September 1998
(At left: "Woodie" Broun was the only student with a bookie and the only one to take Professor Philip Hicks to the races. Yet despite this rakish persona, he graduated with Honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key that he wears to this day.)
As a student, Heywood Hale Broun '40 saw nothing odd about simultaneously managing the football team and serving as secretary of the theater club. But a schoolmate direly predicted "a patternless existence that would lead to identity crises and regrets," and urged him to focus on one interest or the other.
Broun further confounded stereotypes as a vice president of Delta Upsilon who was also president of the left-wing American Student Union. In addition, he wrote for The Phoenix, chaired the Men's Conduct Committee, performed in the student-faculty play, and started a badminton team.
Half a century later, when Swarthmore awarded him an honorary doctorate, "Woodie" Broun could celebrate a "patternless existence" that many would envy. In thanking Vice President Kendall Landis '48 for the citation, he observed that it "seems to put a framework around a career which the carping [observer] might describe as sprawling." But only the carping; others would call it a dazzling model of vocational variety.
Broun may be best known for his 19 years at CBS-TV, where no Kentucky Derby broadcast was complete without Woodie at the rail, dispensing sharp observations in rococo phrases, wearing one of his wild sportcoats. (He still carries a photo of Secretariat in his wallet.) And he brought brains and enthusiasm to baseball--"DiMaggio is still on a pedestal for me"--and other sports from rugby to ice fishing.
But he also produced jazz records of black virtuosos in New Orleans, worked on the experimental national newspaper called PM, survived blacklisting in the 1950s, performed in 14 Broadway plays, acted in TV soap operas, and wrote three acclaimed books--not to mention serving in World War II.
Broun's first book, A Studied Madness (he took the title from essayist William Hazlitt) covers his life in show business. Tumultuous Merriment is named for Dr. Samuel Johnson's definition of sports, which is its theme. Whose Little Boy Are You? describes growing up as the only son of famous and difficult parents. The title is a line that young Woodie heard all too often at their soirees for the likes of Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, and Gene Tunney.
His father, Heywood Broun, was a celebrated columnist, a founder of the Newspaper Guild, and a regular at the Algonquin Round Table in Manhattan. (When he died in 1939, 10,000 people attended his funeral.) Broun's mother, Ruth Hale, also was a journalist and an active feminist. After the couple di-vorced in 1934, Woodie stayed with his father, and it was a challenging experience. Imagine being a teenager at a driving range in Florida during a hurricane and hearing your dad yell exultantly over the roar, "You'll never get distance like this again!"
Broun "came to Swarthmore because my father urged me to," he recalls. "He said that since I didn't know what I wanted to do, I should go to a small college and do everything." And so he did, both in and out of the classroom.
He'll never forget Mary Albertson, the formidable chair of the History Department. When Broun registered for Medieval History, she briskly remarked, "You wouldn't enjoy it, Heywood--there's no chance to show off." He was the only student with a bookie and the only one to take Professor Philip Hicks to the races. Despite this rakish persona, he graduated with Honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key that he wears to this day. And Miss Albertson actually offered him a job.
Instead he edited a book of his father's work, moved to New Orleans to absorb the jazz scene, hosted a radio show and produced records--"now available on CD!"--and returned to New York to cover baseball for PM. Five months before Pearl Harbor, he was drafted. By the end of the war, he had five stripes.
Broun's acting career, which he juggled with his CBS sports assignments, included James Cagney's only live TV show and Robert Montgomery's fine anthology series. In addition to dozens of regional productions, he appeared on Broadway in Bells Are Ringing with Judy Holliday and Send Me No Flowers with David Wayne. Among his films were All the Way Home, Black Like Me, and The Odd Couple.
He's self-deprecating about his dramatic roles. "If I had a good part, it was a bad show," he says. "If it was a good show, I had a bad part."
Broun's beloved wife, actress Jane Lloyd-Jones, died in 1991. Their son, Heywood Oren "Hob" Broun, a promising novelist, died four years earlier. Alone in Woodstock, he's "made up a structure. I get up, feed the two cats, read the paper, read the mail, watch some soap operas, read a 'downstairs' book--something serious--and later the 'upstairs' book--trash." He doesn't own a VCR because he's afraid he'd spend all his time watching movies.
Every Tuesday he visits his Manhattan apartment overlooking the Hayden Planetarium. He accepts one "job" a month, like a book review for The Washington Post, offering insights on HBO's recent documentary on Babe Ruth, or helping the Algonquin reopen its dining room by reading a Dorothy Parker poem about his father. He owns shares in five race horses, and there are 10 winner's circle pictures at home in Woodstock.
In 1989 Broun was emcee for the 50th-anniversary celebration of Swarthmore's first undefeated football team, with the late coach Lew Elverson as guest of honor. And he likes to visit fellow alumni in England and Ireland, although his own roots are Scottish. "The Brouns lived 800 years in the same town," he said. "They came with William the Conqueror's wife, and they never accomplished a thing. My grandfather emigrated and won a billiards tournament. It was the first Broun accomplishment." But clearly not the last.
--Barbara Haddad Ryan '59
(At left: David and Miki Holden '64 have been "parenting" exotic animals for 15 years on their ranch in Los Alamos, Calif. Currently they have 12 antelopes and nine zebras.)
About three miles from the little town of Los Alamos, Calif., and 45 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, an unpaved road leads up the steep side of a mesa, climbing 1,000 feet in one-third of a mile. During the infrequent periods of heavy rainfall in California, the road is impassable to vehicles. At the end of the road, there is a ranch, a 101-acre homestead, which is the dwelling of Miki McCaslin Holden '64, her husband, David, and their family, which includes children, dogs, cats, goats, chickens--and--what was that?--zebras and antelopes.
Miki Holden's route to the ranch and to the keeping of animals both domestic and wild was circuitous. After graduating from Swarthmore with a major in psychology, she moved to Berkeley, Calif., to pursue a certificate in elementary education and become a preschool teacher. Following a personal struggle with alcohol, in 1978 she entered Seattle University and earned a diploma in alcohol studies. Then, moving back east to Blue Hill, Maine, she opened a drug and alcohol clinic at the local hospital. Two years later she returned to California, where she married David, a film editor in Los Angeles.
So, whence the exotic pets? In 1982 the Holdens decided to flee urban life but needed to be within striking distance of the city to accommodate David's career. They selected a piece of property in Los Alamos that was part of an agricultural preserve, which meant it had to be used for agricultural purposes. Miki says: "We're both urban children. We didn't know agriculture, so we had to figure out what to do with the land. In the preserve, there was a 100-acre minimum requirement, so we took 101 acres. It was too small for cattle, and although we're in a grape-growing area, to start that requires a lot of funds. And it was too steep for traditional farming."
A seminar on small family farms brought them into contact with a wildlife biologist who had helped set up the San Diego Wild Animal Park and was interested in encouraging private people to become involved in raising exotic animals. The property was examined and proved suitable, so the Holdens applied for a license and permit to become exotic animal owners. In keeping with the regulations, they had to have a 10-foot fence erected around 35 acres of the land to contain the antelopes.
Currently the Holdens have 12 antelopes (four eland, a type of large African antelope, and eight Nilgai, whose natural habitat is the Himalayan foothills) and nine Grant (common, unendangered) zebras. As an exotic species, the antelopes require twice-yearly intensive inspections of animals, property, and food storage facilities by a veterinarian and regular visits from the Department of Agriculture. Furthermore, shortly after the Holdens got their animals, antelopes, which belong to the cattle family, were redefined by state law as a "detrimental species" and possible carriers of cattle diseases. Permits for raising them were suspended in order not to endanger the extensive cattle population of the state unnecessarily.
"They are ornaments and pets now," says Miki, although, except for the old original mother Nilgai, who enjoys having her nose scratched, the animals are shy of being petted. Even a young one, whose life Miki saved in a storm and that she bottle-fed for several months, has returned to the herd. "She's not frightened, but she doesn't come up to the fence." Because the animals breed relatively slowly, giving birth to only one or two offspring at a time, and are not hardy, there has been no population explosion on the Holden ranch.
The zebras are less complicated to raise. "Zebras," Miki says, "are legally regarded as striped horses. You don't need to do anything special to own a zebra. If you can have a horse, you can have a zebra." The Holdens keep breeding stock, and they recently sold a pair, named Romeo and Juliet, to a local horse breeder (who, Miki says, is not planning to crossbreed them with his horses). As they are so common and so hardy, there is low demand for zebras from zoos, although the Holdens did sell one hand-raised baby to a petting zoo. Most of their sales stock goes to "people who love zebras"; they have had customers in Oregon, California, South Carolina, and Louisiana. "It turns out that lots of people have a tender spot for zebras," says Miki.
After 15 years of "parenting" exotic animals, the Holdens have become quite the experts. David in particular is sought as a source of information on zebra breeding conditions. Some zebras will not breed in captivity, but they can be encouraged to do so by adding selenium, a trace mineral found in the soil of their natural African habitats, to their food, which consists of hay and a four-grain sweet feed. Although toxic in excess, selenium is necessary to the zebras' breeding activity.
"We've become more efficient at this," says Miki. "It used to be very time consuming at the beginning, but now we spend only about two hours a day in the early morning." Which is a good thing too, as David is often away from home from Monday to Friday, and Miki teaches first grade locally. Every spring, when the goats have babies, she brings the schoolchildren on a field trip up to the ranch. "What I've consistently found though with first graders," she says, "is that although the zebras and antelopes are exciting to look at, it's bottle-feeding the baby goats and collecting eggs in the henhouse that they like most."
--Carol Brévart
(At left: Eric Dean's book, Shook Over Hell, looks at the postwar experience of both Civil War and Vietnam vets.)
It's a familiar portrait in books, movies, and television. The war-weary veteran struggles to fit into civilian life. He feels alienated from society, which he believes cannot possibly understand the hell he's been through. Nervous and suspicious, quick to become alarmed by a threat or loud noise, he cannot settle into work or family life, cannot readjust. In extreme cases he may snap and go on a killing spree--or kill himself.
Americans usually associate the tormented veteran with the Vietnam War. But as Eric Dean '72 shows in a recent book, significant numbers of Civil War soldiers suffered a similar plight.
"Back in the '70s, the common rhetoric was that the Vietnam veterans' problems were unique--that the problems of all prior veterans had been washed away by parades and the hero's homecoming," says Dean, author of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Harvard, 1997). "It became this unshakable conventional wisdom. I was very suspicious of it when I started the book."
Having completed law school and a stint in the Peace Corps, Dean was practicing law in his home state of Indiana when the book was conceived. While representing a murder suspect who had served in Vietnam, he corresponded with a potential expert witness who was an authority on post-combat stress. Dean decided the defense was too flimsy for the case, but a question was spawned: Was there any truth to the popular notion that the malady was unique to Vietnam veterans?
His Swarthmore-bred suspicion of black-and-white thinking was only sharpened when he began examining records in the Indiana State Archives. Case after case revealed stories not commonly heard in discussions of the Civil War, which tend to focus on gallant generals, brave men, and noble causes.
Dean was struck by the fate of soldiers like Lt. Allen Wiley of the 54th Indiana Infantry, who had a close call with a Confederate shell and never seemed to get over it. Comrades reported that he could no longer sleep for more than a few hours or concentrate on a task. His situation worsened at the war's end. As one family member wrote, he "thought that someone (the neighbors) was going to shoot him." Wiley began turning up at his sister's house in the middle of the night, terrified that some unknown enemy was pursuing him. His condition led to domestic violence, divorce, and commitment in an asylum.
"I could see right off that Civil War veterans had problems that were similar to those associated with Vietnam veterans but that no one had investigated it at all," Dean says. With such an investigation in mind, Dean left his law practice and enrolled in graduate school in history at Yale.
Shook Over Hell--the title comes from the words of a Union soldier describing his experience in a Confederate prison camp--has two principal threads. In addition to documenting the hardship of Civil War combat and its lasting effect on the participants, Dean also re-examines the postwar experience of those who fought in Vietnam. The book casts doubt on the idea that Vietnam veterans were maladjusted, much less half-crazed. Dean shows that in the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnam veterans enjoyed higher median incomes than their peers who didn't serve and had similar rates of unemployment and drug addiction.
"The popular image of the troubled Vietnam veteran was driven by a political agenda," says Dean, who opposed the war during his student days at Swarthmore but now is deeply ambivalent about it. "This image originally came out of the anti-war movement. People against the war were focusing on the damage the war was doing. My feeling is that people were so vehemently against the war that they were willing to exaggerate to get us out of it. While it started with the anti-war movement, other constituencies jumped on board." Dean believes that Ronald Reagan and other conservatives exaggerated post-traumatic stress disorder to drive home their point about the damage caused by the country's less than full commitment to the war.
Although at least one reviewer has blasted Dean for a cavalier attitude toward Vietnam veterans' suffering, his book seems part of a general retipping of the scales between America's "good" and "bad" wars. Cold Mountain, Robert Frazier's best-selling 1997 novel, has as its protagonist a wounded Confederate deserter haunted and embittered by the violence of combat. Images of heroes like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are nowhere to be found.
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which opened to glowing reviews this summer, depicts World War II combat with an unprecedented bluntness. Bruce Shapiro, writing in the online magazine Salon, contends that the U.S. military made a concerted effort to conceal the large numbers of psychological casualties that supposedly couldn't happen in a morally righteous war.
Although his book and other works are beginning to stir a shift, "scholarship simply doesn't understand the shell-shocked veteran," Dean says. "I'm referring to the way that wars other than Vietnam are viewed as glorious and righteous--as heroic. War is horrible whatever the cause, and people lose sight of that basic fact. If anything, my book is a call to re-evaluate war and challenge the conventional wisdom that has shut off our ability to think critically about these issues."
Despite the success of his book and his foray into academia, Dean has returned to being a lawyer in New Haven, a decision prompted by the scarcity of jobs in academia and the numerous offers he received when he sent his resumé out to law firms in the area. Nevertheless, he plans to continue his scholarly life and hopes to write another book, perhaps about the psychiatric toll of the two world wars.
"It's interesting that the Library of Congress classified my book as psychology," Dean says. "Others would say it's about war. It seems to me the two are almost inseparable."
--Tom Krattenmaker
(At left: Jonathan Stillerman '90 says so few men take an interest
in women's concerns that the MRPP members are anomalies.)
Some people just don't get it. They can't understand why a man would be interested in what appears to be a woman's problem--rape. But Jonathan Stillerman '90 is undeterred by the perceptions of sexual violence as a women's issue. As co-founder and co-director of the Men's Rape Prevention Project (MRPP), a profeminist, nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., Stillerman works to raise awareness of rape as a men's issue and increase male involvement in anti-rape efforts.
MRPP comprises men of all ages and backgrounds who are concerned about the well-being of the women in their lives. Through community education and consulting with high school and college-age youth and the institutions that serve them, members challenge themselves and others to end rape and other forms of male violence.
MRPP's charter states that "rape is a choice men make to exert power over others. As long as men continue to make this choice or to remain silent while other men are violent, rape will continue. We believe men can live peacefully with women, but to do so, we must redefine what it means to be a man."
"Women alone have shouldered the burden of rape prevention for far too long," Stillerman says. "For rape to stop, we as men must join women in speaking out against rape-supporting attitudes.
"We want to help people understand that while rape is one of the most blatant and violent forms of sexism, it is unlikely that any of us will ever come upon a rape in progress. What we are likely to witness, however, are many less violent behaviors and expressions of belief that contribute to a rape culture. For example, calling a woman a 'bitch' or 'whore' sends the message that women are not fully human or deserving of respect. When men see women as inferior, it becomes easier to do harm to them," he says. "Just as with racism or other forms of oppression, it is the underlying sexist stereotypes and the behaviors that reinforce them that we must confront in order to stop rape before it ever starts."
Stillerman, a clinical psychologist who received his doctorate from George Washington University in 1996 and now works as a therapist at the Alexander Institute in D.C., first took an interest in the issue of sexual violence upon learning of several women friends who had been assaulted. Although some of the reactions he had to his friends were supportive, Stillerman admits to having other, less supportive feelings: "To be honest, I felt pretty helpless and got angry at my friends for putting themselves at risk." Stillerman says, "I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I even punched a wall once."
These confusing feelings intensified during sexual assault awareness weeks as a junior and senior at Swarthmore. Stillerman recalls reading "horrifying" but true accounts of rape written by Swarthmore students on bulletin boards all over campus. "I was floored," he recalls, "but I didn't know where I could go to talk about what I felt." It wasn't until Stillerman came to DC in 1992 and discovered DC Men Against Rape (DCMAR), a men's collective focused on men's role in rape prevention, that he found a "safe place" to express what he was feeling and move beyond his sense of helplessness.
Over the next five years, Stillerman became increasingly involved in DCMAR, eventually assuming a leadership role. In 1997, he and colleague Patrick Lemmon transformed DCMAR into a professional nonprofit organization and changed the name to Men's Rape Prevention Project.
Since then the demand for MRPP's services has dramatically increased, and the organization has begun to write proposals seeking foundation grants to support its expansion. In the past year, MRPP conducted more than 50 workshops in high schools and universities throughout the country and presented at the Seventh International Conference on Sexual Assault and Harassment on Campus in Orlando, Fla. MRPP is also developing a rape prevention program as part of American University's new student orientation program.
Most recently MRPP has begun to work with young men "at risk," including athletes and fraternity members, and is assisting a local fraternity in organizing a day of campus events focused on raising men's awareness of rape.
Stillerman says that men have a variety of reactions to MRPP's workshops. Some embrace the message that "men can stop rape" and feel empowered. Others are threatened and defensive and try to dismiss MRPP's speakers as gay or man haters. One of Stillerman's friends went as far as to categorize a man who would be involved with this issue of rape prevention as a eunuch.
"Somehow a man speaking out against sexual violence is seen as un-manly or stripped of sexual desire, as if to be against rape is anti-male or anti-sex." Because of these misinformed and sometimes even hostile reactions, Stillerman says it takes courage for men to speak out against rape and speak up when other men disrespect or degrade women. "It's as if there's a silent pact among men that forbids us to say something when a man puts a woman down. If you do, you're out of the 'manhood' club. "
"Fortunately," Stillerman says, "a growing number of men are beginning to understand that if being a man means supporting rape, we need to redefine masculinity." Stillerman recalled one such man, a college student who approached him in tears after a workshop wanting to know how he could help his girlfriend who had been raped. "It's experiences like that one that remind me why I got involved with this issue in the first place--to give men an opportunity to talk about how rape affects them and help them understand that no one is immune to the pain of rape, not even a man."
More information about the project can be found on the World Wide Web at www.mrpp.org.
--Audree Penner
Swarthmore College 1998. All rights reserved.