Escort and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, seeing them as opportunities to prove himself in the

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Kristoffer Polaha ’95 with Britt Robertson on Life Unexpected

Sylvain White ’93

“Stevenson really prepared us to go out and be aggressive and achieve — to be thought leaders.” — Cira Sims ’94

process. “By the time I got Stomp the Yard, I had already delivered two small movies on budget,” he says, and now he can pick his own projects. H

State Warriors, which led to cheering professionally for the San Francisco 49ers. It was a sideline pursuit, so to speak, which Sims balanced with full-time work at an advertising agency.

When White says Stevenson gave him confidence, he’s echoing the sentiments of the other graduates who found work in showbiz. “Stevenson really prepared us to go out and be aggressive and achieve — to be thought leaders,” Sims explains. Though she took dance classes and performed alongside Polaha in school musicals, she had never considered a career in entertainment, majoring in economics at nearby Santa Clara University.

After the company downsized itself out of existence, she packed her things in a U-Haul and moved to Los Angeles. A temp office suggested she apply for a job at CAA, “and I thought, ‘Talent agency? How much different can that be from an advertising agency?’ I had no idea what I was getting into,” she recalls, amused by her own naïveté. It was a trial by fire that introduced her to the film business, giving her the experience she needed to join Overbrook Entertainment a few years later.

“I probably thought I would go into medicine, until I got that first Biology 101 grade back,” she jokes. Yet Sims never lost her passion for dance. During her senior year in college, she auditioned to be an NBA cheerleader for the Golden

Today, Sims oversees public relations and marketing for the company, working closely with actor-producer Will Smith. Looking back, she marvels, “Never in a million years would I have guessed I could travel to so many continents and

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do all the things I’ve been able to do with [Smith], from meeting the president to Nelson Mandela, just being able to reach so many people.” H

Though they never crossed paths, both White and fellow alum Stephenson started out at Propaganda Films, the same music-video production company that launched the careers of such A-list directors as Michael Bay (Transformers), David Fincher (Seven) and Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are). Like many of the Stevenson grads working in showbiz, Stephenson had participated in school plays while attending the school. However, while others gravitated toward the limelight, he says, “I was always behind stage, the kid who was building the sets.” Stephenson graduated without a clear idea of what he wanted to do for a living, having decided only one thing — “that

Bob Stephenson ’83

Kristoffer Polaha ’95 with Shiri Appleby and Britt Robertson on Life Unexpected

I didn’t want to sit behind a desk,” he says. Armed with a Liberal Studies degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Stephenson moved to Los Angeles, found a sleeping bag and slept on a friend’s floor. The guy was working in music videos, and Stephenson applied to be a production assistant. In movies, the P.A. position usually amounts to a glorified go-fer, but in music videos, where the crews are smaller and every pair of hands is essential, he became a vital on-set presence. “I knew this is what I was supposed to be,” says Stephenson, who befriended the directors (he and Fincher still watch football together on Sundays) and began writing treatments for music videos and commercials. He even produced a couple of films, Thumbsucker and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and tried his hand at screenwriting, only to be blindsided along the way by his true calling — acting.

“My first part ever was while I was a P.A. on Twin Peaks. Caleb Deschanel cast me as the ‘burger boy,’” he explains. Stephenson had one line, “Order up!” but the roles kept on coming, and before he knew it, he had moved from behind the camera to find his place in front of it. H

Former classmates Pearson and Ferrantelli went the opposite direction. After co-starring in shows put on by then-theater director Hamish Tyler, they ended up redirecting their passion for performance into careers neither could have imagined at age 14. “Nobody sets out to be an agent — or at least I didn’t,” Pearson confides. He double-majored in theater and literature at Yale. In school, he began producing shows, and after graduating, he continued doing so for both avant garde performance spaces and major community theaters.

Then ICM called. “I didn’t come up the usual route of working in the mailroom or going to law school or business school, the way a lot of agents do,” he notes. “My experience with agents before coming here was negotiating against them.” Pearson’s creative experience made him uniquely suited to represent theater clients, and so began his unexpected career managing theater writers for one of the three major talent agencies. As for Ferrantelli, he left Stevenson thinking he would most likely become either an opera singer or a theater producer. He’d applied early decision to one college, Columbia University, and fell in love with the first film studies class he took there. It was a survey course on the history of film scores, which convinced him to take more classes in the field, even if his employment options seemed iffy — “Similar to what people who get English majors and don’t go to grad school do. They figure it out,” he says.

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Bob Stephenson ’83 with Heather Stephens and Christian Slater on The Forgotten

“I knew this is what I was supposed to be”– Bob Stephenson ’83

It wasn’t glamorous, but Ferrantelli immediately found work as a receptionist at Good Machine, an artsy film shingle where he met producer Ross Katz. Ferrantelli became Katz’s assistant, observing firsthand as Katz (who came from a post-production background) oversaw completion of the editing, sound and scoring for director Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Katz asked Ferrantelli to manage and budget the same process on Coppola’s next film, Marie Antoinette, rewarding him with a post-production supervisor credit — and the job stuck. Ferrantelli set up his own company and went on to manage such details (basically, overseeing everything that happens after the film is shot) for a variety of films, ranging from Kit Kittredge: An American Girl to The Visitor. H

Of the group, Polaha can most clearly trace the origins of his career to Stevenson. Boarding school was his own idea, but after leaving Reno, Nevada, he

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felt desperately homesick. A bully was picking on his roommate, and in response to the pressure, Polaha acted out, using a broom to break the windows in his dorm. Feeling guilty, he confessed to the Dean of Students, Robert Henderson, who sat Polaha down and asked him if he’d set any goals for himself. “No one had ever asked me about goals,” he marvels. Henderson suggested he attempt some extracurricular activities, so Polaha (who was already well above six feet tall at the time) tried out for both basketball and the school play. He didn’t make the team, but Hamish Tyler cast him in Streetcar, and from that moment on, Polaha did every play, musical and one-act the school offered — and to his surprise, his parents supported his decision. He continued acting at New York University, even though freshmen weren’t allowed to participate in school plays. When Polaha appeared in a 1998 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Bread and Butter, a critic for The New York Times

raved that the “engaging young actor… carries most of the show,” which caught the attention of the Gersh Agency. With a manager behind him, Polaha went into audition overdrive, often flying to Los Angeles to test for shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The goal formula helped Polaha deal with the inevitable rejection (he estimates that between 1999 and 2000, he went on nearly 200 auditions, but booked nothing), and when opportunities did arise, he was able to recognize them. A failed pilot led to a starring role on Fox’s North Shore, followed by significant parts on Mad Men, the Ashton Kutcherproduced Miss Guided and his current series, Life Unexpected. Every January, Polaha updates where he wants his life and work to go, carrying the list in his wallet as a reminder — though chance still plays a part. “Had I made the basketball team and not done the play, my life would have taken a very different course,” he says.

STEVENSON WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU Stevenson School will publish two alumni magazines each year, and we need your help to make it happen. Your personal stories and experiences embody the school’s mission and hearing about your achievements and journeys lets us share in the rich and exciting lives of Stevenson alumni. Simply email your personal update and any current photos to be included in the Alumni at Large section to alumni@stevensonschool.org. Photos must be high resolution/300 dpi and please identify the people. Here are some topic ideas: • News about your personal and professional life (i.e. accomplishments, awards, promotions, education, travel, etc.)

• What you do for fun

• Personal passages or quotes

• Published pieces (books, articles, etc.) and works you’ve developed or produced (include art, music, patents, etc.) which we will proudly feature in “The Pirate Review.”

• Births, marriages, and deaths in our Stevenson families

• Website links relevant to your life and work

• What you do and where you work Finally, please share your thoughts about how Stevenson can serve you better. Thank you. Go Pirates! Frank Stephenson Director of Alumni Relations fstephenson@stevensonschool.org

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI AT LARGE

Where are they going? Where have they been? Stevenson Alumni share the latest in their lives.

1963 Doug Robinson ’63 lives in Aptos and is a partner in Moving Over Stone (www.movingoverstone.com), a film and guide company for climbing and backcountry skiing in the Sierra. He is writing a book about adventure sports and recently received a literary award from the American Alpine Club, which “instantly elevated me from starving writer to undernourished writer.” His children help support his habit; Tory (16) plays the emerging sport of bike polo and Kyra (13) just finished a season of coed flag football.

1967 Peter Stremmel ’67 is a noted international art auctioneer and owner of Stremmel Gallery in Reno, Nevada (www. stremmelgallery.com). He is a graduate of The University of Notre Dame. Grover Wickersham ’67 is chairman of S&W Seed Company. As this magazine goes to press, he is taking the company public on NASDAQ. S&W is a 30-year-old alfalfa seed company in Five Points, in California’s Central Valley. It sells its products nationally and internationally, including to Mexico, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia (www.swseedco.com). Grover anticipates using the company as a platform for other activities, including growing and processing stevia leaf. He

STEVENSON SCHOOL

is a graduate of UC Berkeley, Harvard Business School, and Hastings College of Law. His son Eric graduated from Stevenson in 2002 and his niece Elizabeth Wickersham is a member of the Stevenson Class of 2012.

1968 John Allen Cann ’68 lives in Sacramento and is a teacher, poet, and performer. His works include Lemurian Rhapsodies (1976), Translations from the Translucent (1977), Accompaniments for a Dozen Roses (1980), Halfway to Zeno’s House (1983), and Solitude the Shape of a Woman (1987). John has degrees from Cornell and San Francisco State universities, and is a professor of English at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento. He also offers a class on American poets born in the 1930s, at the Room to Write School of Poetry on 25th Street. He can be reached at johnallencann@comcast.net.

1969 James Tonkin ’69 is principal of Healthy Brand Builders (www.healthybrandbuilders.com), a group that creates and implements business and financial strategies for domestic and international firms focusing on production and manufacturing, branding, sales, marketing, and distribution for the food and beverage industry. He earned a BS in psychology

from University of Oregon; he lives and works in Scottsdale, Arizona.

1971 Bruce Armstrong ’71 is senior vice president with Menke & Associates, specialists in the design, creation, and administration of ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) in San Francisco (www.menke.com). He graduated from Stanford with a BA in economics in 1975 and earned an MBA in finance and accounting from UCLA in 1979.

1976 Jay Flagg ’76 graduated from UC Berkeley in 1980 with a BA in history, and earned his JD degree from University of San Diego Law School in 1984. Since 1999 he has resided in Southampton, New York and is senior managing director for Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

1977 Djembar Kartasasmita Hussein ’77 visited Stevenson with his son Kevin. After graduating from Stevenson, Djembar studied business at the University of LaVerne and returned to Indonesia. He is president and director of Polim Residence (www.polimresidence.com), a hotel and real estate development enterprise in Jakarta.

Richard Zahm ’77 is principal and portfolio manager at Second Angel Fund. He is also portfolio manager with Whole Loan Traders, which specializes in turnarounds and workouts, and distressed real estate assets and companies in the greater New York City area.

1978

Richard Bromley ’79 is Counsel with Nixon Peabody in Los Angeles (www. nixonpeabody.com/attorneys_detail1. asp?ID=1592). He earned BA and JD degrees from UCLA and McGeorge School of Law at University of the Pacific.

1980

Michael Leach ’78 lives in Dallas with his wife Lisa and has accepted a new position in the food business with Hardies Fruit and Vegetable, a distributor of fresh produce to Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and McAllen (www.hardies.com). Their children David ’02 and Anne ’04 graduated from the University of Denver with degrees in business/marketing and business and history, respectively.

Mark Siegel ’80 is president of Advanced Broadcast Solutions (ABS), in SeaTac, Washington (www.advancedbroadcastsolutions.com). His company has been at the forefront in the design, integration and installation of digital and highdefinition television systems since 1992. Their installations include sports venues, broadcast television groups, locally owned television stations, and university and public access facilities.

1979

1981

Craig Lewis ’79 is CEO of Artisan Precast Inc., the preferred precast fence company, in Los Angeles with branch offices worldwide (www.artisanprecast.com). He has BA and MBA degrees from Georgetown and UPenn/Wharton, respectively.

Chris Lord ’81 is founder and managing director of Criterion Capital Management, in San Francisco (www.criterionmgt.com). He and his wife live in the city with their two sons. He graduated from Dartmouth with a BA in religion in 1985 and from

Harvard Business School in 2001. Stuart Hall ’81 works with Curious Oranj (www.curious-oranj.com), launched in 2004 by design, marketing, and IT professionals and was quickly recognized as a leading-edge developer of integrated multi-media marketing solutions. It is known for creating richly textured, dimensional interactive experiences that take full advantage of evolving technologies. Its offices and studios are in Malibu and Pasadena, California.

1984 Robert Payne ‘84 lives with his wife and two children in Woodland, California. He owns and operates Payne Farms, which was started by his father in 1959 (www. paynefarms.com). He earned a BS degree in agricultural and managerial economics from UC Davis in 1989.

1985 After five years as the dean of Berkeley College at Yale University, Kevin Hicks ’85 will move to the Hotchkiss School in

ALLEN W. BURNHAM ’66 Allen Burnham came to Stevenson from Chandler School in Pasadena, and after Stevenson, like a number of the boys at the time, he served in the U.S. military and went to Vietnam — the first war in which Stevenson alumni were involved in. The roster of alumni who served and are serving with distinction in the military grows longer; someday it will be the subject of a Stevenson story. Seven or eight years ago, when I was still pretty new to Stevenson, I visited Allen at his home in Dallas. We talked about his experiences here and in Vietnam, and I asked him if he knew of any alumnus who was killed over there. He said he thought someone was, but he couldn’t recall a name. We left it at that until late

in 2006 when I called to tell him about Nathan Krissoff ’99, who had been killed in action in Iraq a few weeks earlier, on December 9. And then in late February 2007, Allen called. He had read in the Dallas newspapers an obituary for Joseph E. Gallo, the last line of which said that his son Peter was killed in Vietnam in March 1968. Peter Gallo was the person Allen was thinking about when we talked in Dallas. Allen has since created an endowment at Stevenson, which will provide financial assistance to students with need, with preference given to children of military personnel. It is called The Memorial Fund,

and it has been created by Allen in honor of Peter Joseph Gallo ’64, who came to Stevenson as an 11th-grader in the fall of 1962 and who was with us just a year. He was a lieutenant at the time of his death on March 30, 1968; his named is etched on the Wall in Washington, D.C., on Stone 47E, Row 10. All gifts to The Memorial Fund are recorded in a book displayed in the Alumni Office. Lest we forget... Frank Stephenson Alumni Relations

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI AT LARGE Lakeville, Connecticut as associate head of school. Kevin has a BA in religious studies from Yale and a PhD in English from Princeton.

1986 Nick Moore ’86 owns Moore Financial Advice (www.moorefinancialadvice.com) in San Francisco and works with classmate David Hollander ’86, who owns the brokerage firm Nick is affiliated with. Nick graduated from UC Davis in 1991. Glenn McMahon ’86 is the drama instructor at Baton Rouge Magnet School in Louisiana. His latest project was to introduce his students to the world of opera and prepare them to see a live performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, through a high-definition video broadcast by satellite at a local Baton Rouge theater. Glenn earned a BA in history from the Univ. of North Florida and an MA in theatre arts from University of Akron. His daughter Brittany will attend Northwestern Louisiana State in the fall on a technical theater scholarship.

1987 Greg Lippman ’87 is executive director of ACE Public School Network in San Jose. Formerly known as the New Schools Center, ACE’s focus is to incubate, train, startup, and sustain new small schools (and now Charter Schools) in under-resourced communities in Santa Clara County (www.acepublic.org). Greg earned a BA in English literature from Princeton in 1991 and an MA in teaching from Stanford University; he cofounded and was the original principal of Downtown College Prep, a school that prepares students who are the first members of their families to attend college.

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1988 Mark Pocock ’88 lives in Alpine, Utah with his wife and their four children ages 13, 10, 7, and 1. He is CFO with Wavelink (www. wavelink.com), a wireless communication software company specializing in devices such as barcode readers. His company employs 80 people and services major retailers such as FedEx, Toys R Us, and Amazon. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting from Brigham Young, and spent two years serving his church in missionary work in France. Colleen Finegan Bailey ’88 has been appointed interim executive director of the exhibition center of the National Steinbeck Center in Old Town Salinas. A native of Salinas, Colleen earned BA and MA degrees in theater and performing arts from USC and Northwestern, respectively, and taught at Stevenson from 1993 to 2001. Before joining the Steinbeck Center in 2007 as director of community engagement and learning, she taught at Fountain Valley School in Colorado and Sage Hill School, in Newport Coast, California. Chad Greulach ’88 lives in Santa Monica with his wife and two daughters. He is CEO of Lorenzo Cycles (www.lorenzocycles.com) in Santa Monica and is executive producer of Hard Core Pawn, which premiered in December.

1989 Rodney (Fife) Bowen ’89 is founding principal of DreamYard Preparatory School, Bronx, New York (www.dyprep.org). He studied art and architecture at Brown University and then moved to Harlem to teach 4th grade as a member of Teach for America Corps. While a teacher, he studied theater, became a board member of the Harlem Theater Company, and

founded his own company, Rising Circle. He has an MFA in printmaking from City College and an MSE in education administration and supervision from Pace, and he is a proud member of New Leaders for New Schools (www.nlns.org). Elliott Easterling ’89 is CEO at Surgery. com LLC; president at Echo Prospects, a leading website and web service incubator; and cofounder and chairman at Red Bricks Media, which specializes in search engine optimization and marketing; online, database, and email marketing; and media planning and landing page optimization. The mission at www. surgery.com is to build the most complete and informative surgery resource on the Internet; it was founded on the simple idea that everyone should have easy access to quality, doctor-reviewed content related to surgical procedures and related topics. Elliott started Red Bricks Media in 2004 in San Francisco with his friend Craig and his sister Montana. The company has recently been listed at #354 on the 2009 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies and has offices in New York, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. Described as one of the “innovative companies that are creating jobs, redefining their industries, and shaping our world,” the company’s threeyear growth rate is 698.4%. It employs 65 people and its annual revenue is $6.6 million. Red Bricks Media (www.redbricksmedia.com) offers search engine marketing, interactive media planning, e-mail campaign management, creative services, and mobile and viral marketing services. Elliott was feted at a black-tie gala for entrepreneurial superstars in Washington, D.C. In his spare time he is building a tree house in Costa Rica and is also helping to produce an event called www. manifestogathering.com in Costa Rica.

specializes in employee stock option, education, and retirement planning. Her education includes a BA in sociology with an emphasis in law from UC Davis. She lives in Sausalito with her husband Vladimir and son Alexander.

1991

Joshua Cohen ’91 with his wife Martha and children Esther and Sebastian

1990 Richard Kaufman ’90 is the founder and president of City-Core Development, Inc., and has been investing in innovative urban infill developments, including hospitality, housing, and retail projects throughout the United States since 1991 (www.city-core.com). Rick played lacrosse for four years at UC Davis (with Andy Zaninovich ’89) and graduated in 1996 with a BS degree from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He started his company while in college (he built about 200 homes in Davis); among his other commitments, he is president of the board of Camp Tawonga, a summer camp near Yosemite National Park. Bethany Goldstein ’90 lives in Santa Barbara and continues to work as a graphic designer, although she is pursuing an MFA online through The Academy of Art in San Francisco (www.divinetiles.com and www.bethanyanderson.us). Developing her fine art skills has helped her take leaps and bounds in her graphic design

skills as well. She is now focusing on illustration-based graphic design. Steve White ’90 works with Angelo, Gordon & Company, a privately held investment advisor dedicated to alternative investing, in its Strategies division (www.angelogordon.com). He is responsible for the company’s real estate activities in the northwestern U.S. Prior to joining the firm in 2004, Steve worked in the real estate investment banking group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. where he participated in the disposition and recapitalization of office, retail, hotel, and multi-family properties. He earned an AB degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Laura Gorman Chernova ’90 is senior investment adviser at StanCorp Investment Advisers in San Francisco. Prior to that and for 13 years she worked as a wealth manager and financial planner at Wetherby Asset Management. She is a certified financial planner and

Joshua Cohen ’91 lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Martha, kids, Esther (5) and Sebastian (3), and dog Boo (6). He has spent the past 10 years working as an ecologist with Michigan Natural Features Inventory (http://web4.msue. msu.edu/mnfi/), gathering information for the conservation of biodiversity. He is coauthor of a book available through the Michigan State University Press: Prairies and Savannas in Michigan (http:// msupress.msu.edu) and serves on the editorial board of Natural Areas Journal as a plant ecology editor. Joshua graduated from Amherst College in 1995 and from the Duke University Nicholas School of Environment in 1999 with a master’s degree in environmental management.

1992 Former AFS Student Gert Heinholt Skov ’92 writes from Denmark that in 2006 he married a Danish nurse and that they are now parents of sons William and Nicolai. Gert works with a major Danish company, FLSmidth, (www.flsmidth.com/ FLSmidth/English/Frontpage.htm). the world leader in cement production technology, and he is currently responsible for the construction of a cement plant in Russia. Patrick White ’92 is vice president, sponsor finance with American Capital, in Los Angeles (www.americancapital.com). He is a 1996 graduate of Washington & Lee with a BA in economics. He is also a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom III, where he served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. While in Iraq, he served with the

We want to hear from you! Please email your personal stories and digital photos* for the Alumni At Large section to alumni@stevensonschool.org. *All photos become the property of Stevenson and must be 300-dpi, high-resolution images. 2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI AT LARGE

Heather Bassett-Barnard ’94 with her husband Jared and their children

Joshua Sobeck ’92 is a partner with 747 Capital LLC (www.747capital.com) in New York. He received an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School in 2004 and a BA in molecular biology and biochemistry from Middlebury College in 1996. He and his wife Alison recently moved to Chappaqua with their son Sam. He had dinner with Lorraine (Hopkins) Lalin ’92, Stephanie (Mann) Fikry ’92, Courtney (Slautterback) Harwood ’92, and Justin Woo ’92, who was in town from Sydney. Go, Pirates!

1993 1st Infantry Division and 42nd Infantry Division as a rifle platoon leader, company executive officer, and division task force commander. He was awarded the combat infantryman badge for actions in combat and numerous other medals for his service. Miguel Ridolfi ’92 works with Common Vision (www.commonvision.org) to create real changes in health, hunger, environmental justice, and climate change through education and on-the-ground community action in communities across California. Its mission is to cultivate dynamic leaders in sustainability practice and education, and to support schools and neighborhoods to transform their landscapes into edible orchards. In the past six years, the Fruit Tree Tour Program has directly impacted 45,000 students and has transformed more than 150 lowincome schools and community centers into abundant orchards with the planting of more than 3,500 fruit trees. A six-minute version of the Emmy Award-winning documentary Fruit Tree Tour can be seen at http://www.commonvision.org/programs/fruittreetour/fruittreetour.php.

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Brian Wilson ’93 lives in New York and works with the United Nations. He is one of eight legal experts appointed by the Secretary-General on the Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team. Brian earned a BA degree in Middle East studies at Georgetown University in 1997 and a JD degree from the University of Michigan in 2002. Bill Winslow ’93 lives in Petoskey, Michigan with his wife Alisa. He works with Coldwell Banker Schmidt Realtors (www. winslowproperties.com). He earned a BA in sociology from Boston College in 1997 and an MBA from Xavier University in 2001. He and Alisa enjoy the northern Michigan outdoors, where they sail, kayak, and run. They recently completed their first marathon together. Tiffani Ferrantelli ’93 graduated from Smith College in 1997 and works with the federal government. She is currently in Moscow, and has traveled all over that country and to former member states in the USSR.

1994 Heather Bassett-Barnard ’94 reports that she and husband Jared and their three children will be moving to Abu Dhabi in

August. She will teach English there for two years to Emirate children as part of a 10-year reform, and invites fellow Pirates to follow her adventures at http://jewelsofabudhabi.blogspot.com. In October 2009 she launched a new website for www.chickadeeprints.com that will be featured on a national TV show to air on May 10, and she also opened www.sweettosassyphotography.com. Heather earned a BA in child psychology from St. Mary’s College, a teaching certificate from Sacramento State, and a master’s in education from the University of Utah. Matt Miller ’94 is an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hips and knees. He will finish his fellowship at Chicago’s Rush Hospital in August, where he is learning to do minimally invasive joint replacements, and has accepted a position as a professor of medicine at Stanford University and as a surgeon at Stanford Hospital. He will also be associated with a Stanford-sponsored orthopedic clinic that is currently being established in Los Gatos. His wife Stephanie is a neonatologist and will be working at the Stanford Hospital as well.

1995 Karen Hiles ’95 completed her PhD in historical musicology at Columbia University early last summer and is now a professor of music at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Sunny Irvine ’95 reports that he got married in March 2009 and that he and his wife will be heading to South Africa for the World Cup matches. He works with his family tourism business (www. tropicaltours.com) and has participated in several road rallies, including the 6,000mile race from Europe to Africa in 2007. He is considering another such race in

2011 (www.rallyraidmex.com). He graduated from University of San Diego in 1999 with a BS in business administration. Thomas Michaels ’95 completed requirements for his doctoral degree in clinical psychology (PsyD) at Antioch University New England. His dissertation is titled “Mental health clinicians’ views of superficial self-mutilation in the DSM-IV-TR.” He earned a BA in psychology from St. Michael’s College (Vermont) in 1999 and an MA in clinical psychology from Boston University in 2000. He lives in Boston and works with a private mental health agency on the South Shore. Catherine Smith ’95 earned a BA degree in English in 1999 from Hamilton College. She lives in New York and is in her final year of studies toward an MS degree in architecture-historic preservation from Columbia University.

Council, the Pebble Beach Community Emergency Response Team (C.E.R.T.), and the Pebble Beach Community Services District (PBCSD). Ryan earned a BS in construction management from the College of Architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He and his wife Marni have a daughter, Merelle Frances.

1996 Lindsey Yellich ’96 visited campus to meet with students interested in the University of Michigan. She has moved to Los Altos, California from Newport Beach and has joined the Sereno Group (www. serenogroup.com), a real estate firm with offices in Los Altos, Los Gatos, and Saratoga. She earned a BS in organizational management from Michigan in 2000 and a JD from Chapman University in 2003.

Kristi Marotta ’96 was named 2009 Nurse of the Year at CHOMP, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, by her colleagues for embodying the mission of the hospital: to provide innovative health care with a human touch. Kristi is a licensed public health nurse with five years’ experience as a charge nurse, triage nurse, and instructor. She earned a BA in international development studies from UCLA in 2000 and a BS in nursing from Mount St. Mary’s College in 2004. Chris Chatham ’96 practices law in Los Angeles (www.chathamfirm.com). He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Southwestern School of Law. He appeared with other attorneys in a piece on the television program Dr. Phil.

Jay Dolata ’95 opened Carmel Belle, an 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. restaurant in the Doud Craft Studios at the corner of Ocean and Carlos in Carmel (www.carmelbelle. com) a year or so ago. A summer review in the Monterey Herald recommended “must order” items such as baked goat cheese, meatloaf sandwich, cheese tray, green eggs and ham, and mozzarella and roasted-tomato salad. Emphasizing hand-selected organic foods, high-quality ingredients, house-made breads, mozzarella, and many vegetarian options, the “bottom line” for the reviewers is that the owners use “simple, quality ingredients hand-selected from small American suppliers to create rustic food straight from the heart.” Ryan Flagg ’95 owns Flagg Industries (www.flaggindustries.com), a real estate development, management, and construction company in Salinas, California focused on assisted living projects for the elderly. He is a member of the Monterey County Area Agency on Aging Advisory

Sunny Irvine ’95 at the beach in Senegal on the last stage of the 2007 Dakar Rally that started in Lisbon and finished in Dakar, Senegal after about 9000 kms

ALUMNI AT LARGE Rekha Chandrasekaran ’98 has been profiled in a recent edition of The Hill.com (http://thehill.com/ cover-stories/the-hills-50-most-beautiful-2009-2009-07-28.html). Starting in Washington as an unpaid volunteer with Monterey County Representative Sam Farr, she is now in what she calls a dream job as a legislative assistant for Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-Texas). She is a 2002 graduate of the College of William and Mary.

Chris Orosco ’96 married Lisa Fowler in November in Maui, with mostly immediate family in attendance. He was joined at the occasion by Stevenson classmate Aaron Snegg ’96 and his wife Renee Wilson. They intend to have a local reception and celebration in the spring or summer. Chris graduated from Stanford in 2000 with a BA in economics; he works with the Orosco Group in Monterey.

1997 Andrew Gaul ’97 has been living in San Francisco for the past four years and working as a programmer with Riverbed on networking and file systems (www.riverbed.com). The company had a successful IPO in 2006 and it has been a lot of fun for him to help it grow from a startup to 1,000 employees. He has been in touch with Chris Jou ’97, who is living in Los Banos and doing well. Andrew graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002 with a BS in computer sciences. He can be reached at http://gaul.org/. Kestrin Pantera ’97 married Jonathan Grubb on April 2, 2010 at The Wedding

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Rock at Carmel River State Park. Erin Schelcher ’97 performed the marriage ceremony. Kestrin graduated from Wake Forest with a BA in psychology. She moved to Los Angeles in 2003 after returning from Taiwan, where for two years she taught English and learned Chinese. She plays electric cello in a band and makes television commercials, among other endeavors in the entertainment industry.

Dania Akkad ’98 has been living in Syria and volunteering for the Iraqi Student Project (http://iraqistudentproject.org/). She has also been on the staff of Syria Today (http://www.syria-today.com/) as one of its feature writers. Syria Today has the appearance of a Time or Newsweek magazine and is one of two Englishlanguage magazines in Damascus. One of her recent pieces is “Velvet Hands and Iron Fists.” She and a colleague © Feather Love Photography

Chris Orosco ’96 with his new wife Lisa, Aaron Snegg ’96 and his wife Renee Wilson (they were also married recently in September ‘09 in Big Sur)

Michelle Storkan ’97 attended Kestrin Pantera’s ’97 wedding; she is in her second year of medical school at St. Louis University. She earned a BA in mathematics from Colby College.

1998 Shawn Cronin ’98 lives in San Francisco with his wife Blair (Williams), who graduated from Carmel High in 1999. He earned a BS in marine biology at UC Santa Cruz in 2002 and started but didn’t finish a master’s in marine ecology. He is the manager of business development with Widgetbox.com (www.widgetbox.com).

Kestrin Pantera ‘97 with her husband on their wedding day

Glynis (Tyler) Barrett ’98, Lauren Proulx, Natica Rudavsky ’96, Dania Akkad ’98, Audrey Higuera, Heather (Proulx) Lazare ’98, Erin Schelcher ’97, Michelle Storkan ’97, Ursula Damani

are translating a book. Following her attendance at the wedding of Heather Proulx ’98 in September, Dania moved to London to work on a master’s program in Middle East politics at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (http:// www.soas.ac.uk/). She graduated from Wellesley College in 2003 with a BA in anthropology.

1999 Brian Boitano ’99 has been living in Geneva, Switzerland for almost three years and works with Caterpillar. Much of his time is spent in Africa and the Middle East. He graduated from Santa Clara Universityin 2003 with a BS in economics. Matt Chatham ’99 lives in San Francisco with his wife Samantha. He graduated from Rollins College in 2003 with a BA in international relations. He is vice president of Jones Lang Lasalle, a financial and professional services firm specializing in real estate service and investment management (www.us.joneslanglasalle.com) with offices in 60 countries around the world. Matt co-leads its Markets/Corporate Solutions Group in San Francisco; his division consults with local and multina-

tional companies/firms regarding their corporate real estate. Brooke Steven ’99 is living in New York and will complete her studies for her BS in nursing at NYU in May. She earned a BS in psychology at San Francisco State in 2004.

2000

is a great need for better understanding between people, governments, and businesses in an increasingly interdependent world. She hopes to initiate a summit of young leaders on Arab-Chinese cultural understanding, which she thinks will fit well with a group she started in Dubai called POAG, Promise of a Generation (www.thenational.ae/article/20090627/ MAGAZINE/706269970).

Cory O’Donnell ’00 is working in the music industry and tours for a living. She’s what is referred to in the business as a “roadie,” and works in VIP Ticketing and Production (mainly PR and Artist Relations). In the past calendar year her tours have included Fleetwood Mac, Linkin Park, and Miley Cyrus. She graduated from Whitman College in 2004 after two years at USC and has traveled around the world since then; her home address is a storage unit in Venice, California! Esther Tang ’00 visited Stevenson. She is on leave from The Dubai Group to study Chinese law at Peking University. Her work experience in Texas and the Middle East, and her studies at Cornell, Oxford, and now Peking, will enable her to participate in and help meet what she feels

Cory O’Donnell ’00 with pop singer Miley Cyrus.

ALUMNI AT LARGE

Beth Ann Simpkins ‘00 with her sister Katie ’03 and Kyle Gentry ’02 in Tokyo

in November. She graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2004 with a BA in marketing and accounting. Willy Schaeffler ’00 and his brother Cory Schaeffler ’05 will graduate in June with International MBA degrees from the University of Denver. They and a friend recently participated as a team in the D.U. + CTAM (Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing) competition, aimed at developing solutions to issues affecting the cable industry, one of which is the decreasing use of cable by young people (who choose instead to use other forms of TV). Their team placed second among 17 teams from D.U.’s Daniels School of Business.

2001

Kimberly Eugene Weidenbach ’00 is living in Phoenix with her husband and a cat and dog named Mendel and Cadfael, respectively. She is certified to teach biology and chemistry, and is currently a full-time honors chemistry teacher. She earned a BS in molecular and cellular biology at UC Berkeley and a master’s in education from Arizona State University. Beth Ann Simpkins ’00 is living in New York and recently opened Pulino’s, a pizza restaurant created by executive chef Nate Appleman, who also created A16 in San Francisco. She has been associated with A16 for a time; she spent four months opening an A16 in Tokyo. Katherine Atkins ’00 married Andrew Meyer in September 2009. They live in Los Angeles and she is expecting a child

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Hye Won (Michelle) Keum ’01 earned a BBA degree in design and management (with a concentration in fashion) from Parsons School of Design in 2004. She is living in Seoul and is a buyer with Shinsegae International (www.sikorea.co.kr). Todd Holman ’01 is in his second year at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA in a four-year JD/MBA degree program. After graduating from UC San Diego with a BA in economics, he worked at a hedge fund in San Diego before moving to D.C. to work as an analyst, then senior business analyst, for Capital One. Last summer he worked with the Department of Justice in the Office of the U.S. Trustee overseeing corporate restructuring in Los Angeles; this summer he will work with Shartsis Friese LLP, a law firm in San Francisco. Brian Orosco ’01 was on TV in December for a show called American Ninja Warrior. It aired over the course of five days beginning December 12 on G4TV.

Debbie Lin ’01 is president of dbyj (www.dbyj.com) (www.facebook.com/ shopdbyj), a bamboo fiber and organic cotton clothing and home collection company in Rowland Heights, California. Why bamboo? It’s the world’s fastest-growing plant, it’s completely biodegradable, it’s naturally pest and insect-resistant, and it absorbs 400% more greenhouse gases and produces 35% more oxygen than trees. Debbie graduated from UCLA in 2006 with a BA in music and will soon complete her MA in media studies online through The New School. She and her friend Jamin plan to marry in May. Juliette Jackson ’01 earned dual degrees in finance and film & acting at Loyola Marymount University. She continues to be involved in acting in Los Angeles, and she writes reviews for comic books and video games. She reports that Anthony Arger ’01 has moved to Napa to work with the family vineyard. Nikko Arger ’03 is in medical school at USC. Melissa Kanchanapoomi ’01 studied premedicine at UCLA and is now in medical school at UC San Francisco. Jennifer Cohen ’01 and her sister own clothing boutique Switch on Beverly Boulevard. in Los Angeles between Olympic and Wilshire. Elena Crevello ’01 is making a name for herself as a stand-up comic and actor.

2002 Candi Kao ’02 lives in New York and is an assistant buyer with Chanel (www.chanel. com). She earned a BA in economics from Davidson College in 2006 and moved to New York to work with Theory, then owned by Andrew Rosen ’75.

Megan Segal ’02 with a Thornback Ray caught in Goleta

in Nepal trekking and volunteering his time as an English teacher in a small government school in Nipani. Prior to that, he spent a month in China and India. Katrina Cornell ‘02 is a substitute teacher in Jackson, Wyoming and hopes to be full-time next year. She is a river guide in Idaho and Oregon during the summer. She has a B.S. in physics and geology, and an M.S. in geology, both from MIT.

Megan Segal ’02 graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2006 with a BS in biology and a concentration in Marine and fisheries biology. Since then she has worked as a biologist in the Santa Barbara Channel and on the Bering Sea. Currently she works with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission as the ground fish sampler for Monterey Bay, in which capacity she visits local dealers and subsamples fish landed by the Monterey Bay commercial fleet. She also volunteers at the Tuna Research and Conservation Center at Hopkins Marine Station. A highlight for her was standing in the tank while some of the most powerful fish on the planet circled around her.

Austin Krissoff ’02 took a break from his responsibilities as a 1st lieutenant with the U.S. Marine Corps to visit teacher and water polo coach Jim Fannin and catch up on life at Stevenson. He is moving to his next assignment, in Washington, D.C., which will include graduate studies at one of the capital’s universities.

2003 Allison Kenton ’03 graduated from UC Davis in 2003 with a degree in history (modern European and American West concentration) and communication. She is working with Carmel Realty Company as an administrative assistant in the property management division. She is currently studying for her real estate

license to pursue a career in that field, and she works with The Pebble Beach Company during major events, including the AT&T Pro-Am, the Concours d’Elegance, and the U.S. Open. Tracy Wong ’03 graduated from UC Berkeley in 2007 with a BS in molecular environmental biology and has been working since then in a vaccine research lab at Children’s Hospital Oakland. She travels to Hong Kong at least once a year to see family and friends. It’s hard to keep up with Katie Kohn ’03, but we’ll give it a shot. We do know that in the fall she will be at Harvard as a fully funded PhD candidate in film and visual studies, that is to say “film philosophy,” and as a teacher of undergraduate film courses. Prior to that and for the past few years she was in graduate school studying film, media studies, and philosophy at King’s College (London), where she earned an MA in film and cultural studies, and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Oh yes, and before that she spent her undergraduate years at NYU. She says she’s on a full-time academic track now, and that this passion she has is all the fault of her Stevenson experi-

Morgan Sellers ’02 graduated from Columbia in 2006 with a BA in anthropology. She worked for two years in Washington and is currently in her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Lane Verlenden ’02 passed the New York Bar exam and is working in New York. He graduated from Dartmouth in 2006 with a BA in economics and from Boston University Law School in 2009. He spent time

Austin Krissoff ’02 with water polo coach Jim Fannin

ALUMNI AT LARGE ence. After all, she says, she could’ve been a hedge fund manager or something. New UC Santa Cruz men’s lacrosse coach John McCreery ’03 is involving his team in the local community to help develop young lacrosse players and establish strong high school programs. Two of his players coach the Pacific Collegiate School team (Santa Cruz), his assistant coach helps out at Aptos High School, and John himself coaches at Carmel High School. Watsonville High School was able to add 20 players to its roster and expand its junior varsity program due in large part to the generous donation of lacrosse helmets from the UCSC team.

2004 Brett Cornell ’04 graduated recently from Harvard and will be continuing his studies in the fall toward a PhD in high energy particle physics, either at MIT, UC Berkeley, or Cal Tech. Wendy Garrett ’04 purchased her first home in Los Angeles and is working in music promotions and as an event producer. She worked on a music festival that took place in March; all proceeds were donated to arts and music programs for underserved schools.

Nedjo Spaich ’04 graduated from Bennington College and is working as an assistant producer for a documentary film in Los Angeles. Maggie Greene ’04 graduated from Lehigh in 2008 with a BA in graphic design; she is a freelance designer also in Los Angeles (www.designgreene.com). Frederic de Sibert ’04 also visited us. He graduated in 2008 from George Washington University with a double major in computer science and criminal justice. He lives in New York and works with Goldman Sachs in the infrastructure risk department in its technology division. After working for a couple of years as assistant pro at Yoche Dehe Golf Course (part of Cache Creek Casino Resorts) during which he participated in several professional golfing events, Jason Gilbert ’04 was recently appointed apprentice pro at the Monterey Peninsula Country Club.

2005 Rebecca Haskell ’05 graduated from Boston University with a BA in elementary education. She teaches kindergarten at an elementary school in Anacostia (southeast D.C.) and lives in Alexandria.

While at The University of Chicago, Saffia Hossainzadeh ‘05 participated in an expedition to Antarctica to study glaciers. She recently embarked on a PhD program in glaciology at UC Santa Cruz. Kana Imuta ’05 visited the campus in April. She earned a BS in neuroscience and economics from Claremont McKenna and has embarked on a PhD program in Developmental Psychology at the University of Otago, in New Zealand.

2006 Congratulations to Rick Storkan ’06 on his election to Phi Beta Kappa at Lake Forest College. The senior politics and history major is captain of Lake Forest’s lacrosse team and was scholar athlete on his football team. Megan Richardson ’06 visited campus. She was very pleased with her education and experience at Franklin College (Switzerland), from which she graduated in December 2009 with a BA in International economics. She had extraordinary opportunities there to incorporate travel with her studies and experience different cultures and lifestyles. She will spend the summer following a family tradition, working with The Evans Carnival from

John McCreery ’03 coaching UC Santa Cruz men’s lacrosse

STEVENSON SCHOOL

Northern Missouri. She intends to work in green technology, in the area of local energy production such as that being developed by Bloom Box, a company in Sunnyvale. Bob Wei ’06 will graduate in May from Bowdoin College with a BA in mathematics and computer science. He intends to work in New York with start-up companies. With thanks to Patrick Martin ’06, we learned that Kyle Ankenbauer ’06, a civil engineering major at the University of Wisconsin, won a gold medal and $22,400 from the United Nations and a trip to Stuttgart with a classmate and two students from Haiti, courtesy of UNESCO. (www.mondialogo.com/197.html?&L=0&action=get viewprofile&uid=51638&cHash=07e0 0653f4). The primary objective of his project is to design and construct a hydroelectric power generation facility in Bayonnais, Haiti that will allow locals to conduct repairs and ensure a continuous power supply for medical equipment, refrigeration, cistern refill, and light for students at night despite frequent failures due to hurricanes, lack of maintenance, and overall harsh environmental conditions. We wonder if occasional power failures at Stevenson perhaps inspired him!

2007 Meghan O’Brien ’07 is enjoying her studies at the University of San Diego, during which time she has been active in climbing and hiking, and earned First Honors. She spent a spring break on a college-sponsored trip to Ecuador to do community service and mountain climbing; she spent a summer studying in Madrid; and she went to China to tour and performed community service at her cousin’s school for underprivileged kids in Beijing. Currently she is doing a semester abroad at Cork University in Ireland. She intends to go to law school after USD.

ROBERT U. RICKLEFS SCHOLAR AWARD The Robert U. Ricklefs Scholar Award was established in 1985 by the Stevenson Alumni Association to honor our founder. It is given each year to a member of the Junior Class who exemplifies the values Mr. Ricklefs admired most in people: high scholarship, responsibility, consideration for others, loyalty, courage, and leadership. Finalists for the Award are selected by vote of the Junior Class and the faculty; students receiving the most votes and who appear on both sets of nominations are the Ricklefs Scholar Award finalists. They submit a copy of their transcript, a résumé, and an essay to the five alumni members of the Alumni Selection Committee, and meet with the Committee for interviews. Finalists this year (pictured left to right) were Cole Clark, Claire Margolis, Mary Ndubuisi-Obi, Tobin Paxton, Jeff Goodman, and Matt Bruckmann. The recipient of this year’s Award is Tobin Paxton. The school motto, “Suaviter in Modo; Fortiter in Re” (Gentle in Manner, Strong in Deed) aptly describes these outstanding members of the Class of 2011.

This is the 26th year for the Ricklefs Scholar Award. Recipients are: Matthew Pretzer ’86 Greg Lippman ’87 Austin Choi ’88 Stephen Pretzer ’88 Taylor Matheson ’89 Frank Becking ’90 Shauna Sosnowski ’91 Leah Lin ’92 Bryan White ’93 Gong Lee ’94 Karen Hiles ’95 Samantha Topol ’96 Jonathan Ferrantelli ’97 Dania Akkad ’98 Emily Cedergreen ’99 Catherine Halaby ’00 Ben Eichorn ’01 Kelsey Engelbrecht ’02 James Staples ’03 Anne Leach ’04 Nathan Laughton ’05 Jeremy Sandler ’06 Bartell Cope ’07 Maggie Wei ’08 Laura McCoy ’09 Sam Wilcoxon ’10 Tobin Paxton ’11

2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

ALUMNI AT LARGE between the sciences and arts at UCI, and the amount of student enthusiasm there, an outgrowth of which is numerous clubs and organizations, including the Film-Arts-Drama Alliance and the coed community service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, which she hopes to join. She is also a campus representative, in which capacity she gave our Southern California college tour students a tour of the university. Martin Sung, ’07 and his USC a cappella group The Trojan Men

Lok Ka Yeung ’07 is in his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He is studying finance and is a member of the famous Penn Glee Club. He met with a group of Stevenson students from the East Coast college tour who attended the club’s 148th annual spring show “Top Chef, a Soup Opera” at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at Penn. Martin Sung ’07 and his USC a cappella group The Trojan Men visited campus for a day that included classroom visits and informal chats with current students and faculty, and a rousing, half-hour performance of song and dance in Keck Auditorium that was enthusiastically received by a standing-room-only crowd. Performing Arts Director Ann Marie Hunter commented afterward that Martin’s return represented the closing of a Stevenson circle and the greatest reward a teacher can have. Martin began expressing his love for music here, we watched him develop his talent and enthusiasm here, he went on to university (where he is studying international relations and business development), and he returned to share his life and companions with us, inspiring a lot of current students in the process.

STEVENSON SCHOOL

2008 Emily Talley ’08 earned Athlete of the Week at CU Boulder for her success as a member of the golf team. She finished in 6th and 3rd place in the BYU and CU Mountain View invitationals, respectively. Her third-place finish is just the 24th topthree finish in university history and her two top-ten finishes give her seven in her career, which ties her for fourth-most in CU history. And she’s only a sophomore. Justine Oh ’08 is a sophomore at UC Irvine and is currently studying film (she has her own film crew this year). She is very happy with the strong balance

Clare McKendry ’08 is a creative writing and math major at Carnegie Mellon University and continues her involvement with water polo. When she arrived in Pittsburgh, CMU had only a coed recreational team with two or three female players. She set out to change that and as of this year the university has a recognized women’s team competing in CWPA (Collegiate Water Polo Association) women’s tournaments. Fiona Corner ’08 is in her sophomore year at Lewis & Clark and is majoring in international affairs. She is active in her church and was recently chosen as the National Catholic Student Coalition 2010 Western Region chairperson. She is also a leader of the campus Newman Club (http://www.catholic.org/prwire/headline. php?ID=8691).

Lok Ka Yeung ’07 with Stevenson students on the east coast college tour.

2009 Laura McCoy ’09 is continuing her interest in water polo at The University of Notre Dame. We expect that by the time their collegiate careers are over, she and Clare McKendry ’08 (see note in 2008) will find themselves in the same pool but in different colors. We greatly enjoy Laura’s occasional columns on the sports pages of the Monterey County Herald. Charles Windon ’09 reports that he loves Carnegie Mellon academically and athletically. He’s a member of the golf team there.

David Ricci ’09 stopped by and reports that he is doing well at in engineering UC Riverside. He feels he is very well prepared for the work ahead and is grateful to Stevenson for teaching him how to learn and how to think, two things he feels his classmates at UCR are working very hard to learn on their own. Victor Atkins ’09 transferred to The Colorado School of Mines where he is studying petroleum engineering.

misses the training runs along 17-Mile Drive and to the gate beyond Poppy Hills.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Please email your personal stories and digital photos* for the Alumni At Large section to alumni@stevensonschool. org. *All photos become the property of Stevenson and must be 300-dpi, highresolution images.

Vivian Hui ’09 writes that she is studying biochemistry at UCLA and is enjoying the university immensely, although she

OMISSIONS The following list of student donors was inadvertently omitted from the 2009 Annual Report. We gratefully acknowledge their contributions and regret the omission. Timothy Barroca ’09 Sean Browne ’09 Clayton Callander ’09 Junbo Chen ’09 Margeaux Gallo ’09 Kaylee Gibson ’09 Eric Han ’09 Taylor Holt ’09 Vivian Hui ’09 Anne Lee ’09 Kristina Lindstrom ’09 John Mangiola ’09 David Marangoni-Simonsen ’09 Laura McCoy ’09 Miles Mercer ’09 Rebekah Mourao ’09 Allison Nkwocha ’09 Coray Runge ’09 Katherine Schultheis ’09 Allen Shen ’09 Abigail Smith ’09 Reed Thayer ’09 Jeong Eun We ’09 Bernard Yiu ’09

Alexander Bennett ’10 Ai Ling Chen ’10 In Na Chung ’10 Katelyn Bergholz ’11 Chieh Hsin Chen ’11 Cole Clark ’11 Travis Larson ’11 Benjamin Rehm ’11 Matthew Stein ’11 Christopher Tollner ’11 Dang Jun We ’11 Tomoichi Andry ’12 Gregory Hill ’12 Philip James ’12 Niels Jensen ’12 Hugh Killebrew ’12 Hyung Jin Kim ’12 Thanin Kovitchindachai ’12 Alfred McKelvy ’12 Joshua Provost ’12 Ryu Tomita ’12 Holden Young ’12 Molly Clark ’13 Daniel Matsumoto ’13

Ali Kammerling ’09 2009 Recipient of the McNeely Award In the 2009 Stevenson Annual Report, the announcement of Ali Kammerling ’09 as the recipient of the McNeely Award for Most Improved Student was accidentally omitted. The award and the traditional school chair were presented to Ali at commencement exercises in May 2009. The McNeely Award honors the graduating senior who during his or her career at Stevenson has shown the most improvement academically, as a leader on campus and as a person. It was established in 1972 by former trustee Don McNeely and graduate Kevin McNeely ’71. We congratulate Ali and her family, and regret the omission. 2010 ALUMNI MAGAZINE

View from the Back Porch BY FRANK STEPHENSON, DIRECTOR OF ALUMNI RELATIONS

G R AT I T U D E One day at Assembly our chaplain Bill Rolland spoke about Easter and Passover and spring: the new beginning they offer us, the renewal and rebirth of innocence that this season of blossoms and flowers represents. I’d been thinking along those lines myself lately, although in a different context. I was thinking about what I wanted to say to our seniors before they graduate, and what popped into my mind was “The Rose,” a song sung by Bette Midler in the movie by the same name. “When the night has been too lonely And the road has been too long And you think that love is only For the lucky and the strong Just remember in the winter Far beneath the bitter snow Lies the seed That with the sun’s love in the spring Becomes the rose.” Our seniors are our roses. They have sprung from the seed that is Stevenson, with all their beauty and with all their thorns (suaviter in modo, fortiter in re), and they will go off into the next phase of their lives. And the seed that is Stevenson will go back into the earth and rest, and be nurtured and restored, so that when the next season rolls around, the scene will repeat itself. And life will go on.

STEVENSON SCHOOL

At formal dinner on a Monday night, Sam Radseresht ’11 asks me how the teachers here remain so enthusiastic about what they do, so caring about their students. My response is to say in so many words, look at you, Sam; look at your schoolmates around you with whom we have the pleasure and honor to interact; and look at this special place in which we are privileged to work and play. How could we not? At an evening Vespers, history teacher Dale Hinckley shares with us his love of music, particularly his relationship with his banjo, a relatively new instrument in his extensive repertoire. At his age, he muses, the 10,000 hours to greatness theory doesn’t apply. He doesn’t have them. So he’s going to take each day as it comes with his banjo, enjoy the process, and do the best he can. It is an important lesson for all of us, to not get so caught up in the goal that we overlook the joy in the journey. Our founder Mr. Ricklefs would be pleased. Our seniors do not disappear. They remain here with all who went before them in the memory of their teachers and the history of the School, and they become with their fellow alumni the earth and rain and, yes, the sun’s love in the spring that the seed that is Stevenson needs to produce beautiful roses. And we are grateful for that.

Reunion Weekend 2010 Things may have changed, but Stevenson spirit is forever. FRIDAY, JUNE 4 – SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010

We’re kicking off the 2010 Reunion Weekend with a delicious cookout on Wilson Field

Extra gifts help Stevenson’s

to break the ice and get mingling. Your family is welcome too. On Saturday, we roll

students immediately by providing

back the years with a presentation titled “Catching Up: Stevenson through the years

scholarship aid, faculty salaries,

and looking ahead,” followed by tours, a chapel service, lunch, reception, class pictures,

books, and by supporting athletics,

reunion dinner, and the ever-popular after party at 9:30 p.m. Sunday morning starts with a tasty breakfast, morning prayer and departures at 11 a.m.

clubs, and other campus activities.

Every gift counts The Stevenson Fund (831) 625-8354 www.stevensonschool.org/giving

Non-Profit Org U.S. Postage

3152 Forest Lake Road, Pebble Beach, CA 93953

PAID Salinas, CA Permit No. 467

ALUMN I M AGAZI N E

JUNE 4 – JUNE 6, 2010

Paul Saffo weighs in on what’s to come.

GOLFING LEGACY STRETCHES AROUND THE WORLD and back to Pebble Beach.

ALUMNI MAGAZINE

Things may have changed, but Stevenson spirit is forever.

STEVENSON SC HO OL

Don’t Miss Reunion Weekend

FUTURIST’S CRYSTAL BALL OFFERS NEXT LEVEL INSIGHT.

Stevenson Alumni

SPRING/SUMMER 2010

SIP, READ & DISCUSS WINE, BOOK & ART REVIEWS

ALUMNI AT LARGE Find out the latest on fellow alumni. Pebble Beach Campus, 3152 Forest Lake Road, Pebble Beach, California 93953 Carmel Campus, 24800 Dolores Street, Carmel, California 93923

tel (831) 625-8300

tel (831) 626-5200

www.stevensonschool.org

fax (831) 625-5208

fax (831) 624-9044

info@stevensonschool.org

infoecc-8@stevensonschool.org

VIEW FROM THE BACK PORCH

SHINE IN THE FILM BUSINESS.

KRISTOFFER POLAHA, BOB STEPHENSON & SYLVAIN WHITE make their mark in Hollywood.

Reunion Weekend 2010 Things may have changed, but Stevenson spirit is forever. FRIDAY, JUNE 4 – SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010

We’re kicking off the 2010 Reunion Weekend with a delicious cookout on Wilson Field

Extra gifts help Stevenson’s

to break the ice and get mingling. Your family is welcome too. On Saturday, we roll

students immediately by providing

back the years with a presentation titled “Catching Up: Stevenson through the years

scholarship aid, faculty salaries,

and looking ahead,” followed by tours, a chapel service, lunch, reception, class pictures,

books, and by supporting athletics,

reunion dinner, and the ever-popular after party at 9:30 p.m. Sunday morning starts with a tasty breakfast, morning prayer and departures at 11 a.m.

clubs, and other campus activities.

Every gift counts The Stevenson Fund (831) 625-8354 www.stevensonschool.org/giving