Trojan Family Magazine Spring 2010 by University of Southern California

›› page 25

Entrepreneur Jonathon Nostrant ’09 turned an idea for a voice-activated alarm clock into hot new company Moshi Lifestyle.

Inside Features

24 Masters of

Their Own Universe Hard-working entrepreneurs in their early 20s are pouring out of USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. By Starshine Roshell

32 Transit Tales Take a ride with USC Transportation, whose fleet is larger than those at many other universities and rivals the public transit systems of some cities. By Carl Marziali

38 The Consummate Listener There are many original thinkers at USC, but nobody quite like Josh Kun, who’s become the go-to scholar on popular music and the politics of cultural connections. By Elizabeth Segal

›› page 38

“I always knew, from very early on, that I wanted to be around music. I decided then to devote my life to being a fan.” – USC professor Josh Kun, author of Audiotopia: Music, Race and America and coauthor of And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl:

44 The Personal Is Medical Personalized medicine is the new standard at USC Norris Cancer Hospital, one of only a few facilities in Southern California built exclusively for cancer research and patient care. By Katie Neith and Sara Reeve

Green & Serene

›› page 34

The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost

USC Trojan Family Magazine Spring ’10 Published by the University of Southern California Volume 42 Number 1

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Spring 2o1o columns

4 Editor’s Note

5 President’s Page Celebrating entrepreneurism and innovation, which seem to be part of USC’s very DNA. 64 Last Word There are few places where people don’t enjoy a cup o’ Joe.

17 Arts & Culture The release of a treasure trove of newly discovered Woody Guthrie recordings; Indian playwright Girish Karnad visits USC. 20 Lab Work Lessons to be learned from the 1918 H1N1 flu, and clues to drug resistance in leukemia.

departments

7 Mailbag What’s on readers’ minds. 10 What’s New After 19 years in which USC achieved a rise unparalleled in American higher education, Steven B. Sample will step down.

››

Page 10 Steven and Kathryn Sample: “The presidency of USC has been far more than just a job. It has been a calling, an allconsuming passion.... Our years here have been simply exhilarating.”

For past issues of USC Trojan Family Magazine, visit www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family

13 Reaching Out School of Social Work students develop legislation aimed at keeping homeless children housed with their parents.

22 People Watch David Bohnett ’78, as chair of the LA Phil board, promotes new youth orchestras. 48 Family Ties The USC Alumni Association welcomes three generations of Trojans back to campus. 53 Class Notes Who’s doing what and where. On the cover: Happy Trojan tram riders. Illustration by Tim Bower

15 Shelf Life Multi-talented Tim Page’s book on growing up with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome; and a long-forgotten journal by the legendary Norman Corwin.

13 U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

town 19 years ago. When USC Trojan Family first announced the new president’s arrival in the

USC

spring of 1991, we called him “a man of uncommon scope” – little guessing how prophetic that

Susan Heitman

[ editor’s note ]

The Beginning of an Era

I’ve been trying to remember what USC was like before Steve and Kathryn Sample came to

Editor

phrase would be. You can read (on page 10) about the spectacular changes he

Art Director

engineered during his USC presidency; a series of honors and celebrations are

Rick Simner

scheduled through the summer, and we are preparing a tribute for the next issue of this magazine. But I also wanted to look back at what we said about him when he arrived, a relative unknown who had been president of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and see how it sounds today. One of the first things he told us was, “When my wife Kathryn and I were interviewing at Buffalo in 1982, everybody was down on the university .... I started, after I’d been there about a year, to talk about UB becoming one of the really best public universities around. At first, people thought it was just silly, but nobody thinks it’s silly anymore.” Two things stand out in that quote. One is his relentless drive not only to change the university itself, but to change the university’s perceptions about itself. He was known then – and is known now – for seeing the glass half full rather than half empty, and for persuading those around him to share this view. A former USC colleague told the Los Angeles Times in October, “Sample understood that university leadership involves both improving substance and marketing the change. The brilliance of Sample is that he does both.” The second prophetic note was including his wife, Kathryn, in his presidency. He consistently talks about the job in terms of “Kathryn and I.” His letter to the USC community announcing his impending retirement begins, “Having had the profound privilege and joy of serving this university for 19 years, Kathryn and I are today formally announcing my retirement from the presidency of USC,

We invite you to share your own thoughts about the Samples, their presidency and the effects they have had on USC. Go to http://search.usc.edu and click on “Share your messages ....” – Susan Heitman

name

managing Editor

Mary Modina Russell Ono Stacey Torii Photography

Allison Engel (coordinator) Dietmar Quistorf

USC Trojan Family Magazine University of Southern California Los Angeles, California 90089-7790 tel: (213) 740-2684 / fax: (213) 821-1100 e-mail: magazines@usc.edu web: www.usc.edu/trojan_family

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USC Trojan Family Magazine (ISSN 8750-7927) is published four times a year, in February, May, August and November, by the University of Southern California, Office of University Public Relations, 3375 S. Hoover St, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790.

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U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Contributing Writers

Susan Andrews, Andrea Bennett Alex Boekelheide, Mary Bruce Ariel Carpenter, Anna Cearley Talia Cohen, Mel Cowan Lori Craig, Jackson DeMos Cadonna Dory, Bill Dotson Beth Dunham, Kevin Durkin James Grant, Kirstin Heinle Richard Hoops, Pamela J. Johnson Timothy O. Knight, Ross M. Levine Meghan Lewit, Eric Mankin Carl Marziali, Steve McDonagh Cynthia Monticue, Annette Moore Jon Nalick, Katie Neith Eddie North-Hager, Justin Pierce Sara Reeve, Leslie Ridgeway Gilien Silsby, Kukla Vera Lauren Walser, Suzanne Wu

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Please attach your current mailing label and send to: USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790. Or e-mail us at: magazines@usc.edu

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Moving?

city

senior Editors

Design and production

effective August 2, 2010.”

Trojan Family Magazine

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President’s Page By Steven B. Sample

At 6 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in October nearly 16

years ago, USC Distinguished Professor George Olah was officially informed that he’d won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was recognized for his research in hydrocarbons, research that holds tremendous promise for developing cleaner and more efficient fuels. Within hours of the good news, we arranged a reception at USC for that afternoon to celebrate Professor

President Steven B. Sample, left, and USC Distinguished Professor George Olah, center, lift flutes of champagne with others in 1994 to celebrate Olah’s Nobel Prize.

Olah’s spectacular achievement. Like so many other scientists, artists and intellectuals, Professor Olah had fled his native Hungary during the “three-day open window” following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Several of his fellow Hungarian refugees attended our reception that afternoon, delighted to be part of the congregation of congratulations. At one point during the festivities, someone claimed that the United States was the only country that taxes a Nobel Laureate’s prize money. “Not only that,” chimed in another voice, “as the laureates come back to the states, their medals are weighed by customs and they get taxed on the value of the gold in the medal!” (Now as it happens, neither of these assertions is true. But at the time, we all thought they were true.) Amid loud tsk-tsks of disapproval at this notion of taxing Nobel Prize money, George Olah spoke up. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him at that moment – taller than nearly everyone else in the room, poised and thoughtful, and with tears welling up in his eyes, he said to his fellow Hungarian refugees, “Aren’t we lucky to be in this country and to be able to pay these taxes?” Today when I recall Professor Olah’s comment, it is a powerful reminder to me of the extent to which America has been a magnet for so many of the world’s greatest minds – in science, engineering, medicine, the arts and literature. This country has developed an ethos that encourages originality and supports innovators and entrepreneurs through research funding and market success. In turn, we as a country

have truly benefited from the “brain gain.” USC itself has benefited substantially from our ability to attract some of the world’s best faculty as well as postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergraduates. Entrepreneurialism and innovation seem to be part of USC’s very DNA. Perhaps this stems from the audacity of USC’s founders, who, like all pioneers worth their salt, saw and seized opportunity and built a university where there was only a mustard field on the outskirts of a frontier village. Perhaps our entrepreneurial spirit derives from our location in Los Angeles – a city that enthusiastically embraces originality and creativity, whether manifested in the arts, communications, science, technology, transportation or business. As you’ll see in an article in this issue about our own Trojan entrepreneurs associated with the USC Marshall School of Business and the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (“Masters of Their Own Universe,” p. 24), USC is doing its part to encourage and support smart people with great ideas who are attracted to this university from around the globe. Just as we’re doing through the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, the latter of which has spun out 15 start-ups and raised $115 million in capital in only two years. Just as we did, and continue to do, for Distinguished Professor Olah and hundreds of other faculty researchers who are on the cutting edge in their respective fields. It makes me very proud to lead an institution that is so good at being original. l

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Mailbag

“USC, supported by men and women like Virginia Ramo (who helped raise the millions needed for scholarships like mine), offered me an opportunity to see much more of the world. I often say that I was raised in Nevada but came of age at USC.” quoted ››

Music for the Masses Thank you for the article on the USC Thornton School of Music’s 125th anniversary (“With a Song in Their Hearts,” Winter 2009, p. 28). I am very happy to read about the progress and innovations taking place, especially the opportunity for students to major in popular music performance. The school of music today is the school I wish I’d had when I enrolled in 1978. Although we got a great education in classical music performance, theory and history, the school at that time did not give us any information about the real world of the contemporary music business. It’s great to see USC now embrace the value in all kinds of music, and include curricula that will help students succeed in this very competitive industry. Linda Normando Cicino ’82 LA HABRA, CA

Remembering Virginia I am sure you will receive many remembrances of Virginia Ramo (In Memoriam, Winter 2009, p. 60); this is mine. I came to USC as a Trustee Scholar in September 1984. A couple of years later, I met Mrs. Ramo – who may or may not have had a role in selecting me for a Trustee Scholarship. We met when the Student Affairs Committee invited several student leaders to lunch, as it did a couple of times each year. Now that I look back, I’m rather impressed it would take the time. Odd, isn’t it, that a committee charged with student affairs would want to talk to students? I sat between Wallis Annenberg and Lorna Y. Reed; Mrs. Ramo was across the

table. I remember each of them asking questions about what I was doing, how the dorm was holding up (I lived in Marks Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus). Was the faculty-in-residence program (new at the time) a good idea? Did my clubs get enough support? I remember each of them listening to what I had to say, and I remember then student affairs vice president James Dennis looking on as well.

[last word]

What I remember most, though, was when Mrs. Ramo told Mrs. Annenberg and Mrs. Young that they had to stop asking me questions. As she pointed out, everyone else was just about done with lunch and I had not yet started eating mine. I had grown up in a one-high-school town. USC, supported by men and women like Mrs. Ramo (who helped raise the millions needed for scholarships like mine), offered me an opportunity to see much more of the world. I often say that I was raised in Nevada but came of age at USC. That lunch, in its way, shows why. Russell West Jr. ’88 NEW YORK, NY

Value Added I appreciated with interest the article “Virtue Takes Time” (What’s New, Autumn 2009, p. 19). When viewing the article from

Four-Legged Friends

Were we being sneaky or just careless? That was the real puzzler in our latest Last Word, which featured two different clues identified as No. 9. Of the 142 entries, few failed to point out this numbering anomaly. But was it an error? Or an insidious trick? “I figure you guys are pretty adept at dropping clues, so I hesitated at elevating the second 9 to a 10,” writes Lyle Parrish ‘56. Alas, we are not nearly as clever (or cruel) as readers would imagine, and the redundant numbering was just an old-fashioned typo. However, two common errors that did cost points involved identifying “Gordo” as the space explorer of clue No. 1 and “Little Sorrel” as the famous Civil War mount of clue No. 5. Both were good guesses, but Gordo, as canny Last Worder Robert Knecht Schmidt BS ‘00, MS ‘01 notes, was a squirrel monkey, a New World species not likely to be born in Cameroon. As for Little Sorrel, he couldn’t have carried Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to Appomattox, since the Confederate hero had been mortally wounded two years earlier. The correct steed was Robert E. Lee’s “Traveller.” Drawn randomly from 114 correct entries, these five winners will receive Borders gift certificates for their efforts: Charlette Bond, David Cherryhomes ’97, Marina Clifton ’86, Edith Frampton and Don Ross PhD ’91. Congratulations to all our animal-appreciating Last Worders. Answers ›› 1. Ham, the chimp 2. Dolly, the sheep 3. Secretariat 4. Seabiscuit 5. Traveller 6. Jumbo 7. Hanno, the elephant 8. Laika 9. Chips, the war dog 10. Elsa, the lioness. l

We welcome letters from readers although we do reserve the right to select and edit for space. Please include your name, address, e-mail address, degree and year of graduation, if applicable, with each letter and mail to: USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790 or e-mail us at: magazines@usc.edu. Please note that, because of our production schedule, it might be several months before your letter appears.

U S C T rojan Family ma g a z in e spring 2010

Last Word In I have a great time working on the Last Word challenges! Even when I don’t get a chance to submit them, they are still a lot of fun. Thanks for putting them together. Andrea Weigel, BA ’95

Wayne’s World It was with great interest and pleasure that I just finished Rick Jewell’s article about John Wayne (“John Wayne, an American Icon,” Autumn 2008, p. 32). I am a big John Wayne fan, and am always interested in learning more about him. A few weeks ago while at church, I met a woman who indicated that she had been at an event with a man she thought might be a [Wayne] family member, and mentioned something about a football scholarship, or perhaps an academic scholarship, related to John Wayne. Maybe it was in Wayne’s name? I would be interested in finding out more. I am a moderator of the Original John Wayne Message Board, at www.dukewayne. com, and it is just such little tidbits about our hero that we enjoy learning. It pleases us greatly to know that Duke is still an integral part of USC, as well as a part of its history. If you could share a little more information regarding the scholarship, or perhaps forward my e-mail on to someone who knows more about it, I would appreciate it. Chester Berrlow

T e m p leton , C A

B en lo m on d , ca

a religio-spiritual view, I remembered the story of creation from the Judeo-Christian tradition that relates how mankind was created in the likeness of God and that virtue was likely natural at that time. The reference in the article to virtue as “nobler” seems to indicate that such a way provides a better quality life. To attend to such an aim might be easier if virtue were a habit that stayed close to the significance of its separation from emotional fluctuation. It almost seems as though the article begins to reveal the bridge that may be forming between Western and Eastern spiritual thought, with science as a way of shedding light or introducing Eastern spiritual thought. This can lead to a better understanding of wholesome virtues. Maureen Kris (Halikis) ’84 LOS ANGELES, CA

U S C T rojan Family ma g a z in e spring 2010

Cynthia Villasenor, assistant dean of development at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, replies: The Michael Wayne Film Preservation and Restoration Fellowship [named after John Wayne’s eldest son, who died a few years ago] was established by Gretchen Wayne, Michael’s wife, and Batjac Productions, Inc., to fund the Michael Wayne Fellow in the USC School of Cinematic Arts archives. 30-Year Splash This year, Swim With Mike, the physically challenged athletes scholarship fund, celebrates a special milestone. Its annual Swim With Mike fundraiser – to be held at the McDonald’s Olympic Swim Stadium on the University Park campus on April 17, 2010 – will mark 30 years of this unique philanthropic effort. Over three decades, Swim With Mike has expanded its fund-raisers to other locations and campuses – Hawaii, Hong Kong, Stanford University, University of Connecticut, Princeton University – and seen its recipients attend universities across the nation. The effort began as a one-time event organized by friends of Mike Nyeholt ’78, an All-American swimmer at USC who was

photo b y D an Av ila

Mike Nyeholt ’78 after swimming laps at the 29th annual Swim With Mike.

paralyzed from the chest down, to purchase a specially equipped van. So much was raised that day that Nyeholt suggested that the excess money be used to create a physically challenged athletes scholarship fund at USC. Over the years, the swim-a-thons have raised more than $9.6 million to provide more than 93 scholarships to athletes at 34 universities. Currently, there are 42 scholar-athletes receiving financial support – a dozen of them at USC. While the financial support is critical,

Swim With Mike also offers students support to navigate the challenges as they gain independence. Here’s what the family of civil engineering graduate Chad Hendrickson ’07, MA ’08 of Cerritos, Calif., wrote for a recent Swim With Mike newsletter: “For the families, being surrounded by others who have faced the same challenges offers comfort and inspiration as their children succeed in ways once thought impossible. “Once a year, as we come together to support one another and raise funds, it is a comfort to know we are not alone, and realize there are so many people that care and are willing to give of their time, talents and resources to make a difference. “Upon recently sharing with a Swim With Mike board member how amazed we were with the Swim With Mike family, that they are always ready and willing to help, her response was: ‘This is what the Trojan Family and the Swim With Mike family are all about!’ “We feel blessed to be a part of this family. With continued support, this tradition will continue to make a positive impact for many years to come.”

For more information about Swim With Mike, please visit www.swimwithmike.org Claire Adams ’10 Swim With Mike newsletter editor C A MP U S

Notice Board We need your assistance in preserving the heritage of our university. The USC University Archives exist to collect, preserve and make available records having permanent value in documenting the history of the university and USC-related organizations as well as the activities of faculty, staff and students. Books, manuscripts, USC periodicals and newspapers, posters, photographic images, disc and tape recordings, and other items are available for research under supervised conditions. Gifts of any items contributing to documentation of the history of USC will be greatly appreciated and carefully preserved. Please contact me at (213) 740-2587 or czachary@usc.edu, or visit us at www.usc. edu/ arc/libraries/uscarchives Claude Zachary USC University Archivist C A MP U S

Half Page ???? Ad FPO x: 7.6125 y: 4.875

U S C T rojan Family ma g a z in e spring 2010

What’s New News

Notes on all things trojan

Steven B. Sample to Retire The visionary leader is widely credited for an institutional rise that is unparalleled in American higher education. president of the University of Southern California since 1991, announced in November that he will retire in August 2010. “For Kathryn and me, the presidency of USC has been far more than just a job,” Sample said. “It has been a calling, an allconsuming passion to move this university ahead farther and faster than any other university in the United States. “We have been blessed to have pursued this mission in the company of many colleagues and friends who share our commitment to USC’s advancement. Our years here have simply been exhilarating.” Sample’s 19-year presidency has seen dramatic changes at USC. Under his leadership, the university: • Became a highly selective undergraduate institution; • Saw the excellence of its faculty rise to new levels; • Completed the largest fund-raising campaign in the history of higher education; • Created a global network of scholars and programs, especially around the Pacific Rim; • Built successful partnerships in its neighborhoods to spur economic and educational development; and • Embraced its role as the largest private employer and key social force in the City of Los Angeles. Steven B. Sample,

“If there were a tagline for his leadership style,” said USC Board of Trustees chairman Edward P. Roski Jr., “it would be ‘Never let up.’ And the results have been nothing short of spectacular. “From the very start he understood the entrepreneurial zeal of USC and fueled our desire to be excellent. Again and again, he would achieve his objectives for the university but would then push even harder, urging everyone to reach for even higher goals. Filling his shoes will be a big job for the trustees as we search for his successor.” Sample became the 10th president of USC

in March 1991, after service as president of the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York. Under his leadership, USC has become world renowned in the fields of communication and multimedia technologies, received national acclaim for its innovative community partnerships and solidified its status as one of the nation’s leading research universities. During his tenure, USC climbed 25 points in the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings, an increase that is unprecedented for its rapidity and magnitude. Among the milestones of the past 19 years is a national record-setting fundraising campaign which, at its conclusion in December 2002, had raised $2.85 billion. During Sample’s presidency, USC became the only

Running the Numbers Sample’s tenure is marked by five $100 million-plus gifts – a national higher ed record Alfred Mann establishes USC Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering

$112.5M

W. M. Keck Foundation endows Keck School of Medicine of USC

$110M

Annenberg Foundation establishes USC Annenberg Center for Communication

$120M

Annenberg Foundation endows USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

$100M

USC alumnus George Lucas & Lucasfilm Foundation endow USC School of Cinematic Arts $175M

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

American university to have received five gifts of $100 million or more (see below); and also secured seven school naming gifts: USC Leventhal School of Accounting, USC Marshall School of Business, USC Rossier School of Education, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Roski School of Fine Arts, Keck School of Medicine of USC and USC Thornton School of Music. Significant faculty achievements during this time included the awarding of the Nobel Prize in chemistry to USC professor George Olah and the conferring of the

MacArthur Fellowship to USC law professor Elyn Saks. At the undergraduate level, USC ad vanced rapidly as a highly selective university, with SAT scores rising more than 300 points and the number of freshman applications nearly tripling since 1991. This fall, USC enrolled 232 National Merit Scholars in its freshman class, a dramatic increase from 33 in 1991 that placed USC among the nation’s top five universities in the number of National Merit Scholars.

ph o t o by j o hn li v z ey

In 2000, USC was proclaimed “College of the

Year” by Time magazine and the Princeton Review, in recognition of its community partnership programs. USC ranked among the top five in the nation in a survey of “Great Colleges to Work For” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008), was named a “college with a conscience” for its service learning and community involvement in 2005 and this year ranked no. 1 in the Saviors of

Our Cities: A Survey of Best College and University Civic Partnerships. Sample, the university’s first holder of the Robert C. Packard President’s Chair, is an electrical engineer, a musician, an outdoorsman, an author and an inventor. In 1998, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to consumer electronics and his educational leadership. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an active member of USC’s faculty, teaching with management expert Warren Bennis a popular course, “The Art and Adventure of Leadership.” His best-selling book, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, named a “must-read” by Harvard Management Update, has been translated into five languages. l A Web site including Steven Sample’s letter to the USC community, a photo gallery and the opportunity to share messages with the president can be found at http://search.usc.edu President Steven B. Sample and Kathryn Sample

CapitalConnections ›› MISSING WOMEN Historian Philippa Levine of USC College presented a lecture at the Library of Congress in mid-July at the annual International Seminar on Decolonization. Decolonization is a term used to mark the period after the Second World War when European imperial powers rapidly lost their colonial overseas possessions. Says Levine: “My lecture asked why in studies of this phenomenon, questions of gender – and the role and experience of women – are seldom addressed.” Levine, who normally specializes in the 19th century, said the topic was of interest to her as a historian of empire and of gender.

›› BONUS POINTS

With taxpayer outrage simmering over bonuses Merrill Lynch and AIG paid after receiving federal bailout money, USC Marshall School of Business professor Kevin Murphy appeared before the House Financial Services Committee in June to discuss executive compensation, his field of expertise. Murphy testified that regulating compensation “will cripple” the financial services industry. He argued that it’s not “in the taxpayers’ interest to eliminate bonuses or limit the top pay of executives,” adding, “Banks are losing their best people… precisely the people who understand the complex interests that got us into trouble.” Public anger is understandable, Murphy said. “But we shouldn’t make policy decisions when we’re angry.”

›› PAKISTANI PROMOTERS USC dean of religious life Varun Soni and Rob Asghar, a USC Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy University fellow, went to the U.S. Department of State to discuss the Pakistani diaspora community and to explore a relationship with the USC center. As a result, Soni and Asghar ended up helping organize the Concert for Pakistan on Sept. 13 at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York. The concert drew nearly 2,000 music fans, allied in their concern for the people of the Swat region. “By bringing together musicians from around the world, the concert put a human face to the serious challenges confronting Pakistan’s three million internally displaced people,” says Soni. l For news on USC in Washington and Sacramento, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/capital_connections

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

current USC faculty experts in pharmacoeconomics, public insurance and healthcare financing. The center’s research will focus on five key areas: reducing unnecessary spending, improving insurance design, understanding how public policy affects medical innovation, identifying the macroeconomic consequences of U.S. health-care costs, and improving comparative effectiveness and outcomes research. Goldman said the new center’s anticipated research projects include study of how coverage gaps in federally funded programs impact patient health and how insurance designs affect physician-prescribing behavior. was the founding chairman and chief executive officer of WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company, and a recognized expert in health policy and health economics. He led WellPoint from 1992 through 2004 and continued as chairman through 2005. He is currently chairman of Surgical Care Affiliates and a senior adviser to TPG Capital, a private equity firm. Schaeffer is also a veteran member of the board of councilors at SPPD, and he holds the Judge Robert Maclay Widney Chair, a select executive-in-residence appointment accorded by the university president and named for one of USC’s founders. He lectures and writes widely on health policy issues. leonard schaeffer Left to right: Leonard and Pamela Schaeffer, Dana Goldman

go figure

Health Policy Headquarters USC’s new Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics is headed by RAND’s Dana Goldman Medicine and Public Policy at SPPD, as well as a faculty appointment at the School of Pharmacy. Two of the three new faculty members – Geoffrey Joyce and Neeraj Sood – have been appointed associate professors at the School of Pharmacy; the third, Darius Lakdawalla, has been appointed associate professor at SPPD. They will be joined in their research and outreach activities by

[CHIMP CHAMP ]

– James Grant Information on the activities of the Schaeffer Center can be found at http://healthpolicy.usc.edu

Goodall Spreads Hope

Jane Goodall, internationally renowned anthropologist and world conservationist, filled Bovard Auditorium on Oct. 6 with both a capacity crowd and a renewed sense of hope for a world in need. Goodall has been a distinguished adjunct professor and co-director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at USC College for 19 years. She also is an adjunct faculty member in USC’s Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. Goodall, who began her career in Gombe Stream National Park (Tanzania) in 1960, has spoken to people in 64 countries about her chimpanzee research. At Bovard, she shared several of her unique experiences that paint a vivid image of a global environment in peril. “Each one of us must do everything in our power to slow down climate change,” she said, emphasizing the difference that individuals and small groups of people can make in saving other creatures. – Susan Andrews

Read more about Jane Goodall’s speech and visit to USC at http://tinyurl.com/y9th64g

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

schaeffer ph o t o by t o m q ueally / g o o dall ph o t o by jeff o rl o ws k i

research center focusing on health policy and economics has been established at USC, executive vice president and provost C. L. Max Nikias announced in late September. The Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics is funded by a $1.2 million operating gift from Leonard D. Schaeffer and his wife, Pamela Schaeffer. “At a time when the nation is struggling with health-care reform, we are honored to announce the creation of this new interdisciplinary center, which will bring together USC’s extraordinarily wide range of expertise in order to address one of the most significant issues of our time,” Nikias said. The Schaeffer Center is headed by Dana Goldman, a nationally recognized expert in health economics who was recently elected to the Institute of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. He joins USC from the RAND Corporation, where he headed its health economics, finance and organization division. Three of his former RAND colleagues have also been recruited to USC. The Schaeffer Center is a collaboration between the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the USC School of Pharmacy. In addition to his post as director of the Schaeffer Center, Goldman holds the Norman Topping Chair in A major new

Reaching Out

TrojanCONNECTIONS

Keeping Families Intact Social work students help draft a national bill to protect homeless parents and children from being split up. Maxine Waters introduced legislation developed by USC School of Social Work students to mandate that federal agencies re-prioritize their funding to help keep homeless children housed with their parents whenever possible. The resolution affirms that children should not be denied the right to be housed together with their families based on what neighborhood they live in or how much money they make. “It’s important that Congress acknowledge the fundamental right of children to adequate housing,” says Waters. “Nearly 200,000 children and youth are homeless each night in America. It is appalling and unacceptable that so many children are living on the streets without shelter. The dangers of not having safe and adequate housing are especially harmful to children’s health and development.” Led by their professor, Ralph Fertig, students from several social welfare polCongresswoman

icy classes researched statistics related to homelessness, conducted interviews, rallied stakeholders and made connections with key legislators to help draft and build support for this comprehensive bill. The work was part of their social advocacy project. Fertig, clinical associate professor and head of the social welfare policy sequence for the School of Social Work, wrote the legislation, but says he couldn’t have done it without the work of the students. “The magnitude of their commitment exceeded my expectations,” he says. Fertig has a long history of advocating for the homeless, which he believes represent a “failure of our social service safety net.” He discussed the issue with his students, who decided to pursue it. Instead of a simple class assignment, Fertig felt it would be a good opportunity for students to see firsthand how policy can affect the life chances of vulnerable populations. Fertig, who has worked with Waters

›› SPORTS CAMPS Trojan Kids Camp, which has been running for 42 years, offers community youth a three-week program that promotes a healthy lifestyle. Each day, children participate in swimming, dancing, tennis, basketball and football. Field trips to the Malibu mountains, Lego-building and working on computer skills are also on the agenda. “The kids love it so much,” says Arvin Varma, assistant director of Recreational Sports, who directs the program. “Every single one was crying on the last day of camp this summer.” Youth Impact, founded four years ago by Riki Ellison ’83, a former USC and National Football League player, is a football-oriented program for at-risk boys in the sixth and seventh grades. The free program offers boys a daily structure that incorporates character development, mentoring, coaching and teaching.

›› TROJAN-POWERED SCHOOL The doctorate of education program at the USC Rossier School of Education has been transforming the Glendale Unified School District into a success story for urban public education. Superintendent Michael Escalante EdD ‘02, says that over time, his school district and the Ed.D. program at USC Rossier have become inextricably connected. Scores of graduates from USC Rossier’s doctoral program hold leadership roles in just about every area of the Glendale school district. Thirty percent of students there are English-language learners, and 50 percent have some measure of poverty. Yet Glendale Unified consistently exceeds the statewide average in student scores.

illustrati o n by michael k lein

›› FRESHMEN GIVE BACK During their first weekend as Trojans, hundreds of USC freshmen chose to volunteer their time in the community they just started calling home. More than 450 USC students participated in the 14th annual Friends and Neighbors Service Day hosted by the USC Volunteer Center. Students worked at more than 30 project sites around Los Angeles. “The fact that the Children’s Nature Institute had 20 organized volunteers who were eager to work in a focused way probably helped them do a week’s worth of work in three hours,” says center director Melissa Gaeke, about students at a children’s garden in Griffith Park. l

For more on USC neighborhood outreach, visit http:// communities.usc.edu

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

on anti-poverty issues for decades, reached out to his friend to see if she would be supportive of his students working on a bill. Waters, who is also chair of the of the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, liked the concept. She asked Fertig to bring her the research, rationale and language for the bill, and she committed to introduce it. Excited by the challenge and realizing the enormity of the project, students immediately got to work. They split up into five teams – research, person-in-theenvironment (PIE), legislative, advocacy and communications – to make the work more manageable. While the research team found statistics and numbers to describe the extent of the issue, members of the PIE team interviewed homeless parents and their children to give a face and real voice to the problem. Group members also took video footage of the interviews that was later included in a documentary the students made to record their efforts and progress. They plan to share the documentary with agencies and individuals to build support for the bill. The legislative team spent much of its time sending emails, making phone calls and writing letters to legislators to inform them of the bill and gather support for it.

[city savior ]

Instead of contacting politicians, the advocacy team made community connections by targeting social welfare agencies. The agencies were asked to call and write letters of support to their district and state legislative representatives. MSW student Rosa Guerrero says it felt “surreal” to be a part of this project – she never thought that she would have been able to contribute to such an important and progressive bill. As part of the PIE team, Guerrero had the job of finding and interviewing homeless families. She says it was difficult hearing parents describe how their children were taken away because of their inability to find housing. “In doing the interviews, we discovered homeless women had difficult times recovering their children from foster care,” she says. “They could not get their children back because they did not have housing, but many places would not give them housing until they had their children.” These types of stories emphasized the need for the legislation and motivated Guerrero and the other students to work even harder. This was not a typical class assignment, and

students who participated had to be committed. Many worked weekends and over spring break to help get documentary footage, waking up at 5 a.m. and going to the downtown Los Angeles skid row where numbers of homeless families live. Erin Dowler was one of several students who attended a congressional hearing at Los Angeles Community College where the issue of homelessness was discussed. This is where the students submitted their draft to Waters. Video footage of the hearing is also included in the documentary. Dowler, who helped on the advocacy and communications teams, says being involved in this project has expanded her idea of social work and has given her insight and experience with the legislative process that she hopes to utilize again in her career. “This experience was so powerful,” she says. “To see something start from the beginning and watch it evolve into this huge federal bill that is going to be introduced. It’s amazing to be a part of it all.” – Cadonna Dory

USC is Top Neighbor

USC is the most neighborly university in the country, according to Evan S. Dobelle, president of Westfield State College. Dobelle, who as president of Trinity College in the late 1990s oversaw that university’s notable neighborhood outreach effort, placed USC and the University of Pennsylvania at the top of the list of Saviors of Our Cities: A Survey of Best College and University Civic Partnerships. “This is another affirmation that USC is making a difference in our communities,” says

Thomas S. Sayles, vice president of USC’s government and community relations. The institutions were selected because of positive impacts on their urban communities, including both commercial and residential activities such as revitalization, cultural renewal, economics, community service and development. Dobelle published his first Saviors of Our Cities survey in 2006. USC topped that list as well. The survey highlighted USC’s Family of Schools program, its servicelearning emphasis as seen in such programs as the Joint Educational Project, and the Business Expansion Network, which provides start-up and ongoing support for local businesses. Criteria for judging schools included the length of involvement with the community; real dollars invested; presence felt through payroll, research and purchasing power; faculty and student involvement in community service; continued sustainability of neighborhood initiatives; and effect on local student access and affordability to attend college through elementary and secondary school partnerships. – Eddie North-Hager

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

Sweet Temptations, one of a series of bilingual fotonovelas produced by the USC School of Pharmacy to promote community health awareness

Shelf Life

An Awkward Childhood… In professor Tim Page’s critically lauded memoir, he writes about his attempts to feign normalcy despite undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome. Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s

By Tim Page DOUBLEDAY, $26

Tim Page lived undiagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, until he was 45 years old. “I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed” says Page, now 55, who recently penned a memoir about his adolescence as a loner. Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, was published in September. The book had its origins in an article written for The New Yorker in 2007. For Page to revisit his awkward, disoriented childhood was sometimes painful. Still, in the end, he is proud of Parallel Play. “It’s my story, no doubt about it,” he says. “I told the truth, or as close to it as I could get. And I’m especially glad that this is what they call an ‘easy read.’ You can finish it in three or four hours. Asperger’s Syndrome is a complicated condition and I hope that Parallel Play will explain some things.” Page says that a lot of “Aspies” (as they call themselves) are simply “the typical

tim page k indergarten ph o t o c o urtesy o f d o ubleday

USC professor

absent-minded professor times five, in our own worlds.” Still, he hesitates to stereotype. “You’ve got to remember – when you’ve met one person with autism, well, you’ve met one person with autism. We’re a pretty varied lot.” Parallel Play has received rave reviews from major media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and O, The Oprah Magazine. “In fascinatingly precise detail and often to pricelessly funny effect, [Page] describes ways in which his efforts to feign normalcy have backfired,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. “Recalling an adolescent clinch with a young woman who asked if he’d still care about her the next day, he says he pondered the question, then told her truthfully that he had no idea. ‘Wrong answer,’ he wryly recalls.” That particular review pleases Page because, he says: “Janet Maslin really got Parallel Play. I had wanted to write what could be described as a sad book with a lot of humor or a funny book shot through with sadness, and she understood that it was both.” Parallel Play ends just as Page begins his college career, a point in his life when he began to aquire some of the social skills

that he had never understood. “My worst years with Asperger’s were mostly in my childhood,” he says. “Once you’ve been around the block a few thousand times, you start to get the hang of it. I still struggle today, but I’m more or less used to myself now and I know what circumstances will be difficult for me and mostly avoid them.” Page was a classical music critic for 30 years, at The New York Times, Newsday and finally The Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997. In early 2008, he came to USC, where he is a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and also holds a position at the USC Thornton School of Music. “After covering more than 3,000 concerts, I was a little tired of it and delighted when the USC job came along,” he says. “I consider myself an extremely lucky man.” “In general, I’ve found that people here treat each other with dignity and decency. I’m especially impressed by my students, who are so smart, curious and open-minded – much more so than they were when I was going to school 30 years ago. There’s this weird idea that today’s students are apathetic and purely hedonistic, and I don’t find that true of the USC students I’ve met at all.” Page is known for his intense focus on various seemingly unrelated subjects – he has published books on the musicians Glenn Gould, Virgil Thomson and William Kapell, the authors Dawn Powell and Sigrid Undset and the 19th-century agnostic preacher Robert Green Ingersoll – but says he is currently “between extracurricular obsessions.” “The most important thing for me now is to settle in at USC and be of long and helpful service here,” he says. “Annenberg has recently started an arts journalism master’s degree program, and I want to help shape a new generation of critics.” – Kirstin Heinle

overheard

›› “Human settle-

ment of the moon is now inevitable. Once you split up water into its parts, you can use it as rocket fuel right there on the moon to fly off to distant places, making it economical.” – Madhu Thangavelu, USC engineering professor, on Fox News about the discovery of water on the moon

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

by Ariela Gross Harvard University Press, $29.95

Racial identity trials – court cases that determined a person’s “race” as well as his or her rights and privileges – help explain the history of race and racism in America, argues USC Gould School of Law’s Ariela Gross in her multiple award-winning book. She recounts stories of these trials in American courts, from the early republic well into the 20th century, contributing to ongoing debates over affirmative action, identity politics and the construction of a color-blind society.

This Lovely Life

by Vicki Forman Mariner Books, $13.95

Vicki Forman’s memoir details her conflicting emotions after going into premature labor and giving birth to twins. Knowing that the prognosis would not be good for her 23-week-old babies, Forman begged doctors to let them pass on as a miscarriage, but California laws required that doctors attempt resuscitation. Weighing a pound each at birth, her daughter, Ellie, died four days later, but her son, Evan, lived for eight years with severe developmental difficulties. During that time, Forman, a USC College lecturer, was her son’s advocate.

Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents

by Tom Kemper University of California Press, $21.95

Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall – behind each of these stars was a hidden force: the talent agent. In this first-ever history of Hollywood agents, USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Tom Kemper mines agency archives to present an insider’s view on their tooth-and-claw rise to power during the studio era. It’s a tale of ambitious characters, savvy calculations, muckraking, financial ruin and ultimate triumph, and establishes the agent’s central role in the Hollywood business world. l Faculty books can be purchased at Trojan Bookstore. Call (213) 740-9030 or visit www.uscbookstore.com

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

overdue book

The Return of a Forgotten Journal A diary written in 1946 during Norman Corwin’s epic world tour finally sees print. One World Flight: The Lost Journal of Radio’s Greatest Writer

By Norman Corwin, edited by Michael C. Keith and Mary Ann Watson CONTINUUM, $24.95

gathering at Barnes & Noble’s Westside Pavilion store honored Norman Corwin, a Los Angeles literary treasure, in September. We had assembled for a signing of his new book, One World Flight: The Lost Journal of Radio’s Greatest Writer. [Corwin, 99, is writer-in-residence at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.] Corwin had written the journal during his flight around the world in 1946. He had helped rally the nation during the war with his radio broadcasts and went on to write books, films and memorable radio scripts. The flight was his reward for winning the first Wendell Willkie Award, established by admirers of the 1940 Republican presidential nominee. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Willkie a special envoy and sent him around the world to visit America’s allies. Willkie then wrote a best-selling book, One World, whose goal is still far away. One of the benefits of teaching at USC was the opportunity it gave me and my wife, Nancy, to get to know Corwin, joining an army of friends he has accumulated, starting shortly after his birth in Boston in 1910. Corwin, confined to a wheelchair, could not be heard at first. Instead, his words were delivered to the crowd by Michael C. Keith who, with Mary Ann Watson – both professors of broadcasting history – had brought the long-forgotten journal to publication. After a while, bookstore personnel located a microphone and Corwin took over. His voice, while soft, is as clear and as sharp as his mind and wit. He took note of writers in the audience, and was pleased to acknowledge the presence of another Los Angeles literary treasure, Ray Bradbury, who was also in a wheelchair and made his way through the crowd to greet Corwin, providing a wonderful moment in Los Angeles literary history. Reading from the book were Corwin’s friends Eva Marie Saint, the great actress, and her husband, the director Jeff Hayden. This selection about St. An enthusiastic

Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow gives a good sense of the great writing and wit: I saw the church sitting under a distant cumulus cloud of overwhelming magnificence – a mighty towering cauliflower head crowned and studded with white, ivory and golden botryoids, the peaks rouged here and there by the rays of a sinking sun. The trunk of the cloud shaded to blues and purples out of the night that was advancing over the plains to the east. This apocalyptic mass sat, excessively and redundantly, on top of the most grandiloquent cathedral in the world, itself an architectural curiosity. I have seen some great skies in my years of looking up and down at clouds, but there never had been one to match that vision of tufts and battlements, that nest of hail and thunder, rising above the vari-colored, spiraling domes and cupolas built for a mad emperor. Afterward,

we wanted Corwin to autograph the book. The crowd was dense with others bent on the same mission. But I still had enough of a reporter’s skill – and rudeness – to push my way through. He wrote: “For Bill and Nancy. The best. Norman Corwin.” His small, careful printing was similar to the neat cursive with which he wrote the journal. Brief handwritten excerpts begin each chapter. “There was quite a throng to see us off,” he wrote as the journey began. There was quite a throng to see his book off, too. – Bill Boyarsky (courtesy of laobserved.com)

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New RELEASES

Arts & Culture

Art Films? We Got ‘Em Alex Ago fills the screens at Cinematic Arts with new releases each week, all free and open to the public. of suburban megaplexes teeming with Hollywood blockbusters, where’s an esoteric film buff to go for succor? For the past year or so, the answer – at least among cineastes in and around downtown L.A. – has been USC. More specifically, the School of Cinematic Arts, where a new film series has, in effect, turned the three theatres of the brand spanking-new George Lucas Building into the city center’s premier art house. Since its debut in January, the Outside the Box Office series has given free sneak previews of more than 50 new releases in world cinema, documentary and independent film, with one or more of the filmmakers usually in attendance. The series has featured exotic fare from Canada, China, France, Germany, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Palestine, the Philippines, Russia, Thailand and the United Kingdom, not to mention from all around the United States. The brainchild of SCA special events coordinator Alex Ago, the screenings happen Wednesday nights, and frequently on Fridays and Sundays, too. Sometimes Ago squeezes in a double feature in which, he admits, the films can be extremely mismatched, “but there are so many wonderful movies coming out, and they have to be

ph o t o by mar k berndt

Drowning in a sea

screened before they open commercially, and I have limited space.” Ago got the idea for the series while booking screenings for film critic Leonard Maltin’s popular “Theatrical Film Symposium” class, which spotlights a new release each week. “I’d been getting all sorts of interesting film screening invitations from the distributors I work with,” says Ago, who is himself an ardent film lover. “And I thought it was

[turnstile WOEs]

a shame not to take advantage of this stuff.” Many of the films and filmmakers didn’t fit with Maltin’s course schedule. So, Ago decided to book them anyway, as a public service to the USC community. His efforts mean that USC students no longer have to trek to the Westside or Hollywood, where L.A.’s major art houses are located, to see first-run documentaries, foreign films and indie projects. “In fact, a lot of this screening series came from the fact that I don’t like to drive to West Hollywood to go to the Sunset 5, but I still want to see these movies,” says Ago. “And it’s so hard to keep track of when they’re coming out, how long they’ll be in theatres – it’s just ridiculous how limited the releases are – and what theatres they’ll be playing in. I wanted to remove all the guesswork and all the travel involved with getting to see these wonderful movies.” Recent screenings have included Lee Daniels’ Precious, a double-prizewinner at Sundance; Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, Chinese director John Woo’s Red Cliff, and Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baaria. Outside the Box Office is only possible because of the new SCA complex, which boasts three theatres: the 200-seat Ray Stark Family Theatre which is “35mm capable,” a 106-seat theatre unpretentiously known as “Room 112” and a 70-seat theatre that goes by “Room 110.” The beauty of the series is that it is costneutral. “It doesn’t cost me anything to run these films, because they’re promotional screenings or sneak previews that the studios and distributors give to us for free,” he explains. Ago doesn’t even require the services of a projectionist. “I started this as something I could manage personally with my staff

Do We Need Museums?

Even before the financial crisis hit, top museum directors worldwide knew they were operating in a bubble that couldn’t last. “Everything just got out of control,” says Selma Holo, director of the International Museum Institute and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. “Exhibitions got more and more and more expensive, and more and more people needed to come in order to justify the cost.” Holo and Mari-Tere Alvarez PhD ‘03 of the J. Paul Getty Museum co-edited a timely new book on the subject, Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values (Altamira Books). “We really searched for a common language that would allow museums to evaluate themselves,” says Holo. “The resulting handbook allows museums to look into the future and try to figure out how they can prove and make the case that they are indeed indispensible to society.” – Suzanne Wu

For more on this book of essays about the role of museums, visit http://tinyurl.com/y9a6l2y

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

maintains the Out of the Box Office Web site (cinema.usc.edu/outsidetheboxoffice) to accurately reflect future engagements, and he encourages cinema buffs to check it regularly. He also sends out weekly “eblasts” announcing upcoming screenings to a list of 10,000 film enthusiasts. To join the list, send a request to aago@cinema.usc.edu – Diane Krieger

drama king

Global Thespian Famed Indian playwright Girish Karnad sees his work staged by USC theatre students. to be Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw and Tom Stoppard all rolled into one. Immodest as it sounds, that’s the goal Girish Karnad has set himself. But Karnad – who was at USC in October, thanks to the support of the Visions and Voices program – has something in common with the Bard: He is probably the greatest playwright in his language (Kannada) as well as a popular actor, a prolific screenwriter and a successful film director. (If Shakespeare were alive today, does anyone doubt he’d be making movies?) Indian theatre is a fledgling art form, virtually nonexistent before 1947, Karnad explained at a well-attended Bing Theatre event produced by the School of Theatre. “The last of the great Sanskrit plays was written in the 9th century,” he recounted. Then came a thousand-year hiatus. “Playwriting stopped in India. Until the 19th century, there are no plays in any language.” Under colonial rule, Indian playwriting revived, but being a purely profit-driven enterprise, “no good plays came out,” in Karnad’s judgment. “Really serious playwriting begins only after Independence.” In the last 50 years, a generation of playImagine setting out

overheard

›› “Physically,

there is no such thing as a breaking curveball in baseball. A curveball pitch is mostly in the hitter’s mind.” – Zhong-Lin Lu of USC College in U.S. News & World Report, on his animation of a curveball

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

was the staging of excerpts from his large body of work. Theatre professor Jack Rowe teamed with MFA acting students to present three scenes from different plays. In Naga Mandala (1993), based on a folktale, a neglected wife succumbs to the charms of a cobra, magically disguised as her husband. The scene that Rowe staged was from the play’s prologue, in which a storyteller spies on a gathering of gossiping flames. Yes, in Indian folklore, flames can talk. A quaint conceit would have it that extinguished flames don’t die; they rekindle someplace else, to chatter the night away. In the scene from The Fire and the Rain (1999), a priest’s wife encounters her old lover, returned from the jungle after years of solitude vainly seeking enlightenment. The third scene, taken from The Dreams

Students Amin El Gamal and Lisa Hori in Karnad’s Naga Mandala.

wrights – with Karnad at the forefront – has taken upon itself the Herculean task of filling the vacuum. Winner of his homeland’s highest cultural honors, Karnad, 71, draws on primary sources ranging from oral tradition to Hindu sacred texts to East India Company archives. “I’m challenged to try all forms,” he says, “because I’m creating an entirely new body, a new living tradition. This is felt not only by me but by other playwrights of my generation. That accounts for the variety of styles in which all of us write: historical plays, musicals. There’s almost a desperate need to create a tradition for the language.” (Languages, really. India officially has 29 major ones, though hundreds more are widely spoken.) The occasion for Karnad’s visit to USC

of Tipu Sultan (2000), re-imagines how the East India Company – with an assist from the future Duke of Wellington – plotted the death of the famous Tiger of Mysore, an 18th-century warrior-prince. Why these three scenes? “I wanted to show that this is a writer who does not write the same play again,” says Rowe, who collaborated with Karnad in the selection of the scenes. The evening ended in a Q&A led by USC theatre dean Madeline Puzo. It was Puzo, incidentally, who commissioned Karnad to write The Fire and the Rain for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Karnad answered a barrage of questions with characteristic wit. He ended by saying: “I’m overwhelmed. I thought this was just going to be a small student exercise.” – Diane Krieger

ph o t o by ta k e o ne pr o ducti o ns

and not have to overburden the rest of the school by taking projectionists away from other things. The campus had an opportunity to benefit from something with just a little extra effort on our parts.” Publicizing the screenings isn’t easy, however. Because release dates can change, distributors usually only commit to a preview on short notice. Ago scrupulously

BASEMENT BONANZA

Now PLAYING

Dusty Old Dustbowler USC Annenberg’s Ed Cray helps in the re-issue of lost songs from folk musician and activist Woody Guthrie. to be true. Pristine metal 78-rpm masters of more than a hundred recordings made by folk musician Woody Guthrie in the mid-1940s, including a few songs that had never been released, had been unearthed in cardboard barrels in a basement in Brooklyn. But it was true. The aluminum masters had belonged to Herbert Harris, who had briefly been a business partner of Moses Asch at Disc Records. When Asch and Harris parted company, Harris received approximately half of the masters Guthrie recorded in April and May 1944. After Harris died, his wife took custody of the barrels. When she died in 1999, they went to a neighbor, who opened them 60 years after the music had been recorded. It turned out that the sound quality of the discs was exceptional. “Wow, he’s here,” said Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, when she heard them. She told The Boston Globe: “Truthfully, for years I never got why Woody himself was such a popular performer. They’re good songs, but on recordings his voice always sounded muffled. It’s like I’m able to hear it for the first time now, and it all makes sense to me.” Once the contents of the barrels were inventoried in 2006 and the peerless sound restoration engineer Doug Pomeroy was consulted, a call went out to the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s Ed Cray, whose 2004 book, Ramblin’ Man, is the definitive Guthrie biography. Rounder Records, which wanted to release the best of the recordings, asked Cray to give his recommendations on songs to include and to write liner notes. The “notes,” which he wrote with Rounder co-founder Bill Nowlin, turned out to be a 14,000-word booklet that is part of a 54-song, four-CD boxed set titled My Dusty Road. Cray and Nowlin worked on the notes over a six-month period, during part of which Cray continued his full teaching load. The set came out in late August. One gem among the previously unreleased works is a humorous song called “Bad Repetation.” (The

ph o t o by mar k tanner

It sounded too good

misspelling is deliberate.) But the value of the recordings is their quality, Cray notes. “I had no idea how good they were,” he says. “This is Woody Guthrie as nobody has ever heard him before.” Cray says the short-lived Asch and Harris partnership may have come about because aluminum and shellac (both needed to create recording masters) were scarce during World War II. “Asch had aluminum and Harris had shellac,” Cray says. Many of the recordings were made in marathon sessions during April 1944, when Guthrie was in between voyages in the Merchant Marine. (He made three voyages, including two in which his boat barely survived sinking. Once, before leaving the vessel, Guthrie gathered up all the guitars and fiddles he could find.) For these sessions, Guthrie invited guitarist and fellow Merchant Marine Cisco Houston to accompany him, along with blind harmonica player Sonny Terry. They produced about 300 discs, including multiple takes of the same song. The “box” for the CDs is a scaled-down version of a vintage suitcase. Inside is a replica of Guthrie’s business card (“Woody, Th’ Dustiest of Th’ Dustbowlers”), a 1947 booking notice that shows him being paid $15 to play at a children’s party and a postcard he wrote in 1951. – Allison Engel

›› Getting Tapped

Tony-winning hoofer Savion Glover bangs up the Bovard stage with “Bare Soundz,” a tap recital without musical accompaniment that the Washington Post calls “a remarkable explosion of steel on wood.” Glover and two other dancers become the music, creating a hard-hitting concert of pure choreography. Tuesday, February 23, 7:30 p.m. in Bovard Auditorium.

›› Fifth of July

Where does idealism lead? Lanford Wilson’s 1978 play follows a group of college activists finding their way in the real world after the Vietnam War. Living in his childhood home in Lebanon, Missouri, is gay paraplegic veteran Ken Talley and his lover, Jed. Part of Wilson’s Talley Trilogy, Fifth of July reunites Ken with his sister, niece and aunt over the long holiday weekend. When longtime friend John arrives with his heiress wife, easy camaraderie cracks under the strain of unspoken conflict. Fifth of July runs March 4 through 7 in Bing Theatre.

›› Into the Woods

Journey back to “once upon a time” with Stephen Sondheim’s irresistible Into the Woods, this year’s School of Theatre spring musical. A baker and his wife – childless and unhappy – go in search of the ingredients necessary to lift a witch’s curse: a cow, a red cape, a pair of golden slippers and some magic beans. Directed by John Rubinstein, the show is chock full of hummable Broadway tunes, including “Children Will Listen.” Into the Woods runs April 1 through 11 in Bing Theatre.

›› All About Wagner

For its spring production, Thornton Opera presents Wagner’s little-known comic opera, Das Liebesverbot (Ban on Love), based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. A flop at its 1834 premiere, it only had its North American premiere last year at Glimmerglass Opera. While we’re on the subject of Wagner, why not delve a little deeper? L.A. Opera music director James Conlon, who is in the midst of a two-year Ring cycle at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, delivers a lecture probing the composer’s notorious bigotry, racism and prejudice. Das Liebesverbot runs April 21 through 25 at Bing Theatre. James Conlon’s talk is Tuesday, April 20, at 7 p.m., also at Bing Theatre. l For daily updates on USC events and other campus happenings, visit www.usc.edu/calendar

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

The 1918 Flu Legacy Cardiovascular disease followed those exposed in utero to the H1N1 flu during last century’s pandemic.

an H1N1 strain of influenza A in utero were significantly more likely to have cardiovascular disease later in life, according to a new study published in the Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. “Our point is that during pregnancy, even mild sickness from flu could affect development with longer consequences,” says senior author and University Professor Caleb Finch at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Finch, USC Davis School professor Eileen Crimmins, lead author Bhashkar Mazumder (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago), Douglas Almond (Columbia University) and Kyung Park (University of Chicago) looked at more than 100,000 individuals born around the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the United States. After first appearing in the spring and all but disappearing in the summer, the 1918 pandemic “resurged to an unprecedentedly virulent October-December peak,” the researchers write. The outbreak of H1N1 subtype influenza A killed 0.6 percent of the total population. Most people experienced People exposed to

mild “three-day fever” with full recovery. “[The] 1918 flu was far more lethal than any since. Nonetheless, there is particular concern for the current swine flu, which seems to target pregnant women,” says Finch, who is also the ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology

[DOCTOR TALK]

of Aging. “Prospective moms should reduce risk of influenza by vaccination.” The researchers found that men born in the first few months of 1919 – the second or third trimester during the height of the epidemic – had a 23.1 percent greater chance of having heart disease after the age of 60 than the overall population. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. For women, those born in the first few months of 1919 were not significantly more likely to have cardiovascular disease than their peers, pointing to possible gender differences in effects of flu exposure. But women born in the second quarter of 1919 – the first trimester during the height of the epidemic – were 17 percent more likely to have heart disease than the general population in later life, according to the study. In addition, the researchers examined height during World War II enrollment for 2.7 million men born between 1915 and 1922 and found that average height increased every successive year except for the period coinciding with fetal exposure to the flu pandemic. Men who were exposed to the H1N1 flu in the womb were slightly shorter on average than those born just a year later or a year before, according to the study. The researchers controlled for known season-ofbirth effects and maternal malnutrition. “Prenatal exposure to even uncomplicated maternal influenza can have lasting consequences later in life,” says Crimmins, professor of gerontology and sociology at USC. “The lingering influences from the 1918-19 influenza pandemic extend the hypothesized roles of inflammation and infections in cardiovascular disease from our prior Science and PNAS articles to prenatal infection by influenza.”

Translation Please

When doctors and patients do not speak the same language, care can be jeopardized. Now, USC computer scientists, communication specialists and health professionals hope to create a cheap and effective speech-to-speech medical translation system. Professor Shrikanth Narayanan, who directs the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, hopes to deliver a SpeechLinks prototype within the four-year window of a $2.2 million National Science Foundation grant. Narayanan will collaborate with fellow engineering faculty member Panayiotis Georgiou, Margaret McLaughlin of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Success will require a system that can perceive and interpret not just words, but also cultural and non-verbal cues. – Eric Mankin

Read more about how translations will become bicultural at http://tinyurl.com/ycoovmw

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

– Suzanne Wu

ph o t o c o urtesy o f nati o nal ph o t o c o mpany c o llecti o n ( library o f c o ngress )

Lab Work

Inquiring MINDS ›› ROBO-FRIEND Emily Mower, a Ph.D. student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, works with robots that navigate the complex terrain of human emotional and social interaction. Her most recent research paper addresses the difficulty of extracting meaningful conclusions from the exhaustive number of variables that can affect a subject’s emotional classification of audiovisual input. Robots can influence a person’s emotional responses, but Mower says they are not going to take over the world any time soon. “They still have trouble not walking into walls.”

›› PROTEIN PIECES Computational bio-

DRUG DETECTIVES

Leukemia Puzzle Keck scientists make progress on discovering why chronic myeloid leukemia cells become drug-resistant. the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases have discovered high concentrations of a specific mutator protein in cells that develop resistance to drug treatment in chronic myeloid leukemia. The finding helps explain why chronic myeloid leukemia cells become drug-resistant and may lead to the development of therapies that improve survival in patients. Researchers led by Markus Müschen, director of the leukemia and lymphoma program at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, found that the protein, activation-induced cytidine deaminase, which normally mutates antibody genes in B cells, triggers resistance to Gleevec, the standard treatment for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. Chronic myeloid leukemia cells often develop resistance to Gleevec, limiting treatment options for many patients living with the illness. The multi-investigator study, which features major contributions from USC faculty colleagues Michael Lieber, John Groffen, Yong-mi Kim and Nora Heisterkamp, was published in Cancer Cell. “Before this, we did not know why some patients developed resistance to Gleevec,”

illustrati o n by michael k lein

Researchers at

Müschen said. “Now that we know at least one mechanism, we can work to develop therapies to counter the effects of activation-induced cytidine deaminase in the chronic phase of the disease.” Every year, 4,500 people are diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in the United States; nearly 25,000 have the disease today. Chronic myeloid leukemia is a slowly progressing cancer that usually occurs during or after middle age and rarely occurs in children. Patients with the disease have an unusually high number of hematopoietic stem cells (blood cell progenitors) that were slated to become immune system cells but instead develop into cancerous cells that damage the bone marrow and blood. Gleevec increases overall survival for chronic myeloid leukemia patients to 95 percent over a five-year period. When patients develop resistance to the drug, they quickly transition from the chronic phase of chronic myeloid leukemia to a condition called blast crisis progression, or fatal B lymphoid blast crisis, with an average survival range of less than seven months. The ongoing project is supported by two research grants from the National Institutes of Health. – Leslie Ridgeway

chemist Frank Alber compares determining the architecture of a macromolecular machine to solving a jigsaw puzzle. “There are millions of ways to combine the pieces, but there is only one solution,” says Alber, of USC College. Replace each puzzle piece with proteins and you have the rough idea behind Alber’s approach to understanding the building blocks in a living cell. He will get closer to solving the puzzle now that he has been named a 2009 Pew Scholar in the biomedical sciences, which comes with a $240,000 award.

›› SMOKE NOW, PAY LATER Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have found that the lifelong effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy may occur through specific changes in DNA patterns. The scientists found that children exposed in the womb to maternal smoking had differences in DNA methylation, an epigenetic mechanism in which small chemical compounds are added to DNA. “This research could be important in understanding how what happens in utero is tied to health outcomes later in life,” says one of the lead authors, Carrie Breton. ›› TONGUE-TIED How the tongue develops largely remains a mystery, according to Yang Chai, director of the USC School of Dentistry Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology. The National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research has awarded Chai $2 million to study the process. Research indicates that cells of the cranial neural crest contribute to connective tissue that serves as attachment sites for muscles, while cells from occipital somites become tongue muscle tissue. l To find more articles on USC research advances, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/science_technology

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

Orchestrating Change David Bohnett’s social activism is legendary, including his support of new youth orchestras in Los Angeles. LA Phil music director Gustavo Dudamel conducted his groundbreaking first concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September, David Bohnett ’78, new chair of the LA Phil board, experienced a welter of emotions. He was thrilled at the overflow audience of all ages and ethnicities – many of them first-time Philharmonic attendees. He was moved by “Ode to Joy” played by the young musicians of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles – a project dear to his heart. And he felt a pang of nostalgia, remembering how he came to USC at the age of 18 with two suitcases and not knowing a soul. A music lover, he used to go to Hollywood Bowl concerts regularly – sometimes by himself – sitting on the back benches because that was all he could afford. But that was before this business administration major who was fascinated by computers graduated and went on to found the pioneering Internet portal and social media site GeoCities.com. It was before he started the private equity firm Baroda Ventures and became CEO of OVGuide.com, the world’s most comprehensive video search site. And it was before he became an influential philanthropist whose 10-year-old David BohWhen incoming

nett Foundation funds social activism by supporting LGBT programs, voting rights, handgun safety, animal rights, arts and education programs. Bohnett, who is low-key and personable, does not come across as the major player he is in Southern California. “Don’t let the unassuming demeanor fool you,” stated a 2009 profile in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. “He has an

[shirtmaker]

unwavering determination to right wrongs, a very big heart and a fierce intelligence.” About his role as board chairman for the LA Phil, it is not exaggerating to say that Bohnett is shaping a new era for classical and contemporary music in Los Angeles. Being involved in the recruiting and hiring of Dudamel, who has energized the city and the global music world, is one thing. But helping create a network of youth orchestras modeled on El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education system from which Dudamel emerged, has the potential for extraordinary social and cultural change in the city. Bohnett has been an enthusiastic backer of new youth orchestras in the city. The first group of 102 youngsters played at the Hollywood Bowl. Younger, “feeder” orchestras are in the works. “Dudamel has said that the orchestra is a perfect metaphor for a community, and I agree,” says Bohnett. Recently, Bohnett returned to the USC Marshall School of Business to speak to Adlai Wertman’s class on social entrepreneurship. Wertman said: “David’s message was loud and clear – use your education, experience and resources to attack injustices.” Bohnett grew up in a socially active family in Hinsdale, Ill. When he moved to California after grad school in Michigan, he helped found the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation chapter here and witnessed firsthand how education and awareness can change public attitudes. “It’s important to know we all have a voice,” he says. Whether through music, social issues, preservation or entrepreneurship, Bohnett, in his quiet but determined way, is making himself heard.

Prez Praise

When 17-year-old Kalief Rollins of Carson, Calif., met President Barack Obama on Oct. 19, he gave the president a custom-made “Caution: Educated African-American Male” T-shirt. The shirt was the embodiment of Rollins’ labors as the head of his own clothing business – a business that won him the top $10,000 prize in the 2009 Oppenheimer Funds/Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship Challenge. Rollins, who beat out 24,000 entrants, fine-tuned his plan and presentation skills in USC Marshall School of Business professor Bill Crookston’s summer seminar for high school students. Jackie Garcia, another seminar participant, advanced to the semifinals. – Anne Bergman

Read more about Rollins’ and Garcia’s projects at http://tinyurl.com/yj5bwkc

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

– Allison Engel

b o hnett ph o t o by philip channing / o bama ph o t o by pete s o u z a / the white h o use

People Watch

A Conversation with David St. John

David St. John, who has taught poetry, literature and film classes at USC College for 22 years, is on a creative tear. In 2009, W. W. Norton published an anthology of new poetry

Hybrid Poet Writing the libretto for a chamber opera is but the latest surprise from this honored poet who defies facile categories.

he edited with Cole Swensen, American Hybrid, to rave reviews. The ninth collection of his own poetry, The Face: A Novella in Verse, recently has been set to music by USC Thornton School of Music composer Donald Crockett for a professional chamber opera. St. John also team-teaches an extraordinary interdisciplinary class, “Writer and Composer,” that brings graduate poetry and music-composition students together to create sophisticated, contemporary pieces. He spoke with USC Trojan Family Magazine’s Allison Engel. Your anthology identifies poets who do not neatly fall into the experimental or conventional categories. Why categorize at all? It’s been the fashion of criticism in this country to want to categorize poets, and my co-editor writes about this scholarly preoccupation in her section on “the war of the anthologies.” The truth is that most poets tire of these limiting definitions pretty quickly. Have critics pigeonholed you? They have seemed not to know where to put me. My influences are so located in film and 20th-century cinema as well as really old-line 19thcentury French symbolist poetry that I think I’ve always been somewhat of an anachronism. In the poetry world, is it usually every man or woman for him or herself? I feel really fortunate that when I was a young poet, I had Philip Levine and Donald Justice, Charles Wright and Norman Dubie, as well as Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich in my corner. My first book was taken by Houghton Mifflin because Galway Kinnell sent my poems to his editor. And he did it without telling me. It was a simple act of generosity. How did you meet Kinnell? I was 19 years old. Kinnell came to Cal State Fresno where Philip Levine taught. I was lucky because all of the great poets in America at that time came through Fresno to read because they wanted to visit with Levine. By the time I was 20, I had met W. S. Merwin and all the poets I mentioned earlier except for Dubie. It changed my life. Here were these men and women whom I admired more than any adults I had ever met. It made being a poet a very reasonable goal. This spring will be your fourth “Poet and Composer” class. How has it evolved? We now have a class of singers attached to the class, which means we can workshop the compositions and pieces as we go along. A number of the compositions have gone on to be performed outside class – one at Carnegie Hall. Also, the collaborations of the poets and composers have gone on in several cases for years. This is the best example of an “acrossthe-college” course that I have seen in any university, in terms of fulfillment of its potential. How did the class come about? [Composition professor] Frank Ticheli asked if I would be interested in teaching with him. What he did not know is that I had tried to make this class happen about 13 years before. But times have changed and it has grown into the most fun teaching I’ve ever done. What Frank Ticheli has been able to do in bringing to the poets a complex understanding of how to write for music has been nothing short of breathtaking. Did the course lead to your collaboration with Donald Crockett? It did. I first met Don when he came to talk to the class about his setting of Michael Ondaatje’s poem The Cinnamon Peeler. Then Don asked if he could set two of my poems and I said, “Of course.” About three years ago he said, “Let’s do a chamber opera together.” And so I wrote the libretto, and Don got a Guggenheim to write the opera. He’s lined up the most famous conductor of new music, Gilbert Rose. Paul Desveaux, who directed Philip Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles, is the director. That one course has sparked quite the chain reaction. I’m consistently stunned and

ph o t o by philip channing

thrilled by the quality of work done in the class. It’s fostered not only these valuable student relationships that have gone on and out into the world, but also these faculty relationships. Classes like this should be the norm, not the exception. l To read about the opera collaboration between St. John and Donald Crockett, visit http://tinyurl.com/yavnqad

U S C T rojan F amily maga z ine spring 2010

Undaunted by the recession, hard-working entrepreneurs in their early 20s are pouring out of USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies – and launching imaginative new businesses.

Masters of theırown Universe

Photographs by Mark Berndt

By Starshine Roshell Widely recognized among the nation’s best programs in entrepreneurship, the Lloyd Greif

Center for Entrepreneurial Studies is one of the prized programs in the USC Marshall School of Business. Each year, it turns students’ big ideas into big plans of action, sending students out into the workforce to launch their own carefully mapped and creatively conceived ventures. In a tough economy, that also requires having the skills and resources to create their own jobs. According to the Kauffman Foundation’s annual Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, the recession is actually spurring entrepreneurship; Americans started more businesses last year than in the year prior. The Greif Center has established itself as a leading program by doing things differently. It offers entrepreneurship as a major concentration similar to marketing, management or finance. With both graduate and undergraduate programs, the dedicated faculty – nearly all of whom are veteran entrepreneurs themselves – use innovative coursework to help students develop

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

If you’ve ever had an 8 o’clock class, you know that college students have a tempestuous relationship with alarm clocks. But 2009 Marshall grad Jonathon Nostrant turned the beeping appliance into a booming business. He founded Moshi Lifestyle, a company that makes voice-activated alarm clocks. In response to commands uttered from bed or across the room, the Moshi clock calls out the time, date and temperature, sets an alarm, turns on a night light, and lulls users to sleep with rainforest sounds. In its first year, the company did more than $2 million in sales to retailers including Bed, Bath & Beyond and Brookstone. Nostrant and his clock won first place in the undergraduate category of the Greif Center’s 2009 New Venture competition, an honor that proved to him “that hard work really pays off.” And Nostrant has never shied away from hard work. The son of a San Fernando Valley entrepreneur, Nostrant launched his first business when he was 12. “I started a DJ company called DJs at Your Door,” he says. “We provided dancers, emcees and DJs for bar mitzvahs and birthdays.” He always knew that one day he’d trade dance floors for circuit boards, as electronics and computers have been lifelong passions. While visiting China as a junior at USC, he learned about new voice-recognition technology that enables electronic devices to respond to verbal commands. “It’s going to be the future,” says Nostrant, who envisioned not only an alarm clock that could be controlled without pushing buttons, but also a series of products based around this core technology. And the name Moshi? It’s a word used when answering the phone in Japan. “It’s just a fun name,” Nostrant says. “Moshi moshi!” Back on campus, he applied his Greif coursework to his new idea, testing its feasibility, creating a business plan, brand and sample product, and marketing it. Next up for Moshi Lifestyle are more voicerecognition gadgets from radios to iPhone docking stations. “Basically,” Nostrant quips, “we’re taking over the nightstand.” www.moshilifestyle.com

Jonathon Nostrant [ Partner, Moshi Lifestyle,

developed a voice-activated alarm clock, 22 ]

“Entrepreneurs

are alchemists,”banker Lloyd

Greif once said. “They add value to existence – turning iron into gold – through strength of will, intelligence and a determination to succeed.”

the skills and mindset to manage new business ventures. BusinessWeek and U.S. News & World Report have called the center one of the nation’s best entrepreneurial programs, and both the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine have ranked the program no. 1 in the country based on course offerings, opportunities to learn outside of the classroom, and number of former students and professors who have started businesses. Indeed, Chris DeWolfe and Josh Berman of MySpace are Greif graduates (both MBA ’97); Kinko’s founder Paul Orfalea ’71 is an adjunct faculty member. USC has been offering a series of entrepreneurial courses since 1971; it’s the oldest program of its kind in the United States. But it was in 1998 that investment banker Lloyd Greif, who graduated from the program with his MBA in 1979, donated $5 million to endow the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. At age 42, Greif was the first entrepreneur graduate in the country to endow an entrepreneur program, and his was the largest gift ever given to USC from a person in his 40s. The son of an Auschwitz survivor, Greif had worked full-time at a Ralphs grocery store while pursuing his undergraduate economics degree at UCLA and then his master’s at USC. He launched his business, an entrepreneur’s investment bank called Greif & Co., with the help of alumni connections through the Trojan network, and his gift was a way to show his gratitude to the university. “Entrepreneurs are alchemists,” he once said. “They add value to existence – turning iron into gold – through strength of will, intelligence and a determination to succeed.” The Greif Center program may be uniquely situated for success. “Southern California is a significant entrepreneurial breeding ground, more so than a lot of other places,” says center director Gene Miller, citing the area’s diverse industries, from entertainment and hospitality to biotechnology and electronics. Greif students are required to take advantage of their locale by leaving campus to meet and interview successful Starshine Roshell is a syndicated columnist, author and journalism professor at Santa Barbara City College. Her stories have appeared in Westways, Santa Barbara and Miller-McCune magazines.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Nicole Vietor

[ Founder and president, Text-A-Listing, 24 ]

It’s a fact: The entrepreneur doesn’t fall far from the tree. Many Greif Center graduates grew up watching their own parents launch companies. But Nicole Vietor ’08 didn’t just watch her dad run a business; she saw him attend and graduate from Greif while she was in high school. Now she runs her own successful business and credits Dad’s unwavering support – and indomitable spirit – for getting her there. A single father, Richard Vietor MBA ’03 (shown above) was enrolled at USC when, midway through his studies, he broke his neck in a diving accident. Paralyzed from the neck down, he returned to school in a wheelchair. As part of the program, he traveled to Mexico and Cuba to study international business. Due

to his disability, Nicole accompanied him. She sat in on lectures, fascinated. She enrolled as an undergraduate and soon faced a small challenge of her own. “Trying to rent an apartment, there are so many ‘For Rent’ signs,” she says. “You call them and leave messages. By the time an owner calls back, you’re like, ‘Which apartment are you?’ “ Nicole solved the problem with a business venture: a text-messaging system that puts apartment managers in instant touch with potential renters. Text-A-Listing assigns a 6-digit “smart code” to each rental unit. Prospective renters see the number on a rental sign and send a text, getting an immediate return message any time of day with detailed apartment information. If interested,

they text the apartment manager. In her first four months of operation, she was serving 20 large apartment complexes. Of course, there were some hurdles. “It would be nice if my cash flow was what I predicted it would be,” she says, laughing. “And I didn’t predict all the technological delays.” When stuck, she thinks about her primary investor: her dad, who’s walking now, though doctors said he never would. “He’s taught me to overcome adversity,” she says. Winner of USC’s 2008 Marcia Israel Most Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award, Nicole often returns to campus to share her experiences with current Greif students. It reminds her how far she’s come. www.Textalisting.com

“Feasibility is the

missing link between ‘I have an

idea’ and ‘I have a business plan,’” professor Patrick Henry says. “It allows students to work through a highly structured evaluation of the venture potential of each idea, to make refinements and fixes to enhance the viability.” entrepreneurs. Students also are teamed up with established companies to help solve real business problems. “The exercises are designed to force you to get out,” Miller says. “You think this category is your customer? Go talk to some of them. Talking to 25 potential customers gives you a wealth of information.” More than 1,000 students are typically enrolled in the program, which welcomes both business majors and students from other disciplines who declare a minor in entrepreneurship. “We have had students [CEO, Fireman’s Brew,from 25]virtually every school at USC, from engineering to music to film,” says professor Patrick Henry, who coordinates the undergraduate program. Many students dream of launching their own businesses, but some hope to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the corporate world, finding new ways to solve industrial problems. The center offers courses in management, growth and investing, but what sets it apart from other programs are two classes in particular. One is “Feasibility.” “It’s the missing link between ‘I have an idea’ and ‘I have a business plan,’ ” Henry says. “It allows students to work through a highly structured evaluation of the venture potential of each idea, to make refinements and fixes to enhance the viability.” The second is the “Business Plan” class. Whereas other schools treat the plan as a document, Greif students learn to view it as a “to-do list”; the focus isn’t on writing the plan, but on executing it. “What we’re trying to accomplish is envisioning the business,” Miller says. “People often fail to set priorities. Rather than spending time, energy and resources getting ready to get started, they need to say what is the most important thing for me to do, like get sales, and then do what is necessary to make that happen as soon as possible.” Among the many Greif Center students who have taken these lessons to heart are the four young entrepreneurs profiled here: a technophile who’s making it easier to wake up in the morning, a woman who used text-messaging to solve an apartment-hunting hitch, the proud owner of downtown L.A.’s newest culinary hot spot and a man who turned a beer bottle label into a booming beverage business. l

David Johnson

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

It’s nearly noon and the line has already begun forming down the block. Businessmen, police officers and hip young couples queue up in front of what looks like a warehouse on a nondescript Los Angeles street, waiting for the wide wooden door to slide open. What draws them all here? The promise of a simple, savory lunch. “All it is,” says restaurant co-owner Tyler Wilson, “is sausages, Belgian-style fries and the best beers in the world.” He is co-owner of downtown L.A.’s culinary hot spot Wurstküche (pronounced, roughly, verst-kookah). Open since November 2008, the industrial-looking eatery serves classic sausages like bratwurst, exotic ones like rattlesnake-and-rabbit and everything in between. It sells more than 800 sausages per day, and 70 kegs of premium Belgian and German beer per week. Other offerings include more than a dozen specialty sodas flavored with elderflower, cucumber and dandelion. The idea for the restaurant came to Wilson at USC, but he may have been destined to be his own boss. His father, uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents were all in business for themselves. “I never knew the culture of leaving for work at 8 and being home at 5,” says Wilson, who

grew up in Santa Barbara. At age 5, he picked oranges from his grandparents’ ranch and sold them on street corners and at farmers markets. “I’d make a couple hundred bucks in a weekend,” he says. In high school, he rented out margarita machines to parties. But it was his water polo skills that earned him a spot at USC, where he was also on the swim team. Wilson spent four years at USC and took two years of classes at the Greif Center and USC Marshall, but his GPA was shy of the cutoff to be admitted as a business major. He left school to start his journey as an entrepreneur. Wilson and his cousin Joseph Pitruzzelli came up with the idea of opening a sausage restaurant together. “Sausage stands tend to be divey. It’s a street food,” Wilson says. “But we wondered, what if we were to brand it a little more upscale?” Their vision: high-quality food and stellar service in a fun atmosphere. The guys sampled 500 sausages, choosing the tastiest links from suppliers all over the country. One of their most popular is the duckand-bacon sausage with jalapeño peppers. But for some, the restaurant’s name can be hard to swallow. Pitruzzelli bought a German dictionary from the USC Bookstore and played with words until they settled on Wurstküche, which means “sausage kitchen.” “We didn’t know how to pronounce it,” Wilson says, chuckling. “We thought, ‘People will think we’re crazy, but they’ll have fun trying to say it. It’ll create a buzz.’ ” And judging by the crowds vying for space at the restaurant’s long butcher paper-covered tables, it did. The restaurateur and new father says he and Pitruzzelli already are looking for a location to open a second Wurstküche, perhaps on L.A.’s Westside. But not to worry: You won’t find the name popping up on every street corner. “We want to keep it unique,” Wilson says, “and keep it cool.” www.wurstkucherestaurant.com

Tyler Wilson

[ Co-owner, Wurstküche restaurant, 23 ]

David Johnson

[ CEO, Fireman’s Brew, 25 ]

It was an idea sparked by a Glendale wildfire. On a break from battling the blaze, two firefighters talked about how nice a cold beer would taste right then. They fantasized about an ale brewed especially for firefighters and came up with a slogan: “Extinguish your thirst ... Ignite the party.” But fighting flames is one skill set, and launching a business is another. So they turned to David Johnson, a 2006 Greif Center graduate, who helped turn their good idea into a great product. “They showed me a brown bottle with a label they’d printed off their computer and cut out with scissors,” Johnson recalls, “and they said, ‘This is Fireman’s Brew. Have at it.’ “ Growing up in the San Fernando Valley,

Johnson knew from an early age that he wanted to run his own business. At Greif, he learned how. “Almost on a weekly basis, we had business owners coming into class. You get inside the heads of people who have been there and done it.” After graduation, Johnson was approached by one of the two Los Angeles County firefighters who had dreamed up the brand, Rob Nowaczyk, shown here at right. He and his colleague were home-brewing the product. Johnson set to work. He trademarked the name, had a logo designed, ran a market analysis and learned how to turn small batches into a quality product that can be made in quantity. It worked. Six hundred cases of Fireman’s Brew are produced every month. It’s sold at res-

taurants, Bristol Farms stores, Cost Plus World Market and Gelson’s and Whole Foods markets. The microbrew comes in three varieties: a Blonde lager, “Brewnette” dark and Redhead Ale. Five percent of the company’s profits goes to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Finding investment capital to expand has been hard in the current economy. There’s good news on other fronts, though. The micro-brewing industry is growing fast, and the Trojan network has introduced Johnson to several restaurant owners who want to sell Fireman’s Brew. But the best thing about selling beer for a living? “It’s fun to walk into a bar and see your beer on tap there,” says Johnson. www.FiremansBrew.com

Transit Tales [ BY CARL MARZIALI ]

Take a ride with USC Transportation, one of the best-kept secrets in mass transit. Larger than fleets at many other universities, it rivals some cities’ public transit systems. It might even make you pity those lone drivers far below your window seat.

››

illustratIONS by Tim Bower

Everyone has a story about driving in L.A., but the tale of the passenger goes largely untold. Especially the tale of the bus passenger, that creature on the lower rungs of Angeleno respectables. The starved genre of public transit narrative follows a formulaic opening: “I tried taking the bus to work once and ....” (Eye-roll and grimace follow.) That formula may never be overturned. But with Metro Rail growing and highspeed trains on the horizon, and with drought-afflicted Californians newly conscious of the possible side effects of carbon combustion, mass transit is climbing the status ladder. USC leads the wave of change with a big investment in what may be the nation’s best and greenest little university transit system. You may have taken USC Transportation buses only on game days. You may drive to campus every day. You may even detest the sight of the big USC commuter buses plying the 101 and 110 freeways between Union Station, the University Park campus (UPC) and the Health Sciences campus (HSC), their sides and windows wrapped with the pithy slogans of KUSC’s marketing campaign: “Less Shock, More Bach,” or “Less

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Holler, More Mahler.” But consider how long your commute would take if, instead of looking down at you from behind traveling billboards, those thousands of passengers were in thousands of vehicles all around you. Not that they are doing you a favor. They like it this way. Ride the “trams” long enough, as I have (five years and counting), and it’s clear that the number of regulars and trams only grows. “The times of day that I commute,

it would be a similar or shorter time to drive, but it’s a lot less wear-and-tear on me and my car to take the train,” says Mark Thompson, a USC chemistry professor and 14-year public transit rider. He takes Metrolink from Fullerton and connects to the USC tram at Union Station three to five times a week. Connected wirelessly most of the way, Thompson is “either checking e-mail, editing a manuscript or, rarely, sleeping.” Sleep is not exactly a rare event for USC campus filming coordinator Erica

[ RIDING IN L.A. ]

Green & Serene

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Compared to lone drivers, tram regulars have earned the right to feel good about the carbon they’re saving. But there are other reasons to feel good about riding a tram. For one, the driver’s addiction to control is surprisingly easy to break. It’s hard enough to fight one’s daily battles at work; why not let someone else fight traffic? Fight traffic long enough, and someone eventually will blow a horn at you. The ensuing mix of emotions is never pleasant. USC Transportation trams sometimes get honked at, no matter how skillful their drivers. But when you’re floating above traffic in a 30,000-lb. bunker, a cranky driver’s horn sounds powerless, like the wail of a bully who’s dropped his ice cream. Lone drivers juggle all kinds of tasks: talking or texting on the phone, putting on makeup, scarfing down breakfast, cutting people off – sometimes all at once. Most of those activities are prohibited or discouraged aboard the trams. That leaves conversation, reading, checking e-mail and listening to music – all far less stressful. According to one veteran tram driver, 80 percent of lone commuters are also absorbed in a task involving one’s pinky and certain clogged passages. Such is the glamorous commute of the lone driver: consuming egregious amounts of crude while drilling for deposits of a different kind.

U S C T r o j a n F a m i l y m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Caskey: “I have, unashamedly, come to regularly having a full-on, head-nodding power nap on the afternoon tram to Union Station,” says Caskey, calling it the favorite part of her periodic tram and Metrolink commute to Burbank. Showing that tram riding is not an ideological statement, she also drives, especially when assisting late-night film crews. Then there is extreme commuter Leonid Didkovsky, a research scientist at USC College’s Space Sciences Center and a believer that in transportation, as in physics, everything is relative. How else to tolerate a three-hour, one-way commute from Apple Valley that combines a drive to Rancho Cucamonga with a Metrolink ride to Union Station, topped off with a hop on the tram to campus? “Driving to USC is quite unusual for me, maybe two times a year,” states the unflappable scientist. Most tram riders have another big reason to keep riding: the company. “For me it’s a really good way of connecting with other people in the university,” says Pasadena’s Burt Jones, professor of research in the Sea Grant Program in USC College. “I’ve met people in the university that otherwise I may have never met. “To me it makes the university much more personal.” that even as USC has become more selective, even as it has become harder to get into the university, it has become so much easier to get to the university. Three years ago, a morning commuter could arrive at the transit plaza at Union Station – a major connecting point to Metrolink and Metro lines – and choose from 10 nonstop departures to the University Park campus before 9 a.m. Now it’s 16. Trams to the Health Sciences campus, between HSC and UPC, and around each campus also run more frequently than ever. For the record, USC remains committed to accommodating all commuters, regardless of how they get to campus. Proof? The university has added 2,300 parking spaces just in the last two years, for a total of 12,000 on UPC; another 825 were added on HSC, bringing that campus’s total to 4,100. The university also provides 21 employee vanpools servicing such far-flung locations as Laguna Hills, Palmdale and Moreno Valley. It is a strange irony

But it would be hard to find another mass transit system that has responded as quickly and efficiently to exploding demand. USC Transportation now operates 182 daily weekday runs to or from Union Station and between the two main campuses. The fare? Zero. In addition, the 24-hour campus tram service covers six routes in and around UPC. A similar system on HSC shuttles patients and staff around the clinics and between campus and a Metro busway station. Regular shuttles serve satellite campuses downtown and in Marina del Rey. Last November, USC Transportation teamed with L.A. Live, downtown’s new entertainment hub, to provide free weekend shuttle service to and from USC. Departing every 30 minutes starting Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the university-operated shuttle makes the 2.5-mile run up Figueroa Street into the wee hours, with stops at the Staples Center and Nokia Theatre. USC also hosts the nation’s largest university-based fleet of hourly rental cars. For students who prefer not to walk at night, 26 Campus Cruiser vans (including five fuel-saving hybrids) provide fast, free and efficient point-to-point rides. Compare that to a non-scientific survey of other universities. UCLA? Campus shuttles only. Caltech? A single shuttle route between campus and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, plus a promise of “one guaranteed ride home every three months.” The University of Washington: a brand new, $1 million Lamborghini research lab, but no mass transit except on game days. Berkeley, Chicago, Penn State? Campus shuttles only. There are no free off-campus rides in Aggieland (Texas A&M), just “economical” shuttles. “Lucy,” Penn’s transit system, also charges. Need an after-dark courtesy shuttle at Duke University? Be prepared to shell out for “Charlene’s Safe Ride,” a private taxi service. Only Stanford has a comparable system, with nearly as many buses (23 to USC’s 24) and service to a Palo Alto train station (instead of the main downtown station served by USC). Few cities of around 40,000 (a rough and generous estimate of USC’s weekday population) could rival the Trojan transportation system. Pasadena, population around 150,000, has the same number

[ RIDING IN L.A. ]

The Swoop, Arm and Drift

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Everything I know about driving in L.A., I learned from USC Transportation drivers. Take the notorious but legal swoop: the practice of merging into a crowded lane at the last possible point, just before the dotted line turns solid. I learned the art of proper swooping from Tamara Stanton, a seven-year USC Transportation veteran and former DASH driver. Traveling north up the feeder lanes of the 110 between Ninth and Third streets (incidentally, a better bet during rush hour than the main lanes), Stanton consistently travels up the rightmost exit lanes, then merges left just before the end of the dotted line. Time saved: a good minute or two. At Union Station, that can make all the difference. Now for some frank talk about the swoop. Few maneuvers incite more passion in rush hour drivers, particularly those who merge early and sit stewing while swoopers glide past. Annoying, yes. But who forced you to merge early? Some drivers call it bad form to swoop. But could it be that behind that self-righteous anger lurks the fear of failure, the risk of shame and embarrassment at coming to a full stop next to a wall of cars, the terror of flubbing the swoop? Rationalize it any way you wish. Stanton swoops. Smoothly. Imperiously. To the solid. And when in the course of commuting events it becomes necessary for USC Transportation trams to change lanes on a crowded freeway, drivers employ their pet strategies. Some slide open the window and wave an arm, giving their tram the look of a whale attempting flight. Everyone agrees that the typical driver on the freeway is absent to the point of coma. But if the flashing turn signals and flapping arms don’t do the trick, tram drivers get a driver’s attention with the Drift: the gradual but unstoppable encroachment of their KUSC-painted side into the next lane. It takes one time on the receiving end of the Drift to learn that the experience of Mahler crashing down on your head is best saved for the concert hall.

of buses in its ARTS system. Santa Clarita Transit serves 175,000 residents with only twice the number of buses that USC has. director Tony Mazza came to USC in fall 2006, When USC Transportation

gas prices were high and getting higher, politicians were starting to take global warming seriously, and the USC tram fleet was still burning diesel. Mazza’s first move was to change over to a biodiesel mix containing 20 percent

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[ RIDING IN L.A. ]

Freeway or City Streets?

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Heading out of Union Station on his way to the University Park campus, morning tram manager Ronn Guier sizes up the 101 freeway in a couple of seconds. If it’s moving slower than he would like, Guier heads up Arcadia to the Broadway on-ramp – but not before picking out a vehicle on the freeway to track. And nearly every time the same vehicle is in his rear view mirror when he finally enters the freeway. “It may not save you any time going surface streets, but you’re moving,” Guier explains, making it clear that the choice has as much to do with passenger management as with time. What driver enjoys the company of 60 antsy back-seat drivers as the tram sits in a traffic jam? James “Buddy” Barta, instantly recognizable for his Santa Claus beard, prefers to merge straight onto the 101 when he pulls out of Union Station on the 8:35 a.m. tram to UPC. But he has learned to stay out of the clogged rightmost lane. German Bolanos, a nine-year veteran of the route, relies on the drivers ahead of him for a traffic report on the 110 north. “If co-workers call and say that the freeway is backed up, then we take the street.” He aims for a maximum 20-minute trip to Union Station on the 4:55 p.m. tram from campus. Tamara Stanton – who says of her route, “I love Union Station; that’s my favorite run” – opts for the 110 north nearly every time, even during afternoon rush hour. “I just like staying on the freeway because it’s faster than the streets,” she states with calm certainty. If the debate could be settled, this wouldn’t be L.A. “We’ve never said, ‘This is the route you have to take,’” notes Guier.

“To be honest, I wasn’t even that dialed in to propane being an alternative for us,” Mazza recalls. But at just onethird the cost of diesel, the fuel sold itself. By early 2008, Mazza and his team had decided to make the switch, and had installed a large propane refueling tank right in the tram yard, just south of the Parking Center. One of the new Union Station buses runs on propane, along with two smaller campus shuttles. Thanks, ironically, to the GM bankruptcy, more are on the way. Early in 2009, Mazza learned that Chevrolet would close the only plant making large buses capable of propane conversion. (Ford makes propane-convertible buses, but only in smaller sizes.) For its Union Station run, USC Transportation needs buses that seat at least 40. And, Mazza learned, “there were only eight of these left at the dealer.” Though the buses cost more than their diesel counterparts, Mazza arranged financing to buy all eight. It was the right thing to do, he believes. “If we didn’t get them, they would have been lost,” Mazza says. “So while it’s a little bit more expensive, I think it’s worthwhile overall.” After the retirement of eight old buses, half of USC Transportation’s fleet will run on alternative fuel: 11 propane buses and one compressed natural gas bus. Well over half of all passengers will ride on propane power, since the new buses are all for the busy Union Station route. Matthew Oden, USC’s sustainability program manager, applauds Mazza’s relentless move toward cleaner fuels. “Every time Tony makes a vehicle purchase, he thinks about the sustainability components; he’s on top of it,” Oden says. about the trams is wonderful, of course. The older buses are rolling lessons in mathematics, such as the inverse relationship between the noise made by an air conditioner and the amount of cold air it actually puts out; the knowledge of folding geometry required of tall “standees”; and the tailbone hazard graph, in which the risk to one’s lower back increases with distance from the front of the bus (the blame falling more on poorly maintained roads than on the trams’ overtaxed shocks). Happily, the new airport-style buses Not everything

recycled farm oil. Once that switch was complete in March 2007, Mazza started looking at even cleaner options. Gas-electric hybrid buses were prohibitive at around $600,000 apiece. The cleanest fossil fuel – compressed natural gas – seemed a great alternative, except that the closest refueling station was several miles from campus, on Alameda in the downtown core. A company run by a USC alum would have been willing to build a

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natural gas station close to campus, but no land was available. That left an underrated option: propane, better known as barbecue gas. It has 10 to 15 percent lower carbon dioxide emissions per mile than gasoline or diesel, produces almost none of the fine particulate matter linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and emits far less carbon monoxide and acid raincausing nitrous oxides.

have no such issues. The music issues, however, are a constant. A few years back, in a classic case of a few people spoiling it for everyone, some drivers on the late-night Parking Center route overdid the volume on certain hard-core stations. As a result, tram drivers are now asked to choose from just four recommended options: K-EARTH 101, “Smooth Jazz” The Wave 94.7, KJAZZ 88.1 and, of course, Classical KUSC. The first two hog most of the tram airtime, and they have their fans. But after the 101st hearing of the “Beat the Pump” game on K-EARTH, you too may desire to beat the pump, literally. On The Wave, you’re guaranteed to hear the cowbells of the instrumental softjazz standard “Grazing in the Grass” at least once a week. If you found it boring to start with, wait until the 50th iteration. And if Billy Paul “and Mrs. Jones have a thing going on,” and if they’ve “gotta be extra careful,” then why do we have to hear about it almost every day? Help is on the way, and his name is Derrick Filer. A former disc jockey with the late R&B station KACE, Filer turns the radio dial to KJAZZ on his first “pull” and keeps it there for the duration. (His intercampus shuttle leaves UPC at 2:30 p.m., 3:45 p.m. and roughly every hour until 9 p.m.; it leaves HSC at 3 p.m., 4:20 p.m. and so on until around 8:30 p.m.) “Radio was my first love,” he says, listing jazzmen Wes Montgomery and Lee Morgan among his idols, and bassists Marcus Miller and Stanley Clarke, pianist Bob James and guitarist Lee Ritenour among his current favorites. Like all the drivers, Filer had plenty of experience driving buses before coming to USC Transportation. After KACE went belly up, he drove a school bus for a private school in Santa Monica. That job made him extra sensitive to safety, which is why he makes a special plea to USC students. “These kids really need to practice caution, especially on 34th Street,” he says, referring mainly to the cyclists and skateboarders who weave in and out of traffic. “They’re putting themselves in a dangerous situation.” As for tram safety, Filer, Stanton and other drivers hold to the same principle: patience before speed. “You gotta be a cool customer,” Filer says.

dates back to the mid 1970s, when it was under the university’s physical plant department. The transportation department took over the trams around 1990, recalls tram driver James Barta, a 22-year veteran of the system. The Union Station runs began in the mid 1990s. In those early days, a busload was “10 or 12 people,” Barta remembers. Today, the system serves almost 30,000 passengers in a typical month, including around 11,500 one-way trips to or from Union Station. The free Campus Cruiser taxi service, a student-run organization, handles between 500 and 1,000 calls a night with 26 vehicles, 10 student supervisors, 120 student drivers and one manager who reports to USC Transportation. In a 40-minute span on a warm Thursday night in October, work-study driver Robert Telles, a fifth-year senior at USC Annenberg, answered three calls in a Saturn Vue hybrid SUV: Nicolette Ramirez and Yanelle Gavina, aerospace and creative writing majors, respectively, needed a ride from North University Park to a friend’s house west of Vermont. Undeclared freshman Daniel Lohrs needed a lift to campus from his apartment on West 37th Street. And Katie Sharify, who lives in Annenberg House but keeps a car at the Parking Center, requested a ride from the garage. “Cruiser is a brilliant idea,” says Gavina, who happens to work for the service. So is Zipcar. Through an agreement with the Massachusetts-based car-sharing USC’s tram system

company and the City of Los Angeles, USC students can choose from 28 hourly rental cars parked on campus or in the immediate neighborhood. It’s the largest campus-based fleet of Zipcars in the nation, according to Mazza, who helped negotiate the deal (along with another deal allowing students to pay for Yellow Cabs with discretionary cards). Zipcar claims that each of its cars takes the place of 15 to 20 individually owned vehicles. USC’s Zipcars (which rent for as little as $7 an hour, including gas) are in nearly constant use during daylight hours. At a City Hall news conference announcing the agreement last Septem ber, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the time had come to retire that old myth about it being impossible “to get around L.A. without a car.” Though some might call the mayor’s declaration premature, for the many Angelenos who live, study or work at USC, the myth has already morphed into urban legend. l Disclaimer: No automobiles were harmed in the making of this feature. Carl Marziali, director of research communications at USC, researched all commuting options before settling on a combination of bike, Metro Gold Line and USC trams. He has been a happy USC Transportation customer for the past five years. If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Trams in the Headlights $150,000 ›› Cost of a new propane-convertible bus 26,000 lbs. ›› Weight of a 40-seat passenger bus 6 to 8 miles per gallon ›› Combined city and highway mileage Total miles driven per day by the fleet 1,068 ›› $200 ›› Cost of a single bus tire 104 ›› Oil changes per year for a fleet of 24 buses 225 ›› Brake jobs per year for the fleet Percentage reduction in carbon monoxide emissions from diesel to propane buses Over 75% ›› Over 90% ›› Percentage reduction in nitrous oxide emissions from diesel to propane buses ›› Percentage reduction in fine particulate matter emissions from diesel to propane buses Nearly 100% Spotty ›› Air conditioner reliability on old buses Air conditioner reliability on new buses “Aaah” ›› 22,336 ›› Public transportation passes subsidized by the university for faculty, staff and students 1.7 ›› Average number of persons in vehicle for USC commuters Need a carpool partner? Check out http://zimride.usc.edu

The

At Music Man Murray vintage vinyl store, Josh Kun inhales music history. Photographs by Markâ&#x20AC;&#x2C6;Berndt.

There are many original thinkers at USC, but nobody quite like Josh Kun. Witty and insightful, he’s the go-to scholar on popular music and the politics of cultural connections.

Consummate

Listener

by elizabeth segal

of Music Man Murray, a legendary South Los Angeles shop stuffed with hard-to-find vinyl LPs, 45- and 78-rpm records, USC professor Josh Kun takes a deep breath of musty album covers, and smiles. “It’s heaven,” he announces. Kun, a scholar who takes popular music seriously, has spent a small lifetime here, enough to have a warm, kidding relationship with 87-year-old owner Murray Gershenz. True to form, the prolific Kun wrote the definitive profile on Gershenz, which ran a few years ago in Los Angeles magazine. He also thinks enough of Gershenz’s musical tastes that he frets about the future of the Music Man Murray collection, filled as it is with rare treasures. If only a foundation or institution would buy it and keep it intact, he says. Kun – an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism with a joint appointment in the USC College Department of American Studies and Ethnicity – knows a thing or two about how important vintage recordings are to academic research. He has spent years tracking down Opening the front door

U S C T r o ja n F amil y maga z i n e spring 2010

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old LPs with Jewish themes, combing through garage sales and eBay, and making pilgrimages to B’nai B’rith chapters and thrift stores in Boca Raton. These recordings, the majority of which have not been digitized and are vulnerable to being lost forever, turned out to be motherlodes of cultural discoveries. Who knew that these records helped keep Yiddish alive, how songs of the diaspora were adopted by the civil rights movement, and that there was a fellowship of early Jewish female adults-only comics who owned their own comedy clubs? What began as a friendly contest with fellow music and pop culture aficionado Roger Bennett to see who could collect more kitschy albums deepened into real scholarship, and resulted in a book the two authored in 2008, And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost. Aside from being a popular professor, Kun, 38, is considered a cutting-edge and intellectually fearless scholar, one whose work examines the music, sound and politics of cultures past and in transit. Says University of Wisconsin School of Music professor Ron Radano, with whom Kun co-edits the Refiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press: “Josh has an uncanny talent for translating ideas – an ability to explain the deep complexity of music’s cultural power in ways that are at once accessible

the thousands of pieces of music he claims are housed in his garage (“Much to my wife’s chagrin,” he says, referring to Mexican-born musician Ceci Bastida.) He hesitates. “It’s gotta be a collection by Irving Fields called Bongos & Bagels from 1959. I had already heard Mickey Katz, but when I heard Fields, a switch went on, and made me start to rethink Jewish culture and start the research that would end up in our Jewish Vinyl book. It’s a record of Yiddish folk songs, done according to various Latin tempos – meringues, mambos, cha cha chas. At the time, I’d been writing mostly about Latin music, and to hear that there was this Jewish guy rethinking Jewish tradition with contemporary Latin dance styles stunned me.” Kun continues: “When I started digging, I found out that Fields was a guy who performed in the Yiddish theatre in the 1920s and ’30s. He ended up on a cruise ship that went to Cuba and Puerto Rico, and fell in love with Caribbean music. He came back to New York City to play this music, ended up being signed to the RCA Victor label, the Latin purple label, as ‘Campos el Pianista,’ which is, literally, ‘Fields, the Piano Player.’ What was so critical to me about this was that it wasn’t about just cashing in on a cultural moment. It was all about cross-cultural relationships that weren’t just happening in New York City but in Los Angeles, too – the pachuco stuff on the east side – and it all later brought about Herb Alpert and the so-called ‘Tijuana Sound’ of the 1960s!”

Music is an incredible passport.

how to recover from a breakup, how not to recover from a breakup, you learn about politics, and profound. But what makes it all work so well is that he’s responsible, thoughtful and funny.” A USC colleague, associate professor of communication and American studies and ethnicity Sarah Benet-Weiser, concurs. “More than any other scholar I know, Josh is truly, and passionately, interdisciplinary, and he is an amazingly gifted public intellectual. A year or so ago, he gave a lecture on the U.S.-Mexico border and anti-globalization for Zocalo [a public affairs forum in Los Angeles], and I was brought to tears by not only what he said, but also his clear conviction about his topic. He truly inspired me, and made me think in different ways.” Not surprisingly for this master of interdisciplinary thought, Kun also has a third university assignment – directing the Popular Music Project (www.usc.edu/pmp) at the USC Norman Lear Center.

and charming manner, and a bit of a leg twitch that makes one wonder what songs he is channeling with his foot while trying to describe the music that has been his life. Ask him a simple question – what is your favorite piece of music? – and you get a clue as to why he is so inspiring. When asked the question, Kun must mentally scan through

un has a warm

Elizabeth Segal lives in Los Angeles, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com and Seattle’s The Stranger Weekly. Her last piece for USC Trojan Family Magazine was on USC’s International Public Policy and Management Program.

U S C T r o ja n F amil y maga z i n e spring 2010

Josh Kun The Consummate Listener

un is overflowing with histories waiting to be retold, using music as a travel guide. And he is working hard to get them all down. His 2006 book, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, won the American Book Award and received reviews fit for valentines. “This book is a guide to how scholarship will look in the future – the first fully realized product of a new generation of scholars thrown forth by tumultuous social ferment and eager to talk about the world that they see emerging around them,” wrote critic George Lipsitz. Jewish Vinyl has been a big hit beyond academia, particularly among those with a love of the Yiddish arts. Kun presented the book last winter at the Santa Monica Museum of Art with actor, painter and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy and “really wowed

the crowd,” says museum director Elsa Longhauser. “We invited Nimoy because he actually came up in the Yiddish theatre, and knew all those songs that Kun wrote about. Josh played the music, Leonard sang along, then talked with Josh about the music. It was like ‘Name That Tune!’ He and Leonard had a lovely, charming conversation. Josh really navigates the realms of literature, music, popular arts and cultures with eloquence, grace, humor and authority.” An exhibition that Kun and Bennett curated, Jews on Vinyl, based on their book, has been at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco this past year and goes to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles from May 11 through Sept. 5. There is also Kun’s work with his record label. He got so excited about the new/old history in recordings that in 2005, he formed a record label and digital archive with three friends called the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation (www.idelsohnsociety.com), a nonprofit that puts out about two reissues per year. The society has just received a grant from the Righteous Persons Foundation to interview and document 15 Jewish-American musicians in their 80s and 90s. The musicians include cellist Fred Katz, who accompanied Harpo Marx on piano in Marx Brothers films; folk singer Theodore Bikel; Korean-American singer and comedian Johnny Yune, who landed a job in a kosher nightclub in New York City due to his fluent

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The anecdote is classic Kun: an off-the-cuff bundling of a powerful lyrical style and an impossibly wide range of interests into a thought-provoking narrative about arts and politics. Kun continues. “As a Jew, I knew that being brought up Jewish meant certain kinds of things, and it didn’t mean mambo, nor funk, nor blues, nor hanging out with Latinos. Hearing this music just ripped open this huge hole for me about our history, and I understood then that there were multiple histories of Jewish-American culture that have been told in pop culture, but never in books. It’s a history that’s been waiting to be retold.”

You learn about how to love, how not to love, you learn about sexuality, about crime and race. I mean, you learn about everything.

Murray Gershenz and Josh Kun are a mutual admiration society. Gershenz appreciates Kun’s eclectic tastes; Kun marvels at Gershenz’s filing system.

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Yiddish; Sol Zim, the flamboyant cantor who created cantorial rock operas, and more. Says Kun sadly: “We lost two musicians last year, so it’s fortuitous that we got this grant.” Next up as part of the Idelsohn Society, Kun will compile a musical anthology tentatively titled Go Down Moses: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations, for which he has received a $10,000 USC Casden Institute Faculty Research Grant. Says Kun somberly: “Volumes have been written about this relationship before, but usually it’s been tilted towards the Jewish interest in black culture; we’re going to do it the other way around, and include leading African-American jazz/blues/pop artists singing material associated with Jews, like Cab Calloway singing in Yiddish, Lena Horne singing a civil rights song set to the tune of ‘Hava Nagila,’ Johnny Mathis singing the Kol Nidre. We’re trying to take seriously the complicated relationship between the two groups that has not always been a lovely one, has been marked by exploitation and anger and misunderstanding and hostility, and yet has involved tremendous collaboration in music and the arts and cross-racial identification in terms of civil rights and freedom movements.” Also on Kun’s schedule for 2010 are two books that he will co-edit and a collection of his music journalism to be published by Duke University Press. Given all this, Kun is a bit sheepish when he confesses to not

And, of course, there is teaching. Kun teaches a seminar titled “Music as Communication: Listening,” and it is a unique reflection of his interests. One recent class started off with rapper Jay-Z’s song “Empire State of Mind,” his paen to New York City, blasting the room. It instantly shook awake any students who walked in feeling less than fully alive. Kun asked a pointedly un-academic query, “What does this music feel like?” The small class grappled with the words. “Soaring?” said one. “Inspiring!” said another. But that was just scratching the surface. The assignment that was due in class had been to report on a soundscape around the city of Los Angeles, and describe how it felt. Kun prodded his students to think hard about the repercussions and the politics of what they’d heard. “Is it possible to hear the city as a whole?” he asked provocatively, and then played the Kronos Quartet’s version of “Cuatro Milpas” (“The Four Cornfields”), a classic Mexican song that incorporates Mexico City street organ grinders. “What can you hear here? And what can’t you?” A spirited discussion segued into issues of “masking,” wherein louder sounds drown out others. The professor queried: “How is it possible to capture the history of a certain moment, place and people when you can only hear and record some of the sounds being made, while others are blocked out?” The students blinked, their brains suddenly on overload.

Working class rural music is the

U.S.A. and in the world, yet it’s invisible. Artists and musicians are giving us a language being able to play a note on any instrument, other than a bit of “Yellow Submarine” on the piano. But as a child, he learned a very important skill – how to make a mean mix tape. “I didn’t want instruments. I didn’t want anything else if it was a gift or a birthday. It was ‘Music! Music! Music!’ I just wanted records, I just wanted cassettes. I didn’t want to go to concerts. A lot of it was in the ownership. It was like, ‘I can go home and I can listen to it a million times, and I can dub it, and chop it up. It’s mine!’ “It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, I want all this stuff so I can be king of the world.’ It was about, say, having a closet full of infinite masks, like, how many different ways of being can I explore? Music is an incredible passport that way. You learn about how to love, how not to love, how to recover from a breakup, how not to recover from a breakup, you learn about politics, you learn about sexuality, about crime and race. I mean, you learn about everything.”

n campus, Kun is active in Visions & Voices events, and in creating his own, from an evening with Mexican pop icon Julieta Venegas, who sold out Bovard Auditorium in record time, to a recent screening of the documentary Tha Carter, about rapper Lil Wayne, which was followed by a discussion with film producer Quincy Jones III. As part of his Popular Music Project, he led a series of “listening lunches” at USC Annenberg, which featured scholars talking about their favorite songs and artists as well as lectures from visiting scholars such as George Washington University’s Gayle Wald, who spoke about her recent biography of pioneering gospel musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

U S C T r o ja n F amil y maga z i n e spring 2010

The professor eagerly led the now-rapt class into a discussion about a recreation of an Olde English song from 1611, through a brainstorm about the aural makeup and architecture of English villages, through a brainstorm about the sonic rules and mores of the English court (such as the protocols of speech before the king or queen, the sound in the king’s rooms versus the sound in the turrets), and then finished with stimulating food for thought about the church bells of 19th-century France and how they were powerful enough to invoke angels as well as revoke demons. And then a note rang out. It was the bell, breaking up the class. Or, as the professor would posit, it was the bell that would also serve to remind the students of the politics behind their place in the educational rung, of their class and their race, of their age in the spectrum of humankind, of their geographic location in the city of Los Angeles at a school such as USC. Kun started weaving together sound and politics early in his life, but first and foremost, it was about the music. “That was something I always knew, from very early on, that I wanted to be around music,” he says. “I decided then to devote my life to being a fan. It was an arbitrary 10-year-old decision.” He says: “My father was really into folk music. He was especially into the Weavers and Pete Seeger, which was my first real immersion into the power of music, the way folk used music as a social lens, as a social tool, as something that was not just fun and pleasurable, but also about community and about building community, politics and international openness. The Weavers also sang in Hebrew, ‘Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,’ they sang in Spanish, ‘Guantanamera.’ I was never taught to question the translations

Josh Kun The Consummate Listener

television programs. Kun adds that, of late, his work in the classroom and with the Popular Music Project has meant he must limit himself to writing two or three articles per year, which he does for national publications.

un’s ties to Latin culture are especially strong, and he’s putting the finishing touches on a book titled The Ballad of Tijuana, which he describes as “a musical history of border city Tijuana, Mexico, as a way of understanding California’s identity,” and a research project with the USC Norman Lear Center that will look at Mexican migrant music in Los Angeles. “Working-class rural music is the most commercially popular Latin music in the U.S.A. and in the world, yet it’s invisible; no one writes about it,” says Kun. “As we move toward 2040, when the majority of the United States’ population will be Latino and Asian, we still only talk about this country in terms of AfricanAmerican and European-American histories. Artists and musicians are leading the way, giving us a language to think about the new cultural frontier. I’m interested in keeping track of that.” At an October lecture at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, which is based at USC, Kun took the podium before an audience of cultural movers and shakers to delve deeper into

“

across national boundaries, or translations across languages. That’s what music does – it moves and it’s political if you want it to be.” Kun is proud of his unusual musical education. “Growing up, there was a used-record store near my house where I would ride my bike. The guy who owned the shop there had promo copies from the studios and the radio stations. He also had a listening station, and he’d say, ‘You haven’t heard that?’ Or I’d say, ‘I like Tracy Chapman,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, then, you really have to listen to this!’ And he’d direct me to such and such a blues singer, or to Joan Armatrading. He gave me this incredibly educational experience. And I never knew even his name. I was always just the kid he was kind to.” With his natural acoustic acumen, Kun very briefly contemplated working in the recording industry. But he realized he couldn’t make the leap. He reminisces: “Growing up in Los Angeles, and being around the music industry and Hollywoodtype stuff, I knew deep down that that wasn’t music, per se.” He continues: “I had a neighbor in the industry who had a huge record collection, and he let me come over during the day and look at his records. I remember in junior high, I asked him for an internship, and he said, ‘You love music too much to ever work in this business!’ I knew he was right, and on the day I graduated from high school, during the moment when the valedictorian says who’s most likely to do this or that, they said I was most likely to

most commercially popular Latin music in the to think about the new cultural frontier. I’m interested in keeping track of that. be head of Capitol Records. And I thought, ‘They just don’t understand me.’ ” He jokes good-naturedly, “I would never do that.” After attending Duke as an undergrad, he was accepted to UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies program, where he earned his Ph.D. “I would incorporate music into my papers. So I would learn such and such theory and apply it to Jewish singer and humorist Mickey Katz (about whom Kun has written in his Jewish Vinyl book as well as in a new introduction to Katz’s biography, Papa Play for Me), or use theories to talk about a rock band in Mexico City. Quite frankly, I feel very, very grateful to have had advisors and employers over the years who let me do what I do, who were always encouraging me to put these things together, even if it didn’t quite fit with the curriculum.” During graduate school, Kun started working steadily as a journalist. For eight years, he wrote a biweekly music column, “Frequencies,” which was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Boston Phoenix. Tommy Tompkins, the former arts editor at the Bay Guardian, insists that some days, he couldn’t believe his luck at being Kun’s editor. “I was getting paid to have conversations with this kid who was so full of ideas, knowledge and enthusiasm. As an editor, you get jaded, but he was as singular as any writer I got to know and edit in my 20 years of doing so. I learned a lot from Josh.” Kun published copiously in the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, SPIN and Rolling Stone magazines, and Mexico’s La Jornada and Proceso, as well as writing liner notes to CDs by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Maldita Vecindad, and Sammy Davis Jr., and appearing regularly as a cultural critic for national radio and

the issues of Mexican music as a discourse about globalization. “It’s much more than what too many people might refer to as ‘gardener’ music,” he told them. “There’s mariachi, banda, ranchera and more….” He referred to a young DJ on the scene named Juan Carlos Razo, who plays a wildly popular character named Don Cheto on the FM radio station 105.5. Cheto is an elderly country bumpkin whom Kun adroitly linked to other elderly bumblers created by first-generation American comics from decades past. “Migrant artists and fans are impacting the way that record labels and the music industry in general are thinking about their marketing practices,” he said. “Records are now coming out strictly on mobile phones because migrant Mexicans are more prone to look to their phones than online for music.” Kun told the audience that drug ballads have become very popular this year, although they’re banned from the radio in Mexico. “Basically, Los Angeles is where they are remixing rural Mexico right now. Mexican artists are signaling to what the artist Gary Garay calls ‘alla,’ an ‘over there’ that we cannot yet see.” Said Kun: “It also can be taken to mean hope for a better life, the ‘possible impossibility.’ ” The young professor drifted off, leaving his audience with new perspectives and thoughts teased out from precious sounds. As Kun links organ grinders with the voices of the unheard and disenfranchised, and finds common strains among far-flung cultures, he is rewriting our history from notes suspended in thin air. l

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

U S C T r o ja n F amil y maga z i n e spring 2010

Personalized medicine is the new standard at USC Norris Cancer Hospital by katie neith and sara reeve

The Personal is Medical

USC T r o j a n Fa mi ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

photo by Don Milici

racEE ManzanArEs had just turned 35 years old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2008. When her doctors at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital told her that the cancer had already spread to several lymph nodes, she was prepared for the worst. But her doctors weren’t. “From the moment I came here to USC, my doctors put me through a treatment plan that was tailored to fit me,” says Manzanares, a hair stylist who lost her waistlength hair during her treatment. “I knew that they weren’t going to let me die at 35 – it wasn’t an option.” Based on a variety of factors, including the presence of genetic markers that predisposed her to a recurrence of cancer, Manzanares and her doctors embarked on an aggressive treatment plan of chemotherapy designed to give her the best chance of survival. That treatment was followed by a bilateral mastectomy and several reconstructive surgeries. “It was very important to me to reclaim my body,” says Manzanares. “I was 35, and I wanted to know I could get back into a bikini top or wear a sundress on vacation. And my doctors worked with me every step of the way to give me back my life.” The patient has long been at the center of care at USC Norris – not just in receiving a standardized treatment, but in participating in treatment plans and implementation. It is one of only a few facilities in Southern California built exclusively for cancer research and patient care.

rosy future Breast cancer survivor Tracee Manzanares visits with her surgeon, Dennis Holmes, during a breast cancer awareness event at USC Norris.

What is personalized medicine?

In layman’s terms, personalized medicine relates to the practice of providing individualized treatment and medication options to patients based on each patient’s genetic makeup, medical history and lifestyle factors. It builds on traditional approaches to disease management that emphasize the application of standardized care based on the results achieved in large studies. Personalized medicine allows physicians to

take specific characteristics of their patients into account, such as gender, age, weight and environment. Personalized medicine has gained considerable attention and traction in the arena of cancer treatment. It has long been a standard practice to classify tumor stages and subtypes based on anatomic and pathologic findings, and to base the type of treatment received on those findings. Advancements in the understanding of the genetics of can-

cer and molecular testing methods have allowed physicians to understand how a patient’s cancer likely will develop and how it will respond to treatment. For Manzanares, personalized medicine meant that her doctors looked at how her cancer affected her as an individual, rather than seeing her as a statistic. “Breast cancer meant something different to me, as a young woman in my thirties, than it would to another woman in her sixties,” she says. “The doctors

USC T r o j a n Fa mi ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

here helped me make treatment decisions that I could live with, both immediately and in the future.” Internationally renowned physicians such as Heinz-Josef Lenz, professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and associate director of the USC Norris Gastrointestinal Oncology Program, and Christy Russell, associate professor of medicine and director of the USC Harold E. and Henrietta C. Lee Breast Center, have pursued the practice of personalized medicine by tailoring treatments and pursuing clinical trials that offer hope for patients. Lenz and his research team have made groundbreaking advances in colorectal can cer research and treatment. They have iden tified variations in genes that predict patients’ responses to chemotherapy, novel genes asso ciated with DNA repair and novel mech anisms of drug action. A strong advocate for genetic counseling for breast cancer patients and their families, Russell believes that this knowledge can arm patients and doctors with information that can affect treatment plans. “When you are talking with your doctor about your risk, there are questions to ask about your family,” says Russell. “How many cases of breast cancer have occurred anywhere in your family – not just with your mother or sisters, but your mother’s sisters, your mother’s mother and all of her sisters?” the future of personalized medicine at USC Norris

USC has made significant advances in personalized medicine by attracting several phy

USC T r o j a n Fa mi ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

sician leaders who have made personalized medicine a key priority in their research and patient care. Renowned breast surgeon Stephen Sener, professor of clinical surgery at the Keck School, knows that size matters when it comes to breast cancer survival. “The smal ler the cancer, the more likely you are to survive,” he says. “In aggressive screening programs, the average cancer found is onehalf inch or smaller, and the survival rate is 85, 90 percent and above.” Sener, who joined USC Norris in September and serves as chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology at the Keck School of Medicine, hopes to augment the breast cancer screening and clinical care program at USC, both on the main medical campus and in the greater Los Angeles community. “I want to strengthen a clinical and basic research program that will be integrated with breast cancer clinical care, and develop multidisciplinary programs that are designed to screen general and high-risk populations for cancer and to facilitate care of newly diagnosed patients with USC physicians,” says Sener. Recruited from Northwestern University, Sener knows a thing or two about improving clinical cancer care. His service as volunteer chairman of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Incidence and End Results Committee was marked by progress in quality of care and health care access issues. He also served as the American Cancer Society’s national president in 2004-05. Also bringing new expertise to USC is David B. Agus, director of the USC Center

for Applied Molecular Medicine and of the USC Westside Prostate Cancer Center, who believes that clinical cancer care is entering a new era. Agus, professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, sees on the horizon a more holistic model that harnesses proteomics (which is the analysis of proteins expressed by genetic material), molecular biology, genetics and nanotechnology for a new way of treating cancer. Agus says that the drugs currently available aren’t the problem. “Actually they’re very good,” he says. “The problem, though, is knowing how to use them. Not everyone responds to the same drugs or the same doses. We need to learn to individualize therapy.” Prior to joining USC, Agus served as director of the Spielberg Family Center for Applied Proteomics and was research director of the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Agus and his team’s research in proteomic technology seeks to integrate clinical trials, pre-clinical studies and molecularly targeted therapy, which focuses on molecular and cellular changes that are specific to cancer, to predict which patients will likely respond to a specific anti-cancer therapy. “If we have 100 women with breast cancer and give them chemotherapy, and half respond and half don’t, we presently can’t analyze which ones respond to what based on their genetic coding or other markers,” says Agus. “Over the next decade we’ll get past treating cancer by body part and go toward treating it by signaling pathways, potentially through the use of proteomics. Patients

a g u s p h o t o b y M a r k H a r m e l , S e n e r p h o t o b y G e o f f J o h n s o n, t r i pat h y p h o t o b y va n u r fa l i a n

cancer warriors From left: David B. Agus talks with a patient at the USC Westside Prostate Cancer Center; breast surgeon Stephen Sener plans further integration of screenings, research and clinical care for breast cancer patients at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital; Debasish Tripathy was part of the team that brought the breast cancer drug Herceptin into clinical care.

deserve better than we are doing today.” For Debasish “Debu” Tripathy, professor of medicine, holder of the Priscilla and Art Ulene Chair in Women’s Cancer and head of the section on women’s cancers in the Department of Medicine at the Keck School, personalized care is a mission to which he has dedicated much of his career. Recruited in August from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Tripathy is a physician-scientist whose work has changed the course of breast cancer treatment for many women. He was part of the original team that brought the now commonly used breast cancer drug Herceptin into clinical care, and continues to study growth factor receptors, important targets in breast and other cancers. Tripathy also co-leads the Women’s Cancer Program at USC Norris. By utilizing the excellent resources available at USC, he hopes to develop a nationally recognized women’s cancer service that features a personalized and patient-centered approach to care. Tripathy plans to increase the number of treatment and clinical trial options for patients, as well as to develop clinical trials and research programs that match the needs of patients and mesh with areas of scientific excellence at USC. “The technology explosion from genetics to cellular biology to population sciences has allowed us to understand the driving forces behind cancer and the unique nature each person’s tumor exhibits,” says Tripathy. “We also learn so much from interacting with our patients and understanding their preferences and values. By incorporating patient feedback and clinical trial data into our research, we can begin to start making linkages that may lead to new, highly individualized therapies.”

tumor tracker Inderbir Gill is chair of the Catherine and Joseph Aresty Department of Urology and director of the USC Institute of Urology.

In addition to working toward better therapies and tailored treatment plans, Tripathy is interested in the patient perspective of the cancer experience and dissemination of information. “I have a commitment to public outreach and social responsibility that I hope is reflected in everything I do here,” he says. For Inderbir Gill, chair of the Catherine and Joseph Aresty Department of Urology, director of the USC Institute of Urology and associate dean for clinical innovation at the Keck School of Medicine, the wealth of new information about the nature of cancer has opened the door for advanced surgical and medical treatment options. Gill, who joined USC in February 2009 after serving as chairman of urology at the Cleveland Clinic, is looking for new and less invasive methods to effectively treat cancer. “We used to think that if you had kidney cancer, you just had kidney cancer – that was it,” says Gill. “But now we know there are four or five different subtypes of kidney

photo by philip channing

Resources at Patients’ Fingertips Personalized medicine is not only about doctors working together. It is also about being an informed health care consumer. At USC Norris, the combined Patient Education and Outreach Center and Jennifer Diamond Cancer Resource Library offer a stateof-the-art cancer resource facility where patients and their families can be well versed in treatment options, side effects and quality-of-life issues. The facility is devoted to patients, their families and community members seeking information about cancer. The facility features computers, reference books, printers, DVDs and Internet access. In addition to manual and computerized information,

the center has live phone help with specialized counselors, a patient navigation information system and trained volunteers to assist with access to cancer-related resources. The library is named for Jennifer Diamond of Los Angeles, who suffered from a rare form of appendix cancer. During her treatment, she and her family found it extremely hard to access information about her disease. After Jennifer passed away at age 30, her parents – Alice and Harvey Diamond – vowed to help others by providing resources to cancer patients and their families. l

cancer. Based on what type one has, we can make a more precise determination about cancer invasiveness, and even predict the possibility of recurrence.” Understanding the subtle molecular differences between tumor subtypes can drastically affect treatment recommendations and options. One area of cancer treatment that is changing thanks to new research is treatment of prostate cancer. The traditional surgical treatment of this cancer has been the total removal of the prostate gland – most recently via robotic prostatectomy – which can lead to erectile and continence issues. Gill and his team of researchers are working to devise a method for performing a “male lumpectomy,” a removal of the tumor that saves the rest of the prostate. “In the carefully selected patient, if we can save the prostate and just remove the cancer, the chances of having these undesirable side effects will decrease dramatically, and that has a lot of appeal to patients,” he says. That appeal is evident in Gill’s ability to attract patients from all over the world – people who are looking for treatments that maximize survival while limiting impact on lifestyle. “We make the treatment fit the patient, and not the patient fit the treatment,” Gill says. Tracee Manzanares believes that her survival is a testament to the commitment of her doctors at USC Norris. “They treated me like a person, not a number,” she says. “They gave me the will to fight, and to make choices that I could and do live with today.” l For more information or an appointment, visit www.DoctorsOfUSC.com.

USC T r o j a n Fa mi ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Family Ties news from the usc alumni association

USC Alumni Association welcomes three generations of Trojans back to campus. More than 860 alumni and friends returned

to USC to evoke fond memories, create new ones and renew support for their alma mater during Reunion Weekend 2009, October 23-24. Sponsored by the USC Alumni Association, this year’s celebration of Trojan Family ties welcomed three generations of alumni back to campus: the Class of 1959 for its 50-year reunion; the Class of 1984 for its 25-year reunion; and the classes of 1999-2009 for an all-new young alumni reunion. Trojans from as far away as New Zealand and London arrived on campus late Friday morning to enjoy a slate of cultural, educational and social activities. While the 25year and young-alumni attendees savored a buffet at Widney Alumni House, approximately 150 members of the Class of 1959 attended an elegant luncheon at Town & Gown, which was decorated with postersized reproductions of Daily Trojan front pages circa 1959.

After a warm welcome by Scott M. Mory, CEO of the USC Alumni Association, 50Year Reunion Committee co-chairs Scott Fitz-Randolph and Alli Lockwood Solum kicked off the reunion festivities. They also introduced a special guest: former USC dean of women Joan M. Schaefer, who joined the university in 1955 – “the day we stepped on campus,” according to Solum. Following Dean Joan’s celebrated appearance, former yell king and current class legacy chair Barney Rosenzweig informed his classmates that their generous reunion giving program would fully fund the Norman Topping Commemorative Monument in honor of the university’s seventh president, as well as enhance the Widney Alumni House Legacy Fund. The luncheon concluded with “USC Then and Now,” a presentation by Courtney Surls, vice president for development, who charted the university’s dramatic changes over five decades. An afternoon of walking tours of Greek

Row, Doheny Memorial Library and the cinematic arts complex preceded a series of lectures and presentations sponsored by the USC Emeriti Center and the USC Office of Continuing Education, respectively, at Davidson Continuing Education Center. Current and emeriti USC faculty discussed subjects ranging from popular music to the “greenness” of global trade. Also at Davidson, two senior USC administrators – Elizabeth Garrett, vice president for academic planning and budget, and L. Katharine Harrington, dean of admission and financial aid – teamed up to report on “USC Today, Tomorrow and in the Future.” After a football pep rally at Heritage Hall, the festivities shifted to the University Club for the 50-year cocktail party and to the cinematic arts complex for back-to-back events: the 25-year reunion dinner and the young alumni cocktail party. Class of ’84 Reunion Committee co-chairs Park E. Eddy and Marie McGrath Stout emceed the reinstated 25-year program, which drew 50 percent more attendees than its 2005 pre decessor. Class legacy leader Robert Vollmer thanked his classmates not only for attending, but also for supporting efforts to fund a display case and an exterior lamppost for the soonto-be completed Ronald N. Tutor Campus Center. Later that evening, young alumni co-chairs Stefanie Garcia ’04 and Harold L. Mann Jr. ’05 welcomed nearly 250 recent alums to the all-new USC event in the cinematic arts courtyard. On Saturday, more than 600 Re union Weekend attendees demonstrated their Trojan spirit at a tailgate party in Argue Plaza, next to the Alumni House, before the nail-biting 42-36 Trojan victory Pictured in this cross-generational portrait are reunion organizers (from left) Seymour Canter ’55, Cornelia Baer ’59, Abe Somer ’59, Mary Coates ’59, Scott Fitz-Randolph ’59, Alli Solum ’59, Janet Eddy ’53, Park Eddy ’84, Harold Mann ’05, Marie Stout ’84, Gigi Johnson ’84, Jessica Kaplan ’06 and, in front, Patrick Auerbach EdD ’08.

photo by Devin Begley

Reunion Weekend Triple Feature

over Oregon State. With Reunion Weekend attendance increasing 83 percent over the previous year, and class legacy giving surpassing the $100,000 mark for the second time in as many years, USC’s expanded reunion program fulfilled two key alumni association goals: providing alumni of all ages with meaningful opportunities to reconnect with USC and inspiring philanthropic support for current university initiatives.

“Reunion Weekend 2009, with its expanded class outreach, represented a significant step in our efforts to engage alumni from different generations in meaningful university experiences,” states senior director of alumni relations Patrick Auerbach EdD ’08. “We hope to continually expand such reunion opportunities to enhance engagement, strengthen the Trojan Family and advance the mission of the university.” – Timothy O. Knight

deans deliver

Alumni in the Academic Loop The Alumni Association promotes USC’s academic success by taking scholarly riches on the road.

Hassan, director of the newly created USC School of Social Work Center for Research and Innovation on Veterans and Military Families, who, as a retired Air Force officer, offered a personal perspective on issues veterans face re-acclimating to civilian society; and Ian Whittinghill ’08, student founder of the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, who described the “ups and downs” students experience in launching rockets that they create. In October, more than 200 Trojans, many of them in the Bay Area for the USC-Cal Weekender, had a chance to “Meet the Deans” at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square. Three USC deans – James G. Ellis of the USC Marshall School of Business; Howard Gillman of USC College; and Yannis C. Yortsos of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering – appeared with Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, to discuss topics that included globalization, undergraduate retention, sustainability and social responsibility. The event was co-sponsored by the alumni association and the USC schools represented. Later in October,

From left, James G. Ellis, Howard Gillman, Geneva Overholser and Yannis C. Yortsos at the “Meet the Deans” event in the Westin St. Francis, San Francisco.

– engaging alumni for life, building a culture of philanthropy among the Trojan Family and being a representative voice for all USC alumni – the USC Alumni Association now has an additional objective: linking alumni to the university’s flourishing academic scene. “We are committed to promoting the university’s academic success by bringing USC leaders and faculty to meet alumni where they live,” says Scott M. Mory, CEO of the USC Alumni Association. The alumni association has been doing this by beefing up regional programming and strengthening its campus partnerships. In the 2008-09 academic year, every sitting USC dean participated in at least one alumni event in cities such as Chicago, Se-

photo by Josh Bingham

In addition to its core mission

attle, Portland and New York, as well as throughout Southern California. Other USC administrators and faculty met with Trojans in Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, London and Washington, D.C. This trend continues with a number of recent alumni events demonstrating the association’s determination to keep alumni in the academic loop. Last September, as part of its 8th annual USC Alumni Leadership Conference, the alumni association presented its second annual “Best of USC” panel to hundreds of alumni leaders and volunteers. Among the panelists were USC Davis School of Gerontology professor Caleb Finch, who talked about a possible decline in U.S. life expectancy if certain health issues are not addressed; Anthony

the alumni association and its Orange County alumni clubs brought hundreds of alumni and friends to the Island Hotel in Newport Beach to spend an evening with USC Executive Vice President and Provost C. L. Max Nikias. Nikias, who had previously headlined similar events in New York and San Diego, spoke about USC’s 2009 acquisition of USC University and USC Norris Cancer hospitals, the USC Institute of Creative Technologies in Marina del Rey and the crucial role Orange County Trojans play in the vitality and future of the university. In attendance were several USC trustees and USC Alumni Association Board of Governors members, as well as Dean Karen Symms Gallagher of the USC Rossier School of Education. Speaking of Dean Gallagher, she appeared in November in Washington, D.C., at an alumni association co-sponsored event titled “A Conversation about Education.” Joining her on stage was Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana PhD ’95, U.S. assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration. “Expect to see more deans, faculty and other distinguished Trojans traveling to meet alumni in all parts of the country and the world,” promises Mory. “Promoting USC’s academic success is an integral part of what we do.” – Ross M. Levine

U S C T rojan Family magazine spring 2010

SHOWING THEIR COLORS

The Alumni SCene Green, pink, cardinal and gold

4 1. Green Team Members and friends of the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Association (APAA) hit the links for a good cause on October 9 when APAA held its 6th annual Scholarship Golf Classic at the Industry Hills Golf Club east of Los Angeles. Players enjoyed an exciting round of golf and competed in various challenges at one of Southern California’s premier courses. Pictured left to right are Steve Choy, tournament chair Glenn Osaka ’91, Albert Gusman and Alan Chong. 2. La Vie en Cardinal USC exchange students got a taste of la vie française last September when the USC Alumni Club of Paris welcomed them to the City of Lights with a picnic in the Champs de Mars near a certain familiar icon. Club

U S C T rojan Family magazine spring 2010

photo by Devin Begley

p h o t o b y D a n Av i l a

photo by Drew Graham

photo by Devin Begley

president Leslie Nelson Cressy ’82 (far left) joined the students in a display of l’esprit Troyen. Continuons le Combat!

reer development adviser with USC Marshall Student Services, offers career tips to a recent USC grad.

3. In the Pink Approximately 300 USC alumni and friends attended a “Pink Slip Networking Party” last September at the downtown Los Angeles Remedy Lounge. While career consultant Jennifer Rosky presented two 45-minute workshops on job-search strategies in today’s competitive market, 14 career counselors provided free résumé feedback and professional advice to participants in oneon-one sessions. The event was the second of three networking parties co-sponsored by the USC Alumni Association and the USC Marshall Keenan MBA Career Resource Center. Seated at right, Julie Samere, a ca-

4. Windy City Warm-Up Co-hosted by the USC Alumni Association and the USC Alumni Club of the MidwestChicago, the USC-Notre Dame Weekender kicked off October 16 in the Windy City, where the Song Girls and the USC Trojan Marching Band dazzled a crowd of 1,100 at a Friday night pep rally in the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers. The rally capped a day of activities that included an architectural river tour and a private visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo. The celebration continued the next day in South Bend, Ind., when the Trojans defeated the Fighting Irish 34-27. l

working wanderers

An Affinity for Travel Dedicated volunteers and USC faculty experts make the alumni association’s Trojan Travel program unique.

Trojan travelers pose before the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx outside Cairo. Center front, holding the banner, is USC professor Laurie Brand, director of the USC School of International Relations, a frequent faculty host for USC Trojan Travel.

photos by devin begley

in 1978, a cruise on Germany’s Rhine River

with 138 Trojans marked the beginning of USC Trojan Travel. Since then, nearly 3,000 USC alumni, parents, friends, faculty and staff have traveled the world – many of them multiple times – with the USC Alumni Association’s affinity travel organization, which is dedicated to promoting lifelong learning and intellectual enrichment through travel, while strengthening the bond between Trojans and USC. Today, the program offers approximately 40 trips a year all over the globe, and has a growing young alumni component, launched in 2006, that has taken Trojans in their 20s, 30s and 40s to Italy, Costa Rica, Peru, Greece and Africa. Although USC is one of many universities with a travel program, two factors set Trojan Travel apart. One is the program’s commitment to utilizing volunteers. Led by USC Trojan Travel associate director Teri Kirkendoll ’70, MA ’79, there are seven staff volunteers, all USC alumnae, who work 47 to 50 hours a month, or approximately two days a week, conducting the program’s business and running its day-to-day operations. Passionate about travel, these alumnae, in exchange for their time, host one Trojan

Travel trip a year. On these trips they play the role of USC ambassadors, offering their charges a “high-touch,” personalized USC travel experience. Volunteer Patti Josi ’58 has been with the program since its inception 31 years ago within the then General Alumni Association. Another volunteer who can claim nearly equal seniority is Shirley Johnstone ’52. Four of the other volunteers are pictured at right. These women are committed supporters of USC, with affiliations ranging from USC Associates and Cardinal and Gold, to Town & Gown and other alumnae support groups. In addition to these seven volunteers, current USC students also assist with various tasks and projects in the University Village travel office. The other distinguishing aspect of Trojan Travel is its commitment to faculty involvement. Faculty hosts represent USC and enhance the travel experience by spotlighting a destination’s culture and history. Faculty members do not function as daily tour guides (already included in every program),

but instead add another layer of expertise to deepen travelers’ understanding of the places they visit. Faculty lecturers are chosen based on colleague referrals and their academic connections to the countries and regions included in the itinerary. Faculty program participants have included educators from USC Annenberg (communication and journalism), architecture, cinematic arts, USC College, USC Rossier (education), USC Roski (fine arts), USC Thornton (music) and social work. This faculty participation elevates Trojan Travel to a component of the university’s educational mission. Trojan Travel does not directly organize and manage the trips it offers; it works with various providers such as Alumni Holidays, Thomas P. Gohagan & Company, and Go Next. Some of the most popular excursions are the Crystal and Oceania cruises and the top-tier private jet trips. Many Trojan travelers are dedicated USC supporters who, even in their recreational pursuits, want to maintain a strong link to the Trojan Family. Since 2000, overall travel participation has been down due to the fear of terrorism in the earlier part of the decade and, more recently, the repercussions of the economic crisis. Nevertheless, according to Kirken doll, Trojan Travel, whose net proceeds support the programs of the USC Alumni Association, “can look forward to lots of retiring Trojan Baby Boomers looking to satisfy their wanderlust during their golden years. Also, as the Young Alumni Program develops, younger and younger Trojans and their friends will discover the joys of traveling Trojan style!” – Ross M. Levine “Manning” the Trojan Travel reservation lines are, from left, volunteers Margie Badham ’51, Mary Coates, ’59, MA ’61, Marilyn O’Driscoll ’61 and Gloria Phillips ’54. At right is USC Trojan Travel associate director Teri Kirkendoll ’70, MA ’79.

U S C T rojan Family magazine spring 2010

Class Notes who’s doing what

& where

’50 Thomas C. Bruice PhD ’54, profes-

sor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, was awarded the 2008 Linus Pauling Medal, given annually by the Puget Sound, Ore., and Portland, Ore., sections of the American Chemical Society to recognize outstanding accomplishments in chemistry.

’56 Roy Aaron LLB recently joined the

Pasadena, Calif.-based investment banking and consulting firms Janas Associates and Janas Consulting as vice chairman. He continues to mediate and arbitrate lawsuits with Alternative Dispute Resolution Services in Century City, Calif.

’57 Dora De Larios was the subject of a

›› name that team

USC sports teams’ early nicknames such as the “Fighting Methodists” and the “Wesleyans” were relegated to the scrap heap in 1912 when Los Angeles Times sports editor Owen R. Bird coined the name that stuck. He was writing about that year’s track team, shown above, and its meet with the Oxy [Occidental College] Tigers. Bird later recalled he appreciated the USC team’s “fighting spirit” and ability to battle“overwhelming odds of bigger and better equipped teams with their colors gloriously nailed to the mast.” He wrote, “It seemed to me the name ‘Trojan’ fitted their case.” l

of Directorship magazine. He was recently appointed to a two-year term on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s standing advisory group and has been the Ernst & Young Executive Professor of Accounting at the University of Georgia since 1997. • Bill A. Block MBA ’65 of Pacific Palisades, Calif., published Trojans 1972: An Immortal Team of Mortal Men, a book about the members of the 1972 USC football team. He has spent more than 40 years on Wall Street as an investment analyst and in 1997 founded his own company, W.A.B. Capital, which researches microcap stocks.

’62 Edward P. Roski, Jr., chairman of the

recent exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, Fifty Years of the Art of Dora De Larios. More than 100 of her sculptures, totems, masks, plaques and other pieces of art were on display. • Carl R. Terzian was named Honorary Alumnus of the Year by Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif. He has served as a dean and professor of government and speech at the school, and has been a trustee since 1979.

USC Board of Trustees and chairman and CEO of Majestic Realty Co., also owns the Industry Hills Golf Club and Pacific Palms Resort in Industry Hills, Calif. The club and resort recently were upgraded, and the golf club received the 2010 Golf Club of the Year award from the National Golf Course Owners Association. • Adrian Ruiz MM ’64 recently recorded and released a two-disc set of piano music by composer Ferdinand Hiller. Ruiz lives in Lancaster, Calif.

’58 Norman C. Bitter DDS of Fresno,

’64 Carol J. Baker, executive director of

Calif., published his latest book, Daily Devotions. He has conducted dental research for many years and has published 14 articles on dentistry in international publications.

’59 Carl E. Rieder DDS received a 2009

Outstanding Service Award from the American College of Dentists for his exceptional service to dentistry, including significant contributions to the fields of prosthodontics, restorative dentistry and implant dentistry. He established and developed the Newport Harbor Academy of Dentistry in Newport Beach, Calif., which is now in its 47th year.

’61 Dennis R. Beresford was named one

of the 100 Most Influential People in the Corporate Boardroom for the third consecutive year in the November 2009 issue

Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Awareness and Research, was recently appointed to serve as chair of the advisory committee on immunization practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

’71 James Campbell PhD was honored

posthumously for his contributions to national reconnaissance by the National Reconnaissance Office, a joint Department of Defense-Intelligence Community organization that develops, launches and operates U.S. signals, imagery and communications intelligence satellites. He was a pioneer in the field, whose research and analysis resulted in innovative reconnaissance capabilities, and he provided key technical improvements that have extended the operational lifespan of spacecraft.

We welcome news items from all USC alumni. Please include your name, street address, e-mail address, degree and year of graduation with each submission. Mail to: USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790 or e-mail us at: magazines@usc.edu. Please note that, because of our long production schedule and the heavy volume of submissions, it might be several months before your notice appears.

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

’73 Christopher Cox recently joined the

global law firm of Bingham McCutchen as a partner in its corporate mergers & acquisitions and securities groups and as a principal of Bingham Consulting Group. He has been chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, the fifth-ranking elected leader in the House and a 17-year member of Congress from California. • Clyde Cronkhite MPA, DPA ’91 published the book Criminal Justice Administration: Strategies for the 21st Century. He is a professor at Western Illinois University. • Judi Hollis MS, PhD ’82 was honored with a star on the Palm Springs (Calif.) Walk of Stars in January for her many years of dedication to furthering treatments for addictive eating styles and food obsessions. A licensed family therapist, she is the author of three books, Fat Is a Family Affair, Fat & Furious and Hot & Heavy, and is working on her fourth book, From Bagels to Buddha. • Bob Oettinger is vice president of the International Baseball Association, which is working to build a baseball academy in Nicaragua that will train and prepare players from throughout Central America for careers in baseball. He and his wife, Eve,

live in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and have two children, Emily ’10 and Daniel ’08.

book, Poems of a Dead Metaphysician, under his pen name, J. William Long.

’75 Bob Hogue of Honolulu recently pub-

’83 Edward Cibener is a special education

lished Sands of Lanikai, a work of historic fiction set in Hawaii in 1941.

’76 Robert Schneider DDS, a professor

at the University of Iowa College of Dentistry, was named an honorary certified dental technician, an honor given by the National Association of Dental Laboratories. He also was presented with the first annual David Bridgham Leadership Award for continuous leadership and support of dentistry, dental technology and dental technical education.

’77 Laurel Bleak is president of the Los Angeles Dental Hygienists’ Society.

’78 Anthony J. Chiaramida MD has been

teaching fourth-year medical students at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School for the last 25 years. He recently published the second edition of the textbook and workbook 12 Lead EKG Confidence: A Stepby-Step Guide.

’80 James W. Long recently published a

teacher and co-coordinator of the community-based instruction program at the Beacon School in San Jose, Calif., a school for teens and young adults with disabilities who live in Santa Clara County, Calif. • Lawrence L. Risley of Pasadena, Calif., recently earned a Professional Clear Social Studies teaching credential, issued by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

’84 Denise Rivera Menchaca was re-

elected to the governing board of trustees for the San Gabriel (Calif.) Unified School District. She previously served as vice president.

’85 Beverly Bradley PhD received the

2009 Distinguished Service Award from the American School Health Association. She worked for many years as a district administrator of school health programs in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a retired assistant clinical professor in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. • Tim Leone MA is the co-author of Gabby: Confessions of a Hockey Lifer, the autobiography of Washington Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau. Leone is a sportswriter living in Hershey, Penn.

’89 Michael Saxton of Kansas City, Mo., is the CEO and managing partner of Business Transition Specialists, a merger and acquisition firm, and the founding partner and executive vice president for IntelliThink, a strategic consulting firm. The businesses are in their fifth and sixth years, respectively.

’90 Ashley Merryman co-authored NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children, an exploration into adolescent psychology and child development. She lives in Los Angeles, where for 10 years she has directed a small all-volunteer tutoring program for inner-city children.

’91 Troy Allen Dyer of Los Angeles and

Lake Geneva, Wis., has recently produced his first feature film, Feed the Fish. He is a financial and business adviser with the company First Financial Resources.

’92 Karen Devor Sherman MSW was or-

dained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Prior to entering rabbinical school, she was special assistant to the chief executive officer and later the director of children’s services at PROTOTYPES, a Los Angeles-based substance abuse treatment center for women.

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

’93 Trudy Arriaga EdD was named Super-

intendent of the Year by the Association of California School Administrators for Region XII, which includes Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. She has served as Ventura Unified superintendent since 2000. • Elizabeth Morrow DMA was recently promoted to full professor of cello at the University of Texas at Arlington. She also was honored with membership in the university’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers and was a recipient of the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.

’95 Matthew Moul of Toluca Lake, Calif.,

Jazz Hands You can’t see them in the dark of Mount Vernon, New York’s Bassline Café, but jazz pianist Donald Vega ’99 has angels on his shoulder. This cat may swing into a solo with the balletic grace of Oscar Peterson, and lead his trio like he was born backstage at a nightclub, but he’s traveled a difficult road to get here tonight. After an immaculate version of his composition “The Will to Nurture” from his debut CD, Tomorrows, we repair to a back room to talk

won a 2009 Emmy Award for his work on the television show Project Runway in the Best Editing for a Reality Program category. He has previously received two Daytime Emmy nominations for his work on Dr. Phil.

about Vega’s hardscrabble yesterdays. And how much he feels he

’97 Marielle Neri was recently named to

1980s, the Nicaraguan military would pick up boys who were 14 and older to fight in the country’s civil

the board of directors of Leap … Imagination in Learning, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that provides hands-on residency programs to elementary and middle schools throughout the Bay Area. She is principal and founder of 5 Spice Design, a graphic design studio specializing in work for the architecture, engineering and construction professions. • Justin Paperny is the author of the recently published book Lessons from Prison, which chronicles his life, career, business decisions that led to his incarceration and his experiences in prison. Since his release, he has spoken at numerous universities, including USC. He continues to maintain the blog he created to document his experience as a federal prisoner, www. JustinPaperny.com. • Anne Renna MAcc gave a presentation on business fraud to the 2009 Joint National Conference of the American Society of Women Accountants and the American Woman’s Society of CPAs in Las Vegas. She lives in Santa Monica, Calif.

’98 Sheldon K. Smith EdD recently ac-

cepted the position of assistant superintendent for business services in the Lompoc (Calif.) Unified School District. For the past 10 years, he was the director of student information and technology in the Paso Robles (Calif.) Unified School District.

’99 Matt Willer of Long Beach, Calif., is

P hoto b y L our d e s D e l g a d o

Class of ’99

alumni profile

founder and principal of ZAPP Gum, a company that manufactures a line of chewing gum with no sugar or artificial sweeteners that works to prevent cavities. The brand recently launched a new Web site, www.ZappGum.com.

owes to the angels he found at USC. “I think I’m lucky to have made it to the United States at all, much less USC,” says the dapper, 35-year-old Vega. He was born in Managua, Nicaragua, where he studied classical piano with his uncle and grandfather, both well-known musicians. However, as a teenager, his safety was imperiled. In the

war. To avoid that fate, Vega’s mother moved to the United States, then helped him flee and join her. After locating in Los Angeles, learning English and changing his focus to jazz piano at the Colburn School of the Performing Arts, Vega was accepted into the USC Thornton School of Music, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in jazz studies. He credits various angels with his getting in and staying in. He said he was indebted to USC’s Mexican American Alumni Association (http:usc.edu/maaa), particularly Raul Vargas, the now-retired founding director, for arranging scholarships for him. “It couldn’t have happened otherwise,” Vega says. At his audition, Vega recalls that USC Thornton professor John Thomas started listening, then stopped him momentarily to find a tape recorder and recorded the audition so the jazz piano professors could hear it. “His help and foresight were an integral part of me getting into USC,” Vega says. Once he was in, USC Thornton professors Aaron Serfaty, Tom Mason, Shelley Berg and John Clayton were unending sources of emotional support and inspiration, the musician says. Then, there was the matter of having a birth defect fixed. Which, Vega says, solved more than a cosmetic problem. “I was born with a cleft palate,” he says. “I was actually having trouble hearing music, because the problem affected my ears. As a result of getting a Spotlight Award [a recognition from the Los Angeles Music Center that highlights Southern California’s top student talent], a philanthropist donated money for my operation. That’s a debt I can’t repay.” It wasn’t only faculty members who insured his time at USC would be productive. Vega connected with students who were spiritual, studied the Bible and followed good moral principles. This strong set of values has helped him in his new life in the New York jazz scene, where there are a lot of ways to get lost if you don’t have a good read on things, he notes. Vega straightens his tie, to get ready for the next set of songs from Tomorrows. Not long after this gig, he would tour Europe and work on his second album, to be released this summer. When Vega thinks about all the luck he’s had and everyone who has helped him, he feels blessed. Every time he’s needed a break, something has always worked out, he observes. Vega says he hopes in the future to be able to help other youngsters in need of similar breaks. Call it a cosmic debt he wants to repay. – Peter Gerstenzang

’00 Debbie Gioia PhD was promoted to U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

associate professor with tenure at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, where she has been teaching since 2006.

’01 Alejandra Campoverdi serves as as-

sistant to the White House deputy chief of staff for policy in Washington, D.C. She recently received the Community Hero Award from the Virginia Avenue Project, a free after-school program in Santa Monica, Calif., that focuses on the performing arts. She has been involved with the program since it began in 1992. • Rebecca Paterson recently received her master of arts in graphic communications management and technology from New York University.

’02 Emily C. Casso recently graduated from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. • Molly Engelhardt PhD published Dancing out of Line: Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture, an examination of dancing in the Victorian period. She is an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

’03 James Kasim MBA was named presi-

dent and chief operating officer of BentleyForbes, a Los Angeles-based national real

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

estate investment company.

’04 Florence Chung MSW of Los Angeles

is a senior specialist in government and community partnerships at Target Corporation. • Jeron Maklanron recently self-published his first novel, The Corrupting of the Redeemer. He lives in Austell, Ga. • Aaron Monty, a marketing manager at EMI Music Publishing, was recently featured in Billboard’s “30 Under 30,” an article that recognizes rising young executives in the music industry. He lives in West Hollywood, Calif. • Joseph Rivera EdD was re-elected as a governing board member of the El Rancho Unified School District in Pico Rivera, Calif.

’05 Suzanne Natbony was recently hired

as Pacific region director for New World Home Pacific LLC, a green home design and building company in Los Angeles.

’06 Jennifer McCard works for a nonprofit

environmental organization in Kigali, Rwanda, where she lives with husband Alex Peterson ’06. He provides tech support for the U.S. Embassy. • John Purcell EdD of Los Angeles recently turned his doctoral

research into the book Uncovering Promising Practices in School/University Partnerships. • Sam Wasson MFA of Los Angeles recently published A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards, a study of the filmmaker who directed classics such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the original Pink Panther movies. Wasson is currently working on a book about Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

’07 Esteban Juarez MSW is a clinical social worker at Hoag Memorial Hospital Pres byterian in Newport Beach, Calif. • Olivier Ochanine became the music director and principal conductor of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra in Manila.

’08 Amy Kaufman recently joined the

Los Angeles Times entertainment team as a staff writer. Previously she was an assistant editor at the The Daily Beast and worked as a reporter in the Los Angeles bureau of The Wall Street Journal. She also has written for Los Angeles magazine and the Santa Monica Daily Press.

’09 Lorelei Bonet MSW is an oncology

social worker at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif. • Karen

Ghulam EdD was selected as the new vice

principal of Desert Hot Springs (Calif.) High School. • Yawen Li PhD is an assistant professor at San Diego State University’s School of Social Work.

Class of ’00

alumni profile

The Aviator When Lieutenant Amy Redditt Tomlinson ’00 explains what she

Marriages Karen A. Reeser ’82 and James B. Walters ’84 • Jacob Ullman ’95 and Xandi Craig • Marcus Wooler ’95 and Katay Kocsis ’04 • Rebecca Paterson ’01 and Douglas Hart • Mudit Jindal ’02 and Sheena Patel ’05, MS ’09, PharmD ’09 • Jennifer Still ’04, DDS ’08 and Jason Morris DDS ’08 • Jennifer McCard ’06 and Alex Peterson ’06.

does as an aviator in the U.S. Navy, she references a popular film. “Have you ever seen Top Gun?” she asks. “You know Maverick, Tom Cruise, is the pilot in the front, and Goose is in the back? I’m Goose. I’m a WSO – pronounced ‘wizzo,’ which stands for Weapon Systems Officer – in the F/A-18 Hornet.” As a WSO, Tomlinson is literally the backseat driver in charge of navigation. She helps determine where to target weapons systems and sorts out the correct targets using advanced digital displays located in the back of the jet. “It can

Births

P hoto C ourt e s y U. S. N av y B lu e An g e ls

Arthur “Bud” Lush PharmD ’74 and Laurie

Lush, a granddaughter, Elise Theresa Fong • Aili (Tapio) Gardea ’85, MBA ’87 and Rene Gardea, a son, Benjamin Jude. He joins sister Anita and brothers Emilio, Matthew and Tadeo • Gloria (Delarosa) Cotten ’92, PharmD ’98 and David Lynch Cotten, a son, Cory Lynch • Matthew Tonkovich ’92 and Babe (Foster) Tonkovich ’04, a daughter, Petra Jeanette. She joins brothers Ryder Dean and August James. She is the greatgreat-granddaughter of Ruth (Dallman) Launer ’16, the great-granddaughter of Earl Harris ’39 and Eunice (Launer) Harris ’39, the great-grandniece of Ruthmarie (Launer) Gruber ’41, the granddaughter of Janet (Harris) Tonkovich ’65, the grandniece of Kathleen (Harris) Windsor ’66, the niece of Diane (Tonkovich) Miller ’92, Gregory Tonkovich ’94, MS ’01 and Jaclyn (Talarico) Tonkovich MA ’01, and the cousin of Divita Elliott ’93 • Bijal Parikh ’93 and Thomas Pyle ’93, a son, Santino. He joins sister Atia • Cristin Powitzky Murphy ’94 and Derek Murphy, a daughter, Tessa Grace. She joins brothers Ryan, 5, and Troy, 2 • Mario Fernandez ’95 and Corinne Fernandez, a son, Mario Giordano • Eileen Cheng MPA ’98 and Pierson Cheng MBA ’99, a daughter, Hannah Madison • Christy Zegub ’98, a son, Xavier Yitzhak • Jennifer Y. Lee ’99 and Herman C. Lee, a son, Lucas Samuel • Danielle Moore ’00 and Jeremy Moore ’00, MBA ’08, a daughter, Ireland Kinkaid • Matthew G. Stevens ’01 and Shelby Stevens, a daughter, Emerson Lynn. She is the granddaughter of Robert G. Stevens ’68, MS ’70 • Helen Vik Wahlin ’02 and Wes Wahlin, a son, Cooper Wesley • Michael D. Logan ’03 and Britt Aadnoy ’04, a son, Martin Aadnoy Logan. He is the greatgreat-grandson of Lyndol Lester Young ’17, and the grandson of Lyndol Major Logan ’72, JD ’75 and John Thomas Logan JD ’75.

feel like a video game and makes for a great office,” she says. Though the job is fraught with danger, Tomlinson says she has never felt afraid or unsafe, even while completing two combat deployments during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Based on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, she flew six-hour missions assisting America’s ground forces. “The flights are long, but they’re challenging and rewarding,” says the decorated naval flight officer. “It’s what we train and prepare for. They’re rewarding because we’re able to provide assistance to troops on the ground if they need it.” Her current two-year assignment through fall 2010 may be less dangerous, but it’s no less demanding. As Blue Angel No. 8, Tomlinson serves as events coordinator for the elite Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, based in Pensacola, Fla. The Blue Angels, whose mission it is to represent and recruit for the Navy, entertain crowds at air shows with six F/A-18 Hornet jets and one C-130 transport aircraft, exe cuting difficult acrobatic maneuvers and demonstrating precision flying at speeds of 120 to 700 mph. One of 16 officers and 120 total Blue Angels, Tomlinson is the first female aviator selected to the team since the squadron began doing air shows in 1946. She is responsible for planning and coordinating shows in 35 cities between March and November. That includes everything from booking hotels and rental cars for the group to setting up community visits. Tomlinson visits each site, meeting with air show planners, investigating site safety and ensuring FAA approval for taking over the airspace. The position is a perfect match for her ebullient personality and taps into the skills she acquired as a journalism and public relations major in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Although her father was a Navy pilot, Tomlinson discovered the NROTC independently during her freshman year at USC. Until then, she had never imagined she’d follow in his footsteps – even though there is a photo of Tomlinson that seems prescient now. It was taken when she was 7 years old, during a visit to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. She is dressed up in her father’s helmet and flight gear (she is absolutely swimming in the pants made for a 6-foot-2 adult), and she’s wearing a chunky pink plastic charm necklace, big round glasses and a huge grin. Her parents visited her at eight air shows last year, and her husband since 2007, Lieutenant Commander Warren Tomlinson, an F/A-18 pilot with whom she flew in combat missions in Iraq, traveled to 16. Tomlinson speaks enthusiastically about every aspect of her career, but when asked about the most rewarding part, she does not hesitate. “Hands down, it’s being around kids – seeing their faces light up and be inspired by airplanes and by the military uniform,” she says. “For me to be able to inspire kids to do whatever it is their dreams are, it’s unbelievable. And I only get to do it as a Blue Angel for two years, so I try to make every day count.” – Julie Riggott

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

Deaths Louis A. Hebert ’35, of Northbrook, Ill.; July

20, at the age of 96. He graduated magna cum laude and received the Alpha Kappa Psi medal in his junior year at USC. After graduating, he became a trader on the Chicago Board of Trade. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and worked for the Department of the Navy for several years following the war. He later re-entered the business world and became vice president of sales for the Englander Mattress Company, where he remained until retirement. He was preceded in death by his wife of 49 years, Mary Rita, and sisters Ruth, Helen and Louise. He is survived by his daughters, Martha, Catherine and Elizabeth, grandsons ChrisJon and Devin, granddaughters-in-law Laura and Kerri Ann, great-grandchildren Olivia, Angelena, Lola, Aidan, Roger, Will and Alexis, sister Florence, and nieces and nephews. Robert Pike Whitten ’35, of Glendale, Calif.;

Nov. 12, of natural causes, at the age of 98. While at USC, he was active in the National Collegiate Players, a theatre group, and Skull and Dagger. After graduating, he took a teaching position at Beverly Hills (Calif.) High School, where he taught speech and drama for three years before accepting a position at Los Angeles City College in 1938. He was a speech professor at LACC for five decades. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he produced more than 300 educational-style live radio broadcasts. He later became a pioneer in educational television, producing programs such as the Young America Speaks series. In the 1960s, he served as president of the faculty association at LACC and chairman of the academic senate. He took a break from his teaching career during World War II, and he served as a civilian instructor in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He attended Officer Candidate School and earned a commission as a second lieutenant. He served as military coordinator for the filming of the 20th Century Fox film Winged Victory. He received several medals, including the American Campaign Medal, the Army Commendation Medal and the Asiatic Pacific Service Medal. Upon his return to LACC, he joined the Air Force Reserve, serving with the 9353rd Air Reserve Squadron in Pasadena, Calif., as executive and training officer. He retired in 1971 as a lieutenant colonel. During his retirement years, he continued to support public education, establishing the Esther Crandell Memorial Scholarship Fund for visual arts and technical theatre at Glendale High School and the Robert Pike Whitten Performing Arts Scholar-

U S C T r o j a n Fa m i ly m a g a z i n e spring 2010

ship at Glendale Community College. He is survived by nephew Phillip Gustafson, nieces-in-law Prudence Hay and Mary Lou Gustafson, and great-nieces Susan Gustafson and Robin Gustafson. M. Churchill Haenke ’38, of Sedona, Ariz.;

May 2. He served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II and the Korean War. He spent 27 years with Northrop Aviation, working in the United States, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Helen, son Churchill, daughter Pamela, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. William P. Camm ’46, of Indianapolis; July

1, at the age of 85. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was a senior partner at Arthur Andersen LLP, a Chicago-based accounting firm, and prior to his retirement in 1978, he was managing partner of the firm’s Los Angeles office and southwestern United States region. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Jeanne Crider Camm, sons William, John and Robert, daughters-in-law Ellen and Laurie, and three grandchildren. Richard “Bud” Mittler ’47, of Oceanside, Ca-

lif.; Aug. 17, 2008, at the age of 93. A World War II veteran, he attended USC after serving in the war. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and was business manager of the Daily Trojan. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Ruthie, children Ginger, Bonnie and Rick, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Pierre Cossette ’49, of Los Angeles; Sept.

11, at the age of 85. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in active duty for three years during World War II. Following his service, he attended Pasadena (Calif.) City College and USC. At USC, he was editor of the Daily Trojan and started his own periodical, Campus Magazine. He began his career at MCA booking acts for concert halls and eventually became head of the variety department. He left in the early 1960s to form a personal management company. He later created Dunhill Records, a record label and publishing company, where he launched the careers of the Mamas and the Papas, Steppenwolf and others. After selling Dunhill to ABC, he moved into television production, producing The Andy Williams Show, The Glen Campbell Music Show and Down to Earth. In 1971, he initiated the live telecast of the Grammy Awards and helmed the show until 2005. Cossette Productions produced the first annual Latin Grammys in 2000, and he received the Latin Grammy Trustees Award. He produced the Black Entertainment

Awards for television, along with 50 specials for assorted networks, a miniseries and several made-for-TV movies. In 1989, he produced The Will Rogers Follies on Broadway, which won six Tony Awards. His other Broadway productions, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Civil War, were nominated for Tony Awards. In 2002, he published his autobiography, Another Day in Showbiz: One Producer’s Journey. He produced many charity events, and in 2005, he created the Pierre Cossette Endowed Fund for Student Support, a need-based award available to all undergraduate cinematic arts students at USC. Don Burke ’52, of Reno, Nev.; Aug. 11, of

cardiac arrest, at the age of 83. He came to USC after playing football at Oakland (Calif.) High School and Salinas (Calif.) Junior College. He lettered as a fullback at USC in 1948. He was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 1950 and played linebacker there for five seasons. After his career in football, he worked in the tourism industry as the national sales manager for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority, sales manager of the Greater Reno and Sparks Chamber of Commerce and national sales manager at Idaho’s Sun Valley. He is survived by his wife, Carole, sons Steve and Jim, five stepsons, two stepdaughters, 11 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Micky “Hasmig” Terazagian Hinthorn ’53,

of Half Moon Bay, Calif.; April 2. She was a member of the Half Century Trojans and a lifelong supporter of USC’s occupational therapy program. At USC, she was editor of the USC OT Trojan Therapist, and after graduating she was editor of the Northern California Occupational Therapy Association’s newsletter from 1954 to 1956 and the American Journal of Occupational Therapy from 1968 to 1970. She was a staff therapist in the occupational therapy department at Los Angeles County + USC Hospital, the first director of occupational therapy at the Palo Alto (Calif.) Medical Clinic and the founder of the Children’s Health Council occupational therapy department. She helped with fund raising for the American Association of University Women. She is survived by her husband of 51 years, Wayne. John “Jack” Nicoll ’54, of Lake Forest, Calif.;

July 23, of lung cancer, at the age of 81. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After graduating from USC, he went to work for Kaiser Cement. He was later transferred to the San Francisco Bay Area as director of technical services. He is survived by his wife of 54 years, Veralie Brookins Nicoll ’55, sons Greg, Eric and Bob, daughtersin-law Sally, Cindy and Yvette, and grandchildren Ben, Katie, Jenna and Cody.

James C. Marsters DDS

’56, of Oakland, Calif.; July 28, after a short illness, at the age of 85. After graduating from both the Wright Oral School for the Deaf in New York City in 1943 and Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1947, he worked at a necktie factory. He then decided to pursue dentistry and studied to be an orthodontist at USC. In 1954, he opened his orthodontic practice in Pasadena, Calif., retiring in 1990. In the 1960s, he co-developed a teletypewriter that opened up phone use to the deaf. He helped create a modem that linked a teletypewriter to traditional phone lines and converted audio tones into typed messages. In 1964, he made the first long-distance teletypewriter call on a traditional telephone line. He pushed to spread the use of the device, refurbishing donated teletype machines and advocating the new technology. He was preceded in death by his wife, Alice. He is survived by his children, James Marsters Jr., Jean Marsters and Guy Marsters, and two grandchildren. Sylvan Wachs ’57, of Turlock, Calif.; March

27, at the age of 73. He was a high school teacher and later went into private industry as vice president of a swimming supply company. He is survived by his wife, Myrna. Jack Reginald Smith ’58, MS ’60, PhD ’64,

of Waldo, Fla.; June 11. After working in both the space and military industries, he joined the electrical engineering department at the University of Florida as an assistant professor in 1964. There, he developed quantitative techniques for sleep analysis. He spent the early 1970s in Cassis, France, collaborating with researchers at the University of Marseille and spent two other academic sabbaticals helping develop sleep instrumentation. He wrote the textbook Modern Communications Circuits, now in its second edition. In 1986, he started the company Microtronics, Inc., which developed sleep-analyzing computers. He sold the company to Oxford Medical in 1990 and then returned to the University of Florida until he retired as professor emeritus in 1994. He served as a consultant to Motorola in Plantation, Fla. After retiring from the university, he developed another sleep-analyzing system, the Polysmith, at his company Neurotronics. He is survived by his wife of 23 years, Eileen McCarthy Smith, son Kirk Russell, daughters Karla, Dari and Staci Shanahan, stepdaughter Katie, stepson Brendan McCarthy, daughter-in-law Paula, sons-inlaw Sergio Quintana and James Shanahan, stepson-in-law Constantine, stepdaughterin-law Mary Ellen, 11 grandchildren, and three stepgrandchildren.

Herbert A. de Vries PhD ’60, of Laguna

Beach, Calif.; Oct. 1, at the age of 91. A professor emeritus of kinesiology at USC College, he was one of the foremost exercise and muscle physiologists of his time. In 1943, he began 33 months of active duty as an officer with the U.S. Army Air Corps. He earned his master’s at the University of Texas at Austin, then earned his Ph.D. at USC in 1960 and became a professor in 1965. He was a USC College professor for 18 years, a preceptor at the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center and a laboratory chief at the center’s Physiology of Exercise Laboratory. His research focused on the effects of exercise on the elderly, and he authored or co-authored many books on the physiology of exercise, most notably Physiology of Exercise for Physical Education and Athletics and Fitness after 50. The American Association for Physical Activity, Education and Recreation named

[ in memoriam ]

its distinguished research award after him. He was also a member of the organization’s National Research Council. He received many awards for his work from various professional organizations. He was an American Academy of Physical Education fellow, former vice president of the American College of Sports Medicine, an American College fellow and a Gerontology Society of America fellow. He retired in 1983 and then worked as a USC consultant until 1988. He is survived by his wife, Ana, and son Herbert Johnson. Cecil Eugene “Dutch” Hollon ’60, of Santa

Ana, Calif.; June 12, from complications from cancer, at the age of 78. He served in the U.S. Marines from 1951 to 1959. After graduating from USC, he was an engineering geologist for the County of Orange, Calif., and later for the city of Newport Beach, Calif. In the 1970s and early 1980s,

Linda Dean Maudlin

Linda Dean Maudlin ’61, USC Alumni Association president from 1997 to 1998 and USC trustee from 1996 to 2000, died on Nov. 26. She was 70. After graduating from the USC Marshall School of Business, she became a founding partner of the investment group Portfolio Partners and served as secretary/treasurer of Descolin Inc., a commercial real estate development and management firm. Maudlin became active in the USC Alumni Association in the 1960s and helped found Trojan Affiliates, serving as its president from 1968 to 1969. She was president of the Town & Gown Junior Auxiliary of Los Angeles from 1974 to 1975. She joined the Trojan League of the San Fernando Valley (now part of the Trojan League Associates of the Valleys) in 1976, serving as president from 1981 to 1983. At USC Marshall, Maudlin joined the New Commerce Associates support group as a founding member in 1988. She was a provost’s-level member of the USC Associates, a life member of Women of Troy and a patron of the Friends of the USC Libraries. Maudlin joined the Women’s Athletic Board in 1982 and was president from 1990 to 1992. She sat on the Athletic Council Advisory Board from 1990 to 1994. On the Health Sciences campus, Maudlin was a founding member of the USC Norris Auxiliary (1987) and the USC University Hospital Guild (1993). She served on surgeon Vaughn Starnes’ Transplantation Unit Fund-Raising Committee and the USC Norris Advisory Board. She received the USC Alumni Association’s Alumni Service Award in 1978 and the Fred B. Olds Support Group Award in 1988. She was honored with the Helen of Troy Award in 1992, the USC Alumni Association named her honorary chair of Homecoming 2000, and Skull and Dagger, which she joined in 1986, presented her the Arnold Eddy Volunteer Service Award in 2003. Maudlin is survived by her husband, Tom ’59, sons and daughters-in-law Dean ’85 and Julia and Scott ’86 and Cindi, grandsons Hudson and Holden, sister Sue Yaberg, brother-in-law Tom, nephews Tyson ’07, MS ’08 and Tanner ’09, and stepmother Mary Ferro. l

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he worked for Mission Viejo Company, a real estate development company, leaving to become a partner at the geotechnical engineering firm Kenneth G. Osborne and Associates in Irvine, Calif. In 1991, he started his own geotechnical firm, Morhol Inc., and worked there until his retirement in 2005. He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Kay, daughters Candy Clark, Stacy Hollon, Maria Theresa Peralta and Maria Alexandra Peralta, sons John, Scott, Roy and Julio Peralta, 14 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Ronald J. Crowley ’61, PhD ’67, of Fullerton,

Calif.; Nov. 7, from injuries sustained in a bicycling accident, at the age of 72. He was a physics professor at Cal State Fullerton and did research in theoretical physics at both the California Institute of Technology and the University of Utah. After he retired from teaching, he became a real estate

[ in memoriam ]

developer and contractor. He supported a number of entrepreneurial activities and was an outdoors activist. He is survived by his wife of 46 years, Marilyn, son Sean, and daughter Colleen. George G. Clucas PhD ’69, of San Luis

Obispo, Calif.; July 11, at the age of 88. He attended Albion College in 1938 on a football scholarship, where he achieved all-league recognition. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy and attended Officer Candidate School at Columbia University. At the end of the war, he entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1948, he moved to Sacramento, Calif., to work at the Office of the California Legislative Analyst. In 1956, he accepted a position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as dean of finance and development. He left in 1962 to become chief of

Herbert Farmer

Herbert Farmer ’42, MA ’54, archivist, professor emeritus and USC School of Cinematic Arts alumnus, died Nov. 22. He was 89.

James Stanley Rochester MA ’70, of Oxford,

Ala.; July 6, at the age of 69. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a lieutenant colonel with 21 years of service. He also was a Vietnam veteran. He is survived by his wife, Delores M. Rochester, daughters Elizabeth LeRoux, Julie Rochester, Tammy Kerigan and Kristen Carl, sons Timothy Smith and Thomas Smith, sons-in-law Mark LeRoux and Brad Carl, daughter-in-law Lori, and grandchildren Dana, Joshua, Erin, ShanaAnne, Tre and Presley. Steve Wojcechowskyj ’77 of New York City;

“Herb was an absolutely essential part of the School of Cinematic Arts, and it’s difficult to imagine him not being here,” said dean Elizabeth M. Daley. “His devotion to the university, the school and the generations of students he instructed and inspired is matchless. I am proud to have had him as a colleague and a friend.” After making a cross-country trip from Buffalo, N.Y., Farmer began classes at USC in 1938. He found time to produce the Trojan Newsreel, shoot football coaching films and surgical motion pictures for the university, and play sousaphone in the USC Trojan Marching Band. A few months shy of his graduation in 1942, Farmer took over teaching a motion picture history class from a professor who had been called to active duty in World War II. Farmer, who also served in the war, returned to USC for his master’s degree in 1954 and began teaching classes in film technology and distribution. He had been involved with the university ever since. At the time of his death, Farmer was still dedicated to overseeing his extensive archive of historical films and equipment ranging from zoetropes to the soundboard from The Jazz Singer, which he had given as a gift to the university. These materials are part of a rotating collection that is regularly on display. Farmer’s son, Jim, often accompanied his father on his trips to the university. “As we would go through the new building, the words would always be the same: ‘incredible’, ‘beautiful,’ ‘wow,’ ‘unbelievable,’ ‘fantastic,’ ‘I wish I could go back to school’,” his son recalled. At a 2008 celebration of his 70 years of service at the university, the alum spoke warmly about his time as a Trojan. “It’s been a wonderful life working with students here at the school,” he told the audience. “I’m grateful for the time that I’ve been able to put into it. And I’d do it again if I had to or could.” Farmer is survived by his son James, and granddaughters Casey and Lindsey, a senior production major at the School of Cinematic Arts. l

budget planning and administration for the chancellor’s office of the California State University System. After four years there, he enrolled at USC and earned his Ph.D., then returned to Cal Poly as director of research and development. He then became the first acting dean of its School of Business and Social Sciences. He later joined the faculty of the political science department, retiring in 1982. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Jan, sons Bob and Rich, daughter Barbara, daughters-in-law Cheri and Nancy, son-in-law Jim, grandson Todd Clucas, granddaughters Lori Vienna and Julie Datter, and three great-grandchildren.

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April 27, of heart failure brought on by complications of pneumonia, at the age of 54. After graduating from USC, he received his MBA from New York University and quickly rose to become a vice president of Bank of America and then a senior vice president for Union Bank of Switzerland. Diagnosed with Nail-Patella syndrome as a child, he spent much of his adult life serving as an orator to benefit the field of nephrology, becoming a nationally recognized patient advocate and patients’-rights lobbyist. He contributed his time and resources to the National Kidney Foundation and helped sponsor research fellows at many universities to attend national conferences. He is survived by his mother, Lillian, brother Lee, sister Julia Swanson, and nieces and nephews. Jen-Kai Liu ’91, of Shanghai, China; June 1,

of heart failure after being in a coma for 44 days as the result of a viral infection, at the age of 42. He was a member of the USC men’s volleyball team. He came to USC from Taiwan, where he was a member of the country’s national team in 1986 and 1987 and its junior national team the previous two years. He also served in the Taiwanese army in 1985 and 1986. A three-year letterman at USC, he also was a member of the university’s 1990 NCAA championship squad. After graduating, he worked in the real estate industry. He returned to Taiwan in 1995 and worked with his brother in

children’s education. In 2002, he and his wife moved to Beijing to start their own after-school program, Mad Science Family. They moved to Shanghai in 2005 to expand the business, which now has six locations in Shanghai and Beijing. He is survived by his wife, Karen, son Walter, daughter Melinda, parents Hsiang-Chen and Crystal Ma, sister Ching, and brother Eddie. Steven Timmons MBA ’94, of Denver,

Colo.; Sept. 21, after a two-year battle with cancer, at the age of 43. He worked as a market development consultant for Southern California Gas Company and then as a senior statistician for Standard & Poor’s Compustat Services, Inc. In 1994, he joined the investment banking firm Causey, Demgen and Moore, Inc., in Denver as a CPA. He was named a manager in 1997 and a principal in 2004. He is survived by his father, John, brother John, sister Jennifer, brother-in-law Jack and nephew Fletcher. Berle Adams of Los Angeles; Aug. 25, after a

long illness, at the age of 92. A past president of Cancer Research Associates, he was an advocate of cancer research at USC for more than 25 years. He, along with the Lucy and Berle Adams Foundation, funded the Lucy and Berle Adams Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC in 2002. He had a 60-year career in the music and television industries. In the 1940s, he co-founded Mercury Records, helping to launch the careers of singers Frankie Laine and Vic Damone. He moved on to MCA, where he represented stars including Jack Benny, Rosemary Clooney and Alfred Hitchcock. In later years, he specialized in the distribution of television programming, and was the sole international distributor of the Emmy Awards for more than 20 years. He was preceded in death by his wife, Lucy, who died in 1990. Jane O’Brien Dart of Pebble Beach, Calif.;

April 8, at the age of 90. The wife of former USC trustee Justin W. Dart, she was an accomplished actress under the stage name of Jane Bryan who had roles in nearly 20 movies during the late 1930s, including Marked Woman, We Are Not Alone, Brother Rat and Brother Rat and a Baby. She and her husband were dedicated supporters of USC. From 1969 to 1975, they funded the Justin Dart Award for Academic Innovation at the university to encourage faculty to develop innovations in teaching and curricula. Today, the Dart name is commemorated in the Justin Dart Professorship in Operations Management at the USC Marshall School of Business. She donated her family’s collection of artworks to the Monterey (Calif.) Museum of Art, which are now housed in the

Jane and Justin Dart Wing at the museum’s facility in La Mirada, Calif. She is survived by three children, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and two brothers. Lillian Fluor of Newport Beach, Calif.; Sept.

2, at the age of 87. She was the wife of former USC trustee J. Robert Fluor, head of the Fluor Corp., an engineering, procurement, construction, maintenance and project management firm. She graduated from Marywood High School in Anaheim, Calif., and attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. A longtime supporter of USC, she was a member of the Recognition Court of Town & Gown and in 1986 was honored by Town & Gown for her support. She was a dean’s-level member of the USC Associates. Her husband’s company built USC’s Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs and, together with the Fluor Foundation, has been responsible for more than $2.8 million in gifts to USC. The Fluor family also supported the construction of Heritage Hall, and in 1984, the 11-story hall previously known as Residence West was rededicated as Fluor Tower in appreciation of the Fluors’ contributions to USC. She is survived by her sons, John Robert Fluor II ’67 and Peter James Fluor ’70, MBA ’72, two daughters-in-law, eight grandchildren, two great-granddaughters, sister-in-law Elizabeth Fluor Taylor, and nieces and nephews. Anne Friedberg of Los Angeles; Oct. 9, from

colorectal cancer, at the age of 57. A theorist of modern media culture, she was a professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, with joint appointments in English and art history. Having joined the school in 2003, she was appointed chair of the critical studies program in 2006. She was a principal architect of the new interdivisional Ph.D. program for iMAP (media arts and practice) and was on the steering committee of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program. She was the author of several books, most notably Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. She was named a 2008 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was president-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Friedberg lectured widely throughout the United States and abroad, and her work was translated into many languages. She also established the doctoral program in visual studies at UC Irvine. She is survived by her husband, USC School of Cinematic Arts professor Howard A. Rodman, and son Tristan Rodman. Arnold Heidsieck of Venice, Calif.; Sept. 23,

at the age of 72. He was a longtime professor of philosophy at USC College and a preemi-

nent scholar in German and European intellectual history and literature. Born in Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland, he studied theology at the University of Tübingen before earning his Ph.D. in 1966 at the Free University of Berlin. In 1967, he came to the United States to teach languages and literature at New York University, where he stayed for seven years before teaching for a short time at Stanford University. He came to USC as an assistant professor in 1975 and was promoted to associate professor four years later, eventually becoming a full professor. He later served as chair of the Department of German. He was the author of the book The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka’s Fictions: Philosophy, Law and Religion and wrote many papers studying Holocaust literature and memory. He is survived by his brothers Günter, Erich and Cordt, sisters Imme Schuler and Gesine Jäger, and nieces and nephews. William Robert Smith of Palos Verdes,

Calif.; July 8, at the age of 91. He taught at USC for 26 years and helped establish the reputation of USC Marshall School of Business’ Leventhal School of Accounting. He spearheaded the accounting school’s code of ethics, which is used today, and was director of the Smith CPA Review Program at USC from 1982 to 1992. He retired from USC in 1997. Prior to his teaching career, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University and his MBA from Stanford University. He served as a navigator in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 1969 as a lieutenant colonel. He was married to Edith d’Entremont Smith for 68 years. He is survived by sons William, Kevin and Gary ’77, and daughter Victoria ’79. Steven J. Torok of Budapest, Hungary; July

23, at the age of 70. He studied nuclear physics at USC in the early 1960s. A participant in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, he arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1957. He worked on the Stanford Linear Accelerator and taught physics at Stanford University. While at the Columbia Business School, he worked as a programmer for IBM. He later worked for Shell International in London, Tokyo, Malaysia and Brunei, and concluded his career at the United Nation’s regional headquarters in Bangkok as an energy economist. He served as a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Northern Italy teaching in a graduate business administration program, and he taught at Sophia University in Tokyo. After retirement, he wrote a novel and started an international negotiations consultancy. He is survived by his wife, Sanguansri, children Estee, Juli and John, grandchildren Oliver, Ben, Matthew and Emily, sister Ilona, and first wife, Sachiko. l

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Last Word

Some sip it from a demitasse, others toss it back by the mugful. However it’s quaffed, there are few places in the world where people don’t enjoy a cup o’ Joe – which helps explain why producers grow more than 16 billion pounds of coffee beans a year. You may prefer it macchiato, affogato or black. You may carry about you a deck of Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Tully’s and Peet’s cards. But how much do you really know about the blessed berry? 1. According to popular legend, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by , a goatherd who observed his flock “dancing” after they had nibbled on the bright red berries of a certain bush. The lad chewed on the fruit himself and experienced the world’s first java jolt. 2. Why do you love it? Because it wakes you up. More precisely, this bug-killing ingredient – an alkaloid plant toxin similar to nicotine and cocaine – blocks neuroreceptors for the sleep chemical adenosine. 3. This ingredient gives coffee its slightly sour flavor. It’s also one of the starter chemicals in the formulation of Tamiflu.

›› contest rules

Jittery Last Worders unite! We are looking for the coffee-related item or items referenced in each clue. Up to five $30 gift certificates from Borders Books and Music will be awarded to the smoothest coffee connoisseurs to respond. If more than five perfect entries are received, five winners will be drawn by lot.

4. Coffee is good for you. Did you know that two espressos provide half your recommended daily allowance of this essential vitamin? And a related alkaloid actually wards off tooth decay? 5. In 2007, the European Union granted “protected designation of origin” to coffee grown in nine regions of this Latin American country. Noted for its soft terroir, this bean accounts for 12 percent of the world’s coffee market (by value).

6. In 1829, an American missionary planted Brazilian cuttings on the west coast of a mountainous island, laying the foundation of one of the most expensive and soughtafter coffees in the world. Only 800 farms working fewer than 2,500 acres, and producing no more than 2 million pounds of coffee a year, may properly sell their beans under this appellation. 7. Coffee beans (actually the seeds of the coffee fruit) normally grow in pairs – two halves within a single fruit. Occasionally, however, a berry contains a solitary, ovalshaped bean. This is commonly called a . 8. When Europeans began growing coffee in this Dutch colony, they little dreamed how well the plant would take to an equatorial climate. Today, this nation of islands is the fourth largest producer of coffee in the world; two of its provinces are practically synonymous with coffee. 9. Coffea benghalensis, Coffea canephora and Coffea congensis are among the many varieties of the coffee tree. But 75 percent of the world’s coffee belongs to this common species. 10. Though Ethiopia is known to be the birthplace of the coffee bean, its etymology is less certain. Some believe the term to be an Anglicization of the name of this forest region of the country’s southwest, combined with the Amharic word for the popular brew. 11. A cockroach and a flying monkey are just two concoctions that can be made with this coffee-based confection, which takes its name from the Acolhua people of Veracruz. l

Send your answers no later than March 15 to The Last Word c/o USC Trojan Family Magazine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7790. Submissions by fax (213-821-1100) and e-mail <magazines@usc.edu> are welcome.

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illustration by tim bower

Coffee Talk