I am badly crippled by a conjunction of illnesses, including kidney failure, which requires three hours of hospital treatment three times a week. It's what I do on the other days that counts. My legs are so weak that I ought to use a wheelchair, but I refuse. With the aid of a stout cane and a helping hand, I go everywhere and enjoy a reasonably fine life. Friends will not allow me to become a recluse or a couch potato, so I go to football games, operas, plays, and discussion groups, using a wheelchair when obligatory.
I live in a big house near campus with a nurse-factotum, a Hispanic woman who was sent down from heaven. She and I are aided by a very sharp young man who serves as my guru and by two young women in their 30s who serve as my secretaries and general helpers. They are exceptionally skilled on computers and advanced word processors and give me flawless help.
Now for the interesting part to fellow Swarthmoreans. I have on my desk every morning a stack of manuscripts for books I'm busy writing-four at the moment. The postman brings every morning a batch of letters from all over the world, and a score of book people in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere keep bringing publishing ideas from everywhere and on every possible subject. I've written an official history for the 1996 Olympic Games, a treatise on the World Cup in soccer, and other similar assignments. In the off hours, I work on my own books and seem able to think up a new one every other week.
I hope to publish later a set of a hundred sonnets on which I've been working since 1928. All done, but I wish I could find an automatic polishing machine. My 10 essays on the state of the Union-race relations, family dissolutions, uneven distribution of wealth, and so on should appear during the 1996 publishing season, and two Hollywood producers are on the verge of launching production companies to make films involving my work. I have no lack of subjects to command my attention, but that richness does not compensate for the fact that I can no longer travel as I did. Sometimes when television commercials show gala cruise ships or exotic scenes of foreign lands I once knew so well but cannot visit, tears come to my eyes.
-Jim Michener '29
Opening a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream can bring on any number of reactions: guilt for your self-indulgence; gratitude for the size of the chunks in Chunky Monkey or for the smoothness of Wavy Gravy; pride in your support of one of the most unique and charitable businesses operating in this country today; or possibly even disappointment that your Cherry Garcia is missing cherries.
And if you are inspired to share your feelings with the creators of the original "bad-for-your-waistline, great-for-the- environment" dessert, write to Alice Clifford Blachly '49. Blachly is the consumer relations coordinator for Ben and Jerry's, which means she has spent every workday for the past 10 years reading and responding to consumers' letters on corporate policy, environmental policy, grassroots politics-and ice cream.
Blachly arrived at Ben and Jerry's through what she calls a "circuitous route," during which she indulged a "vague interest in publishing" and served stints in early childhood education, university administration, teacher training, and as a reference librarian. While working at Goddard College in Vermont, she met her husband-to-be, and they bought a farm outside of Adamant, near Calais, Vt.
When farming proved untenable, they converted their barn into a playhouse for "Unadilla," the local theater troupe they had founded and named after the town Unadilla, N.Y., where the barn's rafters had been made. Blachly's interest in theater had first been awakened by the Rose Valley Players of Rose Valley, Pa., whose performances she had attended while at Swarthmore. She was particularly struck by their production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Mentioning this years later to her husband, it turned out that he had also seen the Rose Valley Players. Today Chekhov is standard stock for the Unadilla players, as is Tom Stoppard, J.B. Priestley, and of course Shakespeare. Now considered a professional group by the local population, they are "the only access to this kind of culture for miles around!" says Blachly.
So what finally led Blachly to Ben and Jerry's ice cream parlor-apart from the obvious allure of a double scoop of Chunky Monkey? At the time when farming was becoming impossible, she was approached by an acquaintance in the company who felt that with her education and friendly manner she would be a great consumer relations coordinator. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield felt that her cultural background matched that of their customers, who are "very literate and make lots of literary allusions, " she says. The company's two founders had definite ideas about the importance of good writing and how to personalize responses. (Jerry's mother was an English teacher, so he grew up a stickler for good grammar.) When Blachly first began working there, Jerry would review her responses and add personal P.S.s to them, often dealing with more serious questions about how to start a small business or about social issues. "I learned a lot about style from him. He gave very thoughtful answers," she says.
Remarking on the humor and intelligence evident in consumers' letters, Blachly recalls one from an apparently desperate customer : "This is a protest letter denouncing ... your corrupting influence in my life with your degrading, addictive product euphemistically called Coffee Almond Fudge Frozen Yogurt [CAFFY]. How could you do this to me? Here I am in my sunset years and a hopeless, non-rehabilitative, over-the-hill addict. Oh, I've tried your other enticements, all equally irresistible, but none with the power to guide my hand away from CAFFY in the Kroger Cabinet of Temptations. And yes, I've tried abstinence ... but the withdrawal symptoms are unprintable." The letter ends with a cheerful "Keep up the good work."
"The people who write have given themselves permission to play," says Blachly, "so I play too. Ben and Jerry want me to do that." In response to a customer's feigned dismay at the absence of any real monkey in the Chunky Monkey ice cream, Blachly responded: "When we came out with Chunky Monkey back in 1988, the name was sufficiently bizarre as to not risk confusion with reality. However, we didn't reckon with California, where evidently the cuisine is so exotic that a name like Chunky Monkey might actually be taken literally. Just in case you were wondering, there's no gravy in Wavy Gravy, no hubby in Chubby Hubby, no rainforest in Rainforest Crunch, and no Aztec in Aztec Harvests Coffee either. We're deliberately trying to confuse people." The pleasure Blachly draws from her work is evident.
"I'm concerned with `the fundamental things of the universe,'" says Blachly, who has cultivated her liberal arts education into a lifestyle. She is continually grateful for her "intense" experience at Swarthmore, where she "learned a respect and love for the truth ... and how to learn for the sake of learning." Writing for Ben and Jerry's creates no conflict with this lifestyle, even if she is now technically a part of "corporate America." The company donates a significant portion of its proceeds to grassroots organizations and groups that work with disadvantaged children and families and the global environment. Specifically they are interested in groups that attack the root causes of problems in society. "I wouldn't feel they were unique," Blachly says. "Ben and Jerry are now aging hippies," she continues, "in the best sense of the word. They are very mellow, terribly nice guys with great ideas. They are very idealistic but also practical." They have faced the fact that they must make money in order to give it away, but they have thought it through in a fresh way. "Is it possible to be a successful business and to care about the global community? It can be done, and it makes the public feel hopeful. I hear that in their letters," she says.
And she'd love you to drop her a line-even if you don't like ice cream.
-Jennifer Rosenblum '94
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Cold Fever, produced by Stark and directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, with whom he shares the writing credit, is as much a spiritual journey as a physical one for the lead character, a young Tokyo fish company employee. Atsushi Hirata (played by the popular Japanese actor Masatoshi Nagase) is asked by his grandfather to give up a golfing trip to Hawaii to go to Iceland to perform a traditional memorial service by a remote river to honor Atsushi's parents, who died there in an accident.<p>
The film will make viewers laugh, cry, drop their jaws in amazement, and want to put on a parka. Throughout Atsushi's journey he encounters sociopathic American )
Cold Fever is the 11th feature for Stark, a corporate lawyer turned independent producer. Working on a shoestring budget isn't easy, he confesses, but it reaps rewards that others in the film business wish they could have.
"Hollywood producers have big budgets, but they've also said to me they wish they could do the work I'm doing. The actors and crews I work with are doing this because they believe in the project and they're trying to create something that has lasting artistic value-something they can make their contribution to and use to develop themselves as artists, actors, or technicians," explains Stark, who spent $1.4 million on Cold Fever.
"In Hollywood you have to take a lunch, schmooz the right people, party with the right people. I don't have to do that here," says Stark, who lives in a New York City loft. "I don't want to spend five years trying to develop a big picture that has 50 writers on it and goes through three studio regimes. I would rather find something I'd like to do, like this, and figure out how to make it happen."
Cold Fever, currently being released around the world, has been a critical success. At its world premiere at the Drambuie Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland last August, it came away with the top prize. Cold Fever also won the top prize at Italy's Rimini Film Festival and was selected from among hundreds of films to be shown at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Utah and the Toronto Film Festival. In April it had a very successful New York opening.
Stark says the two years he spent at Swarthmore gave him the preparation he needed for dealing with people in the film world: "After surviving Swarthmore I realized I would never be intimidated by people again, at least from an intelligence or creativity point of view," says Stark, who transferred in 1969 to the then newly coed Vassar College because he believed the ratio of men to women would be an "interesting experience."
"It's a difficult decision (to go into this business). You have to make sacrifices. I tell young people I've done things for the money, and I've done things because I love them, and they should really find something they love and pursue it fearlessly. Assume you'll be successful and you probably will."
-Audree Penner
Although other countries can teach us a great deal, any attempt to import a system from another country would probably be futile, Bennett believes, because medical systems are closely attuned to the culture of their countries. People in England, admired for their national health program, don't mind waiting in line or visiting a shabby-looking hospital. Canadians, whose health care system was often mentioned as a fine model for the U.S., are far more accustomed to the concept of allocating care, such as for hip replacement surgery. It would be more realistic, Bennett says, to model our health care system on a successful American service industry, such as the telephone system.Bennett observed "an amazing example of how public policy and science interface" while working in Taiwan with Dr. Baruch Blumberg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the hepatitis B virus. The hepatitis B program in Taiwan constitutes the world's most successful vaccination effort to date, Bennett believes. That program reduced the proportion of the population testing positive for hepatitis B antigen from 14 percent to two percent in seven years, and will ultimately reduce liver cancer, the most common cancer in the world.
Public health policy in the United States is often less fruitful. Among Bennett's principal findings is the revelation that people treated for AIDS-related pneumonia under Medicaid receive poorer medical care than those who have private insurance. The primary reason is that they're half as likely to obtain medical care, especially diagnostic tests, in the first place. A board-certified oncologist who received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1981, Bennett became interested in AIDS through the back door. While doing his fellowship training through the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1984-85, he provided care to large groups of hemophiliacs. "It became apparent that over 90 percent were HIV infected," Bennett says. They had received transfusions before the blood supply was screened to eliminate HIV.
An oncologic problem introduced to Bennett through the AIDS epidemic was Kaposi's sarcoma, a previously rare form of cancer that commonly afflicts people with AIDS.
Clinical medicine alone, Bennett saw, couldn't resolve problems related to AIDS. "It became quickly apparent that the boundary between public policy and HIV/AIDS was minimal," he says. "I wanted to be involved in the process." Accordingly, he obtained a doctorate in public policy at the Rand Corporation/ UCLA Center for Health Policy Study in Santa Monica, California. Bennett's dissertation, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1989, showed that hospitals treating large numbers of AIDS patients provide them with better care and achieve significantly lower mortality rates than hospitals treating fewer people with AIDS. "Many people responded by regionalizing AIDS care into large centers of excellence," Bennett says. "That's where the public policy perspective comes in."
Oncology itself has expanded to encompass the study of viruses, Bennett notes, as scientific data unexpectedly demonstrate that many viruses cause tumors or spur them to grow. Therefore, the boundary between emerging viral diseases and cancer "seems to be becoming blurred," he says. For example, Epstein-Barr virus is now associated with lymphoma, and a rare form of herpes, herpesvirus 8, is associated with Kaposi's sarcoma.
Government funding is shifting its focus, Bennett notes. A concentration on basic science is replacing broad-based research incorporating public health and the social sciences. Tighter funding will make it more difficult for Bennett and like-minded researchers to explore certain issues, he explains. Bennett attributes the seeds of his dual career to Bernard Saffran's economics courses at Swarthmore. "Economic theory pushed me into thinking about how I could use an economic approach to medicine," he says.
What most people remember about Bennett from his Swarthmore days, he says, is his skill at card tricks. He still performs them, he states, because they brought him luck when he was applying to medical school. Noting this achievement on his application form, the interviewer requested a demonstration, which was promptly supplied. "The guy liked the trick; I got into med school," says Bennett. "I always wonder whether I would have gotten in if he had picked a different card."
-Marcia Ringel
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